Although Lenin always had a predilection for what Martov called “anarcho-blanquism,”66 he had to have a theoretical justification for his program of action. This he found in a seminal essay by Parvus, written in January 1905 under the immediate impact of Bloody Sunday. Parvus’s theory of “uninterrupted” (or “permanent”) revolution provided a happy compromise between the orthodox Russian Social-Democratic doctrine of a two-phase revolution in which a distinct phase of “bourgeois” rule preceded socialism, and the anarchist theory of “direct assault,” which Lenin preferred temperamentally but was unable to reconcile with Marxism. Parvus allowed for a “bourgeois” phase, but insisted on no interval separating it from the socialist phase, which would get underway concurrently.* Under this scheme, once the anti-autocratic revolution broke out, the “proletariat” (meaning the Social-Democratic Party) would immediately proceed to take power. The justification for this theory was that Russia lacked a radicalized lower middle class which in Western Europe had supported and encouraged the bourgeoisie. In its exposed position, the Russian bourgeoisie would never allow the revolution to come to fruition but would stop it “halfway.” The socialists had to prepare and organize the masses for the civil war that would follow the fall of tsarism. One of the prerequisites of success was for the party to keep an identity distinct from its allies: “fight together, but march apart.” Parvus’s conception had great influence on Russian Social-Democrats, notably Lenin and Trotsky: “For the first time in the history of the Russian movement, the thesis was advanced that the proletariat should at once grasp for political power and … form a provisional government.”67
Lenin initially rejected Parvus’s theory, as he was in the habit of doing whenever anyone challenged, with a new idea or tactic, his primacy in the movement. But he soon came around. In September 1905 he echoed Parvus:
… immediately after the democratic revolution we will begin to proceed, to the extent that our strength allows it … to the socialist revolution. We favor an uninterrupted [
The socialist revolution, in Lenin’s view, could take only one form: armed insurrection. To learn the strategy and tactics of urban guerrilla warfare, he assiduously studied its history: among his authorities were the memoirs of Gustave Cluseret, the military commander of the Paris Commune. What he learned, he passed on to his followers in Russia. In October 1905, he advised them to form “Detachments of the Revolutionary Army,” whose members should equip themselves with a
gun, revolver, bomb, knife, brass knuckles, stick, rag soaked in kerosene to start fires, rope or rope ladder, shovel to build barricades, slab of guncotton, barbed wire, nails (against cavalry), and so forth.… Even without weapons the detachments can play a serious role by (1) leading the crowd; (2) attacking an ordinary Cossack who has gotten separated from his unit (as has happened in Moscow) and disarming him; (3) rescuing those who have been arrested or wounded, if the police force is very weak; (4) mounting to the rooftops and upper stories of houses, etc., and throwing stones at the troops, pouring boiling water on them, etc.… The killing of spies, policemen, gendarmes, the blowing up of police stations …68
One aspect of the armed struggle was terrorism. Although the Bolsheviks nominally adhered to the Social-Democratic platform, which rejected terrorism, in practice they engaged in terrorist acts both on their own and in collaboration with the SRs, including the Maximalists. These operations were, as a rule, organized in secret, but on occasion they openly exhorted their followers to terrorism. Thus, in August 1906, citing the example of the Polish Socialist Party, which had gunned down policemen in Warsaw, they urged attacks on “spies, active supporters of the Black Hundreds, police, army and navy officers, and the like.”*
