In recent years there have been many attempts to downgrade and belittle the role of the Bolsheviks in the workers’ movement in Russia. One of the more serious studies is Robert McKean’s book, which is very well documented, and is intended to correct the excessively rosy and simplistic picture of the old Stalinist histories which present the history of Bolshevism as a kind of triumphal march. The party made no mistakes, was always on the ascent, always in the leadership of every strike and demonstration, and so on. From such fairy tales, one can learn nothing about the way in which the Bolshevik Party was really built. Thus, the road is blocked, not only to the past, but to the future. It is necessary to understand the truth about the past in order to learn from it. While McKean’s case is probably overstated, there is no reason to doubt that the party was in very poor shape at the beginning of the war. This is hardly surprising. The objective conditions were extremely difficult at this time, McKean admits:
At the advanced Petrograd Metals plant, one memoirist recalled, the workers exhibited indifference in the first year of the war to the Bolsheviks’ anti-war case. At other cardinal defence enterprises such as Erikson and Putilov, operatives voluntarily surrendered as much as a fifth of their weekly wage in order to provide support to the families whose breadwinners had been summoned to military duty. Work stoppages remained extremely rare occurrences until the summer of 1915. Bolshevik leaders themselves privately, if indirectly, admitted the existence of this impediment. In the spring of 1915, for example, they acknowledged their “inability to attract the masses to the socialist camp by demonstrations against the war”.
He quotes one unnamed worker from the red Vyborg district of Petrograd as recalling that “in the factories… in the first year of the war the mood was not particularly revolutionary.” And concludes that:
At most the party’s membership [in Petrograd] did not exceed 500. In the almost complete absence of all city or even district networks, consistent planned activity or the formulation of an agreed strategy proved a chimaera. Agitational work could take place only on the most restricted scale. In all the constraining circumstances the outreach of the 25 or so anti-war leaflets published to the summer of 1915 and the unknown copies of Sotsial-Demokrat reaching the city was likely to have been inconsiderable.
Arguing against Soviet historians who claimed that at the outset of the war the five Bolshevik deputies reconstituted along with Kamenev the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee, McKean states that he has found no corroboration of this assertion in the relevant Okhrana files. There is no reason to doubt this, since the arrest of Kamenev along with the Duma deputies, and the general disorganisation of the party committees, would have cut short its activities, if it ever had any. The absence of leadership, either from the leading bodies in Russia or from abroad, meant that everything depended on the initiative of the worker-Bolsheviks in the factories. The difficulty in getting precise information about the work of these unnamed heroes and heroines is self-evident, above all in conditions of strict clandestinity. But this lack of information does not mean that these people did not exist. The point is made by McKean who writes:
In the absence of effective leadership from abroad or from the PK [Petersburg Committee], revolutionary strategy and tactics were at the discretion of rank-and-file socialist militants throughout the first year of the war.
In preparation for 9 January, 1915, the Petersburg Committee succeeded in putting out a leaflet calling for a strike on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday. McKean compares the poor response to the situation after the Lena shootings in 1912. But that was the beginning of an upturn in the class struggle, when the workers were recovering from the effects of the defeat of the 1905 Revolution. In the given context of the war and patriotic reaction, the very fact of producing a leaflet at all may be considered a success. 2,000 workers responded to the call and downed tools – a small result when compared to the pre-war figures, but still a significant one in the given situation. All that it shows is that the masses still had their heads down. The orgy of reaction had still not exhausted itself:
Sweeping police raids and detentions towards the end of April put paid effectively to revolutionaries’ plans for 1 May. “The work of local Leninists,” the police reported at the time, “is at present completely disorganised”. Although the remnants of the PK succeeded in publishing a leaflet on the very eve of the workers’ ‘holiday’, the small number of copies remained undistributed for the most part. A mere 600 workers refused to report for work on that day. (McKean, St. Petersburg Between the Revolutions, p. 368, p. 369, p. 367 and p. 370.)
However, the Okhrana’s agents spoke too soon. Leninism was by no means destroyed. The creation of a strong and disciplined centralised organisation composed of revolutionary cadres was what permitted the Bolsheviks to survive the test of fire. They alone were in a position to sustain revolutionary work in the harsh conditions of the underground. By contrast, the war utterly disorganised the Mensheviks at grass roots level. By January 1916, Martov could write in a plaintive tone: “In Russia things are going badly for us… F.I. (Dan) fears that everything that is alive is going over to the Leninists.” (Pis’ima PB Aksel’rod Yu. O. Martova 1901-1916, p. 355.) This was no accident. The organisational and political flabbiness of Menshevism (which were head and tail of the same coin) rendered them ill-equipped to cope with the arduous conditions of underground work in wartime. In any case, they had made a principle out of disbanding the illegal party organisation in favour of purely legal activities. How could such a position be justified now?
In fact, the Menshevik organisation barely existed in Russia at this time. This is acknowledged by non-Marxist writers like Robert McKean: “The Organisational Committee and the Central Initiative Group betrayed no sign of existence in this period.” And again: “Both the Mensheviks’ dearth of organisations and the ‘liquidationist’ intellectuals’ aversion to strikes as a form of labour protest resulted in their complete indifference to the possibility of utilising the political anniversaries.” (RB McKean, St. Petersburg Between the Revolutions, p. 371.)
The lack of an organised expression of Bolshevism does not tell us everything. If Bolshevism had been completely liquidated during the war, how was it possible for the party to recover so quickly after February? How did it succeed in moving to take power in only nine months? If one accepts McKean’s case at face value, there is no answer to this riddle. But there is, in fact, a very simple answer. In the period before the war, four-fifths of the organised workers supported the Bolsheviks. Many of them were not active in party committees, but readers of Pravda who collaborated with the Bolsheviks in one way or another. Many hundreds of thousands more would have been touched by the agitation and slogans of the Bolsheviks. The idea of the party lived on in their minds even though they had their heads down. This was the real capital of the party, that re-emerged as conditions changed and played a key role in the events of February 1917. In the same letter to Shlyapnikov, where he underlines the difficult position the party found itself in after the arrest of the Duma deputies, Lenin points out the real strength of Bolshevism – in that layer of revolutionary workers educated by the party in the period 1912-14:
At all events, the work of our Party has now become 100 times more difficult. And still we shall carry it on! Pravda has trained up thousands of class-conscious workers out of whom, in spite of all difficulties, a new collective of leaders – the Russian CC of the Party – will be formed. (LCW, To A.G. Shlyapnikov, 28/11/1914, vol. 35, p. 175, my emphasis.)
Subsequent events proved Lenin to be correct, despite Robert McKean’s attempts to show the opposite. In August 1915, when the tide was already beginning to turn in Russia, Lenin wrote to Shlyapnikov, calling for the rebuilding of the organisation:
It would be extremely important for leading groups to come together in two or three centres (most conspiratively), establish contact with us, restore a Bureau of the Central Committee (one exists, I think, in Petersburg already) and the CC itself in Russia. They should establish firm ties with us (if necessary, one or two persons should be brought to Sweden for this purpose). We would send news-sheets, leaflets, etc. The most important thing is firm and constant relations. (LCW, To A.G. Shlyapnikov, 23/8/1915, vol. 35, p. 205.)
The party still faced an uphill struggle. The party’s organisations inside Russia were badly disorganised and contacts with the exterior extremely difficult. Yet the most important thing, as Lenin pointed out in this letter, was that the party had survived, despite everything: “It is clear that the advanced sections of Pravdist workers, that bulwark of our Party, has survived, in spite of terrible devastations in its ranks.”
Lenin’s comments go right to the heart of the matter. No matter what persecution, no matter how many arrests, no matter how many police agents succeeded in infiltrating the party, Bolshevism could not be eradicated. As long as there remained a hard core of cadres, trained and educated in the ideas, methods and traditions of the party, it was invincible. Trotsky writes:
The war produced a dreadful desolation in the underground movement. After the arrest of the Duma fraction the Bolsheviks had no centralised party organisation at all. The local committees had an episodic existence, and often had no connection with the workers’ districts. Only scattered groups, circles and solitary individuals did anything. However, the reviving strike movement gave them some spirit and some strength in the factories. They gradually began to find each other and build up the district connections. The underground work revived. In the Police Department they wrote later: “Ever since the beginning of the war, the Leninists, who have behind them in Russia an overwhelming majority of the underground social democratic organisations, have in their larger centres (such as Petrograd, Moscow, Kharkov, Kiev, Tula, Kostroma, Vladimir Province, Samara) been issuing in considerable numbers revolutionary appeals with a demand to stop the war, overthrow the existing government, and found a republic. And this work has its palpable result in workers’ strikes and disorders”. (L. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, p. 62.)