The real content of Lenin’s slogan was not this at all, but merely an emphatic way of expressing the need to fight against chauvinism and oppose the ‘Burgfrieden’. The essence of the position was that socialists cannot take upon themselves any responsibility for an imperialist war. Even the defeat of Russia was a ‘lesser evil’ than support for the Russian bourgeoisie and its predatory war. It was necessary to instil this idea into the minds of the cadres, to inoculate them against the disease of chauvinism. On the other hand, Lenin was too much of a realist not to understand that it is a fatal error to confuse the way revolutionaries see things with the consciousness of the masses. The whole art of building the revolutionary party and cementing it with the masses consists precisely on knowing how to connect the finished scientific programme of Marxism with the necessarily unfinished, confused and contradictory consciousness of the masses. That is precisely why, when Lenin returned to Petrograd in the spring, he modified his position, stating that he had seen that there were two kinds of defencism – that of the social-chauvinist betrayers and an ‘honest defencism’ of the masses. In making such an assertion, Lenin in no way turned his back on his earlier position of revolutionary defeatism, but merely acknowledged that the way that these ideas were conveyed to the masses in the given situation had to take into account the actual level of consciousness. Not to have done this would have been to reduce the party to the level of a sect.
Lenin’s speeches at that time bear little or no relation to the position he put forward during the war. It is sufficient to read his speech at the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets to see the difference. When speaking to honest working class ‘defencists’ – Menshevik and Social Revolutionary workers who believed that they were fighting to defend a democratic republic and the revolution – Lenin took their views into account. We are prepared to fight against the German imperialists, he explained. We are not pacifists. But we have no confidence in the bourgeois Provisional Government. We demand that the Menshevik and SR leaders break with the bourgeoisie and take the power. Then we can wage a revolutionary war against German imperialism, calling on the German workers to follow our example. This, and not the caricature of ‘revolutionary defeatism’ that is so often presented by empty-headed ultra-lefts, was the real essence of Lenin’s revolutionary military policy.
In the beginning, the organised workers, under the influence of the Bolsheviks, tried to oppose the war but were swiftly swept aside by the mass of patriotic petty-bourgeois peasants and backwards workers. Is it true that the Russian workers were infected with patriotism? Many non-Marxist historians cite evidence to the contrary. Robert McKean, who cannot be suspected of partiality for the Bolsheviks, commenting on the class composition of the patriotic demonstrations writes:
The reports in the capital’s middle-class press described crowds as being formed for the most part of officers, students, society ladies and members of the professions, with a sprinkling of artisans, shopkeepers and shop assistants. One may conclude that at the very least there was no large-scale, overt opposition to the war among the mass of factory and artisanal hands. (R.B. McKean, St. Petersburg Between the Revolutions, p. 358.)
This entirely coincides with the version of a prominent Bolshevik who was an eyewitness of these events, Alexander Shlyapnikov. The declaration of war initially took the workers by surprise. The stunned mood was described by Shlyapnikov:
Knots of people crowded around the leaflets, talking over the events in an anxious, despondent mood. Hundreds of workers’ families thronged the police stations, which had been converted into recruiting offices. Women wept, wailed, and cursed the war. In the workshops, factories, and mills the mobilisation created great havoc since as many as 40 per cent of the workers were taken from their machines and benches. Helplessness and despair arose everywhere. (Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary International, p. 128.)
But once the initial shock wore off, it was soon replaced by a wave of anger. From the beginning, in fact, there were attempts to organise anti-war protests. McKean says that “On the day war was declared, the secret police noted that militant revolutionary youths were arranging factory meetings, at which they exhorted all socialist tendencies to oppose the war and the soldiers to turn their weapons against the internal enemy, the autocracy.” (RB McKean, St. Petersburg Between the Revolutions, p. 356.) The workers came out onto the streets to demonstrate their opposition. On 31 July, an estimated 27,000 people demonstrated against the war on the streets of the capital. In all the great industrial centres, there were strikes and demonstrations – in Belorussia, the Ukraine, the Caucasus, and the Urals. There were initial attempts to resist mobilisation leading to clashes with police and Cossacks in which many were killed and wounded. According to official government figures, there were disturbances and anti-war protests in 17 provinces and 31 districts. 505 draftees and 106 officials were killed in 27 provinces in the two weeks following the declaration of war. That the war was deeply unpopular with the working class was even recognised by the tsarist police whose reports continually emphasised that internationalist positions secured the widest acceptance. (Ibid., p. 365.) In no other country except Ireland was there such resistance to the war.
This was a mainly spontaneous, unorganised mass protest. But it was condemned from the start by the unfavourable class balance of forces and the wave of patriotic fervour that swept all before it. Badayev recalls how the backward layers of the population were used against the workers:
In Petersburg the first days of the war were marked by strikes and even by some scattered demonstrations. On the day that army reservists were mobilised, workers at more than 20 Petersburg enterprises went on strike to protest against the war. In some places the workers met the reservists with shouts of ‘Down with the war’ and revolutionary songs.
But the demonstrations now took place under conditions different from those two or three weeks earlier. The crowds of onlookers, especially in the centre of the city, were stirred up by patriotic shouts. Now they not only did not maintain a ‘friendly’ neutrality, but fell upon the demonstrators, and helped the police arrest and beat them. One incident typical of this time was the ‘patriotic’ outburst that took place the same day as the mobilisation in the city centre, at the City Duma building on the Nevsky Prospect.
Just as a batch of reservists were passing by here, a crowd of demonstrating workers appeared. With shouts of ‘Down with the war’ the demonstrators closed in on the reservists. The public on the Nevsky Prospect, mainly philistines and all sorts of idle loafers, usually scurried away and hid in the side streets during workers’ demonstrations. Sometimes, as a last resort, they huddled timidly in porches and gateways and observed the demonstrators from afar. But this time the public displayed ‘activism’, and took on the role of tsarist police. Crying ‘Betrayers, traitors’ they rushed from the sidewalk onto the avenue and began to beat up the demonstrating workers. The police then arrested the demonstrators and dispatched them to nearby police stations.
Under these conditions any broad development of a protest movement against the war was impossible. The individual heroic actions of the workers were drowned in the broad sea of militant patriotism. (Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary International, pp. 129-30.)
The regime easily rode out the storm. Mobilisation meant that the relatively thin layer of advanced Bolshevik workers were drowned in a sea of politically untutored masses. The army was overwhelmingly peasant in composition. Until events changed the outlook of the muzhiks in uniform, the worker-Bolsheviks in the trenches were impotent.