Many people here are assuming that Lenin and the Bolsheviks would have amounted to nothing without the First World War. (I realize that "Lenin" and "the Bolsheviks" are not synonymous but for the present I will ignore the "other Bolsheviks"--people like Bogdanov and Lunacharsky,
https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/93/4/1091/179616 because by the time the war came they had broken with the Bolshevik party as well as with Lenin, though some were later to rejoin it.) Soviet historians, by contrast, argued that Russia was headed toward revolution in 1912-14 and that the outbreak of the War actually *delayed* the revolution (both because of increased repression and because the outbreak of war at first caused a wave of patriotism from which the working class was not immune). Here is a fairly typical view by a rather atypical Soviet historian, E. N. Burdzhalov in his book *Russia's Second Revolution: The February 1917 Uprising in Petrograd* (Indiana University Press 1987). Burdzhalov, though no doubt a convinced Communist, was no party hack; he lost his post on the editorial board of the historical journal *Voprosy istorii* for writing articles in 1956 dealing frankly with the mistakes of the Bolsheviks in 1917 before Lenin's arrival, and in *Russia's Second Revolution* he notes the role of non-Bolshevik socialists in the February Revolution, especially the "Interdistrict Organization of United Social Democrats" (Mezhraiontsy). Nevertheless, on the situation in 1912-1914 he takes the standard Soviet view:
"The workers of Russia recovered from the blows of the reaction slowly but steadily...In April-May 1912 a protest movement against the shooting of workers at the Lena Goldfields exploded into a new revolutionary upsurge. The peasantry rose behind the working class; revolutionary ferment infected the army and navy. All in all, tsarism's policies failed. The basic aim of Stolypin's System of the Third of June [Burdzhalov and other Soviet historians use the term "System of the Third of June" to refer to June 3, 1907, when Stolypin, unhappy about the opposition majority in the Second Duma, dissolved the Duma and promulgated a new electoral law which would guarantee a pro-government majority] was not achieved; a new revolutionary rising was bound to come. The sleeping Russian giant once again began to stir.
"The revolutionary wave reached its greatest height during the summer of 1914. The proletariat in other cities of the country rose up in support of the workers of Baku who had gone on strike. A strike of Petersburg workers involving three hundred thousand people heated up. Armed police and Cossacks raided workers' meetings and broke up demonstrations. The Bolshevik newspaper *Trudovaia pravda* (Labor Truth) was shut down. Mass arrests began. Barricades were thrown up in response to police action. Gripped by feelings of class solidarity and hatred of tsarism the Petrograd proletariat yearned to strike back at the autocracy. Workers from Moscow, Warsaw, Kharkov, and other cities supported their Petersburg brothers, but the proletariat in the country as a whole lagged behind the proletariat in the capital and was not ready for decisive action. The peasantry and army had not yet been drawn into the nascent struggle.
"The Petersburg workers ended their strike in order to prepare better for the approaching revolution. The Bolsheviks strengthened their forces, conducted propaganda, and agitated in the provinces among peasants and soldiers as much as possible in order to organize the country at large for the coming battle with tsarism. The specter of a new 1905 hovered over the country; revolution was imminent and was already making its presence felt. But developments outside the country now interrupted further revolutionary activities...The streets of the capital had barely been cleaned of workers' blood when torrents of workers' and peasants' blood began to flow at the front in the imperialist war..." (pp. 10-11)
It is easy to dismiss this as based on ideological bias, but in fact there is some evidence which--if it does not support the revolution-knocking-at-the-door-in-1914 hypothesis--does at least show that the far left was beginning to recover from its 1907-11 losses. There *was* a notable revival of strikes in 1912-14 and an increase in the number and percentage classified by the government as "political" rather than "economic." There *were* impressive gains by the Bolsheviks over the Mensheviks in the legal labor movement and in the labor curiae elections to the 1912 Duma. (The Mensheviks actually elected more deputies than the Bolsheviks; but to the Bolsheviks what mattered was that the Bolsheviks won the working-class vote in the big cities, while the Menshevik deputies were from "peripheral" areas, above all the Caucasus.) And there *was* a huge general strike in St. Petersburg in July 1914--ending just a few days before war was declared--the "revolutionary explosiveness" of which was argued for by a pro-Menshevik western historian, Leopold Haimson. In fact, Haimson's article "The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905-1917" in the *Slavic Review* of December 1964 and March 1965 has become the classic critique of the notion that Russia would have been heading for greater stability if war could have been avoided. Haimson's argument in brief is that two developments we associate with 1917--the alienation of educated and privileged "society" from tsarism, and the alienation of the working class from "society"--were already present in 1914 and that "the character although not necessarily the gravity, of the political and social crisis evident in urban Russia by the eve of the war" was more similar to that of 1917 than of 1905.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:CUJnb3VJgkkJ:https://canvas.brown.edu/courses/418222/files/17911391/download?wrap=1+&cd=7&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WtZG-vF2DsYJ:https://canvas.brown.edu/courses/418222/files/17911393/download?wrap=1+&cd=6&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
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On the gains that the Bolsheviks were making against the Mensheviks among the urban working class, there's an interesting discussion in Israel Getzler, *Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat,* pp. 135-137
https://books.google.com/books?id=K663PZgP3s0C&pg=PA135
"...[T]he Bolsheviks had captured and purged the Russian Social Democratic Party, controlled its institutions and its funds, and were forging ahead in conquering positions in the open, legal areas of activity which they had hitherto spurned, such as the legal press, trade unions, and the Duma. The Mensheviks found themselves harassed and beaten in their own favourite areas of activity. By April 1912 Bolshevik initiative and money were producing a daily newspaper Zvezda (the Star) in Petersburg in 29,000 copies while the Mensheviks published only the weekly Zhivoe delo (the Living Cause)." The Mensheviks succeeded in May 1912 in establishing their own newspaper Nevskii golos (the Voice of the Neva) (later Luch, then Rabochaia gazeta) but the Bolshevik Pravda or Put' pravdy (The Path of Truth) sold at least twice as many copies through-out 1913 and 1914. Late in 1912 in the elections to the workers' electoral colleges of the Duma six Bolshevik deputies were elected in Petersburg and Moscow and not one Menshevik. As Martov put it: 'the defeat of the Mensheviks in the workers' curia (partly compensated by their moral victory [sic!] in Petersburg) shows once more that Menshevism rather late grasped the growing danger of Leninism and greatly overrated its temporary disappearance.' The Bolsheviks continued to frustrate Menshevik attempts to activate the working class by drawing it into campaigns for piecemeal demands, such as the right of association, legalization of strikes, workers' insurance.
"Defeat followed upon defeat. In the 1913 elections to the Metal Workers' Union in Petersburg the Bolsheviks gained a majority. Martov's comment shows his despair:
'I am depressed by the story of the Metal Workers' Union which reveals our weakness once again, even more than we used to think. Very likely, our position in Petersburg this season will be pushed back even further. But this is not so bad. What is worse is, above all, that the Mensheviks seem unable to move away from the dead point in the organizational sense and remain, in spite of the newspaper and of everything done in the last two years, a weak circle.'
"Events, as well as money—-in the Russian colony of Paris the affluent Bolshevik members of the Central Committee were no longer called 'Tsekists' but 'Chequists'—and organization, were working for the Bolsheviks. After the Lena goldfield massacre of April 1912, in a period of accelerating industrialization and industrial conflict and strike activity, Menshevik education and legality could scarcely compete with the Bolsheviks' well-organized, hard-hitting demagogical propaganda, especially in its appeal to the new and unsettled strata of the proletariat—-new to the cities and still tied to its village origins. Martov could urge such raw and rough recruits not to steal from their employers, not to ransack and engage in violence. If Grigorii Zinoviev's taunt of 1918 can be trusted, Martov may even have threatened with court action those workers who discredited strike activity by making it the occasion for common crimes.' He certainly insisted that strikes and the class-struggle in general be waged in forms which respected the 'moral-legal consciousness of the wide popular masses' even if they ignored 'bourgeois legality'." This might be good morality, even good sense, but it was not effective propaganda for a crude, excited, ill-used working class. The Bolshevik underground committees, all but defunct, came to life again. A new generation of young, enthusiastic activists, some of them trained in the Bolshevik party school at Longjumeau near Paris, with the aid of a vigorous newspaper, soon got under the skin of large sections of the working class, fed it what Martov called 'social myths', mobilized it in political demonstrations, and kept it in a state of revolutionary excitement. The Bolshevik agitators and newspapers had few scruples: Iraklii Tseretelli, the hero of the Second Duma, was accused by M. L Kalinin of having angled for a ministry under Stolypin, The Bolshevik poetaster, Demian Bednyi, in a scurrilous poem described Martov, 'that pillar of the liquidators' as 'a tattered smart alec, branded by Kautsky as a hero of marked cards' and incited class-conscious workers to violence against the 'liquidators' who meant to take part in the Day of the Workers' Press. Against the Bolshevik identification of all Mensheviks as 'liquidators' and their smear campaign, Martov could appeal to nothing more substantial than 'common canons of morality." When the Bolshevik deputies in the Diana, led by Roman Malinovsky, seceded officially from the workers' fraction, and the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks was thus completed, the Menshevik response was characteristic: a pathetic appeal to the International to intervene, not for the purpose of hounding Lenin from the party, but to reunite them with the Bolsheviks, as it were, by decree from above.
"In all this we may see Martov's failure to adapt his party tactics to his insight. [His errors] were all errors of a man who yet had few illusions about the Bolsheviks' nature. Martov noticed that in Bolshevik strongholds like Ivanovo-Voznesensk, the Moscow industrial region, and the Urals, the intellectual element in the party was very weak, and that a significant section of Bolshevik intellectuals such as A. Bogdanov, A. V. Lunacharsky, N. A. Rozhkov, M. N. Pokrovsky, V. Bazarov, and G. A. Alexinsky, had parted company with Lenin. What remained of the Bolshevik leadership was
'a handful of people literally without names or with names that had an unsavoury ring, a group which belonged rather to the intellectual Lumpenproleteriat than to the intelligentsia. Having taken the baton into their hands, they turned corporals, carrying the name of one intellectual-—Lenin—-as their ideological banner. If by taking the baton they could turn corporal, this means that in the Bolshevik section of the proletariat there was a demand for such a baton and for such corporals.'
"One section of the proletariat, 'romantic, primitive, and rebellious', yearned for such leadership and rejected the 'liquidators', i.e. the European social democrats, who in the years 1907-11 had begun to create an open workers' party out of the Marxist-educated elements of the proletariat." Martov thus identified some significant features of the Bolshevik party-—the leader, the semi-intelligent, sometimes 'tainted' activists or 'corporals', the raw working masses at the primitive rebel stage who hungered for rousing leadership. But as a representative of European social democracy, had Martov drawn the right conclusions from his insight?"
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Now I do not think revolution was knocking at the door in 1914. The urban working class by itself was not enough to make a successful revolution without the support of a large number of radicalized "peasants in uniform" who in 1917 in OTL were the result of the War. And even with respect to the workers, one should remember that there were strike waves in many countries in the years preceding the War, and they did not lead to revolution. The line between "economic" and "poltical" strikes was always hard to draw in Russia, but with respect to the 1914 St. Petersburg general strike, "British historian Robert McKean has argued that the strikers were not in fact acting out of political motives, that the Bolsheviks had little influence on the strike or allegiance from the workers involved, and that the strike was not a sign of imminent revolution: it never included the whole working class of the capital, it did not spark strikes in other cities, and it failed to win the support of educated society..."
https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpres...565&chunk.id=s1.5.24&toc.id=ch5&brand=ucpress Still, the Bolsheviks had come a long way from their low point during the Stolypin repression, *Pravda* was the best-selling socialist newpspaper in Russia, and the Bolsheviks' support among the workers in the big cities would at least make them a force to be reckoned with if (more realistically "when") the next crisis came...