One of the key figures behind the Vilno Programme was the 22 year-old Marxist revolutionary Julius Martov. Although the basic ideas were those of the older Praktiki (practical men) Kremer and Gozhansky, Martov wrote them up in a pamphlet called On Agitation. The pamphlet quickly “acquired the status of a handbook of social-democratic action”.20 For the first time it placed the politically conscious worker at the centre of events, rather than as the recipient of academic wisdom handed down to him by bourgeois intellectuals. Its goal was to link political analysis to the everyday needs of the urban worker, and by doing so “destroy his faith in a paternalist employer and his subservience to a paternalist state, and to turn him into a conscious and organised enemy of both”.21 To achieve this, revolutionaries should immerse themselves in the life of the worker in factory, dock or train yard, and be acutely aware of specific industrial struggles around pay and conditions.
In taking concrete steps to implement such a programme, Martov was far ahead of the other Marxists in St Petersburg and Moscow still sunk in the academic grind of the “study circles”. In the aftermath of the 1891 famine even Plehkanov had argued for a shift of political work to agitation. In On the Tasks of Socialists During the Famine in Russia he wrote that Marxists must take up demands of more immediate relevance to the working classes, and “all–even the most backward workers–will be clearly convinced that the carrying out of socialist measures is of value to the working class”.22 At the time the Marxists of St Petersburg ignored his call. It was in the heavily Jewish parts of the Russian Empire such as Poland and Lithuania that it found a receptive audience, where working-class trade union organisation was far in advance of St Petersburg. Even in 1907, two years after the revolution of 1905, only 7% of St Petersburg’s workers were organised in trade unions, whereas in Vilno it was 24%, in Minsk between 25-40%, and in Gomel over 40%.23
In 1893 Martov moved to St Petersburg, where he met other young Marxists, amongst whom was a brilliant lawyer from Samara named Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. Under the influence of the Vilno Programme this small group formed the Combat Union for the Emancipation of the Working Class, formerly an adherent of the Emancipation of Labour Group. Ulyanov begun to emulate Martov and was soon writing strike leaflets and providing legal advice to workers and their families.
From 1893 to 1896 the Combat Union established trust and a certain level of leadership with workers in some of the huge factory complexes in the city, such as the Thornton wool factory and Putilov engineering works, and were one of the contributory factors to the strikes that convulsed the city at that time.24 In May 1896 a strike of spinners and weavers in the city, prompted by the refusal of factory owners to pay workers for the days lost to mark the new Tsar’s Coronation, drew in 35,000 workers. It spread to encompass the entire city and led to the government’s reluctant concession of a maximum 11.5-hour day.
Retribution was swift. The Okhrana (the secret police) arrested the leaders of the Combat Union, who were sentenced to internal exile. The well-connected and moderately wealthy Ulyanov used his family name to ensure he was exiled to the “Italian Siberia” of Minusinsk, where he was a local celebrity and was kept well-informed of political developments. Using the library and resources of the town doctor he wrote his first substantial Marxist work, The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), in which he utterly rejected Voronstov’s thesis that Russia could avoid capitalism and argued that the Russian economy, rural as well as urban, was already well embarked on a process of capitalist accumulation. Martov, meanwhile, was singled out for harsher treatment and spent his three years at Turukhansk in the sub-Arctic Circle. Both men learnt the hard way that no serious revolutionary movement could be conducted by leaders who could be arrested at any moment. Upon their release in 1900, Martov and Ulyanov left Russia to join the leaders of the Emancipation of Labour Group in Geneva.
Although there were differences of personality between the older leaders Plekhanov, Vera Zazulich and Pavel Axelrod, and the younger activists Martov, Ulyanov and Alexander Potresov, they agreed that the essential first step was the creation and regular dissemination of a party newspaper. In 1900-01, with help from activists and correspondents inside Russia, they set up this newspaper, with the intention that it would help bring all Russian Marxists together into one united Social Democratic Party. They called it Iskra–Russian for “Spark”. On 24th December, 1901 the first issue was printed in Munich. In January 1902, after much hard work and clandestine organising, Iskra arrived in Russia and was widely distributed in the larger cities and towns. The Spark was ignited.
CHAPTER TWO
Mensheviks and Bolsheviks
By 1901, much of the Marxist programme as explained by Marx, Engels and Plekhanov was looking outdated. In Western Europe class struggle had assumed different forms, and in Russia more relevant alternatives were about to arise. The 1890s saw the formation of various revolutionary Marxist groups in Russia, primarily but not exclusively in St Petersburg. These were the froth on a churning sea of labour struggle, particularly the great strike wave of 1896-97, which found its theoretical expression in what came to be known as “Economism”. This advocated the solution of working-class oppression through reforms dragged out of the state by political and industrial campaigning instead of as an offshoot of revolutionary activity. It was not, initially, nonor anti-Marxist in the manner of, for example, the British labour movement. On the contrary, it flowed from the work of Marxist theorists such as Nikolai Berdyaev, Mikhail Turgan-Baranovsky and, most significantly, Peter Struve, who had drafted the initial programme of the Russian Social Democrats in 1898.
These were termed “Legal Marxists” because they lived legally, i.e. not under aliases and not as part of an underground network. They were primarily economists who had reached similar conclusions as Bernstein about Marx’s analysis of capitalism. Struve, whom Lenin held in high regard because he praised and prioritised capitalist industrial development over the “popular production” theories of Vorontsov, later became an intellectual ringmaster for Russian liberalism. Had Russian society democratised in the manner of British, French and German society in the 19th and early-20th century, these trends would undoubtedly have led to the growth of a major trade union movement and Labour Party. Instead, 1901 saw the creation of a radical political party as significant as the RSDLP, which for the first twenty years of the 20th century spoke for the majority of Russia’s population in a way that the Bolsheviks did not.
The Socialist Revolutionary Party (known as the Socialist Revolutionaries, or SRs) was formed from a number of neo-populist agrarian socialist bodies, the most important of which was the Northern Union of Socialist Revolutionaries. Inheritors of the Narodnik mantle, they adapted the Narodnik programme to make it attractive not just to the peasantry but to the semi-urbanised, seasonal proletariat. The SRs began to coalesce in the 1890s after exiled Narodniks such as Catherine Breshkovsky, Mark Natanson and Gregory Greshuni returned to European Russia. The party’s primary theorist and leader, Victor Chernov, is the great “lost leader” and neglected historical actor of the Russian Revolution.