The Red Flag: A History of Communism (17 page)

Lenin was therefore always looking for reasons to push the revolutionary process forward – he was in more of a hurry than most of his fellow Modernist Marxists, who were happy to contemplate living under a temporary bourgeois hegemony. But his view of the forces that would ‘accelerate’ history towards socialism varied depending on circumstances. Most frequently, he looked to a conspiratorial elite of modernizers to take on this accelerator role, in a manner reminiscent of Chernyshevskii or Tkachev. But whilst this elitism was his default position, he did not always put his faith in a revolutionary elite. His Marxism was always flexible, and he adapted it to the conditions of Russia, with its occasionally radical workers and peasants. When it looked as if the people were in insurrectionary mood, Lenin could be more populist than other Marxists, and veered towards a Radical Marxist line. From 1902, he was also more willing to see the peasantry as a potentially revolutionary class than his fellow Russian Marxists (and certainly more than the German Marxists), although Bolshevism remained fundamentally suspicious of the ‘backward’ peasantry.

Freed from his Siberian exile in 1900, Lenin decided it was too risky to stay in Russia, and he began several years’ sojourn abroad, in Zurich, Munich and London. But he still lived and breathed revolutionary politics amongst the small communities of revolutionary exiles. He also continued to argue for the imminence of revolution, most famously in his pamphlet ‘What is to be Done?’ of 1902. A group of Russian Marxists (the so-called ‘Economists’) had in effect adopted Eduard Bernstein’s revisionism, insisting that as the revolution was so far off, Marxists should just help workers to improve their working conditions and wages. Lenin reacted angrily to this heresy. Marxists had to have ambition and inspire workers with Communist ideas. By themselves workers would only develop ‘trade-union’ consciousness – the desire for better conditions. ‘Social Democratic’ consciousness – the desire for fundamental political change – had to be brought to workers ‘from without’, by a revolutionary intelligentsia versed in Marxist ideology. But this
intelligentsia would not be a group of Marxist theorists, as Kautsky assumed.
³⁹
They were to be ‘professional’ revolutionaries, ideologically ‘conscious’ and acting conspiratorially and in secret, bringing Western efficiency to Russian radicalism at a time when the police was becoming more repressive.
⁴⁰
The party, he argued, needed to be centralized, like a ‘large factory’.
⁴¹
Such revolutionaries, both modern and conspiratorial, were, of course, reminiscent of Chernyshevskii’s Rakhmetov, to whom he paid obeisance in the work’s title.
⁴²

Initially Lenin’s idea of a centralized, vanguard party was not controversial amongst Marxists, and in strictly ideological terms it may not have been that new.
⁴³
But Lenin’s idea of the ideal party culture was very different from the assumptions of Kautsky (and indeed Marx). Lenin’s approach to politics was militant, sectarian and hostile to compromise. He was convinced that his colleagues were refusing to prepare seriously for the revolution he believed was imminent; they, by contrast, saw him as over-optimistic about the end of the old order, authoritarian and excessively hostile towards the bourgeoisie. The first major row, which split the party in 1903, took place over the party’s membership rules. Lenin demanded that the party be made up of party activists only; Iulii Martov, his fellow
Iskra
editor, wanted a broader membership of supporters. Lenin was in a minority, but because a number of his opponents walked out before the vote, his faction won and became known as the Bolsheviks (from the Russian word
bolshinstvo
– ‘majority’), whilst Martov’s group was labelled the Mensheviks (from
menshinstvo
– ‘minority’). Lenin then escalated the conflict, acting in an aggressive and high-handed way – even he admitted that he ‘often behaved in a state of frightful irritation, frenziedly’.
⁴⁴
He also alienated most of international Marxism’s leading figures, including Plekhanov, Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg.

Lenin turned out to be more prescient than his Menshevik rivals, for revolution did break out in Russia two years later. The fall of the naval base of Port Arthur (Lüshunkou) in the then Russian Far East to the Japanese in December 1904 was even more humiliating for the tsarist regime than its previous major defeat, by the British in the Crimea. For the first time a European power had been defeated by Asians fighting alone. It is therefore not surprising that at this juncture the many subterranean tensions in Russia should burst into open conflict. An orthodox priest, Father Gapon, used the opportunity to press the demands of
urban workers. On what became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’, he organized a demonstration of 50,000–100,000 people, which assumed the form of a religious procession of icon-bearing loyal subjects presenting a humble petition to the Tsar. The petition resounded with the Tsar’s own paternalistic rhetoric. However, the demands were radical, and included democratic suffrage, the legalization of trade unions and civil rights for all citizens. The police declared the march illegal, and when it failed to disperse, troops fired indiscriminately on the peaceful, unarmed crowd.

In the midst of the shooting, Gapon is said to have declared, ‘There is no God any longer! There is no Tsar!’
⁴⁵
Certainly, this unprovoked violence damaged the image of Tsar Nicholas as benevolent father beyond repair. It was now absolutely clear that his familial model of politics would not give workers and peasants what they wanted. Workers responded by setting up a new type of body – the council, or ‘soviet’, of workers’ deputies – to coordinate strikes. These soviets were organized on the basis of direct democracy, rather like the Paris Commune; in theory, constituents could recall their deputies. Some of those elected were socialists – Lev Trotsky was the chairman of the St Petersburg Soviet – and they helped to organize the general strike which forced the regime to grant the ‘October Manifesto’, a promise of elections to a legislative assembly and civil liberties. The Social Democrats, though, had a modest role in the revolution. It was a genuinely cross-class and cross-party affair. As in the 1830 and early 1848 revolutions, liberals, workers and the small number of socialists were united against a hide-bound autocracy.

Lenin was enthusiastic about the revolution, and the October Manifesto convinced him that it would be safe to return to Russia from exile. He was now allied with some of the most left-wing Marxists in the Russian movement – Aleksandr Bogdanov’s ‘Forward’ group – who had the utmost faith in the proletariat’s ability to build socialism in the near future.
⁴⁶
Neither, though, went as far as Trotsky, who argued that Russia was ready for a one-stage ‘permanent revolution’ that would rapidly lead from the bourgeois democratic stage to socialism.
⁴⁷
Lenin argued for a ‘revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ to bring in the bourgeois revolution – unlike the moderate Mensheviks, who urged an alliance between workers and the middle classes.
⁴⁸

In the event, the 1905 revolution broadly followed the course of its
failed European predecessors of 1848. The liberals, satisfied with the concessions of October and fearing the radicalism of workers and peasants, abandoned the revolutionary movement. Meanwhile the regime managed to regroup, bringing troops back from the Far East to suppress the peasant unrest. In December some Moscow workers staged a final, doomed resistance in the Presnia district where they threw up barricades and set up a local form of workers’ government. But they were no match for the regime’s artillery; carnage ensued and much of Presnia was reduced to rubble.

Prospects again looked bleak for socialists, and in December 1907 Lenin was forced again into exile, travelling to Switzerland. He devoted himself to reading and writing: he began with philosophy, but as war approached he immersed himself in the latest works on capitalism and imperialism, by people like Luxemburg, the up-and-coming Russian Marxist Nikolai Bukharin, and especially by the influential Austrian Marxist Rudolf Hilferding. Hilferding convinced him that the old competition between small entrepreneurs had given way to a vicious struggle between nation states for markets, leading to imperialist expansion and war between the great powers.
⁴⁹
Capitalism’s fundamental immorality had been exposed. No longer did capitalists even pretend to be liberal humanitarians; they were open racists and Social Darwinists, justifying their interests with war-mongering nationalism. At the same time, though, modern capitalism had become highly centralized, and had prepared the ground for socialist planning.

Lenin, always on the lookout for signs of capitalism’s imminent demise, seized on Hilferding’s insights. In his
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
, written in 1915 and published in 1917, he berated both capitalists and Kautsky’s Second International for supporting war.
⁵⁰
He also followed other, more radical, theorists of imperialism in arguing that just as capitalism was becoming globalized, so would revolution. Because imperial states were exploiting states on the colonial periphery, socialist revolution could occur even in semi-‘backward’ countries. The struggle against capitalism could begin in Russia, although he accepted it would have to be supported by socialist revolutions in other more advanced countries. Lenin also argued that Marxists in colonial societies could lead revolutions for political independence against imperialists, even if capitalism had barely taken hold and socialism was far away. Lenin’s text laid the foundations for the merging
of Marxism and anti-colonial nationalism. As will be seen, his
Imperialism
was crucial in bringing Communism to the non-European world.

Few Russians read Lenin’s
Imperialism
, but its main function was to explain to himself and his fellow revolutionaries why history was on their side. When, in 1917, the tsarist regime collapsed, workers and peasants behaved as they had done in 1905, establishing soviets, revolutionary committees and other forms of self-government. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were now in a position to offer a confident and seemingly coherent alternative.

Between 1913 and 1916, the avant-garde symbolist novelist Andrei Bely (born in 1880) published his great modernist novel,
Petersburg
. The city had featured as a major character in previous novels, but Bely’s Petersburg was a very different place to that of Chernyshevskii’s and Dostoyevsky’s novels. Set in 1905, it was a city in ferment, surrounded by a ‘ring of many-chimneyed factories’ from which the menacing sound of the revolutionary proletariat emanated, ‘oooo-oooo-oooo’.
⁵¹
The tsarist official in the novel, Apollon Apollonovich Beleukhov, is no longer an aristocratic reactionary but the embodiment of rational modernization (in the popular Nietzschean imagery of the time, Apollo was the god of reason). The cold Apollon enjoys looking at the perfect cubes and straight lines of Petersburg’s planned streets, and surrounds himself with neo-classical art, including a painting by David. But his command of reason is insufficient to control his own radicalized son, let alone Russia, and he is terrified of the revolutionary forces surrounding him.
⁵²
The other embodiments of reason in the novel are equally ineffectual, though more violent. The revolutionary Dudkin and his mentor, the Azef figure Lippachenko, impose dogmatic and violent schemes on others. Dudkin is even visited by the Bronze Horseman, who pours metal into his veins and hails him as ‘my son’.
⁵³
Yet the Bronze Horseman and the spirit of modernity solve nothing, merely setting off a cycle of revenge and violence.
⁵⁴

For Bely, as for Pushkin, the Bronze Horseman, with two legs on Russian soil and two rearing into the air, was a symbol of Russia’s division into two – the native traditions of ordinary Russians and the cruel
rationalism of Peter the Great.
⁵⁵
But Bely denied that either officials or revolutionaries could reconcile these halves. For him, only the apocalypse, which he identified with the ‘eastern’ revolutionary forces from below, would allow Russia to escape its predicament and ‘leap across history’.
⁵⁶
Ultimately Bely was wrong. The revolution did not bind Russia’s fragmented society together. But he was prescient about the events of 1917. Forces from below were to overwhelm Russia’s bronze horse-men, whether tsarist, liberal or Bolshevik.

The outbreak of war in 1914 brought the third and final crisis for Russia’s post-1815 regime. As Savenko, the leader of the Nationalist Party, declared in 1915, ‘War is an exam, a great exam’, and it was a tougher one than any the tsarist regime had sat in the past.
⁵⁷
Russia’s main enemy, Germany, was aiming at a ‘total’ mobilization of all resources – men, food, industrial production – for war. And Russia, as a semi-reformed
ancien régime
, was at a severe disadvantage in the contest. Mistrustful of involvement from society as a whole – both elites and ordinary people – the state found it difficult to engage their support for the war effort. Its factories could not produce enough munitions, and it could not raise the troops needed. These structural weaknesses, combined with poor trench technology, led to massive defeats in Galicia and Poland, and by August 1915 over 4 million soldiers had been killed, wounded or captured.