by Lars T. Lih
Soon the streets of the suburb are strewn with ‘papers’ written with blue ink (hectographically reproduced proclamations). The ‘papers’ venomously criticize the system in the factory, they tell about labour strikes in Petersburg and Southern Russia, they call the workingmen to unite in defence of their interests. The ‘papers’ are read and commented upon. The older folks are morose, the younger are delighted, the majority have no confidence in the strength of the workingmen, yet they know the ‘papers’ are well meant; the papers speak about the sufferings of the working people; they are telling ‘the truth’.
A bond of sympathy is established between the secret organization and the bulk of the toilers. The ‘papers’ appear regularly; they have become necessary to the population. When they fail to appear for a whole week, people are uneasy. None of the ‘rank and file’ knows the address or the members of the organization, yet its influence grows.21
The organizational goal of the SPD-inspired underground is expressed by the last sentence: ‘None of the “rank and file” knows the address or the members of the organization, yet its influence grows.’ Is this possible? Can a secret organization really have growing mass influence? The solution to this problem worked out by a generation of Social Democratic activists can be called the threads strategy, as set forth in 1906 by M. Liadov, a Bolshevik who broke with Lenin some years later. According to Liadov the challenge facing the underground was ‘to expand as much as possible the framework of a secret organization, and, while preserving intact the konspiratsiia character of the [party] staff, connect it with a whole series of threads to the mass’.22
The word konspiratsiia is key for understanding the logic of the threads strategy. It does not mean ‘conspiracy’ (in Russian, zagovor). The old populist underground was based on conspiracy – that is, a restrictive secret organization aimed at a political overthrow, a high-level assassination or the like. This kind of underground was therefore only a means for carrying out the goal of a successful conspiracy. Thus conspiracy was required for any revolutionary overthrow of autocracy that lacked mass organization. In contrast, konspiratsiia was required for any revolutionary overthrow of autocracy that included mass organization. Although konspiratsiia was derived from the French word conspiration, it had acquired in Russia the strongly contrasted meaning of all the practical rules of conduct needed to elude the police, even while preserving the threads connecting the organization to a wider community. Konspiratsiia can be defined as ‘the fine art of not getting arrested’. In contrast to a conspiracy, konspiratsiia was only a means toward an end, namely, keeping the underground organization and its threads in existence.
In a dispute with veteran populist Petr Lavrov that Lenin conducted during his Siberian exile, Lenin energetically rejected the strategy of conspiracy and associated methods such as individual terror. Old-timers like Lavrov automatically equated anti-tsarist political struggle with bomb-throwing conspiracies. They therefore assumed that the Social Democrats, who rejected conspiracy, were not serious about achieving political freedom by revolutionary means. But there was a real alternative to old-fashioned conspiracy (responded Lenin): an underground organization connected by a variety of threads to a mass constituency, one that manages to stay in existence through strict observance of the rules of konspiratsiia.23
The viability of the konspiratsiia underground was crucial for the success of Lenin’s ‘other way’. The class leadership evoked by his heroic scenario required an underground organization that both eluded police and maintained contact with the workers. No wonder Lenin spent so much thought on the details of how this could be accomplished – they were the nuts and bolts of a dream.
Anyone who argued for the workability of the threads strategy needed to make some very optimistic assumptions. Typically, Lenin made these assumptions with gusto and scorned the sceptics and ‘philistines’ who had less exalted expectations. One such assumption was the existence of a supportive worker milieu that would pick up the threads thrown out by the konspiratsiia underground. When the revolutionaries of the 1870s went to the people, the puzzled peasants promptly turned these strange beings over to the police. When the praktiki of the 1890s went to the workers, they gradually found enough sympathy to allow them to operate. The Social Democrats were no longer alien beings with incomprehensible schemes, but familiar social types with a relevant (even if not always accepted) message. Without the supportive worker milieu, all the methods that the praktiki had painfully elaborated for foiling the police would have meant nothing.
In his advocacy of a particularly ambitious thread connecting underground and workers – a national party newspaper – Lenin insisted on the existence of this worker milieu. True (he admitted) producing and distributing a newspaper of national scope is a difficult task – much more difficult than the tasks taken up by the older Russian underground, which did not even dream about mass distribution of a newspaper. But, continued Lenin, the target audience today makes the task much more manageable: industrial districts where workers make up almost the entire population, so that ‘the worker is factually master of the situation with hundreds of ways to outwit the vigilance of the police’.24 (Note that the sceptical ‘worry about workers’ so often ascribed to Lenin would have radically undercut all his arguments about the viability of a konspiratsiia underground.)
The plausibility of the underground threads strategy also required the validity of another optimistic assumption: a steady supply of people both heroic enough to risk career, health, freedom and even life for the cause, and self-disciplined enough to learn the necessary skills of konspiratsiia and to act in strict accordance with them – not always the most likely combination of qualities. Someone who combined both these qualities was the ideal ‘professional revolutionary’ – a functional necessity of an underground specifically of the konspiratsiia type. The conspiratorial revolutionary of the earlier populist underground was meant to replace a mass SPD-like party, deemed impossible under Russian conditions. In contrast, the professional revolutionary of the konspiratsiia underground was supposed to make something resembling a mass SPD-like party possible, even under Russian conditions.
The term ‘professional revolutionary’ in this meaning was coined by Lenin himself in What Is to Be Done? (1902) and then quickly adopted by the entire socialist underground. Yet Lenin’s own relation to this term is rather curious. The image of the professional revolutionary has two aspects: the poetry of daring and self-sacrifice vs. the prose of competence and self-discipline. At least in What Is to Be Done?, Lenin was much more interested in the prosaic side. The romantic image goes back to Rakhmetov, the ascetic revolutionary saint pictured in Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s novel of 1863, What Is to Be Done?. Lenin was a great admirer of Chernyshevsky, and his use of this title for his book on party organization was not a coincidence. But the underground certainly did not need Lenin to see themselves as Rakhmetovs. One of Lenin’s most vociferous opponents, Aleksandr Martynov, later recalled his own hero-worship of Rakhmetov, whom he imitated when a schoolboy by slowly crushing cigarettes on his own hand.25
While in exile in Siberia – no doubt brooding on the damage done to the Petersburg Union of Struggle by the police – Lenin began to insist that underground praktiki needed to learn their own trade properly and thoroughly. He listed in very specific detail the functions needed to operate a konspiratsiia underground: agitation, distribution of leaflets and other illegal literature, organizers of worker study circles, correspondents reporting on worker grievances, security against government spies, setting up konspirativnyi apartments for secret meetings, transmitting instructions, collecting for funds and so on. He then argued that ‘the smaller and more specific the job undertaken by the individual person or individual group, the greater will be the chance that they will think things out, do the job properly and guarantee it best against failure [and at the same time] the harder it will be for the police and gendarmes to keep track of the revolutionaries.’ True, this kind of work may seem ‘in
conspicuous, monotonous… a grim and rigid routine’.26 To be so prosaic required a special kind of heroism.
The chapter of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? in which he introduced the term revoliutsioner po professii was devoted to pushing this same theme. A translation of this term that brings out Lenin’s underlying metaphor is ‘revolutionary by trade’, since the word professiia at the time meant primarily the trade of a skilled worker (a ‘trade union’ was a professionalnyi soiuz). Lenin’s coinage was thus meant to evoke the image of a specialized and skilled worker in an efficient organization. The image that emerges from Lenin’s unsystematic use of the metaphor is the designedly prosaic one of a praktik honing his skills in his chosen trade.
Lenin’s coinage rapidly became an indispensable part of the vocabulary of the entire underground, partly because the ‘revolutionary by trade’ was a functional necessity of any underground of the konspiratsiia type. But the prosaic ‘revolutionary by trade’ was also the romantic and daring ‘professional revolutionary’. A few years after the publication of What Is to Be Done? a leader of the Socialist Revolutionary party, Victor Chernov, described the professional revolutionary as ‘a roving apostle of socialism, a knight who punishes evil-doers… his lifestyle is konspiratsiia, his sport is a contest with the police in cleverness and elusiveness’. He glories in his escapes from prison.27 Thus for the underground as a whole, the professional revolutionary gains authority because he is tough enough to be arrested and to escape. For Lenin in What Is to Be Done? the revolutionary by trade gains authority because he is smart enough not to get arrested in the first place.
Yet Lenin would not be Lenin if his insistence on the professional qualifications of the underground praktiki were not closely tied to his heroic scenario of inspiring leadership. In What Is to Be Done? professional training is a vital but not the only trait of the ideal underground activist. Following the SPD example, Lenin’s ideal praktik will rise from worker ranks. (The idea that Lenin restricted the status of ‘revolutionary by trade’ to intellectuals has no factual basis and is incompatible with his entire outlook.) Such a praktik will acquire broad horizons by working in all parts of the country. He will acquire in this way ‘a knowledge of the worker milieu plus a freshness of socialist conviction, combined with a full apprenticeship in his trade’, that is, the trade of underground activity. Given such trained agitators, propagandists and organizers from worker ranks, ‘no political police in the world will be able to cope with these detachments’ of the revolutionary army, since these activists will combine boundless devotion to the revolution with the ability to inspire ‘the boundless confidence of the broadest worker mass’.28 Such were Lenin’s boundless promises to the aspiring praktiki.
The fact that Lenin became (as one hostile Menshevik leader put it in 1904) ‘the idol of the praktiki’ is therefore not hard to explain.29 On the one hand Lenin’s interest in the nuts-and-bolts problems of the konspiratsiia underground showed an appreciation of their difficulties that was rare among the intellectual leaders of the party. On the other his heroic scenario provided the activists with a romantic self-image of leaders who were capable of inspiring boundless confidence. In 1904 both supporters and opponents concurred in their view of Lenin as the chosen voice of the praktiki. In 1905 Alexander Potresov – a former colleague of Lenin, but by this time a determined foe – argued that he owed his popularity to the uncanny accuracy with which he embodied the grandiose and pathetically unrealistic self-image of the underground activists.30 Much later, in 1920, Stalin praised Lenin’s early organizational writings because they ‘completely corresponded to Russian realities and generalized in masterly fashion the organizational experience of the best praktiki’ (among whom he numbered himself).31
When Lenin came up with his basic ideas of party organization, he was in Siberian exile. When he wrote What Is to Be Done? five years later, he was an émigré in Western Europe. Yet the emotional link between him and the praktiki toiling away in Russian towns is revealed by a letter Lenin received from a party comrade soon after the publication of What Is to Be Done? in 1902. After talking with some Social Democratic ‘purposive workers’, I. I. Radchenko wrote to Lenin:
Before me sat the Lenin type – people longing for the revolutionary trade [professiia]. I was happy for Lenin, who sits a million miles away, barricaded by bayonets, cannon, borders, border guards and other features of the autocracy – and he sees how people work here on the shop floor, what they need and what they will become. Believe it, my friends, soon we will see our Bebels [August Bebel rose from worker origins to become the leader of German Social Democracy]. Genuine lathe turners /revolutionaries… doing everything for the cause with the profound faith that ‘I will do this’. I say it one more time: this was the happiest moment of my life.32
Iskra and the Heroic Scenario
While Lenin served his time in far Siberia the Social Democratic underground was making progress. Against all odds a Social Democratic movement had established itself by the late 1890s in a myriad of individual towns all across Russia. In March 1898 a genuine step toward national unification was taken by a congress in Minsk at which the Russian Social Democratic Worker Party (RSDWP) was founded. In most respects this First Congress was premature: all of its members were promptly arrested and no central party institutions were put in place. But the party now had at least a virtual existence – the local ‘unions of struggle’ began to think of themselves as committees of a national, if still notional, organization. Perhaps the time was right for realizing Lenin’s dream of a Russian Social Democracy that would be ‘a political factor of the highest order’.
Lenin could only observe developments from the sidelines, but he was eager to reach the end of his Siberian exile and get down to work. He had his own ideas about how to turn Russian Social Democracy into a national presence and he was champing at the bit to put them into practice. As soon as his term elapsed in 1899 Lenin met with Martov (also just released from Siberia) and Potresov (who was more of a littérateur and less of a praktik than the other two). Having concerted their plans they spirited themselves abroad in July 1900 (the fake passport obtained for this occasion may have been the origin of ‘Lenin’ as a pseudonym). Before settling down in Munich, Lenin, Martov and Potresov held meetings in Geneva with the older émigrés of the Liberation of Labour group: Georgy Plekhanov, Vera Zasulich and Pavel Axelrod. After a rocky start, due to Plekhanov’s personal prickliness, the first goal of Lenin’s scheme came to fruition: the all-Russian political newspaper Iskra was launched in December 1900.
Iskra would not win any journalistic awards today for layout and design. An issue usually consisted of six pages of three columns each, each column filled to the brim with small type and big words. Some observers complained that it was over the head of worker readers, but the editors were confident that at least the ‘advanced’ and ‘purposive’ workers were up to it and that they could channel the message to other readers. Because it was written, edited and printed abroad, it could come out with a regularity that broke all underground records. Between the first issue in December 1900 and the publication of What Is to Be Done? in early 1902, fifteen issues had come out. During the three years Lenin was on the editorial board (he left late in 1903) there were 51 issues.
Copies of Iskra (The Spark) and its sister journal Zaria (The Dawn).
Lenin’s ambitious hope was that Iskra would not just be another example of émigré protest literature but would be connected with many threads to actual developments in Russia. The local underground committees would provide Iskra’s editors with journalistic copy on breaking news, while the Iskra organization would do its damnedest to get copies of Iskra to the committees for further distribution. So began the cat-and-mouse game of false passports, double-bottomed suitcases, secret printing presses and roving emissaries that often ended in confusion and despair, but also resulted in giving all-Russia significance to Iskra. Osip Piatnitsky, one of the young ‘revolutionaries by trade’ entrusted with th
e task of setting up this underground distribution network, later recalled how he used the services of Lithuanian religious groups who were already smuggling books across the border (books in Lithuanian were prohibited in Russia). This de facto alliance is revealing. Both the Lithuanians and the Social Democrats were determined to spread the good news, as they respectively saw it.33
Iskra became the centre of Lenin’s life. In 1902, soon after the completion of What Is to Be Done?, the German printers decided that printing Iskra was too risky. So Lenin and Krupskaya moved to London, where they lived from April 1902 to April 1903.
Lenin, along with Krupskaya, was at the centre of the Iskra enterprise: getting people to write articles, writing many of them himself, conducting correspondence, overseeing transport and even putting individual issues to bed at the printer. No task was too menial for Lenin if it meant making the great plan a reality. In many ways the Iskra enterprise was Lenin’s most successful leadership undertaking. Lenin’s devotion to Iskra was closely bound up with his heroic scenario of inspiring class leadership. Newspapers had always been a central feature of the SPD model. Furthermore, Iskra played a crucial role in Lenin’s scheme for creating working party institutions on a national scale. Finally, Lenin’s heroic scenario lay behind the image of contemporary Russia that was ceaselessly propagated by Iskra and other publications of the Iskra team.