by Lars T. Lih
More unexpectedly, Lenin is also extremely enthusiastic about the ‘petty-bourgeois’ peasant as an agent of the capitalist transformation of Russia. Freedom would allow the enterprising peasant to evolve into a fermer (farmer) – a foreign-sounding word that evoked the enticing model of the progressive and dynamic capitalist farmer that Lenin associated with the United States in particular:
A free mass of farmers may serve as a basis for the development of capitalism without any need whatsoever of pomeshchik enterprise… Capitalist development along such a path should proceed far more broadly, freely, and swiftly owing to the tremendous growth of the home market and an upsurge in the standard of living, the energy, initiative and culture of the entire population.17
A basic premise of Lenin’s heroic scenario was that capitalist transformation of Russia was absolutely inevitable. But Russia was still faced with a tremendously important choice: what kind of capitalist transformation? Peasant-based capitalist transformation was not the only possible scenario – in fact, the tsarist government was trying its hardest to set up a much more repressive gentry-based capitalism (as Lenin interpreted the aim of the so-called Stolypin reforms). Gentry-based capitalism was the ‘Prussian path’ to capitalism, while peasant-based democratic capitalism was the ‘American path’. Lenin urged Social Democrats to fight for the American path, even though this path required ‘what, from the standpoint of the philistine, or of the philistine historian, are very unusual and “optimistic” assumptions; it requires tremendous peasant initiative, revolutionary energy, purposiveness, organization, and a wealth of creative activity by the narod’.18 This last remark expresses the very heart of Lenin’s outlook: rejection of ‘philistine’ scepticism in favour of an ‘optimistic’ romanticism about the ‘creative activity of the narod’.
Ebb-tide of Revolution
The ebbing of the revolutionary tide was dramatically reflected in the fates of the Social Democratic representatives in the Second Duma in 1907. The police had prepared a list of charges against the Duma members that also reads like a bill of indictment against the revolution itself:
In 1907, in the city of St Petersburg under the name of the Social Democratic Duma delegation, the accused formed a criminal society, the aim of whose activity is the violent overthrow, by means of an armed popular uprising, of the form of government established by the Basic Laws, the removal of the sovereign Emperor from supreme authority and the constitution of a democratic republic in Russia.19
Among the specific charges were ‘relations with secret criminal societies calling themselves the Central and Petersburg Committees of the RSDWP’; attempts to organize peasants, workers and soldiers into secret associations and to connect up these groups up among themselves; giving inflammatory speeches to illegal gatherings of workers; and providing false passports for people eluding police supervision.20 All these charges were true, of course. The government demanded that the Duma revoke the legal immunity of its Social Democratic members. The Duma refused and found itself revoked, that is, disbanded and replaced by a new legislature by means of Stolypin’s coup d’état of 3 June 1907. This date can be taken as the end of the revolutionary period, since the restrictive suffrage and the repressive policies of the ‘third of June system’ forced most party activity back underground.
The next few years were dismal ones for the party underground. Based on informer reports, a top official in the tsarist political police, Aleksandr Spiridovich, summed up the woes of the underground: ‘Systematic arrest of party activists, indifference on the part of workers toward the revolutionary work that had just recently been so popular, mass flight of the intelligentsia that joined forces with the party during the years of revolutionary upsurge, a lack of the financial means that had flowed so plentifully into party coffers not so long ago – all of this meant that local organizations fell apart.’21
Spiridovich modestly left out another huge problem facing the underground, one that represented a signal accomplishment of the political police: ‘provocation’, the infiltration of underground organizations by police informers. The resulting atmosphere was described in 1911 by Bolshevik Gregor Alexinsky, one of the Social Democratic Duma delegates sentenced to hard labour. After escaping to Europe, he observed from afar the effects of the ‘treason’ committed by disillusioned praktiki: ‘Then [after 1907] commenced a period which in all truth saw “brother turned against brother”, when the breath of treachery poisoned the atmosphere of the revolutionary organizations, and provocation acquired so extraordinary a power that a mutual distrust eventually seized upon all their members. The dismemberment of the organizations followed.’22
Having left Russia at the end of 1907, Lenin was again in exile. He and Krupskaya lived in Geneva for another year and moved to Paris at the end of 1908. But wherever his residence, Lenin lived the intense but self-absorbed life of the party intellectual: engaging in endless polemics with factional opponents, preparing resolutions for party congresses, and then arguing about the proper interpretation of official party decisions. These intra-party fights easily degenerated into the squabbles that Russians describe with the eloquent word skloki – the insupportably petty and demeaning infighting that sucked up the time and energy of the émigrés. Krupskaya tells us that Lenin was made physically ill by the atmosphere created by skloki. Yet, from the point of view of his opponents, Lenin himself was no mean hand at infighting and hard-line factionalism.
Lenin’s apartment at 4, rue Marie-Rose, Paris, 1909–12.
Lenin’s life during these years can be – and most often is – described solely in terms of party factional struggles. Some biographers portray Lenin as compulsively seeking exclusive party leadership for himself, by fair means or foul. Others portray him as defending the correct party line against all deviations, whether from the right or the left. In either case the biographical landmarks are the same: a succession of party congresses and conferences, of polemical books and articles, of various campaigns against ‘organizational opportunism’, ‘liquidationism’, ‘recallism’ and similar heresies, seemingly without number.
But Lenin had an inner political life as well, one that lifted him above the day-to-day skloki and factional clashes. This was the life of his heroic scenario through which he interpreted events. Thus Lenin’s heroic scenario became the emotional link between the enforced smallness of his life and the largeness of the political events of the day. The obsessive factional skloki of émigré life acquired meaning because Lenin saw himself as facilitating the emergence of the vast energies of the people. Lenin wanted to inspire the activist to inspire the proletariat to inspire the narod to rise up against the tsar, thus giving the whole world another inspiring example of how to carry out a people’s revolution.
Lenin’s political positions in the intra-party factional infighting followed from his commitment to his heroic scenario. He first insisted that the Social Democrats should keep their eyes on the prize and not retreat from their ambitious goal. This goal was ‘democratic revolution to the end’, and that meant full political freedom. The result – a paradoxical one from our present-day vantage-point – was that the Bolsheviks criticized the Mensheviks for cravenly accepting the few thin slices of political freedom available in Stolypin’s Russia rather than demanding the full loaf.
The Mensheviks proposed that the workers focus on attainable goals, for example, achieving a crucial political freedom such as freedom of association. The Bolsheviks agreed that freedom of association was indeed crucial, but insisted that it meant nothing in isolation. As the Bolshevik Lev Kamenev put the case, ‘A Marxist should say to the worker masses who have learned from experience the need for freedom of association: freedom to strike, freedom of unions – these are empty words in the absence of inviolability of person, freedom of speech, or freedom of the press. Freedom of association is tied to the basic and fundamental conditions of the country.’23
Kamenev’s words need to be decoded, since he was writing at a time (1913) when the Bo
lsheviks had access to legal publication. He therefore resorted to Aesopian language meant to get past the censor. ‘Marxist’ stood in for ‘Social Democrat’, and the phrase ‘basic and fundamental conditions of the country’ pointed to the need for revolution. Kamenev’s real message was that there was only one way to get secure freedom of association: a full-scale, revolutionary assault on tsarism in order to introduce the full gamut of political freedoms.
As before, the only way to achieve this ambitious goal was through a vast people’s revolution. Menshevik attempts to find allies among the elite liberal bourgeoisie were doomed to failure, since the liberals mortally feared ‘the revolutionary whirlwind’ and would therefore always stop short and sell out the revolution. Daunting as the task seemed, proletarian leadership of the narod was the only way to carry out revolution ‘to the end’: ‘A peasant revolution under the leadership of the proletariat in a capitalist country is difficult, very difficult, but it is possible, and we must fight for it. Three years of the revolution have taught us and the whole narod not only that we must fight for it but also how to fight for it.’24
Given his ambitious ends (full political freedom) and ambitious means (peasant revolution), Lenin furiously rejected any ‘philistine’ pessimism. He was especially outraged at Menshevik scepticism about the utility of the uprising of December 1905, given its bloody suppression, as encapsulated by a famous comment by Plekhanov: ‘the workers should not have taken up arms’. Lenin’s reaction: ‘What an ocean of renegade comment was called forth by that assessment!’ The proper response from non-philistine Social Democrats must instead be
to proclaim openly, for all to hear, for the sake of the wavering and feeble in spirit, to shame those who are turning renegade and deserting socialism, that the workers’ party sees in the direct revolutionary struggle of the masses, in the October and December struggles of 1905, the greatest movements of the proletariat since the [Paris] Commune [of 1871].25
Looking ahead, Social Democrats must retain their confidence that
the very first fresh breeze of freedom, the slightest relaxation of repression, will again inevitably call into being hundreds and thousands of organizations, unions, groups, circles and undertakings of a revolutionary-democratic nature. And this will as inevitably result in another ‘whirlwind’, in a repetition of the October-December struggle, but on an immeasurably greater scale.26
The imperative of spreading the good news of socialism and revolution had always been at the heart of Lenin’s scenario. The eagerly awaited repetition of 1905 gave this imperative even more urgency. Most of Lenin’s factional infighting during the years 1908–12 revolved around this issue. As opposed to the right wing of Social Democracy, he fought against attempts to ‘liquidate’ the konspiratsiia underground. As opposed to the left wing, he fought against the rejection of newly available channels of dissemination, in particular the ‘Duma word’, the forum provided by the elected legislature to Social Democratic deputies.27
Lenin acknowledged that the Social Democratic underground was at present in a state of ‘deep collapse’, yet he remained fiercely loyal to it as an institution. In a tone of puzzlement, the American historian Leopold Haimson wonders why the Bolsheviks attached such importance during these years to ‘issuing pamphlets with their signature and stamp’ and to convening ‘almost illusory’ provisional and regional conferences of underground organizations. ‘The reports of the Department of Police paint a pitiful picture of these meetings, usually attended by only a handful of haphazardly elected and self-appointed delegates, including agents of the Okhrana [tsarist political police].’28
A police spy’s chart of factions within Russian Social Democracy, 1911.
Lenin’s attachment to the konspiratsiia underground becomes understandable when we remember the role it plays in his heroic scenario. The konspiratsiia underground was the one place in Russia where the Social Democratic message could be proclaimed boldly and uncompromisingly, the one place where the banner of socialism and the democratic republic could be proudly unfurled. This could not happen in any organization that was legally permitted in Stolypin’s Russia. Furthermore, the miracle of 1905 showed that, even under tsarism, an underground party could be built that was ‘really capable of leading classes. In the spring of 1905 our party was a league of underground groups; in the autumn it became the party of millions of the proletariat. Do you think, my dear sirs, this came all of a sudden, or was the result prepared and secured by years and years of slow, obstinate, inconspicuous, noiseless work?’29
Lenin’s vision of the konspiratsiia underground and its threads strategy remained essentially the same as before 1905. As he described it in 1908, ‘this illegal core will spread its feelers, its influence, incomparably wider than before’. But since the intelligentsia as a whole was losing interest in socialism and revolution, the ‘revolutionaries by trade’ who kept the underground up and running had to be recruited predominantly from ‘advanced members from among the workers themselves’.30 Despite all the problems faced by the underground, Lenin was confident that the pamphlets issued by the Bolsheviks were a seed that ‘has been sown… And this seed will bear its fruits – perhaps not tomorrow or the day after but a little later; we cannot alter the objective conditions in which a new crisis is growing – but it will bear fruit.’31
Lenin’s emotional intensity about the need to get the word out also revealed itself in attacks on those of his fellow Bolsheviks who (as it seemed to him) neglected the value of ‘the Duma word’. His feelings are evident in a verbal video of Lenin in his underwear found in the memoirs of Georgy Solomon, a long-time Bolshevik who later occupied a high position as a Soviet trade representative. In 1923 Solomon grew so disgusted with the mores of the Soviet government that he stayed abroad. The following scene is taken from memoirs published in Paris around 1930.
In 1908 Solomon lived in Brussels and hosted Lenin when he visited the Belgian capital. On this occasion Lenin was in town to give a talk on the current situation. The speech did not go over very well, in Solomon’s opinion. Lenin vainly tried ‘to inspire those who gloomily doubted by insisting that the revolutionary movement had not died away but was proceeding forward at its own pace’.32 After the speech they retired to Solomon’s apartment and talked politics. It was after midnight, and both men had got ready for bed. Solomon was already in bed while Lenin, in his usual style, paced up and down making his points – this time in his underwear. The conversation moved on to the problems of the Social Demo cratic deputies. Solomon was a ‘recallist’, that is, he wanted to force the Social Democratic delegation of the Duma to resign. Recallism did not arise from an anti-parliamentary bias – on the contrary, the heart of the Bolshevik revolutionary program at this time was to bring a ‘bourgeois democratic’ parliament to Russia. Nor did the recallists refuse in principle to participate in such a pitiful excuse for a parliament as the current Duma. Solomon and other recallists simply felt that the mediocrities now fumbling around in the Duma chamber in the name of Social Democracy were not ‘tribunes of the people’ but simply an embarrassment.
Lenin got angrier and angrier at Solomon’s stand. Supporting the Social Democratic deputies wasn’t softness on the part of the current party leadership, Lenin exclaimed, ‘but simply a desire to preserve our parliamentary group, as is advantageous to a party that stands at the head of the proletariat and expresses its revolutionary interests. And anybody whose brain isn’t completely clouded over should realize this.’ Solomon retorted (in a calm and business-like fashion, he tells us) that the current incumbents were so incompetent that they even threatened to damage the prestige of the Russian Social Democrats in the eyes of European socialists. Lenin exploded:
‘Social Democratic Deputies in the First Duma’, from Russia’s Message (1908).
Oh, that’s it! That means, we should recall them. A very clever solution that does great honour to the profundity and political wisdom of those who thought it up! Let me tell you, my very good and m
ost excellent sir, that ‘recallism’ is not a mistake – it’s a crime! Everything in Russia is now asleep, everything has died away in some sort of Oblomov-style dream. Stolypin stifles everything, the atmosphere of reaction becomes more and more all-embracing. And now, in the words of M. K. Tsebrikova (I hope you know the name, my very esteemed sir), I remind you that ‘when the dour wave of reaction is about to sweep over and swallow everything that still lives, then all those who represent a progressive outlook are called upon to cry out to those who are losing spirit: Stand firm!’ This duty should be clear to anyone with half a brain.33
And when Lenin realized that Solomon thought that having no Social Democratic presence in the Duma was preferable to the current situation, he indignantly interrupted: ‘What?! According to you, it’s better to let the Duma go on without any of our representatives at all?! Well, only political cretins and brainless idiots, out-and-out reactionaries, could think like that.’
At this point Solomon protested against what he considered personal attacks. Lenin backtracked, gave him a sort of hug, and assured him that the expressions that escaped him in the heat of argument were not meant to be taken personally – and perhaps they weren’t! (Similar apologies can be found throughout Lenin’s correspondence.) Lenin’s curiously impersonal abuse was not directed at Solomon as an individual, but against all the sceptics, pessimists, defeatists – in a word, philistines – who refused to lift themselves up to the grand vistas of his heroic scenario.
The ‘Commencing Revolution’