p The First World War broke out on 19 July (1 August New Style) 1914. The commencement of hostilities agitated the whole colony. Questions about the war, its effects on society and its unavoidable consequences were on everybody’s lips.

p No political party, indeed no thinking person, could avoid taking up a definite stand on the war. The majority of the leaders of the 72 international Social-Democrat movement, the Russian Mensheviks and the SRs, who until so recently had been calling themselves socialists, became outright traitors to socialism, betraying the workers’ cause, supporting the nationalist bourgeoisie and making an undignified show of their chauvinist sentiments. One party and one alone—the Bolsheviks headed by Lenin—made a courageous and determined protest against the war, which they recognised as purely predatory, and called on the proletariat of the combatant nations to turn their weapons against their own bourgeoisie.

p Newspapers took weeks to get to Turukhansk; the Bolsheviks there did not know how Lenin and the Party viewed the war. They had to work out their own position from the few scraps of information they received in telegrams.

p At that time Sverdlov was still in the Arctic Circle. He wrote to me from Kureika on 12 August (Old Style) 1914, nearly a month after the outbreak of war:

p ’My major concern just now is what is happening far away. Practically no information, just occasional telegrams and newspapers. Impossible to grasp so many world shaking events all at once. And no really reliable news at all... I know absurdly little and face six or eight weeks’ more silence... The murder of Jaures was a terrible blow. Some comrades here are foretelling the doom of the labour movement, the triumph of reaction, a reverse to our cause that will last for years. I cannot see it. More likely the movement will take a great step forward. The horrors of war and its consequences, the dreadful burden that will fall on the most backward elements, will give a great stimulus to the backward countries too... The war will almost certainly bring cruel repression, reactionary excesses—but that will get them nowhere, it will be nothing but death throes. Yes, this in undoubtedly the beginning of the end... Discontent, bitter discontent, will inevitably grow, and all the drum-beating will not silence it.’

p With no idea of how the Central Committee and Lenin stood on the war, with access to only the most meagre information, Sverdlov could not thoroughly analyse the situation or confidently predict all the effects it would have on the international labour movement. Yet his internationalism never faltered. In a later letter he sharply criticised the German Social-Democrats for supporting war credits; he found it hard to wish success to any of the nations involved in the war and strongly attacked the chauvinism of the Russian Mensheviks. When Lenin’s first articles analysing the war appeared in Turukhansk, in Sotsial-democrat (The Social-Democrat), Sverdlov immediately and unconditionally adopted Lenin’s views.

p Many people remember Sverdlov above all as a great organiser, an essentially practical person, one of the builders of the Party and the Soviet Government, a fine propagandist and agitator.

p Immediately before and after the October Revolution he was wholly immersed in political and organisational activity; though he wrote numerous official documents, he left few literary works. His life was too short—Sverdlov died at 33, a bare 18 months after the Revolution. In 1917 he was 32, and had spent almost 12 years of his life in detention: five and a half years in prison and six in exile in the most remote and wretched corners of Siberia. He was arrested 14 times. Those are the statistics of his life.

p His life in Turukhansk was at last more or less settled, if that is an appropriate word. Once he was convinced that he was stranded there, that escape was practically impossible, he turned his energies to political theory and to literature and produced several articles, essays and letters.

p His theoretical standpoint was refined through further study of Marx, Engels and Lenin, critical analysis of the works of Kautsky, Hilferding and Pannekoek, systematic perusal of political periodicals, magazines and newspapers, and passionate debates with his comrades.

p Every letter from Turukhansk touched on some theoretical issue. He was particularly interested in the international labour movement, the building of the Party, certain historical questions, economics and the potential development of Siberia and Turukhansk territory itself.

p While in exile there he wrote The’Schism in the German SocialDemocratic Party’, The ’Downfall of Capitalism’ and ’Siberia and the War’. Sverdlov passionately criticised opportunism as detrimental to the Bolshevik cause. The Schism’ was written in 1916 for Priliv (The Flood-tide), a miscellany published in Moscow by a group of Bolsheviks attached to the Central Committee’s Russian Bureau, including Mikhail Olminsky, Viktor Nogin, and Ivan Skvortsov- Stepanov. The list of its contributors also included Lenin.

p News reached Turukhansk of the Zimmerwald Internationalist Conference, where Lenin formed the group known as the Zimmerwald Left, from which the genuinely communist Third International was later to grow. Sverdlov immediately advised his comrades to begin a serious study of the international revolutionary movement and gave a series of lectures on the history of the Second International and the potential of the Third. He later compiled his Essays on the History of the International Labour Movement on the basis of those lectures. He intended to proceed from this to a more comprehensive work, beginning with the formation of the First 74 International, but the February Revolution interrupted his research and he never had time to return to it.

p At that time he also began a painstaking study of Turukhansk territory, collecting information about this rich and unknown land that tsarism treated as a huge prison, with help of exiles in other settlements in the area and of the local peasants and fishermen, whose language he was learning. He was most upset that the potential of all Russia’a immense borderlands held such a low priority in the official mind.

p He also wrote two articles about the life of exiles: ’Ten Years of Tsarist Exile (1906—1916)’ and Mutiny in Turukhansk’.

Sverdlov’s essays, articles, and particularly his letters cast some light on his ideas on literature and culture, on philosophical and social issues, but he never had time to develop them or publish them in a complete series of works. He was drawn away to answer the urgent call of the revolution.