According to the logic of Lenin’s heroic scenario, the only way to successfully carry out the democratic revolution ‘to the end’ is for the urban proletariat to be the head, the leader, the vozhd of all the ‘democratic elements’, that is, all the social groups with a stake in attaining full political freedom. The Russian revolution could only succeed as a narodnaia revoliutsiia, a people’s revolution. In order for the proletariat to play its destined leadership role it had to spread its message far and wide. And the only way to do that was through the institutions of the konspiratsiia underground. The Russian revolution could only succeed if these channels were kept open.
During the years 1905–7 Russia underwent a profound revolution and the tsar was forced to grant a significant measure of political freedom. When Lenin viewed these events through the lens of his heroic scenario he arrived at the following conclusions: The 1905 revolution was a vast, mighty people’s revolution. Unfortunately, the revolution was not able to go all the way ‘to the end’ by replacing tsarism with a democratic republic. It nevertheless achieved great things and represented a tremendous vindication of Social Democratic expectations. The decade-long consciousness-raising activity of the underground party paid off because the proletariat did indeed act as leader of the narod.
Lenin’s advice for the future was based on this reading of the events of 1905. The Russian Social Democrats needed to prepare for a decisive repetition of the 1905 revolution – one which would carry out the revolution to the end by creating a provisional government based on the workers and peasants. Only a government based on these classes (‘revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants’) would be able to install a democratic republic and beat back the counterrevolution with the necessary ruthlessness. The best way to prepare for this second people’s revolution was to remain loyal to the strategy that made the first one possible: the leadership role of the urban workers (‘hegemony of the proletariat’) and an energetic commitment to spread the socialist good news despite government repression.
The official slogans of Bolshevism used learned foreign-sounding phrases such as ‘hegemony of the proletariat’ and ‘revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants’. But the inner meaning of these phrases is profoundly Russian and arises from an interpretation of the revolutions of 1905–7 in terms of Lenin’s heroic scenario. Even Bolsheviks who otherwise were opponents of Lenin subscribed to this core platform.
Lenin’s political life during the whole decade was therefore a fight for the meaning of the revolution of 1905–7. A review of the events of these tumultuous years is essential background for Lenin’s personal biography.
The Revolution of 1905–7
The immediate background to the revolution was the shock administered to Russian society by international competition at its most unforgiving. War with Japan began with a Japanese attack on Russian forces on 8 February 1904. Historians have recently suggested that this overlooked conflict should really be called World War Zero, the first of the global conflicts that defined the twentieth century.2 As Russia’s military lurched from disaster to disaster, Russian society – never terribly enthusiastic about the war to begin with – moved toward revolutionary disaffection.
Against the background of growing military defeat the powerful tsarist government began to look shaky and unsure. On 28 July 1904 the widely hated Minister of the Interior Vyacheslav von Plehve was assassinated by Socialist Revolutionary terrorists. The government responded, not in its usual manner of clamping down, but by offering concessions to public opinion. Liberal forces in elite society took advantage of the new atmosphere by unleashing a ‘banquet campaign’ in autumn 1904 which featured respectable pillars of society offering toasts that turned into subversive speeches.
The event that really sparked off the revolution of 1905, from the Social Democratic point of view, was Bloody Sunday (9 January 1905), when the tsarist government, in its ineffable wisdom, chose to open fire on a peaceful crowd that wanted to present a petition to the tsar asking for basic freedoms. The resulting massacre did more to confirm the Social Democratic message than years of propaganda. In the months that followed events in Russia moved closer to a revolutionary explosion.
The rhythm of the revolution waxed and waned over the spring and summer of 1905 but the climax came with the massive events of October 1905, when a strike started by railwaymen became a general one. Russian society was shut down and the government, panicky and isolated, responded by issuing the Manifesto of 17 October, in which the tsar graciously conceded basic political freedoms to his subjects. The final months of 1905 became known as the ‘days of freedom’, since political activity was for a short while unrestricted by police or censor.
After the October Manifesto the question confronting the revolutionary forces was: do we now turn our attention to protecting and using what we have achieved, or do we press on ‘to the end’? The answer of the more impatient revolutionary elements came in the form of the Moscow uprising of December 1905, when the Moscow workers mounted an ‘armed insurrection’ that managed to hold out for a week of heavy fighting. The Moscow uprising was the last of the classic nineteenth-century barricade struggles between elite and people, but one that was fought with a new twentieth-century intensity. Barricades were put up, but the insurgents mainly resorted to guerrilla warfare – hit and run attacks that relied on the sympathy of the city population (not just the workers) for support and cover. In response the government trained artillery fire on the city as a whole. The leadership for the uprising came from the Moscow Bolshevik committee, although the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries had participated enthusiastically.
The ultimate defeat of the Moscow uprising was one of the many signs that the tide of revolution had begun to ebb. The St Petersburg Soviet – a class-based elective ‘council’ that was a prototype for ‘soviet power’ in 1917 – was disbanded, and its leadership (including Lev Trotsky) arrested. Although peasant rebellions were still going strong in 1906, the punitive expeditions of the government were already beginning to quell peasant disorders. The government acted on its promise to create an elective legislature or Duma, but it refused to work with the liberal and peasant parties that made up the Duma majority. It therefore closed down the first Duma (elected in March 1906) and then the second Duma (elected in early 1907). Only in June 1907 was a new, highly restrictive electoral law imposed, allowing the government to get a Duma with which it could work.
The new electoral law in 1907 was imposed by an unconstitutional coup carried out by the newly appointed minister Petr Stolypin. Stolypin was the outstanding figure of the new post-revolutionary regime, representing both its repressive face (the nooses that were used to hang peasant rebels were called ‘Stolypin neckties’) and its reformist face (the ‘Stolypin land reform’ was aimed at transforming property relations in peasant agriculture).