I am grateful for Steve Bloom's contribution to the debate around the character and developments within the Bolshevik Party early after the February Revolution and upon Lenin's return from exile. I think Lars Lih's work and insights have been invaluable to our understanding of this period but, similarly to Bloom, I find his characterization of the events of the "April Theses" period to be lacking.

Lih is insistent that there is next to no change between the "Old Bolsheviks" prior to the return of Lenin and the arguments put forward by Lenin himself. Lih uses Kalinin's assertions to suggest that "Kalinin did not see that Lenin’s new theses contradicted old Bolshevism in any crucial way." It is entirely possible that Kalinin believed this point but it should be made clear that Lenin thought the opposite. Marcel Liebman's Leninism Under Lenin emphasises this well:

At the Petrograd conference of the Bolsheviks [Lenin] said that 'the trouble with us is that comrades have wished to remain "old" Bolsheviks'. Kalinin, who felt that he was one of those whom Lenin was getting at, replied to these attacks by appealing to Lenin's own theories. 'I belong,' he declared, 'to the old school of Leninist Bolsheviks, and I think that the old Leninism has by no means shown itself inapplicable to the actual situation. I am astounded that Lenin should denounce the Old Bolsheviks as a hindrance today.' However, Lenin persisted in his attack on 'those "old Bolsheviks" who more than once already have played so regrettable a role in the history of our Party by reiterating formulas senselessly learned by rote.' He emphasized the point that seemed to him of capital importance: 'Old Bolshevism should be discarded.'

Sukhanov claimed that Lenin was intellectually isolated, Shliapnikov said Lenin was "more Left that our Left," Krupskaya feared her husband would be seen as crazy, Kollontai wrote, "I was the only one to stand up for Lenin's view against a whole series of hesitant Bolsheviks."

Ultimately, Lenin had more in common with Kamenev and the "Old Bolsheviks" than he had differences but that doesn't mean that his positions upon return from exile weren't a jolt that shook the party.

-George Fidler