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 several years I have been honoring various revolutionary forbears, including the subject of this birthday tribute, the Russian Bolshevik Vladimir Lenin architect (along with fellow revolutionary Leon Trotsky) of the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 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 to honor revolutionary forbears. That month has special significance since in the month of 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 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 on some previous occasions. I have also made some special point in previous years about the life of Rosa Luxemburg, “the Rose of the Revolution.” This month, the month of his birth, it is appropriate, at a time when the young needs to find a few good heroes, to highlight the early struggles of Vladimir Lenin, the third L, as he attempted to define himself politically. Below is a sketch of a young fictional labor militant, although not so fictional in the scheme of the revolutionary developments in Russia under the Tsar toward the end of the 19^th century and early 20^th century. This sketch should help define the problems facing the working-class there then, and perhaps now as well.

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“Big Ivan” Smilga (called such for obvious reasons) 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 Smiley 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on a work crew that took the rolls of finished fabric off the bobbing machines for further processing and transport had been replaced by a machine which did the task automatically. He had sulked and drunk himself silly for a while and then grabbed any work he could find as he was running out of funds. (That course of action pursued only after a “caper,” 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). 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) he 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 Smiley and Son, motioned him to come join the group. This Suslov knew of Ivan’s ill-fated attempt to wreak the machinery at Smiley’s 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”) 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, was that Ivan was to do the strong-arm work one evening at the minister’s home. 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 year, for even thinking about the idea of kidnapping the Tsar’s minister.