9 January, 1905

With these words, the working class of Russia made its first decisive entrance upon the stage of history, appealing to the clemency of the Tsar, the ‘Little Father’, with a petition in its hands and a priest at its head. Eleven months later, the same working class rose against the autocracy, arms in hand, under the leadership of a Marxist party. In the intervening months, the first Russian Revolution unfolded on an epic scale, involving every layer of the proletariat and all other oppressed layers of society, passing through every imaginable phase of struggle and utilising every conceivable fighting method, from economic strikes and petitions to the authorities through the political general strike and mass demonstrations, to an armed insurrection. The 1905 Revolution already revealed, albeit in an embryonic fashion, all the basic processes which were to be repeated on a higher scale 12 years later. It was a dress rehearsal, without which the final victory of the proletariat in October 1917 would have been impossible. In the course of 1905, all ideas, programmes, parties, and leaders were put to the test. The experience of the first revolution was decisive for the future evolution of all the tendencies in Russian Social Democracy.

Yet the truth is that the beginning of the revolution found the Party in a lamentable state. On the eve of 1905 the Party was seriously weakened by splits and arrests. The internal faction fight had paralysed its activities for many months. The activists inside Russia were confused and disoriented. Having lost control of the Party centre abroad, the Bolsheviks were deprived of an organ, until the first issue of Vperyod came out in December 1904. An acute shortage of funds meant that even Vperyod led a precarious existence. The Mensheviks had more resources, but were thinner on the ground in the interior, with the exception of certain areas such as the South and the Caucasus, but there too, they were in a relatively weak position. Given the nature of underground work, it is very difficult to estimate the exact strength of the Bolsheviks at this time. The St. Petersburg Party organisation did not formally split until December 1904, when the Mensheviks broke away. Up to that time, Lenin’s supporters had been in the ascendant. But the internal struggle had a damaging effect on the Party’s work, turning it inwards. This is reflected in the number of Bolshevik leaflets issued in Petersburg in 1904: only 11 for the whole year, as against 55 in 1903 and 117 in 1905. (See D. Lane, The Roots of Communism, p. 71.)

In general, the Bolshevik organisation in Russia in the second half of 1904 was in a poor condition. Many of the full-timers, as we have seen, did not really understand the split and were badly shaken by the defection of the conciliationist Central Committee. Despite encouragement and insistence from Lenin, they tended to lag behind the Mensheviks, who were now on the offensive, sending large numbers of agents and money into Russia. In St. Petersburg, they soon gained the upper hand over the Bolshevik-dominated committee. The mistakes and general inertia of the committee caused increasing discontent among the St. Petersburg workers, who were gradually turning to the Mensheviks. The Narva committee passed a resolution expressing its “disinclination to continue working under the leadership of the St. Petersburg committee”. The Vasiliev Ostrov committee passed a vote of “complete lack of confidence” in the Bolshevik-led committee. The Narva, Neva, Vasiliev Ostrov, and ‘Petersburg Side’ sections, representing the bulk of the workers, broke away and declared for the Mensheviks. By December, they had set up a separate committee. Two rival committees continued to exist in St. Petersburg right up to the Stockholm Congress of 1906.

The loss of a number of key areas of St. Petersburg was a body blow to Lenin. It deprived the Bolsheviks of key points of influence and allowed the Mensheviks to get a head start in the stormy events of the following months. To make matters worse, it was clear that the losses were mainly the result of the deficiencies of the local Bolshevik leadership, the quality of which was shown by the stream of complaining letters sent to Lenin. He must have torn his hair out when he read the tearful reports of his principal agent in St. Petersburg, Rosalia Zemlyachka:

No end of Mensheviks have flocked into Russia. The Central Committee has managed to turn many people against us. There are not enough forces to carry on the fight and consolidate positions. Demands for people are coming in from all over. It is imperative to make a tour of the committees immediately. There is no one who can go. I am neglecting the Bureau and am absorbed in local work. Things couldn’t be worse. We need people. Everybody is asking. There is no one to work with…

And the catalogue of complaints continues:

We are running the risk of losing one city after another for the lack of people. Every day, I get heaps of letters from various places, imploring [us] to send people. Just now I got a confused letter from Yekaterinoslav. They write that unless we send people and money at once, we shall lose Yekaterinoslav. But there are no people: one after another are retiring and no new ones arrive. Meanwhile the Mensheviks have consolidated their positions everywhere. They would be easy as can be to drive out if only we had people. The Bureau is a fiction since we’re all busy with local affairs.

And these lines were written on 7 January, 1905, two days before Bloody Sunday. The constant complaints about a ‘lack of people’ showed up the ingrained lack of confidence of the committeemen and women in the workers. Instead of bringing new blood onto the committees, co-opting the best elements of the workers and the youth, they sought easy solutions, demanding more full-timers from abroad. In every line of these letters, one sees a complete inability to relate the work of the leading circle with the living forces of the working-class movement. Commenting on the situation, Litvinov wrote to Lenin:

The trouble is that she [Zemlyachka] does not in the least realise in what a critical and sorry state we are. The periphery, if not everywhere against us, is hardly anywhere for us. The bulk of the party workers still think that we are a bunch of disorganisers without any kind of backing, that since the reconciliation [of the Central Committee and the Mensheviks] the attitude of the committee has changed, that all our efforts are but the death throes of the Bolsheviks. No conferences (least of all secret ones), no agitation will change this widespread view. I repeat, our situation is utterly shaky and precarious. We can get out of it only by 1) immediately calling a congress (not later than February) and 2) immediately starting a paper. Without the speediest fulfilment of these two conditions, we are going to certain ruin, and with giant steps, too… Petersburg we shall probably have to lose. Swarms of Mensheviks have arrived there… We ought to mobilise our forces for Petersburg, but who do we get there?

The Bolsheviks were in a mess, but in fact the position of the Mensheviks was not much better. Neither of the two factions had the support of the workers.

The Social Democratic organisation in St. Petersburg prior to January 1905, by almost any criteria, was weak. In December 1903, the joint Social Democratic organisation had about 18 circles in the factories, and membership of circles was from seven to ten, which would give a total worker membership of not more than 180. If the students and intelligentsia had about the same, as seems likely, total membership would have been 360. During the winter of 1904 the Committee’s membership and activities declined, and the links with abroad were weak or non-existent… The same correspondent says that the Mensheviks too were losing support: in one region where they had 15 to 20 circles, by December 1904 they had only four or five.

In his memoirs, the leading Menshevik PA Garvi describes the position in Kiev on the eve of 1905:

A strange dearth of people in the organisation. A remoteness from the working masses and their daily interests. A meagre organisational life in comparison with the recent past – that is what struck me in Kiev, suggesting melancholy comparisons with the past, with the ebullient life of the Odessa organisation of the 1901 and 1902 period. There was the Kiev committee; there were sector committees; in the sections, there were propagandists conducting propaganda circles, usually leaflets were distributed through the circles, that was about all.

Getting ahead of myself I will say that during all of 1905 in Kiev, in Rostov and in Moscow daily we came up against one and the same phenomenon: in the party organisations were gathered mostly callow youths, hotheaded and resolute but weakly linked to the working masses and uninfluential in the factories. The old social democrats among the workers – the real vanguard of the advanced workers formed in the period of propaganda and of the so-called Economism – these old workers, for the most part, stood aside. In Kiev, Rostov, and Moscow and right up to the October strike I – and not only I – had to resort to more or less artificial methods to draw the ‘oldsters’ into active party work. We arranged special meetings and evening parties with them, we reasoned with them, but they went into party work reluctantly and looked upon our organisation and our working methods with mistrust. (Quoted in S.S. Schwarz, The Russian Revolution of 1905 the Workers’ Movement and the Formation of Bolshevism and Menshevism, p. 54, pp. 54-55, p. 55, p. 72 and p. 57.)