Dictatorship of The Proletariat - Lenin

Lenin

In the 20th century, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin developed Leninism – the adaptation of Marxism to the backward socio-economic and political conditions of Imperial Russia (1721–1917). This body of theory later became the official ideology of some Communist states – but in a distorted form, with many of Lenin's works censored by the ruling elite.

The State and Revolution (1917) explicitly discusses the meaning of the "dictatorship of the proletariat", and proposes pragmatic means of effecting it. In Imperial Russia, the Paris Commune model form of government was realised in the soviets (councils of workers and soldiers) established in the Russian Revolution of 1905, whose revolutionary task was deposing the capitalist (monarchical) state to establish socialism—the dictatorship of the proletariat—the stage preceding communism.

In Russia the Bolshevik Party (described by Lenin as the "vanguard of the proletariat") elevated the soviets to power in the October Revolution of 1917. Throughout 1917, Lenin argued that the Russian Provisional Government was unrepresentative of the proletariat’s interests because, in his estimation, they represented the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”. He argued that because they continually put off democratic elections, they denied the prominence of the democratically constituted soviets, and all of the promises made by liberal-bourgeois parties prior to the February revolution remained unfulfilled, the soviets would need to take power for themselves.