In the Duma session of 26 July 1914, the deputies unanimously adopted a resolution declaring their readiness “at the summons of their sovereign, to stand up in defence of their country, its honour and its possessions”. The only dissentients were the six Mensheviks, five Bolsheviks, and the Trudovik deputies. They left the session and refused to vote war credits (though Kerensky came out in favour of a defensive war). Those were “wonderful early August days” and Russia seemed “completely transformed”, wrote the British ambassador.
– Lionel Kochan, Russia in Revolution
The Duma fraction remained as an important focal point of the work for a time. The provocateur Malinovsky, shortly before the war, had suddenly resigned and gone abroad. Now only five Bolshevik deputies remained – Badayev, Petrovsky, Muranov, Samoilov, and Shagov – and their position was increasingly precarious. The pressure of the petty bourgeois masses led to an immediate breakdown of the agreement with the Trudoviks. Kerensky announced that the latter would actively back the war, hence his attempts to attribute a ‘defencist’ position to the working class. Actually, the workers were mostly against the war, unlike the peasants, who backed the Trudoviks. Feeling themselves isolated, the Bolshevik Duma deputies drew closer to the Mensheviks, much to Lenin’s dismay. Chkheidze, the leader of the Menshevik fraction in the Duma, adopted a semi-left stance, which facilitated a temporary rapprochement with the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks in the Duma fraction wobbled under the intense pressure of jingoism and war fever. The position of the Bolshevik deputies was not at all firm and they were inclined to gloss over the differences with the Mensheviks who, in turn, wavered in the direction of defencism. Under the influence of Kamenev, they soft peddled on the issue of revolutionary defeatism and tried to tone down Lenin’s formulations. The Bolshevik and Menshevik Duma fractions initially took the same position on the war. The joint resolution presented by both factions was read out to the Duma. In Krupskaya’s words it “was very cautiously worded and left many things unsaid”, (NK Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin, p. 285.) but it was enough to provoke howls of protest from the rest of the chamber.
The behaviour of the Russian Social Democrats in the Duma attracted the attention of the leaders of the Socialist International, who were already acting as the open agents of their respective governments. Sometime in August the Duma fraction received a telegram from the Belgian socialist Emile Vandervelde, president of the International Socialist Bureau, who had entered the cabinet as Minister of State, in effect inviting his Russian comrades to follow his example. The hypocrisy of the man was all the more revolting, since only a few months earlier, in the spring of 1914, he had visited Russia on a fact-finding mission, and therefore was well acquainted with the monstrously oppressive character of Russian tsarism. Now, hiding behind the excuse of the need to “defeat Prussian militarism”, he proposed that the Russian Social Democrats suspend their opposition to tsarism until after the war:
For Socialists of Western Europe, the defeat of Prussian militarism – I do not say of Germany, which we love and esteem – is a matter of life and death… But in this terrible war which is inflicted on Europe owing to the contradictions of bourgeois society, the free democratic nations are forced to rely on the military support of the Russian government.
It depends largely on the Russian Revolutionary proletariat whether this support will be effective or not. Of course, I cannot dictate to you what you should do, or what your interests demand; that is for you to decide. But I ask you – and if our poor Jaurès were alive he would endorse my request – to share the common standpoint of socialist democracy in Europe… We believe that we should all unite to ward off this danger and we shall be happy to learn your opinion on this matter – happier still if it coincides with ours. (Quoted in A.Y. Badayev, Bolsheviks in the Tsarist Duma, p. 208.)
These weasel words, which carried the signature “Emile Vandervelde, delegate of the Belgian workers to the International Socialist Bureau and Belgian minister since the declaration of war”, must surely rank as one of the finest examples of sly diplomacy in history. However, it had the effect of causing the Menshevik Duma deputies to waver in their initial position of outright opposition to the war. There was a violent discussion inside the faction on how to respond to the message. Finally, they issued a statement which represented a clear abandonment of the earlier anti-war position. After enumerating the sufferings of the Russian people under tsarism, they concluded:
But in spite of these circumstances, bearing in mind the international significance of the European conflict and the fact that socialists of the advanced countries are participating in it (!), which enables us to hope (!) that it may be solved in the interests of international socialism (!!), we declare that by our work in Russia we are not opposing the war. (Ibid., pp. 208-9.)
Lenin followed the conduct of the Bolshevik leaders in Petrograd with growing anxiety. He was especially disappointed at the Duma deputies’ feeble response to Vandervelde’s telegram.
From fragmentary evidence it can be inferred that Lenin was far from satisfied with his followers’ attitude to the war. Publicly and privately he kept silent about the Duma declaration and, in as yet unpublished correspondence, criticised the Bolsheviks’ reply to Vandervelde. (R.B. McKean, St. Petersburg Between the Revolutions, p. 366.)
Given the intensity of the war fever, it is perhaps not surprising that the Duma deputies were also affected. In the end, what was decisive was not these vacillations, but the fact that they could be rapidly corrected. After its initial hesitations, the Duma fraction recovered its nerve and began to take a principled stand against the war. The Social Democratic deputies refused to vote for the war credits and spoke against them in the Duma, and demonstratively walked out of the chamber. Thereafter, the members of the Duma fraction behaved courageously, visiting the factories and delivering anti-war speeches to workers’ meetings. For the first few months of the war, their activity was at the centre of the party’s work.
Trotsky, commenting on the conduct of the Duma fraction, writes:
The Bolshevik faction in the Duma, weak in its personnel, had not risen at the outbreak of the war to the height of its task. Along with the Menshevik deputies, it introduced a declaration in which it promised “to defend the cultural weal of the people against all attacks wheresoever originating.” The Duma underlined with applause this yielding of a position. Not one of the Russian organisations or groups of the party took the openly defeatist position which Lenin came out for abroad.
But the same author adds:
The percentage of patriots among the Bolsheviks was, however, insignificant. In contrast to the Narodniks and Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks began in 1914 to develop among the masses a printed and oral agitation against the war. The Duma deputies soon recovered their poise and renewed their revolutionary work – about which the authorities were very closely informed, thanks to a highly developed system of provocation. It is sufficient to remark that out of seven members of the Petersburg committee of the party, three, on the eve of the war, were in the employ of the secret service. (L. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, p. 59.)
The work was constantly plagued by the activity of the police who had infiltrated it to the highest levels. Attempts to organise meetings – even small meetings – in the interior merely led to new arrests. The party had virtually ceased to function, except to a limited extent at local level. Not until November 1914 did a national meeting take place, in a small country home outside Petersburg. The meeting was chaired by Kamenev, who had come from Finland. The conference met in conditions of the utmost secrecy in the house of a factory clerk in an isolated suburb of Petersburg. The meeting was only attended by the Duma fraction members plus a handful of delegates from local organisations – from Petrograd (as St. Petersburg had been renamed, to avoid using a German-sounding name), Kharkov, and Ivanovo-Voznesensk, plus one representative from the Latvian Social Democrats. No minutes are available as the person who had them was arrested. When the delegates finally assembled, after many hours of dodging the police, the picture of the organisation that emerged from their reports could not have been more desolate. Badayev, who was present, along with the other Bolshevik Duma members, recalls:
Party cells suffered heavily as well as the legal organisations; our party, the leader and guide of the proletariat, had been half destroyed. Yet the skeleton still existed, some party work was still being done and the question of its extension was bound up with the question of preserving the Duma fraction which acted as the centre and core of the whole organisation. (A.Y. Badayev, Bolsheviks in the Tsarist Duma, p. 212.)
Lenin’s position on war was discussed. According to the ‘official’ version, it was endorsed with only ‘small amendments’. In point of fact, the Duma deputies were by no means convinced of Lenin’s defeatist position. Later, at their trial, all but one of them (Muranov) repudiated it. The hardest blow was about to fall. Despite all the precautions taken, the conference was known to the police. On the third day [4 November, OS], when the delegates were still discussing Lenin’s theses on war, the door burst open and the police arrested everyone present and ‘turned the place over’. The Duma deputies were shortly released but did not remain at liberty for long. They managed to destroy compromising documents, but in the evening the whole Bolshevik fraction was arrested. This was the final blow. With the removal of the one point that had served to rally the party’s scattered forces, the situation was desperate. After the arrest of the five Duma deputies, Lenin wrote to AG Shlyapnikov:
This is terrible. The government has evidently decided to have its revenge on the Russian Social Democratic Labour group, and will stick at nothing. We must be ready for the very worst: falsification of documents, forgeries, planting of ‘evidence’, false witness, trial behind closed doors, etc., etc. (LCW, To A.G. Shlyapnikov, 28/11/1914, vol. 35, p. 175.)
In the general atmosphere of depression and fear, the arrest of the Duma deputies did not arouse mass protests. The chief of the Petrograd Okhrana reported complacently to his superiors that “workers reacted inertly, even coldly” to the arrests. (Quoted in RB McKean, St. Petersburg Between the Revolutions, p. 370.) Attempts by the Bolsheviks to organise protests got no response, with the exception of a half-day walkout at the Psycho-Neurological Institute. The fortunes of the party seemed to be at their lowest ebb. With the liquidation of the Duma fraction, work in Russia was rendered even more arduous than before. It was increasingly difficult to get experienced collaborators in Russia. By January 1915, most of the activists had been swept away by arrests. The charge was always the same: ‘anti-war agitation’. The routes through which letters and propaganda could be delivered were long and dangerous, and the police controls tightened as the war dragged on. The focus then shifted abroad. But here too the problems were multiplying.