The Russian Revolution (6 page)

In terms of their theory, the Russian Marxists started off with what seemed to be a major revolutionary disadvantage: they were obliged to work not for the coming revolution, but for the revolution after next. According to orthodox Marxist prediction, Russia's entry into the capitalist phase (which took place only at the end of the nineteenth century) would inevitably lead to the overthrow of the autocracy by a bourgeois liberal revolution. The proletariat might support this revolution, but it seemed unlikely to have more than a secondary role. Russia would be ripe for proletarian socialist revolution only after capitalism had reached its maturity, and that time might be far in the future.

This problem did not seem very pressing before 1905, since no revolution was in progress and the Marxists were having some success in organizing the working class. However, a small groupthe `legal Marxists', headed by Petr Struve-came to identify itself strongly with the objectives of the first (liberal) revolution on the Marxist agenda, and to lose interest in the ultimate goal of socialist revolution. It was not surprising that modernization-minded opponents of the autocracy like Struve should have joined the Marxists in the 189os, since there was at that time no liberal movement for them to join; and it was equally natural that around the turn of the century they left the Marxists to participate in the establishment of the liberal Liberation movement. The heresy of legal Marxism was nevertheless roundly denounced by Russian Social-Democratic leaders, especially by Lenin. Lenin's violent hostility to `bourgeois liberalism' was somewhat illogical in Marxist terms, and caused some perplexity to his colleagues. In revolutionary terms, however, Lenin's attitude was extremely rational.

At around the same time, the Russian Social-Democratic leaders repudiated the heresy of Economism, that is, that the workers' movement should stress economic rather than political goals. There were in fact few articulate Economists in the Russian movement, partly because Russian workers' protests tended to progress very quickly from purely economic issues like wages to political ones. But the emigre leaders, often more sensitive to trends within European Social Democracy than to the situation inside Russia, feared the revisionist and reformist tendencies that had developed in the German movement. In the doctrinal struggles over Economism and legal Marxism, the Russian Marxists were putting clearly on record that they were revolutionaries, not reformists, and that their cause was the socialist workers' revolution and not the revolution of the liberal bourgeoisie.

In 1903, when the Russian Social-Democratic Party held its Second Congress, the leaders fell into dispute over an apparently minor issue-the composition of the editorial board of the party newspaper Iskra.ls No real substantive questions were involved, though to the extent that the dispute revolved around Lenin it might be said that he himself was the underlying issue, and that his colleagues considered that he was too aggressively seeking a position of dominance. Lenin's manner at the congress was overbearing; and he had recently been laying down the law very decisively on various theoretical questions, notably the organization and functions of the party. There was tension between Lenin and Plekhanov, the senior Russian Marxist; and the friendship between Lenin and his contemporary Yulii Martov was on the point of breaking.

The outcome of the Second Congress was a split in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party between `Bolshevik' and 'Menshevik' factions. The Bolsheviks were those who followed Lenin's lead, and the Mensheviks (including Plekhanov, Martov, and Trotsky) constituted a larger and more diverse group of party members who thought Lenin had overreached himself. The split made little sense to Marxists inside Russia, and at the time of its occurrence was not regarded as irrevocable even by the emigres. It proved, nevertheless, to be permanent; and as time passed the two factions acquired more clearly distinct identities than they had had in 1903. In later years, Lenin was sometimes to express pride in being a `splitter', meaning by this that he considered large, loosely-knit political organizations to be less effective than smaller, disciplined radical groups demanding a high degree of commitment and ideological unity. But some people also attributed this trait to his difficulty in tolerating disagreement-that `malicious suspiciousness' that Trotsky called `a caricature of Jacobin intolerance' in a prerevolutionary polemic.16

In the years after 1903, the Mensheviks emerged as the more orthodox in their Marxism (not counting Trotsky, a Menshevik until mid-1917 but always a maverick), less inclined to force the pace of events towards revolution and less interested in creating a tightly organized and disciplined revolutionary party. They had more success than the Bolsheviks in attracting support in the nonRussian areas of the Empire, while the Bolsheviks had the edge among Russian workers. (In both parties, however, Jews and other non-Russians were prominent in the intelligentsia-dominated leadership.) In the last prewar years, 1910-14, the Mensheviks lost working-class support to the Bolsheviks as the workers' mood became more militant: they were perceived as a more `respectable' party with closer links to the bourgeoisie, whereas the Bolsheviks were seen as more working class as well as more revolutionary.'7

The Bolsheviks, unlike the Mensheviks, had a single leader, and their identity was in large part defined by Lenin's ideas and personality. Lenin's first distinctive trait as a Marxist theoretician was his emphasis on party organization. He saw the party not only as the vanguard of proletarian revolution but also in a sense as its creator, since he argued that the proletariat alone could achieve only a tradeunion consciousness and not a revolutionary one.

Lenin believed that the core of the party's membership should consist of full-time professional revolutionaries, recruited both from the intelligentsia and the working class, but concentrating on the political organization of workers rather than any other social group. In What Is To Be Done? (1902), he insisted on the importance of centralization, strict discipline, and ideological unity within the party. These, of course, were logical prescriptions for a party operating clandestinely in a police state. Nevertheless, it seemed to many of Lenin's contemporaries (and later to many scholars) that Lenin's dislike of looser mass organizations allowing greater diversity and spontaneity was not purely expedient but reflected a natural authoritarian bent.

Lenin differed from many other Russian Marxists in seeming actively to desire a proletarian revolution rather than simply predicting that one would ultimately occur. This was a character trait that would surely have endeared him to Karl Marx, despite the fact that it required some revision of orthodox Marxism. The idea that the liberal bourgeoisie must be the natural leader of Russia's antiautocratic revolution was never really acceptable to Lenin; and in Two Tactics of Social Democracy, written in the midst of the 1905 Revolution, he insisted that the proletariat-allied with Russia's rebellious peasantry-could and should play a dominant role. Clearly it was necessary for any Russian Marxist with serious revolutionary intentions to find a way round the doctrine of bourgeois revolutionary leadership, and Trotsky was to make a similar and perhaps more successful effort with his theory of `permanent revolution'. In Lenin's writing from 1905, the words `dictatorship', `insurrection', and `civil war' appeared increasingly frequently. It was in these harsh, violent, and realistic terms that he conceived the future revolutionary transfer of power.

The 19o.5 Revolution and its aftermath;
the First World War

Late Tsarist Russia was an expanding imperial power with the largest standing army of any of the great powers of Europe. Its strength vis-a-vis the outside world was a source of pride, an achievement that could be set against the country's internal political and social problems. In the words attributed to an earlytwentieth-century Minister of Interior, `a small victorious war' was the best remedy for Russia's domestic unrest. Historically, however, this was a rather dubious proposition. Over the past halfcentury, Russia's wars had tended neither to be successful nor to strengthen society's confidence in the government. The military humiliation of the Crimean War had precipitated the radical domestic reforms of the i86os. The diplomatic defeat that Russia suffered after its military involvement in the Balkans in the late 1870s produced an internal political crisis that ended only with Alexander II's assassination. In the early 19oos, Russian expansion in the Far East was pushing it towards a conflict with another expansionist power in the region, Japan. Though some of Nicholas II's ministers urged caution, the prevailing sentiment in court and high bureaucratic circles was that there were easy pickings to be made in the Far East, and that Japan-an inferior, nonEuropean power, after all-would not be a formidable adversary. Initiated by Japan, but provoked almost equally by Russian policy in the Far East, the Russo-Japanese War broke out in January 1904.

For Russia, the war turned out to be a series of disasters and humiliations on land and at sea. The early patriotic enthusiasm of respectable society quickly soured, and-as had also happened during the 1891 famine-attempts by public organizations like the zemstvos to help the government in an emergency only led to conflicts with the bureaucracy and frustration. This fuelled the liberal movement, since autocracy always seemed least tolerable when it was most clearly perceived as incompetent and inefficient; and the zemstvo nobility and professionals rallied behind the illegal Liberation movement, directed from Europe by Petr Struve and other liberal activists. In the last months of 1904, with the war still in progress, the liberals in Russia organized a banquet campaign (modelled on that used against the French King, Louis Philippe, in 1847), through which the social elite demonstrated support for the idea of constitutional reform. At the same time, the government was under other kinds of pressure, including terrorist attacks on officials, student demonstrations, and workers' strikes. In January 1905, Petersburg workers held a peaceful demonstrationorganized not by militants and revolutionaries, but by a renegade priest with police connections, Father Gapon-to bring their economic grievances to the attention of the Tsar. On Bloody Sunday (9 January), troops fired on the demonstrators outside the Winter Palace, and the 1905 Revolution had begun.18

The spirit of national solidarity against the autocracy was very strong during the first nine months of 1905. The liberals' claim to leadership of the revolutionary movement was not seriously challenged; and their bargaining position with the regime was based not only on support from the zemstvos and the new unions of middleclass professionals but also on the heterogeneous pressures coming from student demonstrations, workers' strikes, peasant disorders, mutinies in the armed forces, and unrest in the non-Russian regions of the Empire. The autocracy, for its part, was consistently on the defensive, seized by panic and confusion, and apparently unable to restore order. Its prospects for survival improved markedly when Witte managed to negotiate peace with Japan (the Treaty of Portsmouth) on remarkably advantageous terms in late August 1905. But the regime still had a million of its troops in Manchuria, and they could not be brought home on the Trans-Siberian Railway until the striking railwaymen were brought back under control.

The culmination of the liberal revolution was Nicholas II's October Manifesto (1905), in which he conceded the principle of a constitution and promised to create a national elected parliament, the Duma. The Manifesto divided the liberals: the Octobrists accepted it, while the Constitutional Democrats (Cadets) formally withheld acceptance and hoped for further concessions. In practice, however, the liberals withdrew from revolutionary activity at this time, and concentrated their energies on organizing the new Octobrist and Cadet parties and preparing for the forthcoming Duma elections.

However, the workers remained actively revolutionary until the end of the year, achieving greater visibility than before and becoming increasingly militant. In October, the workers of Petersburg organized a `soviet' or council of workers' representatives elected in the factories. The practical function of the Petersburg Soviet was to provide the city with a kind of emergency municipal government at a time when other institutions were paralysed and a general strike was in progress. But it also became a political forum for the workers, and to a lesser extent for socialists from the revolutionary parties (Trotsky, then a Menshevik, became one of the Soviet's leaders). For a few months, the Tsarist authorities handled the Soviet in a gingerly manner, and similar bodies emerged in Moscow and other cities. But early in December it was dispersed by a successful police operation. The news of the attack on the Petersburg Soviet led to an armed uprising by the Moscow Soviet, in which the Bolsheviks had gained considerable influence. This was put down by troops, but the workers fought back and there were many casualties.

The urban revolution of 1905 stimulated the most serious peasant uprisings since the Pugachev revolt in the late eighteenth century. But the urban and rural revolutions were not simultaneous. Peasant rioting-consisting of the sacking and burning of manor houses and attacks on landowners and officials-began in the summer of 1905 and rose to a peak in the late autumn, subsided, and then resumed on a large scale in 1906. But even in late 1905 the regime was strong enough to begin using troops in a campaign of village-by-village pacification. By the middle of 1906, all the troops were back from the Far East, and discipline had been restored in the armed forces. In the winter of 1906-7, much of rural Russia was under martial law, and summary justice (including over a thousand executions) was dispensed by field courts martial.

Russia's landowning nobility learnt a lesson from the events of 1905-6, namely that its interests lay with the autocracy (which could perhaps shield it from a vengeful peasantry) and not with the liberals.'9 But in urban terms, the 1905 Revolution did not produce such clear consciousness of class polarization: even for most socialists, this was not a Russian 1848, revealing the treacherous nature of liberalism and the essential antagonism of bourgeoisie and proletariat. The liberals-representing a professional rather than capitalist middle class-had stood aside in October, but they had not joined the regime in an onslaught on the workers' revolution. Their attitude to the workers' and socialist movements remained much more benign than that of liberals in most European countries. The workers, for their part, seem to have perceived the liberals rather as a timorous ally than a treacherous one.