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

 

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 fifth 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 did not know the first moment when he resolved to go after his lover Elena Kassova who was being prepared for deportation to Siberia and either aid her escape or share her fate. Ivan found that he needed to deal with the question of Elena’s fate after returning to Saint Petersburg shortly after New Year’s Day 1900 and finding that his “engaged” Elena Kassova had been arrested for political crimes and was being held for trial prior to deportation to Siberia. She had organized, or had attempted to organize since it never got off the ground, a demonstration on New Year’s Day calling for political rights from the Tsar in front of the Winter Palace. The minute the fifty or so students and workers stepped off onto the street they were arrested and thus there had to have been a Tsarist agent who had infiltrated the organization a problem inherent in the revolutionary movement. Ivan had, as a result of his own transportation to Siberia and some reflection on what was possible under the Tsar, totally opposed Elena’s project   and had left Saint Petersburg in a furious state when she said that she was going ahead with the demonstration. All Ivan knew was that he was ashamed that he had left the city in a huff after several quarrels about Elena’s leadership role in that political demonstration proposed for that New Year’s Day. A day when the bloody sabre-wielding Cossacks had wreaked havoc on the small demonstration before it even stepped off before the Winter Palace. He was ashamed first that he had not been there to share her fate and secondly that Elena had been right, right all along that, something more than getting better wages and working conditions needed to be done to bring Mother Russia into the new century.

Ivan reddened as he thought about how he had constantly belittled Elena (and her friends and associates, mostly sparsely-bearded radical students from Saint Petersburg University and a smattering of young workers, some from his own Putilov Works) around what Mother Russia did or did not need. Mainly that the fight for wages, for shorter hours and for a union was enough to carry the day. He could begin to see that even those demands could not be met without more political organization than that necessary for shop floor issues. Ivan wasn’t sure what that might be but he knew he had been wrong to rattle Elena’s confidence by dismissing her notion that a political party, a revolutionary party from the looks of the situation, was necessary to fight the Tsar and his minions. He cringed when he thought about how he had laughed out loud and said that Russia had too many political parties already.       

But politics, or finding out what politics would serve the ends desired, was not really what drove Ivan to distraction. Ivan loved Elena in the old-fashioned way like a wayward backward peasant boy. He had wronged her and therefore it was his responsibility to right that wrong and hence his resolve. Maybe by going to Siberia he would win back her respect. Maybe even join her and her comrades in their quixotic fight against the massive Tsarist repression. He was not looking forward to going back to Siberia after his prior tour there a few years back when he had served his own two year sentence for political crimes (a scatterbrain scheme involving holding responsible governmental officials hostage in return for some political action which had been betrayed by one of the workers in the cell) but he needed to go. Who knows what the future held but all Ivan knew was that whatever Elena’s fate that was his as well.