Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (9 page)

According to Krupskaya, who herself was highly instrumental in implanting them in post-revolutionary Russia, it was in London that Lenin first observed reading rooms which anyone could enter to read files of current newspapers. ‘At a later period, Il’ich remarked that he would like to see such reading rooms established all over Soviet Russia.’ [Krupskaya 66] The Ulyanovs also, like generations of culture-vulture intellectuals before and since, took advantage of London’s fabulous cultural riches. Tchaikovsky’s latest symphony (the
Pathéthique
), theatre visits and even walks in the countryside occupied them. ‘Most often we went to Primrose Hill, as the whole trip only cost us sixpence. Nearly the whole of London could be seen from the hill – a vast, smoke-wreathed city receding into the distance. From here we got close to nature, penetrating deep into the parks and along green paths.’ [Krupskaya 68]

From the conspiratorial point of view liberal Britain had great advantages. ‘No identification documents whatever were needed in London then, and one could register under any name. We assumed the name Richter.’ [Krupskaya 69] It was easy to travel and in June/July 1902 Lenin spent a month in Loguivy, near Pointe de l’Arcouest on the beautiful north coast of Brittany, with his mother and sister Anna. ‘He loved the sea with its continuous movement and expanse. He could really rest there.’ [Krupskaya 69] He also made trips to Switzerland and Paris to meet and discuss politics. This also made it easy for others to visit him. It was in London that ‘there was a violent knocking at the front door … It was Trotsky’ [Krupskaya 75] who had, at least, managed to find the right door without trouble. Lenin became his patron and recommended him to Axel’rod as ‘a young and very energetic and capable comrade from here (pseudonym: “Pero”) to help you.’ [CW 43 95–6] Lenin’s recommendation was not enough for Plekhanov whose suspicions were raised that Trotsky was simply a young protégé of Lenin’s. The impression was heightened when Lenin, unsuccessfully, tried to have Trotsky co-opted onto the board of
Iskra
in March 1903.

Not everything in London suited them, however. ‘We had found that the Russian stomach is not easily adaptable to the “ox-tails”, skate fried in fat, cake, and other mysteries of English fare.’ [Krupskaya 68] With its positives and negatives London was the most overt, living, breathing example of capitalism that Lenin had encountered and it made a deep impression on him. It even, of course, housed the grave of Karl Marx. No wonder he did not, despite its drawbacks, want to abandon it for the backwater of Geneva.

‘REAL WORK’ COMMENCES

Krupskaya’s presentiment that ‘real’ work was about to begin on their return from Siberia was spot on. Lenin’s anxieties about the critical situation of social democracy were already giving him sleepless nights. According to his wife, ‘Vladimir Il’ich longed passionately for the formation of a solid, united Party into which would be merged all the individual groupings whose attitude to the Party was at present based on personal sympathies or antipathies. He wanted a party in which there would be no artificial barriers, particularly those of a national character.’ [Krupskaya 78] The task facing Russian Social Democracy was enormous. Essentially, the movement was composed only of loosely related groups scattered throughout Russia and western Europe. There was no organizational framework, and nor was there more than the flimsiest foundations of an agreed theory. It was fighting for its identity against other political movements. It seems curious that, at this time and throughout Lenin’s career – and one is tempted to say, the entire history of the socialist left – the closer the opponent the more vigorous the polemic. Opposition to conservative and, to a lesser extent, liberal parties was practically self-evident. Differences with other radical movements, notably the populists who were themselves organizing into the Socialist Revolutionary Party, created great arguments. But the worst quarrels came with others who claimed to be social democrats. Lenin’s sleeplessness was seldom caused by worrying about what capitalists would do next, rather it was about what his friends and apparent allies would do next. His energies were not devoted to refuting the principles of liberalism, rather they were expended on arguing about differences of interpretation of Marxism. At one level, to the outsider, this characteristic makes the debates appear scholastic, the equivalent of discussing how many angels could dance on a pin head. To insiders, however, and especially to Lenin, it was the heretics who adopted a large proportion of the true doctrine who were the most dangerous. In Lenin’s mental universe, there was no danger of workers falling directly for the lure of liberalism or conservatism. However, they could be led surreptitiously into the bourgeois camp by misguided leaders who thought they were Marxists and/or socialists. Time and time again Lenin turned on fellow leftists with much greater venom and far greater frequency than on the imperialists themselves.

To follow the debates, shifting alliances and splits of these years in detail would take us beyond the scope of our current enquiry. We do, however, need to look at the main contours of what was happening. We have already examined two of the three big debates wracking the movement – with the populists over Russian capitalism and the revolutionary role of the peasantry on the one hand and with the revisionists/ Economists on the other. The third, best known, argument revolved around the construction of a unified social democratic party, an endeavour which brought about the famous split of 1903 into Menshevik and Bolshevik branches of the Party. Let us plunge into this complex whirlpool of polemic.

Building a unified party was an obvious task. The problem for social democrats in exile was that they had an excess of architects and no bricklayers. Everyone knew how he or she wanted the Party to look. As a result, there were very many different views. Theoretically, the Party already existed. Its small conference at Minsk in 1898 had at least brought a Party programme into existence, one which, though amended, retained some influence until 1917. The growing problem was also underlined by the fact that one of its main drafters, Peter Struve, was rapidly withdrawing from Marxism towards liberalism and eventually conservative imperialism. For Lenin, the most striking phrase of the programme was the one in which Struve wrote that ‘The further east in Europe one proceeds, the weaker, more cowardly, and baser in the political sense becomes the bourgeoisie and the greater are the cultural and political tasks that devolve on the proletariat. The Russian working class must and will carry on its powerful shoulders the cause of political liberation.’
²
This insight remained basic to Lenin’s, and others’, adaptation of Marxism to Russian conditions. Clearly, it also tied in with the polemic over capitalism. Capitalism and the bourgeoisie might be weak in Russia but the point was not to sit back until they were strong but to overthrow them while they were still weak. The responsibility of the proletariat would then include making up ground lost by capitalism through its weakness before moving on to socialism. Already, in embryo, in those few phrases, we have Lenin’s strategy of 1917–24.

However, such implications lay far in the future. For the time being the intractable problems of Party construction around agreed principles continued. One can categorize the participants in different ways. One could see the conflict as being one between an older and younger generation or, what is almost the same thing, between long-term exiles and those who had only recently left Russia. There is some truth in this but it does not explain why the close friends and allies of the early debates – Martov and Lenin – should become the spearheads of the later rival factions. However, the disputes of 1900 to early 1903 were affected by such features. For the new arrivals the old guard, whom they had revered from afar and continued to respect as long as they could, had become infected with a spirit of exile which, according to Lenin and others, had cut them off from real developments in Russia. The exiles were much more dogmatic, less ready to expect a successful socialist revolution in the near future.

The major focus of dispute was control of the Party newspaper. This follows from the fact that the real central intent and purpose of a party, given that all overt political activity was illegal in pre-1905 Russia, was to produce a Party newspaper and arrange for its clandestine distribution. For this to happen a lot of work was necessary. First, funds had to be raised. If that could be done then printing facilities capable of dealing with the Russian alphabet which were also beyond the direct and indirect reach of the tsarist police had to be found. As we have already seen, one German printer was unwilling to continue printing Russian material because of the risk and Lenin had had to move to London to find a new one. He was welcomed by British socialists who had a printing press at Clerkenwell Green. As Lenin described it, ‘British Social Democrats, led by Quelch, readily made their printing plant available. As a consequence, Quelch himself had to “squeeze up”. A corner was boarded off at the printing works by a thin partition to serve him as an editorial room.’ [CW 19 369–71]

Having printed the paper, distribution was the next, and perhaps greatest, difficulty. A variety of ingenious routes to get material into Russia were developed. False-bottomed suitcases were often enough to evade half-hearted border searches but only small quantities could be moved that way. More ambitious methods involved links with Russian sailors in western ports. One route took packages of newspapers and other material from French Mediterranean and Italian ports to the Black Sea where watertight packages would be tossed overboard for collection by locals in smaller boats. Couriers, concealment on trains and many other methods were tried. Such manoeuvres of course entailed crude clandestine communications to inform recipients of what was arriving and when and how. There was also a reverse traffic of Party news and of newspaper contributions. Simple code names for people, places and operations were embedded in apparently innocuous letters. Odessa was ‘Osip’, Tver ‘Terenty’, Pskov ‘Pasha’. Lenin’s sister Maria was ‘the little bear’, Trotsky ‘the Pen’. Consignments of newspapers from the printing works were ‘beer’ from ‘the brewery’. [Krupskaya 69–71] If all these obstacles were overcome, and some estimate that only one in a hundred copies got through, once in Russia the materials then had to be distributed as widely as possible around the vast country. Consequently, provincial Party cells were mainly occupied in newspaper distribution. The Party and the newspaper would thus become one and the same thing.

However, the problem causing the splits was bigger than all these practical issues. It was the question of questions. Who would control what went into the papers? On the one side, the old hands, especially Plekhanov and Axel’rod, believed they had a natural right to predominance since they were the founders of the movement. On the other, younger and more energetic spirits, like Lenin and Martov, wanted their say. They believed the spirit of exile had softened the revolutionary edge of the elders. Both factions, however, needed each other. A major split in such a small and weak group, comprising only a few thousand activists at most, would have been suicidal, or so it seemed then. Consequently, compromises ruled the day. Two newspapers came out.
Iskra
(
The Spark
) was dominated by Lenin and Martov. The symbolism of the title was obvious, indicating not only the editors’ belief that Russia was ready to catch fire but also their own apparent weakness as a mere spark, though one with the potential to start an uncontrollable fire. The elders produced a less frequently appearing journal
Zarya
(
The Dawn
). Without reading too much into it, the title itself suggests a slower, less violent and more evolutionary process of change. The compromise did not run smoothly. Party unity and harmony seemed far away. Frequent quarrels and disputes broke out. In May 1902 Lenin complained to Plekhanov that he had dealt with one of Lenin’s articles in a summary manner. ‘If you have set yourself the aim of making our common work impossible, you can very quickly attain this aim by the path you have chosen. As far as personal and not business relations are concerned, you have already definitely spoilt them or, rather, you have succeeded in putting an end to them completely.’ [CW 34 103] Lenin was taking a chance alienating Plekhanov and was all too obviously relieved when a reconciliation was brokered in June. ‘A great weight fell from my shoulders when I received your letter, which put an end to thoughts of “internecine war” … That I had no intention of offending you, you are of course aware.’ [CW 34 104–5] Lenin implied that his nervous illness had been to blame. A break with Plekhanov at that point might have been fatal to Lenin’s career.

In the middle of all this Lenin wrote and produced one of his best known works entitled, like Chernyshevsky’s influential novel,
What is to be Done?
It appeared in March 1902. In it Lenin tried to formulate his views on what the Russian Social Democratic Party should be. Also like Chernyshevsky, Lenin apologized in the Preface for the ‘serious literary shortcomings’ of the pamphlet since he had to work in great haste. [SW 1 100] Indeed the subtitle of the 150-page pamphlet is ‘Burning Questions of our Movement’, defined as ‘the character and main content of our political agitation; our organizational tasks; and the plan for building, simultaneously and from various sides, a militant, All-Russian organization.’ [SW 1 99] The Preface also makes clear what Lenin’s prime intention was – to challenge Economism. Lenin’s response to the burning questions revolved around discussion of the relationship of the Social Democrats to the spontaneous mass movement; the difference between so-called trades-union politics and Social Democratic politics; and finally, promotion of the plan for an All-Russian Social Democratic newspaper. [SW 1 100] The work is one of Lenin’s most controversial writings, not least because it is supposed to contain the blueprint for Bolshevism. Does it? In order to find out we need to look at its main arguments.