For Trotsky and Kollontai, who had both come to see the Russian revolution as part of a European-wide struggle against imperialism, there was an iron logic at the heart of Lenin’s slogan which increasingly appealed to their own leftwing Menshevik internationalism. To begin with, in the first year of the war, both had similar doubts about the Bolshevik leader. Whereas Lenin had argued that Russia’s defeat would be a ‘lesser evil’ than that of the more advanced Germany, they opposed the whole idea of military victors and losers. The dispute, though minor in itself, related to a broader difference of opinion. Lenin had recently come to stress the revolutionary potential of nationalist movements within colonial systems, and he argued that Russia’s defeat would help to bring about the collapse of the Tsarist Empire. But Trotsky and Kollontai (like Bukharin for that matter) believed that the nation-state would soon become a thing of the past and thus denied it as a revolutionary force. Nor could they quite yet bring themselves to embrace the Leninist call for a ‘war against war’. They preferred the pacifist slogans of their old friends and allies among the Menshevik Internationalists. Neither Trotsky nor Kollontai was ready to cut loose from the Mensheviks, whose doubts about Lenin’s rigid dogma on party organization they still shared. And while it was true that both were moving towards the Bolsheviks, they still harboured hopes of reuniting the two wings of the SD Party through a broad campaign for peace.
Trotsky had joined Martov in Paris in November 1914 and collaborated with him on Nashe slovo (Our Word), without doubt the most brilliant pacifist organ in Europe. He represented its views at the Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915, a secret gathering of thirty-eight Internationalists from various countries in a tiny mountain village outside Berne. Its rousing manifesto against the war, passed in opposition to Lenin’s civil war resolution, was drawn up by Trotsky himself:
Working men and women! Mothers and fathers! Widows and orphans! Wounded and crippled! To all who are suffering from the war or in consequence of the war, we cry out, over the frontiers, over the smoking battlefields, over the devastated cities and hamlets: ‘WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!’70
By this stage, Kollontai had already thrown in her lot with Lenin. Her love affair with Alexander Shliapnikov, a handsome worker-Bolshevik twelve years her junior, no doubt had something to do with this. He had joined her in Stockholm in the autumn of 1914 and spent the rest of the war years running errands to Russia for Lenin. Yet perhaps it was not so much this romance as her own emotional commitment to the international cause and to ending the war at all costs that brought her under Lenin’s spell. The war’s oppressive influence was omnipresent. It seemed to be driving civilization to the edge of an abyss. ‘So much blood is spilled, so many crimes are committed every day, every hour,’ she wrote in her diary at Christmas 1915:
And the war — it rules over all. Unseen, it decides the fate of each one of us. Before it the individual will is powerless. It was precisely this feeling of helplessness in the face of the war, this sense of the war as an unstoppable force, that had overcome me from the very first days, when I was still in Berlin.
To Kollontai, only Lenin’s call for an armed uprising seemed capable of bringing the war to an end. It alone held out the prospect of restoring the power of human will and action over objective forces. ‘This is not just “analysis” ’, she wrote of Lenin’s war Theses in her diary. ‘This is action. This is a political programme … Let the barricades answer the war.’71
