Happy Birthday-From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- The Dress Rehearsal To The Bolshevik-Led October 1917 Russian Revolution- “1905”- A Book Review-

From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- The Dress Rehearsal To The Bolshevik-Led October 1917 Russian Revolution- “1905”- A Book Review

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1907/1905/ch22.htm


Click on the headline to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archive online copy of his CHAPTER 22-Summing Up from 1905 as background for the review below.
Book Review

1905, Leon Trotsky, translated by Anya Bostock, Random House, New York, 1971

The author of this book, a central Soviet leader of the Russian Revolution of 1905 and of the Bolshevik-led revolution in 1917 as well as one of the 20th century’s larger-than-life revolutionary figures, Leon Trotsky, noted, as have others, that the unsuccessful 1905 revolution acted as a “dress rehearsal” for the Bolshevik-led October 1917 revolution. And thus this book was intended to, and does, give a bird’s eye view from a key participant about the lessons to be drawn from the failure of that first revolution, both the strategic and tactical military and political lessons. And from reading many histories of the October 1917 revolution from all kinds of political perspectives, Trotsky and Lenin at least, learned those lessons very well.

The presentations in this book actually were written in several different periods, the central part was written while Trotsky was in European exile in 1908(after a harrowing escape from the hazards of a court-imposed internal Siberian exile). Trotsky first hones in on a sociological, political, economic and cultural overview of the trends leading up to the 1905 events. He also analyzes the key “sparking” event, the January 9th march (old calendar) by the hat-in-hand workers to petition the Tsar for the redress of pressing grievances that turned into a massacre, the subsequent months long waves of political and economic strikes that forced some timid Tsarist constitutional innovations in October, the creation of the soviets (workers councils) in that period and its subsequent arrest as a body, and the pivotal, although unsuccessful, Moscow insurrection that ended the period of active revolutionary upheaval.

Other parts of the book include polemics against various liberal and social democratic opponents (more on those below), the trial of the Soviet deputies, including Trotsky’s stellar use of the courtroom as a platform to defend the Soviet’s actions from strikes to insurrection. The very last part, which kind of puts paid to the period, is a detailed description of his Siberian escape, the stuff of legend.

A quick summary of the basic strategic concepts of the Russian revolution is in order here to make sense of what the various working class organizations (and others) were trying to achieve in the 1905 revolution. It comes down to three concepts: the Menshevik social-democratic view (also essentially shared by the liberal capitalists, the peasant-based social-revolutionaries, and most of the bourgeois radical intelligentsia) that economically backward (compared to European capitalist and imperialist development), peasant-dominated (including vast peasant-dominated national minorities), and autocratic Russia was ripe for a bourgeois revolution of the Western-type led by the bourgeois before any thought of socialism could be projected; the Bolshevik social-democratic view which also argued for a bourgeois revolution of a more or less short duration but with the understanding that the Russian bourgeois was too tied to world imperialism to lead such a movement and also argued that it would be led by an alliance of the urban workers carrying the bulk of the peasantry with them (especially on the long unresolved land question); and, the Trotsky radical social-democratic view that the urban workers (and urban allies) also including that Russia mandatory peasant alliance would not only fight for the historic gains associated with the bourgeois revolution (quench land hunger, create a unified nation-state, form some kind of popular government with wide representation) but, of necessity, also form a workers and peasants government to start on the road to socialist construction. That is the core of his theory of permanent revolution (later, in the late 1920s, extended to other countries of belated capitalist development) associated thereafter with his name.

This thumbnail sketch does not do justice to all the intricacies of each position but, after reading this book one should understand those positions better and note, at least in passing, that Trotsky seems even in 1908 to have the better of the argument after having seriously drawn the lesson of his own experience and observed that the Russian bourgeoisie, for many reasons, had no heart to lead a revolution and were quite comfortable making its peace with Tsarist society. He also noted that the peasantry was too amorphous, too driven by its land hunger, and too scattered in the countryside to lead a modern revolution. But that is music for the future. Certainly even in 1908 (or earlier) as he was fighting a rear-guard action against his various political opponent, including Lenin) to defend his political perspectives he earned the title bestowed on him by George Bernard Shaw as the “prince of pamphleteers.” Even one hundred years later I am glad, glad as hell, that I am not the one that he is polemizing against with his rapier-edged pen. The wounds would still not have healed.

Of course the theory of permanent revolution, recognized as such or codified in full or not later by the Bolsheviks, turned out to be the fighting formula for the Bolshevik-led October revolution. The liberal bourgeoisie (led by the Kadet Party) turned out to be even more venal that it had been in 1905; the Mensheviks tried to pass a camel through the eye of a needle to try to keep giving power to the bourgeoisie, including taking part in their provisional government; and the social revolutionary-led peasantry turned to the Bolsheviks (at least important elements, including the peasant soldiers) when the latter supported land seizures by the poorer peasants. An attentive reader will see that scenario develop in embryo after reading this important eye witness work.

Note: There is no where else that this observation fits comfortably above so I will place it here. Those familiar with Trotsky’s role in the Bolshevik revolution as the military organizer of the Petrograd insurrection and later, under conditions of civil war, as War Commissar, where he led the red armies against the whites will be surprised to find that he was very perspective about the military necessities of the class struggle even in 1905. If one looks at the fastidiously dressed Trotsky in the famous picture taken of him in his prison cell while awaiting trial along with the other 1905 Soviet deputies one would not take him for a future class struggle warrior. Make that fact an added factor in my characterization of him as one of the 20th century's larger-than-life revolutionary figures.

*From The Pages Of "Women And Revolution"-"The Roots Of Bolshevism: The Russian Revolutionary Tradition"-A Guest Commentary

Click on the title to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the heroic 19th century early Russian revolutionary, Vera Figner, mentioned in the article below.

Markin comment:

The following is an article from the Summer/Autumn 1992 issue of "Women and Revolution" that has some historical interest for all those who wish to learn about our militant forbears. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during this Women's History Month.

The Roots Of Bolshevism:The Russian Revolutionary Tradition

W&R is pleased to present the edited transcript of a talk given by a member of our editorial board, Joseph Seymour, at an educational conference of the Spartacist League/US, held in the Bay Area on 2 May 1992.

The origins of this talk go back a few years to conversations I had with two comrades who were most directly and actively involved in seeking to build a section of the International Communist League in the Soviet Union. We talked about how wretched the present-day Russian intelligentsia was, both the pro-Wall Street self-styled "democrats" and the Stalinist self-described "patriots." Particularly disturbing was the depth of women's oppression and the pervasive¬ness of male chauvinism, not only in Soviet societyat large but even amongpeople who considered themselves communists, Leninists, would-be Trotskyists.

As we were talking, it occurred to me that the present-day Russian intelligentsia is not only profoundly alienated from Bolshevism, but from the many generations of Russian revolutionaries who preceded and culminated in Bolshevism. If the ghost of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who was the greatest Russian socialist of the pre-Marxist era—a man who had a profound influence on Lenin—could return to his old intellectual haunts in the universities and editorial offices of Russia today, he would not be able to understand how anyone who called himself a democrat could want to transform Russia along the lines of Western capitalism. For him, to be a democrat meant to be for social equality. It meant to be for the rule of the lower classes in society. The Russian revolutionaries despised the bourgeoisie, both the Russian version and the Western version.

Chernyshevsky would be even more uncomprehending about how anyone could call himself a communist and yet be a Russian nationalist, a male chauvinist and an anti-Semite. Because to be a communist meant by definition that you were an internationalist, you were an extreme partisan of women's equality and liberation, and you welcomed Jews as equals and as comrades. From the 1870s onward, Jews played a prominent role in all of the Russian radical movements, all of the wings of populism and later all wings of Marxism.

And women played a far more prominent role in the Russian revolutionary movement than they did in any other country in the world. Women like Vera Zasulich and Sofia Bardina of Land and Liberty, which was the principal populist organization, were hard, tough, dedicated revolutionaries. From the shooting of the police commandant Trepov in 1878 to the assassination of the tsarist general Luzhenovsky by Maria Spiridonova in 1906, Russian women carried out some of the most spectacular acts of terrorism. After the
Revolution of 1905 a tsarist prison official in his own way recognized the equality of women: "Experience shows that women, in terms of criminality, ability, and possession of the urge to escape, are hardly distinguishable from men."

If we could get into a time machine and go back to the world of Chernyshevsky and Land and Liberty, we would have big fights about peasant socialism and the efficacy of terrorism. But at a deeper level we would feel ourselves among comrades. So what we are trying to do is to reinstill in Russia today its own great revolutionary tradition, a tradition which has been perverted and degraded or simply forgotten after decades of Stalinist rule and the pressure of Western imperialism on the Soviet bureaucratically degenerated workers state.

French Jacobins and Russian Decembrists

That tradition begins with the Decembrists, a group of revolutionary democratic military officers who sought to overthrow the tsarist autocracy in December 1825. But the Decembrists themselves begin with the French Revolution, which is the fountainhead of radicalism in the modern world. It is one of the ironies of history that the Russian army which the tsar sent into West Europe to crush the French Revolution in its Napoleonic phase became a transmission belt back into Russia for the ideals of that revolution. One of the Decembrists later wrote:

"During the campaigns through Germany and France our young men became acquainted with European civilization, which produced upon them the strongest impression. They were able to compare all that they had seen abroad with what confronted them at every step at home: slavery of the majority of Russians, cruel treatment of subordinates by superiors, all sorts of government abuses, and general tyranny."

So the Decembrists were a belated attempt to extend the French Revolution into Russia. One of their principal leaders had been the son of the Russian ambassador to Napoleonic France; he grew up in a milieu shot through with former Jacobin revolutionaries, among them Napo¬leon himself. Another prominent Decembrist, when he was stationed in Paris in 1815, went around to the leading intellectuals, among them Henri Saint-Simon, a pioneer
theorist of socialism. Saint-Simon attempted to convince this young Russian nobleman to introduce socialism into his homeland.

The most radical of the Decembrists, Pavel Pestel, had not personally been to France although he identified himself wholeheartedly with the French revolutionaries. But he went beyond Jacobinism. By the 1820s the ideas of socialism were beginning to gain currency among the European intelligentsia. Pestel attempted to combine a radical bourgeois-democratic revolution with elements of socialism. He proposed that the land be taken from the nobility and given to the peasants—half given to the peasants to farm privately, the other half to farm collectively so that no peasant family would go hungry. And Pestel called this the Russian Law. After the insurrection was suppressed, the tsarist authorities discovered the Russian Law among Pestel's private papers. Instead of publicizing it at his trial, they thought it was so inflammatory and attractive that they buried it in a secret archive. It did not see the light of day for almost 100 years.

An old reactionary general was on his deathbed when he heard of the Decembrist uprising, and it perplexed him. He said: before we have had uprisings of peasants who want to become noblemen; now we have an uprising of noblemen who want to become shoemakers. The Decembrists did not want to become shoemakers; they were not concerned with their future personal status. But this old reactionary understood something: that this was a movement of an elite, isolated from the peasant masses in whose interests they spoke and attempted to act. And this would be true of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia throughout the 19th century. Initially this milieu consisted mainly of the sons of noblemen, later on the sons and daughters of what was called the "middle class," the children of tsarist bureaucrats or like Chernyshevsky, of Russian Orthodox priests. It was only at the end of the century, in the mid-1890s, that the Marxist wing of the intelligentsia acquired a mass base among the rapidly growing industrial proletariat.

The Decembrists were the first revolutionary bourgeois-democratic movement in Russia. They were also the last such movement. That is, they were the last movement that attempted to overthrow the tsar in order to remodel Russian society along the lines of contemporary West Europe or North America. After that, those people who wanted to transform Russia along the lines of Western capitalism did not call themselves democrats because they were not democrats; they called themselves liberals. They did not want to overthrow the tsarist autocracy. Rather they wanted to pressure the tsarist autocracy to modernize Russia from above. Their goal was a constitutional mon¬archy in which the monarch remained strong and the constitution guaranteed the rule of the propertied classes. As Chernyshevsky put it: "The liberals absolutely refuse to allow the lower strata any preponderance in society."

The First Russian Socialist Movement

Following the suppression of the Decembrists it took another generation for a new revolutionary movement to emerge. This was the so-called Petrashevsky Circle, a group of a couple of hundred radicals around Mikhail Petrashevsky. At that time the Russian Orthodox Church was sexually segregated, and in order to show his support for the equality of women and his defiance of the state church, Petrashevsky donned women's clothing and he attended a ceremony of the church exclusive to women. However he had forgotten to shave off his beard! He was approached by a policeman who said, "Madam, I think you are a man." Petrashevsky replied, "Sir, I think you are an old woman." The policeman was so flustered, Petrashevsky made his getaway.

Whereas the Decembrists had viewed West Europe in the afterglow of the French Revolution, a generation later Petrashevsky and his comrades only saw in West Europe an arena of the horrible exploitation of the lower classes by the propertied classes. They identified with the socialist opposition to Western bourgeois society and defined their goal as the application of Western socialism to Russia. In light of everything that's happening in Russia today, it's important to emphasize that this very first Russian socialist movement was implacably opposed to Russian nationalism in all its manifestations. They of course opposed the Slavophiles, who idealized Russia before Peter the Great and counterposed the spirituality of the Russian people to the crass materialism of the bourgeois West. But Petrashevsky and his comrades also opposed radical democrats like Belinsky who argued that the progress of humanity goes through nations, not by transcending nations. Against this view they argued, "Socialism is a cosmopolitan doctrine, which stands higher than nationalities...for socialists differing nations do not exist, there are only people."

The Petrashevsky Circle was the exact contemporary of the German League of the Just, out of which came the Communist League for which Marx wrote the Com¬munist Manifesto. Like Marx, Petrashevsky and his com¬rades believed that the spectre of communism was haunt¬ing Europe. And Russia was part of Europe. They looked forward, in the near future, to a pan-European socialist revolution, predominantly proletarian in the West, predominantly peasant-based in the East. They believed that the outbreak of the revolutions of 1848 in West Europe was the beginning of that development, and they immediately wanted to get in on the act. They started discussing how they were actually going to overthrow the tsar. But before they got very far, the tsarist authorities simply crushed them. Nicholas I was panicked in his own way by the spectre of communism and moved to destroy its meager reflection among a small section of the Russian intelligentsia.

The Origins of Populism

The revolutions of 1848 and the ensuing counterrevolutions by the combined forces of bourgeois and monarchical reaction are the great historic watershed of 19th century Europe. Among other things they gave rise to Russian populism as a distinct current of European socialism. Petrashevsky and his comrades had believed that socialism would come to Russia as part of a general European revolution. That vision was defeated on the barricades in Paris, Vienna, Rome and elsewhere.

A witness to that defeat was Alexander Herzen, the founder of Russian populism. Herzen had been a radical democrat who emigrated to West Europe, and he experienced the revolutions of 1848 in France and Italy. But Herzen remained optimistic about the prospects of revolution in Russia. If Russia was going to have a revolution in advance and independently of West Europe, however, it would have to be a predominantly peasant revolution because the industrial proletariat was minute. A German conservative, Baron Haxthausen, who had visited Russia in the 1840s, wrote a book saying that Russia didn't need a socialist revolution, it already had socialism in the form of the traditional peasant commune. After 1848 Herzen accepted this premise and argued that what would require a proletarian revolution in the West could be achieved on the basis of Russian rural institutions if the society were sufficiently democratized.

It is important to emphasize that while the Russian populists saw a different path to socialism in Russia, they had the same goal as Western revolutionaries. Thus Marx was always held in extremely high regard in the Russian populist movement. One of the early under¬ground populist groups wrote to Marx in London and proposed that he represent Russia as well as Germany in the leading council of the First International. The first language into which Capital was translated was Russian. It got through the tsarist censors, who figured that a book so dry and abstract as Capital could not inspire anyone to revolutionary passion, and it became an instant best seller. At the end of his life, Herzen stated that he had always been faithful to the ideas of Saint-Simon, who had an extremely technologically advanced conception of socialism.

Herein lay the fundamental contradiction of Russian populism. The populists projected onto the peasant commune not only economic egalitarianism, but social equality at all levels—the equality of women, a libertarian conception of sexual relations, a belief in materialism and the progress of science. They believed that the tsar-worshipping, priest-ridden, wife-beating Russian peasant could be won to the outlook of a Saint-Simon or a Marx. Such an illusion could survive only as long as the populist movement was exclusively a movement of the intelligentsia. And in fact the "To the People" movement marked the beginning of the end of Russian populism.

Revolutionary populism went through four distinct phases. The first phase was ushered in by the Crimean War of 1853-55 in which Russia was defeated by England and France. This defeat sent shock waves through the Russian upper classes. Tsar Nicholas I died in 1855 (some say he committed suicide out of a sense of shame). His successor, Alexander II, appeared to be a liberal, and in the late 1850s Russia experienced the tsarist version of glasnost and perestroika. Censorship was relaxed very considerably, and the tsarist government began talking about fundamental reforms of the system of serfdom.

Initially populist intellectuals like Herzen and Chernyshevsky demanded that the tsar expropriate the landed nobility and give the land to the peasantry. Some believed that the tsarist autocracy would achieve from above what the French Revolution had achieved from below. However, it soon became clear that the legal emancipation of the serfs was going to be done in a way which perpetuated the exploitation of the peasants at the hands of the landlords and the absolutist state. In the first years after the abolition of serfdom, the economic conditions of the peasantry were actually worse than they had been. When the Emancipation Edict of 1861 was read, it provoked scattered peasant uprisings; the peasants thought it was a counterfeit document by the local bureaucrats and the landlords. The so:called Emancipation Edict marked the beginning of revolutionary populism. The intelligentsia became convinced that in order to establish peasant-based socialism they would have to overthrow the tsarist autocracy and create a democratic republic.

The "Common Cause":
Women in the Revolutionary Movement

In the 1860s the first underground revolutionary organizations came into existence. These were easily crushed. Chernyshevsky himself was imprisoned and then exiled. Yet the tsarist repression in no way suppressed the revolutionary populist movement. Over the course of the next decade, a group of perhaps two or three hundred intellectuals became a mass movement of the intelligentsia numbering thousands of activists and perhaps ten times as many sympathizers.

A three-sided political struggle developed during this period within the Russian intelligentsia who opposed the existing social and political order to some degree: the Slavophiles, the liberals, and the revolutionary populists. In this struggle the populists won hands down, and by the early 1870s Russian universities were a bastion of revolutionary populism.

Perhaps the decisive reason for the victory of populism is that they were able to mobilize the vast reserves of the women of the educated classes. This movement literally liberated thousands of women from the shackles of the patriarchal family. A woman was not legally allowed to live on her own without the permission of her parents, or her husband if she was married. To circumvent this, the fictitious marriage became a sort of standard activity within the radical movement. Some young male student would be told by a friend that he knew of a woman of advanced views who wanted to go abroad to study medicine (a woman couldn't study medicine in Russia). And they would meet for the first time in front of a church; they would go in, get married; they would come out, and he would hand her her passport, of which he had control, and say, "Now you are free to go and study medicine and do what you like."

During the 1860s the Russian revolutionary movement acquired the participation of women to a far greater degree than their counterparts in Western Europe. These women at the same time consciously rejected Western-style feminism, that is, the idea of building a separate movement predominantly of women in order to pressure the existing government to pass laws in favor of women's equality. They saw women's equality coming about through what was called the "common cause," a total social revolution in which they would participate on an equal footing with male revolutionaries. Vera Figner, who became the principal leader of the terrorist People's Will in its final phase, recounts how she and her fellow Russian radical students at the University of Zurich viewed this question:

"Generally speaking, as a group the female students abroad were not advocates of the woman question and smiled at any mention of it. We came without thought of pioneering or trying to solve the woman question. We didn't think it needed solution. It was a thing of the past; the principle of equality between men and women had been achieved in the sixties."

Now of course what Figner meant was that it had been achieved within the revolutionary movement, not in Russian society at large. The Russian populists, called "Narodniks" in their own language, were acutely aware of the terrible oppression of women. At a mass trial of populists in 1877, the tsarist prosecutors denounced them for undermining the family. Sofia Bardina replied to this:

"As far as the family is concerned...isn't it being destroyed by a social system which forces an impoverished woman to abandon herself to prostitution, and which even sanctifies this prostitution as a legal and necessary element of every civilized state? Or is it we who are destroying the family? we who are trying to root out this poverty—the major cause of all society's ill, including the erosion of the family?"

"To the People"

In the mid-1870s the populist intelligentsia who were organized in Land and Liberty, which was an all-Russian, fairly highly centralized organization of the Narodnik vanguard, made a heroic 'attempt to overthrow what Bardina called the "social system." This was the "To the People" movement. Thousands of revolutionary intellec¬tuals flocked to rural villages trying to incite the peasants to rise up in a radical democratic and social revolution. The response was not favorable. One of the leading veterans of this movement reported:

"I noticed that any sharp sallies against the Tsar or against religion made an extremely disagreeable impression on the peasants; they were just as deeply perplexed by energetic appeals for a rebellion or uprising."

When the Narodnik intellectuals said that the peasants should have the landlords' land, they got a favorable hearing. But the peasants were unwilling to defy the state to achieve this end.

While the main body of Narodnik intellectuals went to the rural villages, some remained in the cities and sought to agitate and organize among factory workers. Here they were distinctly more successful. They were able to win over some advanced workers, such as Stepan Khalturin, who joined the leadership of Land and Liberty and set up small but significant allied organizations of workers.

One of the leading populist intellectuals involved in organizing the workers was Georgi Plekhanov. Initially Plekhanov accepted what could be called the conventional populist line: factory workers are simply peasants doing seasonal vyork in the factories, which had no effect on their sympathies and ties to the rural villages. But Plekhanov's own experience caused him to question this. In 1879 he wrote:

"The question of the city worker is one of those that it may be said will be moved forward automatically by life itself, to an appropriate place, in spite of the a priori theoretical decisions of the revolutionary leaders."

The "To the People" movement, which necessarily operated quite openly, exposed the Narodniks to massive state repression. This repression, combined with the frus¬tration that the movement had not achieved its basic aim, paved the way for the last phase of revolutionary populism: the turn toward terrorism.

In 1878 Vera Zasulich heard that one of her comrades had been almost beaten to death in prison. She put on her best clothes, walked to the prison, requested that she present a petition to the head of the prison, and when she went into his office she pulled out a gun and shot him pointblank. She did not however kill him. The tsarist authorities thought this was such an open-and-shut case that instead of trying her for a political crime before a special tribunal, they tried her on an ordinary criminal charge before a jury drawn from the St. Petersburg upper classes. And she was acquitted, because the jury found this a justifiable act of moral outrage!

The acquittal had a far more shocking impact than the shooting. Count Leo Tolstoy, the author of War and Peace, expressed the views of the educated elite when he called Zasulich's acquittal "a harbinger of revolution." The populist leaders drew the same conclusion: that if even an upper-class jury will acquit an overt terrorist, then a cam¬paign of terrorism would have enormous popular support. Marx and Engels in London similarly concluded that in the particular conditions of Russia a campaign of terrorism could incite a popular revolution.

The one populist intellectual who dissented was Plekhanov, who warned that the only effect of shooting Alexander II would be to replace him with another Alexander with another digit after his name. He wanted to continue to propagandize and agitate among the rural had been in prison and then in exile for almost 20 years. The tsarist regime had sufficient respect for the effectiveness of People's Will that they did in fact free the old man of Russian socialism. But in the following years Russian populism was basically broken, not so much by the tsarist repression as by demoralization. Neither mass agitation nor terrorism had seriously affected the tsarist autocracy, which emerged if anything even more reactionary than ever.

From Populism to Marxism

The 1880s were the low point of the Russian revolutionary movement. In 1889 a student in St. Petersburg, just ten years earlier a hotbed of revolutionary activism, reported: "There were few self-sacrificing participants who completely consecrated themselves to the cause.... All wanted to finish the course as soon as possible and then to live entirely within the law." Yet just a few years later, a new generation of Russian revolutionaries would enter the scene and finish off the tsarist autocracy
once and for all.

Most accounts of the transition from populism to Marxism within the Russian intelligentsia focus exclusively on Plekhanov and his comrades. It's important, however, to place this transition in its international context. During the 1870s Russia appeared to be the one country on the verge of a radical upheaval. The bomb-throwing Russian Narodnik seemed the model of the European revolutionary. When Zasulich fled to West Europe after being acquitted for shooting Trepov, she was greeted as a heroine not only by socialists, but even by many Western liberals who hated the tsarist autocracy. Yet a decade later the Russian populist movement had almost evaporated. In 1878, the same year that People's Will was formed, the Bismarck regime in Germany passed the so-called Anti-Socialist Laws aimed at breaking the power of the German Marxist movement. The leaders, Bebel and Kautsky, were driven into exile and many activists were imprisoned. Yet unlike the Russian populists, the Marxists became the mass party of the German proletariat despite the repression. So Plekhanov's influence among a new generation of Russian revolutionaries-was not merely because of the intrinsic brilliance of his polemics against populism, but also because he was a cothinker of the strongest, most effective socialist movement in Europe.

After the split in Land and Liberty, Plekhanov attempted to establish a small propaganda group called "Total Redistribution," but the tsarist persecution was so intense that he and his comrades were forced into exile. This compelled them to rethink their basic theoretical premises and strategic perspectives, and in the early 1880s Ple¬khanov made the transition from populism to Marxism. That transition contained two basic elements, one negative, the other positive. Instead of just idealizing it, Plekhanov looked at what was happening to the peasant commune, and he saw that since the emancipation of the serfs, the collective elements of the Russian peasantry were rapidly being undermined. A new layer of rich peas¬ants, known by the insulting term kulaks, or "fists," was increasingly dominating the life of the village because they had the money. That was the negative element. The positive element is that Plekhanov generalized from his own experiences in the 1870s that there was a fundamental difference between workers and peasants, that they were not just part of the narod, the "people," and that only the workers in their mass were receptive to the socialist program. He concluded that a socialist party in Russia must be based centrally on the slowly but steadily growing proletariat.

In rejecting the conception of peasant-based socialism, Plekhanov concluded that Russia at that point in its economic development could not have a socialist transformation of any kind. He conceived a theory of what later came to be called the "two-stage revolution." In the first stage the working class, guided by the socialist intelligentsia, would lead the overthrow of the tsarist autocracy. The liberal bourgeoisie, such as ruled in the West, would then come to power. In turn the workers would gain the political freedom to build a mass proletarian party and allied trade-union movement. Plekhanov also believed that a radical democratic revolution in Russia would enormously accelerate capitalist development, thus increasing the numerical weight of the industrial proletariat and creating the objective economic conditions for a socialist revolution in the future. Thus the program of the Eman¬cipation of Labor group, formed in 1883, stated:

"Present-day Russia is suffering—as Marx once said of the West European continent—not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from insufficiency of that development.

"One of the most harmful consequences of this backward state of production was and still is the underdevelopment of the middle class, which, in our country, is incapable of taking the initiative in the struggle against absolutism. "That is why the socialist intelligentsia has been obliged to head the present-day emancipation movement, whose immediate task must be to set up free political institutions in our country...."

Plekhanov's two-stage revolutionary schema was accepted within the Marxist movement until the beginnings of the Revolution of 1905, when it was confronted, as Plekhanov would have said, "by life itself." It was then challenged in different ways by Lenin's conception of the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry and Trotsky's conception of permanent revolution.

"From a Spark a Flame Shall Be Kindled"

In the first decade of its existence, the Emancipation of Labor group was a mere handful of exiles. This reflected both the apolitical mood of the Russian intelligentsia and the continuing dominance of the populists over the diminished radical movement. Slowly Plekhanov began to influence a new younger generation of Russian intellectuals, personified by Vladimir llyich Ulyanov. According to his own account, the future Lenin was an apolitical youth until 1887, when his older brother was executed for participating in one of the last populist attempts to take the tsar's life. Alexander Ulyanov's execution radicalized his younger brother, who, however, did not follow the same path in a programmatic and strategic sense. In the early 1890s the young future Lenin consciously rejected populism in all its contemporary manifestations, and consid¬ered himself a Marxist.

By the mid-1890s, revolutionary populism was a thing of the past and what passed for populism had merged with liberalism. In the 1890s the only people who were calling for a democratic republic were the Marxists, called the Social Democrats. Thus Lenin could write at this time: "All true and consistent democrats in Russia must become Social Democrats." The Russian Marxists had achieved a position in some ways comparable to the revolutionary populists of a generation earlier. They had become the dominant current among that section of the Russian intelligentsia which was fundamentally hostile to the existing social and political order. They had also acquired a small layer of advanced workers. But they had to break outside the narrow circle. This was called the transition from propaganda to agitation. Plekhanov defined propaganda as the explanation of many complex ideas to the few, and agitation as the explanation of a few basic ideas to the many.

The attempt of the Marxist propaganda circle to involve itself in agitation among the workers happened to coincide with a major strike wave. As a result they got a far more favorable hearing and greater influence among the workers than they had initially expected. Lenin, Martov and the other leaders of the movement sought to direct the workers' economic resistance to the employer toward the ultimate goal of a radical democratic revolution against the tsarist autocracy. In a popular pamphlet on factory fines written in 1895, for example, Lenin wrote:

"[The workers] will understand that the government and its officials are on the side of the factory owners, and that the laws are drawn up in such a way as to make it easier for the employer to oppress the worker."

The turn toward agitation incurred increased tsarist repression. Lenin, Martov and the other leaders of what were called the first generation of Russian Marxist "practicals"—that is, the Russian Marxists who actually organized the workers, as opposed to the older veterans like Plekhanov and Axelrod who provided the theoretical direction from exile—were arrested. The movement passed into the hands of younger people whose formative experience was their involvement in the mass strikes. They became so enthralled with increasing their influence among the workers that they decided to drop the demand for a democratic republic, which they argued was remote from the immediate concerns of the workers and was unpopular among the more backward sections who still had illusions in the tsar's benevolence.

Plekhanov denounced this tendency as "economism," which a colleague of Lenin, Potresov, defined as the Utopian notion of building an effective trade-union move¬ment under tsarist absolutism. Nonetheless in the late 1890s economism became the dominant current within Russian Social Democracy, both the underground circles in Russia and the exile organizations in West Europe.

In 1900 Lenin, Martov and Potresov were released from Siberia, where they had been sent into exile. They joined Plekhanov and his comrades in West Europe to form what was called the Iskra group. "Iskra," meaning "spark," was taken for their journal; it derived from a letter that was written 75 years earlier by the imprisoned and condemned Decembrists to their friend, the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. In justifying their actions, the Decembrists said: "From a spark a flame shall be kindled." In choosing this name the Iskra group was stating that the proletariat was and must be the heir to the tradition of revolutionary democratic struggle against the tsarist autocracy. The very name was an attack on economism.

Although Plekhanov was one of the towering figures of European socialism, it was Lenin who was the real driving force and principal organizer of the Iskra group. Its immediate goal was to wrest control of the movement from the still dominant economists. The Iskra group won rather rapidly, in part because Russian society was beginning to experience revolutionary ferment at all levels. Factory workers in large numbers spontaneously joined student strikes and protests, thereby giving the lie to the economist notion that workers would take to the streets only when their own personal livelihood was involved—a very narrow and degrading conception. The narrowness of the economist perspective was discredited even among the economists themselves.

For Lenin, the leadership of the movement was only the first step. The second and decisive step was to cohere the localized propaganda circles into a centralized party with a clearly defined program, strategic perspective and leadership. Describing the need for a such a party in his principal work of the Iskra period, What Is To Be Done?, Lenin used a metaphor from construction:

"Pray tell me, when a bricklayer lays bricks in various parts of an enormous structure, the like of which he has never seen, is it not a 'paper line' that he uses to find the correct place to lay each brick and to indicate the ultimate goal of his work as a whole.... And aren't we passing now through a period in our party life, in which we have bricks and bricklayers, but lack a guiding line visible to all?"

To establish such a guiding line and a centralized party, the Iskra group called a congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in mid-1903. As is well known, this congress ended in a deep split between the Bolsheviks (the majority, or "hards"), led by Lenin, and the Mensheviks (the minority, called at the time the "softs"), whose principal leader was Martov. At first it appeared that the split was over narrowly organizational grounds: whether to have a highly centralized party consisting of people who are committed revolutionaries, or, as the Mensheviks wanted, a looser party open to all workers and intellectuals who actively supported the movement in some degree. However, as Russia moved toward a revolutionary crisis it became increasingly clear that the difference over the internal nature of the party was linked to differences over the course of the role it would play in the revolution, in fact differences over the revolution itself.

The Permanent Revolution

In 1904 Russia engaged in a war with Japan over which country would control the Far East. The tsarist autocracy had expected that a wave of popular patriotic solidarity would dampen the growing social discontent. Instead the defeats of the Russian army at the hands of the Japanese further undermined the tsarist autocracy. "Bloody Sunday," the January 1905 massacre of peaceful workers who were petitioning the tsar, ignited a wave of mass workers strikes, peasant uprisings and military mutinies throughout the year. The Romanov throne tottered wildly, although in the end it did not fall. However, in the early months of 1905 the demise of the autocracy seemed imminent, and therefore the various factions and tendencies of Rus¬sian Social Democracy were forced to spell out much more concretely their conceptions of the course of the revolution and its aftermath.

The Mensheviks translated Plekhanov's initially rather abstract conception of a two-stage revolution into support for the liberal wing of the Russian bourgeoisie, organized in the Constitutional Democratic party or Cadets. The last thing that the Cadets wanted was a popular insurrection to overthrow the tsar. What they aimed at was to use the turmoil from below to pressure the tsarist autocracy to create quasi-parliamentary bodies in which the propertied classes would have the dominant place. In practice the Mensheviks' adherence to a two-stage revolution, in which the first stage meant the workers were supposed to march arm in arm with the democratic bourgeoisie against tsarist reaction, turned out to be a no-stage revolution because there was no democratic bourgeoisie with which to march.

Lenin recognized that all wings of the Russian bourgeoisie were anti-democratic and anti-revolutionary, that a radical bourgeois-democratic revolution therefore would have to occur against and not in alliance with the Russian bourgeoisie. This was the core of his conception of the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. He projected that a workers party, supported by the mass of the peasants, would be able to purge Russia of all the feudal-derived backwardness, the tsarist autocracy, bureaucracy and the state church. It would eliminate the oppression of nationalities as well as of the Jews and end the exploitation of the peasants by the landed nobility.

This conception was clearly influenced by the Jacobin dictatorship in the Great French Revolution. Yet the ques¬tion remained: could the proletariat replay the Jacobin dictatorship in the Russia of 1905; was it possible to take economic actions which would harm the interests of large sections of the propertied class and at the same time not economically expropriate the bourgeoisie? Lenin insisted that this was not a stable form of government, but rather "only a transient, temporary socialist aim." He argued a' the time (although he later changed his view) that in thi absence of proletarian revolutions in West Europe, a rev¬olution in Russia, no matter how radical, could not go beyond the framework of capitalist economic relations.

The person who uniquely argued arthe time that th Russian Revolution could and had to go beyond bourgeois economic relations was Leon Trotsky. Trotsky had bef one of the younger leaders of the Iskra group; in the split he initially sided with the Mensheviks. He played prominent role in the Revolution of 1905, and in the course of that revolution developed what he called the doctrine of permanent revolution, in part based on Marx's writings in the immediate aftermath of the revolutions of 1848. In a preface which he wrote in 1921 to his writings on the Revolution of 1905, Trotsky summarized the doctrine of permanent revolution:

"This rather high-flown expression defines the thought that the Russian revolution, although directly concerned with bourgeois aims, could not stop short at those aims; the revolution could not solve its immediate, bourgeois tasks except by putting the proletariat into power. And the proletariat, once having power in its hands, would not be able to remain confined within the bourgeois framework of the revolution. On the contrary, precisely in order to guarantee its victory, the proletarian vanguard in the very earliest stages of its rule would have to make extremely deep inroads not only into feudal but also into bourgeois property relations....

"The contradictions between a workers' government and an overwhelming majority of peasants in a backward country could be resolved only on an international scale, in the arena of a world proletarian revolution. Having, by virtue of historical necessity, burst the narrow bourgeois-democratic confines of the Russian revolution, the victorious proletariat would be compelled also to burst its national and state confines, that is to say, it would have to strive consciously for the Russian revolution to become the pro¬logue to a world revolution."

In 1905 the permanent revolution did not go further than the beginnings of dual power between the proletariat and the tsarist autocracy. However, Russia's defeats in the first imperialist world war broke the back of the tsarist autocracy and paved the way for the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, the greatest victory of the world pro¬letariat in history. Today that victory is being desperately threatened by the ascendancy of capitalist counterrevo¬lutionary forces.

But I would like to end this talk rather with a story. After the assassination of Alexander II the leadership of People's Will came into the hands of Vera Figner. It was she who negotiated with the tsarist regime for the release of Chernyshevsky, and she managed to hold together an underground group in Russia for the next two years. The police official who finally tracked her down had gained so much respect for her that he requested to kiss her hand before sending her to prison. But sent to prison she was, where she stayed for the next 22 years. She was only released in the amnesty of 1905. When she came out of prison she was a kind of Narodnik Rip Van Winkle; she could not understand or orient to the radically changed political and social conditions.

Nevertheless, she remained active within the left, where she was universally respected.
In 1917 many prominent old populists joined the counterrevolutionary camp and went into exile. Figner, the old Narodnik terrorist, faced with a fundamental choice of political loyalties, chose to stay in Soviet Russia. In the 1920s she devoted herself to writing her memoirs and to an organization called the Society of Former Political Prisoners, who were old populists who considered themselves loyal citizens of the Soviet Union. In that capacity she sought to induce populists who had emigrated to return to Soviet Russia and to serve the interests of the workers state. This eminently worthy organization was disbanded by Stalin in the early '30s.

Figner was still alive and kicking at the age of 89, living in Moscow, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. As the Wehrmacht approached Moscow, the Russian authorities turned to Figner and said, "We will move you to safety further east." She refused, saying, "I am very old. I will die soon anyway. Save your efforts for people who are living, who still have a life to give to the cause." So the last member of the famous Central Committee of the People's Will died the following year in Moscow, a heroic and self-sacrificing revolutionary right to the end, and in that sense an inspiration for us all.

From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)-"Lenin And The Vanguard Party"-Part Six-"The Final Split With The Mensheviks"

Lenin And The Vanguard Party-Part Six-The Final Split With The Mensheviks

Markin comment on this series of articles:

Oddly enough, when I first became serious about making a revolution in the early 1970s, a socialist working class-led revolution, in the eternal quest for a more just and equitable society, there were plenty (no enough, there are never enough, but plenty) of kindred spirits who were also finding out that it was not enough to “pray” such a revolution into existence but that one had to build a party, a vanguard party in order to do so. The name "Lenin," the designation "Bolshevik," and the term "world socialist revolution" flowed easily from the tongue in the circles that I began to hang around in. As I write this general introduction, right this minute in 2011, to an important series of historical articles about the actual creation, in real time, of a Leninist vanguard working class party (and International, as well) there are few kindred, fewer still in America, maybe, fewest still, and this is not good, among the youth, to carry the message forward. Nevertheless, whatever future form the next stage in the struggle for the socialist revolution takes the question of the party, the vanguard party really, will still press upon the heads of those who wish to make it.

Although today there is no mass Bolshevik-style vanguard party (or International)-anywhere-there are groups, grouplets, leagues, tendencies, and ad hoc committees that have cadre from which the nucleus for such a formation could be formed-if we can keep it. And part of the process of being able to “keep it” is to understand what Lenin was trying to do back in the early 1900s (yes, 1900s) in Russia that is applicable today. Quite a bit, actually, as it turns out. And for all those think that the Leninist process, and as the writer of these articles is at pains to point it was an unfolding process, was simple and the cadre that had to be worked with was as pure as the driven snow I would suggest this thought. No less an august revolutionary figure that Leon Trotsky, once he got “religion” on the Bolshevik organizational question (in many ways the question of the success of the revolution), did not, try might and main, have success in forming such a mass organization. We can fight out the details from that perspective learning from the successes and failures, and fight to get many more kindred.
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Markin comment on this article:

Reflecting over a long life of political struggle probably, going back to when I first became politically aware around age fourteen or fifteen, the hardest idea to understand was, at least among those of us who were progressives, that some political differences placed us on different sides of the barricades. In the world of bourgeois politics those edges are rather blurred. However, even as wet-behind-the ears wannabe bourgeois politico, I knew enough to sense that a liberal pro-civil rights Northern democrat like me and Bull Connors, also a democrat, but of the Southern arch-segregationist sort, were not on the same page. And that our paths would divert sharply at some point. That point was brought home to me very pointed in 1964 when the Fanny Lou Hamer-led Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was NOT seated as the official delegation from that state. Christ, how could it not be, given the platitudes about civil rights from Bobby Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey on down. That is one kind of lesson about the need for clarity, politically and organizationally. It took a while to figure it out but I did.

More perplexing is the question of what I, as other have, call the notion of the “family of the left.” It is easy to see that it cannot work when the opponent is Bull Connor (or George Wallace, you name your favorite political villain). It is more problematic when the others are self-proclaimed progressives, socialists and communists. That lesson, the lesson of separate banners, and striking together over common issues-the question of the united front was harder to understand, and undertake. And that brings us to the max daddy of all leftist disputes- the struggle between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks to stay in a single “party of the whole class” without coming to blows. But, and here is where I have picked up a little wisdom, modern (at least since the dawn of the 20th century) leftist politics just worked out that way. Not every progressive, socialist, or communist cares about making socialist revolution, the only solution to the current crisis of human organization. Thus it is best to maintain political and organizationally clarity, if not for out generation, then for those future generations who will carry out the revolution. For use though we will use that old united front like crazy, when appropriate, to address the issues of the day.
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To read about the overall purpose of this pamphlet series and other information about the history of the document go the the American Left History Archives From-Lenin and The Vanguard Party-Preface To The Second Edition And Part One, dated March 15, 2011.

Following Stolypin's coup of June 1907, the RSDRP was illegalized and its Duma representatives arrested. Party fractions could continue to exist in legal and semi-legal workers organizations (e.g., trade unions, cooperatives), but the party as such could only exist as an underground organization. The party's full program could only be presented in an illegal press. By late 1907-early 1908, the RSDRP local committees had to go underground if they were to survive as functioning bodies.
The necessary transformation into an underground organ¬zation would in itself result in a considerable contraction of the party. Many raw workers and radicalized intellectuals won to the party during the revolutionary period were unwilling or incapable of functioning in an underground network. Furthermore, the wave of despair which passed over the working masses with the victory of tsarist reaction rein¬forced the exodus from the illegal and persecuted RSDRP. By 1908, the RSDRP could exist only as a relatively narrow network of committed revolutionaries.

Menshevik Liquidationism and Its Purposes

Thus the conditions in 1908 resurrected the original organizational differences which had split Russian Social Democracy into the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. As we have seen, at the 1906 "Reunification" Congress the Mensheviks accepted Lenin's definition of membership because, under the relatively open conditions then prevailing, formal organizational participation and discipline were not a bar to broad recruitment. But by 1908 the old dispute between a narrow, centralized party versus a broad, amorphous organization broke out with renewed fury.

Most of the Menshevik cadre did not follow the Bolsheviks into the underground. Under the guidance of A.N. Potresov, the leading member of their tendency in Russia, the Menshevik cadre limited themselves to the legal workers organization and devoted themselves to producing a legal press. These social-democratic activists, subject to no party organization or discipline, nonetheless considered themselves members of the RSDRP and were so regarded by the Menshevik leadership abroad. Lenin denounced this Menshevik policy as Liquidationism, the de facto dissolution of the RSDRP in favor of an amorphous movement based on liberal-labor politics.
The Bolshevik-Menshevik conflict over Liquidationism cannot be taken simply at face value as an expression of antagonistic organizational principles. Menshevik Liquidationism was strongly conditioned by the fact that the Bolsheviks had a majority in the leading bodies of the official RSDRP.
Liquidationism was an extreme form of a more general tendency of the Mensheviks to dissociate themselves from the Leninist leadership of the RSDRP.

In late 1907 the RSDRP delegation to the new Duma, in which the Mensheviks were a majority, declared its independence of the exile party center, arguing that this was a neces¬sary legal cover. Publicly denying the subordination of the Duma delegates to the exile party leadership could have been a legitimate security measure. But the Menshevik parliamentarians gave this legal cover a real political content. The opportunist actions of the Menshevik parliamentarians reinforced the Bolshevik ultraleftists, who wanted to boycott the Duma altogether. (On the ultraleft faction within the Bolsheviks, see Part Five of this series.)

In early 1908, the Menshevik leadership in exile (Martov, Dan, Axelrod, Plekhanov) re-established their own factional organ, Golos Sotsial-Demokrata (Voice of the Social Democrat). In mid-1908, the Menshevik member of the Central Committee resident in Russia, M.I. Broido, resigned from that body ostensibly in protest against the Bolsheviks' armed expropriations. About the same time, the two Menshevik members of the Central Committee abroad, B.I. Goldman and Martynov, circulated a memorandum stating that, in view of the disorganized state of the movement in Russia, the official party leadership should not issue instructions, but instead limit itself to passively monitoring social-democratic activity.
Had Martov, rather than Lenin, been the head of the official RSDRP, the Mensheviks would no doubt have been utterly loyal toward the established party organization (and moreover have ruthlessly used the party rules as a sword to cut the Bolsheviks to pieces). However, as against the Leninists, the Mensheviks were opposed in principle to defining the social-democratic party as an underground organization. Martov's position on the relation of an underground organization to the party is precisely stated in the August-September 1909 issue of Golos Sotsial-Demokrata:

"A more or less defined and to a certain extent conspiratorial organization now makes sense (and great sense) only in so far as it takes part in the construction of a social-democratic party, which by necessity is less defined and has its main points of support in open workers organizations." [emphasis in original]
—quoted in Israel Getzler, Martov (1967)

This position for limiting the significance of the underground represented both a desire for bourgeois-liberal respectability and a tendency to identify the party with broad, inclusive workers organizations.
The Mensheviks were prepared to engage in illegal, clandestine activity to further their own program and organization, while opposing an underground party as such. Beginning in 1911 the Menshevik Liquidators created their own underground network, though this was not as effective as the Bolsheviks' nor did it attain the latter's mass influence.
Menshevik Liquidationism of 1908-12 was an extreme expression of social-democratic opportunism resulting from the following major factors: 1) a desire for bourgeois-liberal respectability; 2) a general bias toward identifying the party with broad, inclusive workers organizations; 3) the fact that such organizations were legal, while the party as such was not; 4) Lenin's leadership of the official RSDRP; and 5) the organizational weakness of the Mensheviks.

The Battle Is Joined

The battle over Liquidationism was first formally joined at the RSDRP conference held in Paris in December 1908. At this conference the Bolsheviks had five delegates (three of them ultraleftists) and their allies, Luxemburg/Jogiches' Polish Social Democrats, had five; the Mensheviks had three delegates and their allies, the Jewish Bund, had three.
All participants at this conference (except the ultraleft Bolsheviks) recognized that the revolutionary situation was definitely over, and that an indefinite period of reaction lay ahead. The party's tasks and perspectives would have to be changed accordingly. In this context Lenin asserted the need for the primacy of the illegal party organization. Lenin's resolution on this question passed, with the Mensheviks voting against and the Bundists splitting:

"The changed political conditions make it increasingly impos¬sible to contain Social Democratic activity within the framework of the legal and semi-legal workers' organizations.... "The party must devote particular attention to the utilization and strengthening of existing illegal, semi-legal and where possible legal organizations—and to the creation of new ones—which can serve it as strong points for agitational, propagandistic and practical organizational work among the masses....This work will be possible and fruitful only if there exists in each industrial enterprise a workers' committee, consisting only of party members even if they are few in number, which will be closely linked to the masses, and if all work of the legal organizations is conducted under the guidance of the illegal party organization" [our emphasis]
—Robert H. McNeal, ed., Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1974)

Lenin used his majority at the 1908 RSDRP conference to condemn Liquidationism by name, presenting it as an expression of the instability and careerism of the radical intelligentsia:

"Noting that in many places a section of the party intelligentsia is attempting to liquidate the existing organization of the RSDRP and to replace it by a shapeless amalgamation within the framework of legality, whatever this might cost—even at the price of the open rejection of the Programme, tasks, and traditions of the party—the Conference finds it essential to conduct the most resolute ideological and organizational struggle against these liquidationist efforts." — Ibid.

As we have already discussed (in Part One), Lenin regarded Menshevism as an expression of the interests and attitudes of the radical intelligentsia, rather than as an opportunist current internal to the workers movement. In this Lenin followed Kautsky's methodology, which located the sociological basis of revisionism in the petty-bourgeois fellow travelers of Social Democracy.

The Mensheviks likewise accused Lenin's Bolsheviks of representing a petty-bourgeois deviation...anarchism. For example, in early 1908 Plekhanov described the launching of the Menshevik organ, Golos Sotsial-Demokrata, as a first step toward "the triumph of social-democratic principles over bolshevik Bakuninism" (quoted in Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union [I960]). The Men¬sheviks explained away the Bolsheviks' working-class support by arguing that the Leninists demagogically exploited the primitiveness of the Russian proletariat, a proletariat still closely tied to the peasantry.

Thus both sides accused the other of not being real social democrats (i.e., working-class-oriented socialists). The Bolsheviks viewed the Mensheviks as petty-bourgeois demo¬crats, the left wing of bourgeois liberalism, the radicalized children of the Cadets. The Mensheviks condemned the Bolsheviks as petty-bourgeois anarchists, radical populists disguised as social democrats. These mutual accusations were not demagogy nor even polemical exaggerations; they genuinely expressed the way in which the Bolsheviks viewed the Mensheviks and vice versa. Since both sides adhered to the principle of a unitary party of all social democrats, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks could justify their split only by declaring that the other group was not really part of the proletarian socialist movement.

Pro-Party Mensheviks and Bolshevik Conciliators

In late 1908, Lenin's campaign against the Liquidators got a boost from a most unexpected source...Plekhanov. The grand old man of Russian Marxism broke sharply with the Menshevik leadership, established his own paper, Dnevnik Sotsial-Demokrata (Diary of a Social Democrat), and attacked the abandonment of the established party organizations in words and tone similar to that of Lenin.

Plekhanov's political behavior in 1909-11 is on the face of it puzzling since he had hitherto been on the extreme right wing of the Mensheviks on almost all questions, including vociferously advocating a split with Lenin. Subjective considerations may have played a role. Plekhanov was extremely prideful and may well have resented being eclipsed by the younger Menshevik leaders (e.g., Martov, Potresov). He may have considered that a "pro-Party" Menshevik stance would enable him to re-establish himself as the premier authority of Russian Social Democracy.

However, Plekhanov's anti-Liquidator position is not at such variance with his general political outlook as might first appear. Plekhanov always believed in the need for a Marxist (i.e., scientific socialist) leadership over working-class spontaneity. It was this belief that impelled him into intransigent struggle against Economism in 1900. Paradoxically, Plekhanov's right-wing position on the revolution of 1905 reinforced his distrust of mass spontaneity. For Plekhanov, a strong social-democratic party was needed to restrain what he believed were the anarchistic, primitivist impulses of the Russian proletariat. In the conflict between Plekhanov and the Menshevik Liquidators we see the difference between an orthodox, pre-1914 Marxist, committed to a bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia, and a group of labor refor¬mists primarily concerned with defending the immediate economic interests of Russian workers.

Plekhanov's "pro-Party" Mensheviks were small in number and only some of these eventually fused with the Bolsheviks. Plekhanov himself opposed Lenin when, at the Prague Conference in January 1912, the latter declared the Bolsheviks to be the RSDRP, thus creating a separate Bolshevik Party. However, the impact of Plekhanov's "pro-Party" Mensheviks on the factional struggle was greatly disproportionate to their meager numbers. Plekhanov retained great authority in the international and Russian social-democratic movement. His strident accusations that the main body of Mensheviks were liquidating the social-democratic party enormously enhanced the credibility of Lenin's position, since Plekhanov could not easily be accused of factional distortion or exaggeration. The few "pro-Party" Mensheviks who did join the Bolsheviks in 1912 greatly added to the legitimacy of Lenin's claim to represent the continuity of the official RSDRP.

By 1909, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in Russia had split into two separate groups competing for mass influence. At a conference of the Bolshevik leadership in mid-1909, Lenin argued that the Bolshevik faction had in fact become the RSDRP:

"One thing must be borne firmly in mind: the responsibility of 'preserving and consolidating' the R.S.D.L.P., of which the resolution speaks, now rests primarily, if not entirely, on the Bolshevik section. All, or practically all, the Party work in progress, particularly in the localities, is now being shouldered by the Bolsheviks." [our emphasis]
-"Report on the Conference of the Extended Editorial Board of Proletary" (July 1909)

At the same time he stressed the importance of uniting with
Plekhanov's "pro-Party" Mensheviks:

"What then are the tasks of the Bolsheviks in relation to this as yet small section of the Mensheviks who are fighting against liquidationism on the right? The Bolsheviks must undoubtedly seek rapprochement with this section, those who are Marxists and partyists." [emphasis in original] —Op. cit.

Lenin's position that the Bolsheviks (hopefully in alliance with the Plekhanovites) should build the party without and against the majority of Mensheviks ran into significant resistance among the Bolshevik leadership and also ranks. A strong faction of conciliators emerged, led by Dobruvinsky (a former Duma deputy), Rykov, Nogin and Lozovsky, which stood for a political compromise with the Mensheviks in order to restore a unified RSDRP.

In a sense the forces of conciliation were stronger in Berlin than in St. Petersburg or Moscow. The German Social Democratic (SPD) leadership remained ever desirous of Russian party unity. In a particularly sentimental mood, Kautsky expressed his attitude on the antagonistic Russian factions in a letter (5 May 1911) to Plekhanov:

"These days I had visits from Bolsheviks,...Mensheviks, Otzovists [ultraleftists], and Liquidators. They are all dear people and when talking to them one does not notice great differences of opinion."
—quoted in Getzler, Op. cit.

The SPD leadership opened up their press to the most important of Russian conciliators—Trotsky. Trotsky's articles in the influential SPD press turned international social-democratic opinion strongly in favor of unity of the Russian party and against the extremists on both sides, Lenin for the Bolsheviks and Potresov for the Mensheviks.

Lenin Fights for a Bolshevik Party

Faced with a strong pro-unity group within his own ranks and under pressure from Plekhanov's "pro-Party" Mensheviks and the SPD leadership, Lenin reluctantly agreed to another attempt at unity. This was the January 1910 plenum held in Paris. Representation at the plenum closely replicated the last, 1907 party congress. The Bolsheviks had four delegates (three of them conciliators) as did the Mensheviks. The pro-Menshevik Jewish Bund had two delegates as did the pro-Bolshevik Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) of Luxemburg/Jogiches. The nominally pro-Bolshevik united Latvian Social Democrats and the ultraleft Vperyod group had one delegate each.

At the plenum the conciliatory elements imposed a series of compromises on the leadership of the two basic tendencies. The factional composition of the leading party bodies (the Editorial Board of the central organ, the Foreign Bureau and Russian Board of the Central Committee) established at the 1907 congress was maintained. Parity between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks was maintained on all party bodies, thus placing the balance of power in the hands of the national social-democratic parties.

On the key question of the underground, a compromise resolution was worked out. Opposing or belittling the underground organization was condemned, but the term "liquidationism" was avoided because of its anti-Menshevik factional connotation. In turn, the Mensheviks got the moral satisfaction of condemning the Bolsheviks' armed expropriations as a violation of party discipline.

The artificiality of the 1910 "unity" agreement was indicated by the Mensheviks' refusal to allow Lenin to administer the party funds. The party treasury was therefore placed in the hands of three German trustees—Kautsky, Klara Zetkin and Franz Mehring. (Kautsky, who was not sentimental where money was concerned, later kept the Russian party treasury on the grounds that it had no legitimate, representative leading body.) Lenin's critical and distrustful attitude toward the results of the Paris Central Committee plenum was expressed in a letter (11 April 1910) to Maxim Gorky: "At the C.C. plenum (the 'long plenum"—three weeks of agony, all nerves were on edge, the devil to pay!)...a mood of 'conciliation in general' (without any clear idea of with whom, for what, and how); hatred of the Bolshevik Center for its implacable ideological struggle; squabbling on the part of the Mensheviks, who were spoiling for a fight, and as a result—an infant covered with blisters.

"And so we have to suffer. Either—at best—we cut open the blisters, let out the pus, and cure and rear the infant. "Or, at worst—the infant dies. Then we shall be childless for a while (that is, we shall re-establish the Bolshevik faction) and then give birth to a more healthy infant."

Lenin's distrust of the Mensheviks was quickly borne out. The Menshevik Liquidators in Russia, led by P.A. Garvi, flatly refused to enter the Russian Board of the Central Committee as agreed at the Paris plenum. Thus Lenin was able to place the blame for the split on the Mensheviks and put the Bolshevik conciliators on the defensive. Years later, Martov still berated Garvi for his tactical blunder, which greatly aided Lenin.
In late 1910, Lenin declared that the Mensheviks had broken the agreements made at the Paris plenum and so the Bolsheviks were no longer bound by them. In May 1911, Lenin called a rump meeting of leading Bolsheviks and their Polish allies, which set up ad hoc bodies to replace the official RSDRP organs established at the Paris plenum. For example, a Technical Committee was set up to replace the Foreign Bureau of the Central Committee as the party's highest administrative body. For Lenin this was a decisive step in building a party without and against most of the Mensheviks.

At this point Lenin's plans were impeded by the emergence of a new and temporarily powerful conciliator—Leo Jogiches, leader of the SDKPiL. Jogiches was a formidable antagonist. Together with the Bolshevik conciliators (e.g., Rykov) he had a majority on the leading party bodies, such as the Technical Committee. Through Rosa Luxemburg he influenced the German trustees of the RSDRP funds.

The 1911 fight between Jogiches and Lenin is often dismissed, particularly by bourgeois historians, as a personal power struggle. However, underlying the SDKPiL-Bolshevik schism in 1911-14 was the difference between an orthodox social-democratic position on the party question and emerging Leninism. Luxemburg/Jogiches were prepared to support the Bolshevik faction within a unitary social-democratic party. They would not support the transformation of the Bolshevik group into a party claiming to be the sole legitimate representative of social democracy. And Jogiches understood that this was what Lenin was in fact doing. In a letter to Kautsky (30 June 1911) concerning finances, he wrote that Lenin "wants to use the chaos in the party to get the money for his own faction and to deal a death blow to the party as a whole" (quoted in J.P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg [1966]).

Lenin's attitude to Jogiches and the other conciliators is
clearly expressed in a draft article, "The State of Affairs in
the Party" (July 1911):

"The 'conciliators' have not understood the ideological roots of what keeps us apart from the liquidators, and have therefore left them a number of loopholes and have frequently been (involuntarily) a plaything in the hands of the liquidators.... "Since the revolution, the Bolsheviks, as a trend, have lived through two errors—(1) otzovism-Vperyodism and (2) concil-iationism (wobbling in the direction of the liquidators). It is time to get rid of both.

"We Bolsheviks have resolved on no account to repeat (and not to allow a repetition of) the error of conciliationism today. This would mean slowing down the rebuilding of the R.S.D.L.P., and entangling it in a new game with the Golos people (or their lackies, like Trotsky), the Vperyodists and so forth." [emphasis in original]

In late 1911, Lenin broke with Jogiches and the Bolshevik conciliators. He sent an agent, Ordzhonikidze, to Russia where the latter set up the Russian Organizing Committee (ROC) which claimed to be an interim Central Committee of the RSDRP. The ROC called an "all-Russian conference of the RSDRP," which met in Prague in January 1912. Fourteen delegates attended, twelve Bolsheviks and two "pro-Party" Mensheviks, one of whom expressed Plekhanov's opposition to the conference as an anti-unity act.

The conference declared that the Menshevik Liquidators stood outside the RSDRP. It also scrapped the nationally federated structure established at the 1906 "Reunification" Congress, in effect excluding the Bund, SDKPiL and Lat¬vian Social Democrats from the Russian party. The conference elected a new Central Committee consisting of six "hard" (anti-conciliator) Bolsheviks and one "pro-Party" Menshevik for symbolic effect. The Prague Conference marked the definitive organizational break between Lenin's revolutionary social democrats and the opportunist Mensheviks. In that important sense Prague 1912 was the founding conference of the Bolshevik Party.

Did Lenin Seek Unity with the Mensheviks?

Even before 1912, Lenin was commonly regarded as a fanatical splitter, as the great schismatic of Russian Social Democracy. The world-historic significance of the Bolshevik-Menshevik split is now universally recognized, not least by anti-Leninists. It is therefore astounding that anybody, particularly a group claiming to be Leninist, could maintain that the Bolshevik leader was a staunch advocate of social-democratic unity, while the Mensheviks were the aggressive splitters.

Yet this is just the position taken by the revisionist "Trotskyist" International Marxist Group (IMG), British section of Ernest Mandel's United Secretariat. As a theoretical justification for a grand regroupment maneuver, the IMG has revised the history of the Bolsheviks to make Lenin out as a unity-above-all conciliator. Referring to the post-1905 period, the IMG writes:

"Far from Lenin being the splitter, far from posing merely 'formal unity,' the Bolsheviks were the chief fighters for the unity of the Party.... It was the Mensheviks in this period who were the splitters and not Lenin."
—"The Bolshevik Faction and the Fight for the Party," Red Weekly, 11 November 1976

The complete falsity of this position is demonstrated by a series of incredible omissions. This article does not mention the real Bolshevik conciliators, like Rykov, and Lenin's fight against them. It does not mention the 1910 Paris "unity" plenum and Lenin's opposition to the compromises made there. It does not mention that Lenin's erstwhile factional allies, Plekhanov and Jogiches/Luxemburg, opposed the Prague Conference in the name of party unity and subsequently denounced Lenin as a splitter. This is the IMG's analysis of the Prague Conference: "The task of the Bolsheviks and the pro-Party Mensheviks in reconsolidating the illegal RSDLP had been accomplished by the end of 1911—although by this time Plekhanov himself had deserted to the liquidators. This reconsolidation was finalised at the Sixth Party Congress [sic] held in Prague in January 1912.
At this congress there was not a split with Menshevism as such—on the contrary...Lenin worked for the congress with a section of the Mensheviks. The split was not with those who defended Menshevik politics but with the liquidators who refused to accept the Party." [emphasis in original] —Op. cit.

It was precisely the Mensheviks 'politics on the organizational question which generated Liquidationism. From the original 1903 split right down to World War I the Mensheviks defined "the party" to include workers sympathetic to social democracy, but who were not subject to formal organ¬izational membership and discipline. It was on that basis that the Mensheviks continually rejected and disregarded Lenin's formal majorities and consequent party leadership.

The statement that Plekhanov rejoined the Liquidators in 1911 is false. And in this historical inaccuracy the IMG demonstrates its fundamental miscomprehension of relations between the Bolsheviks and "pro-Party" Mensheviks. Plekhanov did not rejoin the main body of Mensheviks. Like Trotsky and Luxemburg, he adopted an independent stance in 1912-14, urging the reunification of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.

The IMG cannot explain why Plekhanov, who fought the Liquidators for three years, then refused to split with them and unite with the Leninists. When Plekhanov, who was notoriously arrogant, began his anti-Liquidator campaign in late 1908, he undoubtedly believed he would win over the majority of Mensheviks and possibly become the leading figure in a reunified RSDRP. Even while blocking with Plekhanov, Lenin had occasion to debunk the dissident Menshevik leader's self-serving illusions:

"The Menshevik Osip [Plekhanov] has proved to be a lone figure, who has resigned both from the official Menshevik editorial board and from the collective editorial board of the most important Menshevik work, a lone protester against 'petty bourgeois opportunism' and liquidationism."
—"The Liquidators Exposed" (September 1909)

By 1911, it was clear that the Plekhanovites were a small minority among the Mensheviks. Had Plekhanov united with the Bolsheviks at the Prague Conference, he would have been a small and politically isolated minority. He could never hope to win the Bolsheviks to his pro-bourgeois liberal strategy. He would simply have been a figurehead in a de facto Bolshevik party. Being a shrewd politician, Lenin sought to "capture" Plekhanov in this way. But Plekhanov had no intention of serving as a figurehead for the Leninists. In refusing to participate in the Prague Conference, he wrote: "The makeup of your conference is so one-side'd that it would be better, i.e., more in the interests of Party unity, if I stayed away" (quoted in Bertram D. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution [1948]).

Even before 1912, the Bolsheviks were essentially a party, rather than a faction, because Lenin would refuse to act as a disciplined minority under a Menshevik leadership. The Menshevik leaders, including Plekhanov, reciprocated this attitude. Unity with the numerically small "pro-Party" Mensheviks did not challenge Lenin's leadership of the party as he reconstructed it at the Prague Conference. Had the Plekhanovites been larger than the Bolsheviks, Lenin would have fought for another organizational arrangement which would allow his supporters to act as revolutionary social democrats unimpeded by the opportunists.

Unity Attempts After Prague

After the Prague Conference, the Bolsheviks were bombarded with continual unity campaigns involving most major figures in the Russian movement and also the leadership of the Second International. These campaigns culminated in a pro-unity resolution by the International Socialist Bureau (ISB) in December 1913, which led to a "unity" conference in Brussels in July 1914, Less than a month later most of the unity-mongers of the Second International were supporting their own ruling classes in killing the workers of "enemy" countries.

The first attempt to reverse Lenin's action at the Prague Conference was taken by Trotsky. He pressured the Menshevik Organizing Committee into calling a conference of all Russian social democrats. The Bolsheviks naturally refused to participate as did their former allies, the Plekhanovites and Luxemburg/Jogiches' SDKPiL. The conference met in Vienna in August 1912. In addition to Trotsky's small group, it was attended by the main body of Mensheviks, the Bund and also the ultraleft Vperyod group. The "August bloc" thus combined the extreme right wing and extreme left wing of Russian Social Democracy. Naturally the participants could agree on nothing except hostility to the Leninists for declaring themselves the official RSDRP. In fact, the Vperyodists walked out in the middle leaving the conference as a Menshevik forum.

Trotsky's "August bloc" was a classic centrist rotten bloc—a fleeting coalition of the most heterogeneous elements against a hard revolutionary tendency. After he was won to Leninism in 1917, Trotsky regarded the "August bloc" as his greatest political error. Polemicizing against another centrist rotten bloc in the American section of the Fourth International in 1940, Trotsky looked back on the 1912 "August bloc":

"I have in mind the so-called August bloc of 1912. I participated actively in this bloc. In a certain sense I created it. Politically I differed with the Mensheviks on all fundamental ques¬tions. I also differed with the ultra-left Bolsheviks, the Vperyodists. In the general tendency of policies I stood far more closely to the Bolsheviks. But I was against the Leninist 'regime' because I had not yet learned to understand that in order to realize a revolutionary goal a firmly welded centralized party is necessary. And so I formed this episodic bloc consisting of heterogeneous elements which was directed against the proletarian wing of the party....

"Lenin subjected the August bloc to merciless criticism and the harshest blows fell to my lot. Lenin proved that inasmuch as I did not agree politically with either the Mensheviks or the Vperyodists my policy was adventurism. This was severe but it was true."
—In Defense of Marxism (1940)

The consolidation of a separate Bolshevik Party at the Prague Conference coincided with the beginning of a new rising line of proletarian class struggle in Russia. In the next two and a half years the Bolsheviks transformed themselves once again into a mass proletarian party. In 1913, Lenin claimed 30,000-50,000 members. In the Duma elections in late 1912 the Bolsheviks elected six out of nine delegates in the workers curia. In 1914, Lenin claimed 2,800 workers groups as against 600 for the Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks' legal organ, Pravda, had a circulation of 40,000 compared to 16,000 for the Mensheviks' Luch.

Privately the Mensheviks admitted the Bolsheviks' predominance in the workers movement and their own weakness. In a letter (15 September 1913) to Potresov, Martov wrote: "The Mensheviks seem unable to move away from the dead center in the organizational sense and remain, in spite of the newspa¬per and of everything done in the last two years, a weak cir¬cle" (quoted in Getzler, Op. cit.).

While the transformation of the Bolsheviks into a mass party at this time was of enormous significance to the revolu¬tionary cause, in one sense it could be said to have impeded the theoretical development of Leninism. Developments in 1912-14 appeared to confirm Lenin's belief that the Men¬sheviks were simply petty-bourgeois careerists in Russia and emigre' literati standing outside the real workers movement. The Bolsheviks' claim to be the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party seemed to be empirically vindicated. And thus Lenin believed that he hadn't really split the social-democratic party.

The Prague Conference in January 1912 represented the definitive split between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, but the split was not comprehensive. The six Bolshevik deputies elected to the Fourth Duma in late 1912 maintained a common front with the seven Menshevik deputies in a unitary social-democratic fraction. Among the less advanced workers, sentiment for unity was still strong and this created resistance among the Bolsheviks to splitting the Duma frac¬tion, a public act. Lenin oriented toward splitting the Duma fraction, but did so with considerable tactical caution. Only in late 1913 did the Bolshevik deputies openly split and create their own Duma fraction.

The split in the Duma fraction had a far greater impact on international Social Democracy than the Prague Conference since it made the division in the Russian movement all too public. At Rosa Luxemburg's initiative, the ISB intervened to restore unity in the seemingly incorrigibly fractious Rus¬sian social-democratic movement. The ISB's pro-unity policy was necessarily damaging, if not outright hostile, to the Bolsheviks. Luxemburg's motives were clearly hostile to Lenin. In urging the International's intervention, she denounced "the systematic incitement by Lenin's group of the split among the ranks of other social democratic organisations" (quoted in H.H. Fisher and Olga Hess Gankin, eds., The Bolsheviks and the World War [1940]).

In December 1913, the ISB adopted a resolution calling for the reunification of Russian Social Democracy. This resolution was co-sponsored by three German leaders, Kautsky, Ebert and Molkenbuhr:

"The International Bureau considers it the urgent duty of all social democratic groups in Russia to make a serious and loyal attempt to agree to the restoration of a single party organization and to put an end to the present harmful and discouraging state of disunion." —Ibid.

The ISB then arranged a Russian "unity" conferente in Brussels in July 1914. The authority of the German-led International was such that all Russian social democrats, including the Bolsheviks, felt obliged to attend this meeting. In addition to the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, the Brussels
Conference was attended by the Vperyodists, Trotsky's group, Plekhanov's group, the Latvian Social Democrats and three Polish groups.

Needless to say, Lenin was hostile to the purpose of the Brussels Conference. While he wrote a lengthy report for it, he showed his disdain by not attending in person. The head of the Bolshevik delegation was Inessa Armand. Lenin drafted "unity conditions" which he knew the Mensheviks would reject out of hand. These involved the complete organizational subordination of the Mensheviks to the Bolshevik majority, including the prohibition of a separate Menshevik press and a total ban on public criticism of the under¬ground party. When Armand presented Lenin's "unity conditions," the Mensheviks were furious. Plekhanov termed them "articles of a new penal code." Kautsky, the chairman of the conference, had difficulty keeping order. Nonetheless, the respected German leader dutifully presented a motion stating that there were no principled differences barring unity. This resolution carried with the Bolsheviks (and also the Latvian Social Democrats) refusing to vote.

Lenin's Justification for the Split

The report to the July 1914 Brussels Conference was Lenin's most comprehensive justification for the split and creation of a separate Bolshevik party. It was intended to present the Bolshevik case in the most favorable way before West European social-democratic opinion. Thus, the report probably doesn't fully express Lenin's views on Bolshevik-Menshevik relations.

The report presents two basic arguments, one political, the other empirical. Lenin's basic political argument is that the majority of Mensheviks, by rejecting the underground organization as the party, stand qualitatively to the right of the opportunists (e.g., Bernstein) in the West European social democracies:

"We see how mistaken is the opinion that our differences with the liquidators are no deeper and are less important than those between the so-called radicals and moderates in Western Europe. There is not a single—literally not a single—West-European party that has ever had occasion to adopt a general party decision against people who desired to dissolve the party and to substitute a new one for it!

"Nowhere in Western Europe has there ever been, nor can there ever be, a question of whether it is permissible to bear the title of party member and at the same time advocate the dissolution of that party, to argue that the party is useless and unnecessary, and that another party be substituted for it. Nowhere in Western Europe does the question concern the very existence of the party as it does with us.... "This is not a disagreement over a question or organization, of how the party should be built, but a disagreement concerning the very existence of the party. Here, conciliation, agreement and compromise are totally out of the question." [emphasis in original]
—"Report of the C.C. of the R.S.D.L.P. to the Brussels Conferences and Instructions to the C.C. Delegation" (June 1914)

This view of Menshevik Liquidationism is superficial, focusing on the specific form, rather than the political substance, of social-democratic opportunism. Lenin's belief that the Russian Mensheviks were to the right of Bernstein, Jaur£s, etc. turned out to be false. The war found the small group of Martovite Internationalists who had served as a fig leaf to the Mensheviks not only far to the left of the German social-patriots Ebert/Noske, but also to the left of the SPD centrists Kautsky/Haase. The root cause of the Mensheviks' organizational liquidationism in 1908-12 was not that Martov/Potresov stood qualitatively to the right of Bernstein and Noske, but rather that Lenin, formally the leader of the RSDRP, stood to the left of Bebel/Kautsky.

Most of the report to the Brussels Conference seeks to demonstrate empirically that "a majority of four-fifths of the class-conscious workers of Russia have rallied around the decisions and bodies created by the January [Prague] Con¬ference of 1912." It is important to emphasize that this was not an argument just for public consumption. For Lenin one of the decisive criteria of a real social-democratic party was the extent of its proletarian following. In his private notes to Inessa Armand, he wrote:
"In Russia, nearly every group, or 'faction'...accuses the other of being not a workers' group, but a bourgeois intellectualist group. We consider this accusation or rather argument, this ref¬erence to the social significance of a particular group, extremely important in principle. But precisely because we consider it extremely important, we deem it our duty not to make sweeping statements about the social significance of other groups, but to back our statements with objective facts. For these objective facts prove absolutely and irrefutably that Prav-dism [Bolshevism] alone is a workers' trend in Russia, whereas liquidationism and Socialist-Revolutionism are in fact bourgeois intellectualist trends." [emphasis in original] —Ibid.

As can be seen from the above quote, had the Mensheviks in this period acquired a significant proletarian base, Lenin would have had either to adopt a more conciliatory attitude toward them or justify the split on more general principles.

Lenin's view of the Mensheviks as a petty-bourgeois intellectualist trend external to the workers movement was impressionistic. The wave of patriotism and national defensism which swept the Russian masses in the first years of the war benefited the opportunistic Mensheviks at the expense of the Leninists, who were intransigent defeatists. When the Russian Revolution broke out in February 1917, the Mensheviks were far stronger relative to the Bolsheviks than they had been in 1914.
During 1912-14, Lenin's innumerable polemics against unity with the Mensheviks presented a number of different arguments. Some of these arguments were narrow or empirical, as in the report to the Brussels Conference. However, in other writings Lenin anticipated the split in principle with opportunists in the workers movement which defines the modern communist party. Thus in an April 1914 polemic against Trotsky, entitled "Unity," Lenin writes:

"There can be no unity, federal or other, with liberal-labor politicians, with disrupters of the working-class movement, with those who defy the will of the majority. There can and must be unity among all consistent Marxists, among all those who stand for the entire Marxist body and the uncurtailed slogans, independently of the liquidators and apart from them. "Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers' cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism." [emphasis in original]

However, it was not until 4 August 1914, when the parliamentary fraction of the German Social Democracy voted for war credits, that Lenin was made to understand the epochal significance of the above passage, of his break with the Russian Mensheviks. Only then did Lenin seek to split the consistent, i.e., revolutionary, Marxists from all the liberal-labor politicians and all the opponents and distorters of Marxism. In so doing he created communism as a world-historic revolutionary doctrine and movement, as the Marxism of the epoch of capitalism's death agony.

Part Seven Of This Series Will Be Dated April 15, 2011