At the first sound of the drum the revolutionary movement died down. The more active layers of the workers were mobilised. The revolutionary elements were thrown from the factories to the front. Severe penalties were imposed for striking. The workers’ press was swept away. Trade unions were strangled. Hundreds of thousands of women, boys, peasants, poured into the workshops. The war – combined with the wreck of the International – greatly disoriented the workers politically, and made it possible for the factory administration, then just lifting its head, to speak patriotically in the name of the factories, carrying with it a considerable part of the workers, and compelling the more bold and resolute to keep still and wait. The revolutionary ideas were barely kept glowing in small and hushed circles. In the factories in those days nobody dared to call himself a ‘Bolshevik’ for fear not only of arrest, but of a beating from the backward workers.
– Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution
As soon as war was declared, the regime clamped down hard. In the first months of war, the Party was decimated by arrests. The Bolsheviks once again bore the brunt of the repression. Almost overnight the fortunes of the Party suffered the most abrupt and brutal transformation. Thousands of Bolsheviks were rounded up and dispatched to prison and exile. Many areas were smashed. Party structures disappeared. Links with the leading centres were severed. In St. Petersburg alone over a thousand party and union members had just been arrested for participation in the July general strike. The first wave of mobilisations eliminated many more party activists, especially the youth. The closure of Pravda was the green light for a general witch hunt against the left and progressive press. Most of the central committee members were sent to Siberia. Many of the leaders were in foreign exile. Lenin was caught in Austrian Poland at the outbreak of war and, to avoid being interned by the Austrian authorities, moved to Berne in Switzerland where he remained until the outbreak of the February Revolution. But in the dark days of 1915 such things seemed relegated to a distant and uncertain future. Here he began the painful task of regrouping the Party’s shattered forces, mostly in emigration, and above all concentrating on the ideological rearmament of the cadres on the basic position of war, revolution, and internationalism.
The blow was made much worse by the unexpected collapse of the International. The sell-out of the leaders of the International Social Democracy badly affected morale. Moreover, the isolation of the exiled leaders was far more terrible than anything hitherto experienced. Under wartime conditions, the closure of the borders meant that for months on end no word was received from Russia. This worked two ways. The party centre abroad was completely cut off from the interior until September. Even then communication was all but impossible to maintain. Censorship and other wartime measures deprived the tiny forces of the Party that still functioned inside Russia of any information. Badayev says that conditions were far worse than in the worst period of reaction. The defeat was apparently total for reasons that were not hard to find. At the outset of war, there is almost always a wave of patriotic intoxication that sweeps through the population, dragging behind it not just the petty bourgeoisie but also backward sections of the working class. The advanced guard finds itself temporarily isolated.
After moving to Berne, where they were joined by Zinoviev, Lenin and Krupskaya began the difficult task of reorganising the work. The main problem, apart from the eternal lack of funds, was isolation. Lenin’s manifesto War and the Russian Social Democracy appeared in Sotsial Demokrat no. 33 which had a total print run of 1,500. This figure, however, gives one no real idea of the actual numbers Lenin could hope to reach with his ideas at this time. Only a handful of journals ever reached Russia. Contacts with the interior had been reduced virtually to nil. After July 1914 all communications between Russia and the West had to be conducted across the difficult far northern Swedish-Finnish frontier. In September the Bolshevik Duma deputy, F.N. Samoilov, who had been recuperating in a Swiss sanatorium at the start of the war, brought to Russia a copy of Lenin’s Seven Theses. The hope of renewed contact with Lenin gave a welcome boost to the morale of the party activists, who were only gradually recovering from the body blows inflicted on them since July.