Anyone who argued for the workability of the threads strategy needed to make some very optimistic assumptions. Typically, Lenin made these assumptions with gusto and scorned the sceptics and ‘philistines’ who had less exalted expectations. One such assumption was the existence of a supportive worker milieu that would pick up the threads thrown out by the konspiratsiia underground. When the revolutionaries of the 1870s went to the people, the puzzled peasants promptly turned these strange beings over to the police. When the praktiki of the 1890s went to the workers, they gradually found enough sympathy to allow them to operate. The Social Democrats were no longer alien beings with incomprehensible schemes, but familiar social types with a relevant (even if not always accepted) message. Without the supportive worker milieu, all the methods that the praktiki had painfully elaborated for foiling the police would have meant nothing.
In his advocacy of a particularly ambitious thread connecting underground and workers – a national party newspaper – Lenin insisted on the existence of this worker milieu. True (he admitted) producing and distributing a newspaper of national scope is a difficult task – much more difficult than the tasks taken up by the older Russian underground, which did not even dream about mass distribution of a newspaper. But, continued Lenin, the target audience today makes the task much more manageable: industrial districts where workers make up almost the entire population, so that ‘the worker is factually master of the situation with hundreds of ways to outwit the vigilance of the police’.24 (Note that the sceptical ‘worry about workers’ so often ascribed to Lenin would have radically undercut all his arguments about the viability of a konspiratsiia underground.)
The plausibility of the underground threads strategy also required the validity of another optimistic assumption: a steady supply of people both heroic enough to risk career, health, freedom and even life for the cause, and self-disciplined enough to learn the necessary skills of konspiratsiia and to act in strict accordance with them – not always the most likely combination of qualities. Someone who combined both these qualities was the ideal ‘professional revolutionary’ – a functional necessity of an underground specifically of the konspiratsiia type. The conspiratorial revolutionary of the earlier populist underground was meant to replace a mass SPD-like party, deemed impossible under Russian conditions. In contrast, the professional revolutionary of the konspiratsiia underground was supposed to make something resembling a mass SPD-like party possible, even under Russian conditions.
The term ‘professional revolutionary’ in this meaning was coined by Lenin himself in What Is to Be Done? (1902) and then quickly adopted by the entire socialist underground. Yet Lenin’s own relation to this term is rather curious. The image of the professional revolutionary has two aspects: the poetry of daring and self-sacrifice vs. the prose of competence and self-discipline. At least in What Is to Be Done?, Lenin was much more interested in the prosaic side. The romantic image goes back to Rakhmetov, the ascetic revolutionary saint pictured in Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s novel of 1863, What Is to Be Done?. Lenin was a great admirer of Chernyshevsky, and his use of this title for his book on party organization was not a coincidence. But the underground certainly did not need Lenin to see themselves as Rakhmetovs. One of Lenin’s most vociferous opponents, Aleksandr Martynov, later recalled his own hero-worship of Rakhmetov, whom he imitated when a schoolboy by slowly crushing cigarettes on his own hand.25
While in exile in Siberia – no doubt brooding on the damage done to the Petersburg Union of Struggle by the police – Lenin began to insist that underground praktiki needed to learn their own trade properly and thoroughly. He listed in very specific detail the functions needed to operate a konspiratsiia underground: agitation, distribution of leaflets and other illegal literature, organizers of worker study circles, correspondents reporting on worker grievances, security against government spies, setting up konspirativnyi apartments for secret meetings, transmitting instructions, collecting for funds and so on. He then argued that ‘the smaller and more specific the job undertaken by the individual person or individual group, the greater will be the chance that they will think things out, do the job properly and guarantee it best against failure [and at the same time] the harder it will be for the police and gendarmes to keep track of the revolutionaries.’ True, this kind of work may seem ‘inconspicuous, monotonous… a grim and rigid routine’.26 To be so prosaic required a special kind of heroism.
The chapter of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? in which he introduced the term revoliutsioner po professii was devoted to pushing this same theme. A translation of this term that brings out Lenin’s underlying metaphor is ‘revolutionary by trade’, since the word professiia at the time meant primarily the trade of a skilled worker (a ‘trade union’ was a professionalnyi soiuz). Lenin’s coinage was thus meant to evoke the image of a specialized and skilled worker in an efficient organization. The image that emerges from Lenin’s unsystematic use of the metaphor is the designedly prosaic one of a praktik honing his skills in his chosen trade.
Lenin’s coinage rapidly became an indispensable part of the vocabulary of the entire underground, partly because the ‘revolutionary by trade’ was a functional necessity of any underground of the konspiratsiia type. But the prosaic ‘revolutionary by trade’ was also the romantic and daring ‘professional revolutionary’. A few years after the publication of What Is to Be Done? a leader of the Socialist Revolutionary party, Victor Chernov, described the professional revolutionary as ‘a roving apostle of socialism, a knight who punishes evil-doers… his life-style is konspiratsiia, his sport is a contest with the police in cleverness and elusiveness’. He glories in his escapes from prison.27 Thus for the underground as a whole, the professional revolutionary gains authority because he is tough enough to be arrested and to escape. For Lenin in What Is to Be Done? the revolutionary by trade gains authority because he is smart enough not to get arrested in the first place.
Yet Lenin would not be Lenin if his insistence on the professional qualifications of the underground praktiki were not closely tied to his heroic scenario of inspiring leadership. In What Is to Be Done? professional training is a vital but not the only trait of the ideal underground activist. Following the SPD example, Lenin’s ideal praktik will rise from worker ranks. (The idea that Lenin restricted the status of ‘revolutionary by trade’ to intellectuals has no factual basis and is incompatible with his entire outlook.) Such a praktik will acquire broad horizons by working in all parts of the country. He will acquire in this way ‘a knowledge of the worker milieu plus a freshness of socialist conviction, combined with a full apprenticeship in his trade’, that is, the trade of underground activity. Given such trained agitators, propagandists and organizers from worker ranks, ‘no political police in the world will be able to cope with these detachments’ of the revolutionary army, since these activists will combine boundless devotion to the revolution with the ability to inspire ‘the boundless confidence of the broadest worker mass’.28 Such were Lenin’s boundless promises to the aspiring praktiki.