by Lars T. Lih
Lenin had met Axelrod during a trip abroad in the summer of 1895. This trip represents one more dimension of Lenin’s activities during his time in Petersburg, namely, the effort to establish contacts with the wider Social Democratic world. In Switzerland Lenin met with Axelrod and other members of the Group for the Liberation of Labour such as Georgy Plekhanov and Vera Zasulich. The Group for the Liberation of Labour, one of the earliest Russian Marxist organizations, had been founded about a decade earlier and was now delighted to be able to make contact with a living, breathing Social Democratic movement in Russia. Lenin was also received by one of the legendary leaders of the German Social Democratic party, Wilhelm Liebknecht. Returning home, Lenin supported efforts to make contacts with other Russian towns where similar embryonic Social Democratic groups had arisen.
Lenin’s various activities – polemicizing with populists, working with local activists, making contact with factory workers, visits to émigré leaders abroad – were all tied together in his mind as part of the larger story of European Social Democracy. He and his fellow activists were consciously replicating a process they thought had already taken place in other countries. Naturally, Russian conditions imposed crucial variations but, as Lenin saw it, these variations did not alter the underlying logic of what was going on.
The person who set out this underlying logic most effectively was Karl Kautsky in the Erfurt Programme, and herein lies the source of Kautsky’s huge impact on fledgling Russian Social Democracy. Kautsky’s definition of Social Democracy became universally accepted in the international Social Democratic movement: ‘Social Democracy is the merger of socialism and the worker movement.’ ‘Worker movement’ in this slogan means a militant, anti-capitalist, self-protection movement of worker protest. ‘Socialism’ means the socialist message, as spread by committed propagandists and agitators. Social Democracy happens when the two sides realize that they need each other. The worker movement acknowledges that only socialism can truly end worker exploitation and misery. The socialists acknowledge that socialism can only be established when the workers themselves understand its necessity and are ready to fight for it. As Kautsky goes on to explain, the two geniuses who first understood the need for the merger of socialism and the worker movement were Marx and Engels.5
According to Kautsky, many barriers of mistrust and misunderstanding had to be overcome before the merger could take place. At first the socialist intellectuals (including intellectuals of worker origin) did not aim their message directly at the oppressed and downtrodden workers themselves. They assumed that the workers, precisely because they were downtrodden, were incapable of understanding the necessity of socialism. In response, the militant workers fighting the battles of their class viewed socialism as nothing more than the hobby-horse of patronizing intellectuals. But (Kautsky fervently believed) this original separation would inevitably be overcome in each country. This pattern was confirmed by ‘the history of all countries’ (a phrase used by Lenin more than once to make this point) – and so the Russian Social Democrats of the 1890s could take heart that the merger would eventually take place in Russia as well.
Lenin explicitly endorsed Kautsky’s merger formula in his seminal Friends of the People in 1894. As he put it later, ‘Kautsky’s expression… reproduces the basic ideas of the Communist Manifesto’.6 More than that, the merger formula runs like a red thread through Lenin’s writings from 1894 to 1904 whenever Lenin had occasion to state his basic purposes. When asked by his colleagues to write a draft of a Social Democratic programme (even though he was in jail at the time), Lenin wrote that Social Democracy showed ‘the way by which the aspiration of socialism – the aspiration of ending the eternal exploitation of man by man – must be merged with the movement of the narod that arose out of the conditions of life created by large-scale factories and workshops.’7
Lenin used Kautsky’s merger formula to give meaning to his various activities, since all were in aid of bringing committed socialists and militant workers into a single fighting organization. And in this Lenin was again typical, since activists all over Russia were similarly inspired. Indeed, Kautsky has as good a title as anyone to be called the father of Russian Social Democracy – or rather, he was the channel by which the ‘basic ideas of the Communist Manifesto’ and the prestige of the German socialist party (SPD) were brought home to the young Russians for whom Kautsky’s Erfurt Programme became a textbook of Social Democracy.
Lenin and his fellow activists very much wanted to see Russian Social Democracy as one more exemplar of the canonical merger, of course with the necessary changes having been made. The crucial necessary change was adjusting to the absence of political freedom. Tsarist repression meant that both ‘socialism’ (the activists) and ‘the worker movement’ (unions, strikes, economic protest) had only a passing resemblance to their counterparts in Western Europe. Could functional Russian equivalents be found to serve the same basic purpose?
On the ‘socialism’ side, the interaction of Social Democratic ideals with the realities of Russian society lead to the creation of a new social type, the praktik, the activists who actually ran local organizations. This new type was something of a hybrid, made up of both plebeian intellectuals and ‘intelligentnye workers’ (workers who adopted intelligentsia ideals). The worker contribution to this hybrid social type, crucial both to Social Democratic discourse and practice, was called the ‘purposive worker’ (more usually translated as ‘conscious worker’). The purposive worker was not only militant, but also determined to be ‘rational and cultured’. He or she wanted to think well, to behave well, to dress well, to use proper grammar and to avoid strong drink. Semën Kanatchikov, a worker whose memoirs are the best entrée into the outlook of this social type, describes himself:
Sufficiently fortified by now by my awareness that I was ‘adult’, ‘independent’, and, what is more, ‘purposive’, I bravely entered into combat with ‘human injustice’. I stood up for the abused and the oppressed, enlightened and persuaded the ‘non-purposive’, and argued passionately with my opponents, defending my ideals.8
But this sense of mission and self-worth was fragile, and Kanatchikov recalls the loneliness of a ‘few solitary revolutionary youths’ among ‘the inert, sometimes even hostile masses’.9
Only a determined optimist could see these young and inexperienced Russian praktiki as the functional equivalent of socialist activists in Western European countries. Kautsky’s merger scenario also required a working class that was capable of sustained and ‘purposive’ class struggle. Did the Russian working class – made up of newly arrived peasants thrown without preparation into the factory cauldron – have the necessary cultural level to move from passivity to organized protest, from destructive riots to disciplined strikes? A sceptical Social Democrat, Elena Kuskova, wrote in 1899 that the actual results of capitalist industrialization in Russia were indeed ‘depressing and capable of plunging the most optimistic Marxist… into gloom’.10
These very understandable doubts were the reason that the Petersburg strikes of 1896 were so exhilarating for the Social Democratic praktiki. Their impact can best be gauged by remarks made by the liberal historian and party leader Paul Miliukov, writing less than a decade after the event: ‘In June, 1896, St Petersburg was roused by a startling movement of workingmen, the like of which it had never before seen. The workers in twenty-two cotton factories of the northern capital, numbering more than thirty thousand, organized something like a general strike.’ The demands of the workers were sensible and moderate, the conduct of the strike was disciplined and peaceful. The strike was not instigated by socialists from the intelligentsia, and ‘all the proclamations and other papers published during the strike were written by the men themselves, in a plain, half-educated language’.
Thus the 1896 strikes stand in startling contrast to earlier more destructive and anarchic worker outbursts. According to Miliukov, the Petersburg strikes marked a turning point in the Russian revolutionary movement.
‘The Russian “masses”, up to that time voiceless and silent, appear now for the first time on the political stage and make their first attempt to speak in their own name.’11
This newly independent involvement by the masses marked a fundamental difference from the situation faced by earlier revolutionaries, such as Lenin’s brother Alexander.
Lenin himself had been arrested months before the culmination of the strike movement in summer 1896 and did not have much to do with it. Like Miliukov he stressed that the socialists should not be held responsible for the St Petersburg strikes. As Lenin put it, ‘strikes do not break out because socialist instigators come on the scene, but socialists come on the scene because strikes have started up, the struggle of the workers against the capitalists has started up’.12 Yet all the more did the strikes reassure him that his wager on ‘another way’, the Social Democratic way, was paying off. The merger predicted by Kautsky was taking place and already having an unprecedented impact, since the mighty tsarist government had been forced to make concessions by passing the law of 2 June 1897 that limited working hours.
Lenin saw the whole episode as confirmation that his heroic scenario was not the idle dream of an impotent revolutionary, for it was turning into reality before his eyes. The factory workers were ready to play the role assigned to them. Once they were aware of their interests, they were ready to fight, and ‘no amount of persecution, no wholesale arrests and deportations, no grandiose political trials, no hounding of the workers have been of any avail’. The next step was for the advanced workers to stir up the more backward workers. ‘Unless the entire mass of Russian workers is enlisted in the struggle for the workers’ cause, the advanced workers of the capital cannot hope to win much.’13
The successful participation of the nascent socialist underground in the strike movement gave further proof that the Social Democratic strategy could work in tsarist Russia. Perhaps all that the socialists could do for the present was distribute leaflets that announced the aims of the strikes, but these tiny pieces of paper were the thin end of the wedge of political freedom. As Lenin observed, political freedom meant that, in the rest of Europe, ‘the press freely prints news about strikes’. Even though no free press existed in Russia, the socialists and their leaflets ensured that the tsarist government could no longer keep strikes secret, as they had always done in the past. Lenin proudly claimed that ‘the government saw that it was becoming quite ridiculous to keep silent, since everybody knew about the strikes – and the government too was dragged along behind the rest. The socialist leaflets called the government to account – and the government appeared and gave its account.’14
Lenin went out of his way to emphasize the weakness of the Petersburg underground – ‘The Union of Struggle, as we know, was founded only in 1895/6 and its appeals to the workers were confined to badly printed broadsheets’ – because this weakness was actually a source of encouragement. If such a feeble organization helped to generate an unprecedented strike movement, what could not be accomplished by a properly organized Social Democratic underground? Just by uniting the organizations of at least the major cities – assuming that these organizations enjoyed as much authority among the workers as did the Petersburg Union of Struggle – Russian Social Democracy could become ‘a political factor of the highest order in contemporary Russia’.15 Faced with such intoxicating perspectives, no wonder Lenin’s activist friends danced across the kitchen floor.
The Nuts and Bolts of a Dream
On 8 December 1895 Lenin was arrested, along with the other leaders of the Petersburg Union of Struggle, for the crime of ‘Social Democratic propaganda among the workers of Petersburg’.16
Lenin spent over a year in a Petersburg jail until finally receiving his sentence: three years in Siberian exile. He was assigned to the Siberian village of Shushenskoe, not far from Krasnoyarsk, and duly served out his term. Lenin was lucky – Shushenskoe was tolerable, compared to Turukhansk, the far-north village where L. Martov, a fellow founder of the Union of Struggle, ended up. Martov later wrote passionately about the physical, social and political ghastliness of Turukhansk.17
Police photographs of Lenin, December 1895.
The arrest of so many leaders of the Petersburg Union of Struggle put its very existence in doubt. The younger members who had been left at large worked hard to put out proclamations and to keep in contact with the strikers, since continuing to exist was absolutely necessary for Social Democratic prestige. Lenin cheered these efforts from a distance: ‘The public prosecutors and gendarmes are already boasting that they have smashed the Union of Struggle. This boast is a lie. The Union of Struggle is intact, despite all the persecution… Revolutionaries have perished – long live the revolution!’18
The three years in Shushenskoe were productive ones for Lenin professionally, personally and politically. His main professional achievement was a magnum opus giving a Marxist account of (as the title proclaims) The Development of Capitalism in Russia (published in 1899). In this book, filled with statistics on everything from flax-growing to the hemp-and-rope trades, he provided his heroic scenario with as strong a factual foundation as he could manage.
His main personal achievement was marrying Nadezhda Krupskaya on 10 July 1898 and settling down to married life. Krupskaya had been one of the cohort of early praktiki that Lenin had joined in St Petersburg. She had arrived in that tight-knit community by a different route from Lenin, by volunteering as a teacher in the Sunday education movement. Like everything independent in Russian life, the popular education movement was regarded with suspicion by the government, which looked askance at ‘the tendency to raise the level of popular education by means of organizing lectures, libraries, reading-rooms for, and free distribution of, scientific, moral and literary publications among the factory and rural population’. These are the words of the tsarist minister of the interior in 1895, who described people like Krupskaya when he went on to say that ‘the distributors of these books are intelligent young people of both sexes, very often still pursuing their studies, who penetrate into the midst of the people [the narod] in the capacity of teachers’. All this was very worrisome to the tsarist minister, since it appeared that the popular education movement ‘will develop systematically in a way which will not be in accordance with the views of the government’.19 The government’s suspicion of independent popular education had not changed much since the days of Lenin’s father, Ilya Ulyanov.
Nadezhda Krupskaya in 1917, disguised as a worker.
Many years later, Krupskaya described the life she led after she followed Lenin out to Siberia to marry him:
Before my eyes I see it as if it were real – that time of primordial wholeness and the joy of existence. Everything was somehow close to nature – sorrel plants, mushrooms, hunting, skating – a tight, close group of comrades. We would go on holiday – exactly thirty years ago this was – in Minusinsk – a close circle of comrades/friends, communal outings, singing, a sort of naive joy and togetherness. My mother lived with us, our domestic economy was primordial, close to roughing it – our life was work in common, one and the same feelings and reactions – we received [writings by] Bernstein [the German ‘revisionist’], got all worked up and indignant, and so forth. It seems to me that this kind of life is impossible these days. An awful lot happened over thirty years and many burdens have rested on our shoulders.
There you are – a little bit of lyric poetry…20
Lenin’s main political achievement during his exile was working out an ambitious plan for realizing his dream of a national underground organization that would be ‘a political factor of the highest order’. The most detailed exposition of this plan came a few years later in his famous book What Is to Be Done? (1902). We must proceed carefully, because latter-day readers of What Is to Be Done? have removed Lenin’s book from its context and thereby fundamentally distorted its spirit and impact. According to the standard textbook interpretation, Lenin devised an innovative plan of party organiz
ation that consciously rejected the model of Western socialist parties such as the German SPD in favour of an updated version of the conspiratorial underground of earlier populist revolutionaries such as Narodnaya volya. Driving his new scheme was a compulsive ‘worry about workers’, that is, Lenin’s conviction that workers were inherently reformist and therefore would not, even could not spontaneously support a revolutionary party. He therefore tried to ensure that the party was composed solely of hardened revolutionary intellectuals – or so we are told.
This picture of a dour, jaded, even cynical Lenin stands in striking contrast to the actual romanticism of his heroic scenario. Lenin’s vision of party organization was not his personal innovation but rather a systemization of methods collectively worked out by a whole generation of Social Democratic praktiki. Through trial and error these anonymous activists tried to import the SPD strategy – inspiring the masses through party campaigns – into the hostile environment of repressive absolutism. His whole scheme was based not on an anxious worry about workers, but on an enthusiastic confidence that the workers would provide crucial support.
Lenin’s heroic scenario had its individual features but its basic theme of leadership, as embodied by an inspired agitator or propagandist spreading the word and raising consciousness, was one that excited many people. In 1906, in his famous novel Mother, the left-wing writer Maxim Gorky gave narrative form to this collective dream so effectively that his book later became a Soviet icon and was acclaimed as the precursor of ‘socialist realism’. In 1917, on the eve of the Bolshevik revolution, Gorky’s novel was summarized for American readers by Moissaye Olgin, an émigré with personal experience in the Russian underground. Olgin’s summary reveals not so much what the underground was as what it wanted to be. Recall Lenin’s ambitious claims for the impact of socialist ‘leaflets’ or listki during the 1896 strikes, and compare them to Olgin’s summary of Gorky (listki is here translated as ‘papers’):