The Russian Revolution полностью

Lenin’s unorthodox theses became the subject of intense controversy in 1902–3, as the Social-Democrats were making preparations for the forthcoming Second Congress of the party—a congress which, its name notwithstanding, was to be the party’s founding gathering. Quarrels broke out in which ideological differences fused with and often masked personal struggles over leadership. Lenin, supported by Plekhanov, called for a more centralized organization in which the rank and file would be subservient to the center, while Martov, the future leader of the Mensheviks, wanted a looser structure, offering admission to anyone who gave “the party regular personal cooperation, under the direction of one of the party organizations.”⁶⁰

The Second Congress convened in Brussels in July 1903; it was attended by forty-three voting delegates, authorized to cast fifty-one votes.* All but four of the participants, said to have been workers, belonged to the intelligentsia. Martov, leading the opposition to Lenin, regularly won majorities, but when he joined with his rival to deny the Jewish Bund autonomous status in the party and the five Bundists walked out, followed by the two Economist delegates, he temporarily lost his majority. Lenin promptly exploited the opportunity to seize control of the Central Committee and secure a dominant voice in its organ, Iskra. His ruthless methods and intrigues on this occasion caused a great deal of bad blood between him and the other leaders of the party. Although every effort was made then and subsequently to preserve a façade of unity, the split in fact became irreparable, not so much because of ideological differences, which could have been reconciled, but from personal animosities. Lenin seized the moment to claim for his faction the name Bolshevik, meaning “majority.” This name he retained even after he found himself in a minority, which occurred soon after the Second Congress. It gave him the advantage of appearing as the leader of the more popular branch of the party. Throughout he maintained the pose of being the only “orthodox” Marxist, which had considerable appeal in a country whose religious tradition viewed orthodoxy as the supreme virtue and dissent as apostasy.

The next two years of the party’s history (1903–5) were filled with vicious intrigues that are of small interest except for the light they cast on the personalities involved. Lenin was determined to subordinate the party to his will; failing that, he was prepared to create, under the party’s cover, a parallel organization under his personal control. By the end of 1904, he had, in effect, his own party with its own rump “Central Committee” called “Bureau of the Committees of the Party Majority.” For this action, he was expelled from the legitimate Central Committee.⁶¹ The technique of subverting legitimate institutions in which he was in a minority, by forming unauthorized, parallel, identically named organizations packed with his adherents, Lenin would apply in 1917–18 to other centers of power, notably the soviets.

By the time the 1905 Revolution broke out, the Bolshevik organization was in place:

a disciplined order of professional committee men, grouped around a band of conspirators who were all linked by personal allegiance to their chieftain, Lenin, and ready to follow him in any adventure, as long as his leadership appeared sufficiently radical and extreme.⁶²

Lenin’s opponents accused him of Jacobinism: Trotsky noted that, like the Jacobins, the Leninists feared mass “spontaneity.”⁶³ Unperturbed by such accusations, Lenin proudly claimed the title of Jacobin for himself.⁶⁴ Akselrod thought Leninism was not even Jacobinism but “a very simple copy or caricature of the bureaucratic-autocratic system of our Minister of the Interior.”⁶⁵

Neither the Bolsheviks nor the Mensheviks exerted much influence on the course of the 1905 Revolution, at any rate, until its concluding phase. The violence of 1905 caught the Social-Democrats by surprise and most of that year they had to confine themselves to issuing proclamations and fomenting the unrest which raged beyond their control. It was only in October 1905, with the formation of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, that the Mensheviks could assume a more active role in a revolution until then dominated by liberal personalities and liberal programs.

Lenin was not directly involved in these events, for unlike Trotsky and Parvus, he preferred to observe them from the safety of Switzerland; he judged it prudent to return to Russia only in early November, following the proclamation of political amnesty. He thought that January 1905 marked the onset of a general revolution in Russia. While the initial impetus came from the liberal “bourgeoisie,” this class was certain to capitulate somewhere along the way and strike a deal with tsarism. It was imperative, therefore, for the Social-Democrats to take charge and lead the workers to full victory.