p In December 1905 a Bolshevik Party Conference gathered in Tammerfors, a small town in Finland. It was attended by representatives of Party groups in Russia and chaired by Lenin.

p Sverdlov was to represent the Ural Bolsheviks. I remember his departure from Ekaterinburg. He had never before been able to participate in a nation-wide Bolshevik conference; this would be his first chance to realise his dream of meeting Lenin.

p That meeting with Lenin filled his mind and monopolised his conversation in the days before he left—but he was to be disappointed, for a general railway strike delayed him and he arrived in Tammerfors after the conference had ended and most of the delegates, including Lenin, had left.

p On his way back to the Urals, however, Sverdlov was in Moscow as the heroic proletarian uprising there drew to a close. He spoke at several mass meetings but could not stay long, as he was needed urgently in the Urals. One of the most remarkable stages in the Ural workers’ fight against tsarism during the first Russian revolution had begun.

p On 9 December 1905 the state cannon factories at Motovilikha, the largest in the Urals, went on strike, in response to the Perm Party committee’s call for solidarity with the general political strike. The walk-out turned into a revolt and really frightened the local authorities. On 12 December Strizhevsky, the Governor of Perm 16 Province, encoded this panic-stricken telegram to the Ministry of Internal Affairs:

p ’The workers of Motovilikha, prompted by the revolutionaries, have stopped work in support of the railway strike, have taken over the factory and are running it on their own initiative. Groups of youths from the factories are walking about with rifles; the populace is being urged to rise. The police are powerless...’

p Order was to be restored at the factories at all costs; police and soldiers were sent out against the rebels, and for two days the workers fought nobly against an enemy that was many times stronger. Numerical superiority proved decisive, however, and the Motovilikha revolt drowned in blood. The workers’ leaders, the flower of Motovilikha, either perished or were thrown into prison. Few escaped. The Motovilikha Party organisation was in ruins and the entire Perm Party network seemed to be doomed.

p News of the rising reached Sverdlov while he was still in Moscow. The revolution was facing a crisis: the defeat of the December uprising in Moscow, the suppression of the Motovilikha revolt, the allout government attack on the working class, were all eloquent proof of this. Tsarism was marshalling all its forces to crush the revolution.

p The Bolsheviks, under Lenin’s leadership, considered these events calmly and concluded that the proletariat, in Russia and elsewhere, had learned a tremendous amount from the 1905 revolution, which had revealed the strong and weak points of the Russian working class. They agreed that all possible profit should be extracted from this experience to prepare for the coming power struggle. The workers and peasants, with no panic or confusion, slowly beat a fighting retreat before the brutal onslaught of the bourgeoisie and the autocracy. Sverdlov was entirely guided by Lenin’s assessment, and dedicated all his will and energy to rebuilding the Ural Party organisation as quickly as he could. He had to decide how to help the new revolutionaries who emerged during the recent conflict to recover from the blow, how to transfer them as smoothly as possible to underground activity, how best to deploy our members in this new and more complex situation.

p While still on his way back to us, Sverdlov was already deciding on a fundamental reform of the Ural Party organisations to suit the altered circumstances.

p Meanwhile Ekaterinburg was in the final throes of its constitutional illusions. There were no more open meetings; the Bolsheviks could no longer speak in public. Although Sverdlov reported on the Moscow events at a broad-based Party gathering, this was the last of its kind for a number of years.

p January 1906 saw the first indiscriminate searches and arrests in our town. But we were not caught by surprise.

p The gendarmes and police intended to make their first attack against our headquarters, thus disabling the committee at one blow. They mustered in considerable force and one night they and the Cossacks descended on the Verkhny Isetsk settlement and surrounded the block which housed our commune. All movement in the nearby streets was halted. Despite the late hour a crowd of workers gathered behind the police lines and news of the raid was all over town by the next day.

p Then there was an organised assault on our HQ; the gendarmerie’s tactical geniuses had obviously been working hard. While one group was breaking down the gates, others were scrambling over the fence and throwing themselves into an all-out offensive. Absolutely no one could escape and the officer in charge was already rubbing his hands, anticipating his superior’s compliments on the capture of the entire leadership of the Ekaterinburg Bolshevik Party. After all, it had long been common knowledge that we were in that house.

p His fury knew no bounds when they searched the place and found not only none of us there but not even a single scrap of paper to give us away.

p Sverdlov’s far-sightedness had triumphed. Immediately on his return from Moscow he had begun to transfer the organisation to a clandestine footing, beginning, of course, with its central nucleus. He advised that a watch be put on our headquarters; then we dispersed to several secret addresses. The once-hospitable house stood empty.

p Our transformation into an underground organisation was made easier by the fact that none of us had really believed in the constitutional freedoms promised in the tsar’s Manifesto. Sverdlov never tired of explaining that the final victory of the revolution was still distant and that we should be prepared to change direction many times before then, reacting to circumstances. If any of our comrades became overenthusiastic about those ‘freedoms’, Sverdlov would remind him that the state system, the autocratic regime with its landowners and bureaucracy, still existed, that the secret service, the police, the prisons, had not disappeared and that we therefore had no right to abandon our underground apparatus. In this Sverdlov followed Lenin, who, even at the height of the 1905 revolution, had always insisted that the tsar’s freedoms’ were no cause for celebration and that the Party’s underground organisation should be maintained intact.

p Our local Party groups followed these directives, while holding their legal channels open and using them whenever possible. We 18 still had our clandestine meeting places, and our system of contacts and passwords had been much improved, so that we were ready to go underground at any time.

p By then Ekaterinburg had become the centre of Party activities in the Urals, sending out trained people to numerous local Party groups; Sverdlov had not been thinking exclusively of our town but of the area as a whole when he had put such emphasis on the training of organisers, propagandists and agitators, and when he had founded the Ekaterinburg Party School.

After he got back from Moscow he suggested to the local Party committee that they should redistribute trained Party workers in the area. The committee considered his plan closely and approved it. Our Bolsheviks, well-trained and well-informed, went out to other towns and factories, while the outlying groups sent Party members to us. This had a double advantage: it strengthened the local groups and also protected our revolutionaries against police persecution and arrest. Our comrades were going to places where they were not known to the gendarmes and their spies, and were thus able to function more confidently and under less strain. It was the most thorough re- allocation of duties the Party in the Urals had ever experienced, yet our work continued throughout without a hitch.