The Iranian Revolution has many parallels with certain stages in the Russian Revolution. The writings of Lenin in the first months of 1917, and also his earlier writings on the first Russian Revolution of 1905, provide many useful ideas as to how we should approach the events unfolding in Iran.
Draft Theses, March 4 (17), 1917
The first piece is Draft Theses on the Revolution, written on March 4 (17), 1917, just two days after he had received the first reports of the February Revolution.
The first news of the February bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia reached Lenin on March 2 (15), 1917. Reports of the victory of the revolution and the advent to power of an Octobrist-Cadet government of capitalists and landlords appeared in the Zürcher Post and Neue Zürcher Zeitung by the evening of March 4 (17). Lenin had drawn up a rough draft of theses, not meant for publication, on the tasks of the protetariat in the revolution. The theses were immediately sent via Stockholm to Oslo for the Bolsheviks leaving for Russia.
The Beginning of the Revolution in Russia
The second text is Lenin’s article on the beginning of the 1905 Revolution in Russia. It was published: Vperyod, No. 4, January 31(18), 1905.
Letters from afar: The First Stage of the First Revolution
The last article is an extract from the celebrated Letters From Afar, in which Lenin began to reorient the Bolshevik leaders in Russia, who had been blown off course by the February Revolution and tended to capitulate to the pressures of bourgeois and petty bourgeois democracy. He explains that the overthrow of the old regime was only the first stage of the Revolution, which must ultimately lead to the conquest of power by the workers and peasants, organized in the soviets. It was written on March 7 (20), 1917 and first published in Pravda in Nos. 14 and 15, March 21 and 22, 1917.
