In the spring Lenin finally succeeded in setting up a party school in two small rooms rented from a leatherworker in the village of Longjumeau near Paris. The aim was to emphasise the vital importance of theory for cadre building. Lenin was particularly anxious that workers and people in contact with the masses should be designated by local committees to attend the school. There were, of course, other Party schools at Capri and Bologna, but these were dominated by the supporters of Bogdanov, and it is clear that Lenin intended the school at Longjumeau as a counterweight to the latter. Lenin threw himself wholeheartedly into the enterprise, preparing his lectures with characteristic meticulousness. He gave a total of 45 lectures on political economy, the agrarian question, and the theory and practice of socialism. Zinoviev and Kamenev lectured on the history of the party. Other lectures were given by Charles Rappaport and Inessa Armand. Among the students at the school was a young worker from Kiev whom nobody knew called Andrei Malinovsky, who was an agent of the tsarist police, who reported on every aspect of the school to the Paris Bureau of the Okhrana. Curiously, this Malinovsky was no relation to the notorious Roman Malinovsky.
Although it was clearly a Bolshevik affair, among lecturers there were Bolsheviks, Vperyodists, Mensheviks, Bundists, and conciliators, but no Liquidators. This was Lenin’s idea. If possible, he would have liked to isolate the Liquidators, separate out the better Menshevik elements (especially the Pro-Party Mensheviks), and save what could be saved of the ‘centrists’ and left reformists. But history shows that most left reformists find it easier to cling to the right reformists than to go over to the openly revolutionary trend. This is true of the leaders, but not of the rank and file, as shown by the experience of 1905-6 and 1910-14 as well as 1917. Here again we have another example of the flexibility of Lenin’s tactics. His main aim, however, was to establish the Bolsheviks as a clearly defined, independent tendency. It was necessary to conduct a persistent struggle to win over the best elements in the Party. But the first condition was to organise separately as a tendency.
For this reason, Lenin was delighted when they managed to launch a new publication in Petersburg, Zvezda (the Star), with an editorial board which included the Bolshevik V. Bonch-Bruyevich, but also N. Yordansky from the Plekhanov group and I. Pokrovsky, a Duma deputy sympathetic to the Bolsheviks. But he was even more pleased with the appearance of Mysl’ (Thought) in Moscow because it was a purely Bolshevik paper. He wrote to Maxim Gorky: “Congratulate us on our own little journal in Moscow, a Marxist one. This has been a happy day for us.” (LCW, To Maxim Gorky, 3 January, 1911, vol. 34, p. 437.)
But in general there were not many happy days at this time. The unhealthy atmosphere of émigré life with its eternal squabbles hung like a leaden ball around their necks, as Lenin complained:
Living in the midst of this ‘anecdotic’ situation, amidst these squabbles and scandals, this hell and ugly scum is sickening. To watch it all is sickening too. But one must not be influenced by one’s moods. Emigrant life now is a hundred times worse than it was before the revolution. Emigrant life and squabbling are inseparable. But the squabbling can be dismissed – nine-tenths of it takes place abroad; squabbling is a minor detail. The thing is that the Party, the Social Democratic movement are developing and going forward in face of all the hellish difficulties of the present situation. The purging of the Social Democratic Party of its dangerous ‘deviations’, liquidationism and otzovism, is going ahead unswervingly, and within the framework of unity it has moved ahead far more than before. (Quoted in N.K. Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin, p. 208.)
However, in another letter to his sister Anna, he confided: “I do not know if I shall live to see the next rise of the tide.” (Quoted in R. Payne, The Life and Death of Lenin, p. 247.)
The problem with conciliationism is that politics cannot be reduced to simple arithmetic. It is not always the case that two plus two equals four. Two men in a boat, each one pulling in a different direction, is not better than a single rower who knows exactly where he is heading. The different tendencies inside the RSDLP were indeed pulling in opposite directions with completely contradictory tactics flowing from completely different perspectives and goals. The attempt to combine mutually contradictory tendencies created an impossible situation, which was soon visible to all. Heightened tensions within the party were everywhere in evidence. By May 1911, the Bolsheviks had withdrawn their representative (NA Semashko) from the Foreign Bureau of the CC. The Russian Bureau of the CC, paralysed by inner party strife, had practically ceased to exist. This was inevitable.
The unity of all the groups, achieved with such difficulty in January 1910, swiftly began to break up. As the practical problems of the work in Russia began to crop up it became ever more clear that cooperation was impossible. (N.K. Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin, p. 224.)
The January Plenum had solved nothing. Lenin urgently demanded the calling of a new Conference. But his closest collaborators were stubbornly opposed to a break with the opportunist wing of the party. Rykov, Kamenev, Zinoviev, and the other Bolshevik conciliators clung to the illusion of compromise. Lenin scornfully referred to “good intentions, sweet words, kind thoughts, and impotence to carry them into practice.” (VI Lenin, Collected Works, in Russian, vol. 48, p. 16.) Finally, on Lenin’s insistence, a special meeting of CC members was held in Paris, from 28 May to 4 June, 1911. All of the CC members based abroad turned up (except for the Bundist Yanov). Lenin, Rykov, and Zinoviev attended for the Bolsheviks; Tyszka and Dzerzhinsky for the Polish and Lithuanian Social Democrats; Lieber for the Bund; BI Gorer for the Golos people, and MV Dzolin for the Letts (Latvians). Another mixed bag! The meeting predictably got off to a heated start.
The Liquidator and Bundist representatives immediately called the legality of the meeting into question. After a sharp debate, the meeting finally accepted Lenin’s resolution that this gathering be considered as a Central Committee meeting. (See KPSS v rezoluitsiakh, vol. 1, p. 247.) It was moved that a conference be convened and a committee was set up for the purpose of arranging this. This was too much for the Mensheviks. Martov and Dan walked out of the editorial board of Sotsial Demokrat in protest. After this there was not one representative organ of the RSDLP where Bolsheviks were together with Mensheviks. The split was a fact in all but name. The Mensheviks refused to acknowledge the validity of the June meeting in Paris – a ‘private meeting’, they called it. They were implacably opposed to a conference where they feared, rightly, that they would not have a majority. Lenin, on the contrary, placed all his hopes on the working class rank and file. By this time, any further compromise was ruled out, although even now the conciliators dragged their feet, terrified of being ‘isolated’. However, Lenin, as always, was ready to draw all the conclusions from the situation. Once he decided that ‘enough was enough’, he would not be swayed. Lenin directed a withering and unremitting fire on the ‘conciliators’.
By now, Lenin had decided to push things to the limit. With the revolution entering into a new and decisive phase, any further temporising with the Mensheviks would have been clearly irresponsible. The Bolsheviks were gaining ground inside Russia, the united front with the Pro-Party Mensheviks had borne fruit with the passing over of a large number of the best worker Mensheviks to the Bolsheviks. The tide was beginning to flow in favour of Lenin once again. Those who remained behind and resisted the necessary steps, had to be abandoned. A decisive split with these incorrigible elements was now inevitable. Lenin had only gone through the experience of the January Plenum, which soon turned out to be a farce, in order to convince his co-thinkers in practice of the impossibility of union with the Liquidators. This ‘experiment’ had now to be brought quickly to a close, if irreparable damage was not to be done to the Party and the cause of the revolution. The most pressing need now was to unite the revolutionary wing of the party on a principled basis in order to take advantage of the rising revolutionary wave.
Lenin’s implacable attitude was based upon political considerations. The political evolution of Menshevism was clearly to the right. It represented a Russian variant of opportunism. Although the objective conditions in Russia, and the pressure of the revolutionary wing, compelled the Mensheviks to adopt a somewhat more ‘left’ colouration, the main content of their theory and practice was clearly anti-revolutionary: the stress on parliamentarism, the constant hankering after a bloc with the liberals, the opposition to anything that might frighten the Cadets, the demand for the winding up of all underground activity and to subordinate the party’s activities to the existing tsarist legality – how could such a policy be reconciled with Marxism? Yet, despite the obvious truth of Lenin’s argument, it fell upon deaf ears. Many of the Bolshevik Party workers saw the question in purely practical and organisational terms. One such Party ‘practico’ wrote the following about Lenin’s position at this time:
About the ‘tempest in the teapot’ abroad we have heard, of course: the blocs of Lenin-Plekhanov on the one hand and of Trotsky-Martov-Bogdanov on the other. The attitude of the workers to the first bloc, as far as I know, is favourable. But in general the workers are beginning to look disdainfully at the emigration: “let them crawl on the wall as much as their hearts desire; but as for us, whoever values the interests of the movement – work, the rest will take care of itself”. That I think is for the best. (Quoted in L. Trotsky, Stalin, p. 131.)
These lines were written by Stalin. They accurately convey the disdain for theory and the vulgar empiricism that unfortunately characterised many Party activists in Russia. In general, they tended towards Lenin’s position because it was more in tune with their conception of a disciplined, centralised party. But whereas for Lenin, the party organisation was merely a tool in the service of revolutionary ideas and theory, the committeemen, or at least a good part of them, tended to regard it from an exclusively organisational standpoint. Even after the final split in 1912, Lenin still had many problems with committeemen (and women) who, like Stalin, regarded the split as merely an émigré squabble, and an irritating distraction from practical work. In April 1912, Lenin sent a heated letter to Ordzhonikidze, Spandaryan, and Stasova, reprimanding them for their dismissive attitude to the fight against the Liquidators:
Don’t be light-hearted about the campaign of the Liquidators abroad. It is a great mistake when people simply dismiss what goes on abroad with a wave of the hand and ‘send it to hell’. (LCW, Letter to G.K. Ordzhonikidze, S.S. Spandaryan, and Yelena Stasova, April 1912, vol. 35, p. 33.)