The Russian Revolution

9

Lenin and the Origins of Bolshevism

He will go far, for he believes all he says.

—Mirabeau of Robespierre

One need not believe that history is made by “great men” to appreciate the immense importance of Lenin for the Russian Revolution and the regime that issued from it. It is not only that the power which he accumulated allowed Lenin to exert a decisive influence on the course of events but also that the regime which he established in October 1917 institutionalized, as it were, his personality. The Bolshevik Party was Lenin’s creation: as its founder, he conceived it in his own image and, overcoming all opposition from within and without, kept it on the course he had charted. The same party, on seizing power in October 1917, promptly eliminated all rival parties and organizations to become Russia’s exclusive source of political authority. Communist Russia, therefore, has been from the beginning to an unusual extent a reflection of the mind and psyche of one man: his biography and its history are uniquely fused.

Although few historical figures have been so much written about, authentic information on Lenin is sparse. Lenin was so unwilling to distinguish himself from his cause or even to concede that he had an existence separate from it that he left almost no autobiographical data: his life, as he conceived it, was at one with the party’s. In his own eyes and in the eyes of his associates he had only a public personality. Such individual traits as are attributed to him in the Communist literature are the standard virtues of hagiography: self-denying devotion to the cause, modesty, self-discipline, generosity.

Least known is Lenin’s formative period. The entire corpus of writings for the first twenty-three years of his life consists of a mere twenty items, nearly all of them petitions, certificates, and other official documents.¹ There are no letters, diaries, or essays such as one would expect from a young intellectual. Either such materials do not exist or, as is more likely, they are secreted in Soviet archives because their release would reveal a young Lenin very different from the one portrayed in the official literature.* In either event, the biographer has very little to go on in attempting to reconstruct Lenin’s intellectual and psychic development during the period (roughly 1887–93) when he evolved from an ordinary youth without political commitments or even interests into a fanatical revolutionary. Such evidence as we possess is largely circumstantial; much of it rests on negative knowledge—that is, what Lenin failed to do given his opportunities. Reconstructing the young Lenin requires a conscientious effort to peel off layers of distorting varnish deposited on his image by years of institutionalized cult.†

Lenin was born Vladimir Ilich Ulianov in April 1870 in Simbirsk into a conventional, comfortably well-off bureaucratic family. His father, a school inspector, had attained by the time of his death in 1886 the rank of a state councillor, which gave him status equal to a general and hereditary nobility. He was a man of conservative-liberal views who sympathized with the reforms of Alexander II and believed that education held the key to Russia’s progress. He worked extremely hard and is said in his sixteen years as inspector to have founded several hundred schools. Lenin’s mother, born Blank, was the daughter of a physician of German ancestry: in her photographs she looks as if she had stepped out of Whistler’s portrait. It was a happy, close-knit family which faithfully observed the rituals and holidays of the Orthodox Church.

Tragedy struck the Ulianovs in 1887 when Lenin’s elder brother, Alexander, was arrested in St. Petersburg carrying a bomb with which, in a plot with friends, he intended to assassinate the Tsar. A passionate scientist, Alexander had shown no interest in politics until after he had been three years at St. Petersburg University. There he familiarized himself with the writings of Plekhanov and Marx and adopted an eclectic political ideology calling for the grafting on the program of the People’s Will (Narodnaia Volia) certain elements of Social-Democracy. According industrial labor a predominant role in the revolution, he accepted political terror as the means and the immediate transition to socialism as the objective. This peculiar amalgam of Marxism and Narodnaia Volia anticipated the program which Lenin would develop independently a few years later. Arrested on March 1, 1887, the sixth anniversary of the assassination of Alexander II, Alexander Ulianov was given a public trial and executed along with his co-conspirators. He conducted himself throughout with exemplary dignity.

Alexander’s execution, which occurred soon after the death of the elder Ulianov, had a profound effect on the family, which had known nothing of his revolutionary activity. But there is no evidence that it altered Vladimir’s behavior in any way. Many years later Lenin’s younger sister Maria claimed that on learning of his brother’s fate, Lenin exclaimed: “No, we will not go this way. We must not go this way.”² Apart from the fact that Maria Ulianova was a mere nine years old when this alleged remark was made, it cannot be true, because when his brother was executed Lenin was entirely innocent of politics. The purpose of this invention is to suggest that already as a seventeen-year-old gymnasium student Lenin inclined to Marxism, which is at odds with the available evidence. Moreover, from family recollections it can be determined that the two brothers had not been close and that Alexander took strong objection to Vladimir’s rude manners and habitual sneer.

The striking fact about Lenin’s youth is that, unlike most of his contemporaries, he showed no interest in public affairs.³ The portrait which emerges from the pen of one of his sisters, published before the iron grip of censorship dehumanized Lenin, is that of an exceedingly diligent boy, tidy and punctilious—a type that modern psychology would classify as compulsive.⁴ He was a model student, earning excellent grades in nearly all subjects, behavior included, for which he was awarded gold medals year after year. He graduated at the top of his class. The scanty evidence at our disposal shows no trace of rebelliousness toward either his family or the regime. Fedor Kerensky, the father of Lenin’s future rival, Alexander, who happened to have been principal of the school which Lenin attended in Simbirsk, recommended him to the University of Kazan as a “reticent” and “unsociable” youth who “neither in school nor out of it gave his superiors or teachers by a single word or deed any cause to form of him an unfavorable opinion.”⁵ By the time he graduated from gymnasium in 1887, he held no “definite” political opinions.⁶ Nothing in his early biography hinted at a future revolutionary; rather, the indications were that Lenin would follow in his father’s footsteps and make a distinguished bureaucratic career. It is because of these traits that he was admitted to study law at Kazan University, from which his family’s police record would otherwise have barred him.

On entering the university, Lenin was recognized by fellow students as the brother of a celebrated terrorist and drawn into a clandestine People’s Will group. This organization, headed by Lazar Bogoraz, had made contact with like-minded students in other cities, including St. Petersburg, apparently with the intention of carrying out the deed for which Alexander Ulianov and his associates had been executed. How far its plans progressed and how much Lenin was involved is not possible to ascertain. The group was arrested in December 1887 following a demonstration to protest university regulations. Lenin, who was observed running, shouting, and waving his arms, was briefly detained. On returning home, he wrote a letter to the university announcing his withdrawal, but the attempt to forestall expulsion failed. He was arrested and expelled along with thirty-nine other students. Such savage punishment, typical of the methods which the regime of Alexander III used to stifle signs of independence or “insubordination,” kept the revolutionary movement supplied with ever fresh recruits.

Lenin might perhaps have been forgiven in time and allowed to reenroll were it not that in the course of the investigation which followed the police uncovered his connections with the Bogoraz circle and learned of his brother’s involvement in terrorism. Once these facts became known, he was placed on the list of “unreliables” and put under police surveillance. His and his mother’s petitions for readmission were routinely rejected. Lenin saw before him no future. He spent the next four years in forced idleness, living off his mother’s pension. His mood was desperate and, according to one of his mother’s petitions, verging on the suicidal. Such accounts as we have of Lenin during this period depict him as an insolent, sarcastic, and friendless young man. In the Ulianov family, however, which idolized him, he was regarded as a budding genius and his opinions were gospel.⁷

During this period Lenin did a great deal of reading. He plowed through the “progressive” journals and books of the 1860s and 1870s, especially the writings of Nicholas Chernyshevskii, which, according to his own testimony, had on him a decisive influence.⁸* During this trying time, the Ulianovs were ostracized by Simbirsk society: people shunned association with relatives of an executed terrorist from fear of attracting the attention of the police. This was a bitter experience which seems to have played no small part in Lenin’s radicalization. By the fall of 1888, when he moved with his mother to Kazan, Lenin was a full-fledged radical, filled with boundless hatred for those who had cut short his promising career and rejected his family—the tsarist establishment and the “bourgeoisie.” In contrast to typical Russian revolutionaries, such as his late brother, who were driven by idealism, Lenin’s dominant political impulse was and remained hatred. Rooted in this emotional soil, his socialism was from the outset primarily a doctrine of destruction. He gave little thought to the world of the future, so preoccupied was he, emotionally as well as intellectually, with smashing the world of the present. It was this obsessive destructiveness that both fascinated and repelled, inspired and terrified Russian intellectuals, themselves prone to alternate between Hamletic indecision and Quixotic folly. Struve, who had frequent dealings with Lenin in the 1890s, says that his

principal Einstellung—to use the new popular German psychological term—was hatred. Lenin took to Marx’s doctrine primarily because it found response in that principal Einstellung of his mind. The doctrine of the class war, relentless and thoroughgoing, aiming at the final destruction and extermination of the enemy, proved congenial to Lenin’s emotional attitude to surrounding reality. He hated not only the existing autocracy (the Tsar) and the bureaucracy, not only lawlessness and arbitrary rule of the police, but also their antipodes—the “liberals” and the “bourgeoisie.” That hatred had something repulsive and terrible in it; for being rooted in the concrete, I should say even animal, emotions and repulsions, it was at the same time abstract and cold like Lenin’s whole being.⁹

Lenin’s official vita, as formalized in the 1920s, is in its essential features modeled on the life of Christ. Like Christology it depicts the protagonist as unaltered and unalterable, his destiny being predetermined on the day of birth. Lenin’s official biographers refuse to allow that he had ever changed his ideas. He is said to have been a committed orthodox Marxist from the moment he became politically involved. This claim can easily be shown to be wrong.

To begin with, the term “Marxist” had in Lenin’s youth not one but at least two distinct meanings. Classical Marxist doctrine applied to countries with mature capitalist economies. For these Marx purported to provide a scientific theory of development, the inevitable outcome of which was collapse and revolution. This doctrine had an immense appeal to Russian radical intellectuals both because of its claim to scientific objectivity and because of the inevitability of its prediction. Marx was popular in Russia before there was a Russian Social-Democratic movement: in 1880, he boasted that Das Kapital had more readers and admirers there than in any other country.¹⁰ But since Russia at the time had hardly any capitalism, however liberally the term is defined, early Russian followers of Marx reinterpreted his theories to suit local conditions. In the 1870s they formulated the doctrine of “separate path,” according to which Russia, developing her own form of socialism based on the rural commune, would make a direct leap to socialism, bypassing the capitalist phase.¹¹ Lenin’s brother adopted this kind of ideology in the program for his People’s Will organization and it was common in Russian radical circles in the 1880s.

Knowledge of the intellectual environment in which Lenin grew up sheds light on the evolution of his ideology. In 1887–91, Lenin was not and could not have been a Marxist in the Social-Democratic sense, because this variant of Marxism was still unknown in Russia. The evidence suggests that from 1887 until approximately 1891 he was a typical follower of the People’s Will. He maintained close association with members of this organization, first in Kazan and then in Samara. He actively sought out its veterans, many of whom settled in the Volga region after being released from prison and exile, to learn the history of that movement and especially its organizational practices. This knowledge he deeply assimilated: even after becoming a leading figure in the Russian Social-Democratic Party, Lenin stood apart from his colleagues by virtue of his belief in a tightly disciplined, conspiratorial, and professional revolutionary party and his impatience with programs calling for a lengthy interlude of capitalism. Like the Narodnaia Volia he scorned capitalism and the “bourgeoisie,” in which he saw not allies of socialism but its sworn enemies. It is noteworthy that in the late 1880s he failed to join the circles active in his region which were beginning to approach Marx and Engels in a “German”—that is, Social-Democratic—spirit.¹²

In June 1890, the authorities at long last relented and allowed Lenin to take the examinations for the bar as an external student. He passed them in November 1891, following which he devoted himself, not to the practice of law, but to the study of economic literature, especially statistical surveys of agriculture issued by the zemstva. His purpose, in the words of his sister Anna, was to determine the “feasibility of Social-Democracy in Russia.”¹³

The time was propitious. In Germany, the Social-Democratic Party, legalized in 1890, won stunning successes at the polls. Its superb organization and ability to combine appeals to workers with a broad liberal program won it more parliamentary seats in each successive election. It suddenly appeared conceivable that socialism could triumph in the most industrialized country in Europe through democratic procedures rather than violence. Engels was so impressed by these developments that in 1895, shortly before his death, he conceded that the revolutionary upheavals which he and Marx had predicted in 1848 might never occur and that socialism could well triumph at the ballot box rather than the barricade.¹⁴ The example of the German Social-Democratic Party exerted a strong influence on Russian socialists, discrediting the older theories of “separate path” and the revolutionary coup d’état.

Concurrently with the spread of these ideas, Russia experienced a dramatic spurt of industrial development which in the decade 1890–1900 doubled the number of industrial workers and gave Russia a rate of economic growth unmatched by any other country. The indications, therefore, were that Russia had missed the opportunity to bypass capitalism, which even Marx had conceded to be possible, and was destined to repeat the Western experience.

In this changed atmosphere, the theories of Social-Democracy gained a following in Russia. As formulated in Geneva by George Plekhanov and Paul Akselrod and in St. Petersburg by Peter Struve, Russia was to reach socialism in two stages. First she had to go through full-blown capitalism, which would vastly expand the ranks of the proletariat and, at the same time, bring the benefits of “bourgeois” freedoms, including a parliamentary system under which Russian socialists, like the Germans, could gain political influence. Once the “bourgeoisie” had swept autocracy and its “feudal” economic foundations out the way, the stage would be set for the next phase of historic development, the advance to socialism. In the mid-189os these ideas captured the imagination of much of the intelligentsia and all but submerged the older ideology of “separate path,” for which Struve now coined the derogatory term “Populism.”¹⁵

Lenin was slow to make this transition, in part because, living in the provinces, he had no access to Social-Democratic literature and in part because its pro-capitalist, pro-bourgeois philosophy clashed with what Struve called “the principal Einstellung” or attitude of his mind. In 1892–93, having read Plekhanov, he seems to have arrived at a halfway position between the ideology of the People’s Will and that of Social-Democracy, not unlike that which his brother had reached five years earlier. He abandoned the notion of a “separate path” and acknowledged the reality which stared everyone in the eye: Russia was destined to tread the path charted in Das Kapital, which he had read in 1889. But he was unwilling to concede that before being ready for revolution Russia had to undergo, for an indeterminate period, a stage of capitalist development during which the “bourgeoisie” lorded it over the country.

His solution to the problem was to declare that Russia already was capitalist. This eccentric view, which no other student of the Russian economy is known to have shared, rested on an idiosyncratic interpretation of statistical data on agriculture. Lenin convinced himself that the Russian village was in the throes of “class differentiation” which transformed a minority of peasants into a “petty bourgeoisie” and the majority into a landless rural proletariat. Such calculations, derived from those which Engels had made in regard to the German peasantry, had little to do with the facts of the case: but to Lenin they served as a guarantee that Russia did not have to postpone the revolution ad infinitum, until her capitalism was fully matured. Arguing that fully 20 percent of Russia’s rural population in some provinces qualified as “bourgeois,” and given the industrial boom then underway, Lenin felt emboldened to declare in 1893–94 that “at the present time capitalism already constitutes the basic background of Russia’s economic life” and “essentially our order does not differ from the Western European.”¹⁶

By declaring “capitalist” a country four-fifths of whose population consisted of peasants, most of them self-sufficient, small-scale communal farmers, Lenin could proclaim it ripe for revolution. Furthermore, since the “bourgeoisie” was already in power, it represented not an ally but a class enemy. In the summer of 1894, Lenin wrote a sentence that summarized the political philosophy to which, except for a brief interlude (1895–1900), he would remain faithful for the rest of his life:

The Russian worker, leading all the democratic elements, will bring down absolutism and lead the Russian proletariat (along with the proletariat of all the countries) by the direct road of open political struggle to the triumphant Communist Revolution.¹⁷

Although the vocabulary was Marxist, the underlying sentiment of this passage was People’s Will: indeed, as Lenin would many years later confide to Karl Radek, he had sought to reconcile Marx with the Narodnaia Volia.¹⁸ The Russian worker, to whom the People’s Will had also attributed the role of a revolutionary vanguard, was to launch a “direct” assault on the autocracy, topple it, and on its ruins erect a Communist society. Nothing is said about the mission of capitalism and the bourgeoisie in destroying the economic and political foundations of the old regime. It was an anachronistic ideology, for at the time when Lenin formulated it, Russia had a burgeoning Social-Democratic movement which rejected such an old-fashioned adaptation of Marx’s theories.

On his arrival in St. Petersburg—the city that one day would bear his name—the twenty-three-year-old Lenin was a fully formed personality. The first impression which he made on new acquaintances, then and later, was unfavorable. His short, stocky figure, his premature baldness (he had lost nearly all hair before he was thirty), his slanted eyes and high cheekbones, his brusque manner of speaking, often accompanied by a sarcastic laugh, repelled most people. Contemporaries are virtually at one in speaking of his unprepossessing, “provincial” appearance. On meeting him, A. N. Potresov saw a “typical middle-aged tradesman from some northern, Iaroslavl-like province.” The British diplomat Bruce Lockhart thought Lenin looked like a “provincial grocer.” For Angelica Balabanoff, an admirer, he resembled a “provincial schoolteacher.”¹⁹

But this unattractive man glowed with an inner force that made people quickly forget their first impressions. His strength of will, indomitable discipline, energy, asceticism, and unshakable faith in the cause had an effect that can only be conveyed by the overused term “charisma.” According to Potresov, this “unprepossessing and coarse” individual, devoid of charm, had a “hypnotic impact”:

Plekhanov was respected, Martov loved, but they only followed unquestioningly Lenin, the one indisputable leader. Because Lenin alone embodied the phenomenon, rare everywhere but especially in Russia, of a man of iron will, inexhaustible energy, combining a fanatical faith in the movement, in the cause, with an equal faith in himself.²⁰

A fundamental source of Lenin’s strength and personal magnetism was the quality alluded to by Potresov—namely, the identification of his person with the cause: in him, the two became indistinguishable. This phenomenon was not unknown in socialist circles. In his study of political parties, Robert Michels has a chapter called “Le Parti c’est moi,” in which he describes similar attitudes among German Social-Democratic and trade-union leaders, including Bebel, Marx, and Lassalle. He quotes an admirer of Bebel’s who said that Bebel “always regards himself as the guardian of party interests and his personal adversaries as enemies of the party.”²¹ Potresov made a similar observation about the future leader of Bolshevism:

Within the framework of Social-Democracy or outside it, in the ranks of the general public movement directed against the autocracy, Lenin knew only two categories of people and phenomena, his own and not his own. His own, those which in one way or another came within the sphere of influence of his organization, and the others, which did not, and which by virtue of this fact alone he regarded as enemies. Between these polar opposites—comrade-friend and dissenter-enemy—for Lenin there existed no intermediate spectrum of social and personal human relations …²²

Trotsky left an interesting example of this mentality. Recounting his visit with Lenin in London, he says that when showing him the sights Lenin invariably referred to them as “theirs,” by which he meant, according to Trotsky, not England’s, but “the enemy’s”: “This note was always present when Lenin spoke of any kind of cultural values or new achievements … they understand or they have, they have accomplished or succeeded—but as enemies!”²³

The normal “I/we—you/they” dichotomy, translated into the stark dualism “friend-enemy,” which in Lenin’s case went to uncompromising extremes, had two important historic consequences.

By thinking in this manner, Lenin was inevitably led to treat politics as warfare. He did not need Marx’s sociology to militarize politics and treat all disagreements as susceptible of resolution in one way only: by the dissenter’s physical annihilation. Lenin read Clausewitz late in life, but he was a Clausewitzian long before, intuitively, by virtue of his entire psychic makeup. Like the German strategist, he conceived war not as the antithesis of peace but as its dialectical corollary; like him, he was exclusively concerned with gaining victory, not with the uses to which to put it. His outlook on life was a mixture of Clausewitz and Social Darwinism: when, in a rare moment of candor, Lenin defined peace as a “breathing spell for war,” he inadvertently allowed an insight into the innermost recesses of his mind.²⁴ This manner of thinking made him constitutionally incapable of compromise, except for tactical purposes. Once Lenin and his followers came to power in Russia, this attitude automatically permeated the new regime.

The other consequence of his psychological makeup was an inability to tolerate any dissent, whether in the form of organized opposition or even mere criticism. Given that he perceived any group or individuals not members of his party and not under his personal influence as ipso facto enemies, it followed that they had to be suppressed and silenced. That such actions were implicit in Lenin’s mentality, Trotsky noted as early as 1904. Comparing Lenin to Robespierre, he attributed to him the Jacobin’s dictum: “I know only two parties—that of good citizens and that of bad citizens.” “This political aphorism,” Trotsky concluded, “is engraved in the heart of Maximilian Lenin.”²⁵ Here lay the germs of government by terror, of the totalitarian aspiration to complete control of public life and public opinion.

An attractive aspect of this quality was Lenin’s loyalty and generosity toward “good citizens,” a concept limited to his acolytes: it was the obverse side of hostility toward all outsiders. Much as he personalized disagreements with the latter, within his own ranks he displayed surprising tolerance of dissent. He did not purge dissenters but tried to persuade them; as the ultimate weapon he would use the threat of resignation.

Another attractive aspect of Lenin’s total identification with the revolutionary cause as represented by his party was a peculiar form of personal modesty. Although his successors built a quasi-religious cult around his person, they did this for their private ends: for without him, there was nothing to hold the movement together. Lenin never encouraged such a cult, because he found unacceptable the implication that he had an existence separate from that of the “proletariat”: like Robespierre, he thought that, in the literal sense, he was the “people.”* His “aversion to being singled out as a personality apart from the movement”²⁶ was a modesty rooted in a sense of self-importance far in excess of ordinary vanity. Hence his aversion to memoirs: no leader of the Russian Revolution has left less autobiographical material.†

A stranger to moral qualms, he resembled a pope of whom Ranke wrote that he was endowed with such “complete self-reliance that doubt or fear as to the consequences of his own actions was a pain unknown to his experience.” This quality made Lenin very attractive to a certain type of Russian pseudo-intellectual who would later flock into the Bolshevik Party because it offered certainty in a perplexing world. It appealed especially to the young, semi-literate peasants who left the village to seek industrial work and found themselves adrift in a strange, cold world where the personal relations to which they had been accustomed were replaced by impersonal economic and social ties. Lenin’s party gave them a sense of belonging: they liked its cohesion and simple slogans.

Lenin had a strong streak of cruelty. It is a demonstrable fact that he advocated terror on principle, issued decrees which condemned to death countless people innocent of any wrongdoing, and showed no remorse at the loss of life for which he was responsible. At the same time, it is important to stress that his cruelty was not sadism which derives pleasure from the suffering of others. It rather stemmed from complete indifference to such suffering. Maxim Gorky gained the impression from conversations with Lenin that for him individual human beings held “almost no interest, that he thought only of parties, masses, states.…” On another occasion, Gorky said that for Lenin the working class was what “ore is for a metalworker”²⁷—in other words, raw material for social experiments. This trait manifested itself as early as 1891–92, when the Volga region where Lenin lived was struck by famine. Committees were formed to feed the hungry peasants. According to a friend of the Ulianovs, Lenin alone (echoed, as always, by his family) opposed such aid on the grounds that by forcing peasants off the land and into the cities, where they formed a “proletarian” reserve, the famine was a “progressive” phenomenon.²⁸ Treating human beings as “ore” to build a new society, he sent people to their death before execution squads with the same lack of emotion with which a general orders troops to advance into enemy fire. Gorky quotes a Frenchman that Lenin was a “thinking guillotine.” Without denying the charge, he concedes that he was a misanthrope: “In general, he loved people: he loved them with abnegation. His love looked far ahead, through the mists of hatred.”²⁹ When after 1917 Gorky pleaded with him to spare the life of this or that person condemned to death, Lenin seemed genuinely puzzled why he would bother him with such trivia.

As is usually the case (this held true of Robespierre as well), the obverse side of Lenin’s cruelty was cowardice. This aspect of Lenin’s personality is rarely touched upon in the literature, although there exists a great deal of evidence for it. Lenin showed a characteristic lack of courage while still in his teens when he tried to evade punishment for participating in student disturbances by attempting to withdraw from the university. As we shall note later, he will fail to admit authorship of a manuscript which cost an associate of his two additional years of exile. His invariable reaction to physical danger was flight: he had an uncanny ability to make himself scarce whenever there was the threat of arrest or shooting, even if it meant abandoning his troops. Tatiana Aleksinskii, the wife of the head of the Bolshevik faction in the Second Duma, saw Lenin run from danger:

I first met Lenin in the summer of 1906. I would rather not recall that encounter. Lenin, admired by all Left Social-Democrats, had seemed to me a legendary hero.… Not having seen him up close, because he had lived abroad until the Revolution of 1905, we had imagined him as a revolutionary without fear or blemish.… How keen, therefore, was my disappointment on seeing him [in 1906] at a meeting in the suburbs of Petersburg. It was not only his appearance that made a disagreeable impression on me: he was bald, with a reddish beard, Mongol cheekbones, and an unpleasant expression. It was his behavior during the demonstration that followed. When someone, spotting the cavalry charging the crowd, shouted “Cossacks!” Lenin was the first to flee. He jumped over a barrier. His bowler hat fell off, revealing his bare skull, perspiring and glistening under the sunlight. He fell, got up, and continued to run.… I had a peculiar sensation. I realized there was nothing to do but save oneself. And still …³⁰

These unattractive personal traits were well known to his associates, who consciously ignored them because of Lenin’s unique assets: an extraordinary capacity for disciplined work and total commitment to the revolutionary cause. In the words of Bertram Wolfe, Lenin “was the only man of high theoretical capacity which the Russian Marxist movement produced who possessed at the same time the ability and the will to concern himself with detailed organization work.”³¹ Plekhanov, who on meeting him in 1895 dismissed Lenin as a second-rate intellect, nevertheless valued him and overlooked his shortcomings because, in the words of Potresov, “he saw the importance of this new man not at all in his ideas but in his initiative and talents as party organizer.”³² Struve, who was repelled by Lenin’s “coldness, contempt, and cruelty,” admits to having “driven away” such negative feelings for the sake of relations which he regarded as “both morally obligatory for myself and politically indispensable for our cause.”³³

Lenin was first and foremost an internationalist, a world revolutionary, for whom state boundaries were relics of another era and nationalism a distraction from the class struggle. He would have been prepared to lead the revolution in any country where the opportunity presented itself, and certainly in Germany rather than in his native Russia. He spent nearly one-half of his adult life abroad (from 1900 to 1917, except for two years in 1905–7) and never had a chance to learn much about his homeland: “I know Russia poorly, Simbirsk, Kazan, Petersburg, the exile—that’s all.”³⁴ He held Russians in low esteem, considering them lazy, soft, and not terribly bright. “An intelligent Russian,” he told Gorky, “is almost always a Jew or someone with Jewish blood in his veins.”³⁵ Although he was no stranger to the sentiment of nostalgia for his homeland, Russia was to him an accidental center of the first revolutionary upheaval, a springboard for the real revolution, whose vortex had to be Western Europe. In May 1918, defending the territorial concession he had made to the Germans at Brest-Litovsk, he asserted: “We insist that it is not national interests [but] the interests of socialism, of world socialism that are superior to national interests, to interests of the state.”³⁶

Lenin’s cultural equipment was exceedingly modest for a Russian intellectual of his generation. His writings show only a superficial familiarity with Russia’s literary classics (Turgenev excepted), most of it apparently acquired in secondary school. Tatiana Aleksinskii, who worked closely with Lenin and his wife, noted that they never went to concerts or the theater.³⁷ Lenin’s knowledge of history, other than that of revolutions, was also perfunctory. He had a love for music, but he preferred to suppress it in accord with that asceticism that so impressed and alarmed contemporaries. He told Gorky:

I cannot listen much to music, it excites my nerves. I feel like talking nonsense and caressing people who, living in such a filthy hell, can create such beauty. Because today one must not caress anyone: they will bite off your hand. One must break heads, pitilessly break heads, even if, ideally, we are opposed to all violence.³⁸

Potresov found that with the twenty-five-year-old Lenin one could discuss only one subject: the “movement.” He was interested in nothing else and had nothing interesting to say about anything else.* In sum, not what used to be called a man of many parts.

This cultural poverty was yet another source of Lenin’s strength as a revolutionary leader, for unlike better-educated intellectuals, he carried in his head no excess baggage of facts and ideas to act as a brake on his resolve. Like his mentor, Chernyshevskii, he dismissed differing opinions as “twaddle” and refused even to consider them except as objects of ridicule. Inconvenient facts he ignored or reinterpreted to suit his purposes. If his opponent was wrong in anything, he was wrong in everything: he never conceded the opposing party any merit. His manner of debating was combative in the extreme: he thoroughly assimilated Marx’s dictum that criticism “is not a scalpel but a weapon. Its object is the enemy, [whom] it wishes not to refute but to destroy.”³⁹ In this spirit, he used words like ammunition, to annihilate opponents, often by means of the crudest ad hominem assaults on their integrity and motives. On one occasion, he conceded that he saw nothing wrong with using calumny and confounding workers when this served his political purposes. When in 1907, having charged the Mensheviks with betrayal of the working class, he was made to appear before a socialist tribunal, he admitted with brazen effrontery the charge of slander:

This formulation is calculated, as it were, to arouse in the reader hatred, revulsion, contempt for the people who act in this manner. This formulation is calculated not to persuade but to smash [their] ranks—not to correct the opponent’s error, but to destroy, to rub his organization off the face of the earth. This formulation, indeed, arouses the worst thoughts, the very worst suspicions of the opponent, and, indeed, in contrast to the formulation which convinces and corrects, it “sows confusion in the ranks of the proletariat.” … That which is not permissible among the members of a single party is permitted and obligatory for the parts of a party that has fallen apart.⁴⁰

He thus constantly engaged in what one historian of the French Revolution, Auguste Cochin, called “dry terror”: and from “dry terror” to “bloody terror” was, of course, only a short step. When a fellow socialist once warned Lenin that his intemperate attacks on an opponent (Struve) could inspire some worker to kill the object of his wrath, Lenin calmly responded: “He ought to be killed.”⁴¹

The mature Lenin was made of one piece and his personality stood out in strong relief. After he had formulated the doctrine and practice of Bolshevism, which happened in his early thirties, he surrounded himself with an invisible protective wall which alien ideas could not penetrate. Henceforth, nothing could change his mind. He belonged to that category of men of whom the Marquis de Custine had said that they know everything except what one tells them. One either agreed with him or fought him: and disagreement with Lenin always awakened on his part destructive hatred, the urge to “rub” his opponents “off the face of the earth.” This was his strength as revolutionary and weakness as statesman: invincible in combat, he lacked the human qualities necessary to understand and guide mankind. In the end, this flaw would defeat his effort to create a new society, for he simply could not comprehend how people could live side by side in peace.

In the fall of 1893 Lenin moved to St. Petersburg, ostensibly to practice law, but in fact to make connections with radical circles and launch his revolutionary career.⁴² To the Social-Democrats whom he contacted on arrival he appeared “too red”—that is, still too much of a People’s Will adherent. He soon broadened his circle of acquaintances, joining a group of brilliant Social-Democratic intellectuals, whose leading spirit was the twenty-three-year-old Peter Struve—like Lenin, the son of a high official, but unlike him, a cosmopolitan who had been in the West and acquired an extraordinarily broad range of knowledge. The two had many discussions. Their disagreements centered mainly on Lenin’s simplistic notion of capitalism and his attitude toward the “bourgeoisie.” Struve explained to Lenin that far from having acquired a Western-type capitalist economy, Russia had barely taken the first step on the path to capitalist development, as he would convince himself once he saw the West with his own eyes. He also explained to him that Social-Democracy could flourish in Russia only if the middle class, prodded by industrial labor, introduced such liberties as freedom of the press and the right to form political parties. Lenin remained unconvinced.

In the summer of 1895 he traveled abroad and met with Plekhanov and the other veterans of the Social-Democratic movement. He was told it was a profound mistake to reject the “bourgeoisie”: “We turn our faces to the liberals,” Plekhanov said, “whereas you turn your back.”⁴³ Akselrod argued that in any joint action with the “liberal bourgeoisie” the Social-Democrats would not lose control because they would retain “hegemony” in the joint struggle, guiding and manipulating their temporary allies in a direction that best served their own interests.

Lenin, who worshipped Plekhanov, was impressed. How deeply he was convinced cannot be determined: but it is a demonstrable fact that upon his return to St. Petersburg in the autumn of 1895 he made the debut as an orthodox Social-Democrat, committed to organizing workers for the struggle against the autocracy in a common front with the “liberal bourgeoisie.” The change was striking: in the summer of 1894, he had written that socialism and democracy were incompatible; now he argued that they were inseparable.⁴⁴ Russia in his eyes was no longer a capitalist but a semi-feudal country, and the main enemy of the proletariat was not the bourgeoisie allied with the autocracy but the autocracy itself. The bourgeoisie—at any rate, its progressive element—was an ally of the working class:

The Social-Democratic Party declares that it will support all the strata of the bourgeoisie engaged in the struggle against the autocratic government.… The democratic struggle is inseparable from the socialist one; [it is] impossible to wage a successful fight for the cause of labor without the attainment of full liberty and the democratization of Russia’s political and social regime.⁴⁵

Conspiracy and coup d’état he now dismissed as impracticable. It is important to bear in mind, however, that Lenin’s change of heart on the role of the “liberal bourgeoisie” was firmly anchored in the premise, stated by Akselrod, that in the campaign against the autocracy the revolutionary socialists would lead and the bourgeoisie follow.

After his return from abroad, Lenin established desultory contact with labor circles that were leading a precarious existence in the capital. He did some tutoring in Marxist theory, but he did not much care for educational work and he gave it up after a worker whom he was initiating into Das Kapital walked off with his overcoat.⁴⁶ He preferred to organize workers for action. At the time, there operated in St. Petersburg a circle of Social-Democratic intellectuals which maintained contact with individual workers as well as the Central Workers’ Circle, formed by the workers themselves for purposes of mutual aid and self-improvement. Lenin joined the Social-Democratic circle, but involved himself in its work only late in 1895 when it adopted the technique of “agitation” formulated by Jewish socialists in Lithuania. To overcome the workers’ aversion to politics, the “agitational” technique called for inciting industrial strikes based on the workers’ economic (i.e., non-political) grievances. It was believed that once the workers saw how the government and the forces of order invariably sided with the proprietors of the affected enterprises, they would realize it was impossible to satisfy their economic grievances without a change in the political regime. This realization would politicize labor. Lenin, who learned of the “agitational” technique from Martov, joined in the distribution among St. Petersburg workers of agitational material which explained to the workers their rights under the law and showed how these rights were being violated by the employers. The output was meager, and the effect on the workers doubtful: but when in May 1896, 30,000 textile workers in the capital went on a spontaneous strike, the Social-Democrats had cause for jubilation.

By then Lenin and his comrades were in jail, having been arrested in the winter of 1895–96 for incitement to strikes. Nevertheless, Lenin felt that the “agitational” method of struggle had vindicated itself: “The struggle of workers with factory owners for their daily needs,” he wrote in the wake of the textile strike, “of itself and inevitably suggests to the workers problems of state and politics.”⁴⁷ The task of the party Lenin defined as follows:

The Russian Social-Democratic Party declares its task to be helping the struggle of the Russian working class by developing labor’s class consciousness, assisting its organization, and showing it the real goals of the struggle.… The task of the party is not to invent in its head some fashionable methods of helping the workers, but to join the labor movement, to illuminate it, to help the workers in the struggle which they have already begun to wage themselves.⁴⁸

During the investigation that followed his arrest, Lenin disclaimed authorship of a manuscript of his which the police had mistakenly attributed to an associate by the name of P. K. Zaporozhets. As a consequence, the latter drew two additional years of prison and exile. Lenin spent his three years of Siberian exile (1897–1900) in relative comfort and in constant communication with his comrades. He read, wrote, translated, and engaged in vigorous physical activity.*

As his term of exile drew to a close, Lenin was in receipt of disturbing news from home: the movement, which at the time of his imprisonment was going from success to success, was in the throes of a crisis not unlike that experienced by the revolutionaries of the 1870s. The agitational technique, which Lenin had expected to radicalize workers, turned into something very different: the economic grievances which had been intended to serve as a means of stimulating their political awareness had become an end in themselves. The workers struggled for economic benefits without getting politically involved, and the intellectuals who engaged in “agitation” found that they had become adjuncts of an incipient trade union movement. In the summer of 1899, Lenin received from Russia a document written by Ekaterina Kuskova and called “Credo” which urged socialists to leave the struggle against the autocracy to the bourgeoisie and concentrate instead on helping Russian labor improve its economic and social condition. Kuskova was not a full-fledged Social-Democrat, but her essay reflected a trend that was emerging within Social-Democracy. This incipient heresy Lenin labeled Economism. Nothing was further from his mind than to have the socialist movement turn into a handmaiden of trade unions, which by their very nature pursued accommodation with “capitalism.” The information which reached him from Russia indicated that the labor movement was maturing independently of the Social-Democratic intelligentsia and distancing itself from the political struggle—that is, revolution.

His anxiety was compounded by the emergence of yet another heresy in the movement: Revisionism. In early 1899, some leading Russian Social-Democrats, following Eduard Bernstein, called for a revision of Marx’s social theory in the light of recent evidence. That year Struve published an analysis of Marx’s social theory in which he charged it with inconsistency: Marx’s own premises indicated that socialism could come about only as a result of evolution, not revolution.⁴⁹ Struve then proceeded to a systematic critique of the central concept of Marx’s economic and social doctrine, the theory of value, which led him to the conclusion that “value” was not a scientific but a metaphysical concept.⁵⁰ Revisionism did not trouble Lenin as much as Economism for it did not have the same practical implications, but it heightened his fear that something was seriously amiss. According to Krupskaia, in the summer of 1899 Lenin grew distraught, lost weight, and suffered from insomnia. He now devoted his energies to analyzing the causes of the crisis in Russian Social-Democracy and devising the means to overcome it.

His immediate practical solution was to launch with those associates who had remained faithful to orthodox Marxism a publication, modeled on the German Sozialdemokrat, to combat deviations in the movement, especially Economism. Such was the origin of Iskra. But Lenin’s thoughts ran deeper and he began to wonder whether Social-Democracy should not reorganize as a tight, conspiratorial elite on the model of the People’s Will.⁵¹ These speculations marked the onset of a spiritual crisis which would be resolved only a year later with the decision to form a party of his own.

After his release from exile in early 1900, Lenin spent a short time in St. Petersburg negotiating with colleagues as well as Struve, who, although nominally still a Social-Democrat, was shifting into the liberal camp. Struve was to collaborate with Iskra and provide a good part of its financing. Later that year, Lenin moved to Munich where jointly with Potresov and Julius Martov he founded Iskra as an organ of “orthodox”—that is, anti-Economist and anti-Revisionist—Marxism.

The longer he observed the behavior of workers in and out of Russia, the more compelling was the conclusion, entirely contrary to the fundamental premise of Marxism, that labor (the “proletariat”) was not a revolutionary class at all: left to itself, it would rather settle for a larger share of the capitalists’ profits than overthrow capitalism. It was the same premise that moved Zubatov at this very time to conceive the idea of police trade unionism.* In a seminal article published at the end of 1900, Lenin uttered the unthinkable: “the labor movement, separated from Social-Democracy … inevitably turns bourgeois.”⁵² The implication of this startling statement was that unless the workers were led by a socialist party external to it and independent of it, they would betray their class interests. Only non-workers—that is, the intelligentsia—knew what these interests were. In the spirit of Mosca and Pareto, whose theories of political elites were then in vogue, Lenin asserted that the proletariat, for its own sake, had to be led by a minority of the elect:

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

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.”*

Lenin viewed with skepticism the emergence of the soviets, because they were conceived as “non-partisan” workers’ organizations and, as such, outside the control of the political parties: given his belief in the accommodationist drift of the working class, the soviets did not strike him and his followers as dependable.⁶⁹ At the time of its formation, some Petrograd Bolsheviks urged the workers to boycott the Soviet on the grounds that granting a workers’ organization primacy over the Social-Democratic Party would mean “subordinating consciousness to spontaneity”⁷⁰—in other words, elevating the workers above the intelligentsia. Lenin himself was more flexible, although he could never quite make up his mind about the soviets’ function and utility. In the end, after 1906, he decided that they could be of use but only as helpmates of the “revolutionary army.” They were essential to the revolution (“insurrection”) but had no utility in and of themselves.⁷¹ He also rejected the soviets as organs of self-rule—their function was to serve as “instruments” of an insurrection carried out by disciplined armed detachments.

With the outbreak of the 1905 Revolution, Lenin decided that the time had come to distance himself from the main body of the party and openly form his own organization. In April 1905, he convened in London an unauthorized “Third Congress” of the Social-Democratic Party; all the delegates (thirty-eight in number) were members of his faction. According to Krupskaia:

At the Third Congress, there were no workers—at any rate, there was not one remotely noticeable worker. But there were at the congress many “committee men.” Whoever ignores this structure of the Third Congress will not understand much in its minutes.⁷²

In such a friendly gathering, Lenin had no difficulty gaining approval of all his resolutions, which the legitimate Social-Democratic Labor Party—as evidenced by its actions the following year in Stockholm—would have rejected. The “Third Congress” marked the beginning of the formal split in the SD Party, which would be consummated in 1912.

Having returned to Russia in early November 1905, Lenin encouraged the Moscow uprising of the next month, but as soon as the shooting began he made himself scarce. The day after the barricades had gone up in Moscow (December 10, 1905), he and Krupskaia sought refuge in Finland. They returned only on December 17, after the uprising had been crushed.

In April 1906, the two branches of Russian Social-Democracy made a halfhearted attempt at reunification at a congress held in Stockholm. Here Lenin tried and failed to gain a majority on the Central Committee. He also suffered defeat on a number of practical issues: the congress condemned the creation of armed detachments and the idea of an armed insurrection, and rejected his agrarian program. Undaunted, Lenin formed, in secret from the Mensheviks, an illegal and clandestine “Central Committee” (a successor to the “Bureau”) under his personal direction. Apparently composed at first of three members, it expanded in 1907 to fifteen.⁷³

During and immediately after the revolutionary year of 1905, the ranks of Social-Democracy increased manifold, with tens of thousands of new adherents signing up, a high proportion of them intellectuals. By this time, the two factions acquired a distinct complexion.⁷⁴ The Bolsheviks in 1905 are estimated to have had 8,400 followers, roughly the same number as the Mensheviks and the Bundists. The Stockholm congress of the SD Party, held in April 1906, is said to have represented 31,000 members, 18,000 of them Mensheviks and 13,000 Bolsheviks. In 1907, the party had grown to 84,300 members—approximately equal to the membership of the Constitutional-Democratic Party—of whom 46,100 were Bolsheviks and 38,200 Mensheviks; affiliated were 25,700 Polish Social-Democrats, 25,500 Bundists, and 13,000 Latvian SDs. This marked the crest of the wave: in 1908 desertions began and in 1910 by Trotsky’s estimate, the membership of the Russian Social-Democratic Party dwindled to 10,000 or fewer.⁷⁵

The Menshevik and Bolshevik factions had different social and ethnic compositions. Both attracted a disproportionate number of dvoriane, or gentry—20 percent compared to a 1.7 percent share of dvoriane in the population at large (the Bolsheviks rather more, with 22 percent; the Mensheviks fewer, with 19 percent). The Bolsheviks had in their ranks a considerably higher proportion of peasants: 38 percent of their membership came from this group, compared with 26 percent in Menshevik ranks.⁷⁶ These were not farming peasants, who followed the Socialists-Revolutionaries, but uprooted, déclassé peasants who had moved to the city in search of work. This socially transitional element was to supply numerous cadres to the Bolshevik Party and exert much influence on its mentality. The Mensheviks attracted more lower-class urban inhabitants (meshchane), skilled workers (e.g., printers and railroad employees), as well as intellectuals and professional people.

As concerns the ethnic composition of the two factions, the Bolsheviks were predominantly Great Russian, whereas the Mensheviks attracted mostly non-Russians, especially Georgians and Jews. At the SD Second Congress, Lenin’s support came principally from delegates sent by the central—that is, Great Russian—provinces. At the Fifth Congress (1907), nearly four-fifths (78.3 percent) of the Bolsheviks were Great Russian, compared with one-third (34 percent) of the Mensheviks. Approximately 10 percent of the Bolsheviks were Jewish; their proportion in Menshevik ranks was twice as high.*⁷⁷

The Bolshevik Party, in its formative years, may thus be characterized as follows: (1) heavily rural in composition, its rank and file having been drawn “to a considerable extent from men born in and still having connections with the countryside,” and (2) “overwhelmingly Great Russian” and based on regions inhabited by Great Russians.⁷⁸ Its social and cultural roots, in other words, were among groups and in areas with the oldest traditions of serfdom.

But the two factions also shared certain features, of which the most important was their tenuous relationship with industrial labor, the social group that they claimed to represent. Since the emergence of Social-Democracy in Russia in the 1880s, the workers treated the socialist intelligentsia with ambivalence. The unskilled and semi-skilled workers shunned them altogether, because they viewed intellectuals as gentlemen (“white hands”) who used them to settle private scores with the Tsar. They remained immune to the influence of the Social-Democratic Party. The better-educated, more skilled and politically conscious workers often regarded the Social-Democrats as friends and supporters, without being prepared to be led by them: as a rule, they preferred trade unionism to party politics.⁷⁹ As a consequence, the number of workers in Social-Democratic organizations remained minuscule. Martov estimates that in the first half of 1905, when the Revolution was already well underway, the Mensheviks had in Petrograd some 1,200 to 1,500 active worker supporters and the Bolsheviks “several hundred”—and this in the Empire’s most industrialized city with over 200,000 industrial workers.⁸⁰ At the end of 1905, the two factions had between them in St. Petersburg a total of 3,000 members.⁸¹ In effect, therefore, both the Menshevik and Bolshevik factions were organizations of intellectuals. Martov’s observations on this subject, published in 1914, anticipate the situation which would emerge after the February Revolution:

In such cities as Petersburg, where in the course of 1905 it had become actually possible to engage in active work on a broad arena, … in the party organization there remained only worker “professionals,” who carried out central organizational functions, and labor youths, who enrolled in party circles for the purpose of self-development. The politically more mature worker element remained formally outside the organization or was only counted as belonging to it, which had the most deleterious effect on the relations of the organization and its centers with the masses. At the same time, the mass influx of the intelligentsia into the party, given the greater suitability of its organizational forms to the intelligentsia’s conditions of life (more leisure and the possibility of devoting much time to “conspiracy,” residence in the central quarters of the city, more favorable to eluding surveillance), resulted in all the higher cells of the [Social-Democratic] organization … being filled by the intelligentsia, which, in turn, led to their psychological isolation from the mass movement. Hence, the unending conflicts and friction between the “centers” and the “periphery” and the mounting antagonism between workers and the intelligentsia …⁸²

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

In 1912–13, Lenin concluded that this was not enough: although admittedly nationalism was a reactionary force and probably anachronistic in the era of mounting class conflicts, one still had to allow for the possibility of its temporary appearance. The Social-Democrats, therefore, had to be prepared to exploit it on a conditional and transitory basis, exactly as in the case of peasant claims to private land:

It is the support of an ally against a given enemy, and the Social-Democrats provide this support in order to speed the fall of the common enemy, but they expect nothing for themselves from these temporary allies and concede nothing to them.⁹⁰

Searching for a programmatic formula, he rejected the two solutions popular among Eastern European socialists, federalism and cultural autonomy, the one because it promoted the disintegration of large states, the other because it institutionalized ethnic differences. After long hesitations, in 1913 he finally formulated a Bolshevik program for the nationality question. It rested on an idiosyncratic interpretation of the formula “national self-determination” of the Social-Democratic program to mean one thing and one only: the right of every ethnic group to secede and form a sovereign state. When his followers protested that this formula fostered particularism, Lenin reassured them. For one, the forces of capitalist development, which progressively fused the diverse regions of the Russian Empire into an economic whole, would inhibit separatism and ultimately render it impossible. Second, the “proletarian” right to self-determination always took precedence over the rights of nations, which meant that if, contrary to expectations, the non-Russian peoples separated themselves, they would be reintegrated by force. By offering the minorities a choice between all or nothing, Lenin was ignoring the fact that nearly all of them (the Poles and Finns excepted) wanted something in between. He fully expected the ethnic minorities not to separate but to assimilate with the Russians.⁹¹ Lenin used this demagogic formula to good effect in 1917.

One of the most secretive and yet critical aspects of Bolshevik history before the 1917 Revolution concerns party finances. All political organizations require money, but the Bolsheviks’ insistence that every member work full-time for the party made on them exceptionally heavy financial demands, for it meant that their cadres, unlike the Mensheviks, who were self-supporting, relied on subsidies from the party’s treasury. Lenin also needed money to outmaneuver his Menshevik rivals, who usually had a larger following. The Bolsheviks secured this money in various ways, some conventional, others highly unconventional.

One source was wealthy sympathizers, such as the eccentric millionaire industrialist Savva Morozov, who contributed 2,000 rubles a month to the Bolshevik treasury. After he committed suicide on the French Riviera, another 60,000 rubles from his estate was transferred to the Bolsheviks by Maxim Gorky’s wife, who served as trustee of Morozov’s life insurance policy.⁹² There were other donors, among them Gorky, an agronomist named A. I. Eramasov, Alexander Tsiurupa, who managed landed estates in Ufa province (in 1918 he would become Lenin’s Commissar of Supply), Alexandra Kalmykova, the widow of a senator and an intimate friend of Struve’s, the actress V. F. Komissarzhevskaia, and still others, whose identities remain unknown to this day.⁹³ Such patrons out of snobbery subsidized a cause that was fundamentally inimical to their interests: at this time, writes Leonid Krasin, Lenin’s close associate, “it was regarded a sign of bon ton in more or less radical or liberal circles to contribute money to revolutionary parties, and among those who quite regularly paid dues of from 5 to 25 rubles were not only prominent attorneys, engineers, and physicians but also directors of banks and officials of government institutions.”⁹⁴ The management of the Bolshevik treasury, operated independently of the common Social-Democratic one, was in the hands of a three-man Bolshevik “Center,” formed in 1905, consisting of Lenin, Krasin, and A. A. Bogdanov. Its very existence was kept secret from the Bolshevik rank and file.

But contributions from repentant “bourgeois” proved insufficient and in early 1906 the Bolsheviks resorted to less savory means, the idea of which seems to have been inspired by the People’s Will and the SR Maximalists. A great deal of Bolshevik funding henceforth derived from criminal activity, notably holdups, euphemistically known as “expropriations.” In daring raids, they robbed post offices, railroad stations, trains, and banks. In a notorious robbery of the State Bank in Tiflis (June 1907), they stole 250,000 rubles, a good part of it in 500-ruble notes whose serial numbers had been registered. The proceeds of this loot were transferred to the Bolshevik treasury. Subsequently, several individuals who attempted to exchange the stolen 500-ruble notes in Europe were arrested—all (among them the future Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov) proved to be Bolsheviks.⁹⁵ Stalin, who supervised this operation, and other participants were expelled from the Social-Democratic Party.⁹⁶ Ignoring the resolution of the 1907 party congresses condemning such activities, the Bolsheviks continued to commit robberies, sometimes in cooperation with the SRs. In this manner they acquired large sums, which gave them considerable advantages over the perennially cash-poor Mensheviks.⁹⁷ According to Martov, the proceeds of such crimes enabled the Bolsheviks to send their St. Petersburg and Moscow organizations, respectively, 1,000 and 500 rubles a month, at a time when the legitimate SD treasury’s monthly earnings from membership dues did not exceed 100 rubles. As soon as the flow of these funds dried up, which happened in 1910 when the Bolsheviks had to give up their moneys to three German Social-Democrats acting as trustees, their Russian “committees” vanished into thin air.⁹⁸

The overall direction of these secret operations was in the hands of Lenin, but the principal field commander and treasurer was Krasin, the head of the so-called Technical Group.⁹⁹ An engineer by profession, Krasin led a a double life: outwardly a respectable businessman (he worked for Morozov as well as the German firms AEG and Siemens-Schuckert), in his free time he ran the Bolshevik underground.* He operated a secret laboratory to assemble bombs, one of which was used in the Tiflis robbery.¹⁰⁰ In Berlin he also ran a counterfeit operation which turned out three-ruble notes. He engaged in gunrunning—sometimes from purely commercial motives, to make money for the Bolshevik treasury. On occasion, the Technical Group made deals with ordinary criminals—for instance, the notorious Lbov gang operating in the Urals, to whom it sold weapons worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.¹⁰¹ Inevitably, such activities attracted into Bolshevik ranks shady elements for whom the “cause” served as a pretext for a life of crime.

The lengths to which Lenin was prepared to go to acquire money for his organization is illustrated by the so-called Schmit affair.¹⁰² N. P. Schmit (Shmit), a wealthy furniture manufacturer related to Morozov, died in 1906, an apparent suicide, while awaiting trial on charges of having financed the purchase of weapons used in the December Moscow uprising. He left no last will, but told Gorky and other friends that he wanted his fortune, amounting to some 500,000 rubles, to go to the Social-Democrats. This disposition had no validity in the eyes of the law because the party, being illegal, could not be the beneficiary of a legacy. The money went, therefore, to his next of kin, a minor brother. Determined to prevent Schmit’s estate from being squandered by his heirs or transferred to the SD treasury, the Bolsheviks decided, at meetings chaired by Lenin, to get hold of it by any available means. The teenage brother was quickly talked into renouncing his share of the inheritance in favor of his two sisters. Arrangements then were made for two Bolsheviks to court and marry the heiresses. The younger girl, also a minor, was wed to a Bolshevik roughneck named Victor Taratuta; but to mislead the police, it was arranged for her to be married a second time, fictitiously, to a solid citizen. The 190,000 rubles which she subsequently received was forwarded to the Bolshevik treasury in Paris.¹⁰³

49. Leonid Krasin.

The second installment of the Schmit legacy, owned by the elder sister, was in the hands of her husband, also a Social-Democrat with Bolshevik leanings. He, however, preferred to keep the money. The dispute was submitted to a socialist court of arbitration, which awarded the Bolsheviks only one-half or one-third of the inheritance. Under threats of physical violence, the husband was eventually persuaded to turn his wife’s inheritance over to Lenin. In this manner, Lenin eventually acquired between 235,000 and 315,000 rubles from the Schmit estate.¹⁰⁴

This sordid financial affair and others like it greatly embarrassed the Bolsheviks in socialist circles in Russia and abroad when they were revealed by Martov, compelling Lenin to agree to have the funds of the SD Party deposited with German Social-Democrats as trustees. Quarrels over money were one of the main bones of contention between the two factions during the decade preceding the 1917 Revolution. Working as Lenin’s secretary, Krupskaia maintained a steady correspondence with Bolshevik agents in Russia using invisible ink, codes, and other devices to keep the police in the dark. According to Tatiana Aleksinskii, who helped her with this work, most of Lenin’s letters contained demands for money.* ¹⁰⁵

In 1908, the Social-Democratic movement in Russia went into decline, in part because the intelligentsia’s revolutionary ardor cooled and in part because police infiltration had made it all but impossible to conduct underground activity. The security services had penetrated the Social-Democratic organizations from top to bottom: before they could move, their members were exposed and arrested. The Mensheviks responded to this situation with a new strategy which called for emphasis on legal activity: publishing, organizing trade unions, working in the Duma. Some Mensheviks wanted to replace the Social-Democratic Party with a Workers’ Party. They did not intend to give up illegal activity altogether, but the drift of their program was toward democratic trade unionism in which the party did not so much lead the workers as serve them. To Lenin this was anathema and he labeled the Mensheviks who supported this strategy “liquidators,” on the grounds that their alleged aim was to liquidate the party and give up revolution. In his usage, “liquidators” became synonymous with counterrevolutionaries.

Nevertheless Lenin, too, had to accommodate himself to the difficult conditions created by police repression. This he did by exploiting for his own ends police agents who had infiltrated his organization. Although there cannot be any certainty about this, it seems the most convincing explanation of the otherwise puzzling case of the agent provocateur Roman Malinovskii, who for a while (1912–14) served as Lenin’s deputy in Russia and chairman of the Bolshevik Duma faction. It was a case of police provocation which in the opinion of Vladimir Burtsev exceeded in importance even the more celebrated case of Evno Azef.¹⁰⁶

Lenin ordered his followers to boycott the elections to the First Duma, while the Mensheviks left the matter to their local organizations, most of which, with the exception of the Georgian branch, also opted for a boycott. Lenin subsequently changed his mind and in 1907, disregarding the wishes of most of his associates, instructed the Bolsheviks to run. He intended to use the Duma as a forum from which to spread his message. It was here that Malinovskii proved of inestimable value.

A Pole by nationality, a metalworker by profession, and a thief by avocation, Malinovskii had served three jail sentences for theft and burglary. Driven, according to his own testimony, by political ambitions but unable to satisfy them because of his criminal record, and always in need of money, he offered his services to the Department of Police. On its instructions, he switched from the Mensheviks and in January 1912 attended the Prague Conference of the Bolsheviks. Lenin was most favorably impressed by him, praising Malinovskii as an “excellent fellow” and an “outstanding worker-leader.”¹⁰⁷ He appointed the new recruit to the Russian Bureau of the Bolshevik Central Committee, with authority to add members at his discretion. On his return to Russia, Malinovskii used this authority to co-opt Stalin.¹⁰⁸

On orders of the Minister of the Interior, Malinovskii’s criminal record was suppressed to allow him to run for the Duma. Elected with the help of the police, he used his parliamentary immunity to deliver fiery speeches against the “bourgeoisie” and socialist “opportunists,” some of which were prepared and all of which were cleared by the security services. Despite doubts voiced in socialist circles about his loyalty, Lenin unreservedly backed Malinovskii. One of the greatest services that Malinovskii rendered Lenin was to help found—with the permission of the police and very likely with its financial support—the Bolshevik daily Pravda. Malinovskii served as the newspaper’s treasurer; the editorship went to another police agent, M. E. Chernomazov. The party organ, protected by the police, enabled the Bolsheviks to popularize their views inside Russia much better than the Mensheviks. For the sake of appearances, the authorities occasionally fined Pravda, but the paper kept on appearing, printing the text of the speeches that Malinovskii and other Bolsheviks delivered in the Duma as well as Bolshevik writings: Lenin alone, between 1912 and 1914, published 265 articles in the paper. With the help of Malinovskii, the police also founded in Moscow the Bolshevik daily Nashput’.¹⁰⁹

While engaged in these capacities, Malinovskii regularly betrayed the party’s secrets to the police. As we shall see, Lenin believed that he gained more than he lost from this arrangement.

Malinovskii’s career as double agent was suddenly terminated in May 1914 by the new Deputy Minister of the Interior, V. F. Dzhunkovskii. A professional military man without experience in counterintelligence, Dzhunkovskii was determined to “clean up” the Corps of Gendarmes and put an end to its political activities: he was an uncompromising opponent of police provocation in any form.* When, on assuming his duties, he learned that Malinovskii was a police agent and that through him the police had penetrated the Duma, fearing a major political scandal, he confidentially apprised Rodzianko, the Duma’s chairman, of this fact.* Malinovskii was forced to resign, given 6,000 rubles, his yearly salary, and sent abroad.

The sudden and unexplained disappearance of the Bolshevik leader from the Duma should have put an end to Malinovskii’s career, but Lenin stood by him, defending him from Menshevik accusers and charging the “liquidators” with slander.† It is possible that in this case Lenin’s personal loyalty to a valued associate outweighed his better judgment, but this seems unlikely. At his trial in 1918, Malinovskii said that he had informed Lenin of his criminal record: since such a record precluded a Russian from running in Duma elections, the mere fact that the Ministry of the Interior did not use the information at its disposal to bar Malinovskii from the Duma should have alerted Lenin to his police connections. Burtsev, Russia’s leading specialist in matters of police provocation, concluded in 1918, from conversations with onetime officials of the tsarist police who testified at Malinovskii’s trial, that “according to Malinovskii, Lenin understood and could not help understanding that his [Malinovskii’s] past concealed not merely ordinary criminality but that he was in the hands of the gendarmerie—a provocateur.”¹¹⁰ The reason why Lenin might have wanted to keep a police agent in his organization is suggested by General Alexander Spiridovich, a high tsarist security officer:

The history of the Russian revolutionary movement knows several major instances of leaders of revolutionary organizations allowing some of their members to enter into relations with the political police as secret informers, in the hope that in return for giving the police some insignificant information, these party spies could extract from it much more useful information for the party.¹¹¹

When he testified before a commission of the Provisional Government in June 1917, Lenin hinted that, indeed, he may have used Malinovskii in this manner:

I did not believe in provocateurship in this case and for the following reason: if Malinovskii were a provocateur, the Okhranka [sic] would not gain from that as much as our party gained from Pravda and the whole legal apparatus. It is clear that by putting a provocateur into the Duma, removing for him the rivals of the Bolsheviks, etc., the Okhranka was guided by a crude image of Bolshevism—I would say a comic book caricature: the Bolsheviks will not organize an armed uprising. To have in hand all the threads, from the point of view of the Okhranka, it was worth anything to get Malinovskii into the Duma and the [Bolshevik] Central Committee. But when the Okhranka achieved both these objectives, it turned out that Malinovskii had become one of those links in the long and solid chain connecting our illegal base with Pravda.*

Although Lenin denied knowledge of Malinovskii’s police connections, this reasoning sounds like a convincing apology for employing a police agent to further the party’s objectives—that is, exploiting to the maximum the opportunities for legal work to win mass support when no other means were available.† When Malinovskii went on trial in 1918, the Bolshevik prosecutor indeed pressured tsarist police witnesses to testify that Malinovskii had done more harm to the tsarist authorities than to the Bolsheviks.¹¹² The fact that Malinovskii returned of his own free will to Soviet Russia in November 1918, when the Red Terror was at its height, and demanded to see Lenin strongly suggests that he expected to be exonerated. But Lenin had no more use for him: he attended his trial but did not testify. Malinovskii was executed.

In fact, Malinovskii had performed for Lenin many valuable services. His help in the founding of Pravda and Nash put’ has been mentioned. In addition, in his Duma speeches he read texts written by Lenin, Zinoviev, and other Bolshevik leaders: prior to delivery, he submitted these to Sergei Vissarionov, the deputy director of the Police Department, for editing.¹¹³ By this means, the Bolshevik message was spread nationwide. But above all he worked assiduously to prevent the reunification of Lenin’s followers in Russia with the Mensheviks. When the Fourth Duma convened, it transpired that the seven Menshevik and six Bolshevik deputies acted in a more cooperative spirit than either Lenin or the police desired: they behaved, in fact, like a single Social-Democratic delegation, as was usually the case when Lenin was not personally present to sow discord. Keeping them apart and thus weakening them was a mission to which the police assigned high priority: according to Beletskii, “Malinovskii was ordered to do everything possible to deepen the split in the parties.”¹¹⁴ It was a case of the interests of Lenin and the police coinciding.^‡

Lenin’s dictatorial methods and his complete lack of scruples alienated some of his staunchest supporters. Tired of intrigues and squabbles, caught in the prevailing mood of spiritualism, some of the brightest Bolsheviks began to seek solace in religion and idealistic philosophy: in 1909, the dominant tendency in Bolshevik ranks came to be known as Bogostroitel’stvo, or “God building.” Led by Bogdanov, the future head of “Proletarian Culture,” and A. V. Lunacharskii, the future Commissar of Enlightenment, the movement was a socialist response to Bogoiskatel’stvo, or “God-seeking,” popular among non-radical intellectuals. In Religion and Socialism, Lunacharskii depicted socialism as a type of religious experience, a “religion of labor.” In 1909, the proponents of this ideology established a school in Capri. Lenin, who found the whole development utterly distasteful, organized two counterschools, one in Bologna, the other in Longjumeau, near Paris. The latter, established in 1911, was a kind of Workers’ University, in which workers sent from Russia underwent systematic indoctrination in social science and politics: the faculty included Lenin and his two most loyal followers, Zinoviev and Kamenev. The inevitable police informer, this time disguised as a student, reported that the instruction at Longjumeau consisted of

mindless memorization by the pupils of snatches of lessons, which in their presentation bore the character of indisputable dogmas and which in no way encouraged critical analysis and a rationally conscious absorption.¹¹⁵

By 1912, after Martov’s public revelations of Lenin’s unscrupulous financial dealings and his use of money, much of it illicitly obtained, to achieve domination, the two factions gave up the pretense of being one party. The Mensheviks felt that the Bolshevik actions compromised the Social-Democratic movement. At the meeting of the International Socialist Bureau in 1912, Plekhanov openly accused Lenin of theft. But although the Mensheviks professed to be appalled by Lenin’s resort to crime and slander and by his admission that he deliberately misled workers about them, and although they castigated him as a “political charlatan” (Martov), they refrained from expelling him, whereas Struve, whose only sin was to sympathize with Eduard Bernstein’s “Revisionism,” they got rid of in no time. Little wonder Lenin would not take them seriously.

The final break between the two factions occurred in January 1912 at Lenin’s Prague Conference, following which they never again held joint meetings. Lenin appropriated the name “Central Committee” and appointed one consisting exclusively of hard-line Bolsheviks. Although the breach at the top was complete, rank and file Mensheviks and Bolsheviks inside Russia more often than not worked together and continued to view each other as comrades.

Lenin spent the two years preceding the outbreak of World War I in Cracow, from where he was able to maintain contact with his Russian followers. Either just before or immediately after the start of the war, he entered into a relationship with an agency of the Austrian Government, the Union for the Liberation of the Ukraine, which in return for his support of Ukrainian national aspirations paid him subsidies and assisted his revolutionary activities.¹¹⁶ The Union received funds from both Vienna and Berlin and operated under the supervision of the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. One of the people involved in its activities was Parvus, who in 1917 would play a critical part in securing Lenin passage through Germany to revolutionary Russia. An accounting statement submitted by the Union, dated Vienna, December 16, 1914, contains the following entry:

The Union has given support to the Majority faction of Russian Social-Democracy in the form of money and help in the establishment of communications with Russia. The leader of that faction, Lenin, is not hostile to Ukrainian demands, as demonstrated by his lecture, reported on in Ukrainische Nachrichten.¹¹⁷

50. Lenin: Paris 1910.

This connection proved very useful to Lenin when the Austrian police arrested him and Grigori Zinoviev (July 26/August 8, 1914) as enemy aliens and suspected spies. Influential persons in the Austrian and Polish socialist movements, among them Jacob Ganetskii (Haniecki, also known as Fürstenberg), an employee of Parvus’s and a close associate of Lenin, intervened on their behalf. Five days later, the viceroy of Galicia in Lwow received a cable from Vienna advising him that it was not desirable to detain Lenin, who was identified as “an enemy of tsarism.”¹¹⁸ On August 6/19, the Cracow Military Procurator telegraphed the district court in Nowy Targ, where Lenin was incarcerated, ordering his immediate release.¹¹⁹ On August 19/September 1, Lenin, Krupskaia, and Krupskaia’s mother, on a pass from the Austrian police, left Vienna for Switzerland in an Austrian military mail train—a means of transport unlikely to be made available to ordinary enemy aliens.¹²⁰ Zinoviev and his wife followed two weeks later. The circumstances of Lenin and Zinoviev’s release from an Austrian prison and the manner of Lenin’s departure from Austria indicate that Vienna regarded them as valuable assets.

In Switzerland, Lenin immediately set to work to deal with the failure of the Socialist International to honor its anti-war platform.

It had been a fundamental maxim of the international socialist movement that the interests of the working class cut across national borders and that the “proletariat” would under no circumstances spill blood in the capitalist struggle for markets. The Stuttgart Congress of the Socialist International, convened in August 1907, in the midst of an international crisis, devoted a great deal of attention to militarism and the threat of war. Two tendencies developed, one led by Bebel, which favored opposing war and, if war did break out, struggling for its “early termination.” The other trend was represented by three Russian delegates—Lenin, Martov, and Rosa Luxemburg, who, drawing on the Russian experience of 1905, wanted the socialists to take advantage of the fighting to unleash an international civil war.¹²¹ At the latter’s urging, the congress resolved that in the event of hostilities, it would be the duty of the workers and their parliamentary deputies

to intervene in favor of its speedy termination and to do all in their power to utilize the economic and political crisis caused by the war to rouse the peoples and thereby to hasten the abolition of capitalist class rule.¹²²

This clause represented a rhetorical concession by the right-wing majority to the left-wing minority to paper over their differences. But Lenin was not satisfied with the compromise. Pursuing the same divisive tactic which he had employed in the Russian Social-Democratic movement, he set out to split off from the more moderate majority of the Socialist International an intransigent left, committed to exploiting a future war for revolutionary purposes. He opposed a pacifist policy aimed at stopping hostilities endorsed by most European socialists: indeed, he wanted war very badly because war presented unique opportunities to make revolution. Since such a stance was unpopular and inadmissible for a socialist, Lenin refrained from expressing it publicly. But once in a while, as in a letter to Maxim Gorky written in January 1913, during yet another international crisis he wrote: “A war between Austria and Russia would be a most useful thing for the revolution (in all of Eastern Europe) but it is not very likely that Franz Joseph and Nicky will give us this pleasure.”¹²³

Once the war broke out, socialist parliamentarians of both the Allied and Central powers reneged on their pledges. In the summer of 1914 they had spoken passionately for peace and brought masses of demonstrators into the streets to protest the drift to war. But when hostilities began, they fell in line and voted in favor of war budgets. Especially painful was the betrayal of the German Social-Democrats, who had the strongest party organization in Europe and formed the backbone of the Second International: the unanimous vote of their parliamentary delegation for war credits was a stunning and, as it turned out, near-fatal blow to the Socialist International.

Russian socialists took the pledges of the International much more seriously than their comrades in the West, in part because they had shallower roots in their native country and took little patriotic pride in it and in part because they knew they had no chance of coming to power except by exploiting “the economic and political crisis caused by the war” posited by the Stuttgart resolution. Apart from the patriarchs of the Social-Democratic movement, such as Plekhanov and L. G. Deich, and a number of Socialists-Revolutionaries in whom the clash of arms awakened patriotic sentiments (Savinkov, Burtsev), most luminaries of Russian socialism remained faithful to the antiwar resolutions of the International. This the Social-Democratic and Trudovik (SR) deputies in the Fourth Duma demonstrated with their unanimous refusal to vote for war credits—the only European parliamentarians, save for the Serbians, to do so.

On arrival in Switzerland, Lenin drafted a programmatic statement, called “The Tasks of Revolutionary Social Democracy in the European War.”¹²⁴ After accusing the leaders of German, French, and Belgian Social-Democracy of betrayal, he outlined an uncompromisingly radical platform. Article 6 of “The Tasks” contained the following proposition:

From the point of view of the working class and the toiling masses of all the peoples of Russia, the least evil [naimenshee zlo] would be the defeat of the tsarist monarchy and its armies, which are oppressing Poland, the Ukraine, and a number of peoples of Russia …*

No other prominent European socialist expressed himself publicly in favor of his country losing the war. Lenin’s startling call for the defeat of Russia inevitably brought charges that he was an agent of the German Government.†

The practical conclusion of Lenin’s statement on the war was spelled out in the seventh and final article of his theses, which called for energetic agitation and propaganda among the civilian and military personnel of the belligerent nations for the purpose of unleashing a civil war against the “reactionary and bourgeois governments and parties of all the countries.” Copies of this document were smuggled into Russia and in November furnished the Imperial Government with grounds for closing down Pravda and arresting the Bolshevik Duma delegation. One of the lawyers who defended the Bolsheviks on this occasion was Alexander Kerensky. Tried on lesser charges than treason, which could have cost them their lives, the Bolsheviks were sentenced to exile, which all but put the party out of the picture until the February revolution.

The thrust of Lenin’s program was that the socialists were to strive not to end the fighting but to exploit it for their own purposes: “The slogan of ‘peace’ is incorrect at this moment,” he wrote in October 1914. “This is a slogan of philistines and priests. The proletarian slogan must be: civil war.”¹²⁵ Lenin would remain faithful to this formulation throughout the war. It was much safer for him to uphold it in neutral Switzerland, of course, than it was for his followers in belligerent Russia.

Aware of Lenin’s war program, the Germans were eager to use him for their own purposes: after all, Lenin’s call for the defeat of the tsarist armies was tantamount to an endorsement of a German victory. Their main intermediary was Parvus, one of the leaders of the St. Petersburg Soviet in 1905, the originator of the theory of “uninterrupted revolution,” and more recently a collaborator with the Union for the Liberation of the Ukraine. Parvus had one of the most impressive intellects in the Russian revolutionary movement as well as one of the most corrupt personalities. After the failure of the 1905 Revolution, he concluded that a successful revolution in Russia required the assistance of German armies: they alone were capable of destroying tsarism.* He placed himself at the disposal of the German Government, using his political connections to amass a sizable fortune. At the outbreak of the war he resided in Constantinople. He contacted the German Ambassador there and outlined to him the case for using Russian revolutionaries to promote German interests. His argument was that the Russian radicals could achieve their objective only if tsarism were destroyed and the Russian Empire broken up: since this objective happened also to suit Germany, “the interests of the German Government were … identical with those of the Russian revolutionaries.” He asked for money and authorization to communicate with Russian left-wing émigrés.¹²⁶ With the encouragement of Berlin, in May 1915 he contacted Lenin in Zurich: familiar with Russian émigré politics, he knew that Lenin was the key figure on the left and that if he won him over the rest of the Russian anti-war left would fall in line.¹²⁷ For the time being, the plan failed. It was not that Lenin objected to dealing with the Germans or felt qualms about taking money from them—he just would not negotiate with a traitor to the socialist cause, a renegade and “socialist chauvinist.” Parvus’s biographers suggest that in addition to personal dislike of Parvus, Lenin may also have feared that if he struck a deal with him, Parvus “would eventually acquire control of Russian socialist organizations, and, with his financial resources and his intellectual ability, be able to outmaneuver all the other party leaders.”¹²⁸ Lenin never publicly referred to this encounter.

Although he rejected Parvus’s overtures, Lenin did maintain political and financial contacts with the German Government through an Estonian, Alexander Kesküla.* In 1905–07 Kesküla had been a leading Bolshevik in Estonia. Later, he turned into an ardent Estonian nationalist, determined to gain independence for his homeland. Convinced, like Parvus, that the destruction of tsarist Russia could be accomplished only by the German army, at the outbreak of the war he placed himself at the disposal of the German Government, joining its intelligence services. With German subsidies, he operated out of Switzerland and Sweden to secure from Russian émigrés information on internal conditions in Russia and to smuggle Bolshevik anti-war literature into that country. In October 1914, he met with Lenin.† in whom he was interested as an enemy of the tsarist regime and a potential liberator of Estonia. Many years later, Kesküla claimed that he did not finance the Bolsheviks directly, contributing instead, indirectly, to their treasury and subsidizing their publications. These were important sources of support for the impoverished Bolshevik Party in any event, but he may have paid Lenin direct subsidies as well.

In September 1915, apparently in response to Kesküla’s request, Lenin provided him with a curious seven-point program outlining the conditions on which revolutionary Russia would be prepared to make peace with Germany. The document was found after World War II in the archives of the German Foreign Office.^‡ Its existence suggests that Lenin saw in Kesküla not only an Estonian patriot but also an agent of the German Government. Apart from several points affecting internal Russian affairs (proclamation of a republic, confiscation of large estates, introduction of an eight-hour workday, and autonomy for the ethnic minorities), Lenin affirmed the possibility of a separate peace, provided Germany renounced all annexations and contributions (although exceptions could be made for “buffer states”). He further proposed a Russian withdrawal from Turkish territory and an offensive against India. The Germans certainly had these proposals in mind when a year and a half later they allowed Lenin to travel across their territory to Russia.

Using funds placed at his disposal by Berlin, Kesküla arranged for the publication in Sweden of Lenin’s and Bukharin’s writings, which Bolshevik runners smuggled into Russia. One such subsidy was stolen by a Bolshevik agent.¹²⁹ Lenin reciprocated the favor by forwarding to Kesküla reports sent by his agents in Russia on the internal situation there, in which the Germans, for obvious reasons, were keenly interested. In a dispatch dated May 8, 1916, an official of the German General Staff reported to the Foreign Office functionary in charge of subversive operations in the east:

In the last few months, Kesküla has opened up numerous new connections with Russia.… He has also maintained his extremely useful contact with Lenin, and has transmitted to us the contents of the situation reports sent to Lenin by Lenin’s confidential agents in Russia. Kesküla must therefore continue to be provided with the necessary means in the future. Taking into account the exceptionally unfavorable exchange conditions, 20,000 marks per month should just be sufficient.*

As in the case of Parvus, Lenin maintained lifelong silence about his relations with Kesküla, and understandably so, since they were nothing short of high treason.

In September 1915, there convened, on the initiative of Italian socialists, a secret conference of the International in the Swiss village of Zimmerwald, near Berne. The Russians were strongly represented, with the leaders of both Social-Democratic factions and the SR Party in attendance. The group quickly broke up into two factions, a more moderate one, which wanted to preserve links with those socialists who supported the war, and a left one, which demanded a clean break. The latter, comprising eight of the thirty-eight delegates, was headed by Lenin. The majority rejected Lenin’s draft proposal for the transformation of the “imperialist” war into a civil war because it was unfeasible as well as dangerous: as one delegate pointed out, the signatories of such a proclamation would face death after returning home while Lenin enjoyed the safety of Switzerland. It also turned down Lenin’s demand for a split from the Committee of the International, controlled by patriotic socialists. Even so, Lenin did not go down in defeat at Zimmerwald,¹³⁰ for the official manifesto of the conference did make some verbal concessions to him, condemning those socialists who backed their government’s war efforts and calling on workers of all countries to join in the “class struggle.”¹³¹ The Zimmerwald left issued its own statement, which was stronger but stopped short of calling on the European masses to rise in rebellion, as Lenin wanted.¹³² Underpinning the disagreements between the two wings were differing attitudes toward patriotism, which most of the European socialists felt intensely and most of the Russian ones did not.

In April 1916, a sequel to the Zimmerwald Conference met at Kiental in the Bernese Oberland. The gathering was called by the International Socialist Committee to deal with the war, about to enter its third year. The participants, representing the pacifist wing of the International, again refused to yield to the Zimmerwald left but went considerably further in accommodating it than the year before. In the resolution on “The Attitude of the Proletariat toward the Question of Peace,” the conference, blaming the war on capitalism, asserted that neither “bourgeois nor socialist pacifism” could solve the tragedy facing mankind:

If a capitalist society cannot provide the conditions for a lasting peace, then the conditions will be provided by socialism.… The struggle for lasting peace can, therefore, be only a struggle for the realization of socialism.¹³³

The practical conclusion was for the “proletariat to raise the call for an immediate truce and an opening of peace negotiations.” Again, no call for rebellion and turning the guns against the bourgeoisie, but such action was not precluded by the premise of the resolution and may even be said to have been implicit in it.

As he had done at Zimmerwald, Lenin drafted the minority report for the left, which concluded with this appeal to the proletariat: “Lay down your weapons. Turn them against the common foe!—the capitalist governments.”* Among the twelve signatories under Lenin’s statement (of the forty-four present) Zinoviev took it upon himself to represent Latvia and Karl Radek, Holland.

The key Kiental resolution on the “International Socialist Bureau,” based on a draft by Zinoviev, came close to meeting the demands of the left by condemning this organization for turning into “an accomplice in the policy of the so-called ‘defense of the fatherland’ and of civil peace” and contending that the

International can recover from its collapse as a definite political power only to the extent to which the proletariat is able to liberate itself from all imperialist and chauvinist influences and reenter the road of class struggle and of mass action.¹³⁴

Even though Lenin’s demand for a split in the International once again went down in defeat, after the conference adjourned a member of the right, S. Grumbach, declared that “Lenin and his friends have played an important role at Zimmerwald and a decisive role at Kiental.”¹³⁵ Indeed, the Kiental resolutions laid the groundwork for the Third International, which Lenin was to found in 1919.

Lenin owed his relative success at Zimmerwald and Kiental in 1915–16, as he did later in the Russia of 1917, to the fact that he took the socialists at their word and demanded that they make good on their rhetoric. This earned him a small but devoted following in foreign socialist circles. More importantly, it paralyzed his opponents and prevented them from giving him battle because with this stand he seized the moral high ground of the socialist movement. The leaders of the International despised Lenin for his intrigues and slander, but they could not disown him without disowning themselves. His tactics enabled him to push the international socialist movement steadily leftward and eventually to split off from it his own faction, exactly as he had done in Russian Social-Democracy.

This said, it must be noted that the war years were for Lenin and Krupskaia a time of severe hardship, a time of poverty and isolation from Russia. They lived in quarters that bordered on slums, took their meals in the company of criminals and prostitutes, and found themselves abandoned by many onetime friends. Even some former followers came now to view Lenin as a crackpot and “political Jesuit,” a spent man.¹³⁶ When Krasin, once one of Lenin’s closest associates, now living in comfort as an official working for war industries, was approached for a contribution for Lenin, he pulled out two five-ruble notes, saying: “Lenin does not deserve support. He is a harmful type, and you never know what crazy ideas will sprout in his Tatar head. To hell with him!”¹³⁷

The only shaft of light in Lenin’s exile was an affair with Inessa Armand, the French-born daughter of two music-hall artists and the wife of a wealthy Russian. Influenced by Chernyshevskii, she broke with her husband and joined the Bolsheviks. She met Lenin and his wife in Paris in 1910. She soon became Lenin’s mistress, tolerated by Krupskaia, as well as a faithful follower. Although Bertram Wolfe speaks of her as a “dedicated, romantic heroine,” Angelica Balabanoff, who had many occasions to meet Inessa, describes her as “the perfect—almost passive—executrix of [Lenin’s] orders,” “the prototype of the perfect Bolshevik of rigid, unconditional obedience.”¹³⁸ She seems to have been the only human being with whom Lenin ever established intimate personal relations.

Lenin did not lose faith in the ultimate outbreak of a European revolution, but the prospect seemed remote. The Imperial Government had sufficiently weathered the military and political crisis of 1915 to be able to launch a major offensive in 1916. From sporadic communications sent him by his Petrograd agent, Alexander Shliapnikov, he knew of the deteriorating economic situation in Russia and the popular discontent in its cities,¹³⁹ but he disregarded the information, apparently convinced of the ability of the Imperial regime to overcome such difficulties. Addressing a gathering of socialist youths in Zurich on January 9/22, 1917, he predicted that while a revolution in Europe was unavoidable, “we old-timers perhaps shall not live [to see] the decisive battles of the looming revolution.”¹⁴⁰ These words he spoke eight weeks before the collapse of tsarism.

*On the primary and secondary materials concerning the young Lenin which are kept concealed in Soviet depositories, see Richard Pipes, ed., Revolutionary Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 27, note 2.

†I have attempted to draw a picture of Lenin’s early intellectual and spiritual evolution on the basis of the available documentary evidence in Revolutionary Russia, which I edited. Most of the information on the pages which follow comes from this work as supplemented by two other of my writings: Struve: Liberal on the Left, 1870–1905 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970) and Social Democracy and the St. Petersburg Labor Movement, 1885–1897 (Cambridge, Mass., 1963). Of the secondary sources, the most valuable is Nikolai Valentinov’s The Early Years of Lenin (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1969).

*Chernyshevskii was the leading radical publicist of the 1860s, the author of What is to be done?, a novel that urged young people to abandon their families and join communities committed to new positivistic and utilitarian ways of thinking. He regarded the existing world as rotten and doomed. The hero of the novel, Rakhmetov, is portrayed as a “new man” of iron will, totally dedicated to radical change. Lenin borrowed the title of Chernyshevskii’s novel for his first political tract.

*In 1792, in a transport of exuberance, Robespierre exclaimed: “I am neither the courtier of the people, nor its moderator, nor its tribune, nor its defender—I am the people itself!” (Alfred Cobban, Aspects of the French Revolution, London, 1968, 188.)

†He eventually came to tolerate his personal cult because, as he explained to Angelica Balabanoff, it was “useful, even necessary”: “Our peasants are suspicious; they don’t read, they must see in order to believe. If they see my likeness, they are persuaded that Lenin exists.” Impressions of Lenin (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1964, 5–6).

*A. N. Potresov, Posmertnyi sbornik proizvedenii (Paris, 1937), 297. Tatiana Aleksinskii concurs: “For Lenin, politics superseded everything and left room for nothing else”: La Grande Revue, XXVII, No. 9 (September 1923), 459.

*In order for his common-law wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia, to accompany him to Siberia, Lenin had to marry her. Since the Russian government did not recognize civil marriages, the wedding (July 10, 1898) had to take place in church: Robert H. McNeal, Bride of the Revolution: Krupskaya and Lenin (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1972), 65. Neither Lenin nor his bride ever referred in their writings to this embarrassing episode.

*See above, Chapter 1.

†Lenin, PSS, IV, 375–76. A decade later, Benito Mussolini, ten years Lenin’s junior and a leading Italian socialist, arrived independently at the same conclusion. In 1912 he wrote that “a worker who is merely organized has become a petty bourgeois who obeys only the voice of interest. Every appeal to ideals finds him deaf: B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, IV (Florence, 1952), 156. On another occasion Mussolini said that workers were, by their very nature, “pacifistic”: A. Rossi, The Rise of Italian Fascism, 1918–1922 (London, 1938), 134.

* At the end of the month, to elude surveillance by the Russian and Belgian police, the congress moved to London.

*Parvus first formulated the theory of “uninterrupted” or “permanent” revolution (without, however, using either name) in the introduction to Trotsky’s pamphlet Do deviatogo Ianvaria (Geneva, 1905), pp. iii-xiv, dated Munich, January 18/31, 1905. On this subject, see Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879–1921 (New York-London, 1954), 112–14, 118–19, 149–62, and Z. A. B. Zeman and W. B. Scharlau, The Merchant of the Revolution: The Life of Alexander Israel Helphand (Parvus) (London, 1965), 76–79. The concept of “Revolution in Permanence” had been briefly promoted by Marx in 1848: Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (New York, 1960), 77.

†Lenin, PSS, XI, 222. Both Wolfe (Three, 291–94) and Schapiro (Communist Party, 77–78) believe this statement to be an aberration on Lenin’s part, because he subsequently said on many occasions that Russia could not bypass the “capitalist” and “democratic” phase. But as his behavior in 1917 would reveal, he only paid lip service to the idea of a “democratic” revolution: his true strategy called for an immediate transition from “bourgeois” democracy to the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

*Proletarii, August 21, 1906, No. 1, in A. I. Spiridovich, Istoriia Bol’shevizma v Rossii (Paris, 1922), 138. The Okhrana, whose agents kept it well informed on Bolshevik affairs, reported shortly before the February Revolution that Lenin was not opposed to terror but thought that the SRs attached too much importance to it: Report dated December 24, 1916/January 6, 1917, Hoover Institution, Okhrana Archives, Index No. XVIIa-XVIId, Folder 5, No. R. As we shall note, his organization supplied the SRs with explosives for their terrorist operations.

*These facts did not escape Stalin. Referring to the Fifth Congress, which he had attended, he wrote: “Statistics showed that the majority of the Menshevik faction consists of Jews.… On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of the Bolshevik faction consists of Russians.… In this connection, one of the Bolsheviks observed in jest (it seems it was Comrade Aleksinskii) that the Mensheviks are a Jewish faction, the Bolsheviks a genuine Russian faction, hence it would not be a bad idea for us Bolsheviks to organize a pogrom in the party”: I. V. Stalin, Sochineniia, II (Moscow, 1946) 50–51.

*Krasin’s employment by this German electronics firm may not have been fortuitous. According to the head of Russian counterintelligence in 1917, Siemens had used its agencies for purposes of espionage, which led to the shutting down of its office in southern Russia: B. Nikitin, Rokovye gody (Paris, 1937), 118.

*The importance of such subsidies was stressed by Lenin in a letter of December 1904 to a potential donor: “Our undertaking is faced with bankruptcy if we do not hold out with the help of extraordinary resources for at least half a year. And in order to hold out without cutting back, we need a minimum of two thousand rubles a month”: Lenin, PSS, XLVI, 433.

*Padenie, V, 69, and I, 315. He abolished police cells in the armed forces and in secondary schools, on the grounds that it was improper for men in uniform and students to inform on each other. S. P. Beletskii, the director of the Police Department and Malinovskii’s immediate supervisor, believed that these measures disorganized the work of political counterintelligence: Ibid., V, 70–71, 75. Beletskii was shot in September 1918 by the Cheka in the first wave of the Red Terror.

*The possibility has been raised that Dzhunkovskii fired Malinovskii because he was alarmed by the effect his inflammatory Duma speeches were having on workers at a time when Russia was in the grip of a new wave of industrial strikes: Ralph Carter Elwood, Roman Malinovsky (Newtonville, Mass., 1977), 41–43.

†Lenin, PSS, XXV, 394. In 1915, Malinovskii volunteered for the Russian armies in France. Wounded and captured by the Germans, he conducted pro-German propaganda among Russian prisoners of war. During this time, he maintained a regular correspondence with Lenin: Padenie, VII, 374; Elwood, Malinovsky, 59; Grigorii Aronson, Rossiia nakanune Revoliutsii (New York, 1962), 53–54.

*Vestnik Vremennogo Pravitel’stva, No. 81/127 (June 16, 1917), 3. Lenin’s testimony on Malinovskii is published neither in the multivolume edition of the commission’s records (Padenie) nor in his Collected Works.

†Tatiana Aleksinskii recalls that when questions were raised about the possible presence on the Central Committee of a police informer, Zinoviev quoted from Gogol’s Inspector General: “A good household makes use even of garbage.” La Grande Revue, XXVII, No. 9 (September 1923), 459.

‡The likelihood that Lenin was aware of Malinovskii’s police connections is accepted, in addition to Burtsev, by Stefan Possony (Lenin: The Compulsive Revolutionary, Chicago, 1964, 142–43). Malinovskii’s biographer rejects this hypothesis on the grounds that the Bolsheviks learned far less from Malinovskii about the police than the police learned about the Bolsheviks (Elwood, Malinovsky, 65–66). But he ignores Lenin’s own argument as well as Spiridovich’s statement about the use of double agents, cited above.

*Lenin, PSS, XXVI, 6. Lenin’s puzzling emphasis on Russia’s “oppression” of the Ukraine must be explained at least in part by his financial arrangements with the Austrian Government. He did not demand that the Ukrainians also be liberated from Austrian rule.

† An accusation to this effect is made by General Spiridovich, the usually well-informed official of the gendarmerie. He claims, without furnishing proof, that in June and July 1914 Lenin traveled twice to Berlin to work out with the Germans a plan of seditious activity in the rear of the Russian armies, for which he was to be paid 70 million marks: Spiridovich, Istoriia Bol’shevizma, 263–65.

*He felt vindicated by the events. In 1918, referring to the 1917 Revolution, he wrote that “Prussian guns played a larger role in it than Bolshevik leaflets. In particular, I believe that the Russian émigrés would still be wandering in emigration and stewing in their own juice if German regiments had not reached the Vistula”: Izvne (Stockholm), No. 1 (January 22, 1918), 2.

*On him, see Michael Futrell in St. Antony’s Papers, No. 12, Soviet Affairs, No. 3 (London, 1962), 23–52. The author had a unique opportunity to interview this Estonian but, unfortunately, chose to accept his testimony rather uncritically.

†Futrell in Soviet Affairs, 47, states that this was his only encounter with the Bolshevik leader, but this seems most unlikely.

‡It is reproduced in a cable from the German Minister in Berne, Count Romberg, to Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg in Berlin, dated September 30, 1915: Werner Hahlweg, Lenins Rückkehr nach Russland, 1917 (Leiden, 1957), 40–43 (English translation in Zeman, Germany, 6–7).

*Hans Steinwachs of the Political Section, German General Staff, to Minister Diego von Bergen of the Foreign Office, in Zeman, Germany, 17. The language of this document indicates that Kesküla misinformed Futrell when he intimated that he had obtained such reports by infiltrating Lenin’s organization in Sweden: Futrell in Soviet Affairs, 24.

*Lenin, Sochineniia, XIX, 437. “And objectively who profits by the slogan of peace?” Lenin wrote at this time. “Certainly not the revolutionary proletariat. Not the idea of using the war to speed up the collapse of capitalism.” Citing these words, Adam Ulam comments: “He overlooked the fact that the lives of millions of human beings also could have ‘profited’ by the ‘slogan of peace’ ”: The Bolsheviks (New York, 1965), 306.