Lenin: A Biography

by Robert John Service

  What made matters worse was the fact that Russia unwisely went to war with Japan in 1904 in pursuance of its interests in the Pacific region. Large land forces were sent along the Trans-Siberian Railway, and the Baltic Sea fleet had to circumnavigate the globe to take on the Japanese navy. Through the later months of the year there were reports of a gathering catastrophe. Troops were penned into Port Arthur in the Far East. Supplies were scarce, discipline poor and political and military leadership execrable. Meanwhile the Baltic Sea fleet crossing the North Sea had opened fire on an English trawler, mistaking it for a Japanese warship and nearly starting a war with the United Kingdom. Disaster and farce were blended in equal proportions. The Emperor and his court were declining into universal public disrepute.

  But then on 9 January 1905 a peaceful procession of men, women and children took place in St Petersburg. Its destination was the Winter Palace of the tsars and its object was to present a petition to Nicholas II for the granting of universal civil rights, including a degree of democratic political representation. It was a Sunday. The marchers were dressed in their best clothes. The mood was firm but jovial. At the head of the procession walked an Orthodox Church priest, Father Georgi Gapon. The petition-campaign had been organised by him through the Assembly of Russian Factory and Mill Workers of the City of St Petersburg; his idea on that fateful Sunday was to present a set of loyally phrased requests to the Emperor Nicholas II in person. The Assembly was a trade union operated under the strict supervision of the Ministry of the Interior in a scheme begun in the Russian Empire at the instigation of Moscow police chief Sergei Zubatov. Gapon acted as intermediary, but increasingly he took the workers’ side against the authorities.

  As they drew near to the Winter Palace, the marchers were ordered to disperse but they ignored the instruction and walked on. The troops in front of the building, in the Emperor’s absence, were beginning to panic and their commanding officers decided to fire upon the crowd. Scores of innocent demonstrators were killed. Instead of suppression, the result was mayhem. Everywhere in Russia there were strikes and demonstrations, and everywhere the blame was put upon the dynasty.

  The news of the Russian revolutionary crisis reached Geneva within twenty-four hours of ‘Bloody Sunday’. Among the first Bolsheviks in the city to read the papers were Anatoli Lunacharski and his wife, who hurried to Lenin’s apartment on Rue David Dufour on 10 January. There was jubilation despite the information that innocent people had been shot outside the Winter Palace. The point for Lenin was that tsarism stood on the edge of a precipice; the throne of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great was beginning to totter. Together the Lenins and the Lunacharskis walked over to the café run by Panteleimon and Olga Lepeshinski at 93 Rue de Carouge. This was the main social centre for Russian Marxists, a place where they could eat cheaply and talk about politics and party organisation for as long as they liked. The Lepeshinskis were Marxist veterans who ran their business without expectation of great profit. They offered a service as much as a commercial operation. The tables were always cluttered with coffee cups, porridge bowls and plates of stuffed-cabbage pastries and salami, and there were always several groups of revolutionaries chatting to each other. On that particular day, however, the café had become packed very quickly. The emigrants scented the possibility of Revolution.

  But what was to be done? Indeed what were the emigrants, who depended on Swiss journalists for information on Russia, in any position to do? They had been caught out by the events in St Petersburg and could not easily gauge how best to proceed. Nearly all of them decided to wait on events. Rather than return immediately to Russia, they tried to plan strategy for their followers. Without direct experience of the fast-changing circumstances in St Petersburg, they analysed and predicted things in the light of their previous doctrinal ruminations. They were unembarrassed by this. The working assumption of these revolutionary intellectuals was that their previous doctrines would supply the backbone of practical strategy for their followers in the Russian Empire.

  Certainly Lenin took time to recognise the need for a fundamental strategic reconsideration. His initial reaction to ‘Bloody Sunday’ was to affirm again and again that the priority for Bolsheviks was to maintain a separate organisational identity from the Mensheviks. In December 1904 he had ranted to every member of the Bureau of Committees of the Majority that reconciliation with the present editorial board of Iskra was impossible – and he railed that fellow Bolshevik Noskov had tricked him while he and Nadya had been on holiday. Indeed he had done what any contemporary gentleman, be he a squire or an army officer, would have done in such circumstances: he formally cut off all personal relations with Noskov.1 The problem was that the Central Committee, including some of Lenin’s close supporters, did not accept his judgement and calmly made arrangements for a Third Party Congress that would bring Bolsheviks and Mensheviks back together. Surely, thought Lenin, ‘Bloody Sunday’ would put an end to such stupidity and Bolsheviks would recognise their duty to stand up for Bolshevism as the only genuine revolutionary trend? But even his friend Sergei Gusev, a Central Committee member, turned against him. Lenin raged at all of them by letter. They were ‘wretched formalists’. He didn’t care if they all went over to Martov. They were a disgrace to Bolshevism! No compromise!

  Nadezhda Konstantinovna had to encode such correspondence, and perhaps it was she who pointed out the counter-productive effects of Lenin’s tone. Or maybe Lenin came to his senses by himself and saw that, if he ditched his Bolsheviks, no revolutionary group would be left to him. His only supporters, unless he could hold on to Sergei Gusev and other such comrades, would be his wife, his brother and his two sisters; and even Lenin knew that the Ulyanovs, however pertinacious they proved, were too few to turn Russia upside down.

  Even so, he continued to claim that a permanent split with the Mensheviks was crucial:2

  Either by truly iron discipline we’ll bind together all who wanted to wage war, and through this small but strong party smash the crumbling monster of the new Iskra and its ill-assorted elements; or else we’ll demonstrate by our behaviour that we deserve to perish as contemptible formalists.

  This was still offensive but not to the point that Bolshevik leaders would seriously take umbrage. More likely was that they marvelled at the surreal inappropriateness of his words. At a time when hundreds of thousands of Russians and Japanese were dying in the conflict in the Far East, Lenin talked blithely about ‘war’ in the party. They must surely have thought him outrageous in describing the Mensheviks, a tiny and committed group, as monstrous. They might also have been perplexed by his insisting that revolutionary duty demanded that they support the Japanese cause politically. This was an early version of the stand he was to take in the Great War; for Lenin, any foreign power attacking Russia deserved the support of Russian Marxists (and he habitually portrayed such a power as being less reactionary than the tsarist state). Anything to pull down the Romanovs! And was it not odd that, when every other Marxist was putting his mind to overturning the Romanov dynasty, Lenin thought that the most urgent task was the closure of Iskra in far-off Switzerland? What could anyone think about his behaviour but that he had finally gone somewhat mad? Perhaps they began to wonder whether they had made a mistake when they had taken his side against Martov in 1903.

  And so the Central Committee, led by Bolsheviks, went ahead with a unifying Party Congress. Invitations were carried to practically all the important committees in the Russian Empire. The venue was to be London, and Lenin in high dudgeon got Nadya to buy tickets for the rail trip on the overnight train across France from Geneva. Days later, after arriving at Charing Cross Station, they took up lodgings at 16 Percy Circus in St Pancras. The Congress was to be held in April, and Lenin’s anger steadily dissipated. Plekhanov, Martov and other Iskra leaders were refusing to come to London at all. They argued with some justification that the Central Committee had not been even-handed in its scrutiny of the validity of delegates’ mandates and called upon
Mensheviks to attend their own gathering in Geneva. Consequently, for most purposes, the so-called Third Party Congress in London was a Bolshevik Congress even though the Central Committee had managed to tempt at least a handful of Mensheviks to come to London and participate. Lenin, did he but know it, was a lucky man; he was like a man rescued from a chronic disease by a brilliant but invisible physician. He had wanted a Bolshevik Congress. A Bolshevik Congress was what he got. And he no longer felt the need to go around Bloomsbury in a foul temper about the Iskra group.

  Instead he had the chance to explain his ideas on strategy to activists who had come over from Russia and to learn directly what was going on in St Petersburg and the provinces. Here he came into his own. One of his strengths was his ability to set down his thoughts clearly and pungently, at least to people who shared most of his basic assumptions. Few Bolsheviks had this talent to his extent; perhaps only his rival Bolshevik leader Alexander Bogdanov was in the same class as an expositor. Lenin loved Congresses. He liked to meet delegates. He liked the chance to exchange ideas with the working-class delegates. Along with Nikolai Alexeev, he assisted delegates with addresses of cheap temporary lodgings and with tips on English pronunciation.3 (The fact that, to the British ear, he enunciated his rs like a Frenchman did not deter him.) And of an evening he would walk along with delegates to the little German pub at the top of Gray’s Inn Road to have a beer and talk over the proceedings – and several of them were to recall how much inspiration Lenin drew in this period from the ideas of the Russian nineteenth-century agrarian-socialist terrorists and from the terrorist practice of the Jacobins in the French Revolution in 1792–4.

  An affordable hall was found for the Congress, which began on 12 April 1905; the desire for secrecy was such that we still do not know the hall’s name. Lenin, whose reputation among Bolsheviks in Russia and abroad had been in tatters in the previous months, suddenly reasserted his dominance. He chaired most of the sessions and manipulated the agenda for his own purposes. At last endeavouring to specify how to make Revolution, he presented a set of slogans that electrified the audience: ‘armed insurrection’, ‘a provisional revolutionary government’, ‘mass terror’, ‘the expropriation of gentry land’.4 Each slogan secured rapturous assent. The proceedings were not published at the time; otherwise, probably, he would not have spoken so enthusiastically about dictatorship and terror. But among his own Bolsheviks he felt no inhibition, and it is striking how his audience found nothing objectionable in his remarks. Bolsheviks were a ruthless bunch. They expected to make a revolution and to have to fight against counter-revolutionary forces, and did not see why they should eschew the violent methods developed by Robespierre and his confederates in the French Revolution. Bolsheviks were hard-headed and confident. If they played their anticipated vital role in overthrowing the Russian Imperial government, they assumed, they would be indispensable to the task of securing the political and economic gains; their aim had to be to join the subsequent revolutionary administration. Lenin had ventilated ideas that had expressed their innermost inclinations.

  But not everyone could understand how the new slogans fitted the earlier common understandings of Russian Marxism. Some asked how a Marxist party could aspire to join a government whose purpose was to consolidate a capitalist economy. And if the landed nobility was to be expropriated, where should the agrarian reform stop? Delegate M. K. Vladimirov enquired whether the party should stop short of specifically socialist measures – such as the introduction of collective farms. Lenin was unruffled. He came back instantly with his injunction: ‘Never stop!’5

  When the Mensheviks heard of Lenin’s contributions, they declared him a proven renegade from Marxism. He admired Tkachëv and praised terror. He wanted to give the entire land to the peasantry. Violence and dictatorship fixated him. Lenin tried to prevent the criticisms getting out of hand by writing yet another booklet, Two Tactics of Russian Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, which he was still writing during the Congress. Its purpose was not only to justify his new radical slogans but also to drum some organisational sense into fellow Bolsheviks. He noted, for example, that they were slow in Russia to found trade unions and other organisations for the working class. Lenin was furious with them, urging an end to the preoccupation with clandestine methods of running the party. He tried to make them a bit less ‘Leninist’! Now, to general amazement, he aimed to form a large, open-entrance party. For him, no somersault was involved here. What Is to Be Done? was a tract for its time and situation; its universal theme was the need for leadership but it offered no permanent detailed prescription for the modalities of party organisation. Now, said Lenin, there was a real revolutionary opportunity – and the party had to change the way it operated. Otherwise the Revolution would leave the party far behind.

  Lenin was not changing his assumptions, just his practical proposals in the light of the changed political situation. A revolutionary opportunity existed and the party absolutely had to exploit it. The Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party had been created precisely for this purpose. He was readying his party – or rather his section of it – to recognise and exploit this opportunity. He was a pressure-cooker on the stove waiting to blow off its lid.

  His campaign shows both how much and how little he had come along the road towards becoming a leader of Revolution. The Congress understood his defects. This was why, against his objections, it decided to limit the emigrants’ influence upon the party. In particular, the Central Committee and the central party newspaper, now to be known as Proletari, were to be switched to the Russian Empire. Lenin was being put on notice that if he wished to lead the Bolsheviks he would have to operate not in Geneva but in St Petersburg. For over six months he had ignored this warning. Nothing – not even a decision by Congress – would induce him to return to Russia until his freedom from arrest seemed secure. Thus Lenin was a theorist and rhetorician of Revolution more than a leader. He retained his wholly unrealistic belief that he could direct Bolshevik activity in Russia by means of letters sent from the Switzerland. He failed to comprehend the volcanic unpredictability of the forces that were being released. He had read about the French Revolution, about the Revolutions of 1848 and about the Paris Commune of 1871. But what he had learned from his books had been about the ‘class interests’ of the contending political forces. Like Marx, he had striven to focus on the internal logic of developments. But at the same time he had overlooked the chaos of each of those great historical events as experienced by the people who took part in them.

  Yet Lenin was not complacent. In Geneva he sensed the need to acquire a more lively sense of what was happening in St Petersburg even though he refused to go there. Weeks after ‘Bloody Sunday’ he met the fleeing Father Gapon. Other Marxists were cold-shouldering the Russian Orthodox priest, but Lenin talked with him at length. They even exchanged copies of books they had written; this was not Lenin’s usual reaction unless he was impressed with someone. From the beginning there was a rapport between the two men.

  And so Lenin welcomed him to the Rue de Carouge. As they discussed current developments, peasants’ son Gapon – charismatic, gruff, bearded and hostile to both the Emperor and the Orthodox Church hierarchy – captivated him as someone who had a deep understanding of the feelings of ordinary Russians.6 The fact that Gapon was neither a theorist nor a party member was all to the good; he knew things that were elusive to emigrants. A former tsarist loyalist, Gapon had turned to Revolution only after the massacre outside the Winter Palace. He could speak about haymaking, slums and Sunday schools – all subjects in which Lenin’s knowledge was deficient. Lenin was also intrigued by Gapon’s slogan ‘All the Land to the People’. Obviously this went far beyond Lenin’s demand that the cut-off strips should be restored to the peasants. But Gapon insisted that his own radicalism was justified. God alone, said the priest, was the land’s sole owner and peasants should be helped to rent it. Needless to add, Lenin rejected the proposal in its religious encasement.7 But Le
nin drew inspiration from it in political terms. Lenin was even more impressed when Gapon showed him his open letter to Russia’s socialist parties, calling on them to come to an agreement and prepare the armed overthrow of tsarism. Here was a man of the cloth who understood the practical tasks of the Revolution. Lenin the militant atheist referred approvingly to Gapon’s proposal in the Bolshevik newspaper Vperëd.8

  Lenin was developing as a politician. He was a Marxist, albeit a Marxist who had been inspired by earlier generations of Russian socialist thinkers. He was a scholar-revolutionary with a deep commitment to the perfectibility of mankind inherited from Enlightenment philosophy. But he was also increasingly capable of assimilating ideas from other sources. Although he expressed himself in the lexicon of Marxism, he needed to go outside the Marxist fraternity for help to think through his strategy.

  His policies, despite pointing away from conventional Marxist policies, held to the axiom that the great march to socialism would occur in two distinct stages: first a ‘bourgeois-democratic’ revolution and then a socialist one. But there were also distinct oddities in his argument. Two Tactics of Russian Social-Democracy, for example, insisted that liberals and other middle-class parties were incapable of being trusted even to bring about that first revolution. Even stranger was the project for a ‘provisional revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’. Lenin announced that such a dictatorship would exercise a powerful appeal to the lower social classes. But the Mensheviks retorted that Lenin had thrown out the two-stages concept. They rightly suggested that, if the dictatorship was going to be enormously popular, the bourgeoisie would never be able to supplant it. They also challenged Lenin’s case that a dictatorial regime was the most effective way to introduce universal civic rights and a market economy. His whole project was a contradictory mishmash. Yet Lenin did not deign to respond to these attacks; he had convinced his Bolshevik followers and was unwilling to expose the flaws in his case in a general public debate. This also carried the advantage of allowing him to go on believing that he had stayed within the perimeter of conventional Marxism.