Lenin’s political positions in the intra-party factional infighting followed from his commitment to his heroic scenario. He first insisted that the Social Democrats should keep their eyes on the prize and not retreat from their ambitious goal. This goal was ‘democratic revolution to the end’, and that meant full political freedom. The result – a paradoxical one from our present-day vantage-point – was that the Bolsheviks criticized the Mensheviks for cravenly accepting the few thin slices of political freedom available in Stolypin’s Russia rather than demanding the full loaf.
The Mensheviks proposed that the workers focus on attainable goals, for example, achieving a crucial political freedom such as freedom of association. The Bolsheviks agreed that freedom of association was indeed crucial, but insisted that it meant nothing in isolation. As the Bolshevik Lev Kamenev put the case, ‘A Marxist should say to the worker masses who have learned from experience the need for freedom of association: freedom to strike, freedom of unions – these are empty words in the absence of inviolability of person, freedom of speech, or freedom of the press. Freedom of association is tied to the basic and fundamental conditions of the country.’23
Kamenev’s words need to be decoded, since he was writing at a time (1913) when the Bolsheviks had access to legal publication. He therefore resorted to Aesopian language meant to get past the censor. ‘Marxist’ stood in for ‘Social Democrat’, and the phrase ‘basic and fundamental conditions of the country’ pointed to the need for revolution. Kamenev’s real message was that there was only one way to get secure freedom of association: a full-scale, revolutionary assault on tsarism in order to introduce the full gamut of political freedoms.
As before, the only way to achieve this ambitious goal was through a vast people’s revolution. Menshevik attempts to find allies among the elite liberal bourgeoisie were doomed to failure, since the liberals mortally feared ‘the revolutionary whirlwind’ and would therefore always stop short and sell out the revolution. Daunting as the task seemed, proletarian leadership of the narod was the only way to carry out revolution ‘to the end’: ‘A peasant revolution under the leadership of the proletariat in a capitalist country is difficult, very difficult, but it is possible, and we must fight for it. Three years of the revolution have taught us and the whole narod not only that we must fight for it but also how to fight for it.’24
Given his ambitious ends (full political freedom) and ambitious means (peasant revolution), Lenin furiously rejected any ‘philistine’ pessimism. He was especially outraged at Menshevik scepticism about the utility of the uprising of December 1905, given its bloody suppression, as encapsulated by a famous comment by Plekhanov: ‘the workers should not have taken up arms’. Lenin’s reaction: ‘What an ocean of renegade comment was called forth by that assessment!’ The proper response from non-philistine Social Democrats must instead be
to proclaim openly, for all to hear, for the sake of the wavering and feeble in spirit, to shame those who are turning renegade and deserting socialism, that the workers’ party sees in the direct revolutionary struggle of the masses, in the October and December struggles of 1905, the greatest movements of the proletariat since the [Paris] Commune [of 1871].25
Looking ahead, Social Democrats must retain their confidence that
the very first fresh breeze of freedom, the slightest relaxation of repression, will again inevitably call into being hundreds and thousands of organizations, unions, groups, circles and undertakings of a revolutionary-democratic nature. And this will as inevitably result in another ‘whirlwind’, in a repetition of the October-December struggle, but on an immeasurably greater scale.26
The imperative of spreading the good news of socialism and revolution had always been at the heart of Lenin’s scenario. The eagerly awaited repetition of 1905 gave this imperative even more urgency. Most of Lenin’s factional infighting during the years 1908–12 revolved around this issue. As opposed to the right wing of Social Democracy, he fought against attempts to ‘liquidate’ the konspiratsiia underground. As opposed to the left wing, he fought against the rejection of newly available channels of dissemination, in particular the ‘Duma word’, the forum provided by the elected legislature to Social Democratic deputies.27
Lenin acknowledged that the Social Democratic underground was at present in a state of ‘deep collapse’, yet he remained fiercely loyal to it as an institution. In a tone of puzzlement, the American historian Leopold Haimson wonders why the Bolsheviks attached such importance during these years to ‘issuing pamphlets with their signature and stamp’ and to convening ‘almost illusory’ provisional and regional conferences of underground organizations. ‘The reports of the Department of Police paint a pitiful picture of these meetings, usually attended by only a handful of haphazardly elected and self-appointed delegates, including agents of the Okhrana [tsarist political police].’28
Lenin’s attachment to the konspiratsiia underground becomes understandable when we remember the role it plays in his heroic scenario. The konspiratsiia underground was the one place in Russia where the Social Democratic message could be proclaimed boldly and uncompromisingly, the one place where the banner of socialism and the democratic republic could be proudly unfurled. This could not happen in any organization that was legally permitted in Stolypin’s Russia. Furthermore, the miracle of 1905 showed that, even under tsarism, an underground party could be built that was ‘really capable of leading classes. In the spring of 1905 our party was a league of underground groups; in the autumn it became the party of millions of the proletariat. Do you think, my dear sirs, this came all of a sudden, or was the result prepared and secured by years and years of slow, obstinate, inconspicuous, noiseless work?’29
Lenin’s vision of the konspiratsiia underground and its threads strategy remained essentially the same as before 1905. As he described it in 1908, ‘this illegal core will spread its feelers, its influence, incomparably wider than before’. But since the intelligentsia as a whole was losing interest in socialism and revolution, the ‘revolutionaries by trade’ who kept the underground up and running had to be recruited predominantly from ‘advanced members from among the workers themselves’.30 Despite all the problems faced by the underground, Lenin was confident that the pamphlets issued by the Bolsheviks were a seed that ‘has been sown… And this seed will bear its fruits – perhaps not tomorrow or the day after but a little later; we cannot alter the objective conditions in which a new crisis is growing – but it will bear fruit.’31
Lenin’s emotional intensity about the need to get the word out also revealed itself in attacks on those of his fellow Bolsheviks who (as it seemed to him) neglected the value of ‘the Duma word’. His feelings are evident in a verbal video of Lenin in his underwear found in the memoirs of Georgy Solomon, a long-time Bolshevik who later occupied a high position as a Soviet trade representative. In 1923 Solomon grew so disgusted with the mores of the Soviet government that he stayed abroad. The following scene is taken from memoirs published in Paris around 1930.