Lenin had met Axelrod during a trip abroad in the summer of 1895. This trip represents one more dimension of Lenin’s activities during his time in Petersburg, namely, the effort to establish contacts with the wider Social Democratic world. In Switzerland Lenin met with Axelrod and other members of the Group for the Liberation of Labour such as Georgy Plekhanov and Vera Zasulich. The Group for the Liberation of Labour, one of the earliest Russian Marxist organizations, had been founded about a decade earlier and was now delighted to be able to make contact with a living, breathing Social Democratic movement in Russia. Lenin was also received by one of the legendary leaders of the German Social Democratic party, Wilhelm Liebknecht. Returning home, Lenin supported efforts to make contacts with other Russian towns where similar embryonic Social Democratic groups had arisen.
Lenin’s various activities – polemicizing with populists, working with local activists, making contact with factory workers, visits to émigré leaders abroad – were all tied together in his mind as part of the larger story of European Social Democracy. He and his fellow activists were consciously replicating a process they thought had already taken place in other countries. Naturally, Russian conditions imposed crucial variations but, as Lenin saw it, these variations did not alter the underlying logic of what was going on.
The person who set out this underlying logic most effectively was Karl Kautsky in the Erfurt Programme, and herein lies the source of Kautsky’s huge impact on fledgling Russian Social Democracy. Kautsky’s definition of Social Democracy became universally accepted in the international Social Democratic movement: ‘Social Democracy is the merger of socialism and the worker movement.’ ‘Worker movement’ in this slogan means a militant, anti-capitalist, self-protection movement of worker protest. ‘Socialism’ means the socialist message, as spread by committed propagandists and agitators. Social Democracy happens when the two sides realize that they need each other. The worker movement acknowledges that only socialism can truly end worker exploitation and misery. The socialists acknowledge that socialism can only be established when the workers themselves understand its necessity and are ready to fight for it. As Kautsky goes on to explain, the two geniuses who first understood the need for the merger of socialism and the worker movement were Marx and Engels.5
According to Kautsky, many barriers of mistrust and misunderstanding had to be overcome before the merger could take place. At first the socialist intellectuals (including intellectuals of worker origin) did not aim their message directly at the oppressed and downtrodden workers themselves. They assumed that the workers, precisely because they were downtrodden, were incapable of understanding the necessity of socialism. In response, the militant workers fighting the battles of their class viewed socialism as nothing more than the hobby-horse of patronizing intellectuals. But (Kautsky fervently believed) this original separation would inevitably be overcome in each country. This pattern was confirmed by ‘the history of all countries’ (a phrase used by Lenin more than once to make this point) – and so the Russian Social Democrats of the 1890s could take heart that the merger would eventually take place in Russia as well.
Lenin explicitly endorsed Kautsky’s merger formula in his seminal Friends of the People in 1894. As he put it later, ‘Kautsky’s expression… reproduces the basic ideas of the Communist Manifesto’.6 More than that, the merger formula runs like a red thread through Lenin’s writings from 1894 to 1904 whenever Lenin had occasion to state his basic purposes. When asked by his colleagues to write a draft of a Social Democratic programme (even though he was in jail at the time), Lenin wrote that Social Democracy showed ‘the way by which the aspiration of socialism – the aspiration of ending the eternal exploitation of man by man – must be merged with the movement of the narod that arose out of the conditions of life created by large-scale factories and workshops.’7
Lenin used Kautsky’s merger formula to give meaning to his various activities, since all were in aid of bringing committed socialists and militant workers into a single fighting organization. And in this Lenin was again typical, since activists all over Russia were similarly inspired. Indeed, Kautsky has as good a title as anyone to be called the father of Russian Social Democracy – or rather, he was the channel by which the ‘basic ideas of the Communist Manifesto’ and the prestige of the German socialist party (SPD) were brought home to the young Russians for whom Kautsky’s Erfurt Programme became a textbook of Social Democracy.
Lenin and his fellow activists very much wanted to see Russian Social Democracy as one more exemplar of the canonical merger, of course with the necessary changes having been made. The crucial necessary change was adjusting to the absence of political freedom. Tsarist repression meant that both ‘socialism’ (the activists) and ‘the worker movement’ (unions, strikes, economic protest) had only a passing resemblance to their counterparts in Western Europe. Could functional Russian equivalents be found to serve the same basic purpose?
On the ‘socialism’ side, the interaction of Social Democratic ideals with the realities of Russian society lead to the creation of a new social type, the praktik, the activists who actually ran local organizations. This new type was something of a hybrid, made up of both plebeian intellectuals and ‘intelligentnye workers’ (workers who adopted intelligentsia ideals). The worker contribution to this hybrid social type, crucial both to Social Democratic discourse and practice, was called the ‘purposive worker’ (more usually translated as ‘conscious worker’). The purposive worker was not only militant, but also determined to be ‘rational and cultured’. He or she wanted to think well, to behave well, to dress well, to use proper grammar and to avoid strong drink. Semën Kanatchikov, a worker whose memoirs are the best entrée into the outlook of this social type, describes himself:
Sufficiently fortified by now by my awareness that I was ‘adult’, ‘independent’, and, what is more, ‘purposive’, I bravely entered into combat with ‘human injustice’. I stood up for the abused and the oppressed, enlightened and persuaded the ‘non-purposive’, and argued passionately with my opponents, defending my ideals.8
But this sense of mission and self-worth was fragile, and Kanatchikov recalls the loneliness of a ‘few solitary revolutionary youths’ among ‘the inert, sometimes even hostile masses’.9
Only a determined optimist could see these young and inexperienced Russian praktiki as the functional equivalent of socialist activists in Western European countries. Kautsky’s merger scenario also required a working class that was capable of sustained and ‘purposive’ class struggle. Did the Russian working class – made up of newly arrived peasants thrown without preparation into the factory cauldron – have the necessary cultural level to move from passivity to organized protest, from destructive riots to disciplined strikes? A sceptical Social Democrat, Elena Kuskova, wrote in 1899 that the actual results of capitalist industrialization in Russia were indeed ‘depressing and capable of plunging the most optimistic Marxist… into gloom’.10
These very understandable doubts were the reason that the Petersburg strikes of 1896 were so exhilarating for the Social Democratic praktiki. Their impact can best be gauged by remarks made by the liberal historian and party leader Paul Miliukov, writing less than a decade after the event: ‘In June, 1896, St Petersburg was roused by a startling movement of workingmen, the like of which it had never before seen. The workers in twenty-two cotton factories of the northern capital, numbering more than thirty thousand, organized something like a general strike.’ The demands of the workers were sensible and moderate, the conduct of the strike was disciplined and peaceful. The strike was not instigated by socialists from the intelligentsia, and ‘all the proclamations and other papers published during the strike were written by the men themselves, in a plain, half-educated language’.