The events of 1917 were a defining moment for the revolutionary movement in Russia. Here, at last, all theories, programmes, and individuals were put to the decisive test – the test of practice. Many did not survive the test. Even Lenin’s closest collaborators succumbed to the pressures of the moment and failed to live up to their historic responsibilities. This was not entirely due to their personal characteristics, although these play a role, and not an unimportant one. The idea that history can be reduced to the blind play of economic forces in which men and women are mere puppets of a predetermined fate, like the characters in a Greek tragedy, has nothing in common with Marxism. Marx and Engels never denied the role of the individual in history. They merely explained that human beings are not entirely free agents, but are conditioned by the existing social reality, the constellation of class forces, the existing consciousness of the masses, the political trends, the prejudices, the illusions – all play a determining role, but, in the last analysis (and only in the last analysis) are themselves determined by the patterns of development of the means of production. Ultimately, the economic base is decisive, but the relationship between ‘base’ (productive forces) and ‘superstructure’ (state, politics, religion, philosophy, morality, etc.) is not direct and mechanical, but indirect and dialectical. There is plenty of scope for the actions of individuals to make a difference – even a decisive difference to the course of history, as the Russian Revolution undoubtedly proves.
Marx once observed that theory becomes a material force when it grips the minds of the masses. A correct theory is one that anticipates more or less accurately the main course of events. Armed with such a theory, it should be possible to work out a perspective which makes clear in advance the general line of development even before the facts to support it are available to us. This should enable a revolutionary tendency to orient its forces correctly, and to anticipate the real tendencies before they come into existence. Anyone who studies the polemics in the Russian Social Democracy in the decade or so before 1917 cannot fail to be struck by the superiority of one theory which, with astonishing accuracy, predicted what really occurred in 1917 – Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. By contrast, the theory of the ‘bourgeois-democratic stage’ advanced by the Mensheviks immediately revealed its counter-revolutionary nature after February, when it was used to justify the Mensheviks’ and SRs’ support for the bourgeois Provisional Government, while Lenin’s formulation of the ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’ served as an excuse for Kamenev and Stalin to capitulate to the Mensheviks and abandon the socialist revolution for bourgeois democracy.
In the course of 1917, the differences that had separated Lenin from Trotsky vanished, as if they had never existed. There grew up between the two men a real sense of solidarity and a closeness that was to last until Lenin’s death. At the beginning of October, in a document addressed to a Conference of Bolsheviks of Petrograd which was considering the list of candidates for the Constituent Assembly, Lenin supported Trotsky’s inclusion in the list, writing that:
No one would contest the candidature of, say, Trotsky, for, first, upon his arrival, Trotsky at once took up an internationalist stand; second, he worked among the Mezhraiontsy for a merger [with the Bolsheviks]; third, in the difficult July Days he proved himself equal to the task and a loyal supporter of the party of the revolutionary proletariat. (LCW, From the Theses for a Report at the 8 October Conference of the St. Petersburg Organisation, vol. 41, p. 447.)
In his memoirs, Raskolnikov wrote:
Trotsky’s attitude to Vladimir Ilyich (Lenin) was one of enormous esteem. He placed him higher than any contemporary he had met with, either in Russia or abroad. In the tone in which Trotsky spoke of Lenin you felt the devotion of a disciple. In those times Lenin had behind him 30 years’ service to the proletariat, and Trotsky 20. The echoes of their disagreements during the pre-war period were completely gone. No difference existed between the tactical line of Lenin and Trotsky. Their rapprochement, already noticeable during the war, was completely and unquestionably determined, from the moment of the return of Lyev Davidovich (Trotsky) to Russia. After his very first speeches all of us old Leninists felt that he was ours. (Quoted in L. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, p. 814.)
As soon as he had officially joined the party, at the Sixth Congress, Trotsky was elected to the Central Committee. Trotsky’s enormous popularity with the Bolshevik workers, and his rapid advance, was resented by the ‘Old Bolsheviks’ who showed their irritation by opposing Lenin’s proposal to include him on the editorial board of Pravda – a decision which was reversed in September when he was elected to the editorial board. As Lenin states in the document quoted above (which, incidentally, was not published in the USSR until 1962), Trotsky did not enter the Bolshevik Party alone, but with an important group, the Mezhrayntsi, or Inter-District Group. In point of fact, in agreement with Lenin, he delayed joining the Bolshevik Party in order to win over this group, which finally joined the Bolsheviks after the July Days. At the Sixth Congress, where the Mezhraiontsy joined the Bolshevik Party, and Trotsky was elected to the Central Committee, his was one of the four names (with Lenin, Kamenev, and Zinoviev) which was announced as having polled the highest number of votes (131 out of 134).
The only reason why Trotsky delayed formally joining the Bolsheviks after his return was that, with Lenin’s full agreement, he was working to win over the Mezhraiontsy group. The ‘Mezhdurayonny komitet’, or ‘Mezhraionka’ as it was popularly known, means the ‘Inter-District Committee’. This was not a new organisation, as we have already seen. It was formed in 1913, and kept up its revolutionary activity throughout the war. Its membership was made up mainly of revolutionaries who, for different reasons, did not feel inclined to join Lenin’s party. There were left Menshevik Internationalists, Vperyodists, Bolshevik Conciliators, supporters of Trotsky, and individual leftists, many of them very talented people who later played an important part in the revolution and occupied leading positions in the Soviet government. Such men were Lunacharsky, the first People’s Commissar for Education and Culture; Adolf Joffe, the Soviet diplomat who later committed suicide in protest at Stalin’s usurpation of power; Volodarsky and Uritsky, two important Bolshevik leaders in Petrograd, who are not better known because they were assassinated early on by Left SR terrorists; Ryazanov, the well-known writer; Pokrovsky, the historian; Manuilsky, Yurenev, and many others. In February 1917 they were a significant force with 4,000 members in Petrograd.[3] Their addition to the party was an important development, as Lenin later acknowledged.
From the moment of Trotsky’s return in May, as soon as he saw the fundamental identity of views, Lenin saw the possibility of a partnership that would bear important fruit. The two men held discussions, in which it was decided that Trotsky should delay joining the Bolsheviks until he had first won over the Mezhraiontsy. This was no easy task, in view of all the past frictions and suspicions. Later, in his evidence before the Dewey Commission, Trotsky explained the circumstances:
Trotsky: I was working together with the Bolshevik Party. There was a group in Petrograd which was the same, programmatically, as the Bolshevik Party, but organisationally independent. I consulted Lenin about whether it would be good that I enter the Bolshevik Party immediately, or whether it would be better that I enter with this good workers’ organisation which had three or four revolutionary workers.
Goldman: Three or four?
Trotsky: Three or four thousand revolutionary workers. We agreed that it would be better to prepare for a merger of the two organisations at the Communist Party Congress. Formally, I remained in that organisation and not in the Bolshevik Party, until August, 1917. But the activity was absolutely identical. This was done only to prepare for a merger on a larger scale. (The Case of Leon Trotsky, p. 21.)
On 10 May, as if to underline the importance he attached to this question, Lenin himself attended a meeting of the Mezhraiontsy and took the extraordinary step of offering them a seat on the editorial board of Pravda and on the organisation committee of the forthcoming party congress. (See EH Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, vol. 1, p. 99.) In connection with this, he wrote:
In compliance with the decision of the All-Russia Conference, the Central Committee of our Party, recognising the extreme desirability of union with the Inter-District Organisation, advanced the following proposals (they were first made to the Inter-District Organisation only in the name of comrade Lenin and a few other members of the Central Committee, but were subsequently approved by the majority of the members of the Central Committee):
“Unity is desirable immediately.
“The Central Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party will be asked to include a representative of the Inter-District Organisation on the staff of each of the two papers (the present Pravda, which is to be converted into an All-Russia popular newspaper, and the Central Organ to be established in the near future).
“The Central Committee will be asked to set up a special Organising Committee to summon a Party Congress (in six weeks’ time). The Inter-District Conference will be entitled to appoint two delegates to this committee. If the Mensheviks, adherents of Martov, break with the ‘defencists’, it would be desirable and essential to include their delegates on the above-mentioned committee.
“Free discussion of controversial issues shall be ensured by the publication of discussion leaflets by Priboi Publishers and by free discussion in the journal Prosveshcheniye (Kommunist), publication of which is being resumed”. (LCW, The Question of the Internationalists, 31 (18) May, 1917, vol. 24, pp. 431-32.)
Lenin’s anxiety to win over the Mezhraiontsy was not at all accidental. The experience of the past few weeks since the February overturn had convinced him of the need for a radical renewal of the Bolshevik Party from top to bottom. He needed allies on the left who would act as a counterbalance to the conservatism of the ‘Old Bolsheviks’. His main hope lay in the rank-and-file Bolshevik workers and, especially, the influx of fresh new elements from the youth, the factories, and the barracks. But that was insufficient. He needed experienced people, theoreticians, propagandists and writers who would play a role in shaking up the leadership, fighting routine, and imprinting a clearly revolutionary line on the party’s activity.
The Mezhraiontsy responded to Lenin’s initial overtures with a certain reserve. Not until the summer was the ground sufficiently prepared for the Mezhraiontsy to join the Bolsheviks, which they finally did at the Sixth Congress. However, even before they formally merged, the two organisations worked closely together. On the All-Russian Congress of Soviets held in the beginning of June, which was solidly dominated by the Mensheviks and SRs, the celebrated English historian of the Russian Revolution, E.H. Carr, writes:
Trotsky and Lunacharsky were among the ten delegates of the ‘united social democrats’ who solidly supported the Bolsheviks throughout the three weeks of the congress. (E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, vol. 1, p. 100.)
In order to speed up the accession of the Mezhraiontsy to the Bolshevik Party, which was opposed by some of the Mezhraiontsy leadership, Trotsky wrote in Pravda the following statement:
There are in my opinion at the present time [i.e., July] no differences either in principle or in tactics between the Inter-District and the Bolshevik organisation. Accordingly there are no motives which justify the separate existence of these organisations. (Quoted in L. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, p. 811.)
Following in the time-honoured tradition of Stalinist falsification, the Istoriya KPSS dishonestly describes it as a group which “vacillated between Menshevism and Bolshevism” but adds, without explanation, that “in the summer of 1917, it entered the ranks of the Bolshevik Party”. (Istoriya KPSS, vol. 2, pp. 657-58, note.) Two years after the revolution, Lenin wrote that in 1917 “Bolshevism drew to itself all the best elements in the currents of socialist thought that were closest to it”. To whom do these lines refer? The only other possibility would be the Left Menshevik group of Larin, which applied to join the Bolsheviks about the same time as the Mezhraiontsy. But Lenin’s attitude to this group was well known to be highly critical. In the same speech to the 8 October Conference, Lenin indignantly rejected the proposal to elect Larin as a Bolshevik candidate to the Constituent Assembly, describing it as “especially scandalous”. (LCW, From the Thesis for a Report at the 8 October Conference of the St. Petersburg Organisation, vol. 41, p. 447.)
This reference can only be to Trotsky and the Mezhraiontsy. The fact that no real political differences existed between the Bolsheviks and the Mezhraiontsy was shown by the fact that, when they joined the party, it was decided that the period of their membership of the Inter-District Committee should be regarded for purposes of seniority as equivalent to the same period spent in the Bolshevik Party. This indicated that the political line of the two organisations had been essentially the same, a point that was underlined in a note to the Collected Works of Lenin published during his lifetime which stated: “On the war question, the Mezhraiontsy occupied an internationalist position, and in their tactics were close to the Bolsheviks.”
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Some authors give a lower estimate, probably basing themselves on Shlyapnikov. However, Shlyapnikov’s estimate is suspect, since he displays a resentful attitude to the Mezhraiontsy, presumably because of their reluctance to join the Bolsheviks before the February Revolution. The figure of about 4,000 mentioned by Trotsky in the History, is confirmed both by E.H. Carr in The Bolshevik Revolution, vol. 1, p. 102 and in a note to Lenin’s Collected Works, vol. 24, p. 601.