by Lars T. Lih
The event that really sparked off the revolution of 1905, from the Social Democratic point of view, was Bloody Sunday (9 January 1905), when the tsarist government, in its ineffable wisdom, chose to open fire on a peaceful crowd that wanted to present a petition to the tsar asking for basic freedoms. The resulting massacre did more to confirm the Social Democratic message than years of propaganda. In the months that followed events in Russia moved closer to a revolutionary explosion.
The rhythm of the revolution waxed and waned over the spring and summer of 1905 but the climax came with the massive events of October 1905, when a strike started by railwaymen became a general one. Russian society was shut down and the government, panicky and isolated, responded by issuing the Manifesto of 17 October, in which the tsar graciously conceded basic political freedoms to his subjects. The final months of 1905 became known as the ‘days of freedom’, since political activity was for a short while unrestricted by police or censor.
After the October Manifesto the question confronting the revolutionary forces was: do we now turn our attention to protecting and using what we have achieved, or do we press on ‘to the end’? The answer of the more impatient revolutionary elements came in the form of the Moscow uprising of December 1905, when the Moscow workers mounted an ‘armed insurrection’ that managed to hold out for a week of heavy fighting. The Moscow uprising was the last of the classic nineteenth-century barricade struggles between elite and people, but one that was fought with a new twentieth-century intensity. Barricades were put up, but the insurgents mainly resorted to guerrilla warfare – hit and run attacks that relied on the sympathy of the city population (not just the workers) for support and cover. In response the government trained artillery fire on the city as a whole. The leadership for the uprising came from the Moscow Bolshevik committee, although the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries had participated enthusiastically.
The ultimate defeat of the Moscow uprising was one of the many signs that the tide of revolution had begun to ebb. The St Petersburg Soviet – a class-based elective ‘council’ that was a prototype for ‘soviet power’ in 1917 – was disbanded, and its leadership (including Lev Trotsky) arrested. Although peasant rebellions were still going strong in 1906, the punitive expeditions of the government were already beginning to quell peasant disorders. The government acted on its promise to create an elective legislature or Duma, but it refused to work with the liberal and peasant parties that made up the Duma majority. It therefore closed down the first Duma (elected in March 1906) and then the second Duma (elected in early 1907). Only in June 1907 was a new, highly restrictive electoral law imposed, allowing the government to get a Duma with which it could work.
A satirical look at restrictions on the Duma, 1906–7, from Olgin’s The Soul of the Russian Revolution.
The new electoral law in 1907 was imposed by an unconstitutional coup carried out by the newly appointed minister Petr Stolypin. Stolypin was the outstanding figure of the new post-revolutionary regime, representing both its repressive face (the nooses that were used to hang peasant rebels were called ‘Stolypin neckties’) and its reformist face (the ‘Stolypin land reform’ was aimed at transforming property relations in peasant agriculture).
By the end of 1907 the revolution was over and the ‘Stolypin era’ in full swing, but the passions of the revolutionary era still informed Russian political debate. What were the successes of the revolution? What were its failures? Could a second edition be expected any time soon? If so, how to prepare for it? If not, how to adjust to the new post-revolutionary context? Bolshevism was defined by its answers to questions like these.
Lenin and the Revolution
At the beginning of 1904, when we last saw Lenin, he was living in Geneva and more politically isolated than he would ever be again. After resigning from the Iskra editorial board in late 1903, he had no journalistic outlet in which to make his case – a situation that was never to recur – and was barely hanging on to any official position in the Russian Social Democratic party. Perhaps his career as a leader was over. Grigory Zinoviev later recalled how the older leader Georgy Plekhanov frightened young Social Democratic émigrés such as himself who were leaning toward Lenin:
You follow him, but in a couple of weeks the line he is now carrying out will make him good for nothing but to scare crows in gardens. Lenin picked up the banner of struggle against me, Plekhanov, against Zasulich, Deutsch. Do you really not understand that this is an unequal struggle? Lenin is finished. From the moment he broke with us, the elders, the founders of the Liberation of Labour group, his song was sung.3
But Lenin was not as isolated as he seemed to the émigré community in Switzerland. Many of those actually running the party in Russia saw Lenin as their spokesperson and could not understand why he was no longer in the party leadership. Bolshevism as an organized faction within the Russian Social Democratic party arose in the first place through Lenin’s efforts to mobilize this support. Nevertheless, we should not give too much weight to the various accusations and counteraccusations that accompanied the growing split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks in 1903–4. Pavel Axelrod, leader of the Mensheviks in 1904, did not accuse Lenin of any ideological heresy. Rather (as he wrote to Kautsky trying to explain the Lenin phenomenon), Lenin was just a troublemaker who unfortunately was the ‘idol’ of the underground praktiki in Russia. For his part, Lenin later stressed that Bolshevism acquired its real content during the 1905 revolution.4
Despite the war, Lenin’s attention during 1904 was turned toward disputes within the party, and he wrote practically nothing all year besides factional polemics. But even prior to the outbreak of the revolution in January 1905, Lenin could not imagine a revolution in any terms other than that of the proletariat leading the narod. Writing in late 1904 Lenin explained in his own way the relative quiescence in the militant activity of the Russian worker movement in the year prior to the revolution. ‘The proletariat is holding itself back, as it were, carefully observing the surrounding environment, gathering its forces, and deciding the question whether or not the moment for the decisive struggle for freedom has come.’ But this state of affairs could not last. Lenin was confident that military disaster in the war against Japan would lead to a tremendous outburst of protest from the narod. When this happened, ‘the proletariat will rise and take its stand at the head of the uprising to fight and achieve freedom for the entire narod and to secure for the working class the possibility of waging the open and broad struggle for socialism, a struggle enriched by the whole experience of Europe’.5
Even after the revolution broke out Lenin focused primarily on organizing a new party congress that would consolidate Bolshevik control of the party. Lenin got his congress, which met in London during April 1905, but since it was boycotted by the Mensheviks, it became a purely Bolshevik affair – indeed, it is regarded by some as the founding congress of Bolshevism. The delegates sent abroad by local party committees in Russia ambitiously encouraged each other to focus on armed insurrection, and then dispersed back home.
After London, Lenin remained in Geneva and returned to Russia only after the amnesty that accompanied the October Manifesto. He arrived in Petersburg on 8 November, although, since habits of konspiratsiia died hard, he cautiously disguised himself to ‘look more like a minor Petersburg official than like himself’.6 In the last months of 1905 Lenin participated in the work of the Petersburg Soviet, but continued to give his main attention to party reorganization.
The militancy of 1905 had led to considerable grass-roots unity between the two Social Democratic factions, often in a Bolshevik direction, and Lenin felt that the party could now be unified in a satisfactory way. At one party congress in Stockholm in 1906 – called the ‘Unity Congress’ in a triumph of hope over experience – the Mensheviks were in a majority. At the next congress, in London in 1907, the Bolsheviks were in a majority. But these seesaws hardly mattered. The Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks were by now separated not onl
y by personal animosities but by deep differences that often revealed themselves in disputes over the proper way to remember 1905. According to a joke current at the time, some police officers escorting a Menshevik and a Bolshevik to prison wanted to go off for a drink. They decided they could safely leave their two prisoners without supervision. Anybody else would have used the opportunity to make an escape, but a Menshevik and a Bolshevik would invariably spend the whole time arguing with each other.
In 1906–7 Lenin lived in some ways not unlike that of a Western socialist party leader. He spoke to public gatherings in St Peters burg, wrote articles for the legal press, and consulted with fellow activists. But ‘the days of freedom’ of late 1905 were becoming a fading memory as the tsarist government systematically rolled back the space for legal opposition. By August 1906 Lenin found it convenient to move from Petersburg to nearby Finland, where the political situation was somewhat more liberal. It was a sign of the times when at the end of 1907 Lenin’s tome on agrarian policy was ‘arrested’, that is, all copies were confiscated (it was not legally published until 1917). In order not to meet a similar fate himself, Lenin (and later his wife, whom he met en route), left for Geneva and embarked on his second emigration period.
Vasa Cottage at Kuokkala, now Repino, north of St Petersburg in the semi-autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland, where Lenin hid from the police in 1906–7.
In early 1906 Lenin directly revealed his own deep emotional reaction to the revolution he was living through and, as usual, the occasion was a polemic against his lifelong enemy, philistine scepticism. Lenin’s target was a liberal professor who bemoaned what he called ‘the revolutionary whirlwind’, a destructive and unhinged period during which the unreason of the mob left no room for insight and intellect, as opposed to the safe and sane days of reasonable and constructive progress. Lenin exploded against this attempt to ‘spatter revolutionary periods and revolutionary methods of creating history with the slime of philistine indignation, condemnation and regret’.7 In response Lenin made a stirring defence of the ‘insight of the masses’ during 1905.
Led by the urban workers, the masses had effectively wielded a ‘purely proletarian weapon, the mass political strike, on a scale unprecedented even in the most developed countries’. They had set up new authoritative institutions: the myriad soviets, peasant committees and other organizations that had spontaneously sprung up during the revolution. These new institutions were distinguished by extreme democratism: ‘a public authority [vlast] open to all, one that carried out all its functions before the eyes of the masses, that was accessible to the masses, springing directly from the masses, and a direct and immediate instrument of the mass of the narod, of its will’.8 Lenin did regret the anarchic violence of the masses – not because it was violent but because it was anarchic. As Lenin expressed it a year or so later, a revolutionary Social Democrat should never indulge in ‘hackneyed, philistine, petty-bourgeois moralizing’ about violence. The proper response was rather to transform ‘aimless, senseless, sporadic acts of violence into purposeful, mass violence’.9
The basic premise of Lenin’s scenario had always been the claim that the capitalist transformation of Russia was calling forth spirits from the vasty deep of the people, spirits powerful enough to topple the tsar. The revolution of 1905 showed that these spirits had indeed come when they were called. It was therefore a vindication of Lenin’s ‘other way’ to achieve the dreams of his brother Alexander:
Is it good that the narod should apply unlawful, irregular, unmethodical and unsystematic methods of struggle such as seizing their freedom and creating a new, formally unrecognized and revolutionary authority, that it should use force against the oppressors of the narod? Yes, it is very good. It is the supreme manifestation of the narod’s struggle for freedom. It marks that great period when the dreams of freedom cherished by the best men and women of Russia are translated into practice, when freedom becomes the practice of the vast masses of the narod, and not merely of individual heroes.10
The Role of the Peasant in Lenin’s Heroic Scenario
Looking back at the Bolsheviks through the lens of post-1917 events, particularly Stalin’s disastrous collectivization and its consequences, we tend to assume that Bolshevism was organically anti-peasant. Yet at the time of the 1905 revolution an informed outside observer praised the Bolsheviks precisely because they were they were ‘the popular faction’, in contrast to the Mensheviks and their ‘attitude of suspicion toward the peasantry’.
The American socialist William Walling travelled through Russia in 1905–7 with his wife Anna Strunsky who was of Russian origin. He met and interviewed many notable figures on both sides of the barricades, including Lenin himself. When he returned he wrote a long, enthusiastic book, still worth reading, entitled Russia’s Message: The True World Import of the Revolution. Walling’s 1908 testimony is all the more intriguing because he later became a violent opponent of the Bolshevik revolution and in 1920 wrote an informed diatribe against it, also worth reading.11
Walling was a declared supporter of peasant socialism and regarded the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRS) as the fundamental Russian socialist party. For just this reason he much preferred the Bolsheviks to the Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks, he told his American readers, were ‘the progressive and more Russian part’ of the Social Democratic party. According to Walling, the Bolshevik acceptance of a peasant alliance reflected the real attitude of the workers themselves, who had little sense of class exclusiveness and wanted to fight together with the ‘little bourgeoisie’ of town and country. ‘The majority faction [= the Bolsheviks] realizes thoroughly the necessity of a full unity in the revolutionary movement.’ Walling did take note of the feeling, widespread among all Social Democrats, that ‘in the general movement, the working people should have the leading role’. Walling found this to be ‘a very wrong attitude, since the peasants in Russia are five times more numerous than all other working classes’.12
In his brief account of his interview with Lenin Walling made clear that he did not like Lenin’s forecast that the peasant bourgeoisie would inevitably become a class enemy in the future. He was nevertheless impressed by Lenin’s ‘very full knowledge of the economic and political situation of other countries’ and found him to be ‘far more open-minded [about the peasants] than the leaders formerly in control of the party’. According to Walling, Lenin was at this time ‘perhaps the most popular leader in Russia’.13
Lenin’s scenario of the peasant in revolution was extremely important to him personally. At the end of 1907 he set it all down in one of his most important if overlooked books, The Agrarian Programme of Social Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1905–1907, a substantial volume of over 200 pages. This book is the fourth and last in the series of full-scale expositions of his heroic scenario (the first three being Friends of the People, 1894, Development of Capitalism in Russia, 1899, and To the Village Poor, 1903). Lenin took it hard when the tsarist government suppressed its publication. His close comrade Lev Kamenev describes the book’s fate in words that undoubtedly expressed Lenin’s own attitude: ‘The huge manuscript, the fruits of long and persistent labour, the result of a work attempted by no one else, lies for ten years, until 1917, in the bottom of Ilich’s trunk. It travels with him from Finland to Geneva, from Paris to Krakow, and after ten years, is borne back to Petersburg on the waves of the victorious revolution, and so, at last, finds a printer.’14 When revolution broke out in Russia in 1917, almost Lenin’s first thought was: now I can publish my book!15
‘Typical Peasant Members of the Second Duma. Extreme Revolutionists from the Heart of Russia’, from William Walling’s Russia’s Message (1908).
The following scenario can be extracted from the dense argument of Lenin’s book. If the urban workers were class leaders, then the peasants were class followers. Lenin completely accepted the general Marxist idea that the peasants, scattered in isolated rural villages, could be politically effective only if they accepted t
he leadership of the more advanced urban classes – either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. But his insistence on the peasant as follower did not exclude an exalted, even romantic view of the peasant in the revolution. Heroic leaders require heroic followers.
As we have seen, Lenin believed that capitalism was splitting the Russian peasantry into two groups, proto-proletarian and proto-bourgeois. Although this division would be vital for the future socialist revolution it was not so crucial in the case of the people’s revolution against the tsar. In this revolution, the peasantry as a whole would follow the lead of the proletariat in a crusade against the tsar. The ‘petty-bourgeois’ peasant was therefore still a crucial part of the revolutionary army. Indeed, the most remarkable feature of Lenin’s 1907 book Agrarian Programme is his enthusiasm about the revolutionary fervour of the petty-bourgeois peasant.
‘Baron Taube and pictures he sent his fiancée to show how he dealt with the peasants… These pictures were produced before the First Duma and caused a great sensation’, from Russia’s Message (1908).
From 1902 the peasants had revealed themselves as effective fighters for the democratic transformation of Russia. The peasants were ready, not only to take the land of the noble estate-owners but, in so doing, to destroy the social base of the tsarist system. And this act of economic liberation would have radical political consequences: ‘The peasantry cannot carry out an agrarian revolution without abolishing the old regime, the standing army and the bureaucracy, because all these are the most reliable mainstays of the landed property of the pomeshchiki [gentry estate-owners], bound to this system by thousands of ties.’16 By abolishing the old regime Russia would become a ‘peasant republic’, and this would be good for the peasants, good for the workers’ class struggle and good for Russia.