John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

In 1893 Martov moved to St Petersburg, where he met other young Marxists, amongst whom was a brilliant lawyer from Samara named Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. Under the influence of the Vilno Programme this small group formed the Combat Union for the Emancipation of the Working Class, formerly an adherent of the Emancipation of Labour Group. Ulyanov begun to emulate Martov and was soon writing strike leaflets and providing legal advice to workers and their families.

From 1893 to 1896 the Combat Union established trust and a certain level of leadership with workers in some of the huge factory complexes in the city, such as the Thornton wool factory and Putilov engineering works, and were one of the contributory factors to the strikes that convulsed the city at that time. 24In May 1896 a strike of spinners and weavers in the city, prompted by the refusal of factory owners to pay workers for the days lost to mark the new Tsar’s Coronation, drew in 35,000 workers. It spread to encompass the entire city and led to the government’s reluctant concession of a maximum 11.5-hour day.

Retribution was swift. The Okhrana (the secret police) arrested the leaders of the Combat Union, who were sentenced to internal exile. The well-connected and moderately wealthy Ulyanov used his family name to ensure he was exiled to the “Italian Siberia” of Minusinsk, where he was a local celebrity and was kept well-informed of political developments. Using the library and resources of the town doctor he wrote his first substantial Marxist work, The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), in which he utterly rejected Voronstov’s thesis that Russia could avoid capitalism and argued that the Russian economy, rural as well as urban, was already well embarked on a process of capitalist accumulation. Martov, meanwhile, was singled out for harsher treatment and spent his three years at Turukhansk in the sub-Arctic Circle. Both men learnt the hard way that no serious revolutionary movement could be conducted by leaders who could be arrested at any moment. Upon their release in 1900, Martov and Ulyanov left Russia to join the leaders of the Emancipation of Labour Group in Geneva.

Although there were differences of personality between the older leaders Plekhanov, Vera Zazulich and Pavel Axelrod, and the younger activists Martov, Ulyanov and Alexander Potresov, they agreed that the essential first step was the creation and regular dissemination of a party newspaper. In 1900-01, with help from activists and correspondents inside Russia, they set up this newspaper, with the intention that it would help bring all Russian Marxists together into one united Social Democratic Party. They called it Iskra –Russian for “Spark”. On 24th December, 1901 the first issue was printed in Munich. In January 1902, after much hard work and clandestine organising, Iskra arrived in Russia and was widely distributed in the larger cities and towns. The Spark was ignited.

By 1901, much of the Marxist programme as explained by Marx, Engels and Plekhanov was looking outdated. In Western Europe class struggle had assumed different forms, and in Russia more relevant alternatives were about to arise. The 1890s saw the formation of various revolutionary Marxist groups in Russia, primarily but not exclusively in St Petersburg. These were the froth on a churning sea of labour struggle, particularly the great strike wave of 1896-97, which found its theoretical expression in what came to be known as “Economism”. This advocated the solution of working-class oppression through reforms dragged out of the state by political and industrial campaigning instead of as an offshoot of revolutionary activity. It was not, initially, nonor anti-Marxist in the manner of, for example, the British labour movement. On the contrary, it flowed from the work of Marxist theorists such as Nikolai Berdyaev, Mikhail Turgan-Baranovsky and, most significantly, Peter Struve, who had drafted the initial programme of the Russian Social Democrats in 1898.

These were termed “Legal Marxists” because they lived legally, i.e. not under aliases and not as part of an underground network. They were primarily economists who had reached similar conclusions as Bernstein about Marx’s analysis of capitalism. Struve, whom Lenin held in high regard because he praised and prioritised capitalist industrial development over the “popular production” theories of Vorontsov, later became an intellectual ringmaster for Russian liberalism. Had Russian society democratised in the manner of British, French and German society in the 19th and early-20th century, these trends would undoubtedly have led to the growth of a major trade union movement and Labour Party. Instead, 1901 saw the creation of a radical political party as significant as the RSDLP, which for the first twenty years of the 20th century spoke for the majority of Russia’s population in a way that the Bolsheviks did not.

The Socialist Revolutionary Party (known as the Socialist Revolutionaries, or SRs) was formed from a number of neo-populist agrarian socialist bodies, the most important of which was the Northern Union of Socialist Revolutionaries. Inheritors of the Narodnik mantle, they adapted the Narodnik programme to make it attractive not just to the peasantry but to the semi-urbanised, seasonal proletariat. The SRs began to coalesce in the 1890s after exiled Narodniks such as Catherine Breshkovsky, Mark Natanson and Gregory Greshuni returned to European Russia. The party’s primary theorist and leader, Victor Chernov, is the great “lost leader” and neglected historical actor of the Russian Revolution.

In the 1890s, Chernov attempted to organise the peasants of the Samara province, for which he was imprisoned in the infamous St Peter and Paul Fortress. A Marxist theorist in his own right, he developed SR policy around Marx’s suggestion that the Russian village commune might contain the seeds of a specifically Russian socialism that could avoid the ugliness and alienation of industrial capitalism. In the SRs he forged a mass party advocating progressive taxation, land re-distribution and agrarian socialism. In all contested elections held between 1906 (the first Duma ) and 1918 (the first and last All-Russia Constituent Assembly, of which he was President), the SRs received the majority of votes of Russian workers and peasants. From 1901 to 1918 they indisputably held the most legitimate mandate to speak for the Russian masses.

The SRs offered an attractive package of radical reforms to a wide base of peasant and worker supporters. Francis King’s history of the SRs during 1917 considered that in the light of today’s indigenous peoples’ movements the agrarian policies of the SRs “deserve more serious attention on the left”. 1From their earliest days, the SR’s believed “the coming revolution would be national in character, expressing the aspirations of workers, peasants and intellectuals”. 2Their call for immediate socialisation of the land without compensation and its redistribution to peasant small holders was immensely popular. The SRs based themselves on educational activity and support to the peasantry such as Sunday Schools for adult literacy and Committees for the Elimination of Illiteracy (these efforts were frowned upon by the Ministry of the Interior, who saw no benefit in a literate peasantry). 3This activity “played a considerable part in achieving the rapprochement between the peasantry and the intelligentsia which was a prerequisite for successful revolutionary work in the countryside”. 4

The particular type of “intelligentsia” attracted to the SRs were not the highly educated lawyers and philosophers of the RSDLP. They tended to be village schoolteachers, medical assistants and nurses, and were often the sons and daughters of peasants themselves. This gave them a deeper insight in to the lives and concerns of the peasants than the urban-based Marxists. Because of this organic connection to their members the SRs supported the local consumer and producer cooperatives promoted by peasant radicals such as Sergei Semenov, who wished to escape the often-chaotic allocation of narrow strips of land by the Mir for a more rational system of land management. 5At the same time the SRs’ violent retaliatory actions against repressive police and Land Captains secured the emotional sympathies of peasants looking for swift class justice. Not surprisingly the SRs were subject to fierce attacks by the Social Democrats. Struggling to forge a united Marxist party, the last thing the Social Democrats needed was a populist socialist alternative that tapped into the gut instincts of the mass of worker-peasants.