Thus the 1896 strikes stand in startling contrast to earlier more destructive and anarchic worker outbursts. According to Miliukov, the Petersburg strikes marked a turning point in the Russian revolutionary movement. ‘The Russian “masses”, up to that time voiceless and silent, appear now for the first time on the political stage and make their first attempt to speak in their own name.’11
This newly independent involvement by the masses marked a fundamental difference from the situation faced by earlier revolutionaries, such as Lenin’s brother Alexander.
Lenin himself had been arrested months before the culmination of the strike movement in summer 1896 and did not have much to do with it. Like Miliukov he stressed that the socialists should not be held responsible for the St Petersburg strikes. As Lenin put it, ‘strikes do not break out because socialist instigators come on the scene, but socialists come on the scene because strikes have started up, the struggle of the workers against the capitalists has started up’.12 Yet all the more did the strikes reassure him that his wager on ‘another way’, the Social Democratic way, was paying off. The merger predicted by Kautsky was taking place and already having an unprecedented impact, since the mighty tsarist government had been forced to make concessions by passing the law of 2 June 1897 that limited working hours.
Lenin saw the whole episode as confirmation that his heroic scenario was not the idle dream of an impotent revolutionary, for it was turning into reality before his eyes. The factory workers were ready to play the role assigned to them. Once they were aware of their interests, they were ready to fight, and ‘no amount of persecution, no wholesale arrests and deportations, no grandiose political trials, no hounding of the workers have been of any avail’. The next step was for the advanced workers to stir up the more backward workers. ‘Unless the entire mass of Russian workers is enlisted in the struggle for the workers’ cause, the advanced workers of the capital cannot hope to win much.’13
The successful participation of the nascent socialist underground in the strike movement gave further proof that the Social Democratic strategy could work in tsarist Russia. Perhaps all that the socialists could do for the present was distribute leaflets that announced the aims of the strikes, but these tiny pieces of paper were the thin end of the wedge of political freedom. As Lenin observed, political freedom meant that, in the rest of Europe, ‘the press freely prints news about strikes’. Even though no free press existed in Russia, the socialists and their leaflets ensured that the tsarist government could no longer keep strikes secret, as they had always done in the past. Lenin proudly claimed that ‘the government saw that it was becoming quite ridiculous to keep silent, since everybody knew about the strikes – and the government too was dragged along behind the rest. The socialist leaflets called the government to account – and the government appeared and gave its account.’14
Lenin went out of his way to emphasize the weakness of the Petersburg underground – ‘The Union of Struggle, as we know, was founded only in 1895/6 and its appeals to the workers were confined to badly printed broadsheets’ – because this weakness was actually a source of encouragement. If such a feeble organization helped to generate an unprecedented strike movement, what could not be accomplished by a properly organized Social Democratic underground? Just by uniting the organizations of at least the major cities – assuming that these organizations enjoyed as much authority among the workers as did the Petersburg Union of Struggle – Russian Social Democracy could become ‘a political factor of the highest order in contemporary Russia’.15 Faced with such intoxicating perspectives, no wonder Lenin’s activist friends danced across the kitchen floor.
The Nuts and Bolts of a Dream
On 8 December 1895 Lenin was arrested, along with the other leaders of the Petersburg Union of Struggle, for the crime of ‘Social Democratic propaganda among the workers of Petersburg’.16
Lenin spent over a year in a Petersburg jail until finally receiving his sentence: three years in Siberian exile. He was assigned to the Siberian village of Shushenskoe, not far from Krasnoyarsk, and duly served out his term. Lenin was lucky – Shushenskoe was tolerable, compared to Turukhansk, the far-north village where L. Martov, a fellow founder of the Union of Struggle, ended up. Martov later wrote passionately about the physical, social and political ghastliness of Turukhansk.17
The arrest of so many leaders of the Petersburg Union of Struggle put its very existence in doubt. The younger members who had been left at large worked hard to put out proclamations and to keep in contact with the strikers, since continuing to exist was absolutely necessary for Social Democratic prestige. Lenin cheered these efforts from a distance: ‘The public prosecutors and gendarmes are already boasting that they have smashed the Union of Struggle. This boast is a lie. The Union of Struggle is intact, despite all the persecution… Revolutionaries have perished – long live the revolution!’18
The three years in Shushenskoe were productive ones for Lenin professionally, personally and politically. His main professional achievement was a magnum opus giving a Marxist account of (as the title proclaims) The Development of Capitalism in Russia (published in 1899). In this book, filled with statistics on everything from flax-growing to the hemp-and-rope trades, he provided his heroic scenario with as strong a factual foundation as he could manage.
His main personal achievement was marrying Nadezhda Krupskaya on 10 July 1898 and settling down to married life. Krupskaya had been one of the cohort of early praktiki that Lenin had joined in St Petersburg. She had arrived in that tight-knit community by a different route from Lenin, by volunteering as a teacher in the Sunday education movement. Like everything independent in Russian life, the popular education movement was regarded with suspicion by the government, which looked askance at ‘the tendency to raise the level of popular education by means of organizing lectures, libraries, reading-rooms for, and free distribution of, scientific, moral and literary publications among the factory and rural population’. These are the words of the tsarist minister of the interior in 1895, who described people like Krupskaya when he went on to say that ‘the distributors of these books are intelligent young people of both sexes, very often still pursuing their studies, who penetrate into the midst of the people [the narod] in the capacity of teachers’. All this was very worrisome to the tsarist minister, since it appeared that the popular education movement ‘will develop systematically in a way which will not be in accordance with the views of the government’.19 The government’s suspicion of independent popular education had not changed much since the days of Lenin’s father, Ilya Ulyanov.
