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The Dual Power

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The Dual Power
AuthorVladimir Lenin
Original titleДвоевластие
LanguageRussian
SubjectThe nature of State power after the February Revolution
GenrePolitical essay
PublisherPravda
Publication date9 April 1917
Publication placeRussia
Media typeNewspaper
Pages4[a]

"The Dual Power" (Russian: Двоевластие) is a short political article by Vladimir Lenin, published in the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda on 9 April 1917 (O.S.; 22 April N.S.) about Dual Power in Russia.[1] Written within a week of Lenin's return to Petrograd from exile, the article discussed the system that emerged from the February Revolution, where the Russian Provisional Government and the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies each exercised part of the revolutionary state's authority after the fall of Tsar Nicholas II. It was published days after the April Theses was published and builds upon ideas contained in there.[2]

Background

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The February Revolution[b] was the first of two revolutions in Russia in 1917.[3][4] After Tsar Nicholas II abdicated the throne, the February Revolution led to the establishment of the Russian Provisional Government and its counterpart, the Petrograd Soviet. The Provisional Government was composed of former State Duma representatives; the Petrograd Soviet was made up of socialist leaders. With the Russian government transitioning from an autocracy to this system of "dual power" there was confusion about how both could coexist and govern together effectively.[5][6]

Pravda article

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Lenin argues that the Soviets are not a group alongside the government, but a state power of a different type, one that traditional parliamentary politics does not describe.[7] He states, "This power is of the same type as the Paris Commune of 1871."[1] Writing on the Historical Materialism website, Peter D. Thomas notes that for Lenin the Soviets "represented a 'special type of state' that recalled ... the defining features of the Paris Commune".[2] Lenin lays out three characteristics of their power:

  • Its authority derives not from a law enacted by parliament, but from the direct initiative of the people from below.[c][2]
  • Since the police and the army are institutions set against the people, they should be replaced by the arming of the whole people, with order maintained by the workers and peasants themselves.[d][2][5][7]
  • The bureaucracy must be either replaced by the direct rule of the people or placed under their control, elected and subject to recall.[e][2][8]

The remedy he proposes is not a seizure of power by a minority but the patient winning of the working class to Bolshevik positions, and the article closes on the class alignment that in his view set the party's tasks.[1][9] Lenin returned to the question a day later in "The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution",[f] where he stated the conclusion in its hardest form: "Two powers cannot exist in a state. One of them is bound to pass away."[10][2][1]

Leon Trotsky discusses dual power in a chapter in The History of the Russian Revolution, where he states, "a two-power régime arises only out of irreconcilable class conflicts – it is possible, therefore, only in a revolutionary epoch".[11]

See also

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Further reading

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  • Harding, Neil (1978). Lenin's Political Thought, Volume 1: Theory and Practice in the Democratic Revolution. St. Martin's Press.
  • Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi (1981). The February Revolution: Petrograd, 1917. University of Washington Press.
  • Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi (1973). "The Formation of the Militia in the February Revolution: An Aspect of the Origins of Dual Power". Slavic Review. 32 (2): 303–323.
  • Lih, Lars T. (2011). "The Ironic Triumph of Old Bolshevism: The Debates of April 1917 in Context". Russian History. 38 (2): 199–242.
  • Lih, Lars T. (2011). Lenin. Critical Lives. Reaktion Books.
  • Rabinowitch, Alexander (1968). Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising. Indiana University Press.
  • Sauvé, Guillaume (2020). "Un libéralisme bolchévique? Histoire conceptuelle du double pouvoir en Russie". Canadian Journal of Political Science (in French). 53 (1): 117–132. doi:10.1017/S0008423919000714.
  • Wendland-Liu, Joel (2022). "Marxism, U.S. Democracy, and Lenin's Commune Against Capitalism". Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences. 15 (2): 277–297. doi:10.1007/s40647-021-00342-6.

References

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Notes

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  1. ↑ From the Collected Works of Vladimir Lenin, vol. 24, pp. 38–41.
  2. ↑ Russian: Февральская буржуазно-демократическая революция
  3. ↑ "the source of power is not a law previously discussed and enacted by parliament, but the direct initiative of the people from below, in their local areas".[1]
  4. ↑ "the replacement of the police and the army, which are institutions divorced from the people and set against the people, by the direct arming of the whole people; order in the state under such a power is maintained by the armed workers and peasants themselves, by the armed people themselves."[1]
  5. ↑ "officialdom, the bureaucracy, are either similarly replaced by the direct rule of the people themselves or at least placed under special control; they not only become elected officials, but are also subject to recall at the people's first demand; they are reduced to the position of simple agents; from a privileged group holding "jobs" remunerated on a high, bourgeois scale, they become workers of a special "arm of the service", whose remuneration does not exceed the ordinary pay of a competent worker."[1]
  6. ↑ Written the following day, though not published until September, when it appeared as a pamphlet.[10]

Citations

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  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Lenin, V. I. (1964). "The Dual Power". Collected Works. Vol. 24. Translated by Isaacs, Bernard. Progress Publishers. pp. 38–41. Retrieved 18 September 2026 – via Marxists Internet Archive.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Thomas, Peter D. (10 February 2025). "Lenin's Alternative: Dual Power and a Politics of Another Type". Historical Materialism. Retrieved 19 September 2026. The Soviets, on the other hand, represented a 'special type of state' that recalled, for Lenin, the defining features of the Paris Commune. Both the Commune and the Soviets were founded upon and functioned as popular initiative (in particular, the replacement of the police and army by the arming of the people itself, and direct popular control of officialdom and bureaucracy through processes of delegacy and recall).
  3. ↑ Aluf, I. A. (1979). "February Bourgeois Democratic Revolution of 1917". The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (3rd ed.). Gale (publisher).
  4. ↑ "February Revolution". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 19 September 2026.
  5. 1 2 Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi (June 1973). "The Formation of the Militia in the February Revolution: An Aspect of the Origins of Dual Power". Slavic Review. 32 (2): 303–322. doi:10.2307/2495965. JSTOR 2495965.
  6. ↑ Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi (1977). "The Bolsheviks and the formation of the Petrograd Soviet in the February revolution". Soviet Studies. 29 (1): 86–107. doi:10.1080/09668137708411107.
  7. 1 2 Peeling, Siobhan (8 October 2014). "Dual Power". In Ute Daniel; et al. (eds.). 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War. Freie Universität Berlin. doi:10.15463/ie1418.10075. Retrieved 19 September 2026. From February to October 1917 the Provisional Government possessed formal power in the Russian Empire, while the Petrograd Soviet held the closest thing to real authority among people in the streets. On the Soviet's conditions of 1 (14) March 1917: abolition of all police bodies and the creation of a people's militia responsible to organs of local self-government.
  8. ↑ Miliband, Ralph (1970). "Lenin's The State and Revolution". Socialist Register. 7: 309–319. officials are, as Lenin notes repeatedly, revocable at any time. "Bureaucrats", on this view, have not been altogether abolished; but they have been reduced to the role of utterly subordinate executants of the popular will, as expressed by the armed workers.
  9. ↑ Murphy, Kevin; Gaido, Daniel (2019). "De la dictadura democrática a la dictadura del proletariado: el debate en el Partido Bolchevique sobre las Tesis de Abril de Lenin". Revista de Filosofía de la Universidad de Costa Rica (in Spanish). 57 (148): 69–95. Sólo se lo puede y se lo debe derribar conquistando la mayoría dentro de los Soviets
  10. 1 2 Lenin, V. I. (1964) [First published as a pamphlet by Priboi, September 1917]. "The Peculiar Nature of the Dual Power and Its Class Significance". The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution (Draft Platform for the Proletarian Party), Collected Works. Vol. 24. Translated by Isaacs, Bernard. Progress Publishers. pp. 55–92. Retrieved 19 September 2026 – via Marxists Internet Archive.
  11. ↑ Trotsky, Leon. "Dual Power". The History of the Russian Revolution, Volume One: The Overthrow of Tzarism. Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved 18 September 2026.
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