Despite all its horrors and cruelty, war at least has the merit of exposing all that lies hidden in society and politics. All tendencies are put to the test, all pretences are rudely stripped away, as diplomatic evasions become impossible and history presents its final bill. Wars and revolutions pitilessly seek out any weakness in parties, programmes or individuals and destroy them. The patriotic wave that swept through society appeared to carry all before it. More than one former revolutionary celebrity rallied round the flag, including, of all people, the famous theoretician of anarchism, Prince Kropotkin. The advocate of mutual aid, as Lionel Kochan observes, now became the advocate of mutual destruction. (L. Kochan, Russia in Revolution, p. 177.) All the tendencies which manifested themselves in international Social Democracy were present in Russia, but with an important difference. The influence of the revolutionary wing of Social Democracy – Bolshevism – was immeasurably stronger as a result of Lenin’s stubborn struggle against opportunism throughout the whole of the previous period. By contrast, reformism, both in its right and left variants, was a weak and sickly plant. While the Bolsheviks did not entirely escape from the prevailing disorientation and suffered from vacillations, especially in the first period, they soon recovered their bearings, thanks to the implacable stand adopted from the very first moment by Lenin.
By contrast, the war cruelly laid bare the chronic ideological weakness and instability of the Mensheviks, who immediately splintered into conflicting trends. The outbreak of war caught the Mensheviks off guard. Theoretically disarmed, they split into a myriad of factions and sub-factions on the all-important war question, ranging from the ultra-nationalist Plekhanov to the left-centrism of Martov. In between there were a host of intermediate views. More than anything else, the war cruelly exposed the political and organisational helplessness of Menshevism. The intellectuals grouped around the literary journal Nasha Zarya, A.N. Potresov, E. Maevskii, F.A. Cherevanin, and PP Maslov, defended one variant or another of defencism.
The saddest case was that of Plekhanov, who went over to the extreme right wing from the outset, adopting such a rabid chauvinist stance that he remained isolated even among the Mensheviks. Just like all the other social-chauvinists, Plekhanov tried to cover up his sell-out with ‘clever’ sophisms, an art at which he excelled:
The struggle between exploiters and exploited does not cease to be a class struggle because the exploiters live on the other side of the frontier and speak another language. The proletarians of the countries attacked by Germany and Austria, are conducting an international class struggle by the very fact that they are opposing, arms in hand, the realisation of the exploiting plans of the Austro-German imperialists. (G.V. Plekhanov, Voprosy Voiny i Sotsialisma, p. 69.)
Lenin found it hard to believe what had happened to his old mentor, particularly as he had come so close to Bolshevism in the period of reaction. “Early in October,” recalls Krupskaya, “we found out that Plekhanov, who had returned from Paris, had already addressed a meeting in Geneva and was going to read a paper in Lausanne. Plekhanov’s position worried Ilyich very much. He could not believe that Plekhanov had become a ‘defencist’. ‘I just can’t believe it,’ he said, adding thoughtfully, ‘it must be the effect of his military past’.”
Once Lenin saw that Plekhanov had indeed crossed the line, he immediately decided to confront him in open debate. At first, as Krupskaya recalls, he was worried that he would not be admitted to Plekhanov’s lecture and say what he had to say – the Mensheviks might not let in so many Bolsheviks.
I can imagine how reluctant he was to see people and carry on small talk with them, and I can understand the naïve ruses he devised to shake them off. I can clearly see him amid the dinner-table bustle at the Movshovichs’, so withdrawn, absorbed and agitated that he could not swallow a bite. One can understand the rather forced humour of the remark uttered in an undertone to those sitting next to him about Plekhanov’s opening speech, in which the latter had declared that he had not been prepared to address such a large audience. ‘The slyboots,’ Ilyich muttered, and gave himself up entirely to hearing what Plekhanov had to say. The first part of the lecture in which Plekhanov attacked the Germans had his approval, and he applauded it. In the second part, however, Plekhanov set forth his ‘defence-of-the-country’ views. There was no room for doubt anymore. Ilyich asked for the floor – he was the only one to do so. He went up to the speaker’s table with a pot of beer in his hand. He spoke calmly, and only the pallor of his face betrayed his agitation. He said in effect that the war was not an accidental occurrence, that the way for it had been paved by the whole nature of the development of bourgeois society. (N.K. Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin, p. 286 and pp. 287-88.)
Lenin had only ten minutes to speak, during which he reminded the audience of the resolutions of the International Congresses at Stuttgart, Copenhagen, and Basel, and called on the Social Democrats to combat the chauvinist intoxication and strive to convert the war into a decisive fight against the ruling classes on the part of the proletariat. Plekhanov retorted with his usual irony and was wildly applauded by the Mensheviks, who were an overwhelming majority. Lenin must have felt completely isolated.
The war fever claimed other notable casualties. Potresov, like Plekhanov, capitulated to chauvinism. Another prominent Menshevik, G.A. Alexinsky, moved so far to the right that he became a White Guard after the October Revolution. His was not the only such case. However, Plekhanov’s blatant defence of social-chauvinism found no echo in the ranks of Social Democracy, and throughout the war he remained virtually isolated. Of Plekhanov’s group, McKean writes:
A paltry number of Menshevik intellectuals in Petrograd replicated Plekhanov’s outright capitulation to nationalism. His few adherents included A.I. Finn-Enotaevskii and N. Yordansky, Party Menshevik and editor of the monthly periodical Sovremennyi mir (which reprinted many of Plekhanov’s articles). An Okhrana survey of socialist attitudes to the war in January 1916 noted that the Russian supporters of Plekhanov “exerted minimal influence upon the public mood”. (R.B. McKean, St. Petersburg Between the Revolutions, p. 362.)
Far more dangerous, as Lenin immediately realised, were the disguised chauvinists, those ex-lefts like Kautsky, who enjoyed huge personal prestige and who concealed their betrayal behind a screen of hypocritical ‘Marxist’ sophistry.
On 17 October, 1914, Lenin wrote to Shlyapnikov:
Plekhanov, as I think you have already been told, has become a French chauvinist. Among the Liquidators there is evidently confusion. Alexinsky, they say, is a Francophile… It seems as though the middle course of the whole ‘Brussels bloc’ of the Liquidator gentry with Alexinsky and Plekhanov will be adapting themselves to Kautsky, who now is more harmful than anyone else. How dangerous and scoundrelly his sophistry is, covering up the dirty tricks of the opportunists with the most smooth and facile phrases (in Neue Zeit). The opportunists are an obvious evil. The German ‘Centre’ headed by Kautsky is a concealed evil, diplomatically coloured over, contaminating the eyes, the mind and the conscience of the workers, and more dangerous than anything else. Our task now is the unconditional and open struggle against international opportunism and those who screen it (Kautsky). (LCW, To A.G. Shlyapnikov, 17/10/1914, vol. 35, pp. 161-62.)
The Russian Mensheviks actually stood to the left of most other groups in the International because of the pressure of the Bolsheviks. They adopted what amounts to a centrist position but soon split into two groups. The majority of Mensheviks were closer to Kautsky’s ‘centre’ than to Plekhanov. Throughout the war, in sharp contrast to Plekhanov, they advised the Menshevik fraction in parliament to vote against military credits and maintained an ambivalent attitude to the question of defence. The ‘Organising Committee’ led by PB Axelrod, elected by the August 1912 meeting, had an ambiguous (Kautskyite) position on the war and, as ever, calling for the ‘unity’ of all Social Democrats – including Plekhanov and Alexinsky! They supported the Menshevik Duma Fraction which at first failed to oppose the war, but then opposed the war credits.
Three days after his clash with Plekhanov and in the same hall – the Maison du Peuple – Lenin delivered his own lecture. Krupskaya writes:
The hall was packed. The lecture was a great success. Ilyich was in a buoyant fighting mood. He elaborated his views on the war, which he branded as an imperialist war. He pointed out in his speech that a leaflet against the war had already been issued in Russia by the Central Committee and that similar leaflets had been issued by the Caucasian organisation and other groups. He pointed out that the best socialist newspaper in Europe at the moment was Golos (Voice), in which Martov was writing. “The more often and seriously I have disagreed with Martov,” he said, “the more definitely must I now say that this writer is doing just what a Social Democrat should do. He is criticising his government, denouncing the bourgeoisie of his own country, railing against its ministers”. (N.K. Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin, p. 288.)
Martov stood on the left of the Mensheviks throughout the war. The left wing of Menshevism was represented in Petrograd by the Central Initiative Group, which from August 1914 defended a radical internationalist stance against the war. At first, it seemed as if Martov was moving in the direction of Bolshevism, not only in his internationalist stand, but also in his opposition to blocs with the liberals.
In sharp contrast to most Mensheviks, they [the Menshevik Internationalists] adamantly refused to accept the ‘reactionary’ and ‘anti-popular’ bourgeoisie as the ally of the working class. (R.B. McKean, St. Petersburg Between the Revolutions, p. 364.)
This gave Lenin reason to hope for an alliance with his old colleague Martov, for whom he always maintained a deep personal affection to the end of his days. But, as usual, Martov halted halfway and did not go to the length of conducting a struggle against Kautsky. Nevertheless Martov and his group, the Menshevik-Internationalists, despite certain inconsistencies, held an internationalist position during the war.
Some Menshevik leaders like the Duma deputies Chkheidze, Tulyakov, and Skobelev were inclined to the position of Martov’s ‘Internationalist Mensheviks’. They advocated a campaign for a non-annexationist, democratic peace and later subscribed to the resolutions of the Zimmerwald Conference. They also supported the reconstitution of the old International. Later, with the emergence of the Progressive Bloc and the clash between the State Duma and Goremykin’s cabinet in the summer of 1915, these three parliamentary representatives had illusions (apparently shared by Martov) of the possibility of replacing the 3 June regime by a democratic republic, which would then act as a stimulus to the European peace movement. The reactionary implications of this kind of left-reformist pacifism were only revealed after February 1917 when it led the Mensheviks to support not only the bourgeois Provisional Government, but the war as well.
Trotsky, while still not formally in any faction, immediately took up a consistent internationalist revolutionary stand and tirelessly engaged in agitation and propaganda against the war and social chauvinism. From his place in exile in Paris, Trotsky succeeded in doing something which no other member of the Russian internationalist tendency achieved. With the active collaboration of his friends Monatte and Rosmer, the most outstanding leaders of the left wing in France, he published a daily paper, Nashe Slovo (Our Word). Together with Martov and other internationalists especially in France, Trotsky’s paper played an important role in campaigning for an International Conference, which eventually bore fruit in Zimmerwald. It used to be the fashion in the old Stalinist histories to classify Trotsky at this time as ‘centrist’. That is nonsense. Trotsky’s position on the war differed in no fundamental sense from that of Lenin. The fact that he was not yet formally a member of Lenin’s organisation reflected not political differences, but was an inheritance of the polemics of the previous period. In fact, despite some tactical disagreements and mutual suspicion inherited from the past, there was frequent collaboration between the Bolsheviks and Nashe Slovo which kept up its anti-imperialist struggle until it was finally banned by the French government when a mutiny broke out on the Russian cruiser Askold, based in Toulon, and copies of the paper were found on some of the mutineers.
As ever, what separated Lenin and Trotsky was not the political line but the question of party unity. Given the immense difficulties faced by the revolutionary internationalist wing, Trotsky considered it more vital than ever to strive to unite all those elements who maintained an internationalist position. That included not only the Bolsheviks but those Menshevik-Internationalists like Martov who had come out firmly against social-chauvinism from the beginning of the war. There were, in fact, many such people, a good part of whom later joined the Bolshevik Party and played an outstanding role. A clear example was the Inter-District Group in Petrograd (Mezhraiontsy). Lunacharsky, the future People’s Commissar for Culture and Education, was another case. He also collaborated with Nashe Slovo, and recalls not only Trotsky’s efforts to achieve unity of all the genuinely internationalist elements, but also the vacillations of people like Martov who adopted an internationalist position, but was unwilling to draw all the necessary conclusions:
We sincerely wanted to bring about, on a new basis of internationalism, the complete unification of our Party front all the way from Lenin to Martov. I spoke up for this course in the most energetic fashion and was to some degree the originator of the slogan “Down with the ‘defeatists’, long live the unity of all Internationalists!” Trotsky fully associated himself with this. It had long been his dream and it seemed to justify his whole past attitude.
We had no disagreements with the Bolsheviks, but with the Mensheviks, things were going badly. Trotsky tried by every means to persuade Martov to break his links with the Defencists. The meetings of the editorial board turned into lengthy discussions, during which Martov, with astounding mental agility, almost with a kind of cunning sophistry, avoided a direct answer to the question whether he would break with the Defencists, and at times Trotsky attacked him extremely angrily. Matters reached the point of an almost total break between Trotsky and Martov – whom, by the way, Trotsky always respected as a political intellect – and at the same time a break between all of us left Internationalists and the Martov group. (A.V. Lunacharsky, Revolutionary Silhouettes, pp. 63-64.)
The so-called Inter-District Committee (the Mezhraionka) played an important role throughout the war, which has not received the attention it deserves from historians. The Mezhraiontsy, as its members were known, dated back to 1913, when it was set up on the initiative of a 23-year old Bolshevik, K.K. Yurenev; an ex-deputy of the Third Duma from Perm, N.M. Yegorov; and the metalworker, A.M. Novoselov, a Bolshevik since 1906, who was prominent in the Metalworkers’ union in Vasil’evskii Island. Its declared aim was to achieve the ‘reunification from below of all revolutionary Social Democrats’, (that is, Bolsheviks, pro-Party Mensheviks), and to conduct party agitation in the armed forces. From the beginning, it took a principled position in relation to the war. Independently from the Bolsheviks, the Mezhraiontsy, at a meeting on 20 July, also adopted the slogan ‘war upon war’.
Robert McKean writes:
In the first six months after the outbreak of hostilities the most ‘successful’ of the revolutionary factions was the Mezhraionka. In Vasil’evskii Island an inter-party strike committee survived after the July 1914 disturbances. Sometime in the autumn it set up an illegal Social Democratic district committee which adhered to the Mezhraionka platform. Cells functioned in 11 enterprises, including the Pipes works and Siemens-Schukkert. In October in the town district a group emerged, as did circles in several plants on Petersburg Side, among which were Petrograd Engineering and Langenzippen. In Narva, where the Mezhraionka had put down no roots before the war, Bolsheviks and Party Mensheviks created a committee which won some 130 adherents, mostly in Putilov workshops. In November this autonomous organisation voted to join the Mezhraionka. The latter also possessed a press which printed five leaflets and one edition of the illegal newspaper Vperyod. As in the past, however, the Mezhraionka signally failed to penetrate the Neva or Vyborg quarters. In view of the crucial importance the Mezhraionka ascribed to the army as the key to a successful revolution, it set up a military propaganda group which managed to issue a leaflet to the soldiers. But it possessed no cells in individual Petrograd military units. By the close of the year the Mezhraionka had attracted over 300 followers. Judging from the membership of the Mezhraionka committee itself, the leadership derived from three groups at this time – students, skilled metal workers and, in particular, printers. The organisation’s expansion soon attracted retribution from the security forces. Early in February 1915, widespread arrests almost completely wiped it out, paralysing its activity for months thereafter. (R.B. McKean, St. Petersburg Between the Revolutions, pp. 373-4.)
In 1917, the Mezhraiontsy joined the Bolshevik Party, together with Trotsky, and played an important role, as we shall see later.