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

On 5th September, 1915 anti-war delegates from the socialist parties of the Second International gathered at Zimmerwald in Switzerland to formulate a common position on the war. Germany was represented by several lesser members of the SPD who read out a message from Karl Liebknecht, imprisoned by the German government for his stand against the war; Italy by Angelica Balabanov, Morgari and Serrati of the Italian Socialist Party; Russia by Lenin and Zinoviev for the Bolsheviks, Martov and Axelrod for the Mensheviks, Trotsky for the Nashe Slavo group, Karl Radek for the Polish Social Democrats, and Victor Chernov for the SRs. Neutral countries such as Sweden, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Romania also sent delegates. Bruce Glasier and Frederick Jowett of the British Independent Labour Party sent fraternal greetings but could not attend because the British government refused them visas to do so. Although the delegates did not have specific mandates from their parent parties, what mattered was that they were meeting at all and that they were defying massive nationalistic sentiment in their countries. In the context of 1915 Zimmerwald was, in Isaac Deutscher’s opinion, “an unheard of challenge to all warring governments”. 21

Internal divisions nearly derailed the conference. Although Martov wished to maintain relations with anti-war socialists within the Second International and was sensitive to their problems, he pushed for the conference’s final resolutions to include a refusal to vote for further war credits. The majority felt this was asking too much of socialists still in the national legislatures of warring countries–although it is hard to see what being “anti-war” meant if it included voting for the funds needed to wage it. On this issue Martov and Lenin stood together and reflected the best of the anti-war left. But a separate minority led by Lenin wanted to go further and to explicitly advocate that socialists turn imperialist war into civil war. Lenin was frank that he did not care for the promotion of peace per se . “Much has been left in the world”, he wrote in summer 1915, “that must be destroyed by fire and iron for the liberation of the working class”. 22

The majority statement that emerged from Zimmerwald condemned the war as imperialist, demanded peace without indemnities or annexations, and urged those who agreed with it to resist the war and fight for socialism. But it did not entirely repudiate the Second International or advocate “revolutionary defeatism”. It was therefore more acceptable to those beyond the tiny confines of the “Zimmerwald Left” led by Lenin. It had an immediate effect in that in December 1915, 20 SPD deputies led by Hugo Haase refused to vote for war credits in the Reichstag, and Hasse and Kautsky followed this by calling on all European socialists to demand “Peace without Annexations”.

In March 1916, Haase and 32 SPD deputies who supported him were expelled from the SPD Reichstag Party. They formed a “Socialist Working Group” within the SPD which led to their expulsion from the full party in 1917 and the creation of a radical Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD). But although the majority Zimmerwald Union set up a secretariat for those sympathetic to their aims, it still kept the door open to the Second International’s International Bureau led by Vandevelde. The minority Zimmerwald Left therefore drafted a dissenting note that rejected all forms of pacifism and called for a new, revolutionary International.

Ultimately, despite its best efforts and the split within the German SPD, the Zimmerwald Union failed to build a mass anti-war movement. Lenin did little to help except saddle it with resolutions which made it impossible to reach out beyond the militant left and establish a popular front of potential supporters in the trade unions and liberal middle class. His position had a certain logic for it was undeniable that alliance with the “centrists” or anti-war liberals would channel anti-war activity into efforts to end the war on the most equitable basis and not to fundamentally destroy the bourgeois states that had started it. Others at Zimmerwald, like Grimm and Martov, did not feel that anything positive would emerge from the violent destruction of European society in war.

The war meanwhile reached its apotheosis in the mass slaughter of the Somme in July-November 1916 which, for their failure to turn their guns on their officers, Lenin felt the working class deserved. In September 1916, observing the bloodbath of the war thus far, he wrote, “An oppressed class which does not strive to use arms, to acquire arms, only deserves to be treated like slaves”. 23With the failure of Zimmerwald and the isolation of the “revolutionary defeatists”, Lenin had never felt so marginalised. Uncharacteristically, he succumbed to pessimism and depression. In a public lecture on 22nd January, 1917–a few weeks before a revolution broke out in Russia which overthrew the Tsar–the 46 year-old Lenin examined what appeared to him the dismal political prospects and declared, “We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution”. 24

The outbreak of war did not disturb a Russian belle époque of civilised ease and social peace (nor did it in Britain, which in summer 1914 was convulsed by industrial action, suffragette agitation and incipient civil war in Ireland). 1On the 1913 anniversary of Bloody Sunday, 80,000 workers in St Petersburg took strike action in remembrance of 1905. In March 1914 thousands of workers struck in St Petersburg against government censorship of the socialist press. On May Day that year a quarter of a million Russian workers were on strike. The strikes, although large, were mostly confined to the big cities. By 1914 a fifth of Imperial Russia’s total population lived in cities. Within this minority the four million or so workers of St Petersburg and Moscow (roughly two million in each) formed the core of the industrial working class. Particular workplaces such as the 30,000-strong Putilov Works in St Petersburg, dominated by Bolshevik militants, were the inner core. Other big cities such as Kiev, Odessa and Riga also had a significant working class.

Kevin Murphy records that at the heart of Moscow’s industrial proletariat–the Moscow Metal Works–sectarian differences between Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and SRs declined in the pre-war years, demonstrated by their working together to create a mutual strike fund. Murphy’s micro-analysis of the metalworkers during this period finds that with Bolshevik and Menshevik activists decimated by the Okhrana, it was the SRS who “played a leading role in several large stoppages in the months prior to the war”. 2In April 1914 SR activists in the works led a mass strike to protest the expulsion of Metalworkers Union representatives from the Duma. In July 1914 St Petersburg was paralysed by a city-wide General Strike that led to barricades and scattered street fighting. 10,000 Moscow workers took solidarity action.

This seething unrest was swept aside in August 1914 in a surge of nationalism. Many on the socialist left, and nearly all liberals, rallied to the defence of Mother Russia. The RSDLP took a principled internationalist stand but there were a number of Mensheviks, and even Bolsheviks, who found reasons to support Russia’s war effort. The SRS, who because of their closer connection to the ordinary Russian peasant-worker were always more prone to populist nationalism, gave in to the flood of social-patriotism. Although exiled leaders like Victor Chernov took anti-war stands and participated in Zimmerwald, most SR activists inside Russia gave temporary support to the war as “defence” against Imperial Germany. For a brief period, the industrial action that appeared unstoppable in early 1914 came to a halt. There were anti-German demonstrations on the streets and the German Embassy in the capital was ransacked. St Petersburg was renamed Petrograd to give it a less Germanic, more Slavonic ring.