No single class in history has ever attained mastery unless it has produced political leaders, its leading representatives, capable of organizing the movement and leading it.… It is necessary to prepare men who devote to the revolution not only their free evenings, but their entire lives.†
Now, inasmuch as workers have to earn a living, they cannot devote “their entire lives” to the revolutionary movement, which means that it follows from Lenin’s premise that the leadership of the worker’s cause has to fall on the shoulders of the socialist intelligentsia. This notion subverts the very principle of democracy: the will of the people is not what the living people want but what their “true” interests, as defined by their betters, are said to be.
Having deviated from Social-Democracy on the issue of labor, Lenin required little effort to break with it over the issue of the “bourgeoisie.” Observing the emergence of a vigorous and independent liberal movement, soon to coalesce in the Union of Liberation, Lenin lost faith in the ability of the poorer and less influential socialists to exercise “hegemony” over their “bourgeois” allies. In December 1900, following stormy meetings with Struve over the terms of liberal collaboration with Iskra. Lenin concluded that it was futile to expect the liberals to concede to the socialists leadership in the struggle against the autocracy: they would fight on their own and for their own non-revolutionary objectives, exploiting the revolutionaries to this end.53 The “liberal bourgeoisie” was waging a spurious struggle against the monarchy and, therefore, constituted a “counterrevolutionary” class.54 His rejection of the progressive role of the “bourgeoisie” signified a reversion to his previous People’s Will position and completed his break with Social-Democracy.
Having concluded that industrial labor was inherently non-revolutionary, indeed “bourgeois,” and the bourgeoisie “counterrevolutionary,” Lenin had two choices open to him. One was to give up the idea of revolution. This, however, he could not do, for the psychological reasons spelled out earlier: revolution to him was not the means to an end but the end itself. The other choice was to carry out a revolution from above, by conspiracy and coup d’état, without regard for the wishes of the masses. Lenin chose the latter course. In July 1917 he would write:
… in times of revolution it is not enough to ascertain the “will of the majority”—no, one must be stronger at the decisive moment in the decisive place and win. Beginning with the medieval “peasant war” in Germany … until 1905, we see countless instances of how the better-organized, more conscious, better-armed minority imposed its will on the majority and conquered it.55
The model of the party organization which was to accomplish this task Lenin adopted directly from the People’s Will. The Narodovol’tsy had been very secretive about the structure and operations of their party, and to this day much about this subject remains obscure.56 Lenin, however, had managed to acquire much firsthand knowledge from conversations with ex-Narodovol’tsy while living in Kazan and Samara. The People’s Will was structured hierarchically and operated in a quasi-military manner. Unlike Land and Freedom, its parent organization, it rejected the principle of equality of members, replacing it with a command structure, at the head of which stood the all-powerful Executive Committee. To qualify for membership in the Executive Committee, one had not only to subscribe unquestioningly to its program but also devote oneself body and soul to its cause: “Every member,” the committee’s statutes read, “must unconditionally place all his talents, resources, connections, sympathies and antipathies, and even his life at the disposal of the organization.”57 The decisions of the Executive Committee, reached by majority vote, were binding on all members. These were chosen by co-optation. Serving under the committee were specialized organs, including a Military Organization, and regional or “vassal” branches: the latter had to carry out its instructions without demurrer. Because the members of the Executive Committee were full-time revolutionaries, most of them had to live on money that the party obtained from well-wishers.
Lenin took over these organizational principles and practices in toto. Discipline, professionalism, and hierarchical organization were all a legacy from the People’s Will which he sought to inject into the Social-Democratic Party and, when the effort failed, imposed on his own Bolshevik faction. In 1904 he asserted that “the organizational principle of revolutionary Social-Democracy strives to proceed from the top downward” and requires the parts or branches to subordinate themselves to the party’s central organ58—language which could have come from the statutes of the People’s Will.
Lenin, however, departed from the practices of the People’s Will in two important respects. The Narodnaia Volia, although hierarchically organized, did not allow for personal leadership: its Executive Committee functioned collegially. This was also the theoretical basis of the Bolshevik Central Committee (which had no formal chairman), but in practice Lenin completely dominated proceedings and it rarely took major decisions without his approval. Second, the People’s Will did not intend to become the government of a Russia liberated from tsarism: its mission was to end with the convocation of a Constituent Assembly.59 For Lenin, by contrast, the overthrow of autocracy was only a prelude to the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” managed by his party.
Lenin popularized his views in What Is to Be Done?, published in March 1902. The book brought up to date and garbed in Social-Democratic vocabulary the ideas of the People’s Will. Here Lenin called for the creation of a disciplined, centralized party composed of full-time, professional revolutionaries dedicated to the overthrow of the tsarist regime. He dismissed the notion of party “democracy” as well as the belief that the labor movement would, in the course of its natural development, carry out a popular revolution: the labor movement on its own was capable only of trade unionism. Socialism and revolutionary zeal had to be injected into labor from the outside: “consciousness” had to prevail over “spontaneity.” Because the working class was a minority in Russia, Russian Social-Democrats had to involve the other classes in the struggle as temporary allies. What Is to Be Done? overturned, in the name of orthodox Marxism, the basic tenets of Marxist doctrine and rejected the democratic element of Social-Democracy. Nevertheless, it made an immense impression on Russian socialist intellectuals among whom the older traditions of the People’s Will remained alive and who were growing impatient with the dilatory tactics advocated by Plekhanov, Akselrod, and Martov. Then, as later, in 1917, much of Lenin’s appeal derived from the fact that he spelled out in plain language and translated into programs of action the ideas which his socialist rivals, lacking the courage of their convictions, hedged with countless qualifications.
Lenin’s unorthodox theses became the subject of intense controversy in 1902–3, as the Social-Democrats were making preparations for the forthcoming Second Congress of the party—a congress which, its name notwithstanding, was to be the party’s founding gathering. Quarrels broke out in which ideological differences fused with and often masked personal struggles over leadership. Lenin, supported by Plekhanov, called for a more centralized organization in which the rank and file would be subservient to the center, while Martov, the future leader of the Mensheviks, wanted a looser structure, offering admission to anyone who gave “the party regular personal cooperation, under the direction of one of the party organizations.”60