In Honor Of Russian Revolutionary Vladimir Lenin’s Birthday (April 1870-Janaury 1924)-The Struggle Continues-Ivan Smilga’s Political Journey-Take Two

In Honor Of Russian Revolutionary Vladimir Lenin’s Birthday (April 1870-Janaury 1924)-The Struggle Continues-Ivan Smilga’s Political Journey-Take Two      

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 

 

For a number of years I have been honoring various revolutionary forbears, including the subject of this birthday tribute, the Russian Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin architect (along with fellow revolutionary Leon Trotsky) of the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 in each January under the headline-Honor The Three L’s –Lenin, Luxemburg , Liebknecht. My purpose then was (and still is) to continue the traditions established by the Communist International in the early post-World War I period in honoring revolutionary forbears. That month has special significance since every January  

Leftists honor those three leading revolutionaries who died in that month, V.I. Lenin of Russia in his sleep after a long illness in 1924, and Karl Liebknecht of Germany and Rosa Luxemburg of Poland in 1919 murdered in separate incidents after leading the defeated Spartacist uprising in Berlin.

 

I have made my political points about the heroic Karl Liebknecht and his parliamentary fight against the German war budget in World War I in which he eventually wound up in prison only to be released when the Kaiser abdicated (correctly went to jail when it came down to it once the government pulled the hammer down on his opposition), on some previous occasions. The key point to be taken away today, still applicable today as in America we are in the age of endless war, endless war appropriations and seemingly endless desires to racket up another war out of whole cloth every change some ill-begotten administration decides it needs to “show the colors”, one hundred years later in that still lonely and frustrating struggle to get politicians to oppose war budgets, to risk prison to choke off the flow of war materials.  

 

I have also made some special point in previous years about the life of Rosa Luxemburg, the “rose of the revolution.” About her always opposing the tendencies in her adopted party, the German Social-Democracy, toward reform and accommodation, her struggle to make her Polish party ready for revolutionary opportunities, her important contributions to Marxist theory and her willing to face and go to jail when she opposed the first World War.

 

This month, the month of his birth, it is appropriate, at a time when the young needs to find, and are in desperate need of a few good heroes, a few revolutionaries who contributed to both our theoretical understandings about the tasks of the international working class in the age of imperialism (the age, unfortunately, that we are still mired in) and to the importance of the organization question in the struggle for revolutionary power, to highlight the  struggles of Vladimir Lenin, the third L, in order to define himself politically.

 

Below is a second sketch written as part of a series posted over  several days before the anniversary of Lenin’s birthday on the American Left History blog starting on April 16^th (see archive) of a young fictional labor militant, although not so fictional in the scheme of the revolutionary developments in the Russia of the Tsar toward the end of the 19^th century and early 20^th century which will help define the problems facing the working-class there then, and the very problems that Lenin had to get a handle on.

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“Big Ivan” Smilga (called such for obvious reasons, well over six feet tall, well over two hundred pounds and thus big for a Ukrainian farm boy) had been out of work, steady work anyway, the best part of a year after he (along with his work crew) had been laid off by John Smyte and Son, the English textile firm working under license from Tsar in Moscow. He had been called “redundant” (and of course the crew as well) after the job he held as lead-man on a work crew that took the rolls of finished fabric off the bobbing machines for further processing and transport had been replaced by a machine which did the task automatically. Ivan and that crew in “Luddite” fashion had one Saturday night after a heavy day of drinking had smashed the machine in expectation that that action would get their jobs back. That course of action pursued, a Luddite caper, in which he and his crew snuck into the closed Smiley factory one Saturday night and wreaked the hauling machinery only to find that next Monday morning that it was replaced by an exact replica. Fortunately he and the crew were never discovered and nobody snitched to the Okhrana or he/they would be in Siberia just them. (Luddite being an English moniker well known to the Smythes as a moniker used for “anarchists” who went around smashing machines in England in the early part of the Industrial Revolution for the same reasons as Ivan and his crew and with the same results. Ivan had been befuddled by the term when it had appeared in the pro-Smythe Moscow Gazette until the term was explained to him and he responded with a big laugh saying something like there really wasn’t anything ne win the world.) He had sulked and drunk himself silly for a while (a man who before the trek to the city had been a very modest vodka drinker by Ukrainian standards) and then grabbed any work he could find as he was running out of funds. Grabbing whatever work he could find entailed moving down the working-class scale as his once substantial stash of cash was dwindling and as he came in contact with more nefarious types at the workingmen’s taverns that he then more frequently hung out at to kill time.

One night at the Golden Eagle Tavern (rough Russian translation and allegedly named in honor of the Tsar but maybe just named to curry favor with the police inspectors who were prowling around such working-class haunts ever since labor agitation not unlike in the rest of Europe had started in the Saint Petersburg factories) Ivan ran into some workmen whom he knew and a few who were not working men but students, maybe from Moscow University, who were talking in the back room, talking quietly although not attempting to cover their voices or the door which led into the back. One of the workmen, Vladimir Suslov, known to him from his time at Smythe and Son, motioned him to come join the group. This Suslov knew of Ivan’s ill-fated attempt to wreak the machinery at Smythe from one night when Ivan had been too talkative and he had overheard Ivan speaking of the attempts. What Vladimir, and one of the students, Nicolas Kamkov as he found out later, had to say was that things had become intolerable in Russia, that the sons and daughters of the land needed a reprieve, that the growing working- class needed relief and that the students (they called themselves the “intelligentsia” and maybe they were but around the peasantry, and those who had roots in the peasantry like Ivan, using that term was quickly squashed once they found out that the peasantry associated all intellectuals with the court and government) needed to be able to breath and say whatever they wanted. And this motley group of students and workmen had a plan to solve this problem.

Nicolas let Suslov tell the broad outline of the plan. The idea, like something out of the People’s Will movement of blessed if now distant memory, was rather than try to assassinate governmental officials like in the wild old days, instead to take them hostage, hostages to be returned for various grants of relief for peasants, workers and students. Suslov looked directly at Ivan when he asked who was in and who was out. Ivan nodded, or half-nodded, that he was in. (He later said he feared some Suslov indiscretion more, especially if he was caught, more than the very real doubts he initially expressed about the plot). Since everybody in the room expressed an interest they began to plan. The main idea for hostage number one, the Tsar’s finance minister who was in an entourage along with foreign investors and factory owners headed on a train into Moscow within the next few days according to some inside information the group had, was that Ivan was to do the strong-arm work one evening at the minister’s hotel disguised as a hotel employee. So the planning went on over the next few days. Then just as quickly it was over as a knock came on Ivan’s door one night and when he opened it there was Daniev, the local Okhrana official with Suslov in tow. Suslov had betrayed him (and the others), in order to get out from under his own hard time as a ring-leader. Ivan was thereafter banished to Siberia for two years, a hard two years, for even thinking about the idea of kidnapping the Tsar’s minister.