CHAPTER I

T HE F OUNDAT I ONS OF BOLS HEVI S M

W
HAT afterwards became the " Russian Communist Party
(Bolsheviks) ", and, later still, the " All-Union Com-
munist Party (Bolsheviks) ", traced back its origin to a
tiny congress of nine men who, meeting at Minsk in March 1898,
founded a " Russian ' Social-Democratic Workers' Party ". The
nine delegates represented local organizations at Petersburg,
Moscow, Kiev and Ekaterinoslav, and the Jewish General
Workers' Union in Russia and Poland, commonly called the
" Bund ". The congress lasted three days March 1-3, 1898.
It appointed a central committee and decided to issue a party
organ. But before anything else could be done, the poHce
arrested all the principal participants, so that virtually nothing
remained of this initial effort save a common name shared by a
number of local committees and organizations which had no
central rallying point and no other connexions with one another.
None of the nine delegates at Minsk played any leading role in
the subsequent history of the party. A " manifesto of the Russian
Social-Democratic Workers' Party " issued after the dispersal of
the congress was the work of Peter Struve, a Marxist intel-
lectual. This remained its most substantial legacy to posterity.
The manifesto, after referring to the " life-giving hurricane
of the 1848 revolution ", which had blown over Europe fifty years
before, noted that the Russian working class was " entirely de-
prived of what its foreign comrades freely and peacefully enjoy a
share in the administration of the state, freedom of the spoken and
written word, freedom of organization and assembly ". These were
necessary instruments in the struggle " for its final liberation, against
private property, for socialism ". In the west the bourgeoisie had
won these freedoms. In Russia conditions were different:
' Not Russkaya, but Rossiiskaya to denote not ethnic Russia, but the whole
territory of the Russian Empire.
3
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The farther east one goes in Europe, the weaker, meaner
and more cowardly in the political sense becomes the bourgeoisie,
and the greater the cultural and political tasks which fall
to the lot of the proletariat. On its strong shoulders the Russian
working class must and will carry the work of conquering
political liberty. This is an essential step, but only the first
step, to the realization of the great historic mission of the
proletariat, to the foundation of a social order in which there
will be no place for the exploitation of man by man.'
The document thus unequivocally accepted the two stages of
revolution, the bourgeois-democratic and the proletarian-socialist
revolution, laid down in the Communist Manifesto just fifty years
earlier. Its great merit was that it pointed for the first time to
the fundamental dilemma of the Russian revolution the in-
capacity of the Russian bourgeoisie to make its own revolution
and the consequent extension of the role of the Russian pro-
letariat to leadership in the bourgeois-democratic revolution. The
main criticism afterwards made of it was that it failed to mention
the dictatorship of the proletariat or to indicate the means by
which the proletariat could be enabled to carry out its mission.
The manifesto remained an academic exercise rather than a
programme of action.
The congress at Minsk was the first concerted attempt to
create a Russian Marxist party on Russian soil. For the past
thirty years the leading Russian revolutionaries had been the
narodniks a composite name for a succession of revolutionary
groups believing in the theory of peasant revolution and in the
practice of terrorism against members of the autocracy. At the
end of the 1870s a young revolutionary named Plekhanov broke
with the narodniks on the issue of individual terrorism, which he
rejected as futile, fled abroad, became a convert to Marxism, and
in 1883 founded in Switzerland a Russian Marxist group under
the name " The Liberation of Labour ". For the next fifteen
years Plekhanov and his associates, of whom Axelrod and Vera
ZasuUch were the most active, waged unceasing literary war
against the narodniks, applying to Russia the Marxist thesis that
the revolution could come about only through the development of
capitalism and as the achievement of the industrial proletariat.
The rapid expansion of industry and factory life in Russia during
VKP(B) V Rezolyutsiyakh (1941), i, 3-5-
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these years and the beginning of industrial strikes added sub-
stance to a programme which might at the outset have seemed
unrealistic. In the 1890s embryonic Marxist groups made their
appearance in Russia itself, and the year 1895 saw the foundation
in Petersburg of a League of Struggle for the Liberation of the
Working Class. Among the members of this league was a young
and enthusiastic disciple of Plekhanov, Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov.
Vladimir Ulyanov had been born in 1870 in Simbirsk (which
many years later was renamed Ulyanovsk), the son of a minor
official. The younger generation of the family was early imbued
with the revolutionary tradition. When Vladimir was seventeen,
his elder brother, Alexander, was executed for complicity in a plot
to assassinate Alexander IIL Vladimir Ulyanov studied at the
university of Kazan where he was converted to Marxism and
eventually expelled for revolutionary activities. In the early
1890s he came to Petersburg to practise law and to complete his
Marxist education. His earhest writings were a continuation of
Plekhanov's polemics against the narodniks, and in the winter
of 1894-1895 he was expounding Plekhanov's new work On the
Question of the Development of the Monist View of History ' to an
admiring circle of young Marxists.
In the summer of 1895 young Ulyanov visited the master
himself in Switzerland, and, back in Petersburg, joined the League
of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class. But the
league was not interested only in theory. Ulyanov, like its other
members, engaged in the distribution of revolutionary pamphlets
to factory workers; and this led at the end of 1895 to his arrest,
his imprisonment for some months and his eventual exile to
Siberia, though owing to the laxity of police regulations the
sentence did not interrupt his literary activities. During his exile
in Siberia his mind was turning over plans of party organization
which centred round the creation of a party newspaper to be
published abroad and smuggled into Russia. He discussed these
plans with Nadezhda Krupskaya, who joined him in Siberia and
became his wife, with another social-democrat, Krzhizhanovsky,
who shared his place of exile, and with two others, Potresov and
' The ponderous title was chosen to avert suspicion from the contents,
the work being legally published in Russia with the sanction of the censorship.
The English translation (1947) bears the more informative title In Defence of
Materialism. The author disguised himself under the pen-name of Beltov.
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Martov, who were elsewhere in Siberia.' On their release from
Siberia early in 1900, Ulyanov, Potresov and Martov, having
collected much needed funds, went on to Geneva to seek Ple-
khanov's collaboration. Agreement was soon reached. A popular
weekly named Iskra (" The Spark") and a solid theoretical
journal named Zarya (" The Dawn ") were to be pubhshed under
the editorship of a board of six Plekhanov, Axelrod and
Zasulich, representing the " Liberation of Labour " group, to-
gether with Ulyanov, Potresov and Martov.
The first number of Iskra came from the press in Stuttgart ^
on December i, 1900, the first issue of Zarya on April i, igoi.
Plekhanov's prestige and authority as the doyen of Russian
Marxists made him, in his own eyes and in those of others, the
presiding genius of the enterprise. The three members of the
" Liberation of Labour " group were the only prospective col-
laborators mentioned by name in the preliminary announcement
of Iskra, which was apparently based on a draft made by Ulyanov
in Russia,^ and the same three names Plekhanov, Axelrod and
Zasulich also appeared alone on the title page of Zarya. The
three junior editors were still quite unknown and had their spurs
to win. Ulyanov, the most prolific writer among them, had
published his earliest works under the pen-names " Ilin " and
" Tulin " : since leaving Russia he had concealed his identity
under the pseudonyms " Petrov " and " Frei ". An article
appearing in Zarya in December 1901 was the first occasion for
the use of a new signature, " Lenin ". The occasion was of
symbolical importance. It was about this time that Lenin first
began to emerge head and shoulders above his fellow-editors by
his energy and by the clarity of his ideas. He alone knew exactly
what he wanted : to establish an accepted body of revolutionary
doctrine and an organized revolutionary party. The first of these
aims required, in addition to filling the columns of Iskra, the
promulgation of a party programme; the second, the summoning
of a party congress to take up the work begun and abandoned
' N. K. Krupskaya, Memories of Lenin [i] (Engl, transl. 1930), p. 39.
^ Subsequent issues were printed in Munich down to December 1903,
when publication was transferred to Geneva.
' Lenin, Sochinemya, iv, 37-41; VKP(B) v Rezolyutsiyakh (1941), i, 7-10.
Martov confirms the existence of the original draft (Lenin, Sochineniya, iv, 554):
there is no evidence to prove how much of it survived in the finished version.
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in 1898. Iskra was designed to give, in the words of the pre-
liminary announcement of its birth, " a definite physiognomy
and organization" to the scattered Russian social-democratic
movement:
Before uniting, and in order to unite, we must first decisively
and definitely draw a line of separation. Otherwise our union
would be merely a fiction covering up the present confusion
and preventing its radical removal. It will therefore be under-
stood that we do not intend to make our organ a mere collection
of variegated opinions. We shall on the contrary conduct it in
the spirit of a strictly defined policy.^
By the middle of 1902 Iskra was able to lay before its readers a
draft party programme which represented a careful blend of the
views of the milder and more cautious Plekhanov and those of
the bolder and more uncompromising Lenin. About the same
time Lenin published his first major original work on revolutionary
doctrine and revolutionary organization. What is to be Done ?
Early in 1903 preparations were far enough advanced to summon
a party congress to meet in Brussels in July of that year.
" Bolshevism as a stream of political thought and as a political
party ", Lenin was to write nearly twenty years later, " has existed
since 1903." ^ Its character was determined by the controversies
of the period in which it was conceived and brought to birth
controversies in which Lenin's clear-headed genius, confident
persistence and polemical temperament gave him the outstanding
role. Before the congress met three ideological battles had been
fought and won. As against the narodniks, the Russian Social-
Democratic Workers' Party regarded the proletariat and not the
peasant as the driving force of the coming revolution ; as against
the " legal Marxists ", it preached revolutionary and socialist
action; as against the so-called " Economists ", it put forward
in the name of the proletariat political as well as economic demands.
The campaign against the narodniks was the main achievement
of Plekhanov. The first Russian revolutionaries of the i86os,
building on the intellectual foundations laid by the pioneers of
' VKP(B) V Rezolyutsiyakh (1941), i, 9 ; Lenin, Sochineniya, iv, 39-40.
^ Ibid. XXV, 174.
VOL. I B
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the 184OS, were materialists in the sense of the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment and radicals in the tradition of the French revolu-
tion ; they lacked contact both with the Russian peasant and with
the still numerically insignificant Russian factory worker. The
Russian revolutionaries of the 1870s discovered the Russian peasant
and found in him the prospective protagonist of the Russian
revolution, which thus acquired for the first time a social as well
as an intellectual content. Some of them were followers of
Bakunin and turned towards anarchism and terrorism. Others
were influenced by Marx (whose works began to penetrate Russia
in the 1870s), but interpreted his teaching in a peculiarly Russian
way, arguing that Russia, being a predominantly peasant country,
would avoid the western stage of bourgeois capitalism and that
the specifically Russian peasant commune would provide a direct
transition from the feudalism of the past to the communism of
the future. The distinction between the revolutionary radicals of
the 1860S and the narodniks of the 1870s had some analogy with
the famous argument in other fields of Russian thought between
westerners and Slavophils. The westerners held that it was the
destiny of Russia, as a backward country, to learn from the west
and to advance through the same phases and by the same pro-
cesses which had already marked the progress of the west. The
Slavophils believed that Russia, backward no doubt but full of
youthful vigour and in this respect superior to the already decay-
ing west, had a peculiar destiny of her own to accomplish which
would enable her to rise above the characteristic evils of western
civilization.
Lenin' s early writings against the narodniks did little more than
drive home the arguments of Plekhanov. In the very first of them
he proclaimed with youthful emphasis his own revolutionary faith
in the proletariat:
It is on the industrial working class that the social-democrats
centre their attention and their activity. When the advanced
members of that class have assimilated the ideas of scientific
socialism and the idea of the role of the Russian worker in
history, when their ideas are widespread and the workers have
created stable organizations that will transform the disconnected
economic war of today into a conscious class-struggle then
will the Russian worker, rising at the head of all democratic
elements, overthrow absolutism and lead the RUSSIAN PRO-
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LETARIAT (by the side of the proletariat of ALL COUNTRIES)
along the straight way of open political struggle towards a
Victorious Communist Revolution.^
In the last decade of the nineteenth century Witte and foreign
capitalists were busy intensifying the development of Russian
industry and of the Russian proletariat and thus creating the
conditions which would prove Plekhanov and Lenin right. The
star of the industrial worker was rising, the star of the peasant
waning, in the revolutionary firmament. It was not till 1905
that the problem of fitting the peasant into the revolutionary
scheme again became a burning party issue.
The " legal Marxists " were a small group of intellectuals
who, in the middle 1890s, began to expound Marxist doc-
trines in books and articles cast in such a form as to pass the
Russian censorship. The rapid spread of Marxism among Russian
intellectuals at this time was due to the expansion of Russian
industry and to the absence of any bourgeois tradition or bourgeois
political philosophy which could play in Russia the role of western
liberalism. Marx had praised the growth of capitalism in feudal
conditions as a progressive force. Marxism was acceptable to the
nascent Russian middle class as an ideological reinforcement in
the struggle against feudalism and autocracy, just as Marxism
was later to have its appeal to the rising capitalist class in " back-
ward " Asiatic countries as an ally in the struggle against foreign
imperialism. But, in accepting Marxism, the Russian middle-class
intellectual emptied it of any immediate revolutionary content, so
that the authorities, who still feared the narodniks as the main
revolutionary party, were not unwilling to tolerate these sworn
enemies of the narodniks whose own programme seemed to carry
no imminent threat. The outstanding figure among the " legal
Marxists " was Peter Struve, the author of the manifesto of the
Minsk congress. His Critical Notes on the Question of the Economic
Development of Russia, published in 1894, were the original plat-
form of the group, ending with the famous injunction to socialists
not to concern themselves with unrealistic projects of " heaven-
storming ", but to " learn in the school of capitaUsm "? Other
' Lenin, Sochineniya, i, 194.
^ Struve occupied for some time an equivocal position, and was a contributor
to the first numbers of Iskra ; after 1902 he severed all connexion with the party,
and in later years became a bitter enemy of the revolution.
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" legal Marxists " were Bulgakov and Berdyaev, subsequent con-
verts to Orthodox Christianity, and Tugan-Baranovsky, author of
a standard work on Russian factories. Diametrically opposed to
the narodniks, they accepted without qualification the Marxist
view of the development of bourgeois capitalism as a necessary
first stage in the eventual achievement of socialism; and they
believed that in this respect Russia must learn from the west
and tread the western path. So far Lenin was in full agreement
with them. But their insistence on the necessity of the bourgeois
capitalist stage soon led them to regard this as an end in itself
and to substitute reform for revolution as the process through
which sociahsm would eventually be achieved, thus anticipating
the views of Bernstein and the German " revisionists " of Marx-
ism. As Lenin summed up the matter long after, " they were
bourgeois democrats for whom the breach with narodnism meant a
transition from petty-bourgeois (or peasant) socialism not to pro-
letarian socialism, as in our case, but to bourgeois liberalism ".'
More substantial was the controversy with the so-called
" Economists" a group of Russian social-democrats who exer-
cised a powerful influence on the whole movement about the turn
of the century. The distinctive tenet of the " Economists " was
the sharp separation of economics from politics; the former were
the affair of the workers, the latter of the intellectual leaders of
the party. According to this thesis the workers were interested
not in political, but only in economic, ends; the class struggle
for them reduced itself to a form of trade unionism a struggle
of men against masters for better conditions of work and social
improvements within the framework of the existing order.
Politics were the concern of the intellectuals ; but, since the only
conceivable political programme in contemporary Russia was a
programme of bourgeois reform, the party intellectuals were in
fact limited to the same ends as the bourgeois liberals and became
indistinguishable from them. In the words of the so-called credo
which came to be accepted as the manifesto of the group :
Discussions about an independent workers' political party
are nothing more than the product of a transfer of foreign tasks
and foreign achievements to our soil. . . . A whole set of
historical conditions prevents us from being western Marxists
' Lenin, Sochineniya, xii, 57.
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and demands from us a different Marxism which is appropriate
and necessary in Russian conditions. The lack in every Russian
citizen of political feeling and sense evidently cannot be re-
deemed by discussions about politics or by appeals to a non-
existent force. This political sense can be gained only by
training, i.e. by participation in that life (however un-Marxist
it may be) which Russian reality offers. . . . For the Russian
Marxist there is only one way out : to support the economic
struggle of the proletariat and to participate in liberal opposition
activity. I
These heresies were denounced in the summer of 1899 by Lenin
and a group of his fellow-exiles in Siberia, who described them in a
counter-manifesto as a regression from the party manifesto of the
previous year, where " the work of conquering political liberty "
had been squarely placed on " the strong shoulders " of the
Russian worker.^ In the following year Plekhanov produced a
vade-mecum of documents introduced by a preface of his own
which was designed to serve as the final exposure of " Econom-
ism " ; 3 and Martov, who had a talent for political satire, wrote
a Hymn of the Latest Russian Socialism :
Flatter us not with your politics, ye demagogues of the
toiling masses, prate not to us of your communisms ; we believe
in the might of caisses d'assistance.'^
The controversy was carried on into the Iskra period, occupying
many columns of the new j ournal : and Lenin' s What is to be
Done ?, after an initial sally against the " legal Marxists ", pro-
ceeded to a mass assault on " Economism " in all its ramifications :
The idea of the social-democrat must be not a trade union
secretary, but a tribune of the people. . . . A trade union policy of
the working class is simply a bourgeois policy for the working class.s
Political as well as economic agitation was needed to arouse the
class-consciousness of the masses. Indeed the two could not be
' Ibid, ii, 479-480. According to the author of the document, Kuskova,
it was not intended for publication, nor was the title credo given to it by
her {ibid, ii, 638-639). The publicity it received was due to the fact that
Lenin and his companions in Siberia took it as the text for their attack on
" Economism ".
^ Ibid, ii, 483-486.
3 G. V. Plekhanov, Sochineniya, xii, 3-42.
'' Quoted in E. Yaroslavsky, Istoriya VKP(B), i (1926), 252.
5 Lenin, Sochineniya, iv, 423-426.
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separated, since every class struggle was essentially political.
Unlike the " legal Marxists ", who were in essence a bourgeois
group advocating bourgeois policies through a Marxist idiom,
the " Economists " had a policy of economic agitation and social
reform for the workers and were to that extent a genuine workers'
party. But they reached the same practical conclusion as the legal
Marxists that it was necessary to postpone to an indefinite future
the revolutionary socialist struggle of the proletariat and to con-
centrate meanwhile on a reformist democratic programme in
alliance with the bourgeoisie. Lenin did not fail in later years to
point out that they had in this respect anticipated the fundamental
tenet of Menshevism.'
The underlying issue at stake in the controversy with the
legal Marxists and the Economists was one which continued to
dog the whole history of the Russian revolution. The tidy scheme
of the Communist Manifesto provided for revolution by successive
stages. First, the bourgeois revolution would overthrow the
remains of the feudal order and of political absolutism, and estab-
lish bourgeois democracy and bourgeois capitalism, with its
attendant phenomenon, an industrial proletariat; then the pro-
letariat, organizing itself under the conditions provided by
bourgeois democracy, would proceed to the final revolution to
overthrow bourgeois capitalism and establish socialism. On the
other hand, Marx himself had seemed to have some doubts about
the application of this scheme, which was the product of a brilliant
generalization from English and French history, to the Germany
of the 1840s, still awaiting her bourgeois revolution but
already possessing a nascent industry and rapidly growing
proletariat. In 1844 Marx had questioned the possibility of
keeping the coming German revolution within the limits of a
bourgeois revolution " which leaves the pillars of the house stand-
ing ", and declared that Germany could be emancipated only
through the revolutionary proletariat.- In the Communist Mani-
festo itself he predicted that, owing to the " advanced con-
' Lenin, Sochinerdya, xii, 69.
^ This was the gist of the famous concluding passage of the essay On the
Critique of Hegel's Theory of Law, ending with the prediction that " the signal
for Germany's resurrection from the dead will be given by the crow of the
GaUic cock " {Karl Marx-Friedrich Engels: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe,
V^ Teil, i, i, 617-620).
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ditions " and " developed proletariat " of contemporary Germany,
the German bourgeois revolution would be " the immediate
prelude to a proletarian revolution ". And after the fiasco of
1848 had revealed the helplessness of the German bourgeoisie,
Marx drew the link between bourgeois and proletarian revolutions
in Germany closer still. In his address to the Communist League
in March 1850, he argued that the failure of 1848 had imposed a
dual task on the German workers : first, to support the bourgeoisie
in its democratic struggle against feudalism and to give to that
struggle the acutest possible form; and, secondly, to maintain
an independent party ready to take up the socialist struggle against
bourgeois capitalism as soon as the bourgeois-democratic revolu-
tion was completed. Moreover, while the two tasks were theoretic-
ally separate, the interest of the workers was to make the process
continuous :
While the democratic petty bourgeoisie wants to end the
revolution as rapidly as possible . . . our interests and our
task consist in making the revolution permanent until all the
more or less possessing classes are removed from authority,
until the proletariat wins state power, until the union of prole-
tarians not only in one country, but in all the leading countries
of the world, is sufficiently developed to put an end to com-
petition between the proletarians of these countries, and until
at the very least the chief productive forces are concentrated in
the hands of the proletarians.
And Marx ended a long appeal with the phrase : " Their fighting
slogan must be ' permanent revolution ' ".'
Russian Marxists in the 1890s thus had two courses open to
them. Everyone agreed that Russia had not yet reached her
bourgeois revolution; and it could therefore be argued, as the
legal Marxists and Economists argued, that at this stage the
proletariat could, so far as the socialist revolution was concerned,
only play a waiting game, and in the meanwhile act as a subsidiary
ally of the bourgeoisie in its programme for the overthrow of
feudalism and autocracy. The alternative was to apply to Russia
' Marx i Engels, Sochineniya, vii, 483, 489. The origin of this famous phrase
is uncertain ; Marx used it for the first time in an article of 1844, in which he
observed that Napoleon had " substituted permanent war for permanent
revolution" (Karl Marx-Friednch Engels: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe,
!<" Teil, iii, 299) ; in 1850 he ascribed to Blanqui " a declaration of permanent
revolution (Marx i Engels, Sochineniya, viii, 8i ).
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some such scheme as Marx had propounded for Germany; and
Lenin seems to have been the first, in an article called Tasks of
Russian Social-Democrats, written in Siberia in 1898, to make
the application. Here Lenin argued that the task of Russian
social-democracy was to lead the class struggle of the proletariat
" in both its manifestations " in the democratic struggle against
absolutism, in which the proletariat would have an ally in the
bourgeoisie, and in the socialist struggle against capitalism, in
which the proletariat would fight alone. While " all social-demo-
crats recognize that the political revolution in Russia must precede
the socialist revolution ", it is none the less true that the democratic
task is " indissolubly linked with the socialist task ", so that " all
socialists in Russia must become social-democrats . . . and all true
and consistent democrats in Russia must become social-demo-
crats ".' Lenin preserved a complete theoretical separation
between the two revolutions. Mindful of the absence in Russia
of the relatively advanced industrial development of Germany in
1848, he refrained from following Marx in his prediction of an
" immediate " succession of bourgeois and proletarian revolu-
tions ; he preferred to say nothing at all about the interval between
them. But the " indissoluble link " between the two tasks of
Russian social-democracy brought him near to Marx's conception
for Germany of a continuous process of revolution. Lenin's
article was enthusiastically received by the " Liberation of Labour "
group in Geneva, and published there with a preface by Axelrod
praising it as a " direct commentary " on the party manifesto.^
Acceptance of the dual task of the proletariat, democratic and
' Lenin, Sochineniya, ii, 171-178. The thesis of the " indissoluble link "
had a respectable ancestry in Russian thought. Herzen, who, though rightly
accounted the progenitor of the narodniks, shows occasional traces of Marx' s
influence, wrote in 1868 : " A republic which did not lead to socialism would
seem to us absurd, a transition taking itself for an end ; socialism which tried
to dispense with political liberty, with equality of rights, would quickly de-
generate into authoritarian communism " (Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii i Pisem,
ed. M. K. Lemke, xx (1923), 132 : an obvious error in punctuation has been
corrected). From a different angle, a Minister of the Interior under Alexander
I I I , D. Tolstoy, said in t he 1880s : " Any attempt to introduce into Russia
western European parliamentary forms of government is doomed to failure.
If the Tsarist regime . . . is overthrown, its place will be taken by com-
munism, the pure undisguised communism of Mr. Karl Marx who recently
died in London and whose theories I have studied with attention and interest "
(Bernhard von Biilow, Denkwurdigkeiten (1931), iv, 573).
^ The preface is reprinted in Lenin, Sochineniya, ii, 603-605.
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socialist, had its implications in terms of party organization. One
of the issues in the controversy with the Economists was the
so-called question of " spontaneity " ' in the workers' movement.
The Communist Manifesto, in attacking the Utopian socialists, had
opposed " the gradual, spontaneous class organization of the
proletariat " to "an organization of society specially contrived
by these inventors ". On the other hand, emphasis on " gradual "
and " spontaneous " development might be pushed to a point
where it amounted to a denial of the need for political action.
" Spontaneity " thus became a catchword of the Economists, who
held that the development of economic action among the masses
(trade unionism, strikes, etc.) would make them " spontane-
ously " ripe for revolution. Orthodox social-democrats, as
represented by Plekhanov and the " Liberation of Labour"
group as well as by Lenin, argued not only that the workers
should be encouraged to put forward political as well as economic
demands, but that they should be imbued with a conscious revolu-
tionary purpose and conduct a consciously planned revolutionary
campaign. " Consciousness" was adopted as the opposing
catchword to " spontaneity ".^ According to Lenin, the weak-
ness of the Russian workers' movement at the end of the century
was that the " spontaneous " element had outstripped " con-
sciousness ". Russia's rapid industrial development had provoked
a wave of strikes against intolerable conditions in the factory.
But the protest of the workers was not guided by any revolutionary
consciousness or revolutionary theory.
The theoretical discussion on " spontaneity " and " conscious-
ness " masked the vital practical issue of the nature and function
of a revolutionary party which ultimately rent the Russian Social-
Democratic Workers' Party in twain. What was one day to
become Bolshevik doctrine developed gradually, and provoked
no serious clashes of opinion within the party before the fateful
congress of 1903. It was not moulded exclusively by Lenin.
Plekhanov still enjoyed a unique authority as the theorist of the
' The Russian words stikhiinyi and stikhiinost' are conventionally but in-
adequately translated by " spontaneous " and " spontaneity ". They also convey
the idea of untutored inspiration, of something innate and elemental.
* The controversy is also reflected in an early article of 1901 by Stalin,
who wrote that " social-democracy took in hand this unconscious, spontaneous,
unorganized movement " of the workers {Sochineniya, i, 14).
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party, which Lenin was slow to contest. But from the foundation
of Iskra onwards Lenin became more and more the pace-maker
of advanced ideas within the party; and it is in his writings that
the evolution of party doctrine can be most clearly traced. The
view consistently propounded in Iskra of the character of the
party rested on two propositions to which Lenin returned over
and over again. The first was that " without revolutionary theory
there can be no revolutionary movement ".' The second was that
" social-democratic consciousness " or " class political conscious-
ness " was not a " spontaneous " growth, and could come to the
worker only " from without ".^ Both these propositions defined
the relation of the party to the proletariat as a whole and had
corollaries whose far-reaching implications were not immediately
apparent.
The first proposition, which insisted on the supreme import-
ance of theory, called for a party created by intellectuals and, at
any rate at the outset, composed mainly of them. This, in Lenin's
view, was an historically attested necessity :
The history of all countries bears witness that by its own
resources alone the working class is in a position to generate
only a trade-union consciousness, i.e. a conviction of the
necessity of coming together in unions, of carrying on a struggle
with the masters, of securing from the government the promul-
gation of this or that law indispensable for the workers and so
forth. The teaching of socialism has grown out of philosophical,
historical and economic theories worked out by educated repre-
sentatives of the possessing classes, of the intelligentsia. The
founders of contemporary socialism, Marx and Engels, belonged
themselves by their social origin to the bourgeois intelligentsia.
Similarly in Russia the theoretical teaching of social-democracy
has arisen altogether independently of the spontaneous growth of
the workers' movement, has arisen as the natural and inevitable
result of the development of thought among the revolutionary-
socialist intelligentsia. 3
' Lenin, Sochineniya, ii, 184, iv, 380.
^ Ibid, iv, 384, 422.
3 Ibid, iv, 384-385. Lenin' s emphasis seems here to have led him
into a phrase (" altogether i ndependent l y") which is doubtfully Marxi st ;
elsewhere he laid stress on the necessary social roots of every political
doctrine. The same charge might be brought against a well-known passage
in one of Marx' s own early writings in which he spoke of the proletariat as
" the material weapon of philosophy " for making the revolution {Karl Marx-
Friedrich Engels: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, V' Teil, i, i, 619-620).
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He invoked the authority of the " profoundly just and weighty
words " of Kautsky, still the revered theoretical leader of German
social-democracy:
The contemporary socialist movement can come into being
only on the basis of a profound scientific knowledge. . . . The
bearer of this science is not the proletariat, but the bourgeois
intelligentsia; contemporary socialism was born in the heads
of individual members of this class.^
It is difficult to dissociate this attitude from a faint aroma of
condescension, which was characteristic of Plekhanov and not at
this time wholly absent from the writings of Lenin. The mani-
festo announcing the foundation of Iskra, in pursuing the campaign
against the Economists, expressed contempt for " purely workers'
literature " ; ^ and looking back much later on this period, Lenin
noted that, in Russia as elsewhere, the growth of a mass workers'
movement had been a signal for the appearance of " opportunist "
deviations in the Marxist camp.^ Lenin and his early associates
were intellectuals of the purest water ; and their writings attained
a high standard of learning and acumen. Zinoviev described the
few workers in the early party organizations as " isolated pheno-
mena ".'> The 1905 revolution for the first time brought into the
ranks of the party a significant number of workers.
The second proposition, which envisaged the party as a
revolutionary elite imposing a revolutionary consciousness " from
without " on the mass of the workers, drew a sharp distinction
between the proletariat and the party. The class was an economic
' Lenin, Sochineniya, iv, 390-391.
^ VKP(B) V Rezolyutsiyakh (1941), i, 10.
' Lenin, Sochineniya, xvii, 344. Marx had noted that " the workers, when
they . . . give up work and become professional litterateurs, always make
' t heoret i cal ' trouble " (Marx i Engels, Sochineniya, xxvi, 484-485). R. Michels,
discussing the question on the basis of German and Italian experience, con-
cludes that " whenever the marshal' s baton has rested in the worker' s horny
hand, the army of workers has had a leadership less sure and less satisfactory
for its purposes t han when the leadership has been in the hands of men from
other classes of society ", and adds explicitly : " Ultimately it is not so much
t he revisionist intellectuals as the leaders of the trade union movement, that is
to say, proletarians by origin, who have been behind the reformist tendency in
German social democr acy" {Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens (and ed. 1925),
pp. 391. 408).
G. Zinoviev, Geschichte der Kommunistischen Partei Russlands (1923),
p. 8s.
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unit, the party a political or ideological unit; ' and it was in the
nature of things that the party could be only a part of the class ^
its vanguard and the champion of its interests. It was Ple-
khanov who in the columns of Iskra coined the term " hegemony "
to express the relation of the party to the proletariat. He pro-
tested against the " confusion of the concept ' class ' with the
concept ' party ' ", and added that " the whole working class is
one thing, and quite another thing is the social-democratic party
which represents only the leading and at the beginning numeri-
cally small detachment of the working class".' No serious
Marxist ever believed that a small elite of revolutionaries could
by itself make a revolution; that would have been to fall into the
heresy of " Blanquism ".* No one insisted more powerfully
than Lenin himself that without the masses no serious political
action was possible. But the party was never conceived by Lenin
as a mass organization. Much of its strength was due to the fact
that it was more concerned to exclude than to include: quality
rather than quantity was its aim. The function of the party was
to lead the workers. " The spontaneous struggle of the proletariat
will not become a genuine ' class struggle ' until this struggle is
led by a strong organization of revolutionaries." ^ The doctrine
of spontaneity, which denied this role of leadership, was nick-
named " tail-endism " because it condemned the party to lag at
the tail of the workers' movement.
The doctrine of the party as a repository of revolutionary
' As Lagardelle, the French socialist, put it, the class is held together by a
lien de necessite, the party by a lien de volonte (H. Lagardelle, Le Socialisme
Ouvrier (1911), pp. 166-167).
^ Thi s was even declared to be t he derivation of the wor d: " The word
' par t y' comes from t he Latin pars or par t : and we Marxists say today t hat
the party is part of a definite class " (G. Zinoviev, Geschichte der Kommunistischen
Partei Russlands (1923), p. 10).
3 G. V. Plekhanov, Sochineniya, xii, 80-81.
* " Blanquism " in nineteenth-century revolutionary parlance meant addic-
tion to the isolated revolutionary conspiracy or putsch and neglect of methodical
organization. " A military conspiracy is Blanquism ", wrote Lenin in 1917,
" if it is not organized by t he party of a deiinite class, if its organizers have not
taken into account the political factor in general and t he international factors
in particular " and if the objective conditions are not propitious (Lenin,
Sochineniya, xxi, 347). A briefer, though perhaps less reliable, definition is
suggested by Lenin' s obiter dictum in 1917 : " We are not Blanquists : we are
not in favour of seizure of power by a minority " (ibid, xx, 96).
5 Ibid, iv, 465.
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theory and revolutionary consciousness, leading and guiding a
spontaneous workers' movement, was hammered out by Lenin
and his colleagues in Iskra against a background of current
controversy. It had, however, good Marxist warrant. Some such
doctrine had inspired the first Communist League of the 1840s,
a body whose membership never exceeded a few hundreds, and
left its mark in at least one passage of the Communist Manifesto :
The Communists are, practically, the most progressive and
resolute section of the working class of all countries . . . ; they
have, theoretically, the advantage over the great mass of the
proletariat of understanding the line of advance, conditions, and
general results of the proletarian movement.
Another passage of the Communist Manifesto, on the other hand,
described the proletarian movement as " the independent self-
conscious movement of the immense majority " ; and in later
years, influenced partly by the failures of 1848 and partly by their
English surroundings, Marx and Engels came to believe in a
period of indoctrination of the masses as the necessary prelude of
a proletarian revolution. The only organization sponsored by
Marx and Engels after their arrival in England, the International
Workingmen's Association (the so-called " First International ") ,
was a mass association, not a revolutionary party, and was as
remote as could well be imagined from the Communist League
of their youth.
Such difference as there was between the Marx of the Com-
munist League and the Marx of the First International was the
effect not of an evolution of doctrine, but of a change of milieu
from the Prussian police state of the 1840s to the bourgeois
democracy of mid-Victorian England. It was thus logical that
Lenin should in this respect have been a disciple of the earlier
rather than of the later Marx. Lenin was from the outset a
practical Russian revolutionary, whose revolutionary theory was
framed in the light of Russian needs and Russian potentialities.
The project of making the intelligentsia the spearhead of a pro-
letarian revolution was even more apposite to Russian than to
German conditions, not only because the weak and backward Rus-
sian proletariat stood even more than its German, and a fortiori
than its western European, counterpart in need of such leadership,
but because the Russian intelligentsia did not, like its western
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counterpart, possess social roots in the commercial bourgeoisie
and was not therefore committed to any deep-seated bourgeois
allegiance. The economically rootless Russian intelligentsia had
already shown how its capacity for abstract revolutionary thinking
could be harnessed to the political reality of social revolution.
The " going to the people " movement of the 1870s, being
exclusively directed to the most backward section of the popula-
tion, the peasantry, was a fiasco. But it had its place in history
as a first quixotic and desperate attempt to bridge the gulf between
the masses and the revolutionary intelligentsia; and this could
now be repeated with the proletarian masses. It was, however,
when Lenin reached the details of party organization that Russian
conditions most clearly influenced his thought. The nature of
the Russian state precluded the formation of any kind of socialist,
or even democratic, party on a western model and drove every
democratic or socialist movement into secret and conspiratorial
channels. Isolated revolutionary groups of workers and students
formed by well-meaning amateurs fell easy victims to the Tsarist
police. Such exploits were like " a campaign waged by gangs of
peasants armed with clubs against a modern army ". '
Against small groups of socialists seeking shelter up and
down the broad Russian underworld [wrote Lenin at this time]
stands the gigantic machine of the powerful contemporary state
straining all its forces to crush socialism and democracy. We
are convinced that we shall in the end break this police state.
. . . But in order to carry on a systematic struggle against
the government we must bring our revolutionary organization
to the highest point of perfection.^
The making of revolution in Russia was a task for professional
revolutionaries ; and it was no accident that military metaphors so
frequently appeared in discussions not only by Lenin, but by
Plekhanov and other Iskra writers, of party organization.
The theme of party organization was finally developed by
Lenin in the summer of 1902 in the pamphlet What is to be Done ?,
which drew the conclusions from the campaign against the
Economists. In his treatment of this concrete topic Lenin ran
further ahead of his Iskra colleagues than on any previous occasion.
He compared the position of the Economists to that of the re-
' Lenin, Sochineniya, iv, 439. ^ Leninskii Sbornik, iii (1925), 26.
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visionists in Germany, of the " possibilists " in France and of
the Fabians in England; it w^as the symptom of a profound
division in the social-democratic movement between a democratic
party of social reformers and a socialist party of true revolution-
aries.^ The one party conceived itself as an " organization of
workers ", the other as an " organization of revolutionaries ".
The difference was fundamental :
An organization of workers must be, first of all, occupational;
secondly, it must be as broad as possible; thirdly, it must be
as little secret as possible. . . . Conversely, an organization of
revolutionaries must contain primarily and chiefly people whose
occupation is revolutionary activity. . . . This organization
must necessarily be not very broad, and as secret as possible.^
Lenin faced the charge that such an organization was in contra-
diction with " the democratic principle ". The charge could
come only from foreign quarters ignorant of Russian realities.
The democratic principle as commonly interpreted required " full
publicity " and " election to all posts ". Neither of these require-
ments could be fulfilled by a revolutionary party working within
" the framework of our autocracy ". Lenin concluded :
The one serious organizational principle for workers in our
movement must be strictest secrecy, strictest choice of members,
training of professional revolutionaries. Once these qualities
are present something more than democracy is guaranteed:
complete comradely confidence among revolutionaries. . . . It
would be a great mistake to think that the impossibility of a
really " democratic " control makes the members of a revolu-
tionary organization irresponsible. . . . They feel their re-
sponsibility very keenly, knowing by experience that in order to
rid itself of an unworthy member an organization of genuine
revolutionaries recoils from nothing. ^
This principle was to be applied equally at all levels :
We must break completely with the tradition of a purely
workers' or trade union type of social-democratic organization
down to factory groups inclusive. The factory group or factory
committee . . . must consist of a very small number of
revolutionaries, receiving direct from the [central] committee
orders and powers to conduct the whole social-democratic party
work in the factory. All members of the factory committee
' Lenin, Sochineniya, iv, 366-367. ^ Ibid, iv, 447.
' Ibid, iv, 466-469.
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must regard themselves as agents of the [central] committee,
bound to submit to all its directions, bound to observe all
" laws and customs " of this " army in the field " into which
they have entered and which they cannot leave without per-
mission of the commander.'
Thus the whole emphasis came to rest on the need for a small,
closely knit party under a strong central leadership to act in the
name of the proletariat as the spearhead of revolution. The
methods of the revolutionary struggle varied and must be deter-
mined empirically from time to time. What remained fixed and
consistent was the central plan built up on a sound basis of theory,
and executed, with the support of the masses, by a highly
organized, disciplined and centrally directed party of professional
revolutionaries.
Lenin, now in his early thirties, had reached the summit of
his powers. The three years following his release from Siberia
were years of feverish and incessant intellectual activity. These
were the years in which the foundations of Bolshevism " as a
stream of political thought and as a political party " were laid.
The instrument carried the stamp of the man: it reflected its
creator's simplicity, his unbending strength and, above all, his
singleness of purpose. A well-known passage in Krupskaya's
memoirs bears witness to that masterful concentration on a single
end which was the hall-mark of Lenin's character. As a schoolboy
he liked skating, but found that it tired him, so that he wanted to
sleep afterwards. " This hindered my studies. So I gave up
skating." After his return from Siberia he ceased to play chess
because " chess gets hold of you too much, and hinders work ".
At one time he had been fascinated by the study of Latin, but
" it began to hinder other work, so I gave it up ".^ After the
revolution he told Gorky :
I can't listen to music too often. It affects your nerves,
makes you want to say stupid, nice things and stroke the heads
of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile
hell. And now you mustn't stroke anyone's head you might
get your hand bitten off.'
' Lenin, Sochineniya, v, 185-186.
^ Krupskaya, Memories of Lenin [i] (Engl, trans!. 1930), p. 35.
^ M. Gorky, Days with Lenin (Engl, transl. n.d.[? 1932]), p. 52.
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If Lenin could lead and dominate men, it was because he himself
throughout his life was led and dominated to an exceptional
extent by a single thought and a single aim. This overwhelming
sense of service to an idea accounted for the simplicity and
modesty of demeanour which all remarked in him. He set an
example of austerity and impersonality which long remained a
standard of conduct for the party. No doubt StaUn was correct
in noting this trait as " one of the strongest sides of Lenin as tlie
new leader of the new masses "J But there was no element of
calculation in Lenin about an attitude which was deeply rooted
in his character.
This whole-hearted simplicity and directness left their mark
on Lenin' s thinking. His immense learning, his analytical skill,
his outstanding intellectual power in the marshalling of fact and
argument were displayed without much concern for the subtler
alternations of light and shade; everything was clear-cut, brilliant,
decisive. As Bukharin said in the last year of Lenin' s life :
Lenin is a strategist of genius. He knows that it is necessary
to strike the principal enemy and not eclectically weave shade
upon shade.^
In controversy he was apt to resort to a one-sided emphasis which
he justified by the need to counteract similar one-sidedness in his
adversary:
The Economists bent the stick one way [he said at the
second party congress, defending What is to be Done ?]. In
order to straighten the stick it was necessary to bend it the other
way ; and this is what I did.^
Yet his ideas could be Utopian to the point of naivety, as in his
reflexions on the disappearance of the state or on the replacement
of bureaucracy by the personal service of citizens. The combina-
tion of a fundamental simplicity of thought and character with
fanaticism in opinion and ruthlessness in action is strongly re-
miniscent of Robespierre. Lenin' s self-assurance in the infalli-
bility of his creed was rendered all the more formidable by his
' Stalin, Sockineniya, vi, 55.
^ Dvenadtsatyi S"esd Rossiiskoi Kommunisticheskoi Partii {BoVshevikov)
(1933). P- 563.
3 Lenin, Sockineniya, vi, 23. State and Revolution, written fifteen years later,
reveals the same technique (see p. 240 below).
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lack of personal pretensions. The denunciation of opponents,
and the attribution of their intellectual myopia to moral obliquity,
had been fixed in the Russian tradition since Belinsky and in the
revolutionary tradition since Marx, if not earlier. But the fanati-
cism was none the less real because it was traditional; and even
fellow-revolutionaries were shocked by the ruthlessness with
which Lenin excommunicated dissidents. " A sectarian with a
serious Marxist training, a Marxist sectarian ", was the final
verdict of the bitterly hostile Potresov who regarded Lenin as
" constitutionally incapable of digesting opinions different from
his own ".^ But Lenin was no mere theorist of revolution.
Opinion was never divorced from action. He was a practising
revolutionary; and, whatever might be said of doctrine, the
practice of revolution allowed of no mercy and no exceptions.
It was this union of theory and practice which made Lenin a
complex figure and accounted for his unique greatness. Trotsky
in a well-known passage contrasted Marx, the man of theory, with
Lenin, the man of action :
The whole of Marx appears in the Communist Manifesto,
in the preface to the Critique [of Political Economy], in Capital.
Even if he had never been destined to become the founder of
the First International, he would still remain for all times the
figure which we know today. The whole of Lenin on the other
hand appears in revolutionary action. His scientific works are
only a preparation for activity. Even if he had never published
a single book he would live on in history in the shape in which
he has entered it: as the leader of the proletarian revolution,
as the creator of the Third International.^
This estimate may require some corrective, especially for the
early period. But it was Lenin himself who quoted in April
1917 : " Theory, my friend, is grey, but green is the everlasting
tree of life " ; ^ and it was Lenin who in November 1917 observed
with a sigh of relief thaj it is " more agreeable and useful to go
through the ' experiment of revolution ' than to write about it "^
In the succeeding months he was constantly at odds with the
doctrinaires in his party.
' A. N. Potresov, Posmertnyi Sbornik Proizvedenii (Paris, 1937), pp. 294, 299.
^ L. Trotsky, O Lenine (n.d. [1934]), p. 148.
3 Lenin, Sochineniya, xx, 102. * Ibid, xxi, 455.
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It is not enough [he wrote at this time] to be a revolutionary
and an advocate of socialism in general. It is necessary to know
at every moment how to find the particular link in the chain
which must be grasped with all one's strength in order to keep
the whole chain in place and prepare to move on resolutely to
the next link.'
After three years of revolutionary experience he could exclaim
it was no doubt an obiter dictum uttered in the heat of con-
troversy t hat " practice is a hundred times more important than
any theory ".^ In the roll of Lenin' s genius one of the largest
entries would have to be devoted to his greatness as a political
strategist and as a political tactician. His far-sightedness in
building up impregnable positions in advance was matched by
an uncanny instinct which told him where and when and how to
strike or to hold back.
If, however, Lenin was a great revolutionary perhaps the
greatest of all time his genius was far more constructive than
destructive. The contribution of Lenin and the Bolsheviks to
the overthrow of Tsarism was negligible. It is only in an external
sense that they can be held responsible for the overthrow of the
Provisional Government. From July 1917 its downfall had be-
come inevitable; it was waiting only for its successor to appear.
Bolshevism succeeded to a vacant throne. The crucial moments
of the interval between the February and October revolutions
were Lenin' s announcement at the first AU-Russian Congress of
Soviets in June that the Bolsheviks were willing to take power
and Lenin' s decision in September that the time was ripe to take
it. Lenin' s major achievement came after the bloodless victory
of the revolution in October 1917 and was that of a great con-
structive statesman. But what he built, with all its merits and
all its defects, was raised on foundations laid long before, and
cannot be fully understood without some knowledge of those
foundations. The first of them were laid during the so-called
" Iskra period " before Lenin' s followers received their distinctive
name at the second party congress.
' Ibid, xxii, 466. ' Ibid, xxvi, 71.
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CHAPTER 2
BOLSHEVIKS AND MENSHEVIKS
M
AINLY as the result of the preparatory work done by the
Iskra group, the second congress of the Russian Social-
Democratic Workers' Party met in July and August 1903
under the chairmanship of Plekhanov, first in Brussels (whence
it fled for fear of poHce persecution) and then in London. It was
the real foundation congress of the party: but it also saw the
famous split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks which widened
and deepened until it led to complete formal separation after 1912.
The congress was attended by representatives of 25 recognized
social-democratic organizations, each having 2 votes except the
Jewish workers' organization, the Bund, which had 3 in virtue of
the special status as an autonomous section of the party accorded
to it by the first congress. As some organizations sent only one
delegate the congress was actually composed of 43 voting delegates
disposing in all of 51 votes. In addition there were 14 delegates
from various organizations with consultative, but without voting,
rights. Of the full delegates more than 30 were professed adherents
of Iskra, and the congress was completely dominated by the Iskra
group. So long as the Iskra-ites remained united, the only con-
certed opposition came from the delegates of the Bund, who were
interested almost exclusively in the rights of national minorities
and in upholding their own autonomous status in the party, and
from two delegates with " Economist " leanings, Akimov and
Martynov, who represented the Union of Russian Social-Demo-
crats Abroad. The resolution to recognize Iskra as the central
organ of the party was passed at an early stage of the congress
with only two dissenting votes.'
The most important pieces of business before the congress
were the adoption of a party programme and of a party statute.
I Vtoroi S"ezdRSDRP (1932), p. 155.
26
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