The basic premise of Lenin’s scenario had always been the claim that the capitalist transformation of Russia was calling forth spirits from the vasty deep of the people, spirits powerful enough to topple the tsar. The revolution of 1905 showed that these spirits had indeed come when they were called. It was therefore a vindication of Lenin’s ‘other way’ to achieve the dreams of his brother Alexander:
Is it good that the narod should apply unlawful, irregular, unmethodical and unsystematic methods of struggle such as seizing their freedom and creating a new, formally unrecognized and revolutionary authority, that it should use force against the oppressors of the narod? Yes, it is very good. It is the supreme manifestation of the narod’s struggle for freedom. It marks that great period when the dreams of freedom cherished by the best men and women of Russia are translated into practice, when freedom becomes the practice of the vast masses of the narod, and not merely of individual heroes.10
The Role of the Peasant in Lenin’s Heroic Scenario
Looking back at the Bolsheviks through the lens of post-1917 events, particularly Stalin’s disastrous collectivization and its consequences, we tend to assume that Bolshevism was organically anti-peasant. Yet at the time of the 1905 revolution an informed outside observer praised the Bolsheviks precisely because they were they were ‘the popular faction’, in contrast to the Mensheviks and their ‘attitude of suspicion toward the peasantry’.
The American socialist William Walling travelled through Russia in 1905–7 with his wife Anna Strunsky who was of Russian origin. He met and interviewed many notable figures on both sides of the barricades, including Lenin himself. When he returned he wrote a long, enthusiastic book, still worth reading, entitled Russia’s Message: The True World Import of the Revolution. Walling’s 1908 testimony is all the more intriguing because he later became a violent opponent of the Bolshevik revolution and in 1920 wrote an informed diatribe against it, also worth reading.11
Walling was a declared supporter of peasant socialism and regarded the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRS) as the fundamental Russian socialist party. For just this reason he much preferred the Bolsheviks to the Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks, he told his American readers, were ‘the progressive and more Russian part’ of the Social Democratic party. According to Walling, the Bolshevik acceptance of a peasant alliance reflected the real attitude of the workers themselves, who had little sense of class exclusiveness and wanted to fight together with the ‘little bourgeoisie’ of town and country. ‘The majority faction [= the Bolsheviks] realizes thoroughly the necessity of a full unity in the revolutionary movement.’ Walling did take note of the feeling, widespread among all Social Democrats, that ‘in the general movement, the working people should have the leading role’. Walling found this to be ‘a very wrong attitude, since the peasants in Russia are five times more numerous than all other working classes’.12
In his brief account of his interview with Lenin Walling made clear that he did not like Lenin’s forecast that the peasant bourgeoisie would inevitably become a class enemy in the future. He was nevertheless impressed by Lenin’s ‘very full knowledge of the economic and political situation of other countries’ and found him to be ‘far more open-minded [about the peasants] than the leaders formerly in control of the party’. According to Walling, Lenin was at this time ‘perhaps the most popular leader in Russia’.13
Lenin’s scenario of the peasant in revolution was extremely important to him personally. At the end of 1907 he set it all down in one of his most important if overlooked books, The Agrarian Programme of Social Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1905–1907, a substantial volume of over 200 pages. This book is the fourth and last in the series of full-scale expositions of his heroic scenario (the first three being Friends of the People, 1894, Development of Capitalism in Russia, 1899, and To the Village Poor, 1903). Lenin took it hard when the tsarist government suppressed its publication. His close comrade Lev Kamenev describes the book’s fate in words that undoubtedly expressed Lenin’s own attitude: ‘The huge manuscript, the fruits of long and persistent labour, the result of a work attempted by no one else, lies for ten years, until 1917, in the bottom of Ilich’s trunk. It travels with him from Finland to Geneva, from Paris to Krakow, and after ten years, is borne back to Petersburg on the waves of the victorious revolution, and so, at last, finds a printer.’14 When revolution broke out in Russia in 1917, almost Lenin’s first thought was: now I can publish my book!15
The following scenario can be extracted from the dense argument of Lenin’s book. If the urban workers were class leaders, then the peasants were class followers. Lenin completely accepted the general Marxist idea that the peasants, scattered in isolated rural villages, could be politically effective only if they accepted the leadership of the more advanced urban classes – either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. But his insistence on the peasant as follower did not exclude an exalted, even romantic view of the peasant in the revolution. Heroic leaders require heroic followers.
As we have seen, Lenin believed that capitalism was splitting the Russian peasantry into two groups, proto-proletarian and proto-bourgeois. Although this division would be vital for the future socialist revolution it was not so crucial in the case of the people’s revolution against the tsar. In this revolution, the peasantry as a whole would follow the lead of the proletariat in a crusade against the tsar. The ‘petty-bourgeois’ peasant was therefore still a crucial part of the revolutionary army. Indeed, the most remarkable feature of Lenin’s 1907 book Agrarian Programme is his enthusiasm about the revolutionary fervour of the petty-bourgeois peasant.
From 1902 the peasants had revealed themselves as effective fighters for the democratic transformation of Russia. The peasants were ready, not only to take the land of the noble estate-owners but, in so doing, to destroy the social base of the tsarist system. And this act of economic liberation would have radical political consequences: ‘The peasantry cannot carry out an agrarian revolution without abolishing the old regime, the standing army and the bureaucracy, because all these are the most reliable mainstays of the landed property of the pomeshchiki [gentry estate-owners], bound to this system by thousands of ties.’16 By abolishing the old regime Russia would become a ‘peasant republic’, and this would be good for the peasants, good for the workers’ class struggle and good for Russia.