As the war dragged on and the mood of the masses began to grow restive, the situation of the Party began to change, slowly at first, and then with increasing rapidity. For the first time opportunities began to open up for the revolutionaries. The beginning of the war saw the revolutionary movement in the wilderness. For the first two years, the possibilities were negligible. The arrest and trial of the Duma fraction removed one of the few remaining possibilities for legal activity. Those trade unions that were not banned were placed under strict police surveillance. Most workers’ cultural and educational centres were shut down. Those who went on strike were handed over to the police who usually made sure they were sent to the front with a letter that usually ensured they did not return. Most worker activists were in jail or in hiding. The Party’s forces were reduced to a minimum expression. The masses had their heads down. A few illegal papers were produced inside Russia, like the Petrograd Proletarsky Golos of which four issues appeared at long intervals.
According to the Istoriya, (Istoriya KPSS, vol. 2, p. 547.) the Bolsheviks at this time had organisations in 29 towns and cities: Petersburg, Moscow, Kharkov, Yekaterinoslav, Kiev, Makayevsk, Samara, Saratov, Ryazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Rostov-on-Don, Odessa, Yekaterinodar, Baku, Tiflis, Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Tula, Orekhovo, Zuyevo, Tver, Gomel, Vyazma, Revel, Narva, Yureva, Irkutsk, Zlataust, Yekaterinburg and Orenburg. But it gives no details. It is possible that, at one time or another, small groups could have existed in all of these places and more. The Istoriya calculates that the Bolsheviks at different times would have had a presence in over 200 different places. This may well be an exaggeration. But, in any case, under the prevailing conditions, their existence would, in most instances, have been precarious and fleeting. Only the Latvian Social Democrats, with their tradition of tight organisation, seem to have been able to produce a regular paper in the underground. The other papers had, at best, a fleeting existence. In the war years, 11 different illegal papers saw the light of day, but their sum total amounted to only 17 issues. The Letts, on the other hand, produced 26 issues, no less, in the Latvian language with an impressive run of 80,000 and, in addition, produced journals in Lithuanian and Estonian. But this was quite exceptional.
A report from the city of Tver gives us a glimpse of the kind of situation that must have been prevalent in most of the provincial party organisations:
A city committee was elected as early as the autumn meeting of local party workers in 1915, but it was only able to resume active work in March 1916 when a group of new party workers arrived to assist the ailing committee. Discussion-group activity was promptly set in motion but there was no coordination in the work for the lack of a centre. The committee did not disband but did nothing. The strikes which broke out in the second half of April ended in a victory for the workers at two undertakings. The strike movement ended at the end of May with the rout of the organisation. Over that period the organisation had managed to issue three leaflets on the war, the War Industries Committees, and May Day. Work was resumed at the beginning of June. A new centre was formed and a plan of work was drawn up (the main point lay in stepping up agitation). Work was made harder by the fact that no people remained at the centre who were rich in knowledge and experience. Discussion-group work had not ceased even by September.
From these lines it is clear that the party organisation in Tver only really began to function towards the end of 1915. Even then, it must have been very small (no figures for membership are given) and more of a discussion circle than anything else. Most of the members lacked the experience and political level to make much of an impact, and the very existence of the leading committee was tenuous. A similar picture emerges in a report from the Nizhny-Novgorod area. Here figures are given for membership (between 150 and 200). There were four circles active on the outskirts and a further 14 in the factory districts, with two committees in charge of the different areas. Here the work seems to have been on a sounder basis than in Tver. Even so, there was a “dreadful shortage of literature”.
As yet we have not had many issues of the central organ. The pamphlets On the War and On the High Cost of Living come out only in single copies and those are hard to get hold of. We haven’t even seen Kommunist. All the work in the organisation, including purely propaganda work (there exists a college of propagandists of six members) is at present being undertaken exclusively by workers. The main shortcoming of the organisation is the almost total lack of theoretically knowledgeable and experienced people. The local intellectual forces do not take close part in the work for a variety of reasons. (A. Shlyapnikov, On the Eve of 1917, pp. 181-82.)
The Kazan committee reports a demonstration of students against the war, but says nothing about its participation. On the other hand, the Kharkov organisation claimed “some 120 members” paying dues regularly. But this was in Latvia where the degree of organisation was much higher than elsewhere, as we have seen. The Kharkov organisation even succeeded in producing its own hectographed weekly paper – Golos Sotsial Demokrata. The position of the central organisation was weak in the extreme. The ‘apparatus’ at the disposal of the CC Bureau in Petrograd consisted of the flat of a couple where the wife acted as the ‘custodian of the press’ and the Bureau’s tiny archives. There were various rendezvous points in the city where comrades could pick up the party press – a hazardous occupation when the place was crawling with police agents and spies. Vadim (Tikhomirov) was in charge of the illegal shipment of literature from Finland to the provinces, and also its storage and distribution in Petrograd. For this, he organised a group of young women who travelled to Finland and delivered the hot material to designated addresses.
True, the mood of apathy and pessimism was gradually being dissipated. An increasing number of workers who had been party members before the war were rejoining. But the problems remained immense. The strongest organisation was in St. Petersburg. The Moscow organisation suffered from the lack of a serious leading centre throughout the war and only picked up during the course of 1917 on the basis of the influx of fresh young comrades. Moscow also suffered a great deal from the activities of police provocation. A serious problem was the lack of finance, which prevented the Bolshevik centre in Petersburg from supporting the organisations in the provinces. Only occasional visits were possible. Shlyapnikov recalls with some bitterness how former comrades with well-paid jobs were reluctant to donate to the underground party, though many of them later re-joined it. The bitter tone was understandable, considering the risks and hardships the underground activists were obliged to experience every day:
But we had to work under extremely tough conditions. We proved able to group many active comrades around us. But owing to lack of resources we did not succeed in expanding the work very widely. We were very poor. From 2 December, 1916, to 1 February, 1917, only 1,117 roubles 50 kopeks flowed into the funds of the Central Committee Bureau. We had to carry out all work within these means. If we sent an organiser out to the provinces we could not guarantee him even one month’s support; consequently we had to rely upon the initiative of chance visits by comrades from different areas or strokes of luck for our contacts. The Bureau spent very little on maintaining its staff. The majority had their earnings but underground workers even in February 1917 could not receive more than 100 roubles a month. The supply of literature required a great deal of funds, but we were unable to assign very much to it.
No less difficult were conditions of personal existence. From the very first days of my arrival, when I at once became the object of intensive trailing by spies, it was plain to me that settling down with my own flat, a valid passport, and other such luxuries was, in such a situation, to court real disaster. To have any possibility of countering the stratagems of the agents I had to have as many lodgings as possible. Comrades helped me to find places, and I had a particular spot for each night. These were dispersed in various parts of Petersburg, including its extremities; for example, on the one hand, on the Grazhdanka and on the other, at the Galley Harbour and also in between them in the city centre. My life was turning into a perpetual wandering. It was hard to write, read, and at times even to think as often when tired hospitable comrades engaged me with their political programmes and enjoyable conversation deep into the night. You could survive like that for two or three months but my physical energy did not allow more. (Ibid., p. 141.)
The upswing in the workers’ movement, however, acted as a spur to the recovery of the Bolsheviks. The first signs of recovery were to be observed also in the provinces. In February and March 1916, in the Donets Basin, a major coal-producing area, the first leaflets appeared, calling on workers to organise, and repeating the slogans of the Bolsheviks. In early April, the first wartime strike broke out in the Donets coalfield, involving 20 neighbourhoods with a total participation of some 50,000 miners. The signal for strike action came from the pit where the Bolshevik leaflets had appeared. In at least one pit, a strike committee was elected. Two companies of soldiers were dispatched to the coalfield, but the soldiers refused to take action against the strikers. Even the police showed reluctance to act. The attempt of management to divert the strike into anti-Semitic channels was roundly rebuffed by the workers. Finally, the authorities managed to ‘restore order’ but only after four workers had been killed and 20 wounded. The strike was lost, but the mood of the workers was transformed. This fact was reflected in the growth of the revolutionary organisation:
Simultaneously with the strike wave, strong political groups began to be formed, the cells rapidly gaining strength rather as if workers wanted to recover the precious time lost. They started to seek links between each other. This was now easy. During the strikes all these grouplets and cells had become acquainted with each other. At this juncture they all united to form the social democratic organisations of the Donets Basin, whose statutes and programme were those of the RSDLP majority.
Thus, little by little, the Bolsheviks were reorganising and growing:
In spite of ever mounting repression, mass arrests, and the loss of party workers, our illegal organisation developed and strengthened. The most powerful illegal organisation in Petersburg was our party’s Petersburg Committee which brought together some 3,000 members, but the majority of Petersburg workers could be regarded as sympathising with its anti-war policy. Out of our party’s legal organisations there remained in existence only the Workers’ Group of the Insurance Council, which was also the all-Russian centre of the hospital funds and its journal, Voprosy Strakhovaniya. The activity of these institutions was inhibited in the extreme and many members of the Insurance Group were in jail or exile. (Ibid., p. 163 and p. 164.)
Despite the chronic shortcomings of the apparatus, from the end of July 1916 to 1 March, 1917, local Bolshevik organisations produced more than 600 different leaflets with a total run of about two million printed in about 80 different towns and cities, familiarising the mass of workers and soldiers with Bolshevik slogans. Despite the irregular and unstable nature of these illegal publications, they played a significant role in a situation where legal possibilities for getting Social Democratic ideas into print were practically non-existent. Every legal opening had to be used, though these were limited in the extreme. The trade unions in Petrograd had been closed “for the duration,” although certain “professional associations” were permitted. In Moscow, unions were theoretically allowed, but the workers who participated in them could be prosecuted by the law. Under these circumstances, such openings as health insurance and friendly societies were important. The revolutionaries used them as best they could to maintain contacts with the masses, including the new layers of women and youth.