In Lenin’s view Social Democracy represented not rejection of but rather connection with the earlier Russian revolutionary tradition. The Social Democratic strategy was what the Russian revolutionaries had been groping toward, through heroic mistakes and suffering. It was the answer to the problem that his older brother had tried, and failed, to solve. As we shall see in the next chapter much hard work by a whole generation of Social Democratic activists, many ups and downs, many internal controversies, were needed to make his life-defining wager on his heroic scenario begin to pay off.
Lenin announced his new political identity to the world in the first half of 1894 by writing a book of several hundred pages entitled Who are These ‘Friends of the People’ and How Do They Fight Against the Social Democrats?. In what turned out to be very typical fashion, Lenin’s exposition of his vision of Russian Social Democracy came in the form of an angry polemic against the ‘philistines’ who attacked it. The phrase ‘friends of the people’ was a self-description of Russian populists such as Mikhailovsky, used ironically by Lenin. Friends of the People was Lenin’s first publication, albeit an illegal one. For a long time, all copies of it were presumed missing. When two-thirds of it showed up in 1923 Lenin’s companions and first biographers – Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Krupskaya – were thrilled. They saw Friends of the People as proof that right at the start of his career Lenin had acquired the essentials of the world-view that guided him for the rest of his life – and they were right.
Lenin Unfurls his Banner
The banners that were unfurled in the street demonstrations by Social Democratic workers both in Russia and Europe became a central icon of the socialist movement. To appear in public under a banner with a revolutionary slogan was the essential militant act. The image of the banner was an extremely important one for Lenin himself. It was more than just a figure of speech found littered throughout his writings – it was a metaphor that focused his conception of revolutionary politics. The banner announced to the world who you were and what you were fighting for. The implied narrative summarized in the slogans on the banner inspired your own fighters and rallied others to the cause. The banner signified the moral unity of the fighters that made possible their effective organization. Like the flag for a patriotic citizen, the waving banner with its militant message summed up all the emotional warmth that gave life to the dry bones of Marxist theory.
By 1894 Lenin had worked out the heroic scenario which in formed his entire political career. He summed up this scenario in the last sentence of Friends of the People. The original edition (illegally published by the primitive hectograph method) shows the prominence accorded to these final words. When Friends of the People was rediscovered in the 1920s Lenin’s long-time comrade Grigorii Zinoviev was particularly taken with Lenin’s final sentence: ‘These words, written almost thirty years ago, sound as if they had been written today.’25 Indeed, Lenin’s long and carefully crafted sentence unfurled the banner under which he was to march for the rest of his life:
When the advanced representatives of this class assimilate the ideas of scientific socialism and the idea of the historical role of the Russian worker – when these ideas receive a broad dissemination – when durable organisations are created among the workers that transform the present uncoordinated economic war of the workers into a purposive class struggle, – then the Russian WORKER, elevated to the head of all democratic elements, will overthrow absolutism and lead the RUSSIAN PROLETARIAT (side by side with the proletariat of ALL COUNTRIES) by the direct road of open political struggle to THE VICTORIOUS COMMUNIST REVOLUTION.26
Lenin’s sentence sketches out a world-historical drama starting in Russia in the 1890s and ending with the victorious communist revolution. This drama can be divided into three acts, with each act unified by a single task that has to be accomplished before the curtain rises for the next act. Remarkably enough, Lenin lived to see this entire drama played out, albeit accompanied with the shortfalls, ironies and frustrations that life usually hands out. Each decade of his thirty-year revolutionary career corresponds to one act of the drama – and one chapter of this book (the tumultuous final decade gets two chapters).
Act One, The Creation of Russian Social Democracy: ‘When the advanced representatives of this class assimilate the ideas of scientific socialism, the idea of the historical role of the Russian worker – when these ideas receive a broad dissemination – when durable organisations are created among the workers that transform the present uncoordinated economic war of the workers into a purposive class struggle…’
Act One tells the story of the creation of a Russian version of a Social Democratic party that is genuinely and effectively engaged in bringing what Marx called ‘knowledge and combination’ to the workers, despite being forced underground by tsarist repression. For Lenin, this act of the drama took place during the years 1894–1904.
The emotional content of Act One can be seen in Walter Crane’s poster of the Angel of Socialism. This poster was originally published in England in 1885, but Russianized (with the artist’s consent) in 1902 by Russian émigrés living in London – just as Lenin’s Act One is a Russian version of a process that (as Kautsky and others taught him) had already taken place in other countries. Instead of the original text of ‘Religious Hypocrisy, Capitalism, Party Politics’, the wings of the vampire bat in the Russian version say: ‘Bureaucracy, Church, Capital, Autocracy’. The bat is gnawing the vitals of the sleeping worker (identified as ‘labour’) who is unaware of what is happening. An angel blows a trumpet to open his eyes and to invite him to fight back under a banner that reads ‘socialism’. International Social Democracy saw itself in no less exalted terms. Its mission was to imbue the workers with a sense of their own mission.
Act Two, The Democratic Revolution: ‘then the Russian WORKER, elevated to the head of all democratic elements, will overthrow absolutism…’
Act Two presents the struggle to bring political freedom to Russia by revolutionary overthrow of the tsar. This struggle was Lenin’s central concern in the years 1904 to 1914. Bolshevism emerged in Russia during this decade as a distinct current within Social Democracy, defined by a specific strategy for bringing political freedom to Russia – a strategy based squarely on Lenin’s heroic scenario of the working class leading the narod. In Lenin’s banner sentence the narod is given the label ‘democratic elements’. This bit of Marxist jargon means all those who want an anti-tsarism revolution enough to really fight for it. In Lenin’s mind the main ‘democratic elements’ were the urban workers and the narod.
The emotional meaning of this episode is shown in a later poster by Walter Crane, created specifically at the request of Russian Social Democrats in London – just as Lenin’s Act Two concerns a specifically Russian task not faced by Social Democracy in Europe. In contrast to the worker in the previous poster, the central figure here has awakened and filed through the chains that kept him from acting. He looks with grim determination at the crowned eagle of tsarism that has dug its claws into him. The worker has unfurled his banner: ‘Down with Autocracy! Long live Freedom and Socialism!’ The eagle is taken aback, but obviously the struggle will be difficult. In the background a crowd of militant workers and peasants (is that a hammer or an axe that is being held aloft?), under streaming banners, are moving toward the fight.