At the Tammerfors Conference of the Bolsheviks, which took place while the Moscow uprising was reaching its bloody dénouement, the Bolshevik leaders had debated their attitude to the forthcoming elections to the Duma. The general mood was overwhelmingly in favour of a boycott. Yet Lenin struck a note of caution. When it came to the vote, two votes were cast against the boycott proposal – Lenin and Gorev. This provoked an outburst of indignation by the other delegates, which compelled Lenin to abandon his opposition. Not for the first or last time, he was forced to take into account the mood of the leading layer against his better judgement. His new stance was greeted by stormy applause, although, as he ruefully quipped, he was “retreating in full military order”. (Quoted in R. Service, Lenin: A Political Life, p. 149.)
The boycottists were strongest among that layer of committeemen, including Stalin, who was attending his first party meeting abroad, who considered that their practical knowledge of the situation in Russia was sufficient to place them on a superior plane to the party theoreticians, even to Lenin himself. In another session, the Tammerfors Conference voted for the reunification of the RSDLP. A fourth Party Congress should be convened, and preliminary measures should begin forthwith to unite the two factions on the basis of parity. Local committees should combine their activities, and committees should everywhere be elected from below and should be accountable to the lower echelons. However, democratic centralism should be applied and, once elected, the committees should be accorded “the entire fullness of power in the matter of ideological and practical leadership”. (KPSS v rezoluitsiakh, vol. 1, p. 136.)
Immediately after, meetings were held between the representatives of both tendencies, attended by both Lenin and Martov, to hammer out the obstacles to unity and convene the Fourth Party Congress. On the issue of boycotting the Duma, the Mensheviks gave way to the case for boycott, insistently put by the Bolsheviks. They were still under the impact of the recent events, and, anyway, were themselves suspicious of the Duma. However, by the time the Congress came around, they were already cooling off. After the December defeat, it was undoubtedly necessary to revise the party’s tactics to take account of the new situation. Having failed to take the enemies’ positions by direct assault, it was necessary to resort to siege tactics, making use of all legal possibilities to rally the workers around the revolutionary programme. To boycott parliament in such circumstances was a serious mistake. Trotsky points out that:
It is permissible to boycott representative assemblies only in the event that the mass movement is sufficiently strong either to overthrow them or to ignore them. But when the masses are in retreat the tactic of boycott loses its revolutionary meaning. (L. Trotsky, Stalin, p. 98.)
There were heated internal discussions on tactics in relation to the boycott question. This debate throws into sharp focus the gulf separating Bolshevism and Menshevism. The Mensheviks with their customary inclination towards opportunism rapidly drew the conclusion that the revolution was over and that it was time to turn to the parliamentary arena. However, they faced considerable difficulty in persuading the party rank and file. They also originally refused to participate in elections, but then changed their position to one of a ‘semi-boycott’, linked to the confused and essentially meaningless slogan of ‘revolutionary self-government’. Lenin scornfully denounced their vacillations. “They do not believe in the revolution and they do not believe in the Duma,” he commented. Plekhanov, now on the right wing of the Mensheviks, advocated participation without more ado.
In spite of the increasingly ferocious repression, the Party was still able to function. Meetings still took place, in which tactical questions were hotly debated. The general mood of the Party members was still strongly against participating in elections to the Duma at this stage. On 11 February, at a Petersburg united Party conference, including both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Lenin led off on the party’s attitude to the Duma. Dan and Martov, representing the Mensheviks, spoke against. A second Conference approved Lenin’s position of ‘active boycott’. In later years Lenin honestly admitted that this position was a mistake, but at the time it undoubtedly reflected the prevailing mood of the activists. The reactionary nature of the Duma was evident, not only to the Bolsheviks, but to the majority of Social Democrats. The mood of the majority of Social Democrats throughout the country seems to have been strongly inclined to boycott. The lava of revolution had not yet cooled, so that not only the Bolsheviks, but also the Polish and Latvian Social Democrats, the Lithuanian and even the normally conservative Bund favoured the boycott tactic. Even many Mensheviks were ambivalent. But this mood of the party activists was out of step with the mood of the masses.
On the dispute over participation in the Duma elections in 1906, Eva Broido recalls how the RSDLP, in effect, stumbled into the Duma, almost unexpectedly:
The Bolsheviks were against, the Mensheviks for participation. In the end they agreed that the party should participate only in the first stage of the elections – that of the electoral colleges (there was no direct vote). In this way the party hoped to exploit the elections for the purposes of propaganda and agitation, particularly among the workers. In the event things turned out differently. Where the Mensheviks had a big majority, as in the Caucasus, the party went right through with the elections and returned several members to the Duma. In addition, several members who had been elected as independents now joined the Social Democrats. The party was thus represented in the Duma and had to define its attitude to current political events.
And she adds:
Moreover – and this was contrary to Bolshevik predictions – the Duma at once became a focus of public interest and concern, even among the working class. It was no longer possible simply to ignore the Duma – and we Mensheviks were convinced that we ought to make the fullest possible use of this opportunity of publicly proclaiming our socialist message to the whole country. (E. Broido, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, pp. 130-1.)
In the spring of 1906, elections were held for the first Duma. Given the relatively wide franchise offered by the October Manifesto, there was the potential for a successful campaign by the Social Democrats. Under this system, as we have seen, the workers voted separately through the system of electoral commissions known as ‘curiae’, which elected representatives in the following way. The elections were held in three stages: first, the workers elected representatives at a factory level; the latter then elected the ‘electors’; and finally the ‘electors’ elected the Duma deputies. Factories employing from 50 to 1,000 workers elected one representative. Bigger factories elected one for every 1,000 workers, and factories with fewer than 50 workers were excluded from voting. Paradoxically, the fact that the elections were indirect, which in itself was an undemocratic feature, also gave the Social Democrats an opening which they would not have had under a more normal system of voting, since they could concentrate their energies in a campaign in the workers’ curiae, their ‘natural constituency’.
The Bolshevik position was based on the expectation of an imminent new revolutionary upturn. But that was a misreading of the situation. The more advanced workers felt the need for a revolutionary party, but the masses were increasingly falling into apathy and passivity. It is a well-established fact that the mood of the most active and militant layer of workers can often be at variance with that of the rest of the class. The advanced guard can move too far ahead of the class. This is as bad a mistake in the class struggle as would be the analogous mistake in military tactics. If the advanced guard moves too far ahead and loses contact with the rear, it becomes seriously exposed and runs the risk of being chopped to pieces. This is equally true when the most militant layer, out of impatience, misjudges the mood of the workers, or confuses its own level of understanding with that of the majority. So it was in this case.
The Bolsheviks had misread the situation, and failed to appreciate that the revolution was in retreat. As in war, so in a revolution or even a strike, it is necessary to be able to retreat in good order when the situation demands it. To sound the advance when objective conditions demand a retreat is a recipe for disaster. In the event, the tactic of the active boycott failed to have any effect. The real nature of the Duma was by no means evident to the masses. Constitutional illusions were especially strong among the peasants, who believed they could get land. But the victory of the counter-revolution and the ebbing of the mass movement meant that, for broad layers of urban petty bourgeois masses, and the peasantry, and even a layer of the working class, the Duma remained the only hope, however tenuous, for some prospect of amelioration. The fact that such hopes were devoid of any rational basis did not make them any less persistent.
So long as Lenin continued to believe in the imminence of a new revolutionary upturn, he placed all his emphasis on the goal of armed insurrection: “The revolutionary Social Democracy,” he wrote in October 1906, “must be the first to take its place in the most resolute and the most direct struggle and the last to resort to the most roundabout methods of struggle.” In other words, his attitude to participation in even the most reactionary of parliaments was dictated, not by abstract principles or dogmatism, but by the demands of the revolution. For the whole period from 1906 to the outbreak of the First World War, the question of whether the Social Democrats should participate in the elections to the tsarist Duma, elected on the basis of what Lenin described as the most reactionary electoral law in Europe, was at the heart of the controversies on tactics and strategy that agitated the Party. Years later, in his classic “Left Wing” Communism, Lenin explained his position at that time:
When, in August 1905, the Tsar proclaimed the convocation of a consultative ‘parliament’, the Bolsheviks called for its boycott, in the teeth of all the opposition parties and the Mensheviks, and the ‘parliament’ was in fact swept away by the revolution of October 1905. The boycott proved correct at the time, not because non-participation in reactionary parliaments is correct in general, but because we accurately appraised the objective situation, which was leading to the rapid development of the mass strikes first into a political strike, then into a revolutionary strike, and finally into an uprising. Moreover, the struggle centred at that time on the question of whether the convocation of the first representative assembly should be left to the Tsar, or an attempt should be made to wrest its convocation from the old regime. When there was not, and could not be, any certainty that the objective situation was of a similar kind, and when there was no certainty of a similar trend and the same rate of development, the boycott was no longer correct.
The Bolsheviks’ boycott of ‘parliament’ in 1905 enriched the revolutionary proletariat with highly valuable political experience and showed that, when legal and illegal, parliamentary and non-parliamentary forms of struggle are combined, it is sometimes useful and even essential to reject parliamentary forms. It would, however, be highly erroneous to apply this experience blindly, imitatively, and uncritically to other conditions and other situations. The Bolsheviks’ boycott of the Duma in 1906 was a mistake, although a minor and easily remediable one. The boycott of the Duma in 1907, 1908, and subsequent years was a most serious error and difficult to remedy, because, on the one hand, a very rapid rise of the revolutionary tide and its conversion into an uprising was not to be expected, and, on the other hand, the entire historical situation attendant upon the renovation of the bourgeois monarchy called for legal and illegal activities being combined. (LCW, “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, vol. 31, pp. 35-36.)
The same point was made by Trotsky: “The boycott is a declaration of outright war against the old government, a direct attack against it. Barring a widespread revolutionary revival… there can be no talk of the boycott’s success.” Much later, in 1920, he wrote: “It was an error… for the Bolsheviks to have boycotted the Duma in 1906.” And Trotsky adds: “It was an error, because after the December defeat it was impossible to expect a revolutionary attack in the near future; it was therefore senseless to spurn the Duma’s tribune for mobilising the revolutionary ranks.” (L. Trotsky, Stalin, p. 93.)
Hanging over all this discussion on the Duma was the far more fundamental question of the attitude of the workers’ party to the liberals. In the aftermath of the December events, there were clear indications of a shift in the mood of the contending classes. The workers were thrown onto the defensive everywhere. The December events also marked a decisive shift in the attitude of the liberals. The Cadets had already turned their backs on the revolution in October 1905. The Moscow uprising finally eradicated any last lingering sympathies they might have entertained for the revolutionary proletariat. Now they emerged in their true colours. The bourgeoisie to a man (and woman) united in opposition to December ‘madness’. It was, of course, not the first time in history that we have seen such a phenomenon. Exactly the same thing occurred in the 1848 revolution, as Marx and Engels explained.
The typical style of the liberals in the period of reaction was to appeal for reform to prevent revolution, calling on the state to ‘save itself’. Needless to say, such well-meaning advice was met by contemptuous guffaws from the Octobrist benches. The hypocritical whining of the liberals about the ‘excesses’ of the counter-revolution were merely intended as friendly advice to the autocracy on the best method of strangling the revolution. Quite clearly, it is far better to strangle a person in such a way that he or she makes the least possible noise and fuss. But on the need for the strangling to be carried out, there could be no two opinions! This, in essence, was the difference between the two counter-revolutionary bourgeois blocs. The Cadets began to call themselves the ‘party of the people’s freedom’. The better to deceive the people and put an end to the revolution which had terrified them. The attitude to the Cadets constituted the fundamental dividing line between the Social Democrats, the Mensheviks advocating blocs and agreements with the Cadets in the Duma, while Lenin reserved his most bitter invective for these counter-revolutionary liberals.
The counter-revolutionary conduct of the liberals was no accident. The weak Russian bourgeoisie was tied by a thousand threads to the feudal aristocracy, by marriage, social origin, or direct ownership of land. According to a contemporary study by NA Borodin, The State Duma in Figures, out of the 153 Cadets in the First Duma, 92 were of the nobility. Of these, three owned landed estates between 5,000 and 10,000 dessiatines; eight owned estates from 1,000 to 2,000 dessiatines; and 30 owned estates from 500 to 1,000 dessiatines. Thus, about one-third of the Cadet deputies were actually big landowners. (See LCW, vol. 12, p. 532, note.) How could such people offer a solution to the most pressing problem facing Russia – the agrarian question? Despite their ‘progressive’ protestations, on all the basic issues, the liberals in the Duma were far closer to the tsarist regime than to the workers and peasants.
The bourgeois liberals effectively split into two camps in the Duma, represented by the Right ‘Octobrists’ and the ‘Left’ (Constitutional Democrats, or Cadets as they became popularly known). But although they were formally opposed as ‘reactionaries’ and ‘liberals’, the differences between them were more apparent than real. In relation to the revolutionary proletariat and peasantry, they stood firmly united in a single counter-revolutionary bloc representing the interests of order and property. While enthusiastically supporting the smashing of the revolution, the latter were not averse to leaning on the mass movement to put pressure on the regime to grant concessions. But not when the masses looked like challenging them for power. The bourgeois liberals who had already sold their soul to the autocracy (alleging that it had been miraculously transformed into a ‘Constitutional Monarchy’) immediately took their rightful place in the camp of ‘parliamentary’ reaction, where they remained as His Majesty’s loyal opposition, a mere fig leaf for the counter-revolution. The question of the attitude of the Social Democracy to the bourgeois parties from this point on became the central question for the revolutionaries.