Socialism 101

by Kathleen Sears

  By the time Russia entered the game, the time of small workshops was long over. Without a homegrown base of capital and expertise, the Industrial Revolution started from the top down. The tsarist government was a large entrepreneur in its own right, responsible for constructing a railroad network across the country and a major player in the development of the coal and iron industries. For the most part the landowning aristocracy had no interest in investing in industry, so much of the capital came from abroad. By 1900 more than 50 percent of the capital in Russian manufacturing companies was foreign. In crucial industries, like iron, the percentage was even higher.

  Peasants and the Proletariat

  Russia could only dream of having an urban proletariat in 1900. The tsar’s grandfather, Alexander II (1818–1881), emancipated the serfs in 1861, in part to make it possible for peasants to emigrate to the cities and become industrial workers. Emancipation tied former serfs to the land in new ways. The process by which land was distributed to the peasants required them to “redeem” the land from its former owners over a forty-nine-year period. Ownership was further complicated by the traditional village commune, known as the mir. The self-governing units held the land in common, and allotments were redistributed periodically to ensure economic equality. Before emancipation the mir was responsible for taxes and obligations to the landlord; after emancipation the mir was responsible for taxes and redemption payments to the landlord. A peasant who wanted to move to the city had to give up all claim to the land or return to work the harvest.

  The End of Serfdom

  * * *

  Prior to the Emancipation Manifesto of 1861 Russian peasants were legally tied to the land they were born on: not quite slaves but certainly not free. The Manifesto gave roughly 23 million people the rights of full citizens, including the right to marry without their landlord’s consent, to leave the land, and to own property or a business.

  * * *

  The Russian proletariat had plenty to complain about. The fact that they had to return to the country for the harvest meant that many of them were transient workers who took whatever unskilled jobs were available. Wages were extremely low, even by the standards of other proletariats: in 1880 a factory worker in Moscow earned only a quarter of the wage earned by his British counterpart. With no tradition of personal freedom, many workers were treated like industrial serfs, housed in barracks and marched back and forth to work each day.

  Political parties and trade unions were illegal. Even professional associations were highly regulated and their meetings were supervised. One of the few legal forms of organization was the zemstvo, a type of elected regional council established by Alexander II. Controlled by the nobility, zemstvos were legally limited to dealing with local and charitable issues, though some liberal-minded aristocrats attempted to extend the councils’ scope to include political matters.

  Newspapers, magazines, and books, both those published in Russian and those imported from abroad, were rigorously censored. Political literature had to be secretly printed and distributed. It was often published by political émigrés and smuggled into the country.

  All opposition parties—reformers and revolutionaries alike—worked underground, shadowed by the threat of imprisonment, exile to Siberia, or execution. With no other outlet for voicing opposition, assassination attempts against members of the royal family and high government officials were common. Secret police infiltrated opposition groups, and revolutionaries offered themselves as police spies to find out about police plans.

  THE FIRST RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

  At the end of 1904 Russia was buckling under the Japanese. At first glance the Russo-Japanese conflict looked like a David and Goliath fight, but in fact the least industrialized of the European powers didn’t have a chance against the newly industrialized Japanese.

  The Russo-Japanese War

  * * *

  The Russo-Japanese War began with Japan’s attack on the Russian naval base at Port Arthur in Manchuria on February 9, 1904, and ended with the destruction of the Russian fleet in the Tsushima Straits on May 27, 1905. Officially, the war was a conflict over who controlled Manchuria and Korea. Unofficially, it was Japan’s debut as an international power.

  * * *

  In addition to the sting of national humiliation, the war placed an immense strain on Russia’s fragile infrastructure. While the government concentrated on the difficult task of supplying its armed forces in Asia, the systems for provisioning Russia’s large cities broke down. The price of essential goods rose so quickly that real wages fell by 20 percent.

  Worker Protests

  Worker discontent boiled over in December 1904, when the Putilov Iron Works in St. Petersburg began to lay off workers. The Putilov workers went on strike, soon joined by thousands of workers in other parts of the city. The government responded by cutting off electricity to the city, shutting down newspapers, and declaring public areas of the city closed.

  “Bloody Sunday”

  On January 22 more than 150,000 Russian workers, many of them women and children, marched peacefully on the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. Calling on their “Little Father” for help in difficult times, the workers tried to present Tsar Nicholas II with a petition demanding the usual political and economic reforms, including a popularly elected assembly, improved working conditions, better wages, reduced hours, universal manhood suffrage—and the end of the war with Japan. The Imperial Guard blocked the way and fired on the crowd to keep them from moving forward. Between bullets and the panicking crowd, more than one hundred people were killed or wounded.

  News of what was predictably called “Bloody Sunday” set off insurrections and activism at every level of society. Middle-class professional associations and aristocratically controlled zemstvos called for a constituent assembly. Students walked out of universities in protest against the lack of civil liberties. Village mirs organized uprisings against landholders. Industrial workers went on strike.

  More Insurrection

  In June, soon after the Japanese destruction of the Russian fleet, the spirit of insurrection infected the military. Sailors on the battleship Potemkin protested against being served rotten meat. When the captain ordered the ringleaders shot, the firing squad refused to carry out his orders and the crew threw their officers overboard. Other units of the army and navy followed the Potemkin’s example.

  In October the railway workers went on strike, paralyzing transportation. At the same time the Mensheviks and other parties set up a workers’ council (known as a Soviet) in St. Petersburg to coordinate revolutionary activities. Within a matter of weeks more than fifty Soviets had been formed in towns and cities across Russia. Leon Trotsky eventually became head of the Petrograd soviet.

  Soviet

  * * *

  The term soviet originally referred to a council of any kind. The workers’ Soviets created in the 1905 revolution were made up of elected representatives from each factory or workshop in a town. Soviets became the basic units of government at the local and regional level in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

  * * *

  The Tsar’s Response

  Faced with general unrest, the tsar’s chief minister recommended that Nicholas create an elected legislative assembly as a way to appease the public. The tsar reluctantly agreed. He issued the October Manifesto on October 17, which established a limited form of constitutional monarchy in Russia and guaranteed fundamental civil liberties. The most important provision of the manifesto was the implementation of a new advisory council, the Duma, which would be chosen by popular election and would have the authority to approve or reject all legislation.

  Radicals found the fact that the Duma would be only a consulting body, not a true legislature, hard to swallow. The leaders of the St. Petersburg Soviet denounced the plan and were arrested.

  Backlash

  * * *

  The October Manifesto resulted in a conservative backlash. Between 1906 and 1914 armed bands known as th
e Black Hundreds organized pogroms, took punitive action against peasants who were involved in the insurrections, and attacked students and activists. The Black Hundreds were drawn from those invested in the old system: landowners, rich peasants, bureaucrats, merchants, police officers, and Orthodox clergy.

  * * *

  Radical doubts about the proposed Duma were well founded. When the Fundamental Laws that detailed the structure of the new reforms were released in April 1906, the shape of the Duma was radically altered. The right to vote was severely limited. The elected Duma was now the lower house of a two-house chamber with only limited control over legislature. Members of the upper house were appointed by the tsar, who retained the right to rule by decree when the Duma wasn’t in session.

  Between 1906 and 1917 four separate Dumas were convened. Liberal and socialist groups dominated the first two Dumas, which proposed a series of reforms, including universal manhood suffrage, lifting the restrictions on trade unions, and land reform. Each time, the Duma remained in session for only a few months before Nicholas shut them down.

  The First World War destroyed whatever faith the Russian people still had in the tsarist government. Ill-equipped and badly led, Russia suffered defeat after defeat, mostly at the hands of Germany. By the end of 1915 one million Russian soldiers had been killed, and another one million had been captured.

  The government was equally inept at organizing the home front. Its greatest failure was an inability to organize food distribution, creating rising prices and artificial food shortages in the cities.

  THE FEBRUARY 1917 REVOLUTION

  On February 2, 1917, Petrograd, as St. Petersburg was then called, was in the throes of a general strike. The transportation system had failed, so there was no way to distribute the food that sat in the city’s warehouses. The streets were crowded with people standing in food lines in the bitter cold.

  When the inevitable bread riot broke out, the police fired on the crowd. Everything was business as usual until the army unit that was sent to reinforce the police instead disarmed them and joined the strikers. Suddenly the bread riot was a full-scale rebellion.

  Is It Petersburg, Petrograd, or Leningrad?

  * * *

  It depends on when you’re talking about. Peter the Great founded the city in 1703, claiming that he named it after his patron saint. In 1914 the name became Petrograd because many Russians thought St. Petersburg sounded too German. In 1924 the city became Leningrad in Lenin’s honor. In 1991 residents voted to change the name back to St. Petersburg.

  * * *

  It took several days for the news to reach Tsar Nicholas, who insisted on staying with the army at the front. It apparently took a little longer to make him understand that this was more than just another bread riot. Finally, under pressure from both the Duma and his senior military officers, Tsar Nicholas abdicated in favor of his brother, the Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich. The Grand Duke, apparently quicker on the uptake than his brother, declined to accept the throne.

  The Duma quickly established a provisional government made up of the leaders of all the bourgeois parties. At the same time the leaders of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party organized the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies: 2,500 elected representatives from factories and military units around the city.

  LENIN AND THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

  The Bolsheviks Act

  The Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party was founded in 1898, with the intention of bringing together Russian Marxists in a single organization. Unity didn’t last long. At the organization’s second congress, held in Brussels and London in 1903, party members found themselves divided over two related questions:

  • Should party membership be limited to active revolutionaries?

  • Could a socialist revolution occur in a country that was still in the initial stages of capitalism?

  The debate split the party into two factions: the Bolshevik (majority) party, led by Vladimir Lenin, and the Menshevik (minority) party, led by George Plekhanov and Pavel Axelrod.

  The Minority As Majority

  * * *

  It is typical of the complicated relationship between the two groups that the Menshevik faction actually represented the majority of the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. The names came about as a result of a questionable vote at the 1903 congress that gave Lenin’s faction control of the party for a short time. The Mensheviks quickly regained control, but the names stuck.

  * * *

  Although both groups claimed to be Marxist, there were fundamental differences in their approaches to revolution. The Mensheviks took an approach halfway between revisionist and orthodox Marxism. They believed that Russia could achieve socialism only after it developed into a bourgeois society with an oppressed proletariat. Until the budding Russian proletariat was fully developed and ready for revolution, they were willing to cooperate with nonsocialist liberals to implement reforms. The Bolsheviks were prepared to adapt Marxism to fit Russian political realities. Unlike the Mensheviks, they recognized that the peasants were as oppressed as any urban proletariat and represented a potential revolutionary force.

  THE SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARY PARTY

  The Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party wasn’t the only game in town for would-be Russian revolutionaries. The Socialist Revolutionary Party, founded in 1901, worked chiefly among the rural population. The Marxist-based Social-Democrats looked forward to a socialist state based on the industrialized working class. The Socialist Revolutionaries hoped that Russia could bypass capitalism, or at least limit its scope. They proposed building a socialist country based on the traditional village mir. The land would be nationalized, but it would be worked by peasants on the principle of “labor ownership”: a cross between squatters’ rights and sweat equity.

  VLADIMIR LENIN: ARCHITECT OF THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION

  Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) was born into a middle-class family of educators in a small city near Moscow. When Lenin was a young teenager, his older brother was executed for conspiring to assassinate Tsar Alexander III. After the death of his brother, Lenin began to study revolutionary ideas. By the time he was seventeen he was already in trouble with the Russian authorities for participating in an illegal student rally. He was expelled from the university system and banished to his grandfather’s estate, where his older sister was already under house arrest.

  Pseudonyms

  * * *

  Lenin’s original name was Vladimir Ulyanov. After his return from Siberia he used a number of aliases as part of his clandestine political work. In 1902 he adopted the pseudonym “Lenin,” which was derived from the Lena River in Siberia.

  * * *

  In 1893, after taking his law exams and being admitted to the bar, Lenin moved to St. Petersburg, where he worked as a public defender. He became involved in unifying the city’s various Marxist groups into a single organization known as the Union for the Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class. The Union issued leaflets pleading the workers’ cause, supported strikes, and collaborated with workers’ educational societies.

  That sort of thing never went over well with absolutist rulers. In December 1895 the Union’s leaders were arrested. Lenin spent fifteen months in jail in St. Petersburg, and then was exiled to Siberia for three years.

  At the end of his term in Siberia Lenin joined the Russian expatriate community, living at various times in Munich, London, and Geneva. During this period he cofounded the newspaper Iskra (The Spark) and published books and pamphlets about revolutionary politics.

  What Is to Be Done?

  Much of the debate at the 1903 congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party was based on one of Lenin’s most important books: What Is to Be Done? (1902). In it, Lenin proposed that the party should be the “vanguard of the proletariat,” serving the same purpose in class warfare as the vanguard does in a military war.

  Bolshevism and Syndicalism

  * * *


  Lenin’s idea of the “vanguard of the proletariat” is similar to the syndicalist idea of the “conscious minority.” Both ideas assume that a more enlightened group must lead the proletariat to revolution. Lenin’s “vanguard of the proletariat” would include members of the “bourgeois intelligentsia.” The syndicalist “conscious minority” would be members of the labor elite.

  * * *

  Marx and Engels claimed that the working class would emancipate itself; Lenin argued that the working class, left to itself, would develop “trade union consciousness,” not “revolutionary consciousness.” It was necessary for a vanguard of what Lenin called the “bourgeois intelligentsia” to lead the proletariat in the revolution, and for a hierarchical, strictly disciplined communist party to lead the intelligentsia. No one doubted that Lenin, himself, would lead the party.

  LENIN AND THE BOLSHEVIK TAKEOVER

  Lenin returned from exile on April 3, 1917, a month after the tsar abdicated, and immediately became a leading voice in the Bolshevik Party. (Bolsheviks and Mensheviks had, by this time, more or less formally split into two parties.) Most Bolsheviks still believed that it was impossible for a socialist revolution to take place in a country that was in the first stages of the Industrial Revolution. Lenin took the position that the revolution did not solve the fundamental problems of the Russian proletariat, and the task ahead was to turn the bourgeois revolution into a proletarian one.