1917—Russian Jacobins Come to Power

Chapter 6 shows in detail the degree to which concepts and categories particular to the French Revolution permeated political debate in Russia in 1917 between the February and the October Revolutions. It also shows Lenin relying on what he understood (or misunderstood) to be the essence of Jacobinism in advocating an armed insurrection in Petrograd before the preconditions for a proletarian revolution, as Marx and Engels had described them, existed. This was a dilemma that Lenin, by 1917, had wrestled with for well over a decade; that the Jacobins, in 1792–3, provided a scenario for taking power successfully after a revolution in their own country had begun helps to explain the Bolsheviks’ decision in October 1917 to carry out an armed insurrection in Petrograd that would supersede the revolution that had occurred in February.