The Second Congress convened in Brussels in July 1903; it was attended by forty-three voting delegates, authorized to cast fifty-one votes.* All but four of the participants, said to have been workers, belonged to the intelligentsia. Martov, leading the opposition to Lenin, regularly won majorities, but when he joined with his rival to deny the Jewish Bund autonomous status in the party and the five Bundists walked out, followed by the two Economist delegates, he temporarily lost his majority. Lenin promptly exploited the opportunity to seize control of the Central Committee and secure a dominant voice in its organ, Iskra. His ruthless methods and intrigues on this occasion caused a great deal of bad blood between him and the other leaders of the party. Although every effort was made then and subsequently to preserve a façade of unity, the split in fact became irreparable, not so much because of ideological differences, which could have been reconciled, but from personal animosities. Lenin seized the moment to claim for his faction the name Bolshevik, meaning “majority.” This name he retained even after he found himself in a minority, which occurred soon after the Second Congress. It gave him the advantage of appearing as the leader of the more popular branch of the party. Throughout he maintained the pose of being the only “orthodox” Marxist, which had considerable appeal in a country whose religious tradition viewed orthodoxy as the supreme virtue and dissent as apostasy.
The next two years of the party’s history (1903–5) were filled with vicious intrigues that are of small interest except for the light they cast on the personalities involved. Lenin was determined to subordinate the party to his will; failing that, he was prepared to create, under the party’s cover, a parallel organization under his personal control. By the end of 1904, he had, in effect, his own party with its own rump “Central Committee” called “Bureau of the Committees of the Party Majority.” For this action, he was expelled from the legitimate Central Committee.61 The technique of subverting legitimate institutions in which he was in a minority, by forming unauthorized, parallel, identically named organizations packed with his adherents, Lenin would apply in 1917–18 to other centers of power, notably the soviets.
By the time the 1905 Revolution broke out, the Bolshevik organization was in place:
a disciplined order of professional committee men, grouped around a band of conspirators who were all linked by personal allegiance to their chieftain, Lenin, and ready to follow him in any adventure, as long as his leadership appeared sufficiently radical and extreme.62
Lenin’s opponents accused him of Jacobinism: Trotsky noted that, like the Jacobins, the Leninists feared mass “spontaneity.”63 Unperturbed by such accusations, Lenin proudly claimed the title of Jacobin for himself.64 Akselrod thought Leninism was not even Jacobinism but “a very simple copy or caricature of the bureaucratic-autocratic system of our Minister of the Interior.”65
Neither the Bolsheviks nor the Mensheviks exerted much influence on the course of the 1905 Revolution, at any rate, until its concluding phase. The violence of 1905 caught the Social-Democrats by surprise and most of that year they had to confine themselves to issuing proclamations and fomenting the unrest which raged beyond their control. It was only in October 1905, with the formation of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, that the Mensheviks could assume a more active role in a revolution until then dominated by liberal personalities and liberal programs.
Lenin was not directly involved in these events, for unlike Trotsky and Parvus, he preferred to observe them from the safety of Switzerland; he judged it prudent to return to Russia only in early November, following the proclamation of political amnesty. He thought that January 1905 marked the onset of a general revolution in Russia. While the initial impetus came from the liberal “bourgeoisie,” this class was certain to capitulate somewhere along the way and strike a deal with tsarism. It was imperative, therefore, for the Social-Democrats to take charge and lead the workers to full victory.
Although Lenin always had a predilection for what Martov called “anarcho-blanquism,”66 he had to have a theoretical justification for his program of action. This he found in a seminal essay by Parvus, written in January 1905 under the immediate impact of Bloody Sunday. Parvus’s theory of “uninterrupted” (or “permanent”) revolution provided a happy compromise between the orthodox Russian Social-Democratic doctrine of a two-phase revolution in which a distinct phase of “bourgeois” rule preceded socialism, and the anarchist theory of “direct assault,” which Lenin preferred temperamentally but was unable to reconcile with Marxism. Parvus allowed for a “bourgeois” phase, but insisted on no interval separating it from the socialist phase, which would get underway concurrently.* Under this scheme, once the anti-autocratic revolution broke out, the “proletariat” (meaning the Social-Democratic Party) would immediately proceed to take power. The justification for this theory was that Russia lacked a radicalized lower middle class which in Western Europe had supported and encouraged the bourgeoisie. In its exposed position, the Russian bourgeoisie would never allow the revolution to come to fruition but would stop it “halfway.” The socialists had to prepare and organize the masses for the civil war that would follow the fall of tsarism. One of the prerequisites of success was for the party to keep an identity distinct from its allies: “fight together, but march apart.” Parvus’s conception had great influence on Russian Social-Democrats, notably Lenin and Trotsky: “For the first time in the history of the Russian movement, the thesis was advanced that the proletariat should at once grasp for political power and … form a provisional government.”67
Lenin initially rejected Parvus’s theory, as he was in the habit of doing whenever anyone challenged, with a new idea or tactic, his primacy in the movement. But he soon came around. In September 1905 he echoed Parvus:
… immediately after the democratic revolution we will begin to proceed, to the extent that our strength allows it … to the socialist revolution. We favor an uninterrupted [nepreryvnaia] revolution. We will not stop halfway.†
The socialist revolution, in Lenin’s view, could take only one form: armed insurrection. To learn the strategy and tactics of urban guerrilla warfare, he assiduously studied its history: among his authorities were the memoirs of Gustave Cluseret, the military commander of the Paris Commune. What he learned, he passed on to his followers in Russia. In October 1905, he advised them to form “Detachments of the Revolutionary Army,” whose members should equip themselves with a
gun, revolver, bomb, knife, brass knuckles, stick, rag soaked in kerosene to start fires, rope or rope ladder, shovel to build barricades, slab of guncotton, barbed wire, nails (against cavalry), and so forth.… Even without weapons the detachments can play a serious role by (1) leading the crowd; (2) attacking an ordinary Cossack who has gotten separated from his unit (as has happened in Moscow) and disarming him; (3) rescuing those who have been arrested or wounded, if the police force is very weak; (4) mounting to the rooftops and upper stories of houses, etc., and throwing stones at the troops, pouring boiling water on them, etc.… The killing of spies, policemen, gendarmes, the blowing up of police stations …68
One aspect of the armed struggle was terrorism. Although the Bolsheviks nominally adhered to the Social-Democratic platform, which rejected terrorism, in practice they engaged in terrorist acts both on their own and in collaboration with the SRs, including the Maximalists. These operations were, as a rule, organized in secret, but on occasion they openly exhorted their followers to terrorism. Thus, in August 1906, citing the example of the Polish Socialist Party, which had gunned down policemen in Warsaw, they urged attacks on “spies, active supporters of the Black Hundreds, police, army and navy officers, and the like.”*