Book: The April Theses

Overview
Lenin’s April Theses, presented in Petrograd on April 4, 1917 and published shortly after in Pravda, set out a stark program to transform Russia’s February Revolution into a socialist revolution. Returning from exile amid World War I and the collapse of Tsarism, Lenin rejected cooperation with the liberal Provisional Government and called for power to pass to the Soviets, councils of workers, soldiers, and peasants. The document’s urgency and clarity reshaped Bolshevik strategy through 1917, providing a blueprint for the October seizure of power.

Context and diagnosis
Lenin framed the post-February situation as one of “dual power”: a weak bourgeois government trying to consolidate authority while Soviets embodied a deeper, revolutionary legitimacy. He argued that the revolution had entered a new stage: from a bourgeois-democratic overturn to a struggle for socialist measures led by the proletariat allied with the poor peasantry. The central danger, in his view, was compromise, especially any support for the Provisional Government, which he condemned as incapable of ending the war, land hunger, or social misery.

War and internationalism
A core thesis denounced the ongoing conflict as an imperialist war that had not changed its character merely because the Tsar had fallen. Lenin attacked “revolutionary defensism,” insisting that the Provisional Government still pursued predatory aims tied to secret treaties and great-power ambitions. He demanded an immediate move toward a democratic peace without annexations or indemnities, the publication of secret treaties, and encouragement of fraternization at the front. The Theses linked Russia’s tasks to an international strategy: break with the compromised Second International and work to found a Third International committed to revolutionary defeatism and proletarian internationalism.

State and power
Lenin rejected a parliamentary republic as a diversion from the living institutions of mass democracy created by the revolution. He proposed a republic of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Deputies at all levels, with no standing army or traditional bureaucracy. The police, army, and bureaucratic apparatus of the old state were to be abolished and replaced by armed workers and officials subject to election, recall, and wages no higher than those of a skilled worker. This “Commune-type” state would embody direct, class-based rule by the majority.

Land, finance, and workers’ control
On the agrarian question, Lenin called for the confiscation of landed estates and the nationalization of all land, with local Soviets and peasant committees directing its use. Rather than immediate “introduction of socialism” by decree, he proposed transitional measures that undermined capitalist power: the merger of all banks into a single national bank under Soviet control; oversight of social production and distribution by workers’ organizations; and the establishment of model farms and practical controls in large-scale industry. These steps aimed to shift economic power decisively toward the working class while preparing the ground for broader socialist transformation.

Party and program
The Theses demanded a rapid reorientation of the Bolshevik Party: an immediate congress, programmatic revisions to address imperialism and the state, a clean break with “Old Bolshevism,” and adoption of the name Communist Party to demarcate from reformist Social Democracy. Strategy hinged on patient explanation, winning the masses inside the Soviets to the slogan “All power to the Soviets,” exposing the Provisional Government’s contradictions, and building the organizational means for a transfer of power.

Impact
Initially shocking even to many Bolshevik leaders, Lenin’s proposals became the party’s line after debate at the April Conference. The April Theses condensed a revolutionary logic: refuse support to bourgeois rule, turn the war into a struggle for peace and socialism, and elevate the Soviets from pressure groups into organs of state power. By October, this program would frame the Bolshevik path to insurrection and the remaking of the Russian state.