In fact, even though the Mensheviks liked to identify themselves with the labor movement, both factions preferred to run the movement without worker interference: the Bolsheviks on principle, the Mensheviks in response to the facts of life.83 Martov correctly noted this phenomenon, but did not draw from it the obvious conclusion that in Russia a democratic socialist movement, run not only for the workers but also by them, was not feasible.
Given these similarities, one might have expected the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks to join forces. But this did not happen: notwithstanding spells of amity, the two drifted apart, fighting each other with all the passion of sectarians of the same faith. Lenin missed no opportunity to distance himself from the Mensheviks, castigating them as traitors to the cause of socialism and the interests of the working class.
This bitter animosity was due less to ideological than to personal reasons. By 1906, in the wake of the Revolution’s collapse, the Mensheviks agreed to adopt Lenin’s program calling for a centralized, disciplined, and conspirational party. Even their tactical views were not dissimilar. Both factions, for example, supported the abortive Moscow uprising of December 1905. In 1906, they were at one in condemning as a breach of party discipline the notion of a Workers’ Congress, advocated by Akselrod.84 Given the minute, often scholastic differences separating the two factions, the principal obstacle to reunification was Lenin’s overweening lust for power, which made it impossible to work with him in any capacity other than as a subordinate.
During the interval between 1905 and 1914, Lenin developed a revolutionary program that differed from that adopted by the other Social-Democrats in respect to two important issues: the peasantry and the ethnic minorities. The differences derived from the fact that whereas the Mensheviks thought in terms of solutions, Lenin’s concern was exclusively with tactics: he wished to identify and exploit sources of discontent for the purpose of promoting revolution. As we have noted, he had concluded even before 1905 that in view of the numerical insignificance in Russia of industrial workers, the Social-Democrats had to attract and lead into battle every group opposed to the autocracy, except for the “bourgeoisie,” which he considered “counterrevolutionary”: after the battle had been won, there would be time for settling accounts with these temporary allies.
The traditional view of the Social-Democrats concerning the peasantry, following that of Marx and Engels, held that with the possible exception of the landless proletariat, it was a reactionary (“petty bourgeois”) class.85 However, observing the behavior of Russian peasants during the agrarian disturbances of 1902 and even more in 1905 and noting the contribution which their assaults on landlord property had made to the capitulation of tsarism, Lenin concluded that the muzhik was a natural, if transitory, ally of the industrial worker. To attract him, the party had to go beyond its official agrarian program, which promised the peasants only supplementing the so-called otrezki, land which the 1861 Emancipation Edict had given them an option of taking free of charge but which constituted only a portion of what they needed. He learned much about the mentality of the Russian peasant from lengthy conversations with Gapon after his flight to Europe following Bloody Sunday: according to Krupskaia, Gapon was familiar with the needs of the peasantry and Lenin was so taken with him that he tried to convert him to socialism.86
From observations and talks, Lenin was led to the unorthodox opinion that the Social-Democrats had to promise the peasant all the landlord property, even if this meant reinforcing his “petty bourgeois,” “counterrevolutionary” proclivities: the SDs, in effect, had to adopt the agrarian program of the SRs. In his program the peasant now replaced the liberal “bourgeoisie” as the principal ally of the “proletariat.”87 At the “Third Congress” of his followers, he moved and passed a clause calling for peasant seizure of landlord property. After he had worked out the details, the Bolshevik program came out in favor of nationalizing all the land, private as well as communal, and transferring it for cultivation to the peasants. Lenin adhered to this program in the face of Plekhanov’s objections that the nationalization of land encouraged the “Chinese” traditions of Russian history which led the peasant to view land as state property. The agrarian platform, however, would prove of great value to the Bolsheviks in neutralizing the peasantry in late 1917 and early 1918, during the critical phase in the struggle for power.
Lenin’s agrarian program was endangered by Stolypin’s reforms, which promised (or threatened, depending on one’s viewpoint) to create a class of independent and conservative peasants. Ever the realist, Lenin wrote in April 1908 that if Stolypin’s agrarian reforms succeeded, the Bolsheviks might have to give up their agrarian platform:
It would be empty and stupid democratic phrase-mongering if we said that the success of such a policy is “impossible.” It is possible!… What if, despite the struggle of the masses, Stolypin’s policy survived long enough for the “Prussian” model to triumph? The agrarian order in Russia would turn completely bourgeois, the stronger peasants would seize nearly all the allotments of communal land, agriculture would become capitalist, and under capitalism no “solution” of the agrarian problem—radical or non-radical—would be possible.88
The statement suffers from a curious contradiction: since, according to Marx, capitalism is supposed to carry the seeds of its own destruction, the capitalization of Russian agriculture, with its swelling masses of landless proletarians, should have made a “solution” of the “agrarian problem” easier for the revolutionaries rather than impossible. But as we know, Lenin’s fears proved groundless in any event, for the Stolypin reforms hardly altered the nature of landownership in Russia and not at all the mentality of the muzhik, which remained solidly anti-capitalist.
Lenin also took an exploitative approach to the nationality question. It was axiomatic in Social-Democratic circles that nationalism was a reactionary ideology which diverted the worker from the class struggle and promoted the breakup of large states. But Lenin also realized that one-half of the population of the Russian Empire consisted of non-Russians, some of whom had a strongly developed national consciousness and nearly all of whom wanted a greater measure of territorial or cultural self-government. On this issue, as on the peasant question, the official party program of 1903 was very niggardly: it offered the minorities civic equality, education in their native languages, and local self-rule, accompanied by the vague formula of “the right of all nations to self-determination” but nothing more specific.89