Throughout the year, the revolutionary movement was on the ascendant. The mood of revolt spread to the troops. There were mutinies in the Baltic Fleet, where the sailors, mostly of proletarian origins, were affected by the mood of the workers of nearby St. Petersburg. 500 Baltic Fleet sailors were arrested and sent for court martial. On 26 October, the Petersburg Bolsheviks called a strike in protest at the repression of the sailors. The protest spread to Moscow, Riga, Reval, Nikolaev, Nizhny Novgorod, Berdyansk, and other working class centres, anticipating the future unity of workers and soldiers in 1917.
After the long, frustrating years in the wilderness, the Party now began to experience rapid growth. By early 1913 the Bolsheviks had 22 workers’ cells in Moscow. The new upswing had a positive effect on morale and growth everywhere. Freed from the restrictive and debilitating influence of the Liquidators and the interminable internal conflicts, the Bolsheviks advanced with giant strides, under their own colours. This time the Mensheviks had missed the boat. However, rapidly changing conditions posed the need for a swift transformation of the Party’s methods and an urgent strengthening of the apparatus. The bourgeois liberals had the means to publish ‘popular’ papers like Sovremennik (The Contemporary) which, for lack of an alternative, was widely read by workers. The struggle against bourgeois influence in the masses demanded a Bolshevik daily paper. The Bolshevik Zvezda reached the minority of active workers, but it was quite insufficient for the changed situation. The Prague Conference agreed to launch a daily paper with the name Rabochaya Gazeta. In the spring of 1912 preparations were begun for the new publication. A team was formed consisting of NN Baturin, M.S. Olimsky, N.G. Poletaev, and CC members Ordzhonikidze and Stalin.
At the same time the Liquidators were talking about a daily and began an appeal for funds, although without success. By late March in Petersburg, Zvezda had the support of 108 groups of workers, the Mensheviks seven! By April, after the Lena events, the figures were 227 to eight. By late April, the Bolsheviks had collected enough money to issue the paper, which they called by the well-known name of Pravda. This meant, in effect, appropriating the name of Trotsky’s paper, a move which considerably embittered relations between the Bolsheviks and Trotsky, who, in a moment of anger, wrote a stinging attack on Lenin in a private letter not meant for publication which was later fished out and used unscrupulously by the Stalinists to blacken Trotsky’s name.
The new Pravda was an instant success. The first issue had a print run of 60,000. This was an invaluable weapon in the middle of a massive strike wave. Pravda was a real workers’ paper with links to every factory. Worker correspondents wrote in every issue commenting on every aspect of working class life. About 5,000 letters from workers were received in the first year. Regular columns included ‘Strikes in Petersburg’ and ‘Strikes in the Provinces’. Pravda was much more than a paper. It was a real organiser. In its pages there was not only a lot of information about the workers’ movement, but also directives and slogans, and many letters about the life and conditions of the workers written by workers themselves. This was not just a paper ‘for workers’, but a real workers’ paper, something they could identify with as their own. However, Pravda did not limit itself to describing what is. It also included theory as a necessary means of raising the consciousness of its readers to the level of the tasks demanded by history. It regularly featured Lenin’s articles, which provided the necessary theoretical generalisations and explanations, as well as polemics against other trends, with particular emphasis on exposing the Liquidators.
Lenin paid careful attention to Pravda, and wrote a large number of articles for it – out of 75 issues that came out between March and May of 1913, 41 contain at least one of Lenin’s articles. He also tried to involve Plekhanov, Gorky, and other intellectuals in Pravda, although Plekhanov was already moving away. Nor was Lenin’s participation limited to writing articles. He was also actively involved in reading and correcting articles, studying the reports and correspondence in order to gain a more accurate idea of what was going on in the factories, following the circulation figures, and analysing the results of financial campaigns. Such close attention was not at all accidental. Lenin well understood the key role of the paper as an organiser. To the degree that there is a serious organisation, capable of penetrating every factory, setting up a network of worker correspondents, raising money from the workers, sending regular reports, and the hundred-and-one other tasks involved in the workers’ press, the basis and framework is already established for far bigger tasks.
The new paper did not escape the attention of the authorities. Pravda had to contend with censorship, fines, and police raids. About 17 per cent of all the issues were confiscated in 1912. In May – June 1913 it was up to 40 per cent. By July-September the figure was 80 per cent! In an effort to fool the authorities, they changed its name repeatedly. The paper came out as Rabochaya Pravda (Workers’ Truth), Pravda Truda (Labour Truth), Severnaya Pravda (Northern Truth) and so on. Each time, the authorities imposed a new ban, and each time a new title appeared. And so the cat-and-mouse game went on. Apart from the legal problems, there was a permanent struggle to keep the paper going financially. There were continuous efforts to raise cash. Unlike the Mensheviks, who raised most of their finance from wealthy sympathisers, the Bolsheviks were proud of the fact that they raised most of their funds from small sums collected by the workers themselves. In the long run, this is the only really firm base for financing a revolutionary party. In 1912 there were 620 groups of workers organising collections for the paper, and by 1913, it was up to 2,181. Pravda was maintained mainly by the ‘kopecks of the workers’.
Neither persecution nor the lack of funds could halt the advance of the workers’ daily. Pravda’s influence increased by leaps and bounds. Tens of thousands of workers read the paper, often in groups, passing copies from one workshop to another. Pravda galvanised a wide layer of non-party workers around the Party, considerably expanding its influence and periphery. The local party organisations were given targets of money to raise to support Pravda. By such means the paper began to occupy a central place in the building of the Party – a collective organiser. By early 1913, the paper had not only increased its size, but its run was up too. Starting the year with a circulation of 23,000, by mid-March, it rose to 30-32,000, and 40-42,000 on Sundays. By the summer the number of individual and collective subscribers was an impressive 5,501. This automatically meant a growth in party membership, which had increased to 30-50,000 by September 1913. Groups of supporters were set up all over the country, even in far-off Tashkent in Central Asia. Eventually Pravda even began to penetrate the villages.
Despite the phenomenal success of Pravda, relations between Lenin and the paper’s editorial board were far from smooth. A section of the editorial board did not approve of Lenin’s attacks on the Liquidators: Stalin, S.S. Danilov, N.N. Lebedev, V.M. Molotov, S.M. Nakhimson, M.S. Olminsky – all opposed using the paper for factional disagreements. This detail reveals a total lack of understanding on the part of Lenin’s collaborators, even at this late stage. Lenin tried to ‘patiently explain’ the facts of life to his collaborators.
It is harmful, destructive, ridiculous to conceal differences from the workers (as Pravda is doing)… If you remain silent, you have abstained. And a paper which abstains, has perished. (V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, in Russian, vol. 48, p. 71.)
Lenin’s strained relations with other Bolshevik leaders were directly related to the question of tactics in the Duma. Early in 1912, the editors of Zvezda had published an article by the Bolshevik conciliator MI Frumkin, who demanded a single Social Democratic electoral programme and openly came out in favour of the Mensheviks’ electoral slogans. (See RB McKean, St. Petersburg Between the Revolutions, p. 132.) So sharp did the conflict become that the editorial board of Pravda, where Stalin was in charge at the time, pointedly refused to publish a single article by Lenin or Zinoviev on questions of electoral strategy. This produced a furious row. Even a superficial reading of Lenin’s correspondence with Pravda at this time shows that there was a running battle between him and the editors. Krupskaya notes that: “Sometimes – but not often – Ilyich’s articles got lost. At other times they were held up and inserted only after some delay. Ilyich used to worry; he wrote angry letters to Pravda, but that did not help much.” (NK Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin, p. 261.)
During the election campaign for the Fourth Duma in 1912, Lenin wrote to the Pravda editorial board:
Pravda is carrying on now, at election time, like a sleepy old maid. Pravda doesn’t know how to fight. It does not attack, it does not persecute either the Cadet or the Liquidator.
Some time in October, he wrote to the editorial board in language which shows Lenin’s burning indignation at Pravda’s failure to expose the Liquidators:
The undersigned, now in the capacity of a permanent political contributor to Pravda and Nevskaya Zvezda, considers it his duty to express his protest against the behaviour of the colleagues in charge of these newspapers at a critical time.
The elections in St. Petersburg, both in the workers’ curia and in the 2nd urban curia, are a critical moment, a moment for realising the results of five years of work, a moment for determining, in many respects, the direction of work for the next five years.
At such a moment, the leading organ of working class democrats must follow a clear, firm, and precisely defined policy. But Pravda, which is in many respects effectively the leading organ, is not conducting such a policy.
And he continues:
Pravda itself has admitted that there are two clearly formalised lines, platforms, collective wills (the August, or Liquidators’, line and the January line). Yet Pravda creates the opinion that it is carrying on some third line ‘of its own’, invented only yesterday by someone and amounting (as we have learned from St. Petersburg through other channels, since Pravda’s editorial board has stubbornly refused to favour us with a reply) either to letting the Liquidators have one of the three candidates, or handing over to them the whole of the 2nd curia “in exchange for the workers’ curia”. If these rumours are untrue, Pravda bears the entire responsibility for them, because you cannot sow such uncertainty among Marxists that unquestionable friends, Marxists, believe these rumours, and pass them on.
At this hot time, Nevskaya Zvezda is closed down, without a single letter or explanation, collective exchange of opinion is completely interrupted, and political contributors are left in the dark, not knowing whom they are helping after all to get elected; may it not be a Liquidator? I am obliged hotly to protest against this, and to decline any responsibility for this abnormal situation, which is pregnant with drawn-out conflicts. (LCW, To the Editorial Board of Pravda, first half of October, 1912, vol. 36, p. 198, p. 194 and pp. 195-6.)
Finally, Lenin’s patience was exhausted:
We received a stupid and impudent letter from the editorial board (of Pravda). We will not reply. They must be got rid of… We are exceedingly disturbed by the absence of news about the plan for reorganising the editorial board… Reorganisation, but better still, the complete expulsion of all the old timers, is extremely necessary. (My emphasis.)
Lenin protested against the systematic censorship of his articles:
Why then does Pravda stubbornly and systematically cut out any mention of the Liquidators, both in my articles and in the articles of other colleagues? (LCW, To the Editors of Pravda, 1/8/1912, vol. 35, p. 47.)
In other letters he demands the return of unpublished articles, many of which vanished without trace. At times, it seems, Lenin did not even receive the paper, and there are also complaints that he was not paid: “Why don’t you pay me the money you owe? This delay is causing us great difficulties.” (LCW, To the Editors of Pravda, 24/11/1912, vol. 35, p. 66.) Finally, Lenin’s patience ran out. In a furious letter to Sverdlov, he wrote:
It is essential to put in our own editorial board of Dyen and throw out the present one. Work is thoroughly bad at present, the boosting of the Bundist Liquidators (Zeit) and the non–Social Democrat Jagiello is an absolute disgrace. The absence of a campaign for unity from below is stupid and base… are such people editors? They are not people, but wretched wet-rags and wreckers of the cause. (LCW, Letter to Sverdlov, 9/2/1913, vol. 35, p. 79.)
Despite the reference to Dyen, this letter in fact deals with the state of affairs in the editorial board of Pravda at the end of 1912 and the beginning of 1913. (See LCW, vol. 35, p. 577, note.) It shows how far relations with Lenin had deteriorated at this time. Only after Lenin exerted heavy pressure at the Kraków conference, did Pravda modify its stance. As late as February 1913, Lenin, while noting with relief the changes in the Pravda editorial board, commented: “You cannot imagine to what extent we have been exhausted by working with a sullenly hostile editorial board.” (LCW, To the Editorial Board of Pravda, vol. 35, p. 82.) But gradually, Lenin succeeded in straightening things out. By the autumn of 1913, Lenin was able to write to Pravda congratulating it on its campaign in support of the Bolshevik deputies in the Duma. (LCW, To the Editorial Board of Za Pravdu, 2-11/11/1913, vol. 35, p. 115.)