The Road to October

Do you think that the October Revolution would have happened with or without the Bolsheviks? 

I think a revolution of some kind would have occurred without the Bolsheviks but probably not a coup on the level of what the Bolsheviks actually pulled off. Because Kerensky's government refused to end the war and it was fairly clear that Russia would end up on the losing end of that conflict unless Germany was defeated sooner rather than later, it is unlikely that Kerensky's government would have been able to forestall widespread mutiny for very long. The threat of mutiny in and of itself might have resulted in a coup from the military itself on the order of the Kornilov coup or perhaps even from the military rank and file. Of course, it's also true that Germany was on a course to lose the war by the time American troops deployed in Europe, but that deployment was more or less coincident with the October Revolution. The other possibility is that some faction from within the Provisional Government, perhaps the Left SRs, would make a play for power in the environment of widespread mutiny and ride a wave of rank and file military support to political power. Whether that power would exist within the context of the Provisional Government, a military-backed coup, or some combination of the two is difficult of say, obviously, but it does seem to me that the ongoing war was a guarantee of the Provisional Government disappearing at some point.

To elaborate on these points, first, it's necessary to distinguish what the Bolsheviks actually did from the possibilities listed in the previous paragraph. While it is true that the Bolsheviks controlled the Petrograd Soviet at the time that they staged their coup, they were quite far from being able to claim a popular mandate outside the city, much less outside that city's soviet. This being the case, it becomes clear that seizure of power in the capital is more of a decapitating movement than an expression of popular revolt. Nothing else proves this point more than the elections to the Constituent Assembly and the move by Lenin et al. to nullify the results of the election and rule by decree. Orlando Figes in quite clear in his book that Lenin had no interest in drawing political power from a deliberative body but rather to create a dictatorship. Figes writes, "The 'class struggle' and the defeat of the 'counter-revolution' demanded the consolidation of Soviet power and, unless the Assembly was ready to recognize this, 'the entire people' would agree that it was 'doomed to politiical extinction'. It was a declaration of intent to abolish the Assembly, unless the Assembly agreed to abolish itself."[1] Figes's use of inverted commas here is intended not only to provide direct quotation but also to sneer not so subtly at the terminology used by Lenin to deligitimize the institution. Any other party attempting to seize power would have had to do so while maintaining the legitimacy of the Provisional Government or at least of the Duma. In this regard, Lenin's decision to boycott the Provisional Government was wise.

Finally, the Bolsheviks' emphasis on a party vanguard allowed them to harness the popular unrest and violence of the immediate period of the Provisional Government's collapse. Whereas civil wars are commonly environments in which petty violence and personal score-settling become commonplace,[2] and Russia in the fall of 1917 was no exception, the Bolsheviks, operating on the basis of an ideological mandate to direct the power of the masses, could determine how best to tolerate the street violence until their control of power was firm. It is unlikely that any other single party would have had to discipline to take control of such a volatile situation.

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[1] Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996), 513.
[2] This is a point made well in Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 2000.