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

 

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 fourth sketch written as part of a series posted over several days before Lenin’s birthday on the American Left History blog starting on April 16^th (see archives) 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 ones that Lenin had to get a handle on.

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Ivan Smilga was sitting at the quay on the Neva River in Saint Petersburg forlorn, more forlorn than he had been since sometime in his early childhood when he found out that the land that he lived on did not actually belong to him, or rather did not belong to his father, and he had run out into the fields in rage, had not understood the almost feudal arrangement that his father had with landlord owner, including service by any sons in case of war decreed by the Tsar. He did not know much about that, didn’t care a fig about that military service part since he was well under any conscript age but he did rage that his father, every year his father never got ahead, never tired as well of talking about the miseries of his life that defeated any chance of his getting ahead on land that he continually said had been played out by the previous tenant, Tsachev. Still his father did nothing about it, not even when he had heard that some young people had come out from Moscow to organize them and instead threatened to turn them in if they dared step on “his land” (although in the end that organization effort came to naught since the city radicals had made the cardinal error of calling themselves intellectuals which set them apart as well as the fact that they, as was their wont in the cities, produced much literature which only a few like Ivan would have been able to read).

This day Ivan was forlorn because they had taken Elena off, off to Siberia a place he himself had known having served a two year sentence there a few years before for political crimes against the state, in short trying to kidnap state officials for ransom to get money and to make the point they could do the deed with impunity,   when he had ill-advisedly and against his common sense took up with a revolutionary cell in Moscow and had been “fingered” by one of the worker comrades to the Okhrana in order to cut his own sentence. Elena had been taken in for trying to organize a demonstration for a shorter work day and other more political rights (ten instead of twelve hours days and half a day on Saturday, the right to organize trade unions, the right to free speech, etc.) in front of the Winter Palace on New Year’s Day to bring in the new year, and the new century [1900].

The direct reason for Ivan’s agitated state was that he had become “engaged” to Elena and had come to depend on her for his emotional support. (This engagement thing was not the old-fashioned type involving dowries and exchanges but a “new-type” where that “engagement” signified that they had already slept together in anticipation of marriage, or in more advanced circles just slept together. Ivan and Elena were the former.)

Yes, the year 1899 had not been a good year for the left-wing political struggles in Russia. The Tsar and his ministers had determined to crush any opposition in the bud and so even the organizing of trade unions, illegal but semi-tolerated especially in the foreign concessions, had become a point of contention. Ivan and Elena had clashed many times over that question. Elena, after they had met, or rather had re-met having worked in Moscow together at the Smythe and Son textile factory, at the Putilov Iron Works where he was an apprentice blacksmith and she worked in the foundry, had been involved in a strike action in which Elena was a central figure that wound up getting a number of fellow workers back on the job after they had been fired. As a result of that victory the previously hesitant Ivan (hesitant due to that very trip to Siberia of his own and a desire not to go back and well as fears for Elena that had now come true) had met Elena “half-way” and worked with her on trade-union organizing issues. He would however have no truck with the broader issues, the question of democratic right when he would have to confront the state in a more direct manner. He had had enough of that. Besides he had come to think, under the influence of various liberal and radical thinkers who were popping up in the capital and who were making some sense to Ivan’s mind that if they, the workers, could just get more pay, less work, and some time off that things would be better. Let others, other, smarter people worry about the larger issues. That day to day struggle fight was all that could be expected and that was enough.

When Elena (and her fellow political workers, mainly students at Saint Petersburg University and radical workers from the Vyborg, the working class quarters) determined that trade union organizing was not enough and that the Tsar had to be confronted with the issue of democratic rights and a street demonstration Ivan had gone off in a fit, had left Elena alone for several days to stew outside Saint Petersburg. During that time Elena, a crackerjack organizer and also a very committed revolutionary, had organized the march set for New Year’s Day. On that day there was no turning back for her and her comrades. The minute they stepped off at noon they were surrounded by sabre-welding Cossacks and arrested. Before Ivan could get back to the city, before he could attempt once again to talk her out of the rash action she had been arrested and faced deportation to Siberia. That is why one Ivan Smilga was sitting before the Neva River forlorn. But that is also one reason why Ivan thought that maybe, just maybe Elena had been right, that the struggle for a better life for him and her, them might need some more thought on his part.