During the investigation that followed his arrest, Lenin disclaimed authorship of a manuscript of his which the police had mistakenly attributed to an associate by the name of P. K. Zaporozhets. As a consequence, the latter drew two additional years of prison and exile. Lenin spent his three years of Siberian exile (1897–1900) in relative comfort and in constant communication with his comrades. He read, wrote, translated, and engaged in vigorous physical activity.*
As his term of exile drew to a close, Lenin was in receipt of disturbing news from home: the movement, which at the time of his imprisonment was going from success to success, was in the throes of a crisis not unlike that experienced by the revolutionaries of the 1870s. The agitational technique, which Lenin had expected to radicalize workers, turned into something very different: the economic grievances which had been intended to serve as a means of stimulating their political awareness had become an end in themselves. The workers struggled for economic benefits without getting politically involved, and the intellectuals who engaged in “agitation” found that they had become adjuncts of an incipient trade union movement. In the summer of 1899, Lenin received from Russia a document written by Ekaterina Kuskova and called “Credo” which urged socialists to leave the struggle against the autocracy to the bourgeoisie and concentrate instead on helping Russian labor improve its economic and social condition. Kuskova was not a full-fledged Social-Democrat, but her essay reflected a trend that was emerging within Social-Democracy. This incipient heresy Lenin labeled Economism. Nothing was further from his mind than to have the socialist movement turn into a handmaiden of trade unions, which by their very nature pursued accommodation with “capitalism.” The information which reached him from Russia indicated that the labor movement was maturing independently of the Social-Democratic intelligentsia and distancing itself from the political struggle—that is, revolution.
His anxiety was compounded by the emergence of yet another heresy in the movement: Revisionism. In early 1899, some leading Russian Social-Democrats, following Eduard Bernstein, called for a revision of Marx’s social theory in the light of recent evidence. That year Struve published an analysis of Marx’s social theory in which he charged it with inconsistency: Marx’s own premises indicated that socialism could come about only as a result of evolution, not revolution.49 Struve then proceeded to a systematic critique of the central concept of Marx’s economic and social doctrine, the theory of value, which led him to the conclusion that “value” was not a scientific but a metaphysical concept.50 Revisionism did not trouble Lenin as much as Economism for it did not have the same practical implications, but it heightened his fear that something was seriously amiss. According to Krupskaia, in the summer of 1899 Lenin grew distraught, lost weight, and suffered from insomnia. He now devoted his energies to analyzing the causes of the crisis in Russian Social-Democracy and devising the means to overcome it.
His immediate practical solution was to launch with those associates who had remained faithful to orthodox Marxism a publication, modeled on the German
After his release from exile in early 1900, Lenin spent a short time in St. Petersburg negotiating with colleagues as well as Struve, who, although nominally still a Social-Democrat, was shifting into the liberal camp. Struve was to collaborate with
