As frequently happens, a serious political difference first expressed itself on a seemingly accidental secondary issue. Before being sent into Siberian exile, in February 1897 Lenin and several other leaders were allowed three days in Petersburg to put their affairs in order. They used the time to hold a discussion with leading members of the League. A heated meeting took place between them and the new leadership, who were preparing to set up separate groups for workers and intellectuals. A sharp disagreement emerged on the question of a ‘workers’ fund’ organised on non-political lines. Without denying the possibility of work in such areas, Lenin, supported by Martov and others, placed the main stress on the need to build up the League of Struggle as a revolutionary organisation. The new leadership, in effect, proposed watering down the programme of the League in order, allegedly, to make it more attractive for workers. Such a dilution of the organisation at an early stage of its development would have been fatal. Lenin argued firmly for the education of worker-cadres who should then be given key positions, but without reducing the organisation to the level of the most backward workers. “If there are any conscious, individual workers deserving of confidence,” he argued, “let them come into the central group [of the League] and that’s all.” (Quoted in AR Wildman, The Making of a Worker’s Revolution – Russian Social Democracy 1891-1903, p. 99.)
What lay behind the attitudes of the ‘youngsters’ was an opportunist desire to find a ‘short cut’ to the masses, an impatient desire to reap where they had not sown, together with a barely concealed contempt for theory. Such, in broad outline, were the common features of all the different varieties of ‘Economism’, a phenomenon which, more than a worked-out theory or policy, represented an ill-defined mood among certain layers of, particularly, the student youth which had entered the Social Democracy in the 1890s, and who lacked the same solid theoretical grounding that had characterised the earlier generation of Russian Marxists. For the first generation of Russian Marxists, economic agitation was only one part of the work, which always linked agitation with propaganda and tried to draw out the broader issues. The League had succeeded in winning over members from the old Narodnik movement by arguing a political case. On the other hand, the main task in relation to the strike movement was, while setting out from existing levels of consciousness, to raise the level of understanding of the workers and to make them realise through their own experience of struggle the necessity for a complete social overturn. Local agitational leaflets were too limited in their scope to do this. What was needed was a Marxist paper which would not only reflect the life and struggles of the proletariat but would also present the workers with a generalisation of that experience, in other words, a revolutionary political organ which would serve to unite the strike movement with the revolutionary movement against the autocracy.
It was precisely on this project that Lenin and Martov were working before they were arrested. But the new leaders of the St. Petersburg League of Struggle had other ideas. It should be borne in mind that we are dealing with a cadre organisation, still in its early beginnings, attempting to lay down basic principles both in politics and organisation – moreover, a group working in dangerous underground conditions, having only just been hit by a punishing wave of arrests. For Lenin, organisational forms were not shibboleths or mathematical axioms, but part of a living process which changed and adapted with circumstances. His stance on this issue was thus not determined by abstract principles, but by the demands of the moment.
The phenomenon we have just described was not confined to Russia. It coincided with the campaign of Eduard Bernstein in Germany to revise the ideas of Marxism. Everywhere the slogan was raised of ‘freedom of criticism’, as a guise under which to smuggle alien and revisionist ideas into the party. The same controversies began to surface in the emigration, in the Union of Russian Social Democrats, an organisation set up in 1894, mainly composed of students who had recently joined the Marxist movement. The Union was organisationally independent of the Emancipation of Labour Group, and had effective control of contacts with Russia. They were responsible for collecting funds, the print shop, organising the transportation of clandestine literature and maintaining contacts with the interior. However, in order to preserve its control of the ideological field, the Emancipation of Labour Group insisted on the right to edit the Union’s publications, including the journal Rabotnik.
With the majority of the leaders in Siberian exile, only the exiled Group for the Emancipation of Labour remained to conduct a struggle against the new trend. Towards the end of 1897 the student SN Prokopovich, who up until then had been collaborating with the Emancipation of Labour Group, began to raise similar differences. This must have been a painful blow to the Group, at a moment when at last it looked as though their collaboration with the youth inside Russia was proceeding on a sound basis. Anxious to avoid a break, at first Plekhanov adopted an unusually conciliatory tone. In a letter to Axelrod dated the 1 January, 1898, he wrote: “…We must publish his work on agitation: in my view it’s not bad, and we must encourage ‘young talents’ otherwise you know they’ll be complaining that we keep them down.” (Perepiska GV Plekhanova i PB Aksel’roda, p. 182.)
A large part of the initial friction between the two groups undoubtedly sprang from the resentment of the youth at the political protagonism of Plekhanov. They felt slighted and put down by the old timers, and resented the rigorous ideological control exercised over them. Despite Plekhanov’s attempts to be conciliatory, the conflicts became more frequent. The students soon seized on what was, admittedly, the weak side of the Emancipation of Labour Group’s activities: organisation. They began to pick holes on organisational questions, demanding to see the accounts which were certainly in a chaotic state. Having scored a point here, the youth went on to other issues. The little circle around Plekhanov found itself increasingly beleaguered on all sides. Short of funds, and heavily dependent upon the ‘youngsters’ in the Union of Russian Social Democrats for contact with Russia, the group was now in serious difficulties. The effect of the strains upon the morale and nerves of its members began to show, with increasingly tense relations between Plekhanov and Axelrod. By April 1898, there were clear signs of demoralisation, with Axelrod asking himself whether the group had any reason to exist and Vera Zasulich, alleging illness, talking about dropping out of activity.
In his biography of Plekhanov, S.H. Baron sums up the attitude of the students towards the Emancipation of Labour Group:
Was not the dedication of the Group’s principal figure, Plekhanov, to abstract theoretical and philosophical works a patent demonstration of his alienation from Russian reality? …Arguing that they had lost contact with the situation in Russia and were ill-informed concerning its needs, the veteran Marxists were disqualified from leading the movement. Even if the Group had a more realistic vision of the demands of the time, their slowness and inefficiency rendered them incapable of fulfilling the leading role to which it laid claim. While the reins continued in its hands, essential tasks could not be attended to. Those who had founded and given a great initial impetus to the movement had become converted into an obstacle. Yet they refused to make way for those who were better qualified, and who had both a clear awareness of the necessities, and the energies essential for dealing with them. Another similar accusation they made towards them was that the hypercritical attitude of the Group and its intolerance towards divergent opinions impeded the development of new literary minds urgently needed by the movement… Organising the opposition to the veterans, attacking their prerogatives, showing scant respect for their authority, the critics unleashed a kind of guerrilla war against the Group. What they clearly intended was to reduce the power of the veterans, and maybe they even thought about displacing them completely and themselves taking over the leadership of the movement.
To some extent, the tensions between the Emancipation of Labour Group and the newer generation of young people from Russia were comprehensible. Having conducted a stubborn struggle for Marxist theory, Plekhanov was reluctant to take a chance on allowing the newcomers to participate in literary and theoretical work. The subsequent political evolution of the latter showed that Plekhanov had good grounds for apprehension. On the other hand, Plekhanov was not the easiest individual to work with. His aristocratic aloofness and lack of sensitivity rankled and gave cause for resentment, especially among younger colleagues whose feathers he systematically ruffled. Not for nothing did the young Trotsky, who later also fell foul of the old man, characterise him as maître de tous types de froideur (past master of all shadings of coldness). However, what lay behind this campaign was the egotism of the intelligentsia, aggravated by the usual frustrations, personal conflicts and exaggerations of exile life. On the other hand, the contempt for theory, and demagogic appeals for ‘practical politics’ and ‘activity’ flowed from the arrogance of the intellectuals, which served for a fig leaf to cover up their profound ignorance. Baron summarises Plekhanov’s views on these people thus:
Their preoccupation with matters of practical administration characterises them as mere bureaucrats, men lacking in revolutionary passion, and with too narrow a spirit to be able to respond to the grandiose perspectives of the movement. (S.H. Baron, Plekhanov, pp. 254-55.)
As usual, Vera Zasulich attempted to conciliate between Plekhanov and ‘the youth’. But by the end of 1897, things took a serious turn. Until then, the conflicts between the Union and the Emancipation of Labour Group had been mainly confined to organisational, rather than political questions. But the recent appearance of the journal Rabochaya Mysl’ (Workers’ Thought) brought about a radical change in the situation.