The leaflets and the revolutionary speeches by workers carry the message that a revolution to install the democratic republic is the only way to ensure freedom. This message does not stop at the city limits of Petersburg. The industrial proletariat is able to ‘draw into revolutionary actions the labouring and exploited masses, deprived of basic rights and driven into a desperate situation’. The revolutionary strikes of the Russian proletariat – the mighty weapon it forged for itself in 1905 – are therefore ‘stirring, rousing, enlightening, and organizing the masses of the narod for revolution’. In fact, the May Day strikes and demonstrations will show ‘to the whole world that the Russian proletariat is steadfastly following its revolutionary course’.
Thus, in Lenin’s exalted view, the small Social Democratic underground of Petersburg sent a message heard around the world. And why? – because it told the truth to millions about their hopeless position under tsarism, thus ‘inspiring them with faith in revolutionary struggle’.39
In 1914, on the eve of war, Lenin wrote to Inessa Armand (in English), ‘Best greetings for the commencing revolution in Russia’.40 A new ‘era of revolutionary battles’ was indeed commencing, and not only in Russia. During the next five years, his heroic scenario would be vindicated on a global scale – or so it seemed to Lenin.
For many Marxists, a purely democratic revolution could be ‘only’ a bourgeois revolution – a necessary step forward, but a frustrating one, since it ushered in a long period of bourgeois class domination. Confining oneself to working for the bourgeois revolution while deferring the socialist revolution was an eminently reasonable self-limitation, but nevertheless it was an emotionally difficult substitute for the real thing. Lenin also accepted completely that the 1905 revolution was no more than a bourgeois, political, democratic one and that its historical meaning was limited to clearing the path for socialist revolution. But emotionally there was for him nothing ‘only’ about the events of 1905. He saw them as a vast national epic – a heroic struggle of the narod to conquer freedom and to regenerate Russia.
As usual, Lenin’s emotional commitment to an exalted view of events spills out in ceaseless polemics with all those he considered philistines, pedants, whiners, sceptics, defeatists. Did the slowdown in the strike movement in 1904 mean that the proletariat was no longer interested in revolution? No, the proletariat was merely biding its time. Was the disorder and violent chaos of the revolution in 1905 a bad thing? No, it was a good thing, an explosion of popular creativity. Was the Moscow uprising of December 1905, drowned in the blood of the workers, a mistake committed by over-enthusiastic socialist activists? No, it represented the most splendid popular movement since the Paris Commune of 1871. Were the peasants who burned down landowner estates while dreaming of equalized land tenure a backward and reactionary class capable only of spontaneous outbursts of violence? No, the ‘petty-bourgeois peasants’ were a progressive class that was fighting for a democratic form of capitalism, and therefore a worthy ally of the Russian proletariat in the democratic revolution. Did the new political institutions created by the revolution mean that the previous konspiratsiia underground had become anachronistic, an embarrassing relic that ought to be liquidated? No, the old underground had sown the seeds that had burst forth in the glory of the 1905 revolution. The underground therefore had to be preserved in the post-revolutionary era in order to prepare for the inevitable replay of a bigger and better 1905, when ‘the Russian WORKER, elevated to the head of all democratic elements, will overthrow absolutism’.
4. Three Train Rides
‘A new era of revolutions is drawing near.’
Krakow to Bern
In the early summer of 1914 Lenin had very little idea of what the looming war would bring. He even assumed his workload would be eased somewhat if war actually broke out, since his connections with the Russian underground would be thoroughly disrupted.1 But when war did come it brought some devastating surprises.
Even after Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August 1914, the Social Democratic parties in Germany, Austro-Hungary and France were still organizing mass protests against war. The main German party newspaper, Vorwärts, continued to thunder against the imperialist war and to threaten the capitalist warmongers with revolutionary action. But on 5 August Lenin received a major shock: the SPD Reichstag delegation had voted unanimously for war credits. Forgotten was the traditional cry of ‘not one penny – not one man’ for the capitalist state. When Lenin first saw the headlines in the village of Poronino (his summer residence outside Krakow, which he used after moving back to Poland in 1912), he was sure that they must be a provocation, a trick by the government to confuse the opposition.
Lenin soon had his own firsthand experience with war hysteria. The local officials in Austrian Poland suspected the outlandish Russian emigrant of espionage. A policeman reported to his superiors that many meetings of Russian nationals had taken place at the residence of V. Ulyanov. There were rumours that Ulyanov had been seen taking photographs in the surrounding hills, but these proved unfounded. Nevertheless, the policeman was of the opinion that Ulyanov should be under lock and key – after all, his identity papers were in French (the language of an enemy country), he received money from Petersburg, and he was in a very good position to give information about Austria to the Russians.2
Based on this irrefutable logic, Lenin was arrested and kept in the local jail from 8 to 19 August. Thus the third decade of his political career began the same way as his first decade – in jail. And, as in Siberian exile, Lenin devoted some of his time to helping peasants with their legal troubles, only this time the peasants were his fellow jail mates. But the big difference between 1895 and 1914 was that Lenin now had powerful friends on the outside. Among these was the leader of the Austrian Social Democrats, Victor Adler, who went to the Austrian Minister of the Interior to give personal assurance that no one was less likely to help the tsarist government than V. Ulyanov. When the minister asked, ‘are you sure he’s an enemy of the tsar?’ Adler answered, ‘he is a more implacable enemy than your Excellency’.
Orders soon came down to release Lenin, and even to allow him to travel to Switzerland. On getting out of jail Lenin received another shock, in the form of a leaflet entitled ‘Declaration of Russian Socialists Joining the French Army as Volunteers’. These Russian socialists outdid the Germans in their support of their government’s war effort: they joined the ranks of an allied army. Among the émigrés in France who showed their devotion to internationalism in this way were several Bolsheviks.