At the turn of the century, Russia was entering a period of turbulence. Peasants rioted against a system which piled debts on them and taxed their basic necessities excessively; workers went on strike for better conditions and wages and against police harassment; students were demanding autonomy for their universities and civil liberties for everyone; the professional classes—doctors, lawyers, teachers—were becoming increasingly vociferous in their demand for representative government; and the national minorities in the empire's borderlands were organizing liberation movements. In 1904 the country stumbled into a war against Japan over control of Chinese territory in Manchuria, 6000 miles from European Russia, and by the middle of 1905 Russia's resources appeared exhausted, and humiliation seemed certain. The whole of 1905 was consumed in strikes and demonstrations, and mutinous action in parts of the army and navy, and by the autumn Tsar Nicholas II was ready to concede reform: the creation of a State Duma, or parliament, and various promises of social legislation.
It was against this background of rising political activity that Lenin emerged from his exile in Siberia and threw himself into reorganizing the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party as a revolutionary body, prepared to overthrow the existing order. To justify the rôle of those who were to do the overthrowing, he created the idea of the ‘professional revolutionary’. In his extended essay What is to be Done?, a title he took from Chernyshevsky, he wrote that an ‘Organization of revolutionaries must chiefly and above all include people whose profession is revolutionary activity’,1 one of his main arguments being that it was ‘far harder to catch a dozen clever people than a hundred fools’. By ‘clever people’ he meant professional revolutionaries.2 Published in Stuttgart in 1902,3 What is to be done? was Lenin's grand plan to create a conspiratorial organization. Advancing the idea of an ‘all-Russian political newspaper’ as the basis for such a party, he envisaged a ‘network of agents’—or ‘collaborators, if this is a more acceptable term’—who would provide ‘the greatest certainty of success in the event of a rising’.4
He would certainly succeed in building his strictly disciplined organization, but after it had seized power he would find it difficult to discern where the Party ended and the security organs began. In April 1922, for instance, it was the Politburo that gave the state security organ, the GPU, the power to shoot bandit elements on the spot. In May they ordered that Patriarch Tikhon, the head of the Orthodox Church, be put on trial for allegedly obstructing the expropriation of Church property, and in the same month this élite of ‘professional revolutionaries’ sentenced eleven priests to be executed for the same reason. In August 1921 it was Lenin who initiated the creation of a commission to maintain surveillance on incoming foreigners, notably those involved in the American famine relief programme.5
The illegal, conspiratorial character of the Party predetermined the mutual penetration, if not fusion, of this ‘social’ organization and the state security organs. The process occurred officially and ‘legally’. One of Lenin's most trusted agents, Yakov Ganetsky, wrote to Lenin on 10 October 1919 proposing ‘the closest possible ties between the Party organizations and the extraordinary [security] commissions … and to oblige all Party members in responsible posts to report to the … commissions any information they obtain by both private and official means and which might serve to combat counter-revolution and espionage. They should also actively help the … commissions by taking part in solving cases … being present at interrogations and so on.’6 Lenin could hardly have made the point clearer, when he stated, ‘A good Communist is a good Chekist [secret policeman] at the same time.’7
Theorist of Revolution
As had become their custom, late on the morning of 10 January 1905 Lenin and Krupskaya were making their way to the city library in Geneva, where they were then residing. On the steps they ran into Anatoly Lunacharsky and his wife, who told them the wonderful news that revolution had broken out in St Petersburg. They all ran to Lepeshinsky's émigré restaurant, where the events were already being discussed excitedly. Lenin proposed a joint meeting with the Mensheviks, on condition that only one speaker from each side take the floor, and two days later the two irreconcilable factions met. Lunacharsky spoke for the Bolsheviks, Fedor Dan for the Mensheviks. But each side was more intent on preventing the other from scoring a success than on discussing realities. When Dan hinted darkly at ‘splitters’, Lenin gave a signal and the Bolsheviks walked out.8
Everything Lenin had written until now had been devoted to the problems of preparing for revolution: creating a party, formulating its programme, exposing tsarism. Now it was necessary to write about the revolution itself. Even if it was somewhat embarrassing that the popular workers' leader Father Gapon, who had built up a large following in St Petersburg, was closer to events than ‘real’ revolutionaries, Lenin was fascinated by the priest, who seemed to have been pushed into the revolution only by the suffering he shared with his flock. Gapon in fact had since 1904 been working in close cooperation with the secret police, whose object had been to divert the workers from revolution by helping them in their struggle for economic gains. Lenin did not believe Gapon was a provocateur and he inscribed his 1905 Geneva pamphlet, ‘Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution’, ‘To Georgy Gapon with respect, from the author’.9 In an article in the January issue of Vpered entitled ‘The Priest Gapon’, he wrote: ‘Gapon may be a sincere Christian socialist and perhaps it was precisely Bloody Sunday that pushed him onto a fully revolutionary path.’ He concluded that a cautious attitude was called for.10 ‘Bloody Sunday’, 22 January 1905, had been the occasion of a huge procession of workers and their families, led by Gapon, towards the Winter Palace, to petition the tsar for help. Troops guarding the approaches to the city centre were ordered to fire into the crowds, after repeated warnings, and some eight hundred were killed and many more wounded. It was an event which not only shocked world opinion, but also triggered the violence and disorder of the rest of the year.
* * *
It would appear, from everything that has been written about him by Soviet historians, that there was no field of social life which Lenin did not ‘enrich’, ‘refine’, ‘formulate’ or ‘illuminate’. But let us dwell here only on his theory of socialist revolution, such as it was.
Analysing the entrails of capitalism, Marx had stressed that the coming of proletarian revolution depended wholly on the material conditions of hired labour. For him, revolution was a social fruit that must ripen. While agreeing in principle with this idea, Lenin, believing that only the conscious activity of individuals could guarantee the success of the revolution, shifted the stress onto forcing the process by energizing the masses, by organizations and parties. In principle, he regarded the improvement of the workers' conditions and the realization of socialist goals by evolutionary, reformist means, as impossible. For him the main thing was to create the institution of control. In January 1917 he wrote that contemporary society was ripe for socialism, ripe for control ‘from a single centre’.11 Reforms, he wrote, were ‘a side effect of the revolutionary class struggle’.12 Throughout his writings, he speaks of the decisive rôle of the conscious masses, classes, parties, leaders. Circumstances were important only in order to legitimize the settling of these problems by force of will.
Even though the First World War, and Russia's fortunes in it, dramatically altered the political situation, and led to the downfall of the tsar and the formation of a liberal Provisional Government, Lenin must have known the Mensheviks were right when they said in 1917 that Russia was not ripe for socialist revolution. Yet he was prepared to exploit the opportunity for his own party to seize power in October. The alternative was for the Bolsheviks to occupy the position of an extreme wing with little influence in the forthcoming Constituent Assembly, planned by the Provisional Government and actually convened in January 1918. Lenin therefore leapfrogged the classic Marxist scheme, ignoring ‘Objective conditions’, as well as a host of homegrown and European Social Democrats who were committed to a parliamentary process. He was cleverer than they, for he recognized that the war had not only been the chief cause of the February revolution which finished off the Russian Empire, but would also dash the hopes that had been aroused then. He exploited the war by moving it in effect from the trenches of the Eastern front to the Russian plains in the shape of revolution and civil war, and in doing so, he altered the disposition of political forces. It was this strategy that led to the redrawing of the map of the world, brought into being mighty movements in all continents, and held the minds of statesmen in tension and fear as to whether the world revolution would occur.
Like all die Russian leaders, Lenin was hypnotized by die French Revolution. Peppering their articles and speeches with terms like ‘Girondistes’, ‘Jacobins’, ‘commissars’, ‘Convention’, ‘Thermidor’, ‘Vendée’, they were not merely paying homage to the French revolutionaries, but were also emulating them, as they tried to remake history for themselves. In a telegram of 30 August 1918, the day he was nearly assassinated by the Socialist Revolutionary Fanya Kaplan, Lenin told Trotsky in Sviyazhsk to use the most extreme measures against senior commanders who showed lack of strength: ‘They should be told that from now on we are applying the model of the French Revolution and will put on trial and even shoot … the army commander at Kazan and the other top commanders.’13 The French revolutionaries applied terror in the name of liberty, of course, whereas Lenin did so in the name of power.
At the height of the First World War, Lenin came to die unexpected conclusion that ‘the victory of socialism is possible first in a few or even one individual capitalist country’.14 It would have been hard to disagree, had he meant the seizure of power, rather than the victory of socialism. Shortly thereafter, he set forth one of his fundamental theses even more forcefully, namely that ‘socialism cannot conquer simultaneously in all countries’.15 This, too, would have been a rational assertion, but for the minor matter of what it was he meant by ‘socialism’, and the question of which were the lucky countries that might enter the promised land in splendid isolation. Lenin had the answer: those which were the weakest link in the imperialist system. It was here that the absurdity began. It appears that Germany, Great Britain, the USA and other developed capitalist states had less chance of social and economic advance than, say, Russia. And yet Lenin himself had written that the material base for socialism was already in place in Europe. Despite his attempt to smooth over the inconsistency by asserting that socialism would never arise in Russia without a certain level of capitalist development,16 his position remained absurd, and had nothing in common with socialism. The possibility of ‘building socialism in one country’ boiled down to the chance of seizing power. It was easier in a country where conditions were ‘ripe’, and where the appropriate ‘organization’ was present, even if the state and the level of democracy were less ready to climb the next step up the pyramid of social progress.
After his return to Russia on 16 April 1917, when he was whipping up a mood of frenzy, harnessing the masses' impatience, promising peace and land in exchange for support for his party, Lenin bent every effort to turn that party into a combat organization, capable of seizing power. Soon after the February revolution, when all the ‘illegals’ emerged from hiding, he was still declaiming, ‘we will create our own party as before and we will definitely combine our legal and our illegal work’.17 This had nothing to do with socialism. The society which Lenin and his adherents began to build had to resort to unrestrained violence, in accordance with the leader's views, in order to survive. As the highest principle of revolutionary development, the dictatorship trampled and subordinated everything to its own will. Having once espoused the idea of socialism in one country, Lenin pushed questions of morality well down the Bolshevik agenda. In May 1919 the Politburo gave routine authorization for a collection of valuable jewellery to be made available to Comintern. The list of this jewellery runs to many pages and is valued in many millions of roubles, with items marked ‘for England’, ‘for Holland’, ‘for France’, and so on.18 In November 1921 the Politburo unanimously rejected an appeal from a special commission for the improvement of children's rations.19 The difficulties faced by the new regime do not justify the refusal to meet this need. While millions were dying of hunger and disease, the Politburo was lavishly disbursing tsarist gold to ignite revolution in other countries.
It is not difficult to find evidence in Lenin's writings of the idea that the dictatorship of the proletariat is compatible with full democracy, as indeed Soviet propaganda insisted for decades. It is, however, hard to reconcile the idea with the practice, where it is difficult to understand what Lenin meant by democracy. How can the dictatorship of one class—or more accurately one party—be reconciled with the principles of people's power, liberty and the equality of all citizens? It smacks of social racism. A letter from Lenin to the Bolsheviks in Penza, not far from Simbirsk, written in August 1918, illustrates this point:
Comrades! The kulak uprising in [your] five districts must be crushed without pity. The interests of the whole revolution demand it, for the ‘final and decisive battle’ with the kulaks everywhere is now engaged. An example must be made. 1) Hang (and I mean hang so that the people can see) not less than 100 known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers. 2) Publish their names. 3) Take all their grain away from them. 4) Identify hostages as we described in our telegram yesterday. Do this so that for hundreds of miles around the people can see, tremble, know and cry: they are killing and will go on killing the bloodsucking kulaks. Cable that you have received this and carried out [your instructions].
Yours, Lenin.
P.S. Find tougher people.20
Clearly, not all Bolsheviks were up to the task.
Even after this telegram, Lenin frequently discussed ‘democracy and the dictatorship’. It is, however, unclear what rôle democracy was to play. The document cited above is a total condemnation of Lenin's ‘theory’ of socialist revolution. What did he mean by ‘100 known kulaks, rich men’? Who were these condemned individuals? Today we know them to have been the hardest-working, most capable of the peasantry. If the circumstances were invoked to justify the crime, then they could be invoked to justify anything at all. In what way were Lenin's orders to ‘shoot on the spot’, ‘arrest or shoot’, ‘apply extreme revolutionary measures’, etc., preferable to the ‘Cossack whips’ and ‘bloody massacres’ of Nicholas II? Compared to the bestialities of the civil war, the tragedies of tsarist Russia pale into insignificance.
Nor was it the ‘iron logic’ of a revolution that had gone out of his control that forced Lenin to apply these monstrous methods. In an earlier time, from the peacefully ordered world of Geneva in October 1905, he wrote a series of articles for publication in St Petersburg which were in effect instructions for staging an armed uprising. One such, entitled ‘Tasks for the Ranks of a Revolutionary Army’, discusses ‘independent military actions’, as well as ‘managing crowds’. He recommended that ‘units arm themselves as best they can (with rifles, revolvers, bombs, knives, knuckledusters, sticks, paraffin-soaked rags, rope for rope-ladders, spades to dig barricades, gun-cotton, barbed wire, nails (to stop the cavalry) and so on and so forth)’. Places and people, even if unarmed, must be made ready ‘to throw stones down onto the troops and pour boiling water from top storeys, to throw acid over the police and steal government money’. It was, he wrote, of the utmost importance to encourage the ‘murder of spies, policemen, gendarmes, Black Hundredists’, while it would be ‘criminal’ to trust the ‘democrats’, who were only good at running a liberal talk-shop.21
Lenin's ‘theory’ of revolution proposed nothing other than these inhuman terrorist methods. Even when Nicholas II published his Manifesto of October 1905, leading to the creation of the State Duma and possibly opening the way eventually to constitutional monarchy, and offering perhaps the chance of a move towards democracy, Lenin did not alter his position. To the tsar's proposal to give ‘the population stable foundations of civic freedom on principles of true inviolability of the person, freedom of conscience, speech, assembly and union’, the Bolsheviks responded with a signal for renewed violence. Lenin called for ‘the pursuit of the retreating enemy’, an ‘increase in pressure’, while voicing his confidence that ‘the revolution will finish off the enemy and wipe the throne of the bloody tsar from the face of the earth’.22
The evolution of the Bolsheviks' attitude to the Constituent Assembly of 1918—the first such body to be elected on a fully democratic basis in Russia's history—demonstrates their extreme pragmatism. As long as it appeared possible to exploit this nationwide institution in their own interests, Lenin had supported the idea of the Assembly. But as soon as the elections produced a Bolshevik minority, he abruptly changed course. An All-Russian Commission had been formed before the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 to manage the election, and when that seizure of power took place the Commission declared it ‘a sad event’ that would ‘bring anarchy and terror’.23 When the Commission declared that ‘it found it impossible to enter any sort of relations with the Council of People's Commissars’, i.e. Lenin's government,24 its members were arrested. On the orders of the Bolshevik leadership they were locked in an empty room in the Tauride Palace for four days without food or bedding, in the hope that they would ‘see sense’ and cancel the election. The election went ahead regardless.
Realizing that the new Assembly, in which they had won only a quarter of the seats, would not bow to them, the Bolsheviks simply dispersed it during the night of 6 January 1918, after its first and only day of existence. Since the overthrow of the tsar in February 1917, the revolutionary bodies, the workers' strike committees, and the soldier's and peasants' representatives had been forming their own councils, or soviets, and through these had been applying pressure on the successor (Provisional) government to bring the war to an end and to introduce radical reforms. After seizing power in their name in October, Lenin declared that ‘the Soviets are incomparably superior to all the parliaments in the world’, and therefore ‘there is no place for the Constituent Assembly’. He added, ‘The people wanted to convene the Constituent Assembly, so we convened it. But the people at once sensed what this notorious assembly represented. So now we have carried out the will of the people.’25 ‘The people’ had been given one day in which to make up their minds. This device, of speaking in the name of the people, would become a firm tradition, whereby every activity was authorized by the mythical ‘will of the people’.
Lenin's theory of socialist revolution made no room for any representative elected institutions or direct democracy. Instead, he said, the socialist revolution ‘cannot but be accompanied by civil war’.26 Neither he nor any of his accomplices were troubled by the fact that the people had not empowered them to decide its fate. As the Socialist Revolutionary émigré Boris Savinkov wrote in 1921, in a Warsaw publication: ‘The Russian people do not want Lenin, Trotsky and Dzerzhinsky, not merely because the Bolsheviks mobilize them, shoot them, take their grain and are ruining Russia. The Russian people do not want them for the simple reason that … nobody elected them.’27
On the eve of the Bolshevik coup d'état, in August-September 1917, Lenin wrote his famous work State and Revolution, in which he laid out his ideas on the future socialist state. According to Lenin, ‘when everyone has learned to govern and is in practice independently governing social production, independently accounting for and controlling the spongers, the layabouts, crooks and similar “preservers of capitalist traditions”, then to evade this accounting and control will become so unbelievably difficult, such a rare exception, and will be accompanied, no doubt, by such speedy and serious retribution (for the armed workers, the people who live practical lives, are not sentimental intellectuals and will not permit anyone to fool around with them), that the need to observe the simple, basic rules of any human community will soon become a habit’.28 Lenin placed special emphasis on social control, believing that when it ‘became genuinely universal, general, nationwide’, it would be impossible to refuse to serve the state, ‘there would be no place to hide’.29
Lenin apparently never asked himself why, before 1921, the Bolsheviks were incapable of giving the people anything but chaos, civil war, hunger and terror.30 The fact is, the Bolsheviks had achieved their goal: the Party had power. The revolution was for Lenin a social experiment. If it failed in 1905, it would succeed in 1917, and if not, there was always the future. In an article entitled ‘For the Workers’ Attention', Gorky wrote in November 1917:
Life in all its complexity is unknown to Lenin, he does not know the masses, he hasn't lived among them, but he found out in books how to raise the masses onto their hind legs, how to enrage the masses' instincts easily. To the Lenins, the working class is like iron-ore to a metal-worker. Is it possible, given present circumstances, to cast a socialist state out of this ore? Evidently not. But why not try? What does Lenin risk if the experiment fails?31
To achieve power, the Bolsheviks became wedded forever to violence, while liberty was buried in the marriage. Lenin's address ‘To the Citizens of Russia’, following his coup, and his decrees promising peace and land, say nothing about liberty as the main aim of the revolution. They were not the Bill of Rights of the English revolution of 1689, nor the American Declaration of Independence of 1776. The Russian revolution, which formally gave the people peace and land, cunningly replaced the idea of liberty with that of the abolition of the exploitation of man by man. In giving the people the spectre of hope, Lenin had found and trapped man's most robust and vital element, that of faith. He thus condemned the Russians for decades to contenting themselves with hope alone.
What, if any, was the philosophical foundation of Lenin's approach? He has, after all, been called the most powerful philosopher of the twentieth century by Soviet scholars (the present author included). Had Lenin not come to power, his Materialism and Empiriocriticism(1908) would have been known only to the narrowest circle of experts on the theory of knowledge, and even they would have found it excessively scholastic: ‘Everything in it “corresponding” to the position of dialectical materialism,’ wrote the Russian émigré philosopher Vasili Zenkovsky, ‘is accepted without qualification, while whatever does not, is discarded for that reason alone.’32 Indeed, Lenin himself wrote in this work: ‘Following the path of Marx's theory, we shall approach closer and closer to the objective truth (while never achieving it); following any other path we shall come to nothing but confusion and lies.’33
In other words, only those who employ Marxist methodology are philosophers and scholars. The peremptory nature of his arguments, his hallmark as a politician, organizer and philosopher, puts one mentally on guard. Lenin's philosophy was designed to separate the ‘pure’ thinkers from the ‘impure’, the materialists from the idealists. His aim was to demonstrate that a school of philosophy which accepted the existence of religion could not be scientific.
Whether or not Lenin's reasoning is accepted as plausible or implausible, the principle of Party-mindedness, which he proclaimed as necessary for the philosophical study of scientific knowledge, places the reader beyond the pale of science and in the sphere of ideological opposition to Bolshevik values. After the failure of the 1905 revolution, an upsurge of interest in idealist philosophy occurred in Russia, as it did also in Western Europe, for different reasons. Disappointment with socialist, that is materialist, ideas was driving Russian intellectuals towards a spiritual philosophy which emphasised individual self-perfection as the path to social improvement, rather than the other way round, which was the message and purpose of socialism. In an effort to counter this trend, the Bolshevik intellectuals Alexander Bogdanov and Anatoly Lunacharsky had become interested in the works of the contemporary Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach (the creator of the measurement of the speed of sound) and his mentor, the nineteenth-century Swiss philosopher Richard Avenarius. According to Mach, the attributes of the material world—colour, shape, texture—are conferred on objects by the human mind. In other words, man makes the world as he knows it. The object of this theory was to eliminate the distinction between the spiritual and the physical world, since the world according to Mach is a physical entity given shape by consciousness. Marxist materialism posited the opposite proposition: the physical world, the environment, is what forms and conditions the human mind. Marxists are realists, or materialists, and Machists are idealists.
Bogdanov, a trained biological scientist, took Mach further by asserting that not only the physical world, but society itself, is a product of the human mind, that without the human will to form communal life, society would not have come into being. Society therefore is the expression of consciousness. The object of this line of reasoning was, as has been suggested, to counter the corrosive effect new idealist thinking was having on socialist life in Russia, by showing that Marxist philosophy was sufficiently flexible to absorb such an apparently idealistic notion.
At around this time, 1906 to 1909, Lenin was engaged in complicated relations with Bogdanov and other intellectuals associated with his Bolshevik organization. Partly in competition for intellectual leadership, partly in order to keep control of the organization and its finances, Lenin chose to make an assault on Bogdanov and his allies, by challenging their orthodoxy as Marxists. In order to do so, he read exhaustively in philosophical literature.34 Having accepted Marx's social-political and philosophical teaching without qualification, Lenin confined himself to nothing more than commenting on it. No social-political theory can be universal, yet that is what Lenin made of Marxism. As for such new idealists as Berdyaev and his fellow thinkers, Lenin's hostility in the end saved their lives: when in March 1922 he read a collection of articles by Berdyaev, Fedor Stepun, Frank and others, entitled Oswald Spengler and the Decline of Europe, Lenin wrote to N.P. Gorbunov, general administrator of the Council of People's Deputies (Sovnarkom), describing the book as ‘White Guardist’ and ordering Gorbunov ‘to speak to the Deputy Head of the GPU, I.S. Unshlikht, about it …’35 Philosophers were not yet being shot for ‘White Guardist’ views, but were merely deported from the country.
The philosophical side of Lenin's mind was strong on conviction, but dogmatic. He was absolutely certain that ‘Marx's philosophy is consummate philosophical materialism’,36 and the only true theory. In one of his last works, criticizing the Menshevik Sukhanov, he wrote: ‘You say that to create socialism one must have civilized behaviour. Fine. But why couldn't we create the prerequisites for civilized behaviour from the start, by expelling the landowners and expelling the capitalists, and then start the movement to socialism? Where have you ever read that such changes in the usual historical order are not acceptable or impossible?’37 In other words, if the Marxist books have not prohibited it, any ‘historical order’ is permissible.
The aesthetic side of Lenin's mind was less despotic, perhaps because art was less closely associated with politics than law and philosophy, or perhaps because he did not feel as confident in this sphere. Berdyaev may have exaggerated in calling Lenin backward and primitive in art, but only slightly. His taste was extremely conservative, while his range of knowledge of literature was more extensive. He cited and used Chernyshevsky more than any other writer—more than 300 times in his collected works, indeed—but he also quoted from a range of nineteenth-century Russian writers whose interests and themes tended towards the social and political. He wrote an article on Tolstoy, but he cited Dostoevsky only twice in all of his works.38 Preferring the classics to contemporary writing, he nevertheless much admired Gorky's novel The Mother, which dealt with social and political problems on an accessible artistic level.
His earlier friendship with Lenin did not prevent Gorky from attacking the Bolsheviks fiercely in 1917 and 1918 in his Petrograd newspaper Novaya zhizn'. Under the heading ‘Untimely Thoughts’, he managed to publish forty-eight of these articles before the paper was closed down on Lenin's orders in July 1918. Soon after the Bolshevik coup, on 7 (20) November 1917, Gorky had written: ‘Lenin and his comrades-in-arms think they can commit any crime, like the massacre at Petrograd, the storming of Moscow, abolition of freedom of speech, the senseless arrests—all the abominations that used to be committed by Plehve and Stolypin.* This is where today's leader is taking the proletariat, and it should be understood that Lenin is not an omnipotent magician, but a cold-blooded trickster who spares neither the honour nor the lives of the proletariat.’39
Needless to say, these and many other articles which Gorky wrote at the time were not included in the thirty-volume edition of his works. Soon, however, Gorky altered his tone, aware that the regime was enduring and that he could not manage without its help and that of Lenin. In April 1919 he called on Lenin to ask him to release the Left SR N.A. Shklovskaya, secretary of the poet Alexander Blok. She was set free six months later. In September 1920 he asked Lenin to allow the publisher Z.I. Grzhebin to emigrate. Given Lenin's personal magnetism, these visits had an effect, and soon Gorky was virtually tamed.
While Lenin himself approached art and literature as a consumer, as Party leader he saw in them a powerful instrument of political influence. It was perhaps for this reason that he was so hostile to Futurism and the other modernist trends in art. And no doubt when he urged the closure of the opera and ballet it was because he thought they were ‘court arts remote from the people’, and he could not see how singers and dancers might inspire the detachments that were carrying out food requisitioning. For him, the chief purpose of art was in developing ‘the best models, traditions, results of existing culture from the point of view of the world outlook of Marxism and the conditions of proletarian life in the epoch of the dictatorship’.40
Many biographers and people who met Lenin attest to the enormous ‘physical force’ of his mind. Perhaps this was because he usually crushed his opponent in argument with his absolute refusal to compromise; perhaps it was the uncompromising convictions themselves, the one-dimensional, virtually fanatical conviction. In any event, many people began to stress the force of Lenin's mind, and to relate it to the shape of his head. Lunacharsky, for instance, remarked that ‘the structure of his skull is truly striking. One has to study him for a little while to appreciate its physical power, the contours of the colossal dome of his forehead and to sense something I can only describe as a physical emanation of light from its surface.’41 No one is able to confirm whether light really did emanate from Lenin's forehead. Instead, we must make do with the five editions of his collected works, the forty volumes of the Lenin miscellanies, thousands of unpublished documents, thousands of works of hagiography and a handful of dispassionate, honest books about him. We do, however, have his plans and blueprints, and above all his actions, to judge him by.
The Phenomenon of Bolshevism
Every Soviet schoolboy knew the story of the Second Party Congress of 1903 and the difference between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks: Lenin and his ‘rock-hard’ followers ‘saw the Party as a combat organization, every member of which had to be a selfless fighter, prepared for everyday pedestrian tasks as well as to fight with a gun in his hand’, while Martov, ‘supported by all the wavering and opportunistic elements, wanted to turn the Party into an assembly room’. ‘With such a party,’ Lenin's official biography informed us, ‘the workers would never have been victorious and taken power into their hands.’42 If a student should add that Plekhanov, though wavering and indecisive, sided with Lenin, he would earn an extra mark. Such a student would not, however, be told that it was in fact Martov's more loosely defined formula for membership that was passed by the Congress, nor that it was only because Lenin obtained a majority in elections to the Party central organs that he could call his group the Majorityites, or Bolsheviks, while the ‘opportunists’ naturally became the Minorityites, or Mensheviks.
This laundered version migrated from book to book and became a fixed dogma in the public mind. In the years following October 1917, the term Menshevik became synonymous with opportunist, bourgeois conciliator, White Guard ally, foreign spy, enemy of the people. Naturally, this fundamentally affected attitudes towards the Mensheviks. When the Politburo discussed ‘the Menshevik question’ on 5 January 1922, it instructed Iosif Unshlikht, deputy chairman of the Cheka, to find two or three provincial towns, ‘not excluding those on a railway’, where Mensheviks could be settled. He was further told not to obstruct Mensheviks who wanted to leave the country, and that where a subsidy for fares was needed, he should apply to the Politburo.43 The days of mass execution had yet to come.
By concentrating on the organizational factor as the wall dividing the two wings of the Party, aspects of far greater significance were pushed into the background. In fact the true line dividing Bolsheviks and Mensheviks was not the issue of organization. The only true social democrats were the Mensheviks: they recognized democracy, parliament and political pluralism as values that could avert violence as a means of achieving social development. Democracy for them was a permanent value, not a political front. The Bolsheviks, by contrast, became increasingly convinced of the value of violence. And when they came to power, they believed they had conquered not only the bourgeoisie, but also their former Party comrades, the Mensheviks. ‘October,’ Stalin declared, ‘means the ideological victory of Communism over social democracy, of Marxism over reformism.’
Why did the Bolsheviks win? What was the appeal of their programme? Why did they survive, when it became clear they represented only the interests of the ‘professional revolutionaries’? The answers to these questions will lead to an understanding of the phenomenon of Bolshevism itself.
The First World War provided the key. The news that war had broken out at first caused shock among the Russian émigrés, followed by intellectual confusion, and finally the rapid growth of a defencist mood. A volunteer movement also sprang up as soon as war was declared. Many Russian émigrés in Paris, among them about a thousand Social Democrats, including Bolsheviks,44 were seized by patriotic fervour and rushed to join the French army. Most were drafted into the Foreign Legion, or languished in difficult circumstances because the French government did not know how to deal with them.45
On the other hand, a large group of Social Democratic internationalists, from both wings of the Party, soon emerged and began agitating against the imperialist war altogether. Prominent among them was Julius Martov, then living in Paris and editing a newspaper called Nashe slovo (Our Word). He called for the unification of all progressive forces in the struggle against the militarism of the imperialist powers and for an end to the war without reparations or annexations.46
The orthodox Bolsheviks took up a different position. When Lenin heard on 5 August 1914 that the German Social Democrats in the Reichstag had voted for the war budget, he declared, ‘From this day I am no longer a Social Democrat, I am a Communist.’47The Bolsheviks would not formally change the name of the Party until their Seventh Congress in March 1918, when they became the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik). In 1914, however, Lenin was dissociating himself from the mainstream of European socialism, which in practical terms had suspended its political programme until the war was over, and was giving notice that he was bent on revolution, now more than ever. He did not, however, decline the help of the Austrian Social Democrat leader, Victor Adler, to get out of Austrian Galicia, where he had lived since 1912, in order to be physically closer to events in Russia, and to make his way to Switzerland, where he launched into a spate of writing. His first significant response to the war was a manifesto entitled ‘The Tasks of the Revolutionary Social Democrats in the European War’. In it he penned the phrase that was to become sacrosanct in Soviet historiography: ‘From the point of view of the working class and the toiling masses of all the peoples of Russia, the lesser evil would be the defeat of the tsarist monarchy and its troops, which are oppressing Poland, the Ukraine and many other peoples of Russia.’48 He went further in November 1914 when he wrote, ‘Turning the present imperialist war into civil war is the only proper proletarian slogan.’49
He was calling for the defeat of his own country, and for making an already hideous war into something even worse: a nightmare civil war. With the seizure of power in mind, this may have been a logical position to take, but from the moral point of view it was deeply cynical. Desiring the defeat of the Russian army was one thing from the safety of Berne; it was quite another for those lying in the blood-soaked mud of the trenches on the Eastern front. What Lenin wanted was to turn the whole of Russia into a theatre of war. No one took any notice of his call, no one wanted to think about civil war, and in any case nobody then believed in the socialist revolution. True, Martov had warned at the outbreak of war that out of factional fanaticism Lenin wanted ‘to warm his hands by the fire that has been lit on the world arena’.50 But no one had taken heed.
In a letter of 17 October 1914 to one of his most trusted agents, Alexander Shlyapnikov, then in Sweden, Lenin wrote: ‘… the least evil now and at once would be the defeat of tsarism in the war. For tsarism is a hundred times worse than kaiserism … The entire essence of our work (persistent, systematic, maybe of long duration) must be in the direction of turning the national war into a civil war. When this will happen is another question, it isn't clear yet. We have to let the moment ripen and “force it to ripen” systematically … We can neither “promise” civil war nor “decree” it, but we are duty bound to work—for as long as it takes—in this direction.’51 Articles embodying this message began appearing in the émigré press over Lenin's signature. Despite his sideswipes at ‘imperialist Germany’, there were those in Berlin who realized that they had a new ally living in Switzerland. Seeing that there was no realistic way by which to seize power, Lenin took the side of Russia's enemy, while clothing himself in the garb of internationalism.
When the Russian people had been driven to the limit by the war, and state power in effect lay on the streets of the capital, the Bolsheviks obtained power with remarkable ease, in exchange for the promise of peace. Lenin's call to civil war was forgotten, but having gained power, he felt he had to go further; socialism seemed so close. If yesterday's men could be swept away, one could go on with the great experiment unhampered. Having given the people peace (however unreal and shortlived) and land (which would soon be taken back when Russia's peasants were turned into twentieth-century serfs), Lenin also took back the liberty, such as it was, that he had promised.
The Bolsheviks survived because of their leader and because of their commitment to unbridled force. Lenin was the ideal leader in the situation. As Potresov was to write in 1937:
Neither Plekhanov nor Martov, nor anyone else, possessed the secret of Lenin's hypnotic power over people, or rather his dominance over them. They respected Plekhanov, they loved Martov, but unswervingly they followed only Lenin as the sole undisputed leader. Lenin represented that rare phenomenon in Russia, a man with an iron will, indomitable energy, who poured fanatical faith into the movement and the cause, and had no less faith in himself … Behind these great qualities, however, there lurked great deficiencies, negative qualities, more appropriate perhaps in a medieval or Asiatic conqueror.52
What Lenin thought of Potresov he revealed in a letter to Gorky: ‘Such a swine, that Potresov!’53 Potresov had once been a close comrade of Lenin's, and Lenin always kept his most savage invective for those who had deserted him.
In 1921 the Socialist Revolutionaries illegally published a pamphlet, at a time when it was just still possible to do so in Moscow. Entitled ‘What Have the Bolsheviks Given the People?’, it pointed out that the new masters had not fulfilled a single promise of their programme. Instead of peace, the country had been plunged into a bloody civil war lasting three years, and had lost some thirteen million people through the fighting, disease, terror or emigration. Famine raged, and the peasants were not sowing because they knew their grain would be confiscated. Industry lay in ruins. Russia had been cut off from the rest of the world and was shunned by almost everyone. A one-party dictatorship had been installed. The Cheka was a state within a state. The Constituent Assembly had been dispersed. The regime was conducting a war with its own people.54
One reason the Bolsheviks were able to survive was that their leader was himself capable of setting an example of merciless terror. For instance, in the autumn of 1920 he wrote to Krestinsky, a secretary of the Central Committee: ‘I suggest a commission be formed at once (one can do it secretly to start with) to work out extreme measures (in the way Larin proposed. Larin is right.) What about you plus Larin plus Vladimirsky (Dzerzhinsky) plus Rykov?* The preparation of terror in secret is necessary and urgent.’55What need had the country of a regime that sought to achieve its aims by means of terror as state policy? Force was the style of the Bolsheviks and their leader. The paradox of Bolshevism—the Majorityites—was that theirs was a dictatorship of the minority, a fact observed by Martov in 1919 when writing a book on the intellectual and psychological origins of Bolshevism, which was published before completion by Fedor Dan in Berlin in 1923.
In 1923 Martov, who was terminally ill, wrote that Lenin had promised to bring in immediately all the measures detailed by Marx and Engels, namely election and recall of the government, workers' pay to be the norm, everyone to carry out the functions of control and supervision, so that none would become bureaucrats. ‘Reality has harshly dashed all these hopes,’ he wrote. ‘The Soviet state has revealed a tendency towards the extreme strengthening of state centralism, the maximum development of hierarchical and coercive principles in the community, and the growth and super-abundance of all the special organs of state repression.’56
The slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’ had been replaced by ‘All Power to the Bolshevik Party’, while the Politburo possessed powers beyond those of any emperor. In 1919, it ordered that hostages should be shot if there were any more incidents of bombs being thrown at the civilian population;57 that anyone failing to hand in weapons within an allotted period should be severely punished, even executed.58 In April 1920 Lenin and Stalin (as People's Commissar for Nationalities) signed a cable to their emissary in the Caucasus, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, forbidding self-determination for Georgia.59 Lenin also ordered the arrest of the delegates at an All-Russian Zionist conference being held in Moscow, as well as the publication of compromising material on them.60 The list is endless. It is noteworthy that the Politburo, which at times had up to forty items on its agenda, rarely dealt with strictly Party affairs. The Party had become a state organ.
The system created by Lenin in turn soon created a new type of man in whom, in Berdyaev's words, the motives of strength and power displaced those of love of truth and compassion.
This new man, perfectly suited to Lenin's plan, became the material of the Party organization and took over the vast country. Alien to Russian culture, their fathers and grandfathers had been illiterate and devoid of all culture, living solely by faith. The people had sensed the injustice of the old order but had borne their suffering meekly and humbly … But the time came when they could take no more … Their mildness and humility became savagery and fury. Lenin could not have carried out his plan of revolution and seizure of power without this revolt in the soul of the people.61
Lenin's political approach was the negation of traditional democratic institutions, such as parliament, the resort to purely revolutionary methods, the idolizing of force. Combined with a powerful mind, strong will and the conviction that he was right, it was an approach that exerted a powerful attraction on those who believed in the possibility of making a leap from the kingdom of want into the kingdom of liberty. In 1904, in ‘Forward or backward?’, replying to Lenin's ‘One Step Forward, Two Steps Back’, Martov wrote:
Reading these lines, breathing as they do a petty, at times senseless personal malice, amazing narcissism, blind, deaf, unfeeling fury, endless repetition of the same old meaningless ‘fighting’ and ‘scathing’ little words, one becomes convinced that this is a man who is fatally compelled to slide further down the slope onto which he stepped ‘spontaneously’ and which will take him straight to the full political corruption and shattering of social democracy.62
The Party went on splitting itself, expelling ‘factions’, ‘deviations’ and ‘platforms’, incapable because of its fanaticism of seeing these as differences of opinion rather than obsessions, as creative endeavours rather than fossilized dogma. The splits continued until, by the beginning of the 19305, all that was left was a Stalinist monolith that was utterly incapable of changing. The situation could only lead to disaster.
Lenin and the Mensheviks
When the Third Party Congress opened in London in April 1905, with Lenin as its chairman, he paid particular attention to questions of combat: he believed that tsarism was ‘rotten through’ and that it must be helped to crash to the ground. He made a long speech about armed uprising, tabled a motion on the issue, and tried to convince the delegates that a revolution was a real possibility.63 Throughout this time, he kept up his criticism of the Mensheviks. When they called for active exploitation of a proposed assembly, Lenin insisted on a boycott, since in his view any parliament was nothing more than a ‘bourgeois stable’. When he read Martov's article ‘The Russian Proletariat and the Duma’, published in the Vienna paper Rabochaya gazeta, he became enraged at his former comrade's call to the Social Democrats to take part in elections to the tsarist parliament, and gave his reply in an article entitled ‘At the Tail of the Monarchist Bourgeoisie or at the Head of the Revolutionary Proletariat and Peasantry?’64 The very notion of achieving socialist, democratic and progressive goals by means of reforms, parliament and legal social struggle was blasphemy. Lenin could not see the colossal possibilities of parliamentary activity. His speeches breathe hatred for the liberals and reformists, among whom the most dangerous in his view were of course the Mensheviks.
Lenin's reaction to the October Manifesto, like that of Soviet historians thereafter, was that it was merely a tactical manoeuvre by the tsar and the bourgeoisie, engineered by the tsar's brilliant prime minister, Count Witte. According to eye-witnesses, the tsar realized that in signing the document he was taking a step towards constitutional, parliamentary monarchy. The autocracy had retreated and given a chance for democratic development. Had the Social Democrats—not only Lenin—not at once labelled the Manifesto a ‘deception’, and had they instead fought to make it a reality, history might have been different. Instead, the Manifesto was interpreted as a sign of weakness, and Lenin prepared to return to Russia to help bury the autocracy. He was convinced the moment was approaching. His articles now bore such tides as ‘The Approach of the Dénouement’, ‘On the New Constitutional Manifesto of Nicholas the Last’, ‘The Dying Autocracy and the New Organs of People's Power’.
The differences with the Mensheviks were temporarily pushed to one side. They, meanwhile, like all the liberals, were having second thoughts about changing the existing political structure by force. Even relatively conservative, intelligent politicians like Witte were saying, ‘Russia has outgrown her existing structure. She is striving for a legal structure based on civil liberty.’ Witte proposed that the tsar ‘abolish repressive measures against actions which do not threaten society and the state’.65
The government's concessions were, however, dismissed, tension rose, and the Bolsheviks forced events by exploiting the workers' discontent. Lenin's espousal of widespread violence and terror, however, pushed the Mensheviks further away from the idea of Party reunification. In September 1908, Martov wrote in exasperation to his friend and Menshevik comrade Pavel Axelrod: ‘I confess that more and more I think that even nominal involvement with this bandit gang is a mistake.’66 They were both unwilling to make peace with sectarianism and conspiratorial methods. While keener on reunification than the Bolsheviks, they also wanted to retain democratic principles within the Party. As for Plekhanov, he had long decided that true reunification was impossible. In his view, Lenin regarded reunification as his faction swallowing up and subordinating all the other elements of Russian social democracy, and thus depriving the Russian revolutionaries of any democratic basis. Plekhanov pointed out that instead of underlining the common features shared by the two wings (which both had their roots in the labour movement), Lenin emphasized their differences, and was an incorrigible sectarian.67
As the culmination of the Russian drama of 1917 approached, with defeats at the war front, hunger and chaos, the Bolsheviks concentrated all their energy on preparing the armed uprising. The Mensheviks meanwhile focused on peace and liberty, the Constituent Assembly and a new constitution, a strategy Lenin regarded as treacherous, for it weakened the revolutionaries' chances of a victorious uprising. In the final analysis, the difference between the two factions boiled down to the Bolsheviks' wanting socialism on the basis of a dictatorship, and the Mensheviks' wanting it on the basis of democracy. In Fedor Dan's words: ‘Menshevism stood for turning the struggle for “bourgeois” political democracy and its preservation into its first priority; while Bolshevism put the “building of socialism” at the top of its agenda, throwing overboard and attacking the very idea of a “routine democracy”.’68
Dan, who outlived Lenin by nearly a quarter of a century and who knew him well, spent a good part of his life as the political and ideological leader of Menshevism, together with Martov, who died in 1923. Repeatedly arrested and exiled by the tsarist regime, he exerted great energy to preserve the democratic ideals of the RSDLP. His star reached its zenith in June 1917 when he co-chaired the Executive Committee of the All-Russian Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies (Ispolkom) with N.S. Chkheidze, was chief editor of Izvestiya, and with I.G. Tsereteli and A.R. Gots was one of the spokesmen of the democratic wing of Russian social democracy. Symbolically, it was Dan who opened the Second Congress of Soviets on 25 October (7 November) 1917, and when the Bolsheviks and Left Socialist Revolutionaries voted approval of the seizure of power that had just taken place, Dan protested by leaving the Congress together with the other Mensheviks.
For the next three years, the Menshevik leadership represented the democratic opposition, within the legal means permitted. Lenin, meanwhile, missed no opportunity to launch insulting attacks on his former comrades. Nevertheless, until 1920 the Mensheviks led a more or less legal existence, even if the term ‘Social Democrat’ became a dirty word. Then the Politburo launched open persecution, beginning with ‘semi-harsh’ measures. On 22 June 1922 it was decided that the political activity of ‘these accomplices of the bourgeoisie’ must be ‘curtailed’, and that this should be achieved for the time being by exile: ‘All People's Commissars should be informed that Mensheviks, at present employed in commissariats and capable of playing any political role, should not be kept in Moscow, but dispersed in the provinces, in each case after enquiries have been made at the Cheka and Orgburo.’69 At the same time, Mensheviks were being arrested throughout the country. Protests and appeals for release were sent to Lenin and the Politburo. On 14 October 1920, for instance, the Politburo unanimously voted against an appeal for the release of a group of Mensheviks.70 The arrests continued.
Lenin was especially interested in Martov's activities. In July 1919, in an article entitled ‘Everyone into the Struggle with [White General] Denikin!’, he wrote: ‘Martov and Co. think themselves “above” both warring sides [in the civil war], think themselves able to create a “third side”. This desire, even if sincere, is still an illusion of the petty bourgeois democrat who even now, seventy years after 1848, hasn't learnt the alphabet, namely, that in a capitalist milieu there can only be the dictatorship of the bourgeosie, for the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot coexist with any third option. It seems Martov and Co. will die with this illusion.’71 When Martov and Dan were elected with other Mensheviks to the Moscow City Soviet in 1918, Lenin wrote on Kamenev's report: ‘I think you should “tire them out” with practical tasks: Dan for sanitary work, Martov can look after canteens’72 When, in the same year, Martov submitted the manuscript of his memoirs for publication through Gorky—there was still some latitude in such matters—Lenin had it censored.73 Martov was under constant threat of arrest, but Lenin, perhaps because of their earlier friendship, held back. At the first sign that Martov wanted to go abroad, however, permission was granted, thus releasing Lenin from the dilemma, and enabling him to say ‘We willingly let Martov go.’74
There had never been close relations between Dan and Lenin, and Dan was arrested in February 1921, and held in the Petropavlovsk Fortress in Petrograd (as St Petersburg had been called since 1914) for nearly a year. He was no stranger there, having ‘sat’ (i.e. been imprisoned) in 1896 before being exiled under the tsar. He was now accused of instigating the anti-Bolshevik uprising of soldiers and sailors on the fortress island of Kronstadt in the Baltic, once the spearhead of Bolshevik support, and faced possible execution. Instead he was sentenced to internal exile, in the words of the special Politburo resolution, ‘to some distant non-proletarian district where he can work in his speciality’.75 Dan began a hunger strike, demanding the right to go abroad, and since the inflexibility of the Stalin era had yet to come, the request was granted.
Any real or imagined threat which arose in those years was invariably attributed to some ‘counter-revolutionary activity of the Mensheviks’, thus ensuring harsher treatment for them as a whole. On 28 November 1921, for instance, Trotsky reported to the Politburo that he had information about a counter-revolutionary coup being prepared in Moscow and Petrograd. It was headed by Mensheviks, SRs and ‘surviving bourgeoisie’. Trotsky was immediately appointed ‘Chairman of the Moscow Defence Committee’, and it was decided that ‘Mensheviks should not be released, and the Central Committee should be told to intensify arrests of Mensheviks and SRs’.76 Whenever the Politburo returned to the subject of the Mensheviks its position hardened. On 2 February 1922 Stalin reported on imprisoned Mensheviks, as a result of which the Politburo issued a special order to the GPU, the successor to the Cheka, ‘to transfer to special places of imprisonment the most active and important of the leaders of anti-Soviet parties. Mensheviks, SRs and Anarchists at present held by the Cheka should continue to be kept in imprisonment.’77
The Mensheviks tried appealing to Social Democrats in the West. The Cheka intercepted one such letter to the International Berne Conference and reported it to Lenin. He read it, and underlined the words: ‘the prisons are overflowing, the workers are shooting each other, many of our Social Democrat comrades have been shot’.78 The Mensheviks' Central Bureau also wrote to Lenin, asking for the ‘honest legalization’ of their party, but Lenin's only response was to consign their appeal ‘to the archives’.79 All that was left for the Mensheviks was to try, even from afar, to save something of the values of the revolution of February 1917 through their journal Sotsialisticheskii vestnik (Socialist Messenger), published first in Berlin, then in Paris and, when the war came, in New York, where it closed in 1965, as there were no more old Mensheviks left to run it.
The house in Simbirsk where Lenin was born in 1870.
The town centre of Simbirsk, 1867.
Above left: Lenin's maternal grandfather, Alexander Dmitrievich Blank, who died the year Lenin was born.
Above right: Lenin's father, Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov (1831-86), at the age of thirty-two.
Right: The Ulyanov family in 1879. Vladimir is sitting in front on the right, his elder brother Alexander is standing between his parents, Dmitri is sitting in the centre, Anna is standing on the right, Olga is on the extreme left, and Maria on her mother's lap.
Above left: Alexander Ulyanov in his teens. He was hanged in 1887 at the age of twenty-one for taking part in an attempt on the life of Alexander III.
Above right: Lenin aged seventeen in 1887.
Left: Lenin's sister Olga, born a year after him in 1871, died of cholera as a student in 1891.
Lenin's sister Anna (1864-1935).
Lenin's brother Dmitri (1874-1943) as an army doctor in the First World War.
Above left: Sergei Nechaev (1847-82) at the age of twenty-two. Nechaev was a fanatical revolutionary, chiefly remembered for his ‘Catechism of a Revolutionary’, which inspired Lenin.
Above right: Lenin at the age of twenty as a student in Samara.
Left: Lenin, photographed by the police after his arrest in St Petersburg in 1896.
Above left: Yuli Martov in the police photograph taken when he was arrested with Lenin in 1896.
Above centre: Georgi Plekhanov (1856-1918), the ‘father of Russian Marxism’, was in exile in Western Europe from 1880 until he returned to Russia in March 1917. He died in Finland, a sworn enemy of Bolshevism.
Above right: Alexander Helphand, alias Parvus, under arrest in St Petersburg in 1905. Parvus conducted international trade during the First World War to raise funds for the revolutionary movement, and was also instrumental in channelling money from the German government to the Bolsheviks in 1915-17.
Right: Inessa Armand in her study on her family's estate at Yeldigino, near Moscow, in 1902. She met Lenin in Paris in 1910 and thereafter until her death in 1920 was his close confidante, and for some time also his lover.
Above: Lenin (yawning) playing chess on Capri in 1908 with his Bolshevik colleague Alexander Bogdanov, watched by his friend and benefactor, the writer Maxim Gorky.
Left: Lenin in Paris, 1910.
Right: Nicholas II and the Empress during the tercentenary celebrations of the Romanov dynasty in St Petersburg, 1913. The heir to the throne, Alexei, is being carried on the right.
Below: The Mensheviks Axelrod, Martov and Dan in 1915, probably in Switzerland.
The Bolsheviks meanwhile tightened the screws. It was not only the Menshevik leaders who were being imprisoned and exiled; rank and file members of the Party, most of them of the intelligentsia, were suffering various punishments and persecution. The radical wing of the revolution was finishing off the democratic wing. Not that the Mensheviks were blameless. They had not done well in the election to the Constituent Assembly, they had failed to rally significant numbers of liberal forces, and they had failed to get across the ideas they had advocated for decades. Theirs was a sad fate. With the help of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, Russian Social Democracy died both inside and outside the country quietly and unnoticed. Some of the Social Democrats, it is true, changed direction under the impact of international events. For instance, in 1936, in Paris, Dan recognized the Soviet Union as the main bulwark against fascism. He published Novyi mir (New World), and then after escaping in March 1940 to New York, aged seventy, he retired as chairman of the Foreign Delegation and as editor of Sotsialisticheskii vestnik and launched Novyi put' (New Way). His break with Menshevism was complete by 1943. In Novyi put' he as it were rehabilitated Stalin. In his last book, The Origins of Bolshevism, published in 1946, the old adversary of totalitarianism suddenly saw something positive in the forced collectivization of agriculture, and found himself unable fully to condemn the show trials of the 19305, or the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939. He even stated that ‘the internal organic democratization of the Soviet system was not curtailed at its emergence’.80 Dan's capitulation was complete.
Thus ended the Bolshevik-Menshevik struggle. The Mensheviks had seen democracy as an end, the Bolsheviks merely as a means. The Bolsheviks wanted to create a mighty, enclosed party, while the Mensheviks had wanted a party or association of liberally thinking people who rejected coercion.
The Paradox of Plekhanov
Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov was the acknowledged ‘father of Russian Marxism’. Like Lenin, he was of gentry origin. Born in 1856 in Gudalovka, Tambov province, his father was an army captain who insisted his son follow in his footsteps, and Georgy duly entered military school in Voronezh. Soon after receiving his cadet badge, however, he left to become a student at the St Petersburg Mining Institute, from which he was expelled two years later, in 1877, for taking part in a student demonstration.81 He never lost his military bearing, however, and it was perhaps this that led Lenin to say of him in 1904: ‘Plekhanov is a man of colossal stature who makes you want to shrivel up,’ adding in typical caustic fashion, ‘still, I think he's a corpse already, and I'm alive.’82 A Populist in the 1870s, Plekhanov left Russia in 1879, and by 1883 was a convinced Marxist. Thereafter he devoted himself to formulating doctrine for the Party and programmes for the future of Russia. When Lenin first met him in 1895, the effect of the older man was inspirational. Their next meeting in 1900, however, revealed that leadership ambitions had developed in both men which augured ill for their future collaboration, and when the Party split in 1903, Plekhanov joined the Mensheviks. The mutual hostility between the two men was reinforced by the diametrically opposed positions they took on the war, Lenin as a defeatist, Plekhanov as a defencist.
Plekhanov was abroad, in Switzerland, for thirty-seven years from 1879. He returned at last to Petrograd on 31 March 1917. This was two weeks before Lenin arrived, and is explained by the fact that the Allies were happy to facilitate the return of so ardent an advocate of the war effort. Plekhanov, who was suffering a serious chest condition and resting in the comparatively mild climate of San Remo when Nicholas II was overthrown, was eager to get back to Russia and to show his support for the revolution. He travelled through France to England and from there, on a French passport, was transported via the North Sea to Russia. Despite his warm reception, within a year he would be virtually running away from the revolution he had preached and waited for all his life. In an article, ‘On Lenin's Theses and Why Delirium can be Interesting at the Time’, published in the late summer of 1917, Plekhanov wrote that Lenin's call for fraternization with the Germans, for the overthrow of the Provisional Government and the seizure of power, would be seen by the workers for what they were, namely ‘an insane and extremely dangerous attempt to sow anarchic chaos in the Russian land.’83 His words fell on deaf ears. After the October seizure of power, with Vera Zasulich and Lev Deich he wrote an ‘Open Letter to the Petrograd Workers’, declaring that those who had seized power were pushing the Russian people ‘onto the path of the greatest historical calamity’, and that this step would ‘provoke a civil war which in the end would force them to retreat far from the positions accomplished in February and March’.84 Next day, a unit of soldiers and sailors burst into the apartment where Plekhanov was living with his wife, Rozalia Markovna. Pressing a revolver into his chest, one of the sailors demanded, ‘Hand over your weapons freely. If we find any, we'll shoot you on the spot.’ ‘You're likely to do that, even if you don't find any,’ Plekhanov responded calmly. ‘But I don't have any.’ The search did not end in immediate tragedy, but Plekhanov had to go into hiding, first in a clinic in Petrograd, then in Finland, at Pitkejarvi, near Terioki, where he died on 30 May 1918.
Lenin's relations with Plekhanov went through a full cycle, from deep regard—‘for twenty years, from 1883 to 1903, he gave the masses superb writings’—to complete ostracism—‘brand the chauvinist Plekhanov’. In fact, Marxism in Russia was raised on Plekhanov's articles. No one, including Lenin, had noticed that Plekhanov, for all his orthodoxy, did not include in his vision of Marxism the distorted features which pepper Lenin's writings. Plekhanov did not point out the ‘counter-revolutionary essence’ of the liberals, he did not reject parliamentarism, he accepted with reservations the idea of ‘proletarian hegemony’, and he accorded an enormous rôle to the intelligentsia in social movements. All this was later condemned as opportunism, liberal bootlicking, chauvinism, and so on. His particular sin was not merely ‘to accommodate himself to Menshevism and liberalism’, but to interpret the essence of class war in an ‘opportunistic fashion’.
Indeed, in the introduction to his unfinished work ‘The History of Russian Social Thought’, Plekhanov had written: ‘The development of any given society, divided into classes, is determined by the development of those classes and their mutual relations, that is, first, their mutual struggle where the internal social structure is concerned, and secondly, their more or less friendly collaboration when the defence of the country from outside attack is concerned.’85 He suggested that class relations of this type were especially characteristic of Russia, and that this had left an indelible imprint on Russian history. This view may have prompted his ‘defencist outlook’, but despite being labelled a ‘defencist’ and ‘social patriot’ by the Bolsheviks, he retained his views on the war until the end of his life. To Lenin's call for Russian soldiers to fraternize with Germans, because Russia was conducting a predatory war, he responded ironically: ‘forgive us, good Teutons, for the fact that our predatory intentions made you declare war on us; made you occupy a large slice of our territory; made you treat our prisoners with arrogant bestiality; made you seize Belgium and turn that once flourishing country into a bloodbath; made you ruin many French provinces, and so on and so forth. It's all our fault! Our terrible fault!’86
When he returned to Russia after more than thirty years of exile abroad, Plekhanov soon realized that being a Marxist theorist was not the same thing as being a revolutionary politician. He came out strongly against the idea of socialist revolution, accusing Lenin of forcing events for which Russia was not prepared,87 and was firmly convinced that Russia was not ready for ‘anything but a bourgeois revolution’.88 He was not understood. Was this the chief paradox of Plekhanov? All his life he had written about the class struggle, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the leading rôle of the working class in restructuring society, and socialist revolution, as the goals of Marxist teaching. Yet when his own country raised its foot to cross the threshold of that revolution he staked all his authority on open protest. Perhaps this was not the real paradox. Plekhanov was too orthodox to depart from classical Marxist blueprints and to assent to leapfrogging stages. He regarded such an approach as ‘Leninist delirium’.
Plekhanov in a sense reflected the drama of the Russian nobility and intelligentsia. Realizing that only gradual change would put Russia on the path of genuine progress, one part of this social élite believed that such changes could be achieved by revolutionary methods, while another believed in the path of accommodation, adaptation and appropriate reordering of the existing system. It is therefore not surprising that Plekhanov, a noble from Tambov province, whose mother was related to Belinsky, the famous radical philosopher of the 1840s, should have a brother, Grigory, who was a police superintendent. When the then Bolshevik Nikolai Valentinov asked Grigory if the statues of Catherine the Great would be pulled down when the revolution came, the police superintendent replied, ‘What rubbish! When the revolution comes? There isn't going to be one. There can't be one in Russia. We're not in France.’89 Georgy saw things differently, although for him the revolution, which was inevitable, must be the bourgeois one, which would last a long time. On the eve of the October revolution in 1917 he had the political courage to proclaim loudly that the coming regime must not be based on the narrow foundations of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but ‘must be based on a coalition of all the vital forces in the country’. In a series of articles published in August and September in the newspaper Yedinstvo (Unity), he declared that a coalition would represent a consensus of the nation. ‘If you don't want consensus, go with Lenin. If you decide not to go with Lenin, enter the consensus.’
In his desperate efforts to prevent the dictatorship of the ‘professional revolutionaries’, Plekhanov consciously went about his own political self-destruction: ‘Are the interests of the workers always and in every respect opposed to the interests of the capitalists? In economic history has there never been a time when these interests coincided? Partial coincidence generates cooperation in certain areas. Socialist and non-socialist elements can realize this limited agreement in social reforms.’90 All this was complete heresy to Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
In effect, Plekhanov's last articles, on the eve of the October coup, represent a new conception of socialism. Having for decades defended the class approach of the dictatorship of the proletariat at congresses of the Second International, he was now revising many of his previous principles. He had become not only a ‘defencist’, but also a ‘reformist’, terms of Leninist abuse which were equalled in derisiveness only by that of ‘plekhanovist’. In March 1920, when Lenin was informed that a revolutionary tribunal in Kiev had sentenced one I. Kiselev to death and that he was appealing to Lenin for help, Lenin wrote to Krestinsky, the local Bolshevik in charge: ‘The sentence of death on Kiselev is a very urgent matter. I used to see him in 1910-14 in Zurich, where he was a plekhanovist [Lenin's emphasis] and was accused of several vile things (I never knew the details). I caught a glimpse of him here in Moscow in 1918 or 1919. He was working on Izvestiya and told me he was becoming a Bolshevik. I don't know the facts.’ In the end Lenin left it to Dzerzhinsky to telephone Krestinsky and decide the issue. Dzerzhinsky replied with a note for the file: ‘I'm against interfering.’91
Coming face to face with Russian reality, Plekhanov must have shuddered; after all, he himself had penned the clause on the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Party programme, and he had uttered the famous maxim ‘The good of the revolution is the highest law’, in effect opening the sluice gates of unmitigated violence. Nor could he live down the fact that at the beginning of the century he had said that if after the revolution the parliament turned out ‘bad’, it could be dispersed ‘not after two years, but after two weeks’. In essence, it was Plekhanov's formula that the Bolsheviks applied when they dispersed the Constituent Assembly in January 1918.
Valentinov recalled that when Plekhanov came to Moscow, he went on an excursion to the Sparrow Hills outside the city with a small group of friends. The photographs taken of him with Vera Zasulich are both beautiful and sad. Valentinov recalled that Plekhanov was moved and, taking Zasulich's hand, recalled a moment in the lives of two other revolutionaries: ‘Vera Ivanovna, ninety years ago virtually on this spot Herzen and Ogarev took their oath. Nearly forty years ago, in another place, we also swore an oath that for us the good of the people would be the highest law all our lives, do you remember? We are obviously going downhill now. The time is coming soon when someone will say of us, that's the end. It'll probably come sooner than we think. While we are still breathing, let us look each other in the eyes and ask: did we carry out our oath? I think we did, honestly. Didn't we, Vera Ivanovna, carry it out honestly?’92 Eight months later Plekhanov died, and shortly thereafter, so did Zasulich.
At a meeting of the Politburo in July 1921, Public Health Commissar Nikolai Semashko raised the question of erecting a monument to Plekhanov in Petrograd. The Politburo's response was both neutral and positive, leaving it to Semashko to discuss the matter with the Petrograd Soviet, since it was in a sense also a municipal matter.93 Then the question arose of help for Plekhanov's family, which was living in straitened circumstances abroad. On 18 November 1921 Lenin proposed that ‘a small sum’ of 10,000 Swiss francs be given to the family as a one-off payment. At the same time it was decided without explanation that the much larger sum of 5000 gold roubles be paid to the family of Karl Liebknecht, the German Social Democrat assassinated in Germany in 1919.94Perhaps it was because Liebknecht's widow Sofia, a Russian by birth, had been more insistent in her appeals to Lenin. She had written that her ‘father had had an estate at Rostov on Don, including three houses and shares worth about 3 million roubles. I should have had about 600,000 roubles, but the house was nationalized. Give me about 1,200,000 marks for myself and my children. I must free myself of material dependence … I'm choking with cares … Give us security once and for all with this round sum, I beg you! Oh, free me from dependency, let me breathe freely. But don't give me half, only the whole sum.’ After agreeing to 5000 roubles in gold, Lenin wrote on the file: ‘Secret, for the archives.’95 In fact, Zinoviev had already sent Sofia Liebknecht a box of stolen gems worth 6600 Dutch guilders and 20,000 German marks.
Nikolai Potresov, who had been close to Plekhanov for much of their lives as revolutionaries, marked the tenth anniversary of Plekhanov's death with an essay. It seemed, he wrote, that Plekhanov had gone home only ‘to see with his own eyes Russia being chained up again. And with what chains! Forged by the proletariat! And by whom? By his former pupils! It is hard to imagine a worse punishment … like King Lear, he was thrown out and betrayed by his own children.’96 Rather than as the Master of the Order, or as the leader of the Party that he had created with Lenin, Plekhanov entered history as the prophet of the Bolshevik disaster.
The Tragedy of Martov
It was common for Russian revolutionaries to adopt aliases and pseudonyms, often choosing them randomly or perhaps for dramatic effect. ‘Lenin’, as has been noted, probably derived from the River Lena in Siberia; Iosif Dzhugashvili, a Georgian, adopted ‘Stalin’, which suggested a man of steel; Lev Bronshtein chose ‘Trotsky’ because it was the name of one of his prison warders. Often a new name was a matter of simple security, to obtain a new passport, to evade capture or to throw the police off the scent. Aliases were particularly prevalent among revolutionaries of Jewish origin, since a Russian name might provide a more effective disguise. Thus it was that Julius Osipovich Tsederbaum was to become known as ‘Yuli Martov’.
Martov died in Berlin in 1923, but his political death came on the night of 25 October 1917, during the Second Congress of Soviets. The Soviets were perceived as non-Party bodies, general assemblies of socialist opinion where deputies from workers', soldiers' and peasants' committees gathered to formulate their resolutions calling on the Provisional Government to leave the war, to delay sending troops to the front, and similar demands, including of course to hand over power. In the course of 1917, however, as war-weariness grew and the Bolshevik message generated a greater response, the Soviets remained non-partisan in name only: in effect, they became almost wholly Bolshevik bodies, especially in Petrograd and Moscow.
When the Second Congress of Soviets met, the Provisional Government under Kerensky had just been overthrown by the Bolsheviks, though they had ostensibly acted in the name of the Soviets. Any hope that the Congress would produce a solution to the crisis, preferably by forming a broad socialist coalition government, was dashed before a word was spoken. The composition of the Congress was probably a fair reflection of the situation in the country at large: of 650 delegates, about three hundred were Bolsheviks, while another eighty or ninety were Left Socialist Revolutionaries. The other Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks amounted to about eighty each, and the remaining hundred were either unaccounted for or were genuinely non-partisan.
Fedor Dan opened the meeting, and the Bolsheviks and Left Socialist Revolutionaries—a splinter from the main Party and more in harmony with the Bolsheviks—took up their places on the platform in proportion to the number of their delegates. The Mensheviks refused to occupy the four places allotted to them, in protest against the Bolshevik seizure of power that had taken place the previous night. Martov called out that it was a time for common sense to prevail, for the coup to be repudiated and for talks to take place to form a coalition government. It looked as if the Congress might swing his way, but then Trotsky made a speech which saved Lenin's line, and the delegates swung sharply to the left. His voice hoarse from a cold and from his incessant smoking, Martov's nerve snapped and he declared: ‘We're leaving!’ His supporters shouted and stamped their feet in the face of their defeat. It was not the Bolsheviks who had snuffed out Martov's candle: it was his own decision to leave the Congress.
There had never been a place for Martov in the order created by Lenin at the beginning of the century. Lenin personified the leadership of an iron vangard; Martov was a Russian Don Quixote who expected a following not of Party troops but of an amorphous association. Lenin had proved the better leader, always with his eye on the political goal, while Martov, a naive romantic, had been sustained by the idea of injecting democratic values into the socialist programme.
Widely regarded as one of the most intelligent, and most approachable, of the best-known members of the RSDLP, Martov was born in 1873 into a middle-class Russian Jewish family in Constantinople, where his father was engaged in commerce and acting as the Turkish correspondent for two leading St Petersburg journals. His mother was Viennese, and the atmosphere in the Tsederbaum household was one of liberal enlightenment and tolerance. In 1877 the family moved back to Odessa.
The early 1880s in Russia was a time of mounting hostility to all things foreign, as the assassination of Alexander II in March 1881 had prompted the widespread belief that Russia's new social evil was of foreign, Western origin. As a child Martov witnessed the atmosphere of hatred against the Jews when a pogrom was unleashed in Odessa, and however wholeheartedly he was to become a part of the Russian revolutionary movement, he never lost the sense that he had come from, and would remain part of, an oppressed and despised minority. The family moved to St Petersburg in 1882, and in 1889, when he was sixteen, Julius entered high school, where he formed strong bonds of friendship with the sons of the intelligentsia he found there.97
He was already a committed Populist when he was admitted to St Petersburg University in 1891, and he was soon arrested for voicing seditious ideas. Released after several months, he was expelled from the university, and in 1893 was rearrested and sentenced to two years' exile from St Petersburg and any other university city. He spent 189395 in Vilna (Vilnius), which was both the centre of traditional East European Jewish culture and a hotbed of working-class organization. Martov arrived just at the moment when the leaders of Jewish workers' groups were changing their tactics from intensive teaching circles to mass agitation. That is, instead of raising the general educational level of a few workers, who then tended to want to enter the ranks of the intelligentsia themselves, or to exploit their new-found culture to acquire professional qualifications, the idea was to gather large numbers of workers at secret meeting places and to convey one or two simple ideas, such as the injustice of low wages or poor conditions, and thus hope to ‘agitate’ them sufficiently to take strike action or to demonstrate for better conditions.
The new approach was highly successful, and when Martov returned to the capital in 1895, he spread these ideas. With Lenin, whom he met at that time, he formed the Union for the Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class, but in 1896, like his new comrade, he was arrested and exiled to Siberia. Released in 1900, he went abroad and collaborated with Lenin, Potresov, Plekhanov and Axelrod on their new newspaper, Iskra. Until 1903 it seemed Martov and Lenin were the perfect team. They each brought to the partnership experience in the organization of illegal groups and the formulation of ideas for wide consumption which, together with Plekhanov's more sophisticated writing, created a newspaper that many workers, intellectuals and local organizers were eager to read, risking arrest and Siberian exile for the privilege. What Martov did not know, however, was that during these years of preparation Lenin had been encouraging his agents to use any means necessary to detach local social democratic committees from their existing loyalties, and to make them acknowledge Iskra as the sole ideological and organizational centre of Party activity. Martov naturally wanted Iskra to prosper, but he conceived of the forthcoming Second Party Congress as an opportunity to bind all of the existing social democratic elements into a single, broad-based party. It was only in the course of the Congress itself that he realised that Lenin's idea was to exclude from the Party all but those elements which acknowledged the editors of Iskra as the leadership.
At the Second Congress, which took place in Brussels and London in the summer of 1903, it appeared that Martov's prospects were bright. After Plekhanov, he emerged as the most significant delegate, although Lenin's voice became more confident as he gained supporters. Millions of Soviet citizens, schooled in a history smoothed beyond recognition, believed that the split in 1903 into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks was over the organizational question—or, more precisely, point one of the Party Statutes on membership. Schoolmasters, professors and army commissars all parroted, ‘Lenin wanted to create a party-citadel, a party-fighting unit. Martov preferred to create an amorphous, diffuse formation which could never have achieved Communist aims.’ Ironically, the last point was undoubtedly true. As for the ‘party-citadel’, that was not Lenin's aim. The real issue was whether the Party was to be an order or a democratic body. Lenin was proposing that a member would support the Party by material means as well as by ‘personal participation in one of the Party organizations’. Martov's formula was less rigorous: apart from material support, a member was obliged to give the Party ‘regular personal support under the guidance of one of its organizations’. According to Stalin's Short Courseon the history of the Party, Martov wanted to ‘open the door wide to unstable non-proletarian elements … These people would not be part of the organization, nor be subject to Party discipline or carry out Party tasks, nor face the associated dangers. Yet Martov … was proposing to recognize such people as Party members.’98 Stalin perhaps also believed it was an ‘organizational question’. Political ‘softness’, for Martov, meant not only a readiness to compromise, it also signified understanding the need for a union with high morality. And it was this, not the organizational question, that separated him from Lenin forever: the conflict was dominated by moral rather than political imperatives.
Martov, who had previously been in step with Lenin and had voted with him on all the points of the programme, suddenly ‘rebelled’ during the twenty-second session, not only over the membership issue, but on almost everything else. His rebellion was to last for the rest of his life. Although Lenin's proposal received twenty-three votes to Martov's twenty-eight, Lenin dominated in all further contests.
As we have seen, Martov virtually began his political life as an activist among the Jewish Social Democrats who were to found the Jewish Workers' Union (known by its Yiddish name as the Bund) in 1897. In terms of scale alone, the Bund was to become an impressive social force. In 1904 it could count more than 20,000 members, or more than twice the number in the ‘Russian’ Party organizations.99 For Martov in the early 1890s, the Jewish organizations had seemed the most important force for attaining civil equality for the Jews.100 By the time of the Second Congress, however, he had become strongly opposed to what he now saw as Jewish separatism. The Bund, however, supported Martov at the Congress against Lenin until the majority of the delegates voted against giving it the status of sole representative of the Jewish workers in the RSDLP. Together with the delegates of Workers' Cause, another dissident group, the five Bundists walked out, leaving Martov's side a true minority.
In his relations with the young Vladimir Ulyanov, Martov had begun to observe certain features which in the end would make the chasm between them unbridgeable. He mentioned this in his ‘Notes of a Social Democrat’, which was published in Berlin, remarking that Lenin ‘did not yet have, or had in lesser measure, the confidence in his own strength—never mind in his historical calling—that was to emerge so clearly in his mature years … He was then twenty-five or twenty-six years old … and he was not yet full of the scorn and distrust of people which, I believe, is what made him into a certain type of leader.’101
In practice, until the revolution of 1917, Lenin strove for his main idea of creating a monolithic, centralized party. He never doubted that he would indeed come to power, and what would follow. The Party-order would already be in existence. It would not evaporate. Was this not a threat to the future? He did not think so, and anyone who did was worthy only to join Martov. All those in favour of an iron guard, and willing to fight and smash, were welcome in his party; those who were not could go to Martov's ‘flabby monster’.102
Lenin went on disputing with Martov right up to October 1917, if a constant stream of abuse can be called disputing. Martov was intransigent. Inclined by nature to compromise, he felt no urge for conciliation. He had long ago come to believe that the socialism Lenin wanted had nothing in common with justice, or moral principles, or the humane origins of socialist thinking. Knowing he had already lost, he summed up the ‘interim’ accounts of 1917 in horror. He wrote to a friend, N.S. Kristi:
It is not merely the deep belief that it is senselessly utopian to try to plant socialism in an economically and culturally backward country, but also my organic inability to accept the Arakcheev-style [barracks] concept of socialism and the Pugachev-style [violent] notion of class struggle which are being generated by the very fact that they are trying to plant a European ideal in Asiatic soil. The resulting bouquet is hard to take. For me, socialism was never the denial of individual freedom and individualism, but on the contrary, their highest embodiment, and the principle of collectivism I always saw as opposed to ‘the herd instinct’ and levelling … What is happening here is the flourishing of a ‘trench-barracks’ variety of quasi-socialism, based on the ‘simplification’ of everything …103
Martov's internationalist wartime position of ‘revolutionary defencism’ contrasted markedly with Lenin's defeatism and Plekhanov's patriotism, and was perhaps a truer and more noble one to take. The outbreak of war found Martov in Paris. In his small newspaper, Golos (The Voice), and later in Nashe slovo (Our Word), his constant cry was ‘Long live peace! Enough blood! Enough senseless slaughter!’ He maintained this position after returning to Petrograd in May 1917, arguing against defeatism and against turning the war into a civil war, but also against chauvinism, and so he was often under attack from both sides. I.G. Tsereteli, a Social Democrat who played a leading rôle in 1917, recalled Martov saying in the summer of that year: ‘Lenin is not interested in questions of war and peace. The only thing that interests him is the revolution, and the only real revolution for him is the one in which the Bolsheviks have seized power.’ Martov wondered what Lenin would do if the democrats, i.e. the Provisional Government, managed to make peace: ‘He would no doubt change his tactics and preach to the masses that all the post-war misfortunes were due to the criminal democrats because they ended the war too soon and didn't have the courage to carry it on to the final destruction of German imperialism.’104
In June 1918 the Executive Committee of Soviets (VTsIK) voted to expel the Right SRs and Mensheviks. When they were asked to leave the meeting, Martov leapt up and began shouting curses at the ‘dictators’, ‘bonapartists’, ‘usurpers’, ‘putschiste’, all the while struggling unsuccessfully to get his coat on. Lenin stood, white-faced, watching in silence. A Left SR sitting next to Martov began laughing and poking his finger at Martov, who, coughing and shouting, managed at last to get his coat on and leave, turning as he did so to hurl at his mirthful tormentor: ‘You may laugh now, young man, but give it three months and you'll be following us.’105
Martov nevertheless remained an orthodox Marxist all his life. He believed that the socialist revolution could be an innovative and refreshing act of creativity, but he could not accept the Leninist monopoly and the Bolsheviks' reliance on coercion and terror. In defeat, he naively believed that the revolution could be clean and moral and bright. When Red and White Terror clashed to produce a monstrous wave of violence, Martov wrote a pamphlet called ‘Down with the Death Penalty’. In it, he stated:
As soon as the Bolsheviks came to power, having announced the end of the death penalty, from the very first day they started killing prisoners taken in battle during the civil war, as all savages do. To kill enemies who have surrendered in battle on the promise that their lives will be spared … The death penalty has been abolished, but in every town and district various extraordinary commissions and military-revolutionary committees have sentenced hundreds and hundreds of people to be shot … This bloody debauchery is being carried out in the name of socialism, in the name of the teaching which proclaimed the brotherhood of people labouring for the highest goal of humanity … A party of death penalties is as much an enemy of the working class as a party of pogroms.106
As if to prove Martov right, in November 1923, after his death, the Politburo reviewed the ‘Turkestan question’. Central Committee member Jan Rudzutak, a Latvian, reported that Basmachi (anti-Bolshevik forces) chieftains had been invited to talks with the local Soviet authorities. They had been promised their lives were not in danger, and that a special conference would find ways of settling the conflict peacefully. One hundred and eighty-three chieftains had turned up. They were arrested at once, and 151 of them were sentenced to be shot. The first on the list had already been executed when Moscow intervened. The Politburo regarded the action as ‘inopportune’, nothing worse.107
If Martov's arguments were moral, Lenin's were purely pragmatic. On 31 January 1922 he wrote to Unshlikht: ‘I cannot possibly attend the Politburo. I'm feeling worse. But I don't think there's any need for me. It's only a matter of purely technical measures to help our judges intensify (and speed up) repression against the Mensheviks …’108 Martov had no hope of influencing the Bolshevik leadership towards humanizing their policies. If his political death was noisy, his physical death was quiet and sad, like a guttering candle. Seriously ill, in the autumn of 1920 he was allowed by the Politburo to leave for Germany, where he founded Sotsialisticheskii vestnik. In his last article, he foresaw that the Bolsheviks would leave the scene and be replaced in Russia by a ‘democratic regime ruled by law’. He died of tuberculosis on 24 April 1923, not yet aged fifty. Perhaps it was as much the collapse of all his ideas as his constant smoking that killed him off.109
People like Martov wanted the course of revolution to be like a river, peaceful, smooth and broad, while Lenin's followers saw it as a waterfall, cascading from on high. The party Lenin created soon became an order, after October 1917 a state order. Not a monastic or chivalrous order, but an ideological one, and until his death nobody had the slightest doubt that Lenin had the absolute right to be the master of this order. He had not, however, taken account of the fact that a party such as his could survive only within a totalitarian system, a fact demonstrated by the events of August 1991.
* Vyacheslav Plehve, Nicholas II's Interior Minister, was assassinated in 1904. Peter Stolypin was the Prime Minister from 1906 until he was assassinated—in the tsar's presence—in 1911.
* Larin, whose real name was Mikhail Lurie, was a top official in the economic apparatus. Alexei Rykov was in charge of the Council for the National Economy.