The Opposition of Zinoviev and Kamenev
Grigorii Zinoviev, Letter of Protest. October 24, 1917
With Lev Kamenev
Original Source: V. I. Lenin, Sochineniia (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1929), Vol. 21, pp. 495-97.
A tendency is accumulating and growing in workers' circles that sees the only way out in immediately proclaiming an armed uprising. All due dates have now converged, such that if one speaks of such an uprising, he has to set the time openly, and in the next few days. In one form or another this question is already being discussed by the whole periodical press, and. in workers' meetings, and it occupies the minds of a considerable circle of party workers. We, in turn, consider it our duty and our right to express ourselves on this question with full frankness.
We are most deeply convinced that to proclaim an armed uprising right now means to gamble not only the fate of our party but the fate of the Russian and international revolution as well.
There is no doubt that there occur such historical situations where the oppressed class has to recognize that it is better to go down to defeat than to surrender without a fight. Does the Russian working class now find itself in such a situation? No, a thousand times no!!! ...
As a result of the tremendous growth of the influence of our party in the cities and especially in the army, such a situation has shaped up at the present time that it is becoming a more and more impossible thing for the bourgeoisie to disrupt the Constituent Assembly. Through the army, through the workers we hold a revolver at the temple of the bourgeoisie: the bourgeoisie is put in such a position that if it thought of making an attempt to disrupt the Constituent Assembly now, it would again push the petty-bourgeois parties toward us, and the hammer of the revolver would be released.
The chances of our party in the elections to the Constituent Assembly are excellent. We believe that the talk that the influence of the Bolsheviks is beginning to fall is emphatically without foundation. In the mouths of our political opponents this assertion is simply a maneuver in a political game that counts precisely on evoking a move by the Bolsheviks under conditions favorable to our enemies. The influence of the Bolsheviks is growing. Whole strata of the toiling population have just begun to be caught up by it. With the correct tactics we can win a third or even more of the seats in the Constituent Assembly. The position of the petty-bourgeois parties in the Constituent Assembly cannot be entirely the same as it is right now. Above all, their slogan, "For land, for freedom, wait for the Constituent Assembly," will be dropped. And the intensification of poverty, hunger, and the peasant movement will put more and more pressure on them and compel them to seek an alliance with the proletarian party against the landlords and capitalists represented by the Kadet Party ...
In Russia the majority of the workers and a significant part of the soldiers are for us. But all the rest is questionable. We are all convinced, for instance, that if the matter now reaches the point of the elections to the Constituent Assembly, the peasants will vote in the majority for the SRs. What is this-an accident? The mass of the soldiers supports us not because of the slogan of war, but because of the slogan of peace. This is an extremely important circumstance, failing to consider which we risk building all our calculations on sand. If we now take power alone and confront (as a result of the whole world situation) the necessity of waging revolutionary war, the mass of the soldiers will pour away from us ...
And here we approach the second assertion-that the inter-national proletariat is supposedly now already with us, in the majority. This unfortunately is not yet so. The mutiny in the German navy has an immense symptomatic significance. The harbingers of a serious movement are present in Italy. But from this it is still very far to any amount of active support for the proletarian revolution in Russia, declaring war on the whole bourgeois world. It is extremely bad to overestimate one's forces. Undoubtedly much has been given to us and much will be asked of us. But if we now stake the whole game on one card and suffer a defeat-we will deal a cruel blow as well to the international proletarian revolution, which is growing very slowly but nevertheless growing. In time the growth of the revolution in Europe would make it obligatory for us to take power in our hands immediately, without any hesitation. In this consists the sole guarantee of the victory of an uprising of the proletariat in Russia. This will come, but it is not yet ...
Before history, before the international proletariat, before the Russian Revolution and the Russian working class we do not now have the right to stake the whole future on the card of an armed uprising. It would be a mistake to think that a move now similar to that of July 3-5 would in the event of failure lead only to such consequences. Now the question is bigger. The question is decisive battle, and defeat in this battle would be defeat for the revolution.
Source: Robert V. Daniels, ed., A Documentary History of Communism (Hanover: Published for the University of Vermont by University Press of New England, 1984), pp. 100-102.