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

Lenin might have had a better appreciation of the international scene and the likely response of the Second International to an outbreak of war had he not been engaged with yet more battles with Liquidators and Conciliators. At a Central Committee Plenum in 1910 the majority supported calls for reunification of the RSDLP. Lenin was ordered to shut down Proletary and return money that had been left as bequests to the whole party. A leading Bolshevik, Alexei Rykov, was sent to Russia to brief leading militants on the plans to reunite the party. Malinovsky immediately alerted the Okhrana, who shared Lenin’s wish to avoid reunification and keep the social democrats locked in factional struggle. Rykov was arrested as soon as he arrived in St Petersburg and unification side-lined.

It was becoming clear to Lenin that he had no future as a leader in the RSDLP. His continuance of the secret Bolshevik Centre and misappropriation of money intended for the whole party to fund it, added to his refusal to condemn the expropriations or those who carried them out, had made him a pariah within the Second International. Years of such controversy had the result that “his reputation for even moderate political honesty vis-à-vis the rest of the party was now so compromised that there was little prospect of his being able to manipulate or maneuver within that sphere again”. 10

Accordingly, Lenin called a small meeting in January 1912 in Prague, which he labeled a party conference but from which the majority of the full RSDLP was excluded. The Conciliators (i.e. the majority in both factions abiding by party policy), the Jewish Bund, the Polish social democrats and Trotsky’s “centrists” were not invited to attend. The fourteen delegates who made up the “conference”, two of whom were Okhrana agents, claimed to represent the majority of class-conscious Russian workers. On that basis they established the Bolshevik faction as a separate party and created a new Bolshevik newspaper, Pravda .

The final split of the RSDLP occurred just when the post-1905 retreat of the labour movement in Russia was coming to an end. A new wave of industrial unrest was beginning, ignited by a miners’ strike in the Lena goldfields of northern Siberia in 1912, which ended with troops shooting down strikers. Upon hearing the news spontaneous strikes broke out in the major cities of European Russia. In November 1912, 15,000 strikers took action in Riga to support sailors who had been sentenced to death for mutiny in Sebastopol and in protest at the treatment of political prisoners. In the same month in St Petersburg six strikers were convicted of illegally organising a union in a “socially necessary factory”. 100,000 workers in the city downed tools to protest for the right to organise unions wherever workers wanted them. Over 700,000 workers took part in strikes in 1912 alone. This rose to 900,000 in 1913 and to 1.3 million in the first seven months of 1914. 11

Yet it was at this time, with the social democrats working together to publicise the demands of the trade unions and to agitate for greater political freedom, that Lenin instructed Malinovsky to effect an irreparable breach with Menshevik deputies in the Duma. Malinovsky put a demand to the head of the RSDLP deputies, the Menshevik Nikolai Chkheidze, that all the RSDLP deputies (six Bolshevik, seven Menshevik) follow Lenin’s programme. Chkheidze rejected this and Malinovsky announced there was now a separate Bolshevik caucus of which he was Chair.

The Bolshevik paper Pravda , well - funded by the proceeds from the expropriations, launched a series of attacks on Menshevik deputies and trade union leaders. With Malinovsky’s help the Okhrana targeted, arrested and imprisoned Menshevik trade unionists. As a result, the Bolsheviks, led inside Russia by an Okhrana agent, took control of many major unions. One of the Okhrana’s senior officials, General Spiridovich, later wrote, “Malinovsky, carrying out the directives of Lenin and of the Police Department, achieved in October 1913 the final quarrel between the ‘seven’ and the ‘six’”. 12

Such were Lenin’s priorities in the last year of peace before Europe plunged into the First World War. In theory the Second International would stop its working-class members waging war on each other. A resolution of 1907 had committed it to take all means possible to prevent war should it be threatened. But although the International traced its ancestry back to the 1848 revolutions and the Paris Commune, the day-to-day work of the socialist parties now had very little in common with these struggles. The socialist parties of Western Europe now concentrated almost exclusively on reformist parliamentary politics, campaigning for an extension of civil rights and legal trade union work. This did not preclude serious political and industrial struggle, but the context in which these were conducted was that of reformism, not revolution.

The disjunction between Russian and Western European realities was demonstrated in 1907 when Austrian Social Democrats led by Victor Adler called a general strike to demand the granting of universal suffrage. With Vienna taken over by hundreds of thousands of workers the government conceded the demand, after which the Social Democrats returned to work. They had never seen the action as a precursor to violent revolution and neither had the vast majority of Austrian trade union members. Within the parties of the Second International the RSDLP was “almost the only one to treat the revolutionary traditions and watchwords with passionate seriousness and not as matter of mere decorum”. 13The RSDLP was therefore not prepared when in July 1914 a relatively insignificant Balkan assassination, that of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist, catapulted Europe into war. The system of national alliances created in the previous decade–the Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia and the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary–led inexorably to disaster.

Some had seen it coming. Unlike most European socialist leaders, August Bebel, the veteran leader of German social democracy, came from the working class. He was the living embodiment of a militant worker who had transcended trade union consciousness (his book Woman and Socialism was a pioneering work of socialist feminism), but it was that very quality that meant he did not entertain illusions about his class. In 1907, at a congress held to consider the possibility of an international General Strike to prevent war, Bebel told an English delegate what the reaction of German workers would be if the Fatherland was in danger. “Do not fool yourself”, he said, “Every Social Democrat will shoulder a rifle and march to the French frontier”. 14

They did. As did most French and English and Austrian workers. Caught up in the “extraordinary wave of patriotic enthusiasm” 15which swept over their respective working classes as war was declared, the European socialist parties fell into line. The SPD held an internal vote in which Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg and Franz Mehring (none of whom were Reichstag deputies) and 14 out of 78 deputies opposed voting for the war credits needed to mobilise the German military machine. But after the vote all the SPD’s Reichstag deputies followed collective discipline and voted for the credits, with the sole exception of Karl Liebknecht who abstained.

The French Socialist party, after its leader Jean Jaures was assassinated days before the outbreak of war by an ultranationalist for trying to negotiate a common anti-war position amongst European socialists, also voted unanimously for war credits and even consented to join a wartime coalition government. The Austrian and Belgian socialists did the same. The British Labour Party did likewise, although Ramsay MacDonald and Kier Hardie resigned in protest. They were buried under a tide of calumny as the British working class–which did not need to be conscripted, such was its desire to get to the front–rushed to volunteer for service (750,000 did so in the first eight weeks alone, a further million in the first eight months).