by Lars T. Lih
The differences among the Social Democrats were so sharp that the question more and more became: two parties or one? That is, were the various tactical and organizational differences among Social Democrats so great as to force a split? Many of the praktiki and the rank-and-file party members in Russia thought not, thus putting heavy pressure on the émigrés to work out a modus vivendi. But the upshot was that the party’s orientation veered back and forth as one or another faction gained control or, just as bad, the central institutions got bogged down into an enforced immobilisme. At one point in the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer a demon goddess and a normal human are forced to share the same body, each taking over at unexpected moments, each destroying the continuity of the other one’s life, each finding themselves in unexpected and embarrassing circumstances. The Russian Social Democratic party faced a similar situation.
A formal portrait of Lenin in 1910, when he was living in Paris. Here he presents a respectable middle-class front, very unlike his image after the Revolution.
Lenin’s stand can be guessed from the title of a book he had Kamenev write in 1911: Two Parties.34 The argument of this book was that two parties existed de facto, and productive work would be impossible until they had a separate existence de jure. Lenin wanted to purify the party by pushing the Menshevik ‘liquidators’ out of the party and, to prove his bona fides, he did his best to push the Bolshevik ‘recallists’ out in the same way. Following a familiar logic the ‘conciliators’ within the party, the ones who wanted everybody to get along and therefore condemned any split, were also condemned.
Lenin and Grigory Zinoviev hiking near Zakopane, Poland, in the summer of 1913.
By 1912 Lenin had decided to cut the knot of Damocles by simply deciding that his group was the real party. After a series of institutional manoeuvres the so-called Prague Conference of January 1912 – consisting of Lenin, Zinoviev and about fourteen Bolshevik praktiki from Russia – elected a new Central Committee and thus a new party. Shortly after the Prague Conference Lenin and Krupskaya, accompanied by Zinoviev and his family, moved from Paris to Krakow in the Austrian section of Poland. Krakow was closer to Russia than any of Lenin’s previous exile locations and communication with Petersburg was relatively easy. The Bolshevik leadership nucleus considered this only a semi-exile.
Lenin’s change of residence coincided with a new mood in Russia – an upsurge of disaffection and militancy. The shooting down of striking workers in the gold-mines of Lena in Siberia was the mini-Bloody Sunday that crystallized the growing impatience. The Lena massacre on 17 April 1912 outraged all of Russian society; in particular, it sparked off a round of worker protests and strikes. The new worker militancy meant increased support for the Bolsheviks in the factional struggle and Lenin could now claim solid majority support in aboveground organizations such as trade unions and cooperative societies. The new Bolshevik aboveground presence was symbolized by the launch of a legal newspaper that later became world famous. The first issue of Pravda came out on 5 May 1912.
Lenin ended the second decade of his political career in much the same sort of situation as he began it, dangerously isolated in the world of international socialism but enjoying a solid base of support within the party back in Russia. The other émigré leaders of Russian Social Democracy did not agree on much, but they were all genuinely repulsed by what they saw as Lenin’s hard-line approach and arrogant splitting tactics. Just a little while earlier, Plekhanov had been a de facto ally of Lenin in the fight against ‘liquidationism’. But now even Plekhanov denounced Lenin’s unilateral election of a new Central Committee as an attempt to use for factional advantage party funds he had acquired by various crooked methods (arguments over party funds and Lenin’s methods in obtaining control over them had been going on for years). The exasperation of Russian party leaders with Lenin communicated itself to Western European socialists who felt called upon to try and make peace among the squabbling Russians. In July 1914 European socialist leaders met in Brussels in order to sort out these problems. Lenin’s representative, Inessa Armand, took an uncompromising stand, and probably only the outbreak of war later that summer saved Lenin from condemnation and complete isolation.
In contrast the Bolsheviks back home in Russia were gaining influence, giving Lenin a solid base to support his intransigence. Lenin constantly quoted statistics based on newspaper circulation and worker donations to back up his claim that the Bolsheviks were now the real representatives of the Russian worker movement. His typical optimism about the trend of events found expression in the instructions he sent Inessa Armand on how to present the Bolshevik case at the Brussels conference. If someone objected that the Bolsheviks had only a small majority within a certain section of the Russian party, he told her, she should answer ‘yes, it is small. If you like to wait, it will soon be écrasante’.35
Roman Malinovsky, Bolshevik Central Committee member and police spy.
The short slice of time between the Prague Conference of January 1912 and the outbreak of world war in August 1914 presents us with two of the greatest personal mysteries of Lenin’s career: Roman Malinovsky and Inessa Armand. Knowledge of Lenin’s heroic scenario allows us to shed at least some light on these mysteries. My discussion is limited to this aspect.
Malinovsky was a genuine man of the people who became prominent in the union movement after 1905 and was wooed by both Social Democratic factions as a candidate for the Fourth Duma that was elected in 1912. He joined up with the Bolsheviks and promptly became a real star. His eloquent speeches in the Duma effectively used the parliamentary tribune that was one of the very few legal channels for agitation open to the Social Democrats. But in actuality Malinovsky was on the payroll of the tsarist political police. Most people correctly deduced that he was an informer when in 1914 he suddenly and without explanation resigned from the Duma and fled the country. But Lenin doggedly defended Malinovsky’s innocence and viciously attacked anyone who suggested otherwise. Only after the fall of tsarism in 1917 was he forced to face the truth.
How did Lenin manage to deceive himself so thoroughly? In Lenin’s eyes Malinovsky was a ‘Russian Bebel’, that is, an outstanding party leader of worker origin. He played to perfection a central role in Lenin’s heroic scenario: the ‘purposive worker’ who, inspired by Social Democratic teaching about the mission of the proletariat, was able to inspire others in turn. We have seen how Lenin in What Is to Be Done? dreamed of an ideal party activist who could ‘merge in himself a knowledge of the worker milieu [with] a freshness of socialist conviction’, who could ‘rely on the boundless confidence of the broadest worker mass’ because he himself was boundlessly devoted to the revolution.36 A party populated by Malinovskys would be invincible. No wonder Lenin refused to accept that Malinovsky was a paid actor and not the real thing.
Certainly the ‘purposive worker’ was far from being just a myth – in fact, Malinovsky himself was not a complete fake. He was just a spectacular reminder that real life never seems to confirm our narratives without slipping in an ironic twist.
Inessa Armand in internal exile, photographed with fellow exiles, 1908.
The daughter of a French opera singer and an English actress, Inessa Armand was an unlikely Bolshevik. Born in Paris, she grew up in Moscow and married the son of a wealthy manufacturer. She and her husband opened a school for peasant children, an activity that later might have constituted a link with Lenin and Krupskaya. After an amicable separation from her husband she became more deeply involved in the Social Democratic underground and was arrested in 1907. She escaped from internal exile and ended up in Paris, where she met Lenin.
Long before Armand’s death in 1920 rumours were circulating about a romantic link between her and Lenin. Many historians believe that recently published correspondence between the two has clinched the case for the existence of an affair. But the evidence is still circumstantial and scepticism on this point is still legitimate. For my part, after reading through the relevant documents from L
enin, Armand and Krupskaya, I find it hard to believe that Lenin and Armand had an adulterous affair.
Armand’s role in Lenin’s life should not be reduced to her alleged stint as ‘Lenin’s mistress’. As a trusted confidante – possibly the only woman outside his family to be part of his inner circle – Armand had full opportunity to see all sides of Lenin’s character. She often had to bear the brunt of his factional infighting. Lenin sent her to represent the Bolsheviks at the 1914 conference in Brussels, where she had to defend an unpopular and marginalized standpoint. Lenin thanked her profusely, saying that he himself would have exploded in anger.37
But Inessa Armand was also in a position to see Lenin’s determined optimism at close range. In late 1911 the prominent French socialists Paul and Laura Lafargue (Laura was one of Karl Marx’s daughters) committed double suicide because they felt they could no longer be of use to the cause. Lenin spoke at their funeral in Paris, and Armand translated his remarks into French:
We can now see with particular clarity how rapidly we are nearing the triumph of the cause to which Lafargue devoted all his life. The Russian revolution ushered in an era of democratic revolutions throughout Asia, and 800 million people are now joining the democratic movement of the whole of the civilized world. In Europe, peaceful bourgeois parliamentarianism is drawing to an end, to give place to an era of revolutionary battles by a proletariat that has been organized and educated in the spirit of Marxist ideas, and that will overthrow bourgeois rule and establish a communist system.38
Lenin’s sanguine view of world developments was matched by his excitement about the relative upsurge of 1912–14 in Russia that he saw as the beginning of the bigger and better 1905 he had long been awaiting. His description of May Day strikes and demonstrations in Petersburg in 1913 shows his excitement at the thought that his heroic scenario of class leadership was once again being realized in action. As in the mid-1890s Lenin’s emphasis is on the power of the Social Democratic message to move the masses into action, even when transmitted by small and inadequate technical means. He therefore claimed that although the Social Democratic message in 1913 may have originated in a very small group in Petersburg, its impact was felt all over Russia in ever-widening circles. In response to Menshevik scepticism he described the course of the demonstrations of May 1913 in the following way.
The St Petersburg underground consisted of several hundred workers who were nevertheless (as Lenin writes in ‘May Day Action by the Revolutionary Proletariat’, 1913) ‘the flower of the St Peters burg proletariat… esteemed and appreciated by the entire working class of Russia’. They issue some hasty, poorly printed, and unattractive looking pamphlets. ‘And lo, a miracle!’ – a quarter of a million workers rise up ‘as one man’ in strikes and demonstrations in Petersburg. ‘Singing revolutionary songs, with loud calls for revolution, in all suburbs of the capital and from one end of the city to another, with red banners waving, the worker crowds fought over the course of several hours against the police and the Okhrana [security police] that had been mobilized with extraordinary energy by the government.’
The leaflets and the revolutionary speeches by workers carry the message that a revolution to install the democratic republic is the only way to ensure freedom. This message does not stop at the city limits of Petersburg. The industrial proletariat is able to ‘draw into revolutionary actions the labouring and exploited masses, deprived of basic rights and driven into a desperate situation’. The revolutionary strikes of the Russian proletariat – the mighty weapon it forged for itself in 1905 – are therefore ‘stirring, rousing, enlightening, and organizing the masses of the narod for revolution’. In fact, the May Day strikes and demonstrations will show ‘to the whole world that the Russian proletariat is steadfastly following its revolutionary course’.
Thus, in Lenin’s exalted view, the small Social Democratic underground of Petersburg sent a message heard around the world. And why? – because it told the truth to millions about their hopeless position under tsarism, thus ‘inspiring them with faith in revolutionary struggle’.39
In 1914, on the eve of war, Lenin wrote to Inessa Armand (in English), ‘Best greetings for the commencing revolution in Russia’.40 A new ‘era of revolutionary battles’ was indeed commencing, and not only in Russia. During the next five years, his heroic scenario would be vindicated on a global scale – or so it seemed to Lenin.
For many Marxists, a purely democratic revolution could be ‘only’ a bourgeois revolution – a necessary step forward, but a frustrating one, since it ushered in a long period of bourgeois class domination. Confining oneself to working for the bourgeois revolution while deferring the socialist revolution was an eminently reasonable self-limitation, but nevertheless it was an emotionally difficult substitute for the real thing. Lenin also accepted completely that the 1905 revolution was no more than a bourgeois, political, democratic one and that its historical meaning was limited to clearing the path for socialist revolution. But emotionally there was for him nothing ‘only’ about the events of 1905. He saw them as a vast national epic – a heroic struggle of the narod to conquer freedom and to regenerate Russia.
As usual, Lenin’s emotional commitment to an exalted view of events spills out in ceaseless polemics with all those he considered philistines, pedants, whiners, sceptics, defeatists. Did the slowdown in the strike movement in 1904 mean that the proletariat was no longer interested in revolution? No, the proletariat was merely biding its time. Was the disorder and violent chaos of the revolution in 1905 a bad thing? No, it was a good thing, an explosion of popular creativity. Was the Moscow uprising of December 1905, drowned in the blood of the workers, a mistake committed by over-enthusiastic socialist activists? No, it represented the most splendid popular movement since the Paris Commune of 1871. Were the peasants who burned down landowner estates while dreaming of equalized land tenure a backward and reactionary class capable only of spontaneous outbursts of violence? No, the ‘petty-bourgeois peasants’ were a progressive class that was fighting for a democratic form of capitalism, and therefore a worthy ally of the Russian proletariat in the democratic revolution. Did the new political institutions created by the revolution mean that the previous konspiratsiia underground had become anachronistic, an embarrassing relic that ought to be liquidated? No, the old underground had sown the seeds that had burst forth in the glory of the 1905 revolution. The underground therefore had to be preserved in the post-revolutionary era in order to prepare for the inevitable replay of a bigger and better 1905, when ‘the Russian WORKER, elevated to the head of all democratic elements, will overthrow absolutism’.
4. Three Train Rides
‘A new era of revolutions is drawing near.’
Karl Kautsky, 1909, as paraphrased by Lenin, 1914
Krakow to Bern
In the early summer of 1914 Lenin had very little idea of what the looming war would bring. He even assumed his workload would be eased somewhat if war actually broke out, since his connections with the Russian underground would be thoroughly disrupted.1 But when war did come it brought some devastating surprises.
Even after Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August 1914, the Social Democratic parties in Germany, Austro-Hungary and France were still organizing mass protests against war. The main German party newspaper, Vorwärts, continued to thunder against the imperialist war and to threaten the capitalist warmongers with revolutionary action. But on 5 August Lenin received a major shock: the SPD Reichstag delegation had voted unanimously for war credits. Forgotten was the traditional cry of ‘not one penny – not one man’ for the capitalist state. When Lenin first saw the headlines in the village of Poronino (his summer residence outside Krakow, which he used after moving back to Poland in 1912), he was sure that they must be a provocation, a trick by the government to confuse the opposition.
Lenin after his release from jail in Nowy Targ, Galicia, August 1914.
Lenin soon had his own firsthand experience with war hysteria. The local offi
cials in Austrian Poland suspected the outlandish Russian emigrant of espionage. A policeman reported to his superiors that many meetings of Russian nationals had taken place at the residence of V. Ulyanov. There were rumours that Ulyanov had been seen taking photographs in the surrounding hills, but these proved unfounded. Nevertheless, the policeman was of the opinion that Ulyanov should be under lock and key – after all, his identity papers were in French (the language of an enemy country), he received money from Petersburg, and he was in a very good position to give information about Austria to the Russians.2
Based on this irrefutable logic, Lenin was arrested and kept in the local jail from 8 to 19 August. Thus the third decade of his political career began the same way as his first decade – in jail. And, as in Siberian exile, Lenin devoted some of his time to helping peasants with their legal troubles, only this time the peasants were his fellow jail mates. But the big difference between 1895 and 1914 was that Lenin now had powerful friends on the outside. Among these was the leader of the Austrian Social Democrats, Victor Adler, who went to the Austrian Minister of the Interior to give personal assurance that no one was less likely to help the tsarist government than V. Ulyanov. When the minister asked, ‘are you sure he’s an enemy of the tsar?’ Adler answered, ‘he is a more implacable enemy than your Excellency’.
Orders soon came down to release Lenin, and even to allow him to travel to Switzerland. On getting out of jail Lenin received another shock, in the form of a leaflet entitled ‘Declaration of Russian Socialists Joining the French Army as Volunteers’. These Russian socialists outdid the Germans in their support of their government’s war effort: they joined the ranks of an allied army. Among the émigrés in France who showed their devotion to internationalism in this way were several Bolsheviks.
Among many harrowing scenes of wartime hysteria and early military casualties (vividly described by Krupskaya in one of the most gripping sections of her memoirs), Lenin, his wife and his confused and soon-to-die mother-in-law packed up and embarked on a week-long train trip to Bern, Switzerland (with a stop in Vienna to get necessary documents and to thank Victor Adler, soon to be a political enemy). When he arrived in Bern on 5 September Lenin hit the ground running. The day he stepped off the train he met with local Bolshevik émigrés and proposed a set of theses about the proper reaction to the war. Just a month had gone by since the outbreak of hostilities – a month mostly taken up with the hassles and uncertainties of jail and of leaving Poland – and yet Lenin was ready with theses that defined a radically new chapter of his career.