The weakness of the Party coincided with a new upswing in the workers’ movement, which was therefore obliged to express itself through other channels. In 1900-2, the head of the Moscow Okhrana (secret police), S.V. Zubatov, hit on the idea of setting up legal unions, under the control of the police, which were allowed to function, and even elect committees, subject to police vetting, and carry out activities, provided they were of a strictly economic, non-political character. Zubatov not only established legal trade unions, under the control of the police (a tactic ironically christened ‘police socialism’ by the revolutionaries), but also went to great lengths to recruit revolutionaries as agents. He would visit them in prison, showing a fatherly interest in their welfare, brought them tea and biscuits and even Marxist literature to read. Interrogations were organised, not in prison but in the study of his home, where he tried to persuade them that the best way to defend the workers’ interest was to participate in his ‘movement’. By combining harshness with such methods, some of the weaker or more naïve elements were eventually ensnared and became informants upon their release. Once entangled, it became virtually impossible to escape. Known provocateurs were not treated very gently by the revolutionaries.
Zubatov was far more intelligent than the average tsarist police chief and his methods were quite successful for a time – too successful, in fact! In a climate of general labour unrest and in the absence of genuine mass legal organisations the workers entered the police unions in large numbers. In order to keep in the workers’ good books, over-zealous police officers even organised strikes. These unions contained thousands of workers – far more than the relatively small numbers active in the Social Democratic committees. With their customary resourcefulness, the workers turned the tables on the police, and used the opportunity to press home their demands and organise legally in the workplaces. Zubatov’s unions gave the workers a chance to organise and express their grievances. The question arose of what attitude the Social Democrats should take towards these reactionary police unions. Many years later, when the Russian workers had already taken power, Lenin gave the answer in his masterpiece on revolutionary strategy and tactics, “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder:
Under tsarism we had no ‘legal opportunities’ whatsoever until 1905. However, when Zubatov, agent of the secret police, organised Black Hundred [the Black Hundreds were a reactionary, anti-Semitic organisation used by tsarism as an auxiliary arm against the revolutionary movement] workers’ assemblies and working men’s societies for the purpose of trapping revolutionaries and combating them, we sent members of our party to these assemblies and into these societies… They established contacts with the masses, were able to carry on their agitation, and succeeded in wresting workers from the influence of Zubatov’s agents.
Lenin did not confine his remarks to the particular conditions of tsarist Russia, but laid down a general rule which governs the approach of Marxists to the mass organisations of the proletariat. In order to build a real revolutionary party, it is not sufficient to proclaim it from the street corner. It is necessary to find a road to the masses, regardless of all obstacles. It is necessary to go to the masses wherever they are:
To refuse to work in the reactionary trade unions means leaving the insufficiently developed or backward masses of workers under the influence of the reactionary leaders, the agents of the bourgeoisie, the labour aristocrats, or ‘workers who have become completely bourgeois’…
This ridiculous ‘theory’ that Communists should not work in reactionary trade unions reveals with the utmost clarity the frivolous attitude of the ‘Left’ Communists toward the question of influencing the ‘masses’ and their misuse of clamour about the ‘masses’. If you want to help the ‘masses’ and win the sympathy and support of the ‘masses’, you should not fear the difficulties, or pinpricks, chicanery, insults, and persecution from the ‘leaders’ (who, being opportunists and social-chauvinists, are in most cases directly or indirectly connected with the bourgeoisie and the police), but must absolutely work wherever the masses are to be found. You must be capable of any sacrifice, of overcoming the greatest obstacles, in order to carry on agitation and propaganda systematically, perseveringly, persistently, and patiently in those institutions, societies and associations – even the most reactionary – in which proletarian or semi-proletarian masses are to be found. (LCW, vol. 31, p. 55 and p. 53, emphasis in original.)
This was always the hallmark of Lenin’s method: absolute implacability on questions of theory and principle combined with extreme flexibility on tactical and organisational issues. The authorities attempted to construct a wall between the Marxists and the masses. The Social Democratic workers, by patient and careful work and flexible tactics, succeeded in breaking down the barriers, penetrating the unions, and fertilising them with the ideas of Marxism. Under the irresistible pressure of the shop floor, the Zubatov unions became partially transformed into organs of struggle. After the strike wave of 1903, the unfortunate Zubatov was unceremoniously sacked. Even then this movement continued to play a role. Typical of these Zubatov unions was the St. Petersburg ‘Assembly of Russian Factory and Workshop Workers’, set up by Father Grigory Gapon with police permission.
Many Social Democrats failed to grasp the necessity of participating in Gapon’s organisation in order to reach the masses. They were repelled by its reactionary features. Not for the first or last time, revolutionaries failed to understand the way in which the real movement of the working class unfolds. Setting out from an abstractly correct idea (‘The workers need a revolutionary party’) they failed to take into account the real organisation of the workers that had evolved out of concrete circumstances and which bore no resemblance to their preconceived ideas of what a workers’ organisation ought to look like. Was this union not organised by the police in order to control the working class? How could Marxists participate in such an abomination? Yet the attempts of the tiny Social Democratic circles to win the masses directly by means of propaganda and agitation alone proved futile. The organised workers were mainly skilled and experienced proletarians, mostly members of Gapon’s union, who looked askance at the beardless youngsters who were trying to teach them lessons. Their propaganda seemed to rebound like water off a duck’s back. The Menshevik S. Somov (IA Pushkin) described the situation in their St. Petersburg organisation at the start of the year:
A very sad picture emerged. Well-functioning organisations were to be found only in the Narva sector, with its 30,000 workers for example, the whole social democratic organisation consisted of six or seven circles of workers of the Putilov and the Railway Car Construction plants (five to six workers in each circle) and the work was conducted according to old-fashioned methods, with long courses in political economy and primitive culture. True, there was also a sector organisation of representatives of the circles, but what it did is hard to determine. Factory life found no echo at all in the circles. The diffuse unrest…
that was finding an expression in the powerfully developing Gapon movement in which the yearning of the working masses for broad organisation and class unity was so clearly displayed was ignored as Zubatovism. Moreover, most of the workers belonging to our circle were very young men, just out of apprenticeship and with no influence whatsoever in their factory milieu. (Quoted in S.S. Schwarz, The Russian Revolution of 1905 the Workers’ Movement and the Formation of Bolshevism and Menshevism, p. 56.)
Those active in the circles were generally the more skilled and literate among the workers, good at their work and with a strong sense of pride in it, not just in politics but in the workplace as well. It was a hard milieu to penetrate. “In those days,” wrote the Putilov worker AM Buiko, “it was felt that if a worker did not master his trade, did not become a good craftsman, then he was not a proper fellow. This point of view had its roots in the days of kustashchina, the propaganda circles, when old craftsmen regarded unskilled workers as a casual element in their midst… if a young man began a conversation with an older skilled fitter or turner he would be told: ‘Learn first how to hold a hammer and use chisel and a knife, and then you can begin to argue like a man who has something to teach others’.” (Quoted in GD Surh, 1905 in St. Petersburg: Labour, Society and Revolution, p. 73.)