The period of reaction expressed itself not only in physical acts of repression, but in far more insidious ways. The trauma of defeat affected people psychologically in a thousand different ways, in an epidemic of depression, pessimism, and despair. The working class does not live in isolation from other social layers. It is surrounded in all countries and in every period by other classes, in particular the petty bourgeoisie in all its innumerable subdivisions, which acts as a huge conveyor belt transmitting the moods, prejudices, and ideas of the ruling class into every corner of society. The proletariat is not immune to the pressure of alien classes transmitted via the petty bourgeoisie. Such influences play a particularly malevolent role in periods of reaction. Disappointed in the revolution and the working class, sections of the intellectuals withdrew from the struggle to retreat within themselves, where they felt safe against the storm blowing outside. The reactionary mood of the intelligentsia expressed itself in a variety of ways – subjectivism, hedonism, mysticism, metaphysics, pornography. It found its reflection in literature, in the prevailing school of Symbolism; in philosophy, where revolutionary dialectics were rejected in favour of Kantianism, with its strong subjective element. All this was merely an expression of the demoralisation of the intellectuals, a turning aside from the world and an attempt to seek refuge in an ‘interior life’, which under all manner of pretentious and essentially meaningless labels (‘Art for Art’s sake’, and so on) provided a comforting excuse for contemplating their navels. A contemporary source recalls how:
The radical sons of petty merchants submitted to their fate and took up positions behind the counters of their father’s business. One or other of the socialist students buried himself in knowledge as in a monastery.
This phenomenon is not new. It is something common to every period of reaction, when the hopes of the intelligentsia in revolution are dashed. After the fall of Robespierre, we saw the rise of the ‘gilded youth’, and a tendency towards hedonism and egotism. A similar phenomenon may be observed in England after the restoration of Charles II. The defeat of the 1848 Revolution in France saw a movement of the artists and poets, who had earlier displayed revolutionary tendencies, towards introversion and mysticism, the literary manifestation of which was the Symbolism of Baudelaire. It is no accident that the predominant school of Russian poetry during the years of Stolypin reaction was precisely Symbolism. A schoolboy of the time explains:
Now it was no longer Marx and Engels, but Nietzsche and Baudelaire and Wagner and Leonardo da Vinci whom we passionately discussed, we did not sing revolutionary songs but recited to one another poems of contemporary symbolist poets and our own imitations of them. A new period had begun. (Quoted in L. Kochan, Russia in Revolution, p. 155 in both quotes.)
The principal trait of this poetry is its inward-looking character. The isolated individual turns his back on the world and seeks refuge in the darkness of the soul. As one Russian Symbolist expressed it:
We are all alone,
Always alone.
I was born alone.
Alone I shall die.
The whole movement was impregnated with religious and mystical notions. The author Fyodor Sollogub wrote: “I am the god of a mysterious world, all the world is in my dreams alone.” And VV Rozanov: “All religions will pass, but this alone will remain, simply sitting in a chair and looking in the distance.” (Ibid., p. 155.) And so on and so forth. This phenomenon was by no means confined to literature. Intellectual fellow travellers of the Cadets produced a journal called Vekhi (Landmarks) which attempted to give a philosophical basis to the mood of despair and pessimism among the petty bourgeoisie. “The intelligentsia should stop dreaming of the liberation of the people – we should fear the people more than all the executions carried out by the government, and hail this government which alone, with its bayonets and its prisons, still protects us from the fury of the masses,” wrote MO Gershenzon in the pages of Vekhi. (Quoted in O. Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924, p. 209.)
A kind of de facto reactionary division of labour was established. While right-wing journals like Vekhi and Russkaya Mysl openly lauded and excused the reaction, in the salons of Moscow and St. Petersburg, intellectual ex-lefts, anxious to find some profound justification for their abandonment of the revolutionary cause, opened up a more subtle and more insidious assault on the ideology of Marxism which had so badly let them down. These unconscious or half-conscious anti-revolutionary moods among the intelligentsia were given a finished form by those renegades who had earlier formed the basis of the trend which became known as Legal Marxism, such as Struve, the philosopher Berdyaev, A.S. Izgoev, and DS Merezhkovsky. These former exponents of an anaemic and half-digested university ‘Marxism’, which is to be found in every period in academic circles, by some misconception imagine themselves to be Marxists, without any real relation to the real world of the class struggle. At the first signs of difficulties, these ‘fellow travellers’ jump ship and become apologists of reaction.
Of the two enemies, it is difficult to say which was the more harmful. This theoretical backsliding threatened the future of the revolutionary movement, gnawing away at its very foundations. It was imperative to engage in an implacable ideological struggle on all fronts to save the Party from a complete debacle. Not by accident, dialectics was singled out for attack by the intellectual critics of Marxism. Despite appearances, dialectics is not at all an abstract philosophical doctrine with no practical implications, but the theoretical basis of Marxism, its method and its revolutionary essence. Rejection of dialectical materialism implies rejection not only of the scientific philosophical basis of Marxism, but above all of its revolutionary essence.
These alien ideas soon began to penetrate the workers’ party itself. Kantianism was smuggled in via the fashionable theories of Ernst Mach, the Austrian physicist and philosopher whose theories were impregnated with the spirit of subjective idealism. In this guise, anti-Marxist philosophical views were echoed by the ultra-left trend in Bolshevism, including such leading members of Lenin’s faction as Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, and VA Bazarov. As usual, the lapse into revisionism was carried out under the banner of the search for new ideas. The appeal to novelty and originality always prefaces a reversion to old ideas fished out from the prehistory of the workers’ movement – anarchism, Proudhonism, Kantianism. As the French saying goes: ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!’ (‘The more things change, the more they stay the same!’). This trend tried to marry Marxism with… religion! Its supporters gave themselves some fancy names – ‘God Builders’ and ‘God Seekers’ – which reveal their real nature far more accurately than intended. Lunacharsky’s book Religion and Socialism argued that the “cold and impersonal” theories of Marxism could not be grasped by the masses and proposed the creation of a “new religion”, which would be a “godless religion”, a “religion of labour”, and so on and so forth. Socialism was referred to as a “new, powerful religious force”. (AV Lunacharsky, Revolutionary Silhouettes, p. 35.) This mystical claptrap masquerading under the name of philosophy filled Lenin with indignation.
After a stormy united Party Conference held in Paris in December 1909, a new editorial board for Sotsial Demokrat was elected, consisting of Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Martov, and Marchiewski. Nine issues were put out in the course of the year, during which, as Krupskaya recalls, “Martov was in a minority of one on the new editorial board, and he often forgot about his Menshevism”. And she adds: “I remember Ilyich once remarked with satisfaction that it was good to work with Martov, as he was an exceedingly gifted journalist. But that was only until Dan arrived.” (NK Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin, p. 193.)
Many people get the idea that Lenin was a very hard man who took a perverse delight in ‘hammering’ his opponents in polemics. This impression – very far from the truth – is derived from a one-sided acquaintance with Lenin’s writings. If one merely reads the public articles, many of which were naturally of a polemical character, then it does seem that Lenin treats his opponents none too gently. But this gives only one side of the picture. If one reads Lenin’s correspondence, an entirely different picture emerges. Lenin was always extraordinarily patient and loyal in his dealings with comrades. He would go to great lengths to convince and carry his colleagues with him. Only in the last analysis, when the disputed issues passed over into the public domain, especially where issues of principle were at stake, Lenin would come out fighting. At this juncture, diplomacy took a back seat and no feelings were spared. For Lenin, all other considerations were secondary when it came to the defence of the fundamental principles of Marxism. This method can be seen clearly in this case.
That Bogdanov had reservations about dialectical materialism was not new. But in the storm and stress of the revolution, such things appeared of little importance. In any case, there was no time to devote to philosophy. But under conditions of reaction, the question appeared in an altogether different light. The dangers were all too clear. But to split over such questions, and in such a difficult situation – this thought was too awful to contemplate. Initially, Lenin attempted to play down the differences, so as to avoid a damaging conflict inside the Bolshevik leadership:
At the end of March Ilyich had been of the opinion that philosophical disputes could and should be detached from political groupings within the Bolshevik section. He believed that such disputes in the section would show better than anything else that Bogdanov’s philosophy could not be put on the same level as Bolshevism.
But then Krupskaya adds: “It grew clearer every day, however, that the Bolshevik group would soon fall apart.” (Ibid., p. 181.)
In his shallow and pretentious memoirs, N.V. Volsky (Valentinov) gives a picture of the sharp conflicts over philosophy that shook the Bolshevik organisation at this time. (See NV Valentinov, Encounters with Lenin, 1968.) Reading this, one realises that Lenin must have had the patience of Job. But everything has its limits. Despite all Lenin’s attempts at peace-making, the differences were too serious to paper over. To make matters worse, a defiant Bogdanov wrote an article in Kautsky’s journal Die Neue Zeit praising Machism. For Lenin, this was like a red rag to a bull. The German Party was the leading party of the International. To go public in the German party press was an open provocation. Worse still, the SPD had an ambiguous position on the question of philosophy, while the Austrian Social Democratic theoretician Friedrich Adler hailed Machism as a great scientific discovery. By giving the polemic in the Russian Party such a high profile internationally, Bogdanov upped the ante and deepened the split. From this moment there was no turning back.
It was very hard for Lenin to break with people with whom he had worked closely, as Krupskaya points out:
For about three years prior to this we had been working with Bogdanov and the Bogdanovites hand in hand, and not just working, but fighting side by side. Fighting for a common cause draws people together more than anything. Ilyich, on the other hand, was wonderful at being able to fire people with his ideas, infect them with his enthusiasm, while at the same time bringing out the best in them, taking from them what others had failed to take. Every comrade working with him seemed, as it were, to have a part of Ilyich in him, and that perhaps is why he was so close to them.
The conflict within the group was a nerve-wracking business. I remember Ilyich once coming home after having had words with the otzovists. He looked awful, and even his tongue seemed to have turned grey. We decided that he was to go to Nice for a week to get away from the hurly-burly and take it easy in the sunshine. He did, and returned fit again. (N.K. Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin, pp. 193-94.)
Lenin now felt he had no alternative but to wage a war to the death against the supporters of Bogdanov. But as it happened, it was not Lenin, but Plekhanov who fired the first shot. His article Materialismus Militans (Militant Materialism), was written partly as an open letter to Bogdanov. But the main theoretical response was Lenin’s philosophical masterpiece, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, one of the seminal works of modern Marxism. This book played a key role in the ideological rearmament of the Russian working class and the reorientation of the movement, combating retrograde tendencies and reactionary ideas. Lenin cuts across the fog of mysticism as a hot knife cuts through butter. It was now a question of war to the finish. The hardening of Lenin’s attitude can be seen from his letters to his sister Anna, who was handling relations with the publisher of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. The latter tried to tone down the language used against the other side. But Lenin was now adamant that no concessions at all be made. In his text he used the word popovshchina (an untranslatable word, meaning approximately ‘priestliness’) to describe the outlook of the supporters of empirio-monism. This was incorrectly translated as ‘fideism’, which, apart from being linguistically inaccurate, clearly marked an attempt to water down the tone of Lenin’s polemic. This called forth a sharp rebuke from the author, expressed not in one letter but in several, for example, one dated 9 March, 1909:
Please do not tone down the places against Bogdanov and against Lunacharsky’s popovshchina. We have completely broken off relations with them. There is no reason for toning them down. It is not worth the trouble. (Letter to his sister Anna, 9 March, LCW, vol. 37, p. 414.)
And again, only three days later:
Please do not tone down anything in the places against Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, and Co. They must not be toned down. You have deleted the passage about Chernov being a ‘more honest’ opponent than they, which is a great pity. The shade of meaning you have given it is not the one I want. There is now no overall consistency in my accusations. The crux of the issue is that our Machists are dishonest, mean-spirited, cowardly enemies of Marxism in philosophy. (Letter to his sister Anna, 12 March, 1909, LCW, vol. 37, p. 416.)