As a result, throughout the 1905 Revolution the Mensheviks were the prime representative of the Russian proletariat and the leadingx Marxist theory dictated. The RSDLP conference of April-May 1905 (which the Bolsheviks boycotted) grappled with this problem. It declared that in principle it was not opposed to an armed uprising of the masses but it stressed that before it could be attempted more propaganda and educational work needed to be done. It adopted Martov’s strategy of calling for “a network of organs of revolutionary self-government throughout Russia in the hope that these would ultimately amass enough strength to launch an assault on the central government”.13
Some Mensheviks even began to consider whether Russia might transcend a bourgeois revolution and proceed straight to a socialist one. In Russia, those Mensheviks closest to the St Petersburg Soviet–Trotsky, Theodore Dan and Alexander Martynov–created a new newspaper, Nachalo, which was far more militant than the Bolshevik paper and published articles which prefigured the theory of “Permanent Revolution”. This led to differences with Axelrod and Martov, who whilst committed to revolutionary activity to overthrow autocracy were not willing to forego the central precept of Marxism, i.e. that the relations of production of a bourgeois capitalist system must be fully developed before it could begin a transition to socialism.
The Bolsheviks were even more confused. What Is To Be Done?, the bible on which the “hards” around Lenin had taken their stand in the split of 1903, had let them down. Worse, the Mensheviks were in the vanguard of a working class that had not waited for instruction or guidance from either faction of the RSDLP. The St Petersburg Bolshevik Committee passed a resolution condemning the Soviet and stating that it would “hold back the proletariat at a primitive level of development”. Some members advocated joining it and then “exploding the Soviet from within”.14 As late as October 1905, when the Soviet was clearly the centre of working-class resistance to the autocracy, Alexander Bogdanov, the senior Bolshevik at the time after Lenin, insisted the Soviet accept the Bolshevik programme and submit itself to the Bolshevik Central Committee. When the Bolshevik delegate Krasikov put this to the Soviet, “the debate was very brief” and it dismissed the proposal with contempt. Just before Lenin returned to Russia in November 1905, the Bolshevik paper Novaya Zhizn published an article on the Soviets. It conceded that whilst social democrats might support the Soviet as an executive organ of working-class activity, they “must now no less vigorously combat all attempts on its part to become the political leader of the working class”. That role was reserved for the party alone.15
Lenin himself now shifted his position. In an article the editors of Novaya Zhizn refused to publish he acknowledged the Soviet as “the embryo of a provisional revolutionary government” and suggested that the party should not be counter-posed to the Soviet. In this he was groping his way to a fresh, final conception of the 1905 Revolution. This would not lead, in his view, to a progressive bourgeois regime but to what he called a “revolutionary democratic-dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry”. This reflected Lenin’s belated recognition of the potentialities of a revolution that he admitted the Bolsheviks had misjudged.
Writers such as Liebman and Lih have argued that under the pressure of the events of 1905 and the creation of the Soviets, Lenin demonstrated his innate creativity by jettisoning much that he had stood for up to that point and embracing the Soviets as the means through which to deliver socialism. In Liebman’s opinion this showcased Lenin’s “exceptional genius” and capacity to appreciate the “dialectical potentialities” of real life, in this case the obvious reality that the development of the 1905 Revolution contradicted the organisational strategy he had advocated only two years before. Yet at a separate Bolshevik Congress of April 1905 the overriding theme was the Bolsheviks’ deep suspicion of the Soviets. Faced with the reality of Bolshevik “committee-men” who had taken his every word to heart, Lenin wrote in frustration to a St Petersburg Bolshevik activist, “Take a lesson from the Mensheviks, for Christ’s sake!”16
Meanwhile, although the role of the Bolsheviks in the upheavals of 1905 was, in the opinion of E.H. Carr, “slight and undistinguished”,17 the Soviets–most especially the St Petersburg Soviet–plowed ahead with revolutionary activity. On 28th October it ordered that all shops and factories in St Petersburg be shut down or face “the people’s vengeance”. A few days later St Petersburg lay in darkness as electricity and telegraph systems were cut off and all courts, schools, restaurants and theaters were closed. With the German Kaiser offering him refuge and his chief advisors urging conciliation, Nicholas finally appointed Witte as Prime Minister.
For a brief period Witte held in his hands the concentrated power of the Tsar. He drew up and insisted the Tsar issue a proclamation known as the October Manifesto which, at least on paper, promised full civil and political liberties, an end to censorship, a consultative Duma (a Parliament) elected by universal male suffrage, and a Cabinet government under a still powerful but constitutional monarch. Nicholas had to declare that henceforth no laws emerging from his government, which would still be appointed by him, would be promulgated without the approval of the Duma. It was not the Constituent Assembly that Russian progressives had been demanding for decades, but it was a first step towards it.
The Soviet pressed on. It demanded a legally established eight-hour day, immediate pay rises in the industries of St Petersburg, an amnesty for all political prisoners and a promise of a full Constituent Assembly. A demonstration in the capital on 3rd November led to a bloody clash with the “Black Hundreds”, gangs of anti-left, anti-Semitic thugs who enjoyed the toleration of Court and police. On 8th November the naval base at Kronstadt, a socialist stronghold, mutinied and joined the Soviet. Tsarist forces arrived swiftly to crush it and after brief fighting the leaders of the rebellion faced summary execution. In solidarity the Soviet called another general strike.
Lenin was adamant that the working class should initiate its own revolution independent of bourgeois liberals who, he suspected, were content to stop at the October Manifesto and build from there. But it was not simply Lenin pushing for insurrection. The Mensheviks under Dan and Trotsky, intoxicated by the atmosphere of revolutionary defiance that animated the St Petersburg Soviet, also favoured armed revolt. It was a terrible misjudgment. The social democrats, with a few exceptions such as Martov and Axelrod, did not consider whether the mass of working people would actually support armed revolution, whether the military was sufficiently alienated from the regime to disobey its orders, or how an attempted insurrection immediately after the October Manifesto would splinter any prospect of a successful popular front in opposition to Tsarism.
For Lenin this was irrelevant. “To say that because we cannot win we should not stage an insurrection”, he wrote in November, “that is the talk of cowards”. Even before he returned to Russia he had written to the St Petersburg Bolshevik Committee: “Organise at once and everywhere fighting brigades among students, and particularly among workers. Let them arm themselves immediately with whatever weapons they can obtain–a knife, a revolver, a kerosene-soaked rag for setting fires”. Demanding “two to three hundred squads in St Petersburg in one to two months”, he urged,