The Bolshevik deputies in the Duma also did their duty on the question of the Balkan War. On 12 June, 1913, Badayev announced the Bolsheviks’ refusal to vote for the war budget in the Duma, with the defiant slogan: ‘Not a penny for the arms budget’. Mass agitation was organised against war, with factory resolutions denouncing the Balkan War and the even greater threat of world war. At the same time there were anti-war demonstrations in Germany, France, and Britain. As the fatal year 1914 dawned, there were big strikes and demonstrations commemorating the anniversary of Bloody Sunday on 9 January. In St. Petersburg, Riga, Moscow, Nikolaev, Warsaw, Tver, Kiev, Kheso, Drinsk, and other workers’ centres, 260,000 people participated in demonstrations. And this was only the beginning. From 17 to 20 March in St. Petersburg there were 156,000 workers on strike, in Riga 60,000, in Moscow 10,000. The atmosphere was white hot. Russia was rapidly moving towards a new revolutionary situation. On 22 April, Bolshevik, Menshevik, and Trudovik deputies were excluded from the Duma for ‘obstructionism’. More than 100,000 workers participated in political protest strikes in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
One strike wave followed another. On 1 May more than half a million workers struck and demonstrated: in St. Petersburg there were 250,000, in Riga 44,000, in Moscow 32,000, in the Caucasus about 20,000. In its size and sweep, the movement surpassed even that of 1905. Lenin, in his article May Days of Revolution, pointed out that there are two basic conditions for a pre-revolutionary situation: that the masses cannot live as before and that the ruling class cannot rule as before. This was clearly the case in Russia. On the eve of the World War, Russia was again rapidly heading for a new revolution. The workers’ movement was in a state of continuous ebullition. The growth in the party’s influence was recorded by Badayev, who deals with the structure of the St. Petersburg organisation and the work of the St. Petersburg committee:
All activity in the St. Petersburg District is now controlled by the St. Petersburg Committee, which has been functioning since autumn last year. The Committee has contacts at all works and factories and is informed of all developments there. The organisation of the district is as follows: At the factory, party members form nuclei in the various workshops and delegates from the nuclei form a factory committee (at small factories, the members themselves constitute the committee). Every factory committee, or workshop nucleus in large factories, appoints a collector who on each payday collects the dues and other funds, books, subscriptions for the newspapers, etc. A controller is also appointed to visit the institutions for which the funds were raised, to see that the correct amounts have been received there and collect the money. By this system, abuses in the handling of money are avoided.
Each district committee elects by secret voting an executive commission of three, care being taken that the committee as a whole should not know of whom the executive commission actually consists.
The district executive commissions send delegates to the St. Petersburg Committee, again trying to ensure that the names should not be known by the whole district committee. The St. Petersburg Committee also elects an executive commission of three. Sometimes, for reasons of secrecy, it was found inadvisable to elect the representatives from the district commission and they were co-opted at the discretion of the St. Petersburg Committee.
Owing to this system, it was difficult for the secret police to find out who are members of the St. Petersburg Committee, which was thus enabled to carry on its work, to guide the activities of the organisations, declare political strikes, etc.
The Committee is held in high esteem by the workers, who, on all important points, await its guidance and follow its instructions. Special attention is paid to the leaflets which the Committee issues from time to time.
St. Petersburg trade union organisations have decided not to call political strikes on their own initiative but to act only on instructions from the St. Petersburg Committee. It was the Committee which issued the call for strikes on 9 January, 4 April, and 1 May. The workers strongly resented the suppression of Pravda and wanted to strike, but the Committee decided that it was necessary first to prepare the action properly and to issue an explanatory leaflet which should reach the masses. Within a few days another paper appeared and as it followed the same policy the workers were somewhat reassured. Although no appeal to strike action was issued, some 30,000 workers left their work.
Leaflets are of great importance and the Committee devoted much effort to perfecting its machinery for their printing and distribution. The Committee consists entirely of workers, and we write the leaflets ourselves and have difficulty in finding intellectuals to help in correcting them.
The St. Petersburg political strikes, far from ruining the organisation, strengthened it. It may be asserted that the St. Petersburg organisation was revived, strengthened, and is developing, owing to the political strike movement. The shouts of the Liquidators about a ‘strike fever’ show that they are completely detached from the workers’ organisations and from the life of the masses; they altogether fail to grasp what is now taking place among the workers. From my position in the centre of the St. Petersburg working-class movement, I notice everywhere how the strength of the workers is increasing, how it shows itself and how it will overwhelm everything.
The resolutions of the Kraków Conference were read and studied by the workers in the factories and the entire work of our organisation was conducted in their spirit. Their correctness was fully proved in practice; taking active part in the work, I felt all the time that the line of policy was correct. I rarely met a Liquidator or heard of one; this surprised me at first, but later, at a meeting of metalworkers, I learned that they were almost non-existent in St. Petersburg. (Quoted in A.Y. Badayev, Bolsheviks in the Tsarist Duma, pp. 117-18.)
Bolshevik influence was continually spreading to new layers of the class – to the youth and women. Pravda was the main weapon for this work. Its circulation grew to an impressive 40,000 a day, whereas the Mensheviks’ Luch (The Ray) sold a maximum of 16,000 copies. The Bolsheviks always took the question of revolutionary work among women workers very seriously. Lenin, in particular, attached an enormous importance to this question, especially in the period of the revolutionary upsurge from 1912-14, and during the First World War. It was at this time that International Women’s Day, 23 February (8 March), began to be celebrated with mass workers’ demonstrations. It is not an accident that the February (March, according to the new calendar) Revolution arose from disturbances around Women’s Day, when women demonstrated against the war and the high cost of living.
Social Democrats had begun consistent work among women workers during the 1912-14 upsurge. The Bolsheviks organised the first International Women’s Day meeting in Russia in 1913. The same year, Pravda began regularly publishing a page devoted to questions facing women. The Bolsheviks launched a women’s newspaper, Rabotnitsa (Woman Worker), in 1914, with the first issue appearing on International Women’s Day, when the party again organised demonstrations. The paper was suppressed in July along with the rest of the workers’ press. The Bolshevik paper was supported financially by women factory workers and distributed by them in the workplaces. It reported on the conditions and struggles of women workers in Russia and abroad, and encouraged women to join in struggle with their male co-workers. It urged them to reject the women’s movement initiated by bourgeois women following the 1905 Revolution.
A key question was the fight for leadership in the unions, where the Mensheviks were traditionally strong. Prior to the First World War in most countries the unions represented a minority of the class and were heavily dominated by the skilled trades who enjoyed higher wages and better conditions than the rest. This layer, which Marx characterised as the ‘aristocracy of labour’ were frequently under the influence of the liberals and it was no accident that the trade unions, especially their leading layer, were organically inclined towards conservatism and opportunism. Russia was no exception to the rule, which explains why the Mensheviks were traditionally stronger than the Bolsheviks in this milieu.
The St. Petersburg trade unions, among the strongest and best organised had at most 30,000 members in 1914, and in the whole of Russia, there were no more than 100,000, a small percentage of the total work force. Nevertheless, as the basic units of the class, the unions were of fundamental importance to any tendency which aspired to the leadership of the masses. Despite all the difficulties, the Bolsheviks conducted patient revolutionary work in even the most bureaucratic and reactionary unions to win the majority. And eventually this painstaking and patient labour was crowned with success.
By 1913-14, the Bolsheviks were in a position to organise an intervention in all the trade union congresses and mount a successful challenge to the right wing. By the summer of 1914, the Bolsheviks had won the majority in the unions of both Moscow and St. Petersburg. In St. Petersburg, out of 19 trade unions, 16 supported the Bolsheviks, while only three (the draughtsmen, clerks, and chemists) were for the Mensheviks. In Moscow, all 13 trade unions were with the Bolsheviks. Given the traditional influence of the Mensheviks in the unions, this advance was particularly spectacular, and symptomatic of a complete change in the mood of the class.
Under the impulse of the mass revolutionary movement the right wing were losing their traditional base of support among the skilled layers of the working class and the unions. The statements of the Menshevik leaders of this period provide a frank admission of their growing isolation from the working class. AL Chkhenkeli, member of the Duma for Kars and Batum, lamented at a meeting of the Menshevik Duma fraction in January 1914 that “we have lost all our ties with the working class”. This evaluation received official confirmation at the OC’s meeting in February which admitted that “the Duma fraction stands at a remote distance from the popular masses”. The reason for the Mensheviks’ loss of support is not hard to find. Their entire policy consisted of cultivating their connections with the liberal bourgeoisie. They looked up, not down, for a solution. Consequently, the upsurge of the mass movement in the form of a stormy strike wave took them aback. In fact, they really regarded it as a nuisance, fearing anything that might frighten away their Cadet friends. This attitude of distrust towards the mass movement was intimately linked to their whole conception of the Russian Revolution as a bourgeois affair. The masses were supposed to behave responsibly, accept the role of second fiddle to the bourgeoisie, and not go ‘too far’.
Mensheviks also remained extremely ambivalent in their attitude towards strikes. In part their reservations derived from their different interpretation of the shape of a bourgeois revolution in Russian conditions and of the nature of the contemporary crisis… [However] the unspoken fear of Menshevik intellectuals was that the apparently ceaseless and uncontrollable surge of labour unrest would frighten off potential ‘bourgeois allies’.
In an article in Nasha Zarya, Dan warned that “in the political struggle, the strike is not always the sole expedient means.” (RB McKean, St. Petersburg Between the Revolutions, p. 120 and p. 122.) For reformist labour leaders, the strike, or any mass initiative from below is, of course, never ‘expedient’. But the masses see things differently, and soon learn how to distinguish between leaders and organisations that support them in struggle and those that act as permanent fire-hoses for the bosses.
The Bolsheviks showed no such restraint, and consequently were rapidly extending their influence in the unions, especially the key industrial unions, like the metalworkers. Even traditionally Menshevik unions, like the print-workers, moved away from the Liquidators, who were increasingly isolated and discredited. In the summer of 1913, they were defeated in the election of the Moscow printers’ union. The same thing happened in the Baltic region in the autumn. In April 1914 the Bolsheviks won half of the seats on the leading bodies of the Petersburg printers’ union. This energetic and successful drive into the trade unions proved to be a dress rehearsal for what occurred in 1917. The skilful combination of work in the illegal underground party organisations and the penetration of all kinds of legal workers’ organisations – the unions, the co-ops, the insurance societies (kassy), the legal press, and the Duma, was shown in practice to be the only correct road.
The figures for the unions – embracing only a small minority of the workers, albeit an important one – by no means gives us a complete picture of the strength of the Party at this time. In most towns, the Bolsheviks had won a predominant influence in almost all workers’ clubs and associations which, under the influence of the Party, were given a political character. In many areas (especially the provinces) these clubs became centres of revolutionary activity. The same was true of the cooperative societies in the Ukraine and elsewhere, and in the workers’ mutual and insurance societies (kassy). By participating in such work, paying attention to the day-to-day problems of the workers and their families, the Bolsheviks were able also to establish contacts with other layers: traders, shopkeepers, accountants, railway employees, civil servants, artisans, and other non-proletarian sections. In St. Petersburg, Moscow, Riga, Baku, etc., legal work was conducted by the Bolsheviks even in sports clubs and musical and drama societies. The slow, patient work in these seemingly unpromising environments paid off handsomely in the end. After all, real revolutionary work is not at all glamorous, but consists in a proportion of about nine-tenths of precisely such humdrum and unspectacular work to sink roots in the masses wherever they are.
In order to build links with the peasants and rural proletarians – a vital task for a mass party in Russia – the Bolsheviks launched the slogan: ‘Carry the revolutionary word to the village’. Pravda published letters from peasants alongside those of the workers. Nor did the Bolsheviks neglect work among students and intellectuals. The Petersburg higher education group (which included all Social Democratic factions) under Bolshevik leadership had about 100 members, which was still relatively weak, reflecting the falling off of revolutionary influence in the intelligentsia in the previous period, but was expanding again. Thus, the newly formed Bolshevik Party carried into practice the old slogan of the Narodniks, ‘Go among the People!’ But it did so on a higher basis, armed with a scientific programme and a proletarian revolutionary policy. The whole thrust of the policy can be simply summed up: the proletariat must fight to place itself at the head of each and every oppressed section of society, and the Party must fight to win the leadership of the proletariat.