Among many harrowing scenes of wartime hysteria and early military casualties (vividly described by Krupskaya in one of the most gripping sections of her memoirs), Lenin, his wife and his confused and soon-to-die mother-in-law packed up and embarked on a week-long train trip to Bern, Switzerland (with a stop in Vienna to get necessary documents and to thank Victor Adler, soon to be a political enemy). When he arrived in Bern on 5 September Lenin hit the ground running. The day he stepped off the train he met with local Bolshevik émigrés and proposed a set of theses about the proper reaction to the war. Just a month had gone by since the outbreak of hostilities – a month mostly taken up with the hassles and uncertainties of jail and of leaving Poland – and yet Lenin was ready with theses that defined a radically new chapter of his career.
We hardly exaggerate if we say that one Lenin got on the train in Krakow and another Lenin got off in Bern. The Krakow Lenin was a Russian Social Democrat with opinions about European and global issues. The Bern Lenin was a European Social Democrat of Russian origin. Lenin had long been of the opinion that the final episode of his heroic scenario – in the words of his banner sentence of 1894, when the Russian proletariat, side by side with the proletariat of all countries, would take ‘the direct road of open political struggle to the victorious communist revolution’ – was fast approaching in the countries of Western Europe. But since, as he saw it, the leaders of European Social Democracy had now abandoned the banner of revolutionary socialism, he, Lenin, would stride forward to pick it up.
Central to the programme of this new Lenin was a vision of a world entering an era of revolutions. Western Europe was on the eve of the final, socialist revolution. In Russia the democratic anti-tsarist revolution was already ‘commencing’ (as Lenin had written to Inessa Armand in summer 1914). All over the world, national and anti-colonial revolutions were brewing. These various genres of revolutions would inevitably influence each other in an intense process of interaction. In Lenin’s vision, the world war that broke out in 1914 had tremendously accelerated the process of global interaction. The miseries caused by the imperialist war would speed up revolution everywhere. Any successful revolution – whether socialist, democratic or national – would then spark off revolution in other countries, often by means of revolutionary war. After a socialist revolution, for example, ‘the victorious proletariat of that country, after expropriating the capitalists and organizing their own socialist production, will arise against the rest of the world – the capitalist world – attracting to its cause the oppressed classes of other countries, stirring uprisings in those countries against the capitalists, and in case of need using even armed force again the exploiting classes and their states’.3 In this invocation of revolutionary war we easily see Lenin’s familiar scenario of inspiring class leadership, now applied on an international scale.
The manifest duty of socialists everywhere was therefore to ‘turn the imperialist war into a civil war’ – that is, to use the crisis caused by the war in order to accelerate the revolution on a national and international scale. But, as Lenin observed with horror, a large majority of European socialist leaders had reneged on this duty when they supported their own government’s war effort. Lenin already believed that ‘opportunism’ – the deluded hope that socialism could be achieved other than by class revolution – was an insidiously powerful force in the European Social Democratic parties. Majority socialist support for the war convinced him that the rot of opportunism had infected Social Democracy at its core. In a Bolshevik manifesto drafted by Lenin in October 1914 he announced ‘with deepest sorrow’ that ‘the most influential socialist leaders’ had ‘defamed socialism’. Their conduct inspired ‘a burning feeling of shame’, because they ‘dishonoured the banner’ of revolutionary Social Democracy.4
According to many writers on Lenin the shock of socialist betrayal in 1914 kicked off a process of rethinking that led to the rejection of what he had earlier considered to be Marxist orthodoxy. According to Lenin himself it was not he who had changed but the others. He insisted that the vision of a world in revolution that I have just outlined was part and parcel of a universal consensus among pre-war revolutionary Marxists. Thus comments such as this one are a constant feature of his wartime rhetoric: ‘there is no need here for us to prove that the objective conditions in Western Europe are ripe for a socialist revolution; this was admitted before the war by all influential socialists in all advanced countries’.5
Lenin presented himself not as a bold innovator or a fearless rethinker but as someone faithful to the old verities – as the socialist leader who kept his head while all about him were losing theirs. This is how he could walk off the train in Bern in September 1914 and start agitating that very day on the basis of a platform that remained unchanged until the outbreak of the Russian revolution in spring 1917. This is how he had the amazing self-assurance to defy the entire socialist establishment in the name of Marxist orthodoxy.
The emotional content of Lenin’s politics during this period cannot be understand without grasping his ferocious anger at the way that socialist leaders reneged on their own word. For Lenin one of the most glaring examples of this behaviour – an example he recalled again and again – was the refusal to honour the declaration issued by the Basel International Congress of 1912. There, in solemn conclave assembled, the representatives of European Social Democratic parties had resolved that in the event of war, Social Democrats would ‘use the economic and political crisis created by the war to rouse the masses and thereby hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule’.6
Lenin had a personal relation to the mandate of the Basel Congress, since he himself, along with Rosa Luxemburg and L. Martov, had been instrumental in adding a similar pledge to a resolution passed by an earlier international socialist congress in 1907. This personal connection was just one more reason why Lenin saw the Basel Manifesto of 1912 as an expression of Social Democratic consensus, as a summary of ‘millions and millions of proclamations, newspaper articles, books, speeches of the socialists of all countries’ from the entire epoch of the Second International (the international socialist organization that united the main socialist parties from the mid-1890s to 1914). ‘To brush aside the Basel Manifesto means to brush aside the whole history of socialism.’7
Lenin blamed ‘opportunism’ for this betrayal and his feelings found expression in an emotional call for purification: ‘The European war has done much good to international socialism in that it has disclosed the whole extent of the rottenness, vileness, and meanness in opportunism, and thereby has given a wonderful stimulus for purging the worker movement of the dung which had accumulated during the decades of the peaceful epoch.’8 Many European socialists were taken aback by Lenin’s purificatory zeal. A French socialist who supported his country’s war effort, Solomon Grumbach, no doubt spoke for many:
In speaking of [Lenin and Zinoviev] we deal with the Grand Inquisitors of the International, who fortunately lack the power of carrying out their ideas, for otherwise Europe would have known many more funeral pyres and quite a few of us would have been seared over a slow fire to the accompaniment of Leninist hymns on the ‘only true Leninist socialism’ and would have thrown into the hell of socialist traitors as lost filthy-bourgeois-chauvinist-nationalist-social-patriotic souls.9