The Russian Revolution полностью

to intervene in favor of its speedy termination and to do all in their power to utilize the economic and political crisis caused by the war to rouse the peoples and thereby to hasten the abolition of capitalist class rule.¹²²

This clause represented a rhetorical concession by the right-wing majority to the left-wing minority to paper over their differences. But Lenin was not satisfied with the compromise. Pursuing the same divisive tactic which he had employed in the Russian Social-Democratic movement, he set out to split off from the more moderate majority of the Socialist International an intransigent left, committed to exploiting a future war for revolutionary purposes. He opposed a pacifist policy aimed at stopping hostilities endorsed by most European socialists: indeed, he wanted war very badly because war presented unique opportunities to make revolution. Since such a stance was unpopular and inadmissible for a socialist, Lenin refrained from expressing it publicly. But once in a while, as in a letter to Maxim Gorky written in January 1913, during yet another international crisis he wrote: “A war between Austria and Russia would be a most useful thing for the revolution (in all of Eastern Europe) but it is not very likely that Franz Joseph and Nicky will give us this pleasure.”¹²³

Once the war broke out, socialist parliamentarians of both the Allied and Central powers reneged on their pledges. In the summer of 1914 they had spoken passionately for peace and brought masses of demonstrators into the streets to protest the drift to war. But when hostilities began, they fell in line and voted in favor of war budgets. Especially painful was the betrayal of the German Social-Democrats, who had the strongest party organization in Europe and formed the backbone of the Second International: the unanimous vote of their parliamentary delegation for war credits was a stunning and, as it turned out, near-fatal blow to the Socialist International.

Russian socialists took the pledges of the International much more seriously than their comrades in the West, in part because they had shallower roots in their native country and took little patriotic pride in it and in part because they knew they had no chance of coming to power except by exploiting “the economic and political crisis caused by the war” posited by the Stuttgart resolution. Apart from the patriarchs of the Social-Democratic movement, such as Plekhanov and L. G. Deich, and a number of Socialists-Revolutionaries in whom the clash of arms awakened patriotic sentiments (Savinkov, Burtsev), most luminaries of Russian socialism remained faithful to the antiwar resolutions of the International. This the Social-Democratic and Trudovik (SR) deputies in the Fourth Duma demonstrated with their unanimous refusal to vote for war credits—the only European parliamentarians, save for the Serbians, to do so.

On arrival in Switzerland, Lenin drafted a programmatic statement, called “The Tasks of Revolutionary Social Democracy in the European War.”¹²⁴ After accusing the leaders of German, French, and Belgian Social-Democracy of betrayal, he outlined an uncompromisingly radical platform. Article 6 of “The Tasks” contained the following proposition:

From the point of view of the working class and the toiling masses of all the peoples of Russia, the least evil [naimenshee zlo] would be the defeat of the tsarist monarchy and its armies, which are oppressing Poland, the Ukraine, and a number of peoples of Russia …*

No other prominent European socialist expressed himself publicly in favor of his country losing the war. Lenin’s startling call for the defeat of Russia inevitably brought charges that he was an agent of the German Government.†

The practical conclusion of Lenin’s statement on the war was spelled out in the seventh and final article of his theses, which called for energetic agitation and propaganda among the civilian and military personnel of the belligerent nations for the purpose of unleashing a civil war against the “reactionary and bourgeois governments and parties of all the countries.” Copies of this document were smuggled into Russia and in November furnished the Imperial Government with grounds for closing down Pravda and arresting the Bolshevik Duma delegation. One of the lawyers who defended the Bolsheviks on this occasion was Alexander Kerensky. Tried on lesser charges than treason, which could have cost them their lives, the Bolsheviks were sentenced to exile, which all but put the party out of the picture until the February revolution.