Act Three, The Social Revolution: The Russian worker will ‘lead the RUSSIAN PROLETARIAT (side by side with the proletariat of ALL COUNTRIES) by the direct road of open political struggle to THE VICTORIOUS COMMUNIST REVOLUTION.’
Act Three in Lenin’s heroic scenario is the world socialist revolution. During the final decade of Lenin’s career, 1914 to 1924, his central concern was carrying out the socialist revolution both at home in Russia and in Western Europe. When war broke out in 1914 and the various Social Democratic parties renounced international solidarity and participated in national defence, Lenin felt that ‘the banner of Social Democracy has been besmirched’ and began to insist on a name change from Social Democrat to Communist. In this final act Lenin no longer defined himself primarily as a Russian Social Democrat but as a leader of the world communist movement. Yet, even as a Communist, Lenin remained loyal to his 1894 scenario.
The emotional content of this act is revealed by a Soviet poster from 1920. The Russian worker, still with his anachronistic black-smith’s hammer, stands amid the ruins of tsarism’s once mighty edifice. The crown that was once atop the eagle’s head is now lying disregarded in the rubble. Yet the banner unfurled by the Russian worker makes a prouder claim than simply to have achieved political freedom and the possibility of ‘open political struggle’. It displays (unfortunately not visible here) the initials of an actual revolutionary regime, the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. Inspired by his example are many workers who stand under their own banners with the slogan ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ in various languages.
By 1894 Ulyanov had adopted the public identity later known as ‘N. Lenin’. The particular pseudonym ‘Lenin’ was first used only in 1901 but Vladimir Ulyanov had already defined himself as an activist of the Social Democratic underground by 1894. More importantly, he had found the ‘other way’ that would allow him to stride forward with the uncanny self-confidence that so bemused observers. The sentence that concluded Friends of the People was a banner, not unlike the banner carried by the angel of socialism, the banner of the awakened Russian worker, the banner of the European proletariat on the march. The dramatic and ambitious narrative on that banner was Lenin’s story – and he stuck to it.
2. The Merger of Socialism and the Worker Movement
Boris Gorev was one of the young Social Democratic activists with whom Lenin teamed up after he arrived in St Petersburg in 1893. Gorev later remembered coming home one day during the great Petersburg strikes of 1895–6 and finding two of his women friends – fellow activists in the nascent Social Democratic underground – twirling around the apartment in sheer delight.1
What exhilarated these young people, in spite of the long and dangerous hours they were putting in to support the striking workers? As we shall see, the imposing dimensions of the strike not only showed the potential for a militant worker movement in Russia – more fundamentally, the strike validated the wager these young activists had made about the workability of the Social Democratic strategy in tsarist Russia. Lenin had made the same wager in as public a manner as underground conditions permitted in his underground manifesto Friends of the People. Lenin may not have danced around his apartment (or he may have!), but his writings during the 1890s reveal the same sense of excited pride.
Lenin in St Petersburg, 1894–6
To understand this exhilarating sense of confirmation, we need to know what Lenin was doing during his two years in Petersburg, the meaning he gave to his own activities and the ways in which the Petersburg strikes of the mid-1890s validated this meaning. In all of this Lenin was a typical Social Democratic activist – or, rather, he was exceptional only in the fervour and energy with which he threw himself into his new role.
When Lenin arrived in Petersburg in late 1893 his first aim was to get in touch with existing Social Democratic circles. The most active circle consisted of students at the university’s technology institute. The energy and erudition of the newcomer from the Volga quickly made him a leader. Over the next two years Lenin worked with other activists such as L. Martov to bring greater organizational structure to the various Social Democratic groups in the city. These efforts culminated in late 1895 with the creation of the Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class. The title ‘Union of Struggle’ soon became the standard one for local Social Democratic organizations.
A great rite of initiation for these young activists was their first contact with the worker groups who requested propagandists from the intelligentsia. In the Social Democratic jargon of the time, the term ‘propaganda’ had connotations that were very different from those it later acquired. It did not mean simplistic messages used to bombard passive targets, but rather an intensive and wide-ranging education that was initiated by the workers. ‘Propagandized worker’ was therefore a title of honour, an indication of potential leader status. These propaganda circles gave rise to Lenin’s conversations with workers that Krupskaya later claimed were so crucial to his self-definition.
Lenin also collaborated with workers in carrying out investigations of factory conditions in places like the Thornton works in St Petersburg. Later he recounted how one worker, worn out by Lenin’s relentless grilling, ‘told me with a smile, wiping the sweat away after the end of our labours, “working overtime is not as tough for me as answering your questions!”.2
As at all periods of his life, literary activities took up much of Lenin’s time. Partly these were writings aimed at an intelligentsia audience that was passionately attentive to the debates between the young Marxists and the older writers in the populist tradition. For this audience Lenin produced polemical essays with titles like ‘A Line-by-Line Critique of a Populist Profession de foi’ (the populists or narodniki were the dominant current in the Russian revolutionary tradition prior to the rise of Social Democracy).3 Lenin also wrote directly for the workers, for example, a forty-page pamphlet setting forth the worker’s legal position in relation to factory fines. When the émigré Social Democrat Pavel Axelrod praised this pamphlet, Lenin gratefully responded: ‘I wanted nothing so much, dreamed of nothing so much, as the possibility of writing for the workers.’4