The writings of the Iskra period covered a wide range of topics, but all of them were informed by the fiery energy of Lenin’s commitment to his ‘other way’. Among the subjects treated are:
The overall crisis facing tsarism and its ineffective attempts to stave off its swiftly approaching doom.
Heroic worker protest and its effect on the rest of Russian society.
The peasantry as an integral part of the anti-tsarist coalition.
The nationalism of ethnic minorities, to be encouraged as a force subverting tsarism but discouraged as a centrifugal force within the party.
Individual terrorism as an outmoded and harmful revolutionary expedient.
The deficiencies of the liberals and the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), the emerging rivals to Social Democracy for leadership of the anti-tsarist revolution.
As we saw earlier, Iskra was also meant to be a springboard toward achieving ideological and organizational unity among the scattered committees. This part of Lenin’s plan was also put into practice, but the reality was a lot messier than his original picture. True, more and more committees officially endorsed Iskra as their spokesman. But this bandwagon effect was achieved at the cost of hurtful internal struggles, sharp practices on all sides and local reorganizations that, although intended to help put workers onto local committees, were carried out in such a way that many workers felt seriously aggrieved.
In April 1903, Lenin and Krupskaya moved rather reluctantly from London to Geneva, in deference to the wish of the other Iskra editors to be together in one city. By this time enough momentum had been created to organize an acceptably representative Second Congress, and RSDWP members met abroad in August 1903. The Congress opened in Brussels but was then forced by pressure from the Belgian police to move to London. As Social Democrats often said to console themselves during the bitterness of the ensuing factional struggle, the Second Congress did have some lasting positive achievements. Not only were central party institutions finally created, but a consensus on basic programmatic and tactical perspectives was laid down. Social Democracy had become and remained a coherent all-Russian presence.
But Lenin’s plan hit a completely unexpected snag at the very moment of its fulfilment. The Iskra editorial board fell apart in ugly mutual recriminations. The divisive issues were dense and tangled, combining personal animosities, organizational jockeying for position and genuine difference in revolutionary tactics. These deeper differences only gradually rose to the surface, and resulted in the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks that dominated Social Democratic politics for the next decade. At the Second Congress in August 1903 Lenin had been the dominant party leader. But by the end of the year he was completely isolated – forced to leave the Iskra editorial board and on very bad terms with all his former colleagues (see chapter Three). For a while it looked like Lenin’s first decade as a party leader might be his last.
According to the banner sentence of 1894 the opening act of Lenin’s world-historical drama would see the Russian ‘purposive worker’ imbued with the ‘idea of the historical role of the Russian worker’, namely, to act as leader of the narod. Furthermore, ‘durable organisations [would be] created among the workers that transform the present uncoordinated economic war of the workers into a purposive class struggle’. Something like this actually happened. The Russian version of Kautsky’s canonical merger of socialism and the worker movement was the konspiratsiia underground, that unique and underappreciated historical creation of a whole generation of praktiki. Lenin’s individual role in this creation was, first, his summation of the logic of the threads strategy; second, his eloquent defence of the optimistic assumptions needed to sustain faith in the viability of a truly Social Democratic underground; and third, his ingenious plan for creating national party structures. As always a cold-eyed look at reality will reveal the yawning gap between the actual konspiratsiia underground and its heroic self-inscription into the narrative of Lenin’s banner sentence. Certainly for Lenin himself his first decade ended in bitterness and seeming isolation. Yet his dream, far-fetched as it may have been, was a historical reality because people believed in it.
In a climactic passage from What Is to Be Done? Lenin evoked his heroic ‘other way’ as he outlined his ambitious project of using the newfangled methods of European Social Democracy in order to realize the dreams of Russian revolutionaries such as his brother Alexander. Lenin uses Alexander Zheliabov, a leader of the Narodnaya volya group that assassinated the tsar in 1881, to symbolize the Russian revolutionary tradition; he uses August Bebel, a worker who became the top leader of the German SPD, to sym bolize Social Democracy:
If we genuinely succeed in getting all or a significant majority of local committees, local groups and circles actively to take up the common work, we would in short order be able to have a weekly newspaper, regularly distributed in tens of thousands of copies throughout Russia. This newspaper would be a small part of a huge bellows that blows up each flame of class struggle and popular indignation into a common fire. Around this task – in and of itself a very small and even innocent one but one that is a regular and, in the full meaning of the word, a common task – an army of experienced fighters would systematically be recruited and trained. Among the ladders and scaffolding of this common organizational construction would soon rise up Social Democratic Zheliabovs from among our revolutionaries, Russian Bebels from our workers, who would be pushed forward and then take their place at the head of a mobilized army and would raise up the whole narod to settle accounts with the shame and curse of Russia.
That is what we must dream about!36
3. A People’s Revolution
‘During the whirlwind [of the 1905 revolution], the proletarian, the railwayman, the peasant, the mutinous soldier, have driven all Russia forward with the speed of a locomotive.’
Bolshevism, as a distinct current in Russian Social Democracy, arose in the years 1904–14. During those years Bolshevism was a Russian answer to Russian problems. Later, when Bolshevism acquired a wider meaning, Lenin coined the term ‘Old Bolshevism’ as a label for the earlier period. ‘Old Bolshevism’ is a useful term that we will employ in later chapters. But for now Old Bolshevism is the only Bolshevism there is, so we shall dispense with the qualifying adjective.
In Lenin’s banner sentence of 1894 the crucial central episode of the heroic scenario is described in the following words: ‘the Russian WORKER, elevated to the head of all democratic elements, will overthrow absolutism’. These few words contain the essence of Bolshevism during its first decade, and we shall spend this chapter unpacking their meaning. We must first ask: what is the role of this episode in the overall heroic scenario? The answer: to open up the road to socialist revolution by removing the obstacle of tsarist absolutism. The more thoroughly the revolution did its job, the swifter would be the journey to the final goal. Therefore, the party’s goal should be revolution ‘to the end’ (do kontsa), that is, ‘to the absolute destruction of monarchical despotism’ and its replacement by a democratic republic.1