It is completely anachronistic to see Lenin assuming in 1902 that the party could accomplish its task only if it had control of the state and a monopoly of propaganda. His idea of an effective party in 1902 was an organisation that was efficient enough to publish and distribute a national underground newspaper in regular fashion and that was surrounded by a core of activists who were inspired by and could inspire others with the good news of Social Democracy. Thus the key sentence in What Is To Be Done? is: 'You brag about your practicality and you don't see (a fact known to any Russianpraktik) what miracles for the revolutionary cause can be brought about not only by a circle but by a lone individual.'[354]
Given later events, it is difficult to remember that a central plank in the Iskra platform was the crucial importance of political liberties. Iskra insisted to other socialists that achieving political liberty had to be an urgent priority. It insisted to other anti-tsarist revolutionaries that only proletarian leadership in the revolution would ensure the maximum achievable amount of political liberty. They drummed home in their propaganda and agitation the vital importance of what might be called the four S's: svoboda slova, sobraniia, stachek, freedom of speech, assembly and strikes. The Social Democratic narrative absolutely required these freedoms to operate.
Overthrowing the autocracy was a national task that would advance the interests of almost every group in Russian society. Following the logic of the Social Democracy class narrative, Iskra assumed that a socialist party could and should assume the leadership role in achieving democracy. They engaged in a complicated political strategy whereby they supported anti-tsarist liberals, fought with the liberals for the loyalty of the non-elite classes and tried to make the non-elite classes aware of the necessity of winning as much political liberty as possible in the upcoming revolution.
Iskra conducted the usual Social Democratic two-front polemical war. The prominence of What Is To Be Done? means that we see only one front of the war, namely, the attack against the 'economists' who allegedly wanted to keep the workers aloof from the great merger. In Iskra's activity (and in Lenin's writings) as a whole during this period, the other front in the war was just as prominent or even more so: the attack against the terrorists who allegedly believed that an organised mass worker movement was a pipe dream that would only delay the revolution.
After 1903, the Iskra organisation broke up into two Social Democratic factions. The Menshevik/Bolshevik split has achieved mythic status as the place where two roads diverged and taking one rather than the other made all the difference. Counter-intuitive as it may seem, the Menshevik leaders originally dismissed Lenin as someone who put too high a priority on achieving political liberties, who would allow Social Democracy to be exploited by bourgeois revolutionaries and who neglected the specifically socialist task of instilling hostility between worker and capitalist.
Similarly, Bolshevism prior to the First World War can almost be defined as the Social Democratic faction most fanatically insistent on the importance of political liberties. Lenin's precepts were: Don't be satisfied with bourgeois leadership of the bourgeois revolution because the liberals will not push the revolution to achieve its maximum gains. Don't be satisfied with the meagre liberties provided by the post-1905 Stolypin regime. Search for the most radically democratic allies among the non-elite classes. Preserve at all costs a party base in the illegal underground that is the only space in Russia for truly free speech.
The class narrative in a time of troubles
In 1914 a group of Bolsheviks - the party's representatives in the national legislative Duma - met to compare impressions about the stunning news that the German SPD had voted in favour of war credits for the German government. This news shook them profoundly because 'all Social Democrats had "learned from the Germans" how to be socialists'. The deputies agreed on one thing: the erstwhile model party had betrayed revolutionary socialism.[355]
Six years later, at the Second Congress of the Third International, another party presented itself as an international modeclass="underline" the Bolsheviks themselves. This new Bolshevik model, profoundly marked by the intervening six years of war and civil war, could not have been predicted from knowledge of pre-war Bolshevism. A party that had put the achievement of 'bourgeois democracy' in Russia at the centre of its political strategy now angrily rejected bourgeois democracy and all its works. A party that had propagandised the crucial importance of political liberties had become notorious for dictatorial repression and a state monopoly of mass media.
And yet, despite all these changes, the Bolsheviks claimed to remain loyal to the old class narrative - indeed, they claimed to be the only loyal ones. Bolshevism as a factor in world history - as an alternative model for a socialist party and as the constitutive myth of the Soviet Union - was based on the Social Democratic class narrative as it emerged from the severe and distorting impact of an era of world crisis.
Three major developments influenced the new version of the class narrative. The first was the sense of betrayal by Western Social Democracy. The Western European party leaders had announced in solemn convocation that they would make war impossible by using the threat of revolution - and now they not only refused to make good on this threat but turned into cheerleaders for their respective national war machines! The next influence was the apocalyptic world war. The adjective is hardly too strong: the war seemed to the Bolsheviks to present mankind with a choice between socialism and the collapse of civilisation.
The third influence was the Bolshevik experience as a ruling party. The Bolsheviks understood the October Revolution as the onset of the central episode ofthe class narrative-the long-awaited proletarian conquest ofpower. All their experiences in power were deeply informed by this narrative framework. In turn, the rigours and emergencies ofthe civil-war period modified their understanding of the framework. Just as fundamentally, the very concept of a class in power was discovered in practice to contain a host of hitherto unsuspected consequences and implications.
The experience of being a ruling party responsible for all of society meant dealing with other classes. This necessity intensified a fear already latent in the class narrative - the fear of becoming infected by contact with other classes and losing the proletarian qualities needed to accomplish the great mission. A group often hailed as the conscience of the party, the Worker Opposition of 1920-1, was also the one that most energetically followed out the resulting logic of purge, purification and suspicion.
When the Bolsheviks closed down the bourgeois and even the socialist press, they shocked many socialists into realising their own commitment to 'bourgeois democracy'. The short-term justification was that coercion was needed to complete any revolution, as shown by the record of bourgeois revolutions. This argument was not as fateful as the decision to create an exclusive state monopoly of the mass media. This decision paradoxically had strong roots in the pre-war class narrative. The central reasonthat Social Democracy required freedom of speech was to be able to raise the consciousness of its worker constituency, and Social Democrats had always envied the tools of indoctrination at the command of the elite classes. If one mark of an SPD-type party was the massive effort to inculcate an alternative culture, then one possible path for an SPD-type party in power was to create what has been called the 'propaganda state'. Grigorii Zinoviev explained why the Bolsheviks chose this path:
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A. G. Shliapnikov