Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s elder brother Alexander, was hanged for an attempt on the life of Tsar Alexander 3rd in March 1887 when Lenin was just seventeen and this, combined with political activity by Lenin himself, meant he was excluded from all Russian universities. Lenin’s intellect, his single-mindedness and determination were made clear when, in 1891, after a period of respectability, the Tsarist police agreed to his request to take the final law examinations at an imperial university (St Petersburg). Normal preparation for these examinations was four-years’ full-time study. Lenin’s situation meant he had just eleven months to prepare and had to study alone at home. Lenin took his examinations during the illness and final days of his younger sister, Olga, who died of typhoid on the very day that four years earlier Alexander had been executed. Lenin passed each of the thirteen examinations with the highest grade, and achieved the highest aggregate mark in his class[1].
By 1895, Lenin was living in St Petersburg, a full-time revolutionary leading a group of about a dozen (including his future wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya), which had established links with militants in many of the workers’ districts[2]. In the November of that year, a newly-established group of SDs led by Julius Martov fused with the so-called ‘veterans’. Martov, three years Lenin’s junior, a gifted writer and dedicated socialist, was to be Lenin’s closest collaborator for the next seven years[3].
On 19 December, a meeting of Lenin and others to discuss the first issue of a Marxist newspaper, Rabocheye Dyelo (The Workers’ Cause), was raided by the police who found the material written for the journal. The participants were arrested for possession of illegal literature. By early January, Martov and the other members of the St Petersburg group had also been rounded up. All were held in prison over a year for interrogation, and in January 1897, Lenin, Martov and the other members of the group were sentenced to three years exile in Siberia[4].
It took nearly eight weeks to reach the village of exile, Shushenskoye, but, despite the physical isolation, Lenin’s day-to-day conditions allowed him to write a number of important works including The Tasks of the Russian Social Democrats[5] (Autumn 1898) and A Draft Programme of Our Party[6] (end of 1899). Lenin was able to keep abreast of events in Russian Social Democracy (SD), and communicate his opinions to its leaders, including those outside Russia. He also wrote and prepared for publication, a major book, The Development of Capitalism in Russia[7] (1899), probably the best analysis of capitalism emerging from feudalism in the literature of Marxism. Lenin emphasised Russian internal economic development to the virtual exclusion of foreign investment, whether industrial or finance capital because, at that time, he was seeking to show that capitalism would inevitably arise in Russia as part of the natural economic processes in the countryside[8],[9]. This was in marked contrast to Trotsky who, as will be shown, emphasised the relative importance of foreign investment in the growth of modern industry in Russia, and made it a key feature of his analysis.
At this stage of his development, Lenin was already an important figure in the internal life of Russian SD as an exponent of the orthodox, or “classical”, Marxism of the pre-1917 leaders of European SD, such as Kautsky. Just how important was demonstrated during the period of his arrest and exile when a reformist current (Economism), supported by Russian SDs who believed their main activities should be organising strike support funds and workers’ self-help circles, began to crystallise around the newspaper Workers’ Thought which promoted economic activity as an end in itself. With Lenin in Siberia, the fight against Economism was left to Georgy Valentinovitch Plekhanov, a brilliant Marxist theoretician with a European-wide reputation, who had made Marxism intellectually respectable in Russia, and who, through his writings, was the acknowledged teacher of all the leaders of the new generation of Marxists now coming to the fore in Russia. However, on its own, the Emancipation of Labour Group singularly failed to halt the new reformist current, and it was not until the re-entry into the struggle of Lenin and Martov, that the balance was tipped decisively against reformism.
During Lenin’s exile, the First Congress of Russian SDs was held in Minsk in March 1898, attended by nine delegates representing groups from Moscow, Kiev, St Petersburg and Yekaterinoslav, as well as The Workers’ Journal group and a Jewish Social Democratic organisation, the Bund. Within weeks, five of the nine delegates and some 500 SDs nationally had been arrested[10]. To Lenin, the outcomes of the Congress demonstrated the impossibility of having the Social Democratic organisational centre inside Russia, and he called for this to be located abroad, in a country where conditions permitted continuity of leadership and relative freedom of the press.
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Trotsky, On Lenin, George Harrap and Co., London, 1971, p167-169.
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Cliff, 1975 Lenin, Building the Party, Pluto Press, London, 1975, p52
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Woods, A., Bolshevism the Road to Revolution, Wellred Publications, London, 1999, p80
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Woods, A., op cit, p90
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Lenin, V.I., The Tasks of the Russian Social Democrats, 1897, CW 2:323-347
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Lenin, V.I., A Draft Programme of Our Party, 1899, CW 4:227-254
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Lenin, V.I., The Development of Capitalism in Russia, 1899, CW 3:21-607
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White, J.D. Lenin, The Practice and Theory of Revolution, Palgrave, 2001, p43
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Harding, N., Lenin’s Political Thought, Vol 1 Theory and Practice of the Democratic Revolution, Macmillan Press, London, 1977, p87
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Harding, N., op cit, p139