The year 1912 had begun quietly enough. The Factory Inspectorate only registered 21 strikes in January and the same number in February. Then, without warning, a bombshell burst in a clear blue sky. The Lena goldfield in Siberia was one of the biggest gold mines in the world. Among the shareholders was the Tsar’s mother, Count Witte, and government ministers. At the end of February a strike broke out in Lena over the atrocious wages and conditions. Significantly, the chairman of the strike committees was a Bolshevik, P.N. Batashev. The government sent in the troops, who, on 4 April, opened fire on a crowd of 3,000 miners, killing 270 and wounding a further 250. It was Bloody Sunday all over again. The shots that echoed over the frozen tundra broke the ice of five years of reaction.
The news of the massacre of miners had an electrifying effect. On 7 and 8 April, mass protest meetings were held in the factories of St. Petersburg. A few days later, with incredible stupidity, Makarov, the Minister of the Interior, answering questions in the Duma, said “so it was, and so it will be in the future”. The indignation of the masses finally boiled over. Between 14 and 22 April there were 140,000 on strike in St. Petersburg and from 12 to 30 April, 70,000 in Moscow. The protest strikes spread to the Ukraine, the Baltic states, the Middle Volga, Belorussia, Lithuania, Poland, and the North and Central industrial regions. This was followed by a new wave of strikes on 1 May, when 400,000 workers came out. These strikes were increasingly of a political character. There were 700 political strikes in April. On 1 May, there were more than 1,000 strikes in the St. Petersburg area – a higher number than in 1905. The knot of history was retied: the workers continued where they had left off in 1907, but on a higher level. The workers had learned from their experience. In January 1905 they began with appeals to the Little Father. Now they began with the slogan, ‘Down with the tsarist government!’
After Lena, everything changed in a matter of days. MF Van Koten, the St. Petersburg Okhrana Chief, wrote to the Police Department: “The events at Lena have heightened the mood of the local revolutionary groups and of factory workers.” (Quoted in RB McKean, St. Petersburg Between the Revolutions, p. 88.) Suddenly, the fortunes of the Bolsheviks were transformed. In 1905 the Social Democrats had been in a weak position with a very scant presence in the working class. And the Bolsheviks had been in a still weaker position within the Social Democracy. Now the opposite was the case. The Bolsheviks quickly became the decisive force within the Social Democracy, and the Social Democracy was the decisive political force in the working class. Responding quickly to events, they called on the workers to take revolutionary action. Using Zvezda as a legal front, they were able to give leadership to the mass movement, issuing fighting slogans and directives. The swift reaction of the Bolsheviks and their militant stance facilitated the rapid growth of Bolshevik numbers and influence. It also completely justified the split, which had, in fact, come just in time. To have remained entangled with the Mensheviks at such a moment would have meant paralysis.
The workers quickly took up the Bolshevik slogans on May Day: ‘Long live the democratic republic!’ ‘Long live socialism!’ The movement was not restricted to the workers. The student movement was given a new impetus by the Lena events which sparked off a ferment in the universities. This presented new possibilities for the spread of revolutionary ideas. But a lot of work was still needed to win complete hegemony of the mass movement. In particular, the re-awakening of democratic aspirations and the undoubted presence of constitutional illusions could have strengthened the influence of the bourgeois-liberals, who appeared to be ‘in opposition’. They were well-known public figures, not averse to making demagogic speeches ‘for democracy’, and speaking in the name of ‘the people’. For this reason, Lenin’s main fire was directed against the bourgeois liberals.
Revitalised and elated by the change in the situation, which he had awaited for so long, Lenin immediately set about galvanising his comrades and spurring them into action. In the latter part of June, he and Krupskaya moved from Paris to Kraków, in the Austrian-held part of Poland, in order to be nearer the revolution. Krupskaya recalls this period as only “half-emigration” when they had ever closer ties with the interior. From here, he bombarded the Party with letters, calls to action, complaints, and words of encouragement. It was also a relief to get away from the enervating atmosphere of intrigue, backstabbing and gossip which characterised émigré life in Paris. He wrote to Gorky that summer:
You ask me why I am in Austria. The Central Committee has set up a bureau here (entre nous); we are nearer to St. Petersburg, and it is much easier to write articles for the papers in Russia, and collaboration is being arranged. There is less wrangling, and that too is an advantage. There is no good library, and that is a disadvantage. It is hard to live without good books. (Quoted in R. Payne, The Life and Death of Lenin, p. 248.)