Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (14 page)

Be that as it may, the October Manifesto had changed the situation sufficiently to allow Lenin and other, but not all, the leading revolutionary émigrés, to consider returning to Russia. Lenin made up his mind and arrived in St Petersburg on 21 November.

LENIN IN RUSSIA AND FINLAND (NOVEMBER 1905–DECEMBER 1907)

Lenin spent the next two years based in Russia and Finland. In the early weeks he had to report to the police and lived apart from Krupskaya who had arrived separately ten days after him. Because of irksome restrictions and police surveillance Lenin went underground on 17 December. Using a false passport he took a trip to Finland returning on 30 December. From the middle of March he was mainly based in Finland, at Kuokkala and later Styrs Udde. He travelled frequently to St Petersburg and Moscow as well as to overseas Party and associated meetings in Stockholm, Copenhagen, London, Stuttgart and elsewhere. He finally left in December 1907, making a perilous journey over thin ice that almost gave way beneath him. For two full years. Lenin was closer to the heart of events than he had ever been or was to be again until 1917 itself. What do his writings and actions of this period tell us about him?

One of the first articles he produced after his return contained some unexpected twists and turns. Writing in Gorky’s newspaper
Novaia zhizn’
in November 1905 Lenin discussed ‘The Reorganisation of the Party’ in which he called for its democratization. [CW 10 29
–
43] It was, of course, consistent with his views before and after, that underground and conspiratorial tactics were not ideal, they were simply the necessary response to oppressive conditions. Once those conditions changed such tactics were no longer obligatory. More conventional open and democratic Party relations could be embarked upon, in this case in the form of what was becoming known as ‘democratic centralism’. Lenin had already outlined this in
One Step
and
Two Tactics
. He was determined the centre would remain the decisive element of the Party but local bodies would have the right to approach it and fight for changes in its outlook without having the right to go their own way on any significant policy issues.

Also at this time, as part of an initial drive to clarify the role and tasks of the Party, Lenin wrote two more articles destined to have an important impact later on. In ‘Party Organisation and Party Literature’ (13 November 1905) he expressed the view that all Party publications should be approved from the centre. Without going into the complexities here it is clear that Lenin was making the eminently sensible point that anything published in the Party’s name should be officially approved by it. It is also clear that what Lenin meant by Party literature was political pamphlets. This article came to haunt Soviet literature in the Stalin era when its strictures were applied not only to political pamphlets but to all kinds of written material including artistic literature. It also came to apply not only to official Party publications but to everything published, since in Stalin’s day there was little scope for publishing anything independently of the Party. It remained a guiding light of Soviet publishing and censorship policy almost until the end.

A second article which came to have baleful consequences was devoted to ‘Socialism and Religion’. It was published in mid-December 1905 in the last issue of
Novaia zhizn’
before its closure by the police. Lenin condemned all forms of religion and expressed the view that they should not be tolerated in the Party. He quoted Marx’s dictum that religion was ‘the opium of the people’ without reference to Marx’s further elaboration that it was ‘the sigh of the oppressed creature; the heart of a heartless world; just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation: it is the opium of the people.’
⁵
For Marx religion was more subtly understood as a comfort in the alienating world of capitalism while Lenin saw it solely as an agent of stupefaction and corruption. It marked a significant turn away from Marx in the direction of Bakunin who also put hostility to religion in the front rank of the revolutionary’s outlook. Together with an article of 1909 entitled ‘The Attitude of the Workers’ Party Towards Religion’ – in which Lenin disagreed with wider European practice that religious belief was a private matter for each Party member and instead insisted that the Party should be actively opposed to religion at all levels – it laid down guidelines for Party policy on religion for much of the Soviet era.

The fact that Lenin occupied his first weeks back in revolutionary Russia writing organizational articles is, in itself, rather extraordinary, even though the pattern was to be repeated in 1917. Lenin had arrived in the middle of the most tumultuous upheaval Russia had, so far, endured. And yet he played little practical role in it. He was not an active member of the St Petersburg Soviet and visited it on only a few occasions. He advocated armed uprising and fully supported the Moscow workers when they embarked on one, but his contribution to it was minimal. Ironically, for a movement which later came to pride itself on its revolutionary praxis, that is the active combination of theory and practice, Lenin eschewed direct activism. Theory was his practice. Where one might expect to find an active revolutionary out on the street encouraging and organizing protest and rebellion, Lenin preferred the committee room, the study and the printshop. He did make the occasional public appearance. Krupskaya describes one in May 1906 when he spoke in front of three thousand people, using the name Karpov to put the police off the scent. ‘Il’ich was very excited. … One immediately felt how the excitement of the speaker was being communicated to the audience. … At the end of Il’ich’s speech, all those present were swept with extraordinary enthusiasm.’ [Krupskaya 135
–
6] He focused his activities in 1906 and 1907 on attending important Party policy-making meetings including a variety of conferences and congresses.

In fact, Lenin had missed the main revolutionary action. By the time of his return the authorities, by means of massive repression, were regaining control. Lenin remained committed to the idea of armed uprising but its moment had, for the time being, passed. For him, 1906 and 1907 were dominated by ambiguous joint activity between the two Party factions. Each side needed the other though each wanted to gain the upper hand in a ‘united’ Party. Both realized that without unity social democracy would be totally irrelevant, leaving the stage to the better organized SRs and even the liberals of the Kadet Party. Thus a kind of shared yoke bound the two sides together. There were violent arguments followed by hollow reconciliations. At one point Lenin even declared his faction was closed down and talked of ‘the former Bolshevik fraction’. However, as the revolutionary wave receded through 1906 the need for unity gave way to a renewed struggle between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, the terminology being in general use by this time.
⁶

In any case, the issues dividing the factions were also in a state of evolution. In 1906 and 1907 no one was arguing about Party membership and professional revolutionaries. Democratic centralism, Lenin claimed with some justification, was ‘now universally recognised’. [CW 10 147
–
63] The central issue was armed uprising and, in Lenin’s case which is our concern here, convoluted tactics opposing constitutional illusions and electoral pacts but also boycotting and then opposing the boycott of the various Dumas.

Despite its failure, the Moscow armed uprising remained Lenin’s ideal pretty well throughout 1906. He continued to write about the growing prospects for a successful repetition, criticized Plekhanov for his opposition to it in February 1906 and was heartened by the Kronstadt and Sveaborg insurrections which were sparked off in July 1906 by the dissolution of the First Duma. Even in September he drew the ‘Lessons of the Moscow Uprising’ which he continued to see as a peak of revolutionary effort and a model for the future since he wrote ‘A great mass struggle is approaching. It will be an armed uprising.’ [CW 11 61
–
8]

In reality, however, the revolutionary wave was subsiding and the issue of the Party’s attitude to the Duma was more pressing. Lenin, having at first called for a boycott of the First Duma, which sat from late April to July 1906, changed his position vis-à-vis the Second, which sat from March to early June 1907. In Lenin’s view, made clear in his denunciation in February 1907 of a group of thirty-one Mensheviks urging electoral agreement with the Kadets, the Party should stand alone without making any deals with anyone. As we have seen, he had already warned against mistaking support for, or at least an expectation of, the bourgeois revolution with a policy of getting too involved in it. In March 1907 he continued to argue that the revolution was bourgeois but could only be brought to fruition through the joint action of the proletariat and the peasants. [CW 43 175] As ever, the distinctions were very fine but none the less real to Lenin. The class principle had to be remembered and any blurring of it by over-enthusiastic relationships with class enemies was to be avoided. The main barbs were directed at Plekhanov, whose plans to return to Russia had been thwarted by illness. He had not only opposed the Moscow armed uprising but had also promoted a policy of the Social Democrats making electoral pacts with other parties, notably the Kadets in the Second Duma elections.
⁷
In July, Lenin continued to argue that, despite the changes in the electoral system, the correct position for the Party was to participate in the elections to the Third Duma, as a separate, distinct group. The ebbing of the revolutionary tide meant that, instead of promoting armed uprising about which he was now silent, Lenin was prepared to settle for using the Duma delegation as a publicity mouthpiece for the movement.

He spent less and less of his time and energy on Russia and, in the summer of 1907, spent more and more time liaising with the International Socialist Bureau, not least in his never-ending quest for Party funds. In August he attended the International Socialist Conference in Stuttgart. The excitement of Russia was beginning to pall, the revolutionary opportunity clearly over for the time being, though Lenin did not overtly acknowledge this fact. Back in Finland Lenin wrote one of his best-known descriptions of émigré life in a letter to Grigorii Aleksinsky: ‘Over there, you are frightfully out of touch with Russia, and idleness and the state of mind which goes with it, a nervous, hysterical, hissing and spitting mentality, predominate … there is no
live
work or an environment of live work to speak of.’ [CW 43 176]

Perhaps Lenin had a premonition because he was almost disengaging from Russian politics as the summer turned to autumn. Reaction was back in control. In early December 1907 the first volume of a selection of his major works, including
One Step
and
Two Tactics
, was seized by the police. Lenin needed no further hint. He went into deeper concealment, moving from Kuokkala to Helsinki. Krupskaya recounts Lenin’s tale of how he then left the Russian Empire altogether. Despite having a false identity as Professor Müller, a German geologist, police surveillance caused him to take the almost fatal decision to avoid joining the steamer to Sweden at Abo, since there had been arrests of revolutionaries escaping via this route. Instead, he decided to walk across the treacherous ice to a neighbouring island and pick the boat up there. It was too dangerous for any sensible guide to lead him. He had to entrust himself to the care of ‘two rather tipsy Finnish peasants. … [I]n crossing the ice at night they and Il’ich very nearly perished. In one place the ice began to move beneath their feet. They only just managed to extricate themselves. … Il’ich told me that when the ice began to slide from beneath his feet, he thought, “Oh! What a silly way to have to die.”’ [Krupskaya 146]

Lenin had left Russia behind and only returned via the Finland Station in April 1917. From intense polemic and the intoxication of the nearness of revolution Lenin returned to the nerve-jangling world of exile. Its pangs were softened by an immersion in philosophy, sojourns in Italy and the establishment of rival Party schools in Capri and Paris.

CONSOLIDATING BOLSHEVISM: PHILOSOPHICAL WARS

Defeat was a bitter pill for the left to swallow. From our perspective of knowing that tsarism had only a decade to live it is easy to minimize how depressed the left was. From the contemporary perspective the situation looked bleaker than ever. The Russian revolution, that had been expected by radicals, centrists and conservatives for half a century, appeared to have come and gone. Indeed, had tsarism displayed minimal political sense the chance might have gone forever. Above all, the left feared the emergence of a Russian Bismarck, that is, an authoritarian monarchist who would bring the new industrial and financial propertied elite into the government-supporting alliance, harshly repress left-wing parties and buy off workers with minimal measures of, for instance, social insurance.

In Peter Stolypin, governor of the troublesome province of Saratov, the autocracy had just the man who might have done it. He was appointed Prime Minister in 1906 in succession to Witte. However, Nicholas II was so far detached from reality that he remained obsessed with maintaining an undiluted autocracy despite the existence of the Duma. As a result, he not only had to face opposition from the left, but the tsar also dismayed liberals. Their leader Miliukov believed ‘nothing had changed’ as a result of the October Manifesto.
⁸
He also lost the confidence of the far right. The fright they had experienced in 1905 led them to attack him for the minimal concessions he had made. The period showed, especially through the Duma, that Nicholas had little support and even the carefully gerrymandered right-wing dominated Third Duma showed up the continuing fissures in the body politic. Certainly there was no sign of the emergence of a new alliance of old and new property, that is the landowners and the new capitalist bourgeoisie, around the autocracy. Both sides of this potential alliance doubted the autocracy’s ability to guarantee their security. The problem beyond that was that, on the one hand, liberals believed greater concessions to democracy were needed to preserve Russia’s current class structure and prevent a redistributive upsurge from below. On the other, the ultra-right believed there should be a turn to what amounted to military dictatorship under the autocrat based on nationalism, anti-semitism, opposition to democracy and anti-intellectualism, an almost proto-fascist programme. Nicholas himself was firmly in this camp. Stolypin saw the need for more flexibility and had lost the confidence of the tsar before his assassination in 1911.