In 1908 Solomon lived in Brussels and hosted Lenin when he visited the Belgian capital. On this occasion Lenin was in town to give a talk on the current situation. The speech did not go over very well, in Solomon’s opinion. Lenin vainly tried ‘to inspire those who gloomily doubted by insisting that the revolutionary movement had not died away but was proceeding forward at its own pace’.32 After the speech they retired to Solomon’s apartment and talked politics. It was after midnight, and both men had got ready for bed. Solomon was already in bed while Lenin, in his usual style, paced up and down making his points – this time in his underwear. The conversation moved on to the problems of the Social Demo cratic deputies. Solomon was a ‘recallist’, that is, he wanted to force the Social Democratic delegation of the Duma to resign. Recallism did not arise from an anti-parliamentary bias – on the contrary, the heart of the Bolshevik revolutionary program at this time was to bring a ‘bourgeois democratic’ parliament to Russia. Nor did the recallists refuse in principle to participate in such a pitiful excuse for a parliament as the current Duma. Solomon and other recallists simply felt that the mediocrities now fumbling around in the Duma chamber in the name of Social Democracy were not ‘tribunes of the people’ but simply an embarrassment.
Lenin got angrier and angrier at Solomon’s stand. Supporting the Social Democratic deputies wasn’t softness on the part of the current party leadership, Lenin exclaimed, ‘but simply a desire to preserve our parliamentary group, as is advantageous to a party that stands at the head of the proletariat and expresses its revolutionary interests. And anybody whose brain isn’t completely clouded over should realize this.’ Solomon retorted (in a calm and business-like fashion, he tells us) that the current incumbents were so incompetent that they even threatened to damage the prestige of the Russian Social Democrats in the eyes of European socialists. Lenin exploded:
Oh, that’s it! That means, we should recall them. A very clever solution that does great honour to the profundity and political wisdom of those who thought it up! Let me tell you, my very good and most excellent sir, that ‘recallism’ is not a mistake – it’s a crime! Everything in Russia is now asleep, everything has died away in some sort of Oblomov-style dream. Stolypin stifles everything, the atmosphere of reaction becomes more and more all-embracing. And now, in the words of M. K. Tsebrikova (I hope you know the name, my very esteemed sir), I remind you that ‘when the dour wave of reaction is about to sweep over and swallow everything that still lives, then all those who represent a progressive outlook are called upon to cry out to those who are losing spirit: Stand firm!’ This duty should be clear to anyone with half a brain.33
And when Lenin realized that Solomon thought that having no Social Democratic presence in the Duma was preferable to the current situation, he indignantly interrupted: ‘What?! According to you, it’s better to let the Duma go on without any of our representatives at all?! Well, only political cretins and brainless idiots, out-and-out reactionaries, could think like that.’
At this point Solomon protested against what he considered personal attacks. Lenin backtracked, gave him a sort of hug, and assured him that the expressions that escaped him in the heat of argument were not meant to be taken personally – and perhaps they weren’t! (Similar apologies can be found throughout Lenin’s correspondence.) Lenin’s curiously impersonal abuse was not directed at Solomon as an individual, but against all the sceptics, pessimists, defeatists – in a word, philistines – who refused to lift themselves up to the grand vistas of his heroic scenario.
The ‘Commencing Revolution’
The differences among the Social Democrats were so sharp that the question more and more became: two parties or one? That is, were the various tactical and organizational differences among Social Democrats so great as to force a split? Many of the praktiki and the rank-and-file party members in Russia thought not, thus putting heavy pressure on the émigrés to work out a modus vivendi. But the upshot was that the party’s orientation veered back and forth as one or another faction gained control or, just as bad, the central institutions got bogged down into an enforced immobilisme. At one point in the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer a demon goddess and a normal human are forced to share the same body, each taking over at unexpected moments, each destroying the continuity of the other one’s life, each finding themselves in unexpected and embarrassing circumstances. The Russian Social Democratic party faced a similar situation.
Lenin’s stand can be guessed from the title of a book he had Kamenev write in 1911: Two Parties.34 The argument of this book was that two parties existed de facto, and productive work would be impossible until they had a separate existence de jure. Lenin wanted to purify the party by pushing the Menshevik ‘liquidators’ out of the party and, to prove his bona fides, he did his best to push the Bolshevik ‘recallists’ out in the same way. Following a familiar logic the ‘conciliators’ within the party, the ones who wanted everybody to get along and therefore condemned any split, were also condemned.
By 1912 Lenin had decided to cut the knot of Damocles by simply deciding that his group was the real party. After a series of institutional manoeuvres the so-called Prague Conference of January 1912 – consisting of Lenin, Zinoviev and about fourteen Bolshevik praktiki from Russia – elected a new Central Committee and thus a new party. Shortly after the Prague Conference Lenin and Krupskaya, accompanied by Zinoviev and his family, moved from Paris to Krakow in the Austrian section of Poland. Krakow was closer to Russia than any of Lenin’s previous exile locations and communication with Petersburg was relatively easy. The Bolshevik leadership nucleus considered this only a semi-exile.
Lenin’s change of residence coincided with a new mood in Russia – an upsurge of disaffection and militancy. The shooting down of striking workers in the gold-mines of Lena in Siberia was the mini-Bloody Sunday that crystallized the growing impatience. The Lena massacre on 17 April 1912 outraged all of Russian society; in particular, it sparked off a round of worker protests and strikes. The new worker militancy meant increased support for the Bolsheviks in the factional struggle and Lenin could now claim solid majority support in aboveground organizations such as trade unions and cooperative societies. The new Bolshevik aboveground presence was symbolized by the launch of a legal newspaper that later became world famous. The first issue of Pravda came out on 5 May 1912.
Lenin ended the second decade of his political career in much the same sort of situation as he began it, dangerously isolated in the world of international socialism but enjoying a solid base of support within the party back in Russia. The other émigré leaders of Russian Social Democracy did not agree on much, but they were all genuinely repulsed by what they saw as Lenin’s hard-line approach and arrogant splitting tactics. Just a little while earlier, Plekhanov had been a de facto ally of Lenin in the fight against ‘liquidationism’. But now even Plekhanov denounced Lenin’s unilateral election of a new Central Committee as an attempt to use for factional advantage party funds he had acquired by various crooked methods (arguments over party funds and Lenin’s methods in obtaining control over them had been going on for years). The exasperation of Russian party leaders with Lenin communicated itself to Western European socialists who felt called upon to try and make peace among the squabbling Russians. In July 1914 European socialist leaders met in Brussels in order to sort out these problems. Lenin’s representative, Inessa Armand, took an uncompromising stand, and probably only the outbreak of war later that summer saved Lenin from condemnation and complete isolation.