by Lars T. Lih
The overwhelming influence of the German party on international Social Democracy was further increased by the Erfurt Programme (1892), a book-length explication of the Social Democratic strategy written by the up-and-coming Marxist writer Karl Kautsky. Kautsky was born into a Czech family in 1854 and came to Social Democracy only after a period as a Czech nationalist. He served for a term in the Austrian Social Democratic party and then moved to Germany to become the editor of the theoretical journal Die Neue Zeit (New Times), a post he retained until the First World War. His influence on Russian Social Democracy and Lenin personally was incalculable, and we shall meet him again in every chapter of this book.
In many ways Kautsky’s book was unoriginal popularization. But a clear exposition of basic principles, an inspiring application to the contemporary situation and a compelling overarching narrative can have a profound impact on events, whether it is original or not. More importantly for Lenin personally, Kautsky’s version of Social Democracy also contained a heroic scenario of class leadership – one that, like Lenin’s, assigned the workers a national mission. In the Erfurt Programme Kautsky wrote that Social Democracy has a tendency to become more and more ‘a Volkspartei, in the sense that it is the representative not only of the industrial wage-labourers but of all the labouring and exploited strata – and therefore the great majority of the population, what is commonly known as “the Volk”’ (= narod in Russian).23
Kautsky also emphasized that Social Democrats had a duty, not only to use political freedoms, but to struggle to win them where they were absent. Political freedoms were ‘light and air for the proletariat; he who lets them wither or withholds them – he who keeps the proletariat from the struggle to win these freedoms and to extend them – that person is one of the proletariat’s worst enemies.’24 In short, Lenin could feel that his own heroic scenario had received the authoritative endorsement of one of Europe’s leading Marxists. No wonder Lenin took the trouble to translate the Erfurt Programme into Russian during the summer of 1894.
As we saw in the Introduction, Lenin’s widow Nadezhda Krupskaya identified St Petersburg as the time and place where Lenin acquired his heroic scenario – his confidence that ‘all the labouring masses, all the oppressed’ will follow the industrial working class and thus assure its victory. According to Krupskaya the final push for this life-defining commitment was Lenin’s ‘work among the workers of Piter [St Petersburg], conversations with these workers, attentive listening to their speeches’.
Was Krupskaya suggesting that these workers were committed Marxists who lectured Lenin on the fine points of theory? Not at all. When Lenin moved to St Petersburg and had regular contact for the first time with real workers, he did not learn that the workers were necessarily wonderful and noble people. What he learned was that some of them were fighters who were willing to have conversations with intellectuals like himself. He became convinced that they could indeed play the role assigned to them by the Social Democratic scenario. Lenin also discovered the rudiments of a specifically Social Democratic underground, that is, a set of institutions that allowed Social Democratic activists to have ongoing contact with militant workers.
‘A Type of Russian Working Man’, an illustration from William Walling’s Russia’s Message (1908).
In Lenin’s view Social Democracy represented not rejection of but rather connection with the earlier Russian revolutionary tradition. The Social Democratic strategy was what the Russian revolutionaries had been groping toward, through heroic mistakes and suffering. It was the answer to the problem that his older brother had tried, and failed, to solve. As we shall see in the next chapter much hard work by a whole generation of Social Democratic activists, many ups and downs, many internal controversies, were needed to make his life-defining wager on his heroic scenario begin to pay off.
Lenin announced his new political identity to the world in the first half of 1894 by writing a book of several hundred pages entitled Who are These ‘Friends of the People’ and How Do They Fight Against the Social Democrats?. In what turned out to be very typical fashion, Lenin’s exposition of his vision of Russian Social Democracy came in the form of an angry polemic against the ‘philistines’ who attacked it. The phrase ‘friends of the people’ was a self-description of Russian populists such as Mikhailovsky, used ironically by Lenin. Friends of the People was Lenin’s first publication, albeit an illegal one. For a long time, all copies of it were presumed missing. When two-thirds of it showed up in 1923 Lenin’s companions and first biographers – Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Krupskaya – were thrilled. They saw Friends of the People as proof that right at the start of his career Lenin had acquired the essentials of the world-view that guided him for the rest of his life – and they were right.
Lenin Unfurls his Banner
The banners that were unfurled in the street demonstrations by Social Democratic workers both in Russia and Europe became a central icon of the socialist movement. To appear in public under a banner with a revolutionary slogan was the essential militant act. The image of the banner was an extremely important one for Lenin himself. It was more than just a figure of speech found littered throughout his writings – it was a metaphor that focused his conception of revolutionary politics. The banner announced to the world who you were and what you were fighting for. The implied narrative summarized in the slogans on the banner inspired your own fighters and rallied others to the cause. The banner signified the moral unity of the fighters that made possible their effective organization. Like the flag for a patriotic citizen, the waving banner with its militant message summed up all the emotional warmth that gave life to the dry bones of Marxist theory.
By 1894 Lenin had worked out the heroic scenario which in formed his entire political career. He summed up this scenario in the last sentence of Friends of the People. The original edition (illegally published by the primitive hectograph method) shows the prominence accorded to these final words. When Friends of the People was rediscovered in the 1920s Lenin’s long-time comrade Grigorii Zinoviev was particularly taken with Lenin’s final sentence: ‘These words, written almost thirty years ago, sound as if they had been written today.’25 Indeed, Lenin’s long and carefully crafted sentence unfurled the banner under which he was to march for the rest of his life:
When the advanced representatives of this class assimilate the ideas of scientific socialism and the idea of the historical role of the Russian worker – when these ideas receive a broad dissemination – when durable organisations are created among the workers that transform the present uncoordinated economic war of the workers into a purposive class struggle, – then the Russian WORKER, elevated to the head of all democratic elements, will overthrow absolutism and lead the RUSSIAN PROLETARIAT (side by side with the proletariat of ALL COUNTRIES) by the direct road of open political struggle to THE VICTORIOUS COMMUNIST REVOLUTION.26
Lenin’s sentence sketches out a world-historical drama starting in Russia in the 1890s and ending with the victorious communist revolution. This drama can be divided into three acts, with each act unified by a single task that has to be accomplished before the curtain rises for the next act. Remarkably enough, Lenin lived to see this entire drama played out, albeit accompanied with the shortfalls, ironies and frustrations that life usually hands out. Each decade of his thirty-year revolutionary career corresponds to one act of the drama – and one chapter of this book (the tumultuous final decade gets two chapters).
The Angel of Socialism in the Russian copy of Walter Crane’s The Capitalist Vampire.
Act One, The Creation of Russian Social Democracy: ‘When the advanced representatives of this class assimilate the ideas of scientific socialism, the idea of the historical role of the Russian worker – when these ideas receive a broad dissemination – when durable organisations are created among the workers that transform the present uncoordinated economic war of the workers into a purposive class struggle…’
Act One tells the story of the creation of a Rus
sian version of a Social Democratic party that is genuinely and effectively engaged in bringing what Marx called ‘knowledge and combination’ to the workers, despite being forced underground by tsarist repression. For Lenin, this act of the drama took place during the years 1894–1904.
The emotional content of Act One can be seen in Walter Crane’s poster of the Angel of Socialism. This poster was originally published in England in 1885, but Russianized (with the artist’s consent) in 1902 by Russian émigrés living in London – just as Lenin’s Act One is a Russian version of a process that (as Kautsky and others taught him) had already taken place in other countries. Instead of the original text of ‘Religious Hypocrisy, Capitalism, Party Politics’, the wings of the vampire bat in the Russian version say: ‘Bureaucracy, Church, Capital, Autocracy’. The bat is gnawing the vitals of the sleeping worker (identified as ‘labour’) who is unaware of what is happening. An angel blows a trumpet to open his eyes and to invite him to fight back under a banner that reads ‘socialism’. International Social Democracy saw itself in no less exalted terms. Its mission was to imbue the workers with a sense of their own mission.
Act Two, The Democratic Revolution: ‘then the Russian WORKER, elevated to the head of all democratic elements, will overthrow absolutism…’
Act Two presents the struggle to bring political freedom to Russia by revolutionary overthrow of the tsar. This struggle was Lenin’s central concern in the years 1904 to 1914. Bolshevism emerged in Russia during this decade as a distinct current within Social Democracy, defined by a specific strategy for bringing political freedom to Russia – a strategy based squarely on Lenin’s heroic scenario of the working class leading the narod. In Lenin’s banner sentence the narod is given the label ‘democratic elements’. This bit of Marxist jargon means all those who want an anti-tsarism revolution enough to really fight for it. In Lenin’s mind the main ‘democratic elements’ were the urban workers and the narod.
Walter Crane’s illustration of the Russian liberation struggle.
The emotional meaning of this episode is shown in a later poster by Walter Crane, created specifically at the request of Russian Social Democrats in London – just as Lenin’s Act Two concerns a specifically Russian task not faced by Social Democracy in Europe. In contrast to the worker in the previous poster, the central figure here has awakened and filed through the chains that kept him from acting. He looks with grim determination at the crowned eagle of tsarism that has dug its claws into him. The worker has unfurled his banner: ‘Down with Autocracy! Long live Freedom and Socialism!’ The eagle is taken aback, but obviously the struggle will be difficult. In the background a crowd of militant workers and peasants (is that a hammer or an axe that is being held aloft?), under streaming banners, are moving toward the fight.
A Soviet poster from 1920 celebrating the third anniversary of the October Revolution.
Act Three, The Social Revolution: The Russian worker will ‘lead the RUSSIAN PROLETARIAT (side by side with the proletariat of ALL COUNTRIES) by the direct road of open political struggle to THE VICTORIOUS COMMUNIST REVOLUTION.’
Act Three in Lenin’s heroic scenario is the world socialist revolution. During the final decade of Lenin’s career, 1914 to 1924, his central concern was carrying out the socialist revolution both at home in Russia and in Western Europe. When war broke out in 1914 and the various Social Democratic parties renounced international solidarity and participated in national defence, Lenin felt that ‘the banner of Social Democracy has been besmirched’ and began to insist on a name change from Social Democrat to Communist. In this final act Lenin no longer defined himself primarily as a Russian Social Democrat but as a leader of the world communist movement. Yet, even as a Communist, Lenin remained loyal to his 1894 scenario.
The emotional content of this act is revealed by a Soviet poster from 1920. The Russian worker, still with his anachronistic black-smith’s hammer, stands amid the ruins of tsarism’s once mighty edifice. The crown that was once atop the eagle’s head is now lying disregarded in the rubble. Yet the banner unfurled by the Russian worker makes a prouder claim than simply to have achieved political freedom and the possibility of ‘open political struggle’. It displays (unfortunately not visible here) the initials of an actual revolutionary regime, the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. Inspired by his example are many workers who stand under their own banners with the slogan ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ in various languages.
By 1894 Ulyanov had adopted the public identity later known as ‘N. Lenin’. The particular pseudonym ‘Lenin’ was first used only in 1901 but Vladimir Ulyanov had already defined himself as an activist of the Social Democratic underground by 1894. More importantly, he had found the ‘other way’ that would allow him to stride forward with the uncanny self-confidence that so bemused observers. The sentence that concluded Friends of the People was a banner, not unlike the banner carried by the angel of socialism, the banner of the awakened Russian worker, the banner of the European proletariat on the march. The dramatic and ambitious narrative on that banner was Lenin’s story – and he stuck to it.
2. The Merger of Socialism and the Worker Movement
Boris Gorev was one of the young Social Democratic activists with whom Lenin teamed up after he arrived in St Petersburg in 1893. Gorev later remembered coming home one day during the great Petersburg strikes of 1895–6 and finding two of his women friends – fellow activists in the nascent Social Democratic underground – twirling around the apartment in sheer delight.1
What exhilarated these young people, in spite of the long and dangerous hours they were putting in to support the striking workers? As we shall see, the imposing dimensions of the strike not only showed the potential for a militant worker movement in Russia – more fundamentally, the strike validated the wager these young activists had made about the workability of the Social Democratic strategy in tsarist Russia. Lenin had made the same wager in as public a manner as underground conditions permitted in his underground manifesto Friends of the People. Lenin may not have danced around his apartment (or he may have!), but his writings during the 1890s reveal the same sense of excited pride.
Lenin in St Petersburg, 1894–6
To understand this exhilarating sense of confirmation, we need to know what Lenin was doing during his two years in Petersburg, the meaning he gave to his own activities and the ways in which the Petersburg strikes of the mid-1890s validated this meaning. In all of this Lenin was a typical Social Democratic activist – or, rather, he was exceptional only in the fervour and energy with which he threw himself into his new role.
From a revolutionary magazine of the 1905–7 era. Its caption read: ‘The working man who reads indulges in a dangerous occupation’.
When Lenin arrived in Petersburg in late 1893 his first aim was to get in touch with existing Social Democratic circles. The most active circle consisted of students at the university’s technology institute. The energy and erudition of the newcomer from the Volga quickly made him a leader. Over the next two years Lenin worked with other activists such as L. Martov to bring greater organizational structure to the various Social Democratic groups in the city. These efforts culminated in late 1895 with the creation of the Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class. The title ‘Union of Struggle’ soon became the standard one for local Social Democratic organizations.
Members of the Petersburg Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class. This photograph was taken in early 1897, after the arrest of the Union’s leaders and shortly before their exile to Siberia. Lenin is directly behind the table; seated to his left, with one arm resting on the table, is L. Martov, a later leader of the Mensheviks and Lenin’s political enemy.
A great rite of initiation for these young activists was their first contact with the worker groups who requested propagandists from the intelligentsia. In the Social Democratic jargon of the time, the term ‘propaganda’ had connotations that were very different from those
it later acquired. It did not mean simplistic messages used to bombard passive targets, but rather an intensive and wide-ranging education that was initiated by the workers. ‘Propagandized worker’ was therefore a title of honour, an indication of potential leader status. These propaganda circles gave rise to Lenin’s conversations with workers that Krupskaya later claimed were so crucial to his self-definition.
Lenin also collaborated with workers in carrying out investigations of factory conditions in places like the Thornton works in St Petersburg. Later he recounted how one worker, worn out by Lenin’s relentless grilling, ‘told me with a smile, wiping the sweat away after the end of our labours, “working overtime is not as tough for me as answering your questions!”.2
As at all periods of his life, literary activities took up much of Lenin’s time. Partly these were writings aimed at an intelligentsia audience that was passionately attentive to the debates between the young Marxists and the older writers in the populist tradition. For this audience Lenin produced polemical essays with titles like ‘A Line-by-Line Critique of a Populist Profession de foi’ (the populists or narodniki were the dominant current in the Russian revolutionary tradition prior to the rise of Social Democracy).3 Lenin also wrote directly for the workers, for example, a forty-page pamphlet setting forth the worker’s legal position in relation to factory fines. When the émigré Social Democrat Pavel Axelrod praised this pamphlet, Lenin gratefully responded: ‘I wanted nothing so much, dreamed of nothing so much, as the possibility of writing for the workers.’4