In the summer of 1895 he traveled abroad and met with Plekhanov and the other veterans of the Social-Democratic movement. He was told it was a profound mistake to reject the “bourgeoisie”: “We turn our faces to the liberals,” Plekhanov said, “whereas you turn your back.”43 Akselrod argued that in any joint action with the “liberal bourgeoisie” the Social-Democrats would not lose control because they would retain “hegemony” in the joint struggle, guiding and manipulating their temporary allies in a direction that best served their own interests.
Lenin, who worshipped Plekhanov, was impressed. How deeply he was convinced cannot be determined: but it is a demonstrable fact that upon his return to St. Petersburg in the autumn of 1895 he made the debut as an orthodox Social-Democrat, committed to organizing workers for the struggle against the autocracy in a common front with the “liberal bourgeoisie.” The change was striking: in the summer of 1894, he had written that socialism and democracy were incompatible; now he argued that they were inseparable.44 Russia in his eyes was no longer a capitalist but a semi-feudal country, and the main enemy of the proletariat was not the bourgeoisie allied with the autocracy but the autocracy itself. The bourgeoisie—at any rate, its progressive element—was an ally of the working class:
The Social-Democratic Party declares that it will support all the strata of the bourgeoisie engaged in the struggle against the autocratic government.… The democratic struggle is inseparable from the socialist one; [it is] impossible to wage a successful fight for the cause of labor without the attainment of full liberty and the democratization of Russia’s political and social regime.
45
Conspiracy and coup d’état he now dismissed as impracticable. It is important to bear in mind, however, that Lenin’s change of heart on the role of the “liberal bourgeoisie” was firmly anchored in the premise, stated by Akselrod, that in the campaign against the autocracy the revolutionary socialists would lead and the bourgeoisie follow.
After his return from abroad, Lenin established desultory contact with labor circles that were leading a precarious existence in the capital. He did some tutoring in Marxist theory, but he did not much care for educational work and he gave it up after a worker whom he was initiating into Das Kapital walked off with his overcoat.46 He preferred to organize workers for action. At the time, there operated in St. Petersburg a circle of Social-Democratic intellectuals which maintained contact with individual workers as well as the Central Workers’ Circle, formed by the workers themselves for purposes of mutual aid and self-improvement. Lenin joined the Social-Democratic circle, but involved himself in its work only late in 1895 when it adopted the technique of “agitation” formulated by Jewish socialists in Lithuania. To overcome the workers’ aversion to politics, the “agitational” technique called for inciting industrial strikes based on the workers’ economic (i.e., non-political) grievances. It was believed that once the workers saw how the government and the forces of order invariably sided with the proprietors of the affected enterprises, they would realize it was impossible to satisfy their economic grievances without a change in the political regime. This realization would politicize labor. Lenin, who learned of the “agitational” technique from Martov, joined in the distribution among St. Petersburg workers of agitational material which explained to the workers their rights under the law and showed how these rights were being violated by the employers. The output was meager, and the effect on the workers doubtful: but when in May 1896, 30,000 textile workers in the capital went on a spontaneous strike, the Social-Democrats had cause for jubilation.
By then Lenin and his comrades were in jail, having been arrested in the winter of 1895–96 for incitement to strikes. Nevertheless, Lenin felt that the “agitational” method of struggle had vindicated itself: “The struggle of workers with factory owners for their daily needs,” he wrote in the wake of the textile strike, “of itself and inevitably suggests to the workers problems of state and politics.”47 The task of the party Lenin defined as follows:
The Russian Social-Democratic Party declares its task to be helping the struggle of the Russian working class by developing labor’s class consciousness, assisting its organization, and showing it the real goals of the struggle.… The task of the party is not to invent in its head some fashionable methods of helping the workers, but to
join
the labor movement, to illuminate it, to
help
the workers in the struggle
which they have already begun to wage themselves
.
48
During the investigation that followed his arrest, Lenin disclaimed authorship of a manuscript of his which the police had mistakenly attributed to an associate by the name of P. K. Zaporozhets. As a consequence, the latter drew two additional years of prison and exile. Lenin spent his three years of Siberian exile (1897–1900) in relative comfort and in constant communication with his comrades. He read, wrote, translated, and engaged in vigorous physical activity.*
As his term of exile drew to a close, Lenin was in receipt of disturbing news from home: the movement, which at the time of his imprisonment was going from success to success, was in the throes of a crisis not unlike that experienced by the revolutionaries of the 1870s. The agitational technique, which Lenin had expected to radicalize workers, turned into something very different: the economic grievances which had been intended to serve as a means of stimulating their political awareness had become an end in themselves. The workers struggled for economic benefits without getting politically involved, and the intellectuals who engaged in “agitation” found that they had become adjuncts of an incipient trade union movement. In the summer of 1899, Lenin received from Russia a document written by Ekaterina Kuskova and called “Credo” which urged socialists to leave the struggle against the autocracy to the bourgeoisie and concentrate instead on helping Russian labor improve its economic and social condition. Kuskova was not a full-fledged Social-Democrat, but her essay reflected a trend that was emerging within Social-Democracy. This incipient heresy Lenin labeled Economism. Nothing was further from his mind than to have the socialist movement turn into a handmaiden of trade unions, which by their very nature pursued accommodation with “capitalism.” The information which reached him from Russia indicated that the labor movement was maturing independently of the Social-Democratic intelligentsia and distancing itself from the political struggle—that is, revolution.
His anxiety was compounded by the emergence of yet another heresy in the movement: Revisionism. In early 1899, some leading Russian Social-Democrats, following Eduard Bernstein, called for a revision of Marx’s social theory in the light of recent evidence. That year Struve published an analysis of Marx’s social theory in which he charged it with inconsistency: Marx’s own premises indicated that socialism could come about only as a result of evolution, not revolution.49 Struve then proceeded to a systematic critique of the central concept of Marx’s economic and social doctrine, the theory of value, which led him to the conclusion that “value” was not a scientific but a metaphysical concept.50 Revisionism did not trouble Lenin as much as Economism for it did not have the same practical implications, but it heightened his fear that something was seriously amiss. According to Krupskaia, in the summer of 1899 Lenin grew distraught, lost weight, and suffered from insomnia. He now devoted his energies to analyzing the causes of the crisis in Russian Social-Democracy and devising the means to overcome it.
His immediate practical solution was to launch with those associates who had remained faithful to orthodox Marxism a publication, modeled on the German Sozialdemokrat, to combat deviations in the movement, especially Economism. Such was the origin of Iskra. But Lenin’s thoughts ran deeper and he began to wonder whether Social-Democracy should not reorganize as a tight, conspiratorial elite on the model of the People’s Will.51 These speculations marked the onset of a spiritual crisis which would be resolved only a year later with the decision to form a party of his own.
> After his release from exile in early 1900, Lenin spent a short time in St. Petersburg negotiating with colleagues as well as Struve, who, although nominally still a Social-Democrat, was shifting into the liberal camp. Struve was to collaborate with Iskra and provide a good part of its financing. Later that year, Lenin moved to Munich where jointly with Potresov and Julius Martov he founded Iskra as an organ of “orthodox”—that is, anti-Economist and anti-Revisionist—Marxism.
The longer he observed the behavior of workers in and out of Russia, the more compelling was the conclusion, entirely contrary to the fundamental premise of Marxism, that labor (the “proletariat”) was not a revolutionary class at all: left to itself, it would rather settle for a larger share of the capitalists’ profits than overthrow capitalism. It was the same premise that moved Zubatov at this very time to conceive the idea of police trade unionism.* In a seminal article published at the end of 1900, Lenin uttered the unthinkable: “the labor movement, separated from Social-Democracy … inevitably turns bourgeois.”52 The implication of this startling statement was that unless the workers were led by a socialist party external to it and independent of it, they would betray their class interests. Only non-workers—that is, the intelligentsia—knew what these interests were. In the spirit of Mosca and Pareto, whose theories of political elites were then in vogue, Lenin asserted that the proletariat, for its own sake, had to be led by a minority of the elect:
No single class in history has ever attained mastery unless it has produced political leaders, its leading representatives, capable of organizing the movement and leading it.… It is necessary to prepare men who devote to the revolution not only their free evenings, but their entire lives.
†
Now, inasmuch as workers have to earn a living, they cannot devote “their entire lives” to the revolutionary movement, which means that it follows from Lenin’s premise that the leadership of the worker’s cause has to fall on the shoulders of the socialist intelligentsia. This notion subverts the very principle of democracy: the will of the people is not what the living people want but what their “true” interests, as defined by their betters, are said to be.
Having deviated from Social-Democracy on the issue of labor, Lenin required little effort to break with it over the issue of the “bourgeoisie.” Observing the emergence of a vigorous and independent liberal movement, soon to coalesce in the Union of Liberation, Lenin lost faith in the ability of the poorer and less influential socialists to exercise “hegemony” over their “bourgeois” allies. In December 1900, following stormy meetings with Struve over the terms of liberal collaboration with Iskra. Lenin concluded that it was futile to expect the liberals to concede to the socialists leadership in the struggle against the autocracy: they would fight on their own and for their own non-revolutionary objectives, exploiting the revolutionaries to this end.53 The “liberal bourgeoisie” was waging a spurious struggle against the monarchy and, therefore, constituted a “counterrevolutionary” class.54 His rejection of the progressive role of the “bourgeoisie” signified a reversion to his previous People’s Will position and completed his break with Social-Democracy.
Having concluded that industrial labor was inherently non-revolutionary, indeed “bourgeois,” and the bourgeoisie “counterrevolutionary,” Lenin had two choices open to him. One was to give up the idea of revolution. This, however, he could not do, for the psychological reasons spelled out earlier: revolution to him was not the means to an end but the end itself. The other choice was to carry out a revolution from above, by conspiracy and coup d’état, without regard for the wishes of the masses. Lenin chose the latter course. In July 1917 he would write:
… in times of revolution it is not enough to ascertain the “will of the majority”—no, one must
be stronger
at the decisive moment in the decisive place and
win
. Beginning with the medieval “peasant war” in Germany … until 1905, we see countless instances of how the better-organized, more conscious, better-armed minority imposed its will on the majority and conquered it.
55
The model of the party organization which was to accomplish this task Lenin adopted directly from the People’s Will. The Narodovol’tsy had been very secretive about the structure and operations of their party, and to this day much about this subject remains obscure.56 Lenin, however, had managed to acquire much firsthand knowledge from conversations with ex-Narodovol’tsy while living in Kazan and Samara. The People’s Will was structured hierarchically and operated in a quasi-military manner. Unlike Land and Freedom, its parent organization, it rejected the principle of equality of members, replacing it with a command structure, at the head of which stood the all-powerful Executive Committee. To qualify for membership in the Executive Committee, one had not only to subscribe unquestioningly to its program but also devote oneself body and soul to its cause: “Every member,” the committee’s statutes read, “must unconditionally place all his talents, resources, connections, sympathies and antipathies, and even his life at the disposal of the organization.”57 The decisions of the Executive Committee, reached by majority vote, were binding on all members. These were chosen by co-optation. Serving under the committee were specialized organs, including a Military Organization, and regional or “vassal” branches: the latter had to carry out its instructions without demurrer. Because the members of the Executive Committee were full-time revolutionaries, most of them had to live on money that the party obtained from well-wishers.
Lenin took over these organizational principles and practices in toto. Discipline, professionalism, and hierarchical organization were all a legacy from the People’s Will which he sought to inject into the Social-Democratic Party and, when the effort failed, imposed on his own Bolshevik faction. In 1904 he asserted that “the organizational principle of revolutionary Social-Democracy strives to proceed from the top downward” and requires the parts or branches to subordinate themselves to the party’s central organ58—language which could have come from the statutes of the People’s Will.
Lenin, however, departed from the practices of the People’s Will in two important respects. The Narodnaia Volia, although hierarchically organized, did not allow for personal leadership: its Executive Committee functioned collegially. This was also the theoretical basis of the Bolshevik Central Committee (which had no formal chairman), but in practice Lenin completely dominated proceedings and it rarely took major decisions without his approval. Second, the People’s Will did not intend to become the government of a Russia liberated from tsarism: its mission was to end with the convocation of a Constituent Assembly.59 For Lenin, by contrast, the overthrow of autocracy was only a prelude to the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” managed by his party.
Lenin popularized his views in What Is to Be Done?, published in March 1902. The book brought up to date and garbed in Social-Democratic vocabulary the ideas of the People’s Will. Here Lenin called for the creation of a disciplined, centralized party composed of full-time, professional revolutionaries dedicated to the overthrow of the tsarist regime. He dismissed the notion of party “democracy” as well as the belief that the labor movement would, in the course of its natural development, carry out a popular revolution: the labor movement on its own was capable only of trade unionism. Socialism and revolutionary zeal had to be injected into labor from the outside: “consciousness” had to prevail over “spontaneity.” Because the working class was a minority in Russia, Russian Social-Democrats had to involve the other classes in the struggle as temporary allies. What Is to Be Done? overturned, in the name of orthodox Marxism, the basic tenets of Marxist doctrine and rejected the democratic element of Social-Democracy. Nevertheless, it made an immense impression on Russian socialist intellectuals among whom the older traditions of the People’s Will remained alive and who were growing impatient with the dilatory tactics advocated by Plekhanov, Akselrod, and Martov. Then, as later, in 1917, much of Lenin’s appeal derived
from the fact that he spelled out in plain language and translated into programs of action the ideas which his socialist rivals, lacking the courage of their convictions, hedged with countless qualifications.
Lenin’s unorthodox theses became the subject of intense controversy in 1902–3, as the Social-Democrats were making preparations for the forthcoming Second Congress of the party—a congress which, its name notwithstanding, was to be the party’s founding gathering. Quarrels broke out in which ideological differences fused with and often masked personal struggles over leadership. Lenin, supported by Plekhanov, called for a more centralized organization in which the rank and file would be subservient to the center, while Martov, the future leader of the Mensheviks, wanted a looser structure, offering admission to anyone who gave “the party regular personal cooperation, under the direction of one of the party organizations.”60
The Second Congress convened in Brussels in July 1903; it was attended by forty-three voting delegates, authorized to cast fifty-one votes.* All but four of the participants, said to have been workers, belonged to the intelligentsia. Martov, leading the opposition to Lenin, regularly won majorities, but when he joined with his rival to deny the Jewish Bund autonomous status in the party and the five Bundists walked out, followed by the two Economist delegates, he temporarily lost his majority. Lenin promptly exploited the opportunity to seize control of the Central Committee and secure a dominant voice in its organ, Iskra. His ruthless methods and intrigues on this occasion caused a great deal of bad blood between him and the other leaders of the party. Although every effort was made then and subsequently to preserve a façade of unity, the split in fact became irreparable, not so much because of ideological differences, which could have been reconciled, but from personal animosities. Lenin seized the moment to claim for his faction the name Bolshevik, meaning “majority.” This name he retained even after he found himself in a minority, which occurred soon after the Second Congress. It gave him the advantage of appearing as the leader of the more popular branch of the party. Throughout he maintained the pose of being the only “orthodox” Marxist, which had considerable appeal in a country whose religious tradition viewed orthodoxy as the supreme virtue and dissent as apostasy.
The Russian Revolution Page 56
