Lenin viewed with skepticism the emergence of the soviets, because they were conceived as “non-partisan” workers’ organizations and, as such, outside the control of the political parties: given his belief in the accommodationist drift of the working class, the soviets did not strike him and his followers as dependable.69 At the time of its formation, some Petrograd Bolsheviks urged the workers to boycott the Soviet on the grounds that granting a workers’ organization primacy over the Social-Democratic Party would mean “subordinating consciousness to spontaneity”70—in other words, elevating the workers above the intelligentsia. Lenin himself was more flexible, although he could never quite make up his mind about the soviets’ function and utility. In the end, after 1906, he decided that they could be of use but only as helpmates of the “revolutionary army.” They were essential to the revolution (“insurrection”) but had no utility in and of themselves.71 He also rejected the soviets as organs of self-rule—their function was to serve as “instruments” of an insurrection carried out by disciplined armed detachments.
With the outbreak of the 1905 Revolution, Lenin decided that the time had come to distance himself from the main body of the party and openly form his own organization. In April 1905, he convened in London an unauthorized “Third Congress” of the Social-Democratic Party; all the delegates (thirty-eight in number) were members of his faction. According to Krupskaia:
At the Third Congress, there were no workers—at any rate, there was not one remotely noticeable worker. But there were at the congress many “committee men.” Whoever ignores this structure of the Third Congress will not understand much in its minutes.72
In such a friendly gathering, Lenin had no difficulty gaining approval of all his resolutions, which the legitimate Social-Democratic Labor Party—as evidenced by its actions the following year in Stockholm—would have rejected. The “Third Congress” marked the beginning of the formal split in the SD Party, which would be consummated in 1912.
Having returned to Russia in early November 1905, Lenin encouraged the Moscow uprising of the next month, but as soon as the shooting began he made himself scarce. The day after the barricades had gone up in Moscow (December 10, 1905), he and Krupskaia sought refuge in Finland. They returned only on December 17, after the uprising had been crushed.
In April 1906, the two branches of Russian Social-Democracy made a halfhearted attempt at reunification at a congress held in Stockholm. Here Lenin tried and failed to gain a majority on the Central Committee. He also suffered defeat on a number of practical issues: the congress condemned the creation of armed detachments and the idea of an armed insurrection, and rejected his agrarian program. Undaunted, Lenin formed, in secret from the Mensheviks, an illegal and clandestine “Central Committee” (a successor to the “Bureau”) under his personal direction. Apparently composed at first of three members, it expanded in 1907 to fifteen.73
During and immediately after the revolutionary year of 1905, the ranks of Social-Democracy increased manifold, with tens of thousands of new adherents signing up, a high proportion of them intellectuals. By this time, the two factions acquired a distinct complexion.74 The Bolsheviks in 1905 are estimated to have had 8,400 followers, roughly the same number as the Mensheviks and the Bundists. The Stockholm congress of the SD Party, held in April 1906, is said to have represented 31,000 members, 18,000 of them Mensheviks and 13,000 Bolsheviks. In 1907, the party had grown to 84,300 members—approximately equal to the membership of the Constitutional-Democratic Party—of whom 46,100 were Bolsheviks and 38,200 Mensheviks; affiliated were 25,700 Polish Social-Democrats, 25,500 Bundists, and 13,000 Latvian SDs. This marked the crest of the wave: in 1908 desertions began and in 1910 by Trotsky’s estimate, the membership of the Russian Social-Democratic Party dwindled to 10,000 or fewer.75
