The leadership of the Bolshevik faction was now openly split. Their journal Proletary had a ‘narrow’ editorial board, composed of Lenin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, whose collaboration began in these years, together with Bogdanov and CC members Goldenberg and Dubrovinsky. The above-named editors met together with others in a mini-Conference in Paris in 8-17 (21-30) June, 1909. Among those present were Rykov and Tomsky, the future trade union leader from Petersburg. The aim of the conference was to discuss ‘otzovism’ and ‘ultimatism’. In open debate, Bogdanov defended his position, but was practically isolated. With the exception of Shantser, who took a conciliationist position, and two abstentions (Tomsky and Goldenberg), all the other delegates voted for Lenin’s position. The conference also discussed the philosophical views of Bogdanov’s group which were condemned. However, it should be noted that all Lenin’s positions were accepted with votes against and abstentions. Of course, there is nothing unusual about decisions being taken by majority votes. The idea that every vote must be unanimous belongs to the tradition of Stalinism, with its cult of the infallible Leader, something completely alien to the democratic traditions of Bolshevism. But in this case, the abstentions were significant in that many Party activists in Russia regarded the dispute on philosophy as an incomprehensible luxury in the difficult conditions in which the Party was now operating. For such people, to tell the truth, disputes about theory are always ‘inopportune’.
A typical example of this cast of mind was Stalin, who completely failed to grasp what Lenin was driving at. In a letter to MG Tskhakaya, he stated that empirio-criticism had good sides also, and that the task of Bolsheviks was to develop the philosophy of Marx and Engels “in the spirit of J. Deitzgen, mastering on the way the good sides of Machism”. This winged phrase, like others of the same kind that reveal Stalin’s narrow, ignorant, and crude vision of Marxism, were naturally omitted from his Collected Works, but survived in some forgotten corner of the Party archives, from whence they were extracted by the authors of the official Party history published under Khrushchev. (See Istoriya KPSS, vol. 2, p. 272, my emphasis.) In all probability Stalin had never read a single line of Mach, and, as the personification of the Party ‘practico’, was indifferent to such theoretical questions, which were regarded as an annoying irrelevance and a distraction to everyday Party tasks. The above quote represents a clumsy attempt to achieve unity by the simple device of ignoring principled questions altogether.
However, Stalin was not the only one to fail to recognise the importance of the struggle for theoretical principles. On the contrary, such attitudes were widespread in the ranks of the Bolsheviks, including Lenin’s closest collaborators. The future leader of the Soviet trade unions, Mikhail Tomsky, was against all philosophy and declared, “I have never felt nostalgic about philosophy. Those who are going into philosophy want to escape the realities.” (Protokoly soveshchaniya rasshirennoy redaksii Proletariya, p. 12.)
On 26 May, 1908, Kamenev wrote in the first version of a letter to Bogdanov:
If… I am confronted with the ultimatum of working together politically, you must approve all the steps taken by us against our philosophical opponents… of course, in the struggle of these groups I have no other way out but to withdraw from this struggle. (Pod Znamenem Marksizma, No. 9-10, 1932, p. 203 my emphasis.)
Following the line of least resistance, he advocated that the Party’s central organ, Sotsial Demokrat, should publish not only articles by those who defended dialectical materialism, but also by those who opposed it; this at a time when Lenin had come to the conclusion that a complete break with the Bogdanovites was necessary. In the summer of 1908, Lenin wrote to Vorovsky, who had worked with him in Vperyod and in 1905, in terms which make it clear that an open break with the Bogdanov group was only a matter of time. Lenin even envisaged that he might be in a minority, in which case, he would make the break:
Dear friend,
Thanks for the letter. Both your ‘suspicions’ are wrong. I was not suffering from nerves, but our position is difficult. A split with Bogdanov is imminent. The true cause is offence at the sharp criticism of his philosophical views at lectures (not at all in the newspaper). Now Bogdanov is hunting out every kind of difference of opinion. Together with Alexinsky, who is kicking up a terrible row and with whom I have been compelled to break off all relations, he has dragged the boycott out into the light of day.
They are trying to bring about a split on empirio-monistic and boycott grounds. The storm will burst very soon. A fight at the coming conference is inevitable. A split is highly probable. I shall leave the faction as soon as the policy of the ‘Left’ and of true ‘boycottism’ gets the upper hand. (LCW, Letter to V.V. Vorovsky, 1 July, 1908, vol. 34, p. 395.)
During this period, Lenin’s fortunes fell to their nadir. Although the support of the Polish and Latvian Social Democrats gave a majority to the Bolshevik positions at Party meetings, within the Bolshevik faction Lenin now found himself in a minority. Most of his closest former collaborators – Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Lyadov – were otzovists. The new generation of leaders were strongly inclined to conciliationism. Lenin, Krupskaya, and the men who were to become their closest companions in the next few years, Zinoviev and Kamenev, were compelled to emigrate to Switzerland. An inveterate optimist by nature, Lenin was not given to bouts of depression. But when he arrived back in Geneva in January 1908, the signs of strain were showing. The atmosphere of gloom and depression permeates every line of the following passage of Krupskaya’s memoirs:
Geneva looked bleak. There was not a speck of snow about, and a cold cutting wind was blowing – the bise. Postcards with a view of the freezing water near the railings of the Geneva Lake embankment were being sold. The town looked dead and empty. Among the comrades living there at the time were Mikha Tskhakaya, V. Karpinsky, and Olga Ravich. Mikha Tskhakaya lived in a small room and got out of bed with difficulty when we arrived. The conversation flagged. The Karpinskys were then living in the Russian library (formerly Kuklin’s) where Karpinsky was manager. He had a very bad headache when we arrived and kept wincing all the time. All the shutters were closed, since the light hurt him. As we were going back from the Karpinskys through the desolate streets of Geneva, which had turned so unfriendly, Ilyich let fall: “I have a feeling as if I’ve come here to be buried”. (N.K. Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin, p. 162.)
Lenin’s misgivings were understandable. The situation of the Russian exiles was far worse than ever before. Funds had dried up, creating appalling hardship for people already traumatised by mental and physical suffering. The Bolsheviks had suffered most from arrests in the period of reaction, because the Liquidators confined themselves mainly to legal activities. Their organisation had less money than the Mensheviks, who could always rely on wealthy backers from the intelligentsia. Mainly for this reason, Lenin had tolerated the continuation of the ‘expropriations’ for longer than was really justified from a strictly political point of view. In January 1908, Lenin wrote a letter to the English socialist, Theodore Rothstein, underlining the dire financial position:
The Finnish smash up, the arrests of many comrades, the seizure of papers, the need to remove printing presses and to send many comrades abroad – all this has entailed heavy and unforeseen expenditure. The Party’s financial plight is all the more unfortunate because during two years everyone has grown out of the habit of working illegally and has been ‘spoiled’ by legal or semi-legal activities. Secret organisations have had to be organised almost afresh. This is costing a mint of money. And all the intellectualist, philistine elements are abandoning the Party; the exodus of the intelligentsia is enormous. Those remaining are pure proletarians who have no opportunity of making open collections. (LCW, Letter to Theodore Rothstein, 29 January, 1908, vol. 34, p. 375.)
The acute shortage of funds meant that there was no longer any money to pay for the large number of exiles who flocked abroad. In mid-December 1908, Lenin moved to Paris with his mother-in-law and Krupskaya. The life of the exiles was even worse there than in Geneva because there were so many of them. A hardship fund was set up, but it was pathetically small and could only be used in cases of extreme necessity. Lenin eked out a living from writing articles and the small amounts that his mother could send him from time to time. Poverty, depression, and sickness were the common lot of the exiles. Some went mad and ended their lives in insane asylums, others in lonely hospital beds, or at the bottom of the river Seine. It was a frustrating and lonely time. Krupskaya recalls the case of a man who had fought in the Moscow uprising and was now living in a working class suburb in Paris, keeping himself to himself. One day he went mad and started to babble incoherently. Recognising that the delirium was brought on by starvation, Krupskaya’s mother gave the man some food:
Ilyich was white with misery as he sat beside the man. I ran off to find a psychiatrist, who was a friend of ours, and the psychiatrist came and talked to the patient and gave it as his opinion that this was a serious case of insanity brought about by starvation, which had not yet reached a terminal stage; it would develop into persecution mania, and then the patient would be likely to commit suicide. (Quoted in R. Payne, The Life and Death of Lenin, p. 240.)
Such was the fate of the Russian exiles in the dark years of the Stolypin reaction.
While the Fifth Congress marked an important step forward for the Bolsheviks, it did not alter the fact that the movement inside Russia was facing very difficult times. The Bolsheviks were gaining the ear of the most radicalised sections of the workers and youth, but the general picture was one of unrelieved gloom. The 3 June coup ushered in a period of profound reaction. In 1907, the Party’s total membership was nominally 100,000. But this figure was to suffer a swift collapse. Only in the Caucasus was the decline somewhat less steep, but that was a stronghold of Menshevism. Nominal membership of the Bolshevik organisation in Petersburg stood at 6,778 early in 1907. One year later the figure was halved to 3,000, but by the start of 1909, only 1,000 people admitted to membership. By the spring of 1910, the Okhrana put the total membership at a mere 506. (See RB McKean, Between the Revolutions, p. 53.) Police raids continued to wreak havoc on the Party’s severely depleted underground organisations. In the first three months of 1908 the police struck again, this time concentrating on Party organisers in certain areas of Moscow and Petersburg. A member of the Bolshevik committee in Petersburg was forced to admit in private that, after the spring arrests, “work in the districts almost ceased…” (Kudelli, in Krasnaya letopis’, No. 14, quoted in RB McKean, Between the Revolutions, p. 53.)
Nor does this tell the whole story. Internal conflicts and splits meant that Lenin was almost totally isolated within his own faction. After the expulsion of Bogdanov’s group, the dominant trend in the leadership was the so-called conciliationist faction, which was increasingly disinclined to follow Lenin’s lead. Many years later, Trotsky described the situation of those bleak years in an interview with CLR James (‘Johnson’):
James: How many were there in the Bolshevik Party?
Trotsky: In 1910 in the whole country there were a few dozen people. Some were in Siberia. But they were not organised. The people whom Lenin could reach by correspondence or by agent numbered about 30 or 40 at most. However, the tradition and the ideas among the more advanced workers was a tremendous capital which was used later during the revolution, but practically, at this time we were absolutely isolated. (L. Trotsky, Fighting Against the Stream, in Writings: 1938-39, p. 257.)
The accuracy of this estimate is attested to by Zinoviev, who writes:
The years of Stolypin’s counter-revolution were the most critical and most dangerous in the Party’s existence. In retrospect we can say quite unhesitatingly that in those hard times the Party as such did not exist: it had disintegrated into tiny individual circles which differed from the circles of the 1880s and early 1890s in that, following the cruel defeat that had been inflicted upon the revolution, their general atmosphere was extremely depressed. (G. Zinoviev, History of the Bolshevik Party, p. 165.)
The difficulties facing the underground Party were unprecedented. “In the course of one year after the Fifth Congress,” writes Schapiro, “in many organisations where membership had been estimated in hundreds it was now reckoned in tens.” And the same author estimates that “in the summer of 1909 only five or six Bolshevik committees in all were functioning”. (Schapiro, History of the CPSU, p. 101.) The same story is told by many different authors. “No more than five or six Bolshevik committees were still operating in Russia, and the Moscow organisation could boast only 150 members at the end of 1909,” writes Stephen Cohen. (SF Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, p. 12.)
Krupskaya recalls the position:
They were difficult times. In Russia the organisations were going to pieces. The police, with the aid of agent provocateurs, had arrested the leading Party workers. Big meetings and conferences became impossible. It was not so easy for people, who had only recently been in the eye of the public, to go underground. In the spring (April – May) Kamenev and Warski (a Polish Social Democrat and intimate friend of Dzerzhinsky, Tyszka, and Rosa Luxemburg) were arrested in the street. A few days later Zinoviev, and then N.A. Rozhkov (a Bolshevik, member of our CC) were arrested, too, in the street. The masses withdrew into themselves. They wanted to think things over, try to understand what had happened; agitation of a general kind had palled and no longer satisfied anyone. People readily joined the study circles, but there was no one to take charge of them. These moods provided a favourable soil for otzovism. (N.K. Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin, p. 183.)
With the greatest difficulty, the Bolshevik centre maintained contacts with local groups in Russia, using conspiratorial methods. Osip Piatnitsky once again found himself in charge of sending illegal literature into Russia, especially the Bolshevik journals Proletary and Sotsial Demokrat – just as in the bad old days before 1905. The external centre for this activity was Leipzig, the internal centre in Minsk. And, just as in the old times, his work was closely observed by the tsarist Okhrana, whose agent Zhitomirsky had infiltrated a key position in the Bolsheviks’ foreign organisation. The Fifth Congress had approved a new way of electing the Party leadership at all levels. Given the acute problems of security, this had to include co-option. As leading people fell victim to police raids (efficiently directed by the likes of Zhitomirsky), so new people had to be co-opted to fill the gaps.
A letter from the Urals described the situation:
Our ideological forces are melting away like snow. The elements who avoid illegal organisations in general… and who joined the Party only at the time of the upsurge and of the de facto liberty that then existed in many places, have left our Party organisations. (See LCW, On to the Straight Road, vol. 15, p. 18.)
An article in the central organ summed up the position with the words: “The intellectuals, as is known, have been deserting in masses in recent months.” Commenting on this, Lenin writes:
But the liberation of the Party from the half-proletarian, half-petty-bourgeois intellectuals is beginning to awaken to a new life the new purely proletarian forces accumulated during the period of the heroic struggle of the proletarian masses. That same Kulebaki organisation which was, as the quotation from the report shows, in a desperate condition – and was even quite ‘dead’ – has been resurrected, it turns out. “Party nests among the workers [we read] scattered in large numbers throughout the area, in most cases without any intellectual forces, without literature, even without any connection with the Party Centres, don’t want to die… The number of organised members is not decreasing but increasing… There are no intellectuals, and the workers themselves, the most class-conscious among them, have to carry on propaganda work.” And the general conclusion reached is that “in a number of places responsible work, owing to the flight of the intellectuals, is passing into the hands of the advanced workers”. (Sotsial-Demokrat, no. 1, 28). (Ibid., p. 18 in both quotes.)
This had its disadvantages, however. The Party had lost many of its most experienced people, one way or another. The new influx were mainly raw and inexperienced in underground work, which made them easier targets for the police. On the other hand, it was far easier for the police to infiltrate their agents into the underground committees, which were soon full of spies and provocateurs. In order to tighten up on security, methods of election were changed to fit the new conditions. Local organisations seem to have had different ways of electing their committees, reflecting the demands of illegality. In Moscow, instead of electing committees at an all-city aggregate, they were now elected by smaller local meetings. In the beginning there were party cells, committees, and groups in all the big factories, but as time went on and the police intensified their hunt for activists, the party committees were increasingly disrupted and the active membership reduced to a minimum expression. As a rule, district committees were supposed to meet once a month, while the executive of the DC was to meet weekly. But it is doubtful if this was really maintained in most areas. In general only small numbers were involved and those groups that remained active tended to function autonomously.
These changes, however, did little to protect the Party from the attentions of the ever-increasing network of spies and provocateurs that, in the prevailing climate of demoralisation, managed to infiltrate even the most responsible posts and committees:
The gendarmes made visible the invisible text of the letter and – increased the population of the prisons. The scantiness of revolutionary ranks led unavoidably to the lowering of the Committee’s standards. Insufficiency of choice made it possible for secret agents to mount the steps of the underground hierarchy. With a snap of his finger the provocateur doomed to arrest any revolutionist who blocked his progress. Attempts to purge the organisation of dubious elements immediately led to mass arrests. An atmosphere of suspicion and mutual distrust stymied all initiative. After a number of well-calculated arrests, the provocateur Kukushkin, at the beginning of 1910 became head of the Moscow district organisation. “The ideal of the Okhrana is being realised,” wrote an active participant of the movement. “Secret agents are at the head of all the Moscow organisations”. The situation in Petersburg was not much better. “The leadership seemed to have been routed, there was no way of restoring it, provocation gnawed away at our vitals, organisations fell apart…” In 1909, Russia still had five or six active organisations; but even they soon sank into desuetude. Membership in the Moscow district organisation, which was as high as 500 toward the end of 1908, dropped to 250 in the middle of the following year and half a year later to 150; in 1910 the organisation ceased to exist.
In early 1909 Krupskaya wrote despairingly: “We have no people at all. All are scattered in prison and places of exile.” (Quoted in L. Trotsky, Stalin, p. 95 in both quotes.) At the end of March 1910, Lenin complained: “There are few forces in Russia. Ah, if only we could send from here a good Party worker to the CC or for convening a conference! But here everyone is a ‘has-been’.” (LCW, Letter to NY Vilonov, 27 March, 1910, vol. 34, p. 415.)