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

 

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 sixth and final 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.

******

Ivan Smilga trembled with exhaustion as he knocked on the door at 20 Wentworth Street in the city of London where he sought refuge after his long flight from the Siberian frost fields of Mother Russia. Exhausted too beside him was his “wife” Elena (nee Kassova), a very pregnant Elena, whom Ivan had just helped escape from those frost fields after a six month journey over several countries and many stops. He had been given the Wentworth Street address by reliable comrades in Germany after Berlin had become too hot for the couple to stay in as Russian refugees (political exiles but we will use the German governmental designation for effect) and needed to move on to continue the struggle for freedom back home while they were forced abroad. As Ivan stood there waiting for the door to open he reflected on just how fantastic the past six months, hell, the past year had been.   

He thought back to that time a couple of years before, a few days before New Year’s Day 1900 when he had fought with Elena over the very hot question then of whether they would just continue the trade-union organizing at the Putilov Iron Works in Saint Petersburg where they both worked as he wished having been burned before when he tried to act politically or expand as Elena wanted to make political demands of the Tsarist regime including public street demonstrations to make their point. Elena had been determined to pursue that course and had been planning along with a few fellow radical workers and a few students from the University such an action for New Year’s Day 1900 to symbolically bring Russia in the new century. After that argument Ivan had run off, left town for a retreat at the Finnish border and sulked. Finished sulking and filled with love (regular old romantic love) for his Elena he determined that he would help her after all. However by the time he returned to Saint Petersburg the Cossacks had done their dirty bloody sabre-wielding work and Elena had been rounded up and detained for trial and eventual transportation and exile in Siberia. Ivan had been ashamed that he had left  this love, his real love in the lurch by his actions and resolved to  go to the Siberian exile to be with her, or help her escape abroad depending on the circumstances.

Ivan having prior to meeting Elena at the Putilov Works had his own Siberian exile for some scatter-brained conspiracy against the Tsar that he had been talked in to, had no problem getting himself exiled to Siberia for the political crime of standing in front of the Winter Palace by himself calling for freedom for the Winter Palace Twenty (the number of those, including Elena, who were picked up at that New Year’s Day demonstration). Once he got to his place of exile at Yalov in the Siberian wilds (their place eventually since he had “married” Elena while in exile in order bring her with him from her place of exile at Alta Ata) he immediately began to plot their escape. She encouraged him in that pursuit since her days as effective street organizer inside Russia were over for now. That plan became more pressing when Elena shortly after joining him at Yalov became pregnant and didn’t want to have her child born in slave Russia (she had wanted to parent a revolutionary Ivan, just an old county bumpkin wayward backward farm boy at heart just wanted a child). Moreover Elena (and in her wake once Ivan began to attend the lively if sometimes arcane meetings of the local political exile groupings), a crackerjack organizer was needed by her organization, the fledgling Russian Social-Democratic Party, to go into foreign exile in order to help the organization from abroad now that her days inside Russia were numbered.            

Hence the escape by the pair in the dead of night and in the dead of winter, harrowing at times what with nature, wild animals, wild men and desperadoes ready to pounce on any weak thing out there, having to hide out under many furs on a sleigh in order not to freeze to make good their initial escape, then finally by rail to Saint Petersburg. From that location they moved clandestinely over the border and further passage out to Germany. They needed to move on again despite Elena’s weakened condition after Berlin when, at the Tsar’s request to the German government to deny all Russians exile status (the various reigning monarchs were inter-related) that place became too hot for them. From there they moved to Paris and then now exhausted to London. As the door opened and Elena brightened to see Vladmir Smirnov, an old party comrade of Elena’s Ivan finally realized that whatever else Elena’s and now his party work had become a family necessity. He felt he was ready now…               

[Of course the flight to London in the early years of the 20^th century were not the end of their political lives for Ivana and Elena (and son Vladimir) since they had to establish themselves in exile like the thousands of other refugees from the Tsar. Ivan eventually got a job in a blacksmith’s shop (the chief blacksmith seeing in Ivan what everybody else had seen in Russia, a big man who would work hard and do the heavy lifting especially as the shop turned from horses to automobiles toward 1910) and Elena raised Vladimir while doing party work. That work consisted of working with the immigrant community to put out newspapers and pamphlets for general consumption but also to be smuggles back into the Empire via well-known if dangerous land and sea routes. Ivan working long hours especially at the beginning was less likely to show at political events but he kept up with current events through Elena and made some in-road connections which would be helpful later after the 1917 revolution with British trade union militants and members of the fledgling Labor Party. 

In the great dispute between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks in 1903 Elena, bringing Ivan along with her although his temperament shaded toward the Bolsheviks, had originally sided with the Mensheviks. Basically Elena used to the free-wheeling broad-based movement that she had been part of in Saint Petersburg had been attracted to that more open, less polemical tendency with its less demanding definition of party membership and they went through the Revolution of 1905 with that grouping. Although they were forced by exile to watch the events of 1905 they keenly watched what all the parties were up to and to take note of who did and did not perform well under revolutionary circumstances. Being at some distance they sure that as the events unrolled that this was the revolution, finally, that everybody knew was coming, new had to come (even some very pro-Tsar bureaucrats saw the writing on the wall, knew their days were numbered).  Toward the end of the revolutionary period, once the Saint Petersburg Soviet had been dismantled, the leaders, including the big figure of Trotsky, arrested, tried and exiled they pulled more toward the Bolsheviks who had been more wary of the bourgeois democrats than the Mensheviks and had a better sense of what the still slumbering peasants needed to be prodded onto the political stage. (Although both had heard about Trotsky’s summation of the 1905 and his understanding that the bourgeois forces in Russia were played and that the working class would be the dominant force in any future revolution they had been put off by Trotsky’s aloofness and seeming distain for organization work.) Mainly though they adjusted to their new lives until the Great War broke out in 1914 and they had been threatened with deportation if they persisted in their public displays of hostility to the Allied side (the way the British authorities saw the issue), taking as good coin all the international proclamations by the Second International that militants should oppose their own governments if war broke out, proclamations mainly torn up in the actuality of war. This drew them even closer to the Bolsheviks than previously especially when a large number of Menshevik leaders like Plekhanov were siding with the Tsar or keeping their heads down on the war issue.    

When the February Revolution broke out in 1917 Ivan decided to return to Saint Petersburg to see what was happening and in March after the situation became clear, once the Tsar had abdicated and the first Provisional Government established he sent for Elena and Vladimir and they expected to take up some party work in the city alive with politics in every direction while they were there. They found a small, crowded apartment in the Vyborg district, the heart of the revolution at that time, and began to work helping put on the local workers’ newsletter and taking part in the debates of the Petersburg Soviet. In July though, after the big pro-Bolshevik demonstration by the city and soldier hot-heads they had been caught up in the dragnet put out by the Provisional Government and Ivan found himself with Trotsky and others in the Peter and Paul prison where they were held for period. Elena held in the women’s prison was, as a mother with responsibilities shortly thereafter released. Ivan was released in September and both were active during the great October Bolshevik uprising. Elena helping to organize a women’s new sheet. Ivan, always the obviously choice for the heavy work, physical or logistical had been put in charge of a red worker detachment by Trotsky himself that helped storm the Winter Palace and insure the victory of the Soviets.

Eventually toward December Ivan was elected to the Petrograd Soviet after a seat had been vacated by the sitting delegate. Still later when the dreaded civil war started he, responding to a direct plea from then-War Commissar Trotsky, led a Red Guard detachment sent from Saint Petersburg by rail before Kazan when the revolution was most in danger from the rampaging Czech Legions. Ivan Smilga, “Big Ivan” fell before Kazan leading his men helping to recapture the city. Elena, despondent over his death, withdrew from party work for a while and continued to raise young Vladimir. Several years later, after having gotten over her grief and finding work in the Woman’s Department of the All-Russia Soviet, she passed away from an undiagnosed illness. Vladimir then in his late twenties, having gone through the various Red youth organizations went on to become a mid-level Soviet official in the Commissariat of Agriculture and a rabid supporter of all of Stalin’s actions in liquidating the Bolshevik Old Guard and whomever he wished to eliminate, something that it would not have sat well with Elena and Ivan. Vladimir was eventually purged when Khrushchev took over after Stalin’s death.]