From Paris to Petrograd: State and Revolution in Practice

Parker, James, Rudy and Cliff join for a discussion on the context of Lenin’s State and Revolution, and how those ideas were applied in the early years of the Soviet government. We start by discussing the context of the book, especially in relationship with the recent audiobook by Kautsky on Democracy and Republicanism. We continue by discussing the debates in the Second International around the Paris Commune, the Immediate Genesis of the Book during the First World War, the text itself and its surrounding context, the ways in which the principles of the book were implemented after 1917, and why the early RSFSR government gave way to the dictatorship of the politburo.

References:
Étienne Balibar – On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat
Lara Douds – Inside Lenin’s Government Ideology, Power and Practice in the Early Soviet State
Shiela Fitzpatrick – The Russian Revolution
Neil Harding – Lenin’s Political Thought
Alexander Rabinowitch – The Bolsheviks in Power: The first year of Soviet rule in Petrograd
S. A. Smith – Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917-1918
Mark von Hagen – Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917-1930

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