In fact Lenin was tempted to expound a one-stage strategy and drafted an article called ‘Picture of the Provisional Revolutionary Government’ in which he sketched ideas for ‘a revolution uninterrupted’. But then he had second thoughts and withheld his piece from the press. Not all Marxists were worried about flouting convention. Inspired by the ideas of unconventional Marxist Alexander Helphand-Parvus, Trotski proposed unequivocally that the socialist parties should seize power, establish a ‘workers’ government’ and not open themselves to replacement by liberals. Trotski wanted not just to preach but also to practise revolutionary leadership. Returning to Russia in summer, he joined the striking workers of St Petersburg.
Across the summer the troubles of the Imperial government became acute. The news from the Far East was terrible. Russian land forces had been overwhelmed at the battle of Mukden in February, and the navy, having circumnavigated the globe, was annihilated at Tsushima in May. Count Witte, brought out of retirement by the Emperor, managed to negotiate surprisingly gentle terms of peace from the Japanese, but the sense of national humiliation was widespread. So too was the spirit of revolt. In city after city there were industrial strikes and in May there was a novel phenomenon: the soviet. The word, meaning council in Russian, came to stand for an elected body of the lower social classes that assumed the power of local government. It happened first in Ivanovo-Voznesensk but quickly spread elsewhere. Workers without much prior deliberation had set up embryonic alternative administrations. Trotski became Deputy Chairman of the Petersburg Soviet in September. The clandestine political parties came into the open, and even the liberals formed a political party at last: the Party of Constitutional Democrats (or Kadets). Unions proliferated. Censorship almost collapsed. The police were too timid to intervene. Peasants began to take timber from the landlords’ woods and to pasture their cattle on gentry land. Poles and Georgians made their countries ungovernable from the Russian capital. Tsarism was in mortal danger.
This entire crisis occurred in Lenin’s absence. Other Bolsheviks nagged him about this and in September he was firmly requested by his comrade Alexander Bogdanov to return home immediately. Bogdanov was also an intellectual; he too was a prolific author and a theorist. But he was also restless for action. Indeed it was Lenin’s plea for action in What Is to Be Done? that had turned Bogdanov into a Bolshevik. He simply could not understand why Lenin would not take the risk of going back to Russia, and he told him this in plain language. But still Lenin would not budge. He had never gambled with his personal safety or engaged in mere revolutionary gestures. His activity in emigration with its intellectual debates, its publications and its library research continued to fulfil him. No one meeting him on the Rue de Carouge would suspect that this neatly dressed, scholarly type intended, as a basic purpose in his life, to transform the politics and society of the world. He believed that revolutionary leaders were meant to supply doctrinal guidance and practical policies, and to keep themselves free from arrest. He therefore had no trouble in brushing Alexander Bogdanov’s complaint aside.
What changed his stance was the news from St Petersburg that the regime was at last making serious reforms. On 17 October 1905 Emperor Nicholas II issued a Manifesto, promising to realise universal civil rights as well as convoke a State Duma. Immediately Lenin felt reassured. The Okhrana, he thought, would no longer be hunting for him on the streets. Or at least he could hope so. In the first week of November he boarded the train in Geneva and began the journey that led him across Germany. Nadezhda Konstantinovna’s preparations were meticulous. From Germany she and Lenin crossed to the Swedish capital Stockholm, where Bolshevik associates had false papers ready for them. Ferry tickets had been bought for both of them and they took the steamer from Stockholm across the Baltic to Helsinki. For the first time in five years Lenin set his feet on ground ruled by the Russian Emperor. Leaving Helsinki, Lenin and Nadya took another train to St Petersburg. It was a journey of 280 miles and they crossed the Russo-Finnish administrative border at Beloostrov. When they alighted at the Finland Station on 8 November, they were discreetly met by the Bolshevik Nikolai Burënin, who showed them to the first of several apartments where they were to stay over the next few weeks.9
Initially Lenin and Nadezhda Konstantinovna registered legally as residents; they expected to operate in the open. But they dropped this delusion the very next day when the Okhrana surrounded the area with agents who had no talent for disguising themselves. From then onwards they were looked after by fellow Bolsheviks in a succession of safe-houses. Nevertheless Lenin was confident enough to visit his mother and his sister Anna, who were living at the little village and railway-stop of Sablino outside St Petersburg. He also kept up regular contacts with Bolsheviks who were working in the soviets, trade unions and other organisations. All the while he was gulping down impressions about Russia in revolution. But most of his working time was spent in his traditional fashion. He wrote newspaper articles and booklets and sat through the endless discussions of party committees. Occasionally, moreover, he gave speeches to party congresses, conferences and other such gatherings. From November 1905 through to summer 1906 he resided in St Petersburg with the odd visit to Finland, to Moscow and – in April 1906 – to Stockholm for the Fourth Party Congress. His purpose as ever was to guide and control his Bolshevik faction and maximise its influence in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. He was not, and did not aim to be, the tribune of the people.
Not for him, then, the delivery of fiery speeches to public meetings in the fashion that was making Trotski famous. He attempted only one such oration in 1905–6. This was to an all-party meeting in May 1906 in the People’s House. It was a testing experience for him. He was unusually nervous before getting up on to the platform and being introduced to the audience as ‘comrade Karpov’. He need not have worried. Once he was on the platform, he handled the situation well. Screwing up his eyes and grasping the lapel of his jacket, he leaned forward and fixed his gaze on the audience. Then he rapped out his slogans. Everyone went away impressed with his utmost belief that these slogans were the sole means to accelerate progress to socialism in Russia. Slowly Lenin was acquiring the skills of twentieth-century open politics.
The comparison with Trotski is not wholly fair. The rise and fall of the Petersburg Soviet, where Trotski made his declamations, had largely happened before Lenin’s arrival. Thereafter all revolutionary politicians, not just Lenin, concentrated on sorting out the affairs of their respective parties. This was a mammoth task for Lenin because his Bolsheviks continued to despise the soviets and to exaggerate the advantages of political conspiracy. Lenin argued that the time was overdue for Bolsheviks to form a mass party, to participate in the various other public organisations and to organise Revolution. When his recommendations were accepted but only with reluctance, he responded by suggesting the need for the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party to be infused with young blood. Lenin cared little whether the recruits were already Marxists. The priority was to attract radical, working-class activists, activists who raged to be active. And Lenin wanted them to have complete freedom to express their impatience; indeed he tried to strengthen their impatience. Industrial workers inside and outside the party, he declared, should take the Revolution into their own hands. They should not be restrained by their parties. The working class should act as the vanguard of all the forces hostile to the Russian Imperial state.
He was apt to get carried away about such matters. Repeatedly he had deplored the failure of the 1871 Paris Commune to resort to repression; in 1905, however, he not only confirmed his commitment to violent methods but gave them a specificity that was more bloodthirsty than anyone thought imaginable. He displayed a virtual lust for violence. While he personally had no ambition to kill or to maim or even to witness any butchery, he took a cruel delight in recommending such mayhem.
This delight was intense shortly before his return to Russia. Thus he wrote the following summons to members of the Combat Committee
attached to the Bolshevik Central Committee: ‘Here what is needed is frenzied energy upon energy. I see with horror, for God’s sake with real horror, that there has been talk about bombs for more than a year and yet not a single bomb has been made!’ Lenin’s solution was to give arms to detachments of workers and students and let them get on with revolutionary activity regardless of whether they belonged to the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. The detachments should kill spies, blow up police stations, rob banks and confiscate the resources they need for an armed insurrection.10 His imagination ran wild. When it came to street conflicts, he suggested, the detachments should pull up paving stones or prepare hot kettles and run to the tops of buildings in order to attack troops sent against them. Another proposal was to keep a store of acid to hurl at policemen.11 These tactics were not only alarming but also impractical. If used, they would have stiffened the will of troops and policemen to suppress rebellion. Lenin was expressing a rage deep inside himself. He himself did not have to handle bombs, kettles and acids. But unconsciously he got satisfaction from putting his thoughts about them on paper.
He did not worry that others might be appalled by his approach:
Of course, any extreme is bad; everything good and useful taken to an extreme can become and even, beyond a certain limit, cannot help but become a harmful evil. Uncoordinated, unplanned petty terror, when taken to an extreme, can only disintegrate forces and waste them. This is true, and naturally cannot be forgotten. But on the other hand it absolutely mustn’t be forgotten that the slogan of insurrection has already been given, the insurrection has already been started.
The breakdown in logic here was significant. Having begun with a justification for not going to an ‘extreme’, Lenin ended abruptly with an assertion that the armed uprising was under way.
Within a month, however, he had calmed down. His Bolshevik associates in Moscow were acting with precisely the zeal he had wanted. And yet the Moscow Rising, which they had organised together with the other political parties in the City Soviet, was a disaster. The fighting commenced in mid-December 1905. It was concentrated in the Presnya industrial district and the valour of the rebels was beyond dispute. But they were no match for the same troops who had recently closed down the Petersburg Soviet in the Technological Institute. The Rising was ruthlessly put down. Over-optimistic attempts at insurrection, concluded Lenin, should no longer be indulged. He also wished to persuade the Bolsheviks to take full advantage of the Emperor’s October Manifesto. Elections were to take place in early 1906 for an elected, representative assembly: the State Duma. There were severe limits upon the new Russian parliamentarianism. In particular, the Emperor retained the right to disperse the Duma and to rule by decree. But Lenin argued that the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party should put up its own candidates and use the Duma as an opportunity for the dissemination of party propaganda.
This was a battle he could not win. In mid-December 1905 he was defeated at the Bolshevik Conference held in the Finnish town of Tampere, three hundred miles north-west of St Petersburg. But he persisted with his strategic shift even though it broke sharply with everything he had been saying since the Second Party Congress in 1903. He even condoned reconciliation with the Mensheviks. For two years it had been an article of his crusading faith that Menshevism was a heresy, a set of organisational and strategic proposals that flew in the face of Marxist principles. When his followers had queried his hostility to compromise, he had shown them his utter contempt. In Lenin’s eyes, the ‘Conciliator Bolsheviks’ had been hardly better than the Mensheviks.
And yet now Lenin wished to reunify with the Mensheviks. His calculations were not difficult to decipher: he could not control Bolshevik policy. To balance the zealots in his own faction, he therefore needed Mensheviks, most of whom wanted the party to participate in the soviets and to campaign in the State Duma elections. He contemplated this despite the chasm that separated him from Menshevism. Lenin stood for a ‘provisional revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’, for a class alliance of workers and peasants, for the repudiation of the middle classes and for mass terror. The Mensheviks by contrast urged that the ‘bourgeois-democratic’ revolution should be led by the middle classes and that this revolution should immediately implement universal civil rights. It would take all his charm and persuasiveness to bring the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks back together. But Lenin always had abundant self-belief. Without expressly announcing his change of stance, he did all he could to enable the two factions to join each other at the Fourth Party Congress. His highest immediate priority was to get the Congress to sanction participation in the legal political activities that the Imperial government had been compelled to concede. For Lenin, a sinuous manoeuvrer, this was not a tall order.
The Congress was arranged for Stockholm. As the Congress delegates set off across the Baltic Sea to the Swedish capital in April, Lenin opened negotiations with Menshevik leaders. The Mensheviks had a slight majority over the Bolsheviks among the Congress delegates and would undoubtedly win the main debates. This had the effect of freeing Lenin to say what he wanted about a wide range of policies, including those which were diametrically opposed to Menshevism. Lenin enjoyed being aggressive. Refining his project for expropriation of the landed gentry in favour of the peasantry, he called for ‘land nationalisation’ by the ‘provisional revolutionary dictatorship’. The Mensheviks too had widened their demands on the agrarian question and called for ‘land municipalisation’; they contended they would thereby avoid the centralised bureaucracy that Lenin’s scheme would involve. Lenin had casually assumed that it would be a simple administrative task for the revolutionary regime to ensure that the peasants, who would gain use of the land at a very low rent, would adopt efficient farming techniques. But both the Mensheviks and many of Lenin’s critics among the Bolsheviks replied that this would be a task of gigantic complexity. In truth Lenin woefully underestimated the dangers of bureaucratic degeneration.
Lenin was defeated on agrarian policy at the Congress and his other initiatives also met with reverses. The Mensheviks brought up the very embarrassing matter of the Bolshevik factional leadership’s complicity in the organisation of bank robberies in the Russian Empire. This was a growing scandal in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. For Mensheviks, such robberies were an intolerable method of financing the party and Lenin’s secret sanction for them was a disgrace. Plekhanov added his weight to the criticism, repeating that Lenin’s strategy of Revolution – especially his wish for a class alliance with the peasantry – was reminiscent of the Russian agrarian socialists. It was an uncomfortable moment for Lenin. His self-control was strained to the limit because the Bolshevik factional leadership had simultaneously invited him, the advocate of participation in Duma elections, to put the case for boycotting them. He phrased his speech on the subject with uncharacteristic vagueness, which was the most he could do to signal his disquiet with the policy of the Bolshevik faction. But when at the end of the Congress the Mensheviks unexpectedly tabled a proposal to enter the electoral campaign still in progress in one region of the Russian Empire, namely the Caucasus, he broke cover and voted against most of his fellow Bolsheviks. The Menshevik proposal was accepted. At least on this matter he had obtained a degree of pleasure.
The new Central Committee of the reunited party included seven Mensheviks and only three Bolsheviks. Lenin was not among them. He was being warned by fellow Bolshevik delegates that his ideas were not to their liking: his policies on the Duma and on land nationalisation were especially unappealing to them. As a consequence his mood had darkened by the time he took the ferry back from Stockholm. His nerves were frayed.
But the mood quickly lightened. The Bolshevik faction aimed to keep its organisational apparatus separate from the rest of the party and established a secret Bolshevik Centre. Lenin was readmitted to the leadership alongside Bogdanov and Leonid Krasin. From this position he would be able to undo those decisions at t
he Congress which he did not like, and on this he had Bogdanov’s warm collaboration. The two of them got on better than for years and decided that they and their wives should set up house together. They feared the attentions of the Okhrana as the Imperial regime sought to assert control. Their enquiries led them to Vaasa, a large two-storey dacha at Kuokkala in the Grand Duchy of Finland. Kuokkala lies less than forty miles from St Petersburg; it was only five miles from the existing Russo-Finnish administrative border at Beloostrov and had a station on the railway between St Petersburg and Helsinki. Lenin and his friends were opting for safety. Finland was not as secure as Switzerland but had limited self-government even under the tsars. Its border was not just of a formal significance. Travellers had to show their passports and allow the police to inspect their baggage. The Finns had their own currency and postage stamps and were so different from the Russians that they forbade people from buying alcohol on public premises unless it was accompanied by a meal. Finnish ports received ferries regularly from Hull, Lübeck, Stettin and Stockholm; it was possible, in an emergency, to leave for central and western Europe without going back to Russia.
Lenin: A Biography Page 24