This sense of belonging to the party and of being a part of its historic mission acted as a solvent on the social divisions between the workers and the Marxist intelligentsia. Comradeship was, initially, more powerful than class. Yet increasingly the relationship between the two was marked by tension and distrust. The workers were beginning to organize themselves. The strikes of the mid-1890s were the first real breakthrough by the independent labour movement. Most of them were led by the skilled workers themselves, though the Marxist intelligentsia in the Social Democratic Party played an important subsidiary role in spreading the propaganda that helped to make the strikes so widespread and effective. At this stage the Marxists were still committed to the idea of mass agitation for strikes. But towards the end of the decade many began to claim that the labour movement, with its narrow focus on bread-and-butter issues, was not strong enough by itself to bring down the tsarist regime. They demanded a broader political movement, in which the discipline and organization of the Social Democrats, rather than the workers themselves, would play the leading role. Here was the root of the conflict between the economic goals of the labour movement and the political ambitions of the revolutionary intelligentsia, a conflict that would split the whole Marxist movement in Russia.
With one foot in the factory and the other in the revolutionary underground, Kanatchikov now had to choose between them. On the eve of the 1905 Revolution, as we learn from the last proud sentence of his memoirs, he left the factory and became a full-time ‘professional revolutionary’ in the Bolshevik Party.
4 Red Ink
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i Inside the Fortress
At the mouth of the Neva River, directly opposite the Winter Palace, stands the Fortress of Peter and Paul. Constructed in 1703 by Peter the Great as a bastion against the Swedish fleet, it was the first building in St Petersburg, and for several years served as the capital of his vast Empire. Once the rest of the city had been constructed — on the bones of the serfs who died building it — the tiny island fortress ceased to be the seat of tsarist rule, but it continued to symbolize its awesome power. The tombs of the tsars were kept in its cathedral, whose golden spire rose like a needle above the centre of the capital. And inside the thick stone walls and beneath the eight towers of the fortress was concealed the most infamous of all the regime’s political prisons. Its list of inmates reads like a roll of honour of the Russian radical and revolutionary movements: Radishchev; the Decembrists; the Petrashevtsy; Kropotkin; Chernyshevsky; Bakunin; Tkachev; Nechaev; Populists and Marxists; workers and students — they all suffered in its damp and gloomy cells. In its two centuries as a jail not a single prisoner ever escaped from the fortress, although many found a different form of deliverance through suicide or insanity.
This ‘Russian Bastille’ not only held captive dangerous subversives; it captured the popular imagination. Folksongs and ballads portrayed the fortress as a living hell. Legends abounded of how its prisoners were tortured, of how they languished in dark and vermin-ridden dungeons, or were driven mad by its tomb-like silence (enforced as part of the prison regime). Tales were told of prisoners kept in cells so small that they could neither stand nor lie down but had to curl up like a ball; after a while their bodies became twisted and deformed. There were stories of secret executions, of prisoners being forced to dig their own graves on the frozen river at night before being drowned beneath the ice. In the minds of the common people the fortress became a monstrous symbol of the despotism under which they lived, a symbol of their fears and lack of freedom, and the fact that it was located right in the middle of St Petersburg, that people daily passed by its secret horrors, only made it seem more terrible.
