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

The parallels with the land and estate seizures of the Zapatistas, and before them of the rural guerilla campaigns of the Nicaraguan Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nationale (FSLN or Sandinistas) and the El Salvadoran Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) in the 1980s, are striking. In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas adopted a strategy known as “Prolonged Popular War” (GPP). The GPP was centred on the central mountain zone of the country and focused on building a popular peasant support base in preparation for rural guerilla warfare. In opposition to this strategy, Marxist intellectuals such as Jamie Wheelock–the aspirant Lenin of the FSLN’s “Proletarian Tendency”–argued that economic development had turned Nicaragua into a nation of factory workers and wage-earning farm labourers, and that a revolutionary strategy should be based on the working class and led by a vanguard party.

This was a dead end in a country like Nicaragua. A third faction sought to fuse the best elements of the opposing strategies. This Insurrectional Tendency, led by Daniel Ortega, his brother Humberto and Victor Tirado Lopez, called for tactical alliances with non-communist democrats in a Popular Democratic Front against the Somoza regime. It did not shy away from attacking the National Guard directly and it fought bravely to defend its own territory. But at the same time it built up support in the towns and in the capital Managua (as much as, in 1956-58, Castro’s July 26th Movement and the guerilla forces of the Sierra Maestre worked in tandem with trade unions and other democratic forces in Santiago, Santa Clara and Havana). This flexible, inclusive popular front tactic led to the erosion of Somoza’s internal support and the eventual triumph of the Sandinistas in July 1979.

Russia in 1905 saw a similar level of alienation between government and people. A combined wave of rural, urban and military rebellion was clearly a precursor to revolutionary upheaval. In September 1905, Moscow printers came out on strike and immediately linked up with radical students making wider political demands. In October a variety of strikes by transport workers, bank workers, hospital staff, academics and telegraph operators all merged into one mass strike against the structures of the autocracy itself. On 25th October all railways across the Empire ground to a halt. Moscow and St Petersburg were plunged into nightly darkness as electricity failed. As strikers fought police and Cossacks on the streets, their separate demands coalesced into the call for convocation of a Constituent Assembly–a national Parliament–elected by universal suffrage. This was no economic strike. The workers had transcended that limitation without the assistance or leadership of professional revolutionaries.

They had done more. The workers of St Petersburg had created a “Soviet” (Russian for council) of workers’ representatives from the different industries, factories and offices taking part in the strikes, to oversee and coordinate activity. The St Petersburg Soviet, and the entire Soviet movement so central to the 1905 and 1917 Revolutions, began on 17th October, 1905 when 562 factory delegates assembled in the Free Economics Institute and elected a central committee of fifty people, which included seven delegates each from the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks and the SRs. The radical Menshevik lawyer Krustelev-Noser was elected Chair, with fellow Menshevik Trotsky and the SR Nicholas Avksentiev as Vice-Chairs. The Soviet was far more than a strike committee. It had its own newspaper, and it ensured that food and other essential supplies were distributed throughout the city. 11

Within two weeks Soviets had sprung up in nearly every city across the Empire. It was the beginning of the revolution the Bolsheviks claimed to predict and support. Yet as Marcel Liebman admits, the Bolsheviks met the creation of the Soviets with “scepticism, incomprehension, and even sometimes outright hostility”. This was not surprising given that its origin and conception not only “clashed with the political creed of Lenin’s supporters”, but complimented that of the Mensheviks, whose goal was to create “a party that should be as large as possible and in which workers’ initiative and spontaneity should be given full play”. 12

As a result, throughout the 1905 Revolution the Mensheviks were the prime representative of the Russian proletariat and the leadingx Marxist theory dictated. The RSDLP conference of April-May 1905 (which the Bolsheviks boycotted) grappled with this problem. It declared that in principle it was not opposed to an armed uprising of the masses but it stressed that before it could be attempted more propaganda and educational work needed to be done. It adopted Martov’s strategy of calling for “a network of organs of revolutionary self-government throughout Russia in the hope that these would ultimately amass enough strength to launch an assault on the central government”. 13

Some Mensheviks even began to consider whether Russia might transcend a bourgeois revolution and proceed straight to a socialist one. In Russia, those Mensheviks closest to the St Petersburg Soviet–Trotsky, Theodore Dan and Alexander Martynov–created a new newspaper, Nachalo , which was far more militant than the Bolshevik paper and published articles which prefigured the theory of “Permanent Revolution”. This led to differences with Axelrod and Martov, who whilst committed to revolutionary activity to overthrow autocracy were not willing to forego the central precept of Marxism, i.e. that the relations of production of a bourgeois capitalist system must be fully developed before it could begin a transition to socialism.

The Bolsheviks were even more confused. What Is To Be Done? , the bible on which the “hards” around Lenin had taken their stand in the split of 1903, had let them down. Worse, the Mensheviks were in the vanguard of a working class that had not waited for instruction or guidance from either faction of the RSDLP. The St Petersburg Bolshevik Committee passed a resolution condemning the Soviet and stating that it would “hold back the proletariat at a primitive level of development”. Some members advocated joining it and then “exploding the Soviet from within”. 14As late as October 1905, when the Soviet was clearly the centre of working-class resistance to the autocracy, Alexander Bogdanov, the senior Bolshevik at the time after Lenin, insisted the Soviet accept the Bolshevik programme and submit itself to the Bolshevik Central Committee. When the Bolshevik delegate Krasikov put this to the Soviet, “the debate was very brief” and it dismissed the proposal with contempt. Just before Lenin returned to Russia in November 1905, the Bolshevik paper Novaya Zhizn published an article on the Soviets. It conceded that whilst social democrats might support the Soviet as an executive organ of working-class activity, they “must now no less vigorously combat all attempts on its part to become the political leader of the working class”. That role was reserved for the party alone. 15

Lenin himself now shifted his position. In an article the editors of Novaya Zhizn refused to publish he acknowledged the Soviet as “the embryo of a provisional revolutionary government” and suggested that the party should not be counter-posed to the Soviet. In this he was groping his way to a fresh, final conception of the 1905 Revolution. This would not lead, in his view, to a progressive bourgeois regime but to what he called a “revolutionary democratic-dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry”. This reflected Lenin’s belated recognition of the potentialities of a revolution that he admitted the Bolsheviks had misjudged.

Writers such as Liebman and Lih have argued that under the pressure of the events of 1905 and the creation of the Soviets, Lenin demonstrated his innate creativity by jettisoning much that he had stood for up to that point and embracing the Soviets as the means through which to deliver socialism. In Liebman’s opinion this showcased Lenin’s “exceptional genius” and capacity to appreciate the “dialectical potentialities” of real life, in this case the obvious reality that the development of the 1905 Revolution contradicted the organisational strategy he had advocated only two years before. Yet at a separate Bolshevik Congress of April 1905 the overriding theme was the Bolsheviks’ deep suspicion of the Soviets. Faced with the reality of Bolshevik “committee-men” who had taken his every word to heart, Lenin wrote in frustration to a St Petersburg Bolshevik activist, “Take a lesson from the Mensheviks, for Christ’s sake!” 16