Perhaps no part of Lenin’s work has been more misunderstood than his writings on war. Lenin stood on the far left of the internationalist current throughout the war. To many, even in the ranks of Bolshevism, Lenin’s position appeared tinged with ultra-leftism at this time. The sharpness of some of his formulations provoked controversy, and some of them were later toned down or abandoned altogether. The resulting disagreements made it impossible to unite with many genuinely internationalist elements. But there were reasons for this. The collapse of the International had taken him completely by surprise. Once he understood the nature of the problem, he arrived at the conclusion that a radical break was needed, not only with the extreme right-wing chauvinists, but also with the so-called lefts (Kautsky, Haase, Lebedour). The revolutionary wing, isolated and partially disoriented in the first instance, was faced with a difficult task. It was not enough simply to ‘break with social chauvinism’ in words. It was necessary to win over the masses to the programme of genuine internationalism. But the masses could not be reached. The work of the revolutionary internationalists in most cases was, for the time being, reduced to re-educating the cadres in small circles, and waiting for a break in the situation.
It is difficult to imagine now what a shatteringly demobilising effect the betrayal of the Second International had. This was an entirely new and unprecedented situation. Everywhere the workers’ vanguard were caught off guard. For a time confusion reigned, until gradually the Internationalists began to regroup and fight back. Lenin had to re-educate the cadres in an uncompromising spirit against the poison of social-chauvinism. The betrayal of the leaders of the Socialist International in August 1914 fell like a thunderbolt from a clear blue sky. So unexpected was the conduct of the SPD’s Reichstag faction in voting for the war credits that when Lenin read the report in the Party’s official organ Vorwärts, he initially refused to believe it, attributing the article to a provocation invented by the German general staff. Nor was he alone in this. At the Zimmerwald Conference Trotsky recalled: “We thought that the 4 August issue of Vorwärts had been produced by the German general staff.” (Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary International, p. 293.) Zinoviev summed up what was the general position:
Many socialists shared the foreboding that something was rotten in the state of Denmark. But we shall not be wise in hindsight. We honestly admit: the possibility of anything remotely resembling what we witnessed on 4 August, 1914, occurred to none of us. (Ibid., p. 104.)
Axelrod described the reaction of the Mensheviks: “The German party has always been our teacher. When we got word of the German [parliamentary] fraction’s vote we couldn’t believe it.” (Ibid., p. 293.)
But it was true. Particularly shocking was the behaviour of the left Social Democratic leaders. Not for nothing did Lenin reserve his sharpest barbs for the so-called Lefts, and Kautsky in particular, during the war. Before the war, Kautsky was widely seen as the leader of the left. Lenin had considered himself an ‘orthodox Kautskyite’. Rosa Luxemburg, who knew Kautsky better than Lenin, was always more critical of him, sensing that behind all his erudite ‘Marxism’ lay a cowardly conciliator and a bureaucrat. Lenin had occasion to ponder Rosa’s prophetic warnings now:
Rosa Luxemburg was right when she wrote, long ago, that Kautsky has the “subservience of a theoretician” – servility, in plainer language, servility to the majority of the Party, to opportunism. (LCW, To A.G. Shlyapnikov, 27/10/1914, vol. 35, pp. 167-68.)
Kautsky and his followers wanted to convince the workers that the International could not function under war conditions, but that it would be revived again after peace had been restored. Such a view resembles an umbrella full of holes – useless precisely when it rains! Lenin spared no efforts to expose the role of the ‘Lefts’ and hammer home the impossibility of any reconciliation with those responsible for the greatest act of treachery in working-class history. The time for shamefaced evasions and diplomatic formulas was over. It was necessary to call things by their right name!
Keenly feeling his isolation, Lenin anxiously looked around for co-thinkers. As occurred more than once in the course of his political life, his thoughts turned to his old comrade Martov.
In private conversation Ilyich often remarked what a good thing it would be if Martov came over to our side altogether. But he doubted whether Martov would stick to his present position for long. He knew how prone Martov was to yield to outside influences. “He writes like that while he is alone,” Ilyich added. (N.K. Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin, pp. 288-89.)
But long and bitter experience of Martov’s vacillations had taught Lenin to be wary. In a letter to Shlyapnikov he welcomed Martov’s early stand against social-chauvinism, but immediately gave voice to his doubts about the man he knew so well: “Martov is behaving most decently of all in Golos. But will Martov hold out? I don’t believe it.” Time would confirm his worse fears on this score.
Lenin had a clear vision of what had to be done. The Second International was dead. All efforts to reconstitute it were in vain. It was necessary to build a new International. The message was as bold as it was simple. But to carry such a project into practice was not so simple. The millions of workers in the belligerent states still remained in the old organisations. To reach them, especially under wartime conditions, seemed an impossible task. And when we consider that Lenin’s group had by now been reduced to a tiny handful of people, with no apparatus, no money and little influence over events in Russia or anywhere else, it might appear to be sheer madness. No wonder even people who stood very close to Lenin politically were reluctant to accept all the implications of his position. No wonder he had serious difficulties in convincing even the leaders of his own party. Yet Lenin did not hesitate even for an instant. In him we see not just theoretical brilliance, not just an astonishing breadth of vision, but colossal personal courage – not the kind that explodes momentarily and then vanishes, but a dogged, stubborn determination to draw all the necessary conclusions and see things through to the end. These qualities were much in evidence during this testing time. They are shown in the following, absolutely typical lines:
This is an international task. It devolves on us, there is no one else. We must not retreat from it. It is wrong to put forward the watchword of the ‘simple’ restoration of the International (for the danger of a rotten conciliatory resolution on the Kautsky-Vandervelde line is very, very great!). The watchword of ‘peace’ is wrong: the watchword should be transformation of the national war into a civil war. (This transformation may be a long job, it may require and will require a number of preliminary conditions, but all the work should be carried on in the direction of precisely such a transformation, in that spirit and on that line.) Not sabotage of the war, not separate, individual actions in that spirit, but mass propaganda (not only among ‘civilians’) leading to the transformation of the war into a civil war. (LCW, To A.G. Shlyapnikov, 17/10/1914, vol. 35, p. 161 footnote and p. 162.)
The contrast with Martov’s Hamlet-like hesitations and doubts could not be greater. “It devolves on us. There is no one else. We must not retreat from it.” In these few lines is the essence of Lenin the man, the fighter who, once he is convinced of the correctness of a given line of action, does not look back.
But there were problems here too. Most of the young and immature forces that made up the Zimmerwald Left did not really understand what Lenin was driving at. The first task was therefore to insist on basic principles. Lenin’s method always involved an element of polemical exaggeration. He would always hammer home a particular point, and even exaggerate (as he did in 1902, when he stated, wrongly, that the working class, if left to itself, could only attain a ‘trade union’ consciousness) in order to shock people into grasping his point of view. War always mercilessly tears away all subterfuges and falsehoods and compels men and women to face the truth. Lenin’s implacable onslaught on the old leaders, on opportunism and chauvinism took on an extreme form because he was determined to leave not the smallest chink through which they could crawl back after the war. In order to carve this message on the consciousness of the cadres, Lenin did not hesitate to employ the sharpest and most extreme language. True, this created some difficulties, but he considered it absolutely necessary in order to re-educate the proletarian vanguard and prepare it for the titanic tasks that lay ahead. Lenin’s manifesto War and the Russian Social Democracy was intended to stiffen up his own ranks where there was some wobbling, as might be expected under these circumstances. Lenin’s theses on the war only reached Petersburg in September. They did not arouse much enthusiasm. Shlyapnikov states that Lenin’s revolutionary defeatism was greeted by “perplexity”. According to the Moscow Okhrana: “The war caught the ‘Leninists’ unprepared and for a long time… they could not agree on their attitude towards the war…” (Quoted in L. Trotsky, Stalin, p. 168.)
These vacillations among even the leading strata of the Bolsheviks on the vital question of the war, again explains why Lenin adopted slogans that lay them open to the accusation of ultra-leftism such as “turn the imperialist war into a civil war”, and “the defeat of Russia is a lesser evil”. Trotsky criticised Lenin’s slogan: “Turn the imperialist war into a civil war”, understanding that it could not provide a basis for conducting a broad campaign against the war that could get an echo in the masses, and was working on the possibility of a platform which could unite all the genuinely international socialists. There is no doubt that Trotsky had a point. Such slogans could never have appealed to the masses, at least not in that form and at that stage. Lenin described Trotsky’s position as “centrism” and even “Kautskyism”. This was entirely incorrect. Throughout the war, like Lenin, Trotsky maintained a consistently internationalist position. On all the fundamental positions, his position on the war and the International was the same as Lenin’s. But through the pages of his daily paper, Nashe Slovo (Our Word), which he edited in Paris, Trotsky could command a far broader audience than Lenin. Partly for this reason, he placed his emphasis differently, and posed the need for a revolutionary struggle against the war in different terms that could get an echo with at least the most conscious workers who were beginning to look for a left-wing alternative.
During the First World War, Lenin was completely isolated from the masses. The slogans he advanced at that time were not intended for the masses. Lenin was writing for the cadres. If we do not understand this, the most grotesque errors can result. Moreover, the way in which Lenin formulated the question of defeatism left a lot to be desired. Not for the first time, as we have seen, Lenin tended to exaggerate a formulation, in order to hammer home a point that had not been grasped. Endless confusion has arisen from the fact that this has not been grasped by people who have read a few lines of Lenin without grasping Lenin’s method. It is necessary to understand the concrete conditions in which these works were written and who they were aimed at. Lenin was taken aback by the overwhelming tide of chauvinism which seemed to sweep all before it. Cut off from Russia, he was also worried by the possibility of vacillations among his own supporters on the question of war and the International. It was necessary to re-establish basic principles. The stakes were very high. What was involved was the fate not just of the Russian but of the world revolution. For this reason, diplomacy and ambiguity was out of place. Krupskaya explains:
Ilyich deliberately put the case very strongly in order to make it quite clear what line people were taking. The fight with the defencists was in full swing. The struggle was not an internal Party affair that concerned Russian matters alone. It was an international affair. (N.K. Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin, p. 290.)
Part of the problem is that Lenin’s slogan, intended to educate the cadres in an uncompromising spirit of revolutionary struggle against all brands of chauvinism, was frequently presented in a caricatured form by his supporters. In an article published in Sotsial Demokrat (No. 38) Zinoviev, typically, presented it in a crude and simplistic manner: “Yes, we are for the defeat of ‘Russia,’ for that will facilitate the victory of Russia, emancipating it, liberating it from the fetters of tsarism.” (Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary International, p. 273.) As usual, Lenin’s views were wrongly expressed by his supporters, who seized upon his words (which were actually only a polemical exaggeration) and turned them inside out. The idea that a military defeat of tsarism would accelerate the process of revolution in Russia was obviously correct and was confirmed by events. But to go before the masses in Russia with the bald assertion that the revolutionaries were for the victory of the Kaiser would have been suicidal. As a matter of fact, it would have been defencism turned inside out, and would have laid them open to the accusation (used later by the Provisional Government) that the Bolsheviks were German agents.