I did not believe in provocateurship in this case and for the following reason: if Malinovskii were a provocateur, the Okhranka [sic] would not gain from that as much as our party gained from Pravda and the whole legal apparatus. It is clear that by putting a provocateur into the Duma, removing for him the rivals of the Bolsheviks, etc., the Okhranka was guided by a crude image of Bolshevism—I would say a comic book caricature: the Bolsheviks will not organize an armed uprising. To have in hand all the threads, from the point of view of the Okhranka, it was worth anything to get Malinovskii into the Duma and the [Bolshevik] Central Committee. But when the Okhranka achieved both these objectives, it turned out that Malinovskii had become one of those links in the long and solid chain connecting our illegal base with Pravda.*
Although Lenin denied knowledge of Malinovskii’s police connections, this reasoning sounds like a convincing apology for employing a police agent to further the party’s objectives—that is, exploiting to the maximum the opportunities for legal work to win mass support when no other means were available.† When Malinovskii went on trial in 1918, the Bolshevik prosecutor indeed pressured tsarist police witnesses to testify that Malinovskii had done more harm to the tsarist authorities than to the Bolsheviks.112 The fact that Malinovskii returned of his own free will to Soviet Russia in November 1918, when the Red Terror was at its height, and demanded to see Lenin strongly suggests that he expected to be exonerated. But Lenin had no more use for him: he attended his trial but did not testify. Malinovskii was executed.
In fact, Malinovskii had performed for Lenin many valuable services. His help in the founding of Pravda and Nash put’ has been mentioned. In addition, in his Duma speeches he read texts written by Lenin, Zinoviev, and other Bolshevik leaders: prior to delivery, he submitted these to Sergei Vissarionov, the deputy director of the Police Department, for editing.113 By this means, the Bolshevik message was spread nationwide. But above all he worked assiduously to prevent the reunification of Lenin’s followers in Russia with the Mensheviks. When the Fourth Duma convened, it transpired that the seven Menshevik and six Bolshevik deputies acted in a more cooperative spirit than either Lenin or the police desired: they behaved, in fact, like a single Social-Democratic delegation, as was usually the case when Lenin was not personally present to sow discord. Keeping them apart and thus weakening them was a mission to which the police assigned high priority: according to Beletskii, “Malinovskii was ordered to do everything possible to deepen the split in the parties.”114 It was a case of the interests of Lenin and the police coinciding.‡
Lenin’s dictatorial methods and his complete lack of scruples alienated some of his staunchest supporters. Tired of intrigues and squabbles, caught in the prevailing mood of spiritualism, some of the brightest Bolsheviks began to seek solace in religion and idealistic philosophy: in 1909, the dominant tendency in Bolshevik ranks came to be known as Bogostroitel’stvo, or “God building.” Led by Bogdanov, the future head of “Proletarian Culture,” and A. V. Lunacharskii, the future Commissar of Enlightenment, the movement was a socialist response to Bogoiskatel’stvo, or “God-seeking,” popular among non-radical intellectuals. In Religion and Socialism, Lunacharskii depicted socialism as a type of religious experience, a “religion of labor.” In 1909, the proponents of this ideology established a school in Capri. Lenin, who found the whole development utterly distasteful, organized two counterschools, one in Bologna, the other in Longjumeau, near Paris. The latter, established in 1911, was a kind of Workers’ University, in which workers sent from Russia underwent systematic indoctrination in social science and politics: the faculty included Lenin and his two most loyal followers, Zinoviev and Kamenev. The inevitable police informer, this time disguised as a student, reported that the instruction at Longjumeau consisted of
mindless memorization by the pupils of snatches of lessons, which in their presentation bore the character of indisputable dogmas and which in no way encouraged critical analysis and a rationally conscious absorption.115
