Lenin’s work in exile was proceeding frustratingly at a snail’s pace, fraught with difficulties at each step. With meagre resources, Lenin struggled to keep the work going with his tiny group of collaborators in exile. Apart from Zinoviev and Krupskaya, there was Inessa Armand, G.L. Shklovsky, and VM Kasparov. These made up the ‘foreign bureau of the Central Committee’. They tried to get the Bolshevik journal Sotsial Demokrat to act as an organiser. 300 issues were distributed in Paris, 100 in London, Stockholm, and New York, 75 in Geneva and Berne, 50 in Zurich and Lausanne. A few copies were sold in Milan and Genoa. But only a small number ever reached Russia. The collection of money occupied a central place in the preoccupations of the exiles. But despite excruciating difficulties, the paper not only continued to appear, but actually managed to reflect the life of the workers’ movement inside Russia. Its columns carried news, reports, resolutions, and leaflets from the underground party. In order to solve the ever-pressing financial difficulties, a fighting fund to aid Sotsial Demokrat was organised. The party was very hard up and the life of the exiles, bitter enough in itself, was made still more unbearable by the lack of contact with the movement in Russia.
If it was difficult to produce regular publications, it was even harder to deliver them to the intended readership. Closed frontiers and associated wartime conditions rendered the maintenance of regular contact with the interior almost impossible. Police vigilance, spies, and provocation bore down on the revolutionaries on all sides, breaking up all the old channels of underground transportation. The centre for this activity now moved to Stockholm, and also Murmansk and Arkhangelsk. The Scandinavian Social Democrats helped, although because of the pro-German stance of the leadership, such assistance came mainly from the Lefts, especially the Young Socialists who took an anti-war position, though tinged with pacifism, as in all the Scandinavian Social Democratic parties (‘Lay down the weapons!’). The man in charge of the transportation was the veteran worker-Bolshevik Alexander Shlyapnikov, whose memoirs provide an important source for the Party’s activities in this period. Krupskaya, as always, played an invaluable role in organising with meticulous detail all this work and helping younger comrades understand underground methods of work. Her small team of collaborators, apart from Shlyapnikov, included Kollontai, who had recently broken with the Mensheviks and now embraced the Bolshevik cause with the enthusiasm of a neophyte, Lenin’s two sisters, M.I. Ulyanova, A.I. Ulyanova-Elizarova, L.N. Stahl, and VM Kasparov. There were not many others. The fact that two of Lenin’s sisters had to be involved indicates the extreme difficulty in obtaining trustworthy people for this activity.
Lenin continued to have trouble with his close collaborators abroad. In August 1915 another Bolshevik journal appeared, Kommunist, edited by Bukharin. But very soon, Bukharin’s ultra-leftism soon had Lenin tearing his hair out. In an angry letter to Shlyapnikov, he complained that:
Kommunist has become harmful. It has to be stopped and replaced by a different title: Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata (edited by the editorial board of Sotsial-Demokrat). Only in this way will we avoid squabbling, avoid wavering.
Having made numerous concessions to ‘the trio’ – Bukharin, Pyatakov and Eugenie Bosch – Lenin’s patience had finally run out.
Nik[olai] Iv[anovich] is an economist who studies seriously, and, in this we have always supported him. But he is (1) credulous where gossip is concerned and (2) devilishly unstable in politics. The war pushed him to semi-anarchist ideas. At the conference which adopted the Berne resolutions (the spring of 1915) he produced theses (I have them!) which were the height of stupidity, a disgrace, semi-anarchism. I attacked severely, Yuri and Eug. Bosch listened and remained satisfied that I did not allow any falling away to the left (they declared at the time their complete disagreement with N. Iv. [Bukharin]. Six months passed. Nik. Iv. studies economics. He doesn’t occupy himself with politics. And lo and behold, on the question of self-determination, he serves up the same nonsense. Eug. Bosch and Yuri sign it!! (LCW, To A.G. Shlyapnikov, 11/3/1916, vol. 35, pp. 214-15.)
The worst problem was isolation, the sense of being cut off from the movement in Russia. The work with the interior was plagued with difficulties and dangers. Only on rare occasions could someone reliable be sent into Russia to gather first-hand information on the state of affairs in the interior. The ever-resourceful Shlyapnikov, champing at the bit in Stockholm, was dogged by problems of all sorts, not just police surveillance and frontier guards, but lack of funds and the demoralisation produced by the collapse of the International. At first it was possible to maintain reasonable contacts with Russia by means of businessmen and emigrants returning to answer the call-up. But when this possibility dried up and controls became tighter, with regular searches of travellers at the frontier, things took a serious turn for the worse. Many Russian émigrés, who had previously been prepared to carry illegal material into Russia, were no longer willing to do so, preferring to dedicate themselves to more lucrative smuggling activities. The mood of disorientation and despair in the ranks was expressed in the following comments:
The news of our Paris Bolsheviks going off in the army, the ‘cosy chats’ of the old man of Geneva, Plekhanov, and the situation as a whole also casts a gloomy cloud across our heads.
The disorganisation of work in the interior, especially after the arrest of the Duma fraction, expressed itself in a financial crisis. Shlyapnikov found some seafarers who were willing to smuggle in illegal propaganda – for a price. But the money was simply not to be had:
I reported this to the Petersburg Committee and the Duma fraction, but received the sad news that they were not in a position to give the necessary sum of some 300 to 500 roubles a month. It was hard enough for them to send out money for my keep, and, having once sent me 100 roubles, the comrades recommended that I arrange all my own expenses. I could not even begin to think of finding work, as those first months of war had caused great unemployment in Sweden and the plants were operating only a few days per week. No opportunity presented itself of finding resources in the local emigrant community, although there were a lot of speculative racketeers there. Our party’s foreign-based Central Committee was too poor to allocate such a sum for this operation. In order to keep the work going I resorted to loans and sent back news only occasionally. (A. Shlyapnikov, On the Eve of 1917, p. 35 and pp. 37-38.)