THE USSR ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
THE INSTITUTE OF THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING-CLASS
MOVEMENT
__TITLE__ The International Working-Class MovementThe International Working-Class Movement
PROBLEMS
OF HISTORY
AND THEORY
In seven volumes
REVOLUTIONARY
BATTLES OF THE EARLY 20th CENTURY
Introduction by Academician B.N. PONOMAREV
PROGRESS PUBLISHERS
PROGRESS PUBLISHERS MOSCOW
Translated from the Russian Designed by Vladimir Yeryomin
THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING-CLASS MOVEMENT
PROBLEMS OF HISTORY AND THEORY
VOLUME 3
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The Editorial Board:
S. S. Khromov, Editor-in-Chief B. I. Koval I. M. Krivoguz P. A. Rodionov R. Y. Yevzerov
The General Editorial Committee:
B. N. Ponomarev, Chairman, T. T. Timofeyev, Deputy Chairman, A. I. Sobolev, Deputy Chairman, 0. T. Bogomolov, A. S. Chernyaev, G. G. Diligensky, P. N. Fedoseyev, A. A. Galkin, Y. M. Garushyants, S. S. Khromov, G. F. Kim, A. L. Narochnitsky, S. S. Salychev, A. N. Shlepakov, Y. B. Smeral, M. I. Sladkovsky, V. M. Vodolagin, V. V. Volsky, V. V. Zagladin,
Y. M. Zhukov
© H3«aT6JIbCTBO «MHCJIt», 1978
English translation © Progress Publishers 1983 Printed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
M
0901010000-456 014(01)-83
Co-chairmen of the team of authors:
S. S. Khromov, D. Sc. (Hist.) R. Y. Yevzerov, Cand. Sc. (Hist.)
CONTENTS INTRODUCTION
Page
11 Part One
THE UPSURGE OF THE REVOLUTIONARY
WORKING-CLASS MOVEMENT
(1905-1907)
Chapter 1
The Proletariat in the Russian Revolution of 1905-1907
25The First Popular Revolution of the Imperialist Period
25 The Bolshevik Party at the Start of the Revolution
29Lenin's Strategy and Tactics of Working-Class Struggle in the Democratic Revolution
34 The Proletariat---the Leading Force of the First Russian Revolution
51The Main Results and International Significance
of the 1905-1907 Revolution
86Chapter 2
The Growth of the Working-Class Movement in Europe, North America and Japan 93
Consolidation of the International Solidarity of Workers
93 The Struggle of the Proletariat Gains Momentum
104The Experience of the Russian Revolution and the International Working-Class Movement
128 Part Two
The New Stage in the Proletarian Struggle (1908---1914)
Chapter 3 Lenin Develops Marxist Theory
149Analysis of Ways of Realising the Epoch-Making Role of the Proletariat
149 Fresh Research into the Agrarian Question
168The Development of the Marxist Doctrine on the National and National-Colonial Questions 175
Contributors:
Persits, D. Sc. (Hist.) Plimak, Cand. Sc. (Hist.) Pshedetsky, D. Sc. (Hist.) Tyutyukin, Cand. Sc. (Hist.) Undasynov, D. Sc. (Hist.) Vasilchuk, D. Sc. (Philosophy) Yazhborovskaya, D. Sc. (Hist.) Yevzerov, Cand. Sc. (Hist.) Zaborov, D. Sc. (Hist.)
V. V. Chubinsky, D. Sc. (Hist.)
M. A.
I. V. Danilevich, Cand. Sc. (Hist.)
Y. G.
Y. M. Ivanov, D. Sc. (Hist.)
M. I.
G. V. Katsman, Cand. Sc. (Hist.)
S. V.
S. S. Khromov, D. Sc. (Hist.)
I. N.
I. M. Krivoguz, D. Sc. (Hist.)
Y. A.
V. A. Lavrin, D. Sc. (Hist.)
I. S.
A. M. Melnikov, Cand. Sc. (Hist.)
R. Y.
0. G. Obichkin, D. Sc. (Hist.)
M. A M. A. Okuneva, D. Sc. (Hist.)
Individual chapters were written by:
T. V. Anitskaya, Cand. Sc. (Hist.) A. N. Baikova, Cand. Sc. (Hist.) Z. V. Chernukha, Cand. Sc. (Hist.) V. Z. Drobizhev, D. Sc. (Hist.) G. I. Ezrin, Cand. Sc. (Philosophy) T. M. Islamov, D. Sc. (Hist.) Y. P. Mador, Cand. Sc. (Hist.) L. B. Moskvin, D. Sc. (Hist.)
Y. S. Oganisyan, D. Sc. (Hist.)
A. S. Oganova, Cand. Sc. (Hist.)
M. Y. Orlova, Cand. Sc. (Hist.)
N. Y. Ovcharenko, D. Sc. (Hist.)
P. P. Shaposhnichenko, Cand.Sc. (Hist.)
N. M. Stepanova, Cand. Sc. (Hist.)
Z. P. Yakhimovich, D. Sc. (Hist.)
Statistics prepared by:
L. V. Makushina, N. F. Rydvanov, Cand. Sc. (Econ.)
S. I. Vasiltsov, Cand. Sc. (Hist), L. F. Yukhnina
Materials by other researchers of the Institute of the International VVorking-Class Movement have also been used in this volume.
This volume covers the period immediately preceding the era ushered in by the 1917 Socialist Revolution in Russia. Dealing both with the development of the international working-class movement historically and with its major issues, it discusses the positive and negative experience, the features common for the labour struggle internationally and its distinctions in various countries and regions. An analysis is presented of the theoretical contribution and practical work of V. I. Lenin and his Bolshevik comrades and other revolutionary forces in the international labour movement, the book contains an account of their fight against the opportunists. Special attention is devoted to the Russian revolutions of 1905-1907 and February 1917 that paved the way towards the triumph of the Great October Socialist Revolution.
CONTENTS
CONTENTS
Defending and Advancing the Philosophical Principles of the Revolutionary Theory
187Chapter 4 Problems of the Political Organisation of the Proletariat
201The Bolsheviks' Struggle to Preserve and Strengthen the Revolutionary Proletarian Party
201The Confrontation over Organisational Issues Between
the Revolutionary and Opportunist Trends in Other
Labour Parties
212Chapter 5 The Struggle of Trends in the Trade Unions
225The Development of the Trade Union Movement. The Growth of the Revolutionary Trend
225 Anarcho-Syndicalism
239 Christian and Yellow-Dog Unions
246International Trade Union Organisations 247
Chapter 6 The Struggle for Democracy and Socialism: the Political Aspect
251Lenin and the Bolshevik Party on the Revolutionary Policy and Tactics of the Proletariat
252 The Policy of the Left Social-Democrats
275The Growth of Opportunism 287
Chapter 7
The Mass Working-Class and Socialist Movement in the Capitalist Countries
298 The Proletariat's Working and Living Conditions
299The Russian Proletariat in the Period of Reaction and During the New Revolutionary Upsurge
306The Working-Class Movement and the Development of the Pre-Revolutionary Situation in Germany
316Britain: the Proletariat's Mounting Struggle Against the Bourgeoisie
326The Strengthening of Revolutionary Trends in the US Working-Class Movement and the Growing Influence of Socialist Ideas
339France: the Struggle of the Proletariat, Reformism and Anarcho-Syndicalism
347Italy: Aggravation of the Political Situation, and the Working-Class Movement
354The Socialist and Working-Class Movement in Multi-National
Austria-Hungary
362The Proletariat of the Balkan Countries in the Struggle for Democracy, Peace and National Liberation
370 The Main Trends in the International Working-Class Movement
377Chapter 8
The Working Class and Its Movement in Colonial and Dependent Countries in the Early 20th Century
387Latin America: the Growth of the Proletariat's
Organised Struggle
388Asia: National Liberation Revolutions and the Working Class
414Africa: the Condition and Struggle of the Working People
449Chapter 9
The Revolutionary and Opportunist Trends Contending in the Second International
471 Two Approaches to the Issues of International Proletarian Unity
471 Two Trends at the Second International Congresses
477The Activities of the International Socialist Bureau and Other International Organisations of the Second International. The Crisis of the Second International on the Eve of World War I
493 10CONTENTS
Part Three
THE PROLETARIAT DURING THE WORLD IMPERIALIST WAR
Chapter 10
World War I. The Collapse of the Second International. Lenin's Course Towards a Revolutionary Withdrawal from the War
513 The Split in the International Socialist Movement
514Lenin at the Helm of the Struggle for a Revolutionary Withdrawal from the Imperialist War
525Lenin Analysing Imperialism and Developing the Socialist Revolution Theory
538The Organisational and Political Consolidation
of the Revolutionary Internationalist Forces
558Chapter 11 The Mass Proletarian Movement During World War I
570 How the War Affected the Working People
570The Development of the Mass Working-Class Movement
577Chapter 12
The February Bourgeois-Democratic Revolution in Russia and the Rise of the International Revolutionary Movement
615 Russia on the Eve of the Revolution
615 Autocracy Overthrown
619The Formation of the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers* Deputies in Petrograd. The Emergence of Dual Power
625 The Revolution Victorious Throughout the Country
634 Issues of the Revolution's Further Progress
641The Upsurge in the International Revolutionary Movement
648Chapter 13 (Conclusion) The Eve of the Socialist Revolution
672Name Index
699INTRODUCTION
The third volume of this many-volume publication traces the development of the international working-class movement during the period which preceded the onset of the era of the transition from capitalism to socialism ushered in by the Great October Socialist Revolution. Based on the scientific principles of the division into periods of the history of the proletariat's class struggle, which were set forth in the Introduction to the entire publication,^^1^^ the present volume begins with the Russian Revolution of 1905-1907. The latter attested to the fact that mighty revolutionary struggles led by the working class have unfolded in world history since the start of the 20th century.
``Imperialism is the eve of the social revolution of the proletariat,"2 wrote Vladimir Lenin in describing the essence of the qualitative changes in the capitalist system which paved the way for its replacement by socialism, exacerbated all capitalist antagonisms, developed the mainsprings of social revolution and made it a question of direct practice.
Due to the tremendous growth of capitalist production and the high level of its concentration, monopoly rule had taken shape and become the determinant in social life by the turn of the 20th century. The bank monopolies were instrumental in the growth of a close network of channels "centralising all capital and all revenues, transforming thousands and thousands of scattered economic enterprises into a single national capitalist, and then into a world capitalist economy".^^3^^ The financial oligarchy of the imperialist states spread their rule, the economic underpinnings of which was the export of capital, all over the world. Huge international `` supermonopolies'' divided the world into "spheres of influence", while the colonial powers were concluding its territorial division.
The social division of labour nationally and internationally, the
~^^1^^ The International Working-Class Movement. Problems of History and Theory, Introduction by Academician B. N. Ponomarev, Vol. 1, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1980.
~^^2^^ V. I. Lenin, "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism", Collected Works, Vol. 22, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964, p. 194.
~^^3^^ Ibid., p. 213.
12INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
13unprecedented development of large-scale production by individual monopolies and international alliances of monopolies, the monopolisation of sources of raw materials, transport, the process of technological inventions and improvements and even of skilled labour, and the specialisation of production, cooperation between industries, and their amalgamation---all these processes which cameto the fore in the early 20th century, mirrored the progress being made in the socialisation of production. "Capitalism in its imperialist stage leads directly to the most comprehensive socialisation of production," Lenin wrote, elucidating this trend. "It, so to speak, drags the capitalists, against their will and consciousness, into somesort of a new social order, a transitional one from complete free competition to complete socialisation.''^^1^^
The necessity for a revolutionary transition to socialism was dictated by the deepening and exacerbation of the fundamental contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, the main contradiction being between the social nature of the production process and the private capitalist form of appropriation.
Industry developed while the sway of private capital was preserved: productive forces were controlled by a handful of monopoly associations which selfishly took advantage of "amazing technical progress",^^2^^ which appropriated the main results of social progress and the wealth created by the working classes. The chaos inherent in production as a whole heightened. Capitalist production relations limited the development of productive forces and the utilisation of its results in the interests of the whole of society. Moreover, these interests were dealt a tremendous blow by the imperialist rivalry of monopolies, supermonopolies and states; the economic and territorial division of the world only served to bring about a constant striving to recarve it, and to heighten militarism and an overall atmosphere of tension.
Monopoly rule was creating an oppressive atmosphere for the broad masses in all spheres of bourgeois society. "Politically," Lenin wrote, "imperialism is, in general, a striving towards violence and reaction.''^^3^^ The violation and limitation of proclaimed democratic freedoms became a sign of the times. To enable the financial oligarchy to draw handsome profits, the people were subjected to wide-scale plunder in the form of taxes and privileges for the monopolies via the provision to them of enormous state orders, particularly in the arms field. For its interests colonial seizures were made and wars waged to recarve the world. Powerful repressive forces
were employed to buttress the oligarchy's positions---the use of the police, army and other punitive bodies against actions by the working class and other working people was expanded. Not content with the support they were receiving from bourgeois parties, monopolistic circles began to form new organisations---alliances of employers, which fought the working-class movement. The drastically heightened militarism, which became part and parcel of imperialism, was an instrument not only for the obtaining of huge profits and for the struggle to recarve the world, but also for maintaining ``order'' and for suppressing the mounting opposition being offered by the working class and the national liberation movement. Chauvinism and racism, the advocacy of colonial seizures and the expansion of spheres of influence became an important ideological weapon for the imperialists.
The oppression of national minorities was stepped up in the imperialist states. In the United States the rights of the ``emancipated'' blacks and the indigenous Indian population were infringed upon: they were subjected to segregation; in Great Britain the ruling classes perpetrated repressions against the Irish; in Germany the Germanisation of Poles and other national minorities was intensified; national problems were exacerbated to the extreme in AustriaHungary. The Russian Empire was a prison for peoples oppressed by military-feudal imperialism.
Thus, a situation took shape in the early 20th century which was fraught with social upheavals. The unevenness inherent in capitalist development heightened markedly, bringing with it ever more conflicts. As a result, interimperialist contradictions became aggravated to the limit. The chain of ``local'' conflicts led, like a burnt-out safety fuse, to a worldwide explosion. The year 1914 witnessed the outbreak of the First World War, the preparations for which had been undertaken for years by the ruling classes of ``civilised'' countries--- a war which plunged the working masses into unparalleled hardships. The war mirrored and exacerbated the entire gamut of contradictions plaguing bourgeois society; it led to the start of the general crisis •of capitalism.
The world imperialist system was encompassing countries on different levels of political and socio-economic development. Within the framework of individual national economies, monopoly rule combined with backward forms of capitalist and even pre-capitalist production. Imperialist oppression was frequently deepening via the preservation of vestiges of feudalism, absolutism and all manner of medieval reaction.
The financial oligarchy secured itself political support on the part •of the biggest bourgeois parties, land magnates, heads of republics and semi-absolute monarchies, and top civil and military echelons---
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism", Collected Works, Vol. 22, p. 204.
~^^2^^ Ibid., p. 241.
~^^3^^ Ibid., p. 268.
14INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
15in short, all forces with a vital interest in buttressing the foundations of capitalism. However, this did not remove the contradictions among various groups of the bourgeoisie and their clashes with landowners and other differences within the ruling classes.
The manifestations of supremacy and coercion which heightened at the monopoly stage of capitalism were supplemented by social demagoguery and separate concessions to the working masses. Placed at the service of the ruling classes at the time were the compromising expertise of the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, the bourgeois-reformist manoeuvres of US presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the social veering of Italian Premier Giovanni Giolitti, who tried to win the imperialists the support of the working class via a "liberal course", the nationalistic demagoguery of Kaiser Wilhelmll of Germany, and the reactionary reformism of Prime Minister Stolypin in Russia. A sign of the times was the intensification of bourgeois reformism, which was designed to pacify the proletariat through the partial modernisation of the existing system. Describing this tendency, Lenin wrote in 1911 that "the bourgeoisie of Europe and America, as represented by their ideologists and political leaders, are coming out increasingly in defence of so-called social reforms as opposed to the idea of social revolution".^^1^^ This essentially was a policy of fortifying the underpinnings of capitalism.
In order to get the working-class movement on the bourgeois reformist bandwagon, the utilisation of the influence of the labour aristocracy was accompanied by gradual emphasis being placed on drawing heads of trade unions and other mass proletarian organisations into the capitalist camp. In several European countries and in the United States a stratum of labour bureaucrats was formed with the involvement of ruling circles, which was concerned primarily with ensuring its own well-being by collaborating with the state and entrepreneurs, and which refused to defend the fundamental interests of the mass of proletarians. The bourgeoisie did everything in its power to support opportunism, revisionism in particular, proclaiming the "end of Marxism" and calling upon the Social-Democrats to reject their ``extremes'', and strove to guide the activity of labour parties in the direction of reformism.
Enormously intensifying and complicating the entire gamut of capitalist contradictions, monopoly rule prepared the ground for the social revolution of the proletariat and hastened its advent. At the same time, it created rather powerful barriers along the road of the revolutionary current in order to prevent it from breaking through. The international bourgeoisie was consolidating its forces.
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, '"Reformism in the Russian Social-Democratic Movement", Collected Works, Vol. 17, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1968, p. 229.
By virtue of the law of the unevenness of the economic and political development of capitalism, the formation of the objective political, economic and social prerequisites for a proletarian revolution and the subjective factors connected with the struggle of the working class proved under imperialism to be a process which differed highly in its pace and forms from country to country.
What, in this tumultuous historical period, when great revolutionary battles were in the offing, was the proletariat, the class to whom history preordained the decisive role in the revolutionary transformation of capitalism into socialism? What was its strength and potential?
By 1910 the proletariat in the eight leading countries of Europe and North America numbered some 90 million people. However, its proportion in the gainfully employed population was quite varied: in Russia---one-fourth, France, Austria-Hungary and Italy---over one-third, Belgium and Germany---over one-half, Britain and the United States---approximately two-thirds.
The bulk of the working class was the industrial proletariat, which numbered over 50 million in the above-mentioned countries. Their nucleus was factory employees---the most united, organised and receptive to socialist ideas. The very development of large-scale capitalist production, accelerated by monopoly rule, facilitated the unity of these workers. Working at enterprises employing over 500 persons at the end of the first decade of the 20th century were: in Russia---approximately 54 per cent of all factory employees, in the United States---some 33 per cent of all workers in the manufacturing industry, in France---30 per cent of the workers employed in industry, construction and transport. In Japan enterprises with over 100 persons took in about half of all industrial workers. But even in a number of the most industrialised capitalist countries the proportion of workers employed at small-scale enterprises and domestically, with manual production predominating, was quite high. Around half the total number of workers in France and over onesixth in Germany were employed at minute enterprises, 1 to 5 persons in each. In Italy, approximately 90 per cent of all enterprises had from 1 to 10 employees.
In the outlying areas of imperialist domination, in Asia, Africa and Latin America, the same process of growth of the industrial proletariat was taking place, except that it was still at the initial stage, with small semi-artisan enterprises predominating. However, even here---in a number of Latin American countries, separate areas in Asia and Australia, and in parts of Africa---a factory proletariat was taking shape.
A considerable part of the hired workers in many leading capitalist countries was comprised of the agricultural proletariat: in the United
16INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
17States and Germany---around one-fourth, in Russia, France and Austria-Hungary---around one-third and over, and in Italy---a bit less than half. Farm hands were normally engaged in primitive manual labour. Their living and working conditions were extremely difficult, especially in colonial and dependent countries.
The turn of the century in the industrialised countries also witnessed the acceleration of the process of the formation of the " intellectual proletariat" which, according to Frederick Engels, was " intended to play a formidable role in the imminent revolution side by, side with its brothers, the manual workers".^^1^^
The development of the proletariat as a class took place in a tense struggle against capital, during which workers in a number of •countries in the period under review achieved a certain improvement in their working conditions. Of importance in this respect was the movement for an eight-hour working-day, a weekly day off and paid holidays. Under the onslaught of mounting class battles waged by the workers, the ruling elite was forced to introduce legislative limitations on the working-day of women and minors, and to prohibit child labour, arbitrary delays of wages, and deductions, etc., social security laws were adopted in a number of countries.
Socio-economic and other gains of the proletariat made for a growth in its needs. This was dictated by the very conditions of capitalist production, which was making ever higher demands of the proletariat, of its skills and educational level, health and tenacity. The change in the workers' needs was also affected by the rapid burgeoning of cities with their accelerated pace of social life, different set of values of the working population, new cultural life and human intercourse. A great influence was also exerted by the constantly growing number of women in production and public life. However, the substantial broadening of the vital needs of the proletariat was being accompanied by an unprecedentedly wide gap between them and the level---which was frequently dropping---of real earnings, which led to the worsening of the economic and social position of the proletariat. Economic crises had a particularly baleful effect on it. As the party programmes prepared with Lenin's participation pointed out, "crises and periods of industrial stagnation ... lead still more rapidly to the relative and sometimes to the absolute deterioration of the condition of the working class".^^2^^
The chief forms of the capitalists' onslaught against the workers were the raising of prices on consumer goods by the monopolies, the intensification of labour, and unemployment. The tax burden---the result of the exacerbation of imperialist contradictions, the arms race and skyrocketing military spending---grew by leaps and bounds. Typically, military expenditures in the leading capitalist countries were many times the size of allocations for social needs.
The worsening hardships and growing dissatisfaction of the workers with, their lot were mirrored in the increased emigration from a number of countries, which in turn exerted a great influence on the formation of the working class in other countries.
The development of the international proletariat proceeded amidst the growing polarisation of the social structure of bourgeois society. On the one hand, there was taking place an enormous concentration of economic and political power in the hands of the financial oligarchy and big capital, and their intertwining with the landed aristocracy and the state bureaucracy. A small fraction of the population had concentrated in its hands the lion's share of the wealth of the biggest capitalist countries in the world. On the other hand, the army of hired labour was growing. It was being formed by the spontaneous growth of the proletariat and as a result of the rapid stratification of the peasantry, urban petty bourgeoisie and craftsmen, which was creating new masses of proletarians and semi-proletarians.
The shifts taking place in the social structure of society and the tremendous growth of capitalist contradictions engendered a situation whereby the proletariat was being provided an opportunity to rely on the majority of the population of its own country in its struggle. The awakening of Asia and the development of democratic and national liberation movements on imperialism's periphery became a new factor behind the upsurge of the revolutionary movement.
Socialist and democratic tasks acquired increasing prominence in the mounting working-class movement and were more and more organically intertwined. The heightening of monopoly rule, aimed at negating democracy, was accompanied by the growing importance of the democratic goals of the proletariat. Both in countries where extensive bourgeois-democratic transformations were a matter of the future and in those where they had already been effected, the working class addressed itself to the tasks of struggle against monopoly rule, reaction, militarism, etc.
The mass working-class movement had a huge store of fuel. One tidal wave of revolutionary struggle after another was rising in Russia. Strikes in England, Belgium, Sweden and the United States were acquiring unprecedented proportions; a revolutionary atmosphere was taking shape in Germany; fierce outbreaks of the
2-0234
Friedrich Engels, "An den Internationalen Kongress sozialistischer Studenten , Marx/Engels, Werke, Vol. 22, Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 1963, p. 415.
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the Resolutions and Decisions of Congresses, Conferences and Plenums of the Central Committee, Vol. 1, Progress Moscow, 1970, p. 61; Vol. 2, Moscow, 1963, p. 38 (in Russian); V. I. Lenin, "Materials Relating to the Revision of the Party Programme", Collected Works, Vol. 24, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977, p. 467.
18INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
19class struggle were occurring in Italy, Spain and France. The influence of socialist ideas was spreading and growing everywhere. The workingclass movement proved to be an important factor for the development of the liberation struggle of the Balkan peoples. It increasingly made itself felt on the periphery of imperialism as well. The anti-militarist actions of broad strata of the working people acquired vast proportions. The world army of labour was growing in terms of strength and organisation.
The internationalisation of the whole of public life and the Russian revolution of 1905-1907 both made for the intensification of the tendency to the unity of the world revolutionary movement spearheaded against the absolute power of the capitalists. The 1905-1907 revolution the mainspring of which was the proletariat, stimulated the militant international unity of workers, showing, as Lenin had said, that an international alliance of the revolutionary proletariat--- the only force capable of countering the international alliance of capital---"with respect to political solidarity,... is already fully formed".^^1^^ There gradually formed the prerequisites for other, nonproletarian democratic social strata to be incorporated into the united anti-imperialist stream of the struggle of the working class, and for the unity of the revolutionary movement in imperial countries and the national liberation movement of the peoples of colonial and dependent countries.
Yet, translating the revolutionary potential of the proletariat into reality was a highly complicated matter. The level of the class consciousness of the working class was quite varied. Several strata can be singled out in it based on Leninist methodology. The advanced stratum were the most class-conscious workers, who were the earliest to embrace socialist ideas, and dedicated themselves to educating and organising the masses. Their tremendous thirst for knowledge, constant study and self-education, firmness of character and purposefulness turned them into the vanguard of the conscious class movement of the proletariat. Alongside them there existed a broad stratum of average workers---the bulk of the proletariat, which strove for socialism, read socialist newspapers and books and took part in socialist propaganda. Finally there were the numerous "lower strata" of the proletariat, which, while even voting for the Social-- Democrats, had not yet risen to the level of conscious fighters; it took a great and protracted effort to channel their dissatisfaction along a revolutionary course.^^2^^
The realisation of the proletariat's revolutionary potential hinged to a tremendous extent on the degree it was organised politically and on the ability of the proletarian parties to take charge of the struggle of the masses. However, even in this respect the state of affairs was highly complex. International Social-Democracy, particularly the European version, was a significant force in the early 20th century. It was frequently embraced by large masses of workers who had been incorporated into trade unions, cooperatives and youth, women's and other labour organisations.
Yet, international Social-Democracy was affected by symptoms of the protracted disease of opportunism, which brought about a special, qualitatively new situation in the working-class movement during the First World War.
The social base of the growing opportunism was the petty bourgeoisie, the labour aristocracy and the labour bureaucracy. The necessitated concessions of the capitalists to the workers and particularly the imperialists' bribing of the upper crust of the working class, the provision of privileges for the labour aristocracy and the labour bureaucracy, and the specific conditions of the so-called peaceful period in capitalist development fed opportunist tendencies in the working-class movement. The intensifying departure of many leaders of Social-Democratic parties from Marxism and their reformist adaptation to the bourgeoisie, the substitution by them of bourgeois nationalism for proletarian internationalism, and finally, the open shift of the majority of the leaders of the Second International at the start of the world imperialist war to the side of the governments to overtly defend the interests of "their own" bourgeoisie---all this led to the collapse of the Second International. During the First World War, a critical period in the development of the international liberation movement, the opportunist leaders of the Second International deprived the proletariat of prospects for ridding mankind once and for all of the horrors of imperialism, and did all in their power to prevent the war from ending in revolution.
It was only the internationalist revolutionaries, the Bolshevik Party in particular, which manifested a high sense of principle and political perspicacity and identified the true meaning and essence of what was taking place, evaluating it from a class, Marxist viewpoint. Thanks to the Bolsheviks, the ideological and organisational separation of the Social-Democrats into a revolutionary and an opportunistic wings took place in good time in Russia. The idea of the necessity for such separation was paving a way for itself more and more in the international working-class movement and was beginning to take practical forms. Having emerged on the scientific basis of Marxism-Leninism, the Bolshevik Party was able to integrate "scientific socialism with the mass working-class movement and
2*
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "European Capital and the Autocracy", Collected Works, Vol. 8, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1974, p. 273.
~^^2^^ V. I. Lenin, "A Retrograde Trend in Russian Social-Democracy", Collected Works, Vol. 4, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1962, pp. 279-85.
INTRODUCTION
21 20INTRODUCTION
was thoroughly prepared to lead the proletariat towards the seizure of power. It absorbed everything honest, thinking, courageous and self-sacrificing that had been accumulated by generations of revolutionaries and creatively analysed the experience of the revolutionary struggle of the working people. The Bolshevik Party gave the proletariat of Russia a scientific programme for a democratic and socialist revolution, organised it politically and rallied it to a struggle against the autocracy and capitalist system. Its policy conformed to the basic interests of the working class and all other working people and was therefore supported by the majority of the
population.''^^1^^
The Bolshevik Party was headed by the leader of the Russian and world proletariat, Vladimir Lenin. All his work was permeated with resolute striving to prepare the working class and its allies for the decisive revolutionary battles to come.
The epoch-making gains of the international proletariat were
unthinkable without the consistent struggle waged by the Bolsheviks.
and other revolutionary Social-Democrats against opportunism and
revisionism of all types and shades. The opposition of the two main
trends in the working-class movement---revolutionary proletarian
and opportunist---ran through the entire ideological and political
life of the parties of the Second International. It depended on the
outcome of this struggle whether the working class, despite the
opportunists of the right and ``left'' persuasion would be able to
prepare for the socialist revolution and carry it out, or would sink
in the swamp of the notorious "social peace" and nationalistic
prejudices, or would wind up embracing baleful sectarian positions.
A vital condition for the successful triumph of the revolutionary
line was the creative development of revolutionary theory, which
refuted dogmatism and revisionism, in tune with the new historical
situation. The major role here, too, was played by Lenin, to whom
history entrusted the mission of creatively developing for practical
application the teaching of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Leninism
was an inevitable stage in the continued development of Marxism,
of the enrichment of all its components.
During the 1905-1917 period Lenin, drawing on the experience of the multi-million masses and finding in it answers to the burning issues of the working-class movement, comprehensively elaborated a number of fundamental questions of the scientific theory, politics, strategy and tactics of the revolutionary proletariat. The ideological and theoretical work which Lenin did, explaining the meaning of the
new conditions of the class struggle under imperialism, mercilessly unveiling the impotence and falsehood of bourgeois ``refutations'' and revisionist distortions of scientific proletarian ideology, and elaborating a theory of revolution, was of tremendous importance for bringing out the creative initiative of proletarians in many countries.
Similar to the way Marxism in the 19th century synthesised the experience of the world proletarian movement, in the 20th century it was summarised in Leninism, which drew on the legacy of Marx and Engels. Lenin continued their cause. The enrichment by Lenin and other revolutionaries of the proletariat's theoretical arsenal represented the development of a uniform Marxist theory, and prepared the prerequisites for its successful practical realisation and for the implementation of the imminent revolutionary transition from capitalism to socialism.
The leading role in these accomplishments was played by the Russian proletariat. The centre of the revolutionary movement shifted to Russia. It was here that over a period of 12 years three revolutions occurred and the working class took power into its hands in 1917.
The prominence of early 20th-century Russia in the revolutionary movement was due to subjective as well as objective conditions, which made the country the chief point of contradictions and the weakest link in the entire imperialist system. The events in Russia bore out the predictions of Marx and Engels to the effect that the accomplishment of the lofty task facing the Russian socialists "is essential as a pre-condition for the general liberation of the European proletariat",^^1^^ and that the coming revolution in Russia would have tremendous repercussions and be a "turning point in world history".2 And whereas previously the struggle of the proletariat in Germany could provide an example to the working-class movement in other countries by virtue of the fact that it was developing, in Engels's words, "on the shoulders" of the English and French movement, in the early 20th century such an example was the struggle of the Russian proletariat, which utilised the experience of the international working-class movement and stood, as Lenin put it, "on the shoulders" of the Paris Commune.
During the three revolutions Russia's working class, drawing on the experience of the world proletariat, acted as a class of internationalists, marching ahead of the other contingents of the worldwide army of working people. The foresight of the following statement
~^^1^^ The General Council of the First International, 1868-1870, Minutes, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1974, p. 366.
~^^2^^ "Engels an Johann Philipp Becker, 19. Dezember 1879", Marx/Engels, Werke, Vol. 34, Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 1966, p. 433.
~^^1^^ Fiftieth Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, Moscow, 1970, p. 6.
22INTRODUCTION
Part One
THE UPSURGE OF THE REVOLUTIONARY
WORKING-CLASS MOVEMENT
(1905-1907)
by Lenin was borne out: "History has now confronted us with an immediate task which is the most revolutionary of all the immediate tasks confronting the proletariat of any country. The fulfilment of this task, the destruction of the most powerful bulwark, not only of European, but (it may now be said) of Asiatic reaction, would make the Russian proletariat the vanguard of the international revolutionary proletariat.''^^1^^ The revolution of 1905-1907 in Russia, which came to have a tremendous impact on the growth of revolutionary actions by workers and peasants in many countries, and which generated a powerful upsurge in the national liberation movement of the oppressed peoples of the colonial East, attested to the fact that the period of political upheavals and revolutionary battles had begun in world history. All of this shook the world capitalist system and hastened the onset of its general crisis.^^2^^ The 1905-1907 revolution was the dress rehearsal, while the February 1917 revolution was the direct prologue of the Great October Socialist Revolution. The triumph of the October Revolution, the main event of the 20th century, in turn changed fundamentally the course of the development of the whole of mankind. With all the variety of the conditions in which the proletarian revolution in Russia matured and then unfolded, it mirrored the chief patterns of the imminent new era, which were conditioned by preceding socio-economic development. It resolved "primarily Russia's problems, posed by its history, by the concrete conditions existing in it. But basically, these were not local but general problems, posed before the whole of mankind by social development.''^^3^^
In terms of the tremendous shifts which took place in world history and the development of the international working-class movement, the twelve years which separated the first Russian revolution and the October Revolution of 1917 were equal to many decades of ordinary life. Pointing at the start of this period to the " tremendous acceleration of worldwide capitalist development, a quickening of history's pace", Lenin emphasised that it was resulting in the acceleration of the social revolution of the proletariat.^^4^^
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "What Is To Be Done?", Collected Works, Vol. 5, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975, p. 373.
* See "On the Seventieth Anniversary of the Revolution of 1905-1907 in Russia. Resolution of the CPSU Central Committee", Kommunist, No. 2, 1975, p. 5.
~^^3^^ L. I. Brezhnev, Our Course: Peace and Socialism, Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, Moscow, 1978, p. 171.
~^^4^^ V. I. Lenin, "The Fall of Port Arthur", Collected Works, Vol. 8, p. 48.
Chapter 1
THE PROLETARIAT
IN THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
OF 1905-1907
THE FIRST POPULAR REVOLUTION OF THE IMPERIALIST PERIOD
Events in the capital of the Russian Empire on January 9 (22), 1905 shocked the world. On that day the army fired upon a demonstration of workers who had naively hoped that justice and protection from tyranny would be given by the autocratic ruler. Approximately 1,000 were killed and several thousand wounded. That bloody, senseless crime by tsarism finally broke the people's patience. A revolution began. As Lenin put it, "dormant Russia was transformed into a Russia of a revolutionary proletariat and a revolutionary people".^^1^^
The country had been prepared for this transformation by the entire course of previous development. Lenin wrote about it as "the contradiction which most profoundly of all explains the Russian revolution, namely, the most backward system of landownership and the most ignorant peasantry on the one hand, and the most advanced industrial and finance capitalism on the other".^^2^^ The main bastion of the preservation of landed estates in the country and of the landlords' domination in society was the autocracy. The peasantry was landless and suffered from the complete lack of rights. By preserving outmoded semi-feudal forms of landownership and limiting the bourgeoisie politically, tsarism impeded the in-depth development of capitalism, creating, via its great-power aggressive course, conditions for its in-breadth expansion. The autocratic state provided the Russian bourgeoisie an opportunity to obtain superprofits through the use of the crudest, truly barbaric methods of exploiting hired labour. The "labour question" was becoming extremely poignant. The tsar's reactionary colonial policy was generating
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "Lecture on the 1905 Revolution", Collected Works, Vol. 23, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964, p. 238.
* V. I. Lenin, "Political Notes", Collected Works, Vol. 13, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972, p. 442.
26CHAPTER 1
PROLETARIAT IN RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 1905-07
27indignation and mounting protest on the part of the numerous ethnic groups inhabiting Russia.
Although capitalist development in the empire's outlying areas was of an economically progressive nature, under the autocratic reactionary system it led to the merciless exploitation of the indigenous population of the Ukraine, Byelorussia, Poland, the Volga region, the Baltics, the Caucasus and Central Asia. It was compounded by the intensification of national oppression and the exacerbation of national strife and contradictions between the local and the Russian bourgeoisie, between the local aristocracy and the peasant population.
Thus, the most acute contradictions engendered by the development of imperialism were monstrously combined in Russia with numerous vestiges of the Middle Ages. The reactionary autocratic regime and the historical ineptitude of the ruling classes contrasted sharply wi,th the presence of the militant revolutionary proletariat, the potentially revolutionary multi-million peasant masses and the oppressed non-Russian peoples. All of this was fraught with an unprecedented explosion of various social contradictions and class antagonisms.
The economic crisis of the early 20th century and the tsar's defeats in the Russo-Japanese War, which demonstrated the complete bankruptcy of the existing political and economic system, the powerful upsurge of the working-class movement, the widespread democratic ferment, and the inability of the tsarist government to rule by old patterns created a tense revolutionary situation in Russia. The country was rapidly proceeding in the direction of revolutionary upheavals which were to put an end to the tsar's despotism and manorial landownership and give the people basic political rights and freedoms, i.e., solve approximately the scope of problems that bourgeois revolutions had faced in other countries. However, the revolution of 1905-1907 in Russia took place in completely different historical conditions, when capitalism, Russian capitalism included, had grown into its highest, imperialist, stage, and the proletariat had become the leading force in social development. This substantially spread the framework of bourgeois revolutions, objectively drawing them closer timewise to socialist ones, adv anced the working class to the forefront of the world liberation movement and imparted unprecedented dimensions to this movement. The new conditions engendered a new type of bourgeoisdemocratic revolution, a popular revolution of the period of imperialism.
Not fortuitously, it was Russia, where all the basic economic structures and the main social processes and contradictions of the time were represented, and where the proletariat rapidly amassed expe-
rience of class battles and had its own revolutionary Marxist party headed by such a leader as Vladimir Lenin, it was that country that proved to be the weakest link in the entire imperialist system and inaugurated in the 20th century a new cycle of anti-imperialist popular bourgeois-democratic and proletarian revolutions. These were to lead to a fundamental change in the balance of revolutionary and reactionary forces in the international arena and to become a turning point in world history. The revolution of 1905-1907, which emerged on the basis of the profound contradictions of Russian life, in a way also combined the leading tendencies in national and international development; it graphically mirrored the basic social antagonisms and the alignment of class forces in the entire world capitalist system, and became the prototype of the many forthcoming revolutionary battles of the 20th century, the first to demonstrate in practice a number of the features of the liberation movement in conditions of imperialism.
One of them was the intertwining of two social wars during the bourgeois revolution---the struggle of the entire nation under the leadership of the working class against the autocratic regime, the landlords, and all vestiges of serfdom, and the struggle waged by the proletariat and the poor peasants against the urban and rural bourgeoisie. The revolution of 1905-1907 in Russia was brought about not only by the conflict conditioned by the vestiges of serfdom, but also by contradictions inherent in the capitalist system itself. At that time the proletariat and its Bolshevik Party did not yet aim at eradicating capitalism forthwith. However, there could no longer be a lengthy gap between the bourgeois-democratic revolution, doing away with the vestiges of serfdom, and a socialist revolution, which would destroy capitalism.
Aimed against the medieval vestiges, landlords and the autocracy, which was solidly intertwined with Russian and international capitalism and continued to be one of the chief bastions of world reaction, and against the big bourgeoisie, the revolutionary movement in Russia was acquiring marked anti-imperialist features. In case it succeeded, it could develop into a struggle for socialism. The anti-imperialist thrust of the revolution of 1905-1907 was also determined by the fact that while it was taking place the working masses of Russia, led by the proletariat, came out against the RussoJapanese War, which was aggressive on both sides, and against the imperialist foreign and national-colonial policy of the tsar.
The Russian revolution, bourgeois-democratic in its nature and content, intended to overthrow the autocracy and complete the capitalist transformation of the country's agrarian system (Lenin called the struggle against the strong vestiges of serfdom in the countryside "the touchstone of the bourgeois revolution as a whole"
28CHAPTER 1
PROLETARIAT IN RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 1905-07
29in Russia^^1^^), was to a certain extent a proletarian revolution, since the proletariat had become the guiding force, the vanguard of the movement, while the strike---this tried and tested specific method of struggle employed by the working class---had become a mainspring of the entire revolutionary process, the "principal means of bringing the masses into motion and the most characteristic phenomenon in the wave-like rise of decisive events"^^2^^.
Another feature of the bourgeois-democratic revolution of the new type was the alignment of class forces, which was completely different from that in preceding bourgeois revolutions. The proletariat played the leading role in the revolution; its allies were the peasantry and the urban petty-bourgeois strata while the liberal bourgeoisie proved to be a counter-revolutionary class fearing the growth of the independent proletarian movement and peasant uprisings, and organically incapable of resolute struggle against the old regime; all it sought was sharing power with the tsar and the landlord class.
Three camps thus came into play in Russia's political arena: 1) the government, its nucleus the reactionary nobility and the bureaucratic, military and Court elements which sought to preserve the autocracy; 2) the liberals---landlords who had become bourgeois, the bourgeoisie and the upper crust of the bourgeois intelligentsia advocating the limitation of the tsar's power via a parliament and constitution, and 3) the revolutionary democrats (the proletariat, peasantry and petty-bourgeois strata of the urban population and the democratic intelligentsia), fighting to overthrow the tsar, establish a republican system in Russia, and achieve sweeping political, economic and social transformations within the framework of a democratic republic.
The underpinnings of the revolutionary-democratic camp consisted of the alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry of the multinational Russian Empire, with the leading role being assigned to the working class and its vanguard, the party. This determined both the scope of the revolution, the upsurge of the class struggle, and the role which the fundamental social problems played in it. Lenin had good reason to stress that the revolution of 1905-1907 was a truly popular revolution, in which "the very lowest social groups, crushed by oppression and exploitation, rose independently and stamped on the entire course of the revolution the imprint of their own demands, their attempts to build in their own way a new society in place of the
old society that was being destroyed",^^1^^ a revolution in which the Corking class, organised by the Bolsheviks and being the vanguard, fought "for the cause of the whole people, at the head of the whole people".^^2^^
THE BOLSHEVIK PARTY AT THE START OF THE REVOLUTION
The proletariat was the only class in Russian society which had before the revolution an independent political party and a strategic plan of action. Unlike the parties of the Second International, where for years revolutionary and opportunist elements coexisted and peaceful parliamentary forms were recognised as the chief means of struggle, this was a new type of proletarian party which rested on the ideological and theoretical foundation of revolutionary Marxism. This party utilised the rich arsenal of ways and means of struggle developed by the international and Russian working-class movement. It was mastering the complicated art of combining Marxism with the mass struggle of the proletariat and the broad democratic movement. At the Second Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) held in 1903 the revolutionary SocialDemocrats headed by Lenin denned the nature of the forthcoming revolution, the role of the proletariat as the vanguard in the fight for democracy and the role of the peasantry as an ally of the proletariat, and formed a closely-knit revolutionary party. The RSDLP programme reflected the crucial needs of the country's political and economic development and the interests of the broad masses of workers.
The Russian proletariat, by virtue of its position in the social production system and the specifics of its development, the class with rich revolutionary traditions and experience of class struggle, led by a Marxist-Leninist party, its militant political vanguard, and having profound vested interests in a decisive victory over tsarism, this class was historically groomed for its role as leader of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. No other class in Russia was capable of assuming leadership of the revolution.
The Bolsheviks believed organisation of the proletariat to be vital to the realisation of the class independence of the proletariat in the bourgeois-democratic revolution and, in the final analysis, to the success of all revolutionary gains of the working people. The
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1905-1907", Collected Works, Vol. 13, p. 292.
~^^2^^ V. I. Lenin, "Lecture on the 1905 Revolution", Collected Works, Vol. 23,. p. 239.
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "The State and Revolution", Collected Works, Vol. 25, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977, p. 421.
~^^2^^ V. I. Lenin, "Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution". Collected Works, Vol. 9, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, p. 112.
30CHAPTER 1
PROLETARIAT IN RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 1905-07
31Bolsheviks embodied Lenin's teaching about the new type of proletarian party in clear-cut organisational forms.
At that time, the Bolshevik Party numbered some 8,500 members. More than half of them were workers at large enterprises. They were people who had gone through the tough school of underground struggle, who had mastered the skills of that struggle and knew how to lead the proletarian masses. The dangerous work of a revolutionary in tsarist Russia forged staunch fighters prepared to give their all, even their lives, in the struggle. A large proportion of the party was made up of professional revolutionaries from among the workers and the intelligentsia, who were adept at propaganda, agitation and organisation. Most party members had received a Marxist education in underground circles, taking part in the theoretical debates held in them and studying Marxist theory in "prison universities" with the aid of more knowledgeable comrades. All this honed dedicated leaders of the mass reA^olutionary movement during the first Russian revolution.
At the start of the revolution the RSDLP was a nationwide organisation with branches in all main political and economic centres of the country. In accordance with the Rules of the Party, the leadership in the period between Party congresses was exercised by the Party Council, the Central Committee and the editorial board of the Party's Central Organ. All the three bodies had been formed at the Second RSDLP Congress. The Council and the editorial board were located abroad, while the majority of Central Committee members were in Russia and met from time to time for plenary sessions. In the illegal conditions in which the Party existed, particular emphasis had to be placed on underground methods at all levels of party work. Overall guidance of technical and financial matters was continuously effected by Central Committee member L. B. Krasin, a talented engineer and brilliant organiser who maintained his legal position and worked in Baku, in Moscow vicinity and in St. Petersburg throughout the entire period of the first revolution in Russia.
Party work in large economic regions was directed either by regional bureaux of the Central Committee which ran local committees and were appointed by and accountable only to the CC, or by regional associations of the RSDLP headed by committees formed locally.1 The local RSDLP committee was the main link in the party structure. The Rules invested it with complete leadership of the workingclass movement in a given district or city. The unity of principles guiding the formation and functioning of committees, defined at the
time of the struggle to set up the party in Lenin's "Letter to a Comrade on Our Organisational Tasks", was combined with a considerable variety of concrete forms formalised in local Rules.
The largest committees, in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Riga, Baku, Odessa and elsewhere, consisted of a dozen or two party members who had experience in underground work. From among its members a committee assigned an executive organiser to maintain contacts with lower-standing organisations. As the mass base of the party grew, the organiser's work became increasingly important. As early as 1904 district organisers were incorporated in the St. Petersburg and Baku committees, and in 1905 the executive organiser was ever more frequently becoming the head of the respective committee. The role played by district committees was gradually growing within the urban party organisation. The Social-Democratic organisation was structured according to the territorial-production principle.
Workers united and organised at capitalist enterprises were the basis and support of the revolutionary Social-Democrats. The focal point of the proletariat's economic and political struggle, the enterprise, became also the centre of the party organisation of the revolutionary Social-Democrats, which in many ways corresponded to their leading role in this struggle.
This pattern of party work was also prompted by the living and working conditions of workers who had no democratic rights locally, who were forced to work 10-12 hours daily, etc. Lenin wrote: "The important thing is living conditions, conditions of assembly, conditions under which people meet, conditions of joint work, because the primary nucleus should meet frequently and regularly and function in a particularly lively fashion.''^^1^^
Alongside the predominantly working-class Social-Democratic organisations, there were party organisations of students. The first. steps were also taken to coordinate mass agitation work among peasants and soldiers. On the eve and at the outset of the first Russian revolution, the RSDLP set up special organisations to work among the proletariat of the Empire's non-Russian areas. Hummet (Energy), one of the first, was formed in 1904 and operated under the leadership of the Baku committee. It was followed by an Armenian section under the same committee. The Baku committee later set up the Faruk organisation to work among the mountain dwellers of Daghestan. A Tatar Social-Democratic circle began functioning in 1904 under the Kazan Committee of the RSDLP, and eventually developed into a group.
National groups functioned on the footing of district party organisations and in political matters were subordinated to single party
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin to Olga Vinogradova, April 8, 1905, Collected Works, Vol. 34, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1966, p. 310.
~^^1^^ The Third Congress of the RSDLP. April-May 1905. Minutes, Moscow 1962, pp. 472-74 (in Russian).
32PROLETARIAT IN RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 1905-07
33CHAPTER 1
centres. The press was assigned a prominent role in work among ethnic contingents of Russia's proletariat. The Hummet organisation printed a newspaper in Azerbaijani under the same title, and, together with the Armenian section of the Baku committee, it published the legal newspaper Koch Devet in two languages, followed by Tekemyul and Yeldash.
Indubitable success was scored in the formation and consolidation of the Russian labour party. However, the functioning, development and improvement of the party organisation of the new type formed under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin, was impeded by the splitting of the RSDLP by the Mensheviks. The split further intensified on the eve and at the outset of the first Russian revolution. The overwhelming majority of party committees, including the major ones (the St. Petersburg, Moscow, Riga, Odessa, the Northern, the Ural, the committees of the Caucasian Union, etc.), firmly supported the stand of the majority at the Second Congress of the RSDLP and upheld its decisions. The Mensheviks, undermining the fulfilment of the decisions, gradually took over the Foreign League of Russian Social-Democracy and the editorial board of th<? Central Organ, gained predominance in the Party Council and co-opted their supporters into the Central Committee. With the help of these bodies they were able to gain control of the leadership of some committees, mostly those just newly formed, and to set up, in violation of the Rules, their own parallel groups in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Odessa, Nikolayev and other centres. The Mensheviks were subverting the organisation's unity and coming out against centralism and discipline. Lenin pointed out in early 1905 that in comparison to the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks were "materially ... very much weaker. We have yet to convert our moral strength into material strength.''^^1^^
The party was also greatly harmed by an opportunistic conciliatory current which saw the path to party unity to lie in concessions to Menshevik ``generals'' and which thereby encouraged the splitting moves of the Mensheviks. Instead of providing political leadership for the mounting revolutionary movement which was in dire need of clear-cut guidelines and organisation, the compromisers essentially stood for merely "positive work" in providing purely technical services to local organisations.
It was in these conditions that Lenin launched the struggle to consolidate the Bolshevik ranks and to convene the next congress of the party, the supreme body empowered to settle all disputed issues. The Party Council refused to convene a congress, and the Bolsheviks took the initiative. In late 1904, the Northern, Southern
and Caucasian conferences formed the Bureau of Majority Committees, the guiding centre of the Bolsheviks, and their newspaper Vperyod, began to be published under Lenin's editorship. Thus, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks both had their own leadership bodies and their mouthpieces. At the start of the revolution in Russia in March 1905 there were 32 Bolshevik committees and 35 groups, the Mensheviks had 23 committees and 27 groups, and 10 committees and 43 groups embraced conciliatory positions.
The Third Congress of the RSDLP, held in April and May 1905 in London, addressed itself to the task of shaping the party line in the revolution and of ensuring the functioning of a united militant party organisation capable of putting this line into practice.
The congress elaborated a strategy and tactics of the proletariat and all working people in the bourgeois-democratic revolution, and formalised the unity of the Bolsheviks on the organisational principles proposed by Lenin. The Rules of the RSDLP adopted at the congress established the Leninist formulation of party membership according to which "any person who accepts the programme of the Party, supports the Party with material means, and participates in the work of one of its organisations shall be considered a member of the Party".^^1^^ The autonomy of local committees was broadened and the role of party members from among the workers heightened. The congress raised the issue of introducing universal electivity of committees, as the situation in the country would grow conducive to this and the composition of party organisations would become more consistent and homogeneous.
The congress renounced duocentrism (the Central Committee and the editorial board of the Central Organ) and elected a single leading centre, the Central Committee headed by Lenin. The editorial board of the party's central newspaper, the Proletary, was made subordinate to the Central Committee. Lenin became its editor and the representative of the RSDLP in the International Socialist Bureau (ISB) of the Second International. The formation of the Party Council was not stipulated in the new Rules.
The Third Congress of the RSDLP was a Bolshevik congress, as delegates of the minority committees did not attend. Menshevik leaders abroad gathered them in Geneva for a factional conference which expressed the opportunistic course of the Mensheviks in the revolution.
At the outbreak of the revolution the Mensheviks consolidated the split of the proletarian party into two independent parties adhering to two different political lines and tactics in the revolution.
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "A Letter to A. A. Bogdanov and IS. I. Gusev", Collected Works, Vol. 8, p. 145.
~^^1^^ The CPSU in the Resolutions..., Vol. 1, Moscow, 1970, p. 124 (in Russian).
3-0234
34CHAPTER 1
PROLETARIAT IN RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 1905-07
35LENIN'S STRATEGY AND TACTICS OF WORKING-CLASS STRUGGLE IN THE DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION
The elaboration of a strategy and tactics of the proletarian party in the first bourgeois-democratic revolution under imperialism was based on a profound Marxist analysis of Russian reality, a thorough examination of the main tendencies in world development, and a generalisation and critical interpretation of the theoretical legacy and practical experience of the international working-class and democratic movement and the emancipation struggle in Russia per se. Lenin constantly stressed that the ascertaining of identical basic processes of capitalist development in Russia and in the West, and the advancing of the same chief tasks of the Socialists and the working class "must not, under any circumstances, lead to our forgetting the specific features of Russia which must find full expression in the specific features of our programme".^^1^^ Before the onset of the decisive events of the revolution, the Bolsheviks led by Lenin already worked out a consistently revolutionary action programme, and a strategy and tactics of struggle for the proletariat and all working people. Lenin substantially supplemented and creatively developed Marxist theory as applied to new historical conditions, armed the Russian and international proletariat ideologically, and upheld the great teaching of Marx and Engels in the fight against right and ``left'' opportunism.
A special role in this was played by the Bolshevik decisions drafted by Lenin at the Third Congress of the RSDLP and Lenin's book Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution. Concluding the book Lenin expressed the very essence of his approach to the working class's tasks in the democratic revolution. He wrote: "At the head of the whole people, and particularly of the peasantry--- for complete freedom, for a consistent democratic revolution, for a republic! At the head of all the toilers and the exploited---for socialism! Such in practice must be the policy of the revolutionary proletariat, such is the class slogan which must permeate and determine the solution of every tactical problem, every practical step of the workers' party during the revolution.''^^2^^
In the course of the revolution, the fundamental difference between the revolutionaries and the opportunists, first and foremost between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, was manifest. That difference had become evident during the formation of the party at
the Second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903 and increasingly deepened in the period that followed.
The basic antithesis in attitude towards Russian reality, as well as towards the experience of the proletarian struggle, was vividly manifested during the polemics between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks in the very first months of the revolution of 1905-1907. Beginning with the debate on the question of whether the SocialDemocrats should take part in a provisional revolutionary government following the toppling of the autocracy, the polemics revealed the different conceptions of the dynamics of the very process of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, its mainsprings, tasks and strategic perspectives.
Menshevism was objectively leading to the transformation of the working class into an appendage of the liberal bourgeoisie, and was hindering the solution of the basic tasks facing the proletariat and the broad working masses. Bolshevism geared the working class to the role of vanguard of the popular movement, developing extensively and utilising to the full the revolutionary potential of all the country's genuinely advanced forces.
Lenin exposed the complete untenability and unscientific nature of the argumentation of the Mensheviks who worshipped the canons of European bourgeois revolutions. In the spring of 1905, comparing the situation in Russia with that in the Germany of 1848, he noted a number of specific features of the Russian revolution: "(1) An immeasurably greater store of resentment and revolutionary feeling among the lower classes in Russia than there was in the Germany of 1848. With us the change is sharper; with us there have been no intermediate stages between autocracy and political freedom (the Zemstvo does not count); with us despotism is Asiatically virginal.
(2) With us a disastrous war increases the likelihood of a severe collapse, for it has involved the tsarist government completely.
(3) With us the international situation is more favourable, for proletarian Europe will make it impossible for the crowned heads of Europe to help the Russian monarchy. (4) With us the development of class-conscious revolutionary parties, their literature and organisation, is on a much higher level than it was in 1789, 1848, or 1871. (5) With us the various nationalities oppressed by tsarism, such as the Poles and Finns, provide a powerful impulse to the attack on the autocracy. (6) With us the peasantry is in particularly sorry plight; it is incredibly impoverished and has absolutely nothing to lose."1 All these factors bespoke the fact that the Russian bourgeois revo-
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "A Draft Programme of Our Party", Collected Works, Vol. 4, p. 235.
2 V.I.Lenin, Collected Works, Vol._9, p. 114.
ir i^^1^^ I' L Ln^lnVoA Resolution of the 1789 or the 1848 Type?", Collected Works, vol. o, pp. 257-58.
3*
PROLETARIAT IN RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 1905-07
37 36CHAPTER 1
lution would traverse its own path, a path different from the bourgeois revolutions of the age of ``free'' capitalism.
In the struggle against Menshevism, Lenin revealed the dialectical interconnection, especially important for Marxist theory, between the socio-economic content of the revolution and its mainsprings and means of struggle; he showed that there is no direct relationship between them. Lenin explained that in terms of its socio-economic content the impending revolution in Russia would be a bourgeois one, i.e., one which would not directly touch upon the foundations of the bourgeois system. Not only would it not destroy the system, but, to the contrary, it would further deepen and exacerbate the contradictions of the capitalist system, including the main contradiction---that between labour and capital. However, it does not follow at all from this that the bourgeoisie, as the Mensheviks thought, would become the leading force of the revolution. Under imperialism, not only a revolution in a form benefitting predominantly the big capitalist, the financial tycoon and the ``progressive'' landlord was possible, but also a sweeping democratic revolution in the interests of the worker and peasant. The concrete historical form in which the bourgeois-democratic revolution would take place in Russia was to be eventually determined by the outcome of the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie for leadership in the liberation movement, by the outcome of the struggle to win the support of the peasant masses.
The leadership of the proletariat in the liberation struggle underlay the Bolsheviks' political line. Lenin convincingly showed that the proletariat was most interested in the decisive triumph of a bourgeois revolution which would not only ensure it democratic rights and social gains (freedom of speech, coalition and assembly, an eight-hour working-day, etc.), but also create the prerequisites for the struggle for socialism. Lenin stressed here that the proletariat was free of any class ``selfishness'', that it was waging a struggle not for the narrow interests of its own class, but for the interests of the entire people, that it was acting as the representative of the broadest working masses in town and country, as the ideological leader of the entire democracy.
However, the position the working class occupied in the system of social production and in the country's social structure, as well as the proximity of its interests to those of other working classes and strata, only created the objective possibility for the proletariat's leadership in the liberation movement. For this possibility to become a reality the vanguard class had to win the confidence and support of the non-proletarian strata of Russia's working population, forge a solid alliance with them (particularly with the peasantry), assume leadership of their struggle against the autocratic system and para-
lyse the striving towards political leadership of the masses on the part of the liberal bourgeoisie, isolating it from the masses. It was the Bolshevik Party that had the hard job of purging pettybourgeois democratism of "non-democratic admixtures", that had to battle liberalism and constitutional illusions. Thus, the proletariat and its Marxist vanguard faced a complex struggle for leadership of the democratic movement, and that struggle ran through the entire political history of the Russia of the early 20th century.
In Lenin's analysis the vanguard role of the proletariat is revealed as the consistent, profound and extensive influence of the workingclass on the development and prospects of the revolutionary process. This influence is exerted under the direct leadership of the Marxist party of the proletariat, without which the vanguard role of the proletariat would be unfeasible. Being the vanguard class, Lenin pointed out, means not only mounting a most vigorous and selfless struggle against the autocracy and against capitalist oppression, but also bringing a revolutionary consciousness to the people, awakening the latter to active political life, responding to any act of coercion and injustice perpetrated against the oppressed. The tasks of the vanguard class and its party further include a theoretical interpretation of the goals of the revolution, the formulation of corresponding slogans and the selection of the most effective ways and means of revolutionary struggle. The proletariat and its Marxist vanguard lead the movement of the non-proletarian masses, the peasantry in particular, both ideologically and organisationally. This leadership is an absolute necessity, since the peasantry is divided and disorganised, prone to endless vacillations and, finally, it is politically too underdeveloped to independently attain victory in the struggle against the autocratic-landlordist system.
Lenin posed and resolved the problem of the working class's allies in the democratic and socialist revolutions. It would seem that the logical march of history suggested that the bourgeois democrats could have become such an ally in the bourgeois revolution. However, in imperialist conditions they had already ceased to be something uniform, having irrevocably split into the liberal bourgeoisie, with regard to whom the proletariat had to pursue the tactics of political isolation, and the petty-bourgeois, particularly peasant, revolutionary democrats, allies of the working class in its struggle against autocracy. Accordingly, the proletariat had to orient itself not on an agreement with the bourgeoisie, but on an alliance with left forces---petty-bourgeois revolutionary democrats, especially the peasantry whom Lenin called the revolutionary-republican bourgeoisie. In this fashion, the leftist bloc tactics, some examples of which were observed in previous bourgeois revolutions, was now becoming a vital common pattern of the liberation movement. The
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39success of the bourgeois-democratic revolution as a whole depended largely on the success of a broad militant alliance between proletarian and petty-bourgeois democrats and the concrete political agreements of revolutionary parties and organisations in the struggle against tsarism. The historic merit of Lenin lay in his brilliant realisation of the policy of the proletariat's leading role in the revolution based on the leftist bloc tactics which later attained renown in the ranks of the international working-class movement as well.
Lenin elucidated the essence of the Bolshevik tactics as follows: "The further the bourgeois revolution advances, the farther left the proletariat seeks for allies among the bourgeois democrats, and the deeper it goes from their upper ranks to their lower ranks.... The revolution has gone far beyond that. The upper ranks of the bourgeois democrats have begun to desert the revolution. The lower ranks have begun to awaken. The proletariat has begun to seek allies (for a bourgeois revolution) in the lower ranks of the bourgeois democrats.''^^1^^ Lenin invariably stressed that the proletariat supported the bourgeois democrats only when and inasmuch as they actually fought the autocracy.
The Bolsheviks believed that at the democratic stage of the revolution, the proletariat's ally is the entire peasantry, which despite the deeply developed process of its social differentiation, continued to come out against the landlords as a single class or a social stratum. The peasants demanded the complete abolition of manorial ownership, and were prepared to support the slogan of the nationalisation of all land. And if the popular forces were successful, this would make it possible to advance the bourgeois revolution in Russia much further than bourgeois revolutions had gone in the West and, the main thing, it would facilitate the subsequent development of the bourgeois-democratic revolution into a socialist one.
In his work Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, Lenin formulated the essence of the growth of the one process into the other as follows: "The proletariat must carry the democratic revolution to completion, allying to itself the mass of the peasantry in order to crush the autocracy's resistance by force and paralyse the bourgeoisie's instability. The proletariat must accomplish the socialist revolution, allying to itself the mass of the semi-proletarian elements of the population, so as to crush the bourgeoisie's resistance by force and paralyse the instability of the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie.''^^2^^
It is for this reason that Lenin attached prime importance to the elaboration of a correct agrarian programme and to the agitation and organisational work of the proletariat and its party in the countryside. At the Third RSDLP Congress, when it became clear that the struggle for land was acquiring the nature of an extensive peasant revolution and that the slogan of struggle for the return of plots of land expropriated by the nobility after the abolition of serfdom in 1861 was not enough now, a decision was taken to vigorously support all revolutionary demands made by the peasantry, including the confiscation of all land belonging to landlords, the state, the church, monasteries and the Crown. A congress resolution called for the "immediate organisation of revolutionary peasant committees to implement all revolutionary-democratic transformations that would rid the peasantry of the oppression of the police, officials and landlords". At the same time, consistently following a course for the independent class organisation of the rural proletariat, the Bolsheviks reaffirmed at the Congress the necessity for constant work in this area.^^1^^
The decisions of the Third Congress were formalised and expanded upon in December 1905 at the Bolshevik Tammerfors Conference. Later, at the Fourth RSDLP Congress in 1906, Lenin set forth an extensive agrarian programme geared to making maximum use of the peasantry's militant potential in the bourgeois-democratic revolution. Added to the former Bolshevik demands for the confiscation of manorial holdings and the establishment of peasant committees for the actual disposal of confiscated lands was the demand that land be nationalised, that is, made state property (under definite conditions). "In politics, as in all the life of society," Lenin wrote, "if you do not push forward, you will be hurled back. Either the bourgeoisie, strengthened after the democratic revolution (which naturally strengthens the bourgeoisie), will rob both the workers and the peasant masses of all their gains, or the proletariat and the peasant masses will fight their way further forward. And that means a republic and the complete sovereignty of the people. It means---if a republic is established---the nationalisation of all the land as the most that a bourgeois-democratic revolution can attain, as the natural and necessary step from the victory of bourgeois democracy to the beginning of the real struggle for socialism.''^^2^^
To counter Lenin's revolutionary agrarian programme, the Mensheviks advanced a reformist, half-baked municipalisation programme. According to it, the peasants would retain only their allotted plots, while the landed estates would be taken over by the munici-
~^^1^^ The CPSU in the Resolutions..., Vol. 1, p. 117.
~^^2^^ V. I. Lenin, "Revision of the Agrarian Programme of the Workers' Party", Collected Works, Vol. 10, pp. 190-91.
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "Report on the Unity Congress of the R.S.D.L.P", Collected Works, Vol. 10, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975, pp. 360-61.
~^^2^^ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 9, p. 100.
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41palities, from which the peasants could rent these lands. This programme overlooked one of the country's basic needs---that for a break with all medieval forms of land ownership. Neither did it tie the solution of the agrarian question in with the democratisation of Russia's entire political system. Instead of stimulating an upsurge in the peasant movement, which had begun to spread all over the country, it narrowed it to a local framework. As a result, it provided a solution neither to the agrarian issue nor to the tasks of forging an alliance between the working class and the peasantry, nor to the tasks of overthrowing the autocracy.^^1^^
While speaking out against such a programme, the Bolsheviks were not united in their approach to the agrarian issue. Many of them rejected nationalisation and upheld the division of the landed estates making them private property of the peasants. This principle, implying as it did the preservation of peasant land ownership, lost track of the fact that, in itself, it was a vestige of the Middle Ages, However, even with such inconsistency, the programme of the ``divisionists'' aimed at the abolition of manorial ownership was of a revolutionary-democratic nature, and when it became clear that it would be impossible to push through the nationalisation programme at the Congress, Lenin voted along with the ``divisionists''. The majority at the Congress supported the municipalisation programme. However, the Bolsheviks managed to include in the Congress resolutions a direct demand that lands belonging to the church, monasteries, the tsar's family and all private landowners (aside from small holdings) be confiscated, and that revolutionary actions by the peasantry, up to and including the confiscation of manors, be supported.^^2^^
The Bolsheviks felt that it was highly important to draw to the proletariat's side broad strata of the petty-bourgeois urban population, the democratic intelligentsia and students, who were active in the struggle against autocracy, accounting between 1905 and 1908 for some 23 per cent of all "state criminals", as revolutionaries were called when put on trial.^^3^^
Also participating in the overall struggle against the autocratic system was the national liberation movement of the oppressed peoples of the Russian Empire. The working masses of ethnic areas were an inalienable part of the international revolutionary-- democratic camp. They joined the Russian workers and peasants in
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1905-1907", Collected Works, Vol. 13, p. 333.
~^^2^^ V. I. Lenin, "The Unity Congress of the RSDLP", Collected Works, Vol. 10, pp. 279-88.
~^^3^^ V. I. Lenin, "The Role of Social Estates and Classes in the Liberation Movement", Collected Works, Vol. 19, pp. 329-30.
dealing blows at tsarism and the bourgeoisie, as well as fighting the feudal lords.
The task of the vanguard of the working class was to unite all these revolutionary forces where possible, organise them and prepare them for an armed insurrection. The slogan of the uprising as a practical militant task of the proletariat was advanced by the party right after the events of January 9, and the Third RSDLP Congress adopted an ad hoc decision which stated that the diversified ideological, organisational and tactical preparations for the insurrection were one of the most crucial and pressing tasks of the Bolshevik organisations. Lenin called upon the proletariat to master all the forms of class struggle and use them as the situation dictated. He especially studied questions of the armed struggle. As Nadezhda Krupskaya recalled, "he not only read and carefully analysed everything Marx and Engels wrote about the revolution and insurrection, he also read many books about the art of war, examining from all angles the technique and organisation of armed insurrection".1 Marxists have never absolutised armed methods of struggle. Marx wrote addressing himself to bourgeois governments: "We shall advance against you peacefully, where this is possible, and shall use weapons if this becomes necessary.''^^2^^ As if expanding upon this thought, Lenin pointed out in 1899 that the working class would prefer to take power peacefully.^^3^^ However, the actual alignment of forces within the country and in the international arena in the early 20th century was such that only the armed onslaught of the oppressed classes could resolve the conflict between the autocracy and the people in Russia.
The flame of a popular insurrection was to yield the solution to the principal question of any revolution---the question of state power. It is not enough to recognise the revolution and talk about it, Lenin said, it is essential to determine which class should be toppled and which class or classes should take charge of the state. The slogan of the revolution is empty and meaningless without this. Proceeding from the new alignment of class forces, in which the proletariat should assume leadership in the bourgeois-democratic revolution, Lenin formulated the all-important conclusion that the victorious bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia would bring not the bourgeoisie to power, as was the case in all previous bourgeois revolutions, but the proletariat and the peasantry, and would conclude with the establishment of their revolutionary-democratic dictatorship. "Real-
~^^1^^ N. K. Krupskaya, Recollections of Lenin, Moscow, 1972, p. 99 (in Russian).
``Aufzeichnung einer Rede von Karl Marx iiber die politische Aktion der
Arbeiterklasse", Marx/Engels, Werke, Vol. 17, Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 1968, p. 652.
~^^3^^ V. I. Lenin, "A Retrograde Trend in Russian Social-Democracy", Collected Works, Vol. 4, p. 276.
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43isation of the changes urgently and absolutely indispensable to the proletariat and the peasantry," Lenin wrote, "will evoke desperate resistance from the landlords, the big bourgeoisie, and tsarism. Without a dictatorship it is impossible to break down that resistance and repel counter-revolutionary attempts.''^^1^^
From the standpoint of Marxist teaching about the class struggle, Lenin pointed out, the existence of such a dictatorship at the stage of the bourgeois-democratic revolution is quite possible, for the fundamental interests of the proletariat and the peasantry in the struggle for democratic change inevitably coincide.
Lenin singled out the most substantial features of the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.
First, this would be a democratic, not a socialist, dictatorship which would not extend beyond the framework of bourgeois socioeconomic transformations and would realise only the RSDLP minimum programme of redistributing land in favour of the peasants, broadly democratising the political system, improving the condition of the workers, etc., without as yet affecting the foundations of capitalism. Accordingly, this was reflected in the Bolshevik slogans for a democratic republic, eight-hour working-day, and confiscation of manors.
Second, although under this dictatorship the proletariat would share power with the petty bourgeoisie, particularly the peasantry, such a dictatorship is conceivable and feasible only given the leading role of the proletariat in the liberation movement.
Third, the dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, as Lenin repeatedly pointed out, would be a transitional type of power, no longer bourgeois but not fully proletarian either, which would develop into the dictatorship of the proletariat as the bourgeoisdemocratic revolution deepened and grew into a socialist revolution.
A provisional revolutionary government was to become the political organ of the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. Its functions would include convening the Constituent Assembly, arming the nation and effecting broad democratic reforms in town and country, so as to consolidate, both "from below" and "from above", the people's principal gains by way of exerting pressure on the ruling classes.
The 1905-1907 period witnessed the beginnings of the Soviets (people's councils) in a number of areas in Russia as the embryos of the state form of the dictatorship of the revolutionary people. The "sovereignty of the people" which the Bolsheviks advocated during that period clearly did not fit within the historically limited confines
of bourgeois democracy and a parliamentary republic. The Soviets Of Workers' Deputies, the peasants' committees and other similar organisations of the insurgent people formed during the revolution were already the beginnings of a fundamentally new type of revolutionary power. Lenin immediately appreciated their significance. As the Resolution of the CPSU Central Committee on the Seventieth Anniversary of the 1905-1907 Russian Revolution stated, the Soviets "were bodies of revolutionary power, of the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. Lenin keenly identified them as the prototype of Soviet power".^^1^^
Lenin's conclusion about the dictatorship of the revolutionary people opening up the way for the bourgeois-democratic revolution to develop into a socialist revolution was a fresh contribution to Marxist theory. It dealt a heavy blow to the opportunists, who were coming out against the attainment of political power by the proletariat and its allies as a task of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. The establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry would provide the oppressed classes an opportunity to take action not only "from below" but also "from above", and would open up broad vistas for combining spontaneous actions of the masses with the purposeful work of the proletarian vanguard employing a wide range of revolutionary methods. Thus, prospects opened up for the proletariat to fight for power not only in the highly developed capitalist countries but also in countries with a medium level of capitalist development so as to help the bourgeois-democratic revolution mature into a socialist one.
It should be pointed out that in imperialist conditions Lenin posited the question of the relationship between the struggle for democracy and the struggle for socialism in a new way. The early 20th century was marked by the intertwining of the goals of the democratic and socialist stages of the revolution. "Whoever wants to reach socialism by any other path than that of political democracy," Lenin wrote, "will inevitably arrive at conclusions that are ... reactionary.''^^2^^ The very term democracy had deepened considerably in meaning. The working masses had come face to face with the task of attaining a truly popular democracy which would pave the way directly to a socialist revolution. Lenin, who invariably approached the elaboration of the strategy and tactics of revolutionary Social-Democracy from the standpoint of the socialist prospects for the proletarian movement, was the first Marxist to appreciate the significance of this new situation and to show that under imperialism the policy of alliance between the proletariat
~^^1^^ The CPSU in the Resolutions..., Vol. 2, p. 475.
~^^2^^ V. I. Lenin, "Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution", Collected Works, Vol. 9, p. 29.
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution", Collected Works, Vol. 9, p. 56.
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45and the middle strata in the struggle for democracy and socialism was becoming particularly important. The development of revolutionary events in Russia and other countries corroborated Lenin's prediction.
Lenin clearly delineated the bourgeois-democratic and socialist revolutions in terms of their tasks and composition of struggling forces and warned the party against unreal, adventuristic prospects of fighting for socialism right at the outset of the revolution. Nevertheless, already in the 1905-1907 period he saw no insurmountable wall between the democratic and socialist revolutions. Marx's idea about an uninterrupted revolution underlay Lenin's theory of the development of the bourgeois-democratic revolution into a socialist revolution, which represented a further development of the Marxist doctrine of social revolution. Lenin wrote: "From the democratic revolution we shall at once, and precisely in accordance with the measure of our strength, the strength of the class-conscious and organised proletariat, begin to pass to the socialist revolution. We stand for uninterrupted revolution. We shall not stop half-way.''^^1^^
Lenin tackled the problem of the development of the bourgeoisdemocratic revolution into a socialist one on the basis of an exact scientific analysis of the objective and subjective preconditions for a revolution and the prospects for its development.
It was objective conditions that inevitably gave rise to the countrywide struggle against the tsar and the manorial estate, for a democratic republic at the first stage, which grew into the proletariat's struggle against the bourgeoisie, at the second. However, already at the first stage it was the proletariat, the consistently revolutionary and most organised social class, that became the force uniting the masses. Its leadership in the course of the bourgeois-democratic revolution would naturally develop into leadership of the masses in the socialist revolution.
The dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, later opening up the way to the struggle for socialism, was to become the chief political weapon with which the revolution would progress from the first stage to the second. "Like everything else in the world, the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat, and the peasantry has a past and a future. Its past is autocracy, serfdom, monarchy, and privilege. In the struggle against this past, in the struggle against counter-revolution, a 'single will' of the proletariat and the peasantry is possible, for here there is unity of interests. "Its future is the struggle against private property, the struggle of the wage-worker against the employer, the struggle for socialism.
jjere singleness of will is impossible. Here the path before us lies not from autocracy to a republic, but from a petty-bourgeois democratic republic to socialism.''^^1^^ It was in 1905 that Lenin strongly emphasised that the outcome of the revolution, the possibility of the workers and peasants holding power in Russia would be determined largely by the alignment of class forces within the country, and by the character of the democratic revolution taking place in it.2 This approach to the issue was of great importance from the standpoint of the subsequent development of Lenin's theory, which led to the fundamental conclusion, drawn during World War I, that socialism could triumph, initially, in several and even in one, separate, country. Lenin's theory of the development of the bourgeois democratic revolution into a socialist one was an outstanding contribution to Marxism. "Based on a scientific analysis of the new historical era and the alignment of class forces, it paved the only true road of revolutionary practice," the GPSU Central Committee noted in the Resolution on the Seventieth Anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1905-1907.^^3^^
In elaborating the strategy and tactics of the revolution, the Bolsheviks were well aware of the fact that "the cause of Russian freedom and of the struggle of the Russian (and the world) proletariat for socialism depends to a very large extent on the military defeats of the autocracy".^^4^^ Under Lenin's leadership the Bolsheviks worked out a political line of fighting for peace, which ran drastically counter to the pacifist line of the Mensheviks. Instead of platitudes about peace at all costs, that glossed over the importance to Russia's proletariat of the defeat of the autocracy, the Bolsheviks advanced a concrete anti-war programme of action. Here Lenin stressed the importance of continual anti-militarist struggle and anti-war propaganda by the revolutionary proletariat.^^6^^ The preparation of conditions for the revolution was. the key to the solution of the peace issue. The Bolsheviks advocated the defeat of the Russian government, since this would weaken tsarism and lead to the fall of the entire system based on oppression and coercion. Lenin consistently elucidated the difference between the interests of the people of Russia and those of the tsar and the bourgeoisie in this war. The Bolsheviks showed the workers that their enemy was not Japan, but the tsarist autocratic government. Lenin pointed out that the revo-
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution", Collected Works, Vol. 9, pp. 84-85.
^^2^^ Ibid., pp. 83-85.
~^^3^^ The CPSU in the Resolutions..., Vol. 2, p. 474.
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "Social-Democracy's Attitude Towards the Peasant Movement", Collected Works, Vol. 9, pp. 236-37.
~^^4^^ V. I. Lenin, "The Fall of Port Arthur", Collected
Works, Vol. 8, p. 53.
~^^5^^ Ibid.
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47lution would be an upshot of military ventures and the defeat of tsarism on the one hand, and the extension of a major revolutionary onslaught by the proletariat organised and prepared by the SocialDemocrats, on the other.^^1^^ Thus, it was in this period that the foundations were laid for the policy of transforming the imperialist war into a civil war and advocating the defeat of ``our'' government, a policy the Bolsheviks pursued during World War I.
Lenin's truly dialectic concept of the social revolution, of its strategy and tactics, was countered by the abstract doctrinaire stand of the Menshevik opportunists. In their assessment of the prospects of the struggle they exhibited extreme pedantry and shallowness, adherence to stagnant dogmas and banalities, and historical fatalism. Their reasoning could not go beyond the habitual conceptions of ``classical'' bourgeois revolutions which were accomplished under the leadership of the bourgeoisie. The Mensheviks were ready to give away the fruits of the popular struggle to this class.^^2^^ Even when they verbally recognised the leadership of the proletariat in the incipient revolution they actually stripped this conception of its revolutionary essence. Their schemes gave quarter neither to the leadership role of the working class vis-a-vis the peasantry, nor to the consistent struggle against counter-- revolutionary Russian liberalism. The keynote of the entire Menshevik philosophy of revolution was that victory over the autocracy would be ensured only if bourgeois democracy, whether the Cadet or any other party of that type, would become the political nucleus of the liberation movement in Russia.^^3^^ Thus, the Mensheviks virtually assigned the Russian proletariat only the role of the chief physical force of the revolution, its "unskilled worker" voluntarily conceding power to the bourgeoisie, which in practice meant the surrender of the Mensheviks to the liberals. Instead of working to organise the masses the Mensheviks demagogically called for their spontaneous "action on their own" and constantly lagged behind the revolutionary events. One example of this is their attitude to armed insurrection---the proletariat's chief weapon in the struggle against the autocracy. Although they did not deny the need for a resolute struggle between the revolutionary people and tsarism, the Mensheviks nonetheless considered practical military preparation for it absolutely unrealistic and limited the party's task in this sphere solely to agita-
tion and calls for the ``self-arming'' of the people, which turned all their discussions about armed insurrection into empty phrasemongering.^^1^^
The idea of a revolution accomplished with the participation of the peasants under the leadership of the working class was alien to the Mensheviks. They placed the emphasis not on peasant democratism, but on the prejudices and backwardness of the peasant masses, sharply condemning the Bolshevik leftist bloc tactics, and especially the idea of the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.^^2^^
The prospects of the Social-Democrats' participation in the provisional revolutionary government seemed ``tragic'' to the Mensheviks. The bourgeois revolution, as the Menshevik ideologists surmised, was to inaugurate a period of relatively lengthy "free bourgeois development" during which the proletariat would have to limit itself solely to the role of "extreme left opposition". For this reason the Mensheviks equated the Bolshevik aims for the participation of Social-Democrats in the provisional revolutionary government, so as to fight ruthlessly counter-revolution and to uphold the interests of the working class, with those once espoused by the Narodnaya Volya, alleging them to be premature attempts to effect a socialist revolution. The democratic republic to which we aspire, Georgi Plekhanov emphasised, is a bourgeois republic.^^3^^ Any upsurge in the revolution "several steps at a time"---and this is what Plekhanov viewed as the fundamental ``flaw'' in the Bolshevik tactical planwould mean its death, an inevitable step backwards, for only a slow advance of the revolution, one step at a time, corresponding to the French pattern of the 18th century, was capable of accomplishing, according to him, a "maximum of useful historic work".^^4^^
``One must have a schoolboy's conception of history," Lenin wrote in reply to Plekhanov and other Mensheviks, "to imagine the thing without `leaps', to see it as something in the shape of a straight line moving slowly and steadily upwards: first, it will be the turn of the liberal big bourgeoisie---minor concessions from the autocracy; then of the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie---the democratic republic; and finally of the proletariat---the socialist revolution. That picture, by and large, is correct, correct a la longue, as the French
~^^1^^ Iskra, January 27, 1905; The Fourth (Unity) RSDLP Congress. Minutes, p. 372; The Fifth (London) RSDLP Congress. Minutes, Moscow, 1963, p. 62 (both in Russian).
~^^2^^ G. V. Plekhanov, Works, Vol. XV, Moscow-Leningrad, 1926, p. 205; N. Cherevanin, The Struggle of Social Forces in the Russian Revolution. Moscow 1907, p. 57; Otgoloski, Issue V, St. Petersburg, 1907, p. 20-
Kuryer, June 10, 1906 (all in Russian).
~^^3^^ G. V. Plekhanov, Works, Vol. XV, p. 75 (in Russian).
~^^4^^ G. V. Plekhanov, Works, Vol. XIII, p. 285.
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "The Fall of Port Arthur", Collected Works, Vol. 8, p. 55; "The Third Congress", Collected Works, Vol. 8, p. 447.
~^^2^^ See, for example, The Fourth (Unity] RSDLP Congress. Minutes, Moscow, 1959, pp. 141-42, 217; Otkliki Sovremennosti, No. 1, 1906, p. 31 (both in Russian).
3 See The Social Movement in Russia in the Early 20th Century, Vol. Ill, Book 4, St. Petersburg, 1914, p. 610; Otkliki Sovremennosti, No. 2, 1906, p. 178; No. 3, pp. 16, 31 (both in Russian).
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say---spread over a century or so (in France, for instance, from 1789 to 1905); but one must be a virtuoso of philistinism to take this as a pattern for one's plan of action in a revolutionary epoch.''^^1^^
A characteristic feature of Menshevik ideology was dogmatic play on the theoretical legacy of Marx and Engels, a desire to interpret it not only as a system of absolutely true general principles of the revolutionary proletariat's strategy and tactics, but as a kind of code of recipes and directives which could be mechanically applied irrespective of the concrete conditions of time and place. While verbally recognising the creative nature of Marxism, Menshevik theoreticians, including Plekhanov, the most prominent of them, stubbornly refused to realise that the experience of former bourgeois revolutions could not be applied to early 20th-century Russia without substantial clarifications and additions, that a particular statement by Marx or Engels concerning the events of 1848 in Germany did not free the Russian Marxists of the necessity to independently analyse and tackle (from the general methodological Marxist positions, of course) each concrete issue posed by the development of revolutionary events.
Whereas the Mensheviks embraced those facets of Marx's and Engels's theoretical legacy that fixed the historically conditioned limitations of the proletarian movement in the 1848-1849 revolutions, the Bolsheviks drew on the fundamental principles from the same legacy which foresaw incipient tendencies in the proletarian movement. They developed, in terms of the new conditions of the early 20th-century world, the outlines of ideas which could not have been fully elaborated in the setting of mid-19th century Europe. Lenin considered one of Marx's prime principles to be his conclusion regarding the counter-revolutionary nature of the bourgeoisie which clearly came to the fore in the revolutions of 1848-1849 and which rendered it incapable of assuming leadership of a truly democratic bourgeois revolution and meeting, among other things, the demands of the peasants. Lenin also had a very high opinion of Marx's idea of the "popular dictatorship" as a weapon of struggle against feudal and bourgeois reaction, and about the leadership of the working class and its alliance with the peasantry. "There is no doubt," Lenin stressed, "that the proletariat and the peasantry are the chief components of the `people' as contrasted by Marx in 1848 to the resisting reactionaries and the treacherous bourgeoisie." Here Lenin also pointed to the differences between the Germany of 1848 and the Russia of 1905, where the proletarian features of the movement and
the proletariat's ability to be the leader of the peasant masses exhibited themselves to a much greater degree. "The proletariat leading the peasantry," he wrote. "The Bolshevik resolutions contain no other formula to express the idea of the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.''^^1^^
Once having embraced the Marxist idea of uninterrupted revolution, Lenin soon found in Russian reality that political body of power, the Soviets, which could become---and indeed did become--- instrumental in carrying the revolution from its bourgeois-- democratic to the socialist stage.
Marx's idea of uninterrupted revolution was grossly distorted by Trotsky, who set forth a clearly adventurist action plan. According to it, Russia's only revolutionary force was the proletariat, which was capable of immediately forming a government of "labour democracy" and of beginning to restructure the country on socialist lines ("without the tsar, and with a labour government"). Trotsky believed a conflict between the working class and the peasantry inevitable, and surmised that a European revolution alone could somewhat bolster the positions of the Russian proletariat which without it were supposedly ``hopeless''.
Trotsky thereby denied the revolutionary role of the peasantry, and adventuristically called for ``skipping'' the as yet incomplete stage of the democratic revolution. He denied the role of the proletariat as the principal force of the revolution, capable of leading the broad popular masses at that stage. The particular danger and harm of Trotsky's scheme was that for all its outward ``leftism'' and formal references to the Marxist idea of uninterrupted (``permanent'') revolution, it grossly distorted the fundamental tenets of revolutionary Marxism and Marx's concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It could deprive this dictatorship of a mass democratic base, isolate the working class from its allies, and thus ultimately doomed the revolution to defeat. Trotsky's impressive-sounding but empty ``ultra-revolutionary'' phrases actually led to adventurism and impotent outbursts, diverting the proletariat from the correct, revolutionary path. The Bolsheviks resolutely came out against Trotsky's eclectic concept, exposing it as a dangerous variety of opportunism.
The Bolsheviks were also fighting the adventurist trends of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party (SR) and the anarchists.
At that time, the SR Party was the left wing of "an exceedingly broad and undoubtedly mass Narodnik or Trudovik trend, which
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "The Revolutionary-Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Peasantry", Collected Works, Vol. 8, p. 299.
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution", Collected Works, Vol. 9, p. 136; "The Aim of the Proletarian Struggle in Our Revolution", Collected Works, Vol. 15, pp. 362-63.
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51expressed the interests and point of view of the peasantry in the Russian bourgeois revolution".^^1^^ This is why, for all the fallacies in the Socialist-Revolutionaries' doctrine, the Bolsheviks based their relations with them within the framework of leftist bloc tactics, concluding a number of practical agreements with the SRs and involving SR workers in joint revolutionary actions.
The Bolsheviks nonetheless constantly waged a relentless ideological struggle against the harmful SR influence on the masses of workers and peasants, unmasking, among other things, the complete untenability of the Socialist-Revolutionaries' claims to leadership of the revolutionary movement. It should be kept in mind that SR ``workers' unions" functioned between 1905 and 1907 in many of Russia's cities, SR extreme militancy winning the sympathies of unorganised, politically unaware workers. The land socialisation programme it advanced, having nothing in common with socialism but objectively reflecting the peasants' desire to see manorial ownership abolished and land "shared alike", struck a responsive chord among some workers just fresh from the countryside. In addition, the SRs were speculating on a split in the RSDLP, attracting part of the workers dissatisfied with this into their ranks. All this made it necessary for the Bolsheviks to criticise the SR programme most energetically and wage a continuous struggle against the adventurism of the SRs who did not reckon with the objective situation and the degree to which the masses were prepared for open action when the moment for insurrection would be chosen.
The left wing of the SRs, united in 1906 in the Union of Maximalist Socialist-Revolutionaries and calling upon the workers to immediately achieve socialist goals via socialisation of industrial enterprises as well as of land, was very close to anarchism. The latter had also become widespread to a certain extent in the country's western and southern regions, in St. Petersburg and in parts of the Caucasus. Russian anarcho-syndicalism made a name for itself in late 1905 as
well.
Thus, the working-class movement in Russia was marked by an acute ideological struggle in which the proletarian masses gradually rallied around revolutionary Social-Democrats. The clash between Bolshevism and Menshevism, which embodied two revolutionary lines, was the crucial one. The Bolsheviks assumed leadership of the proletariat which boldly went into battle against the autocracy and, allied with the peasantry, fought for the resolute victory of the popular insurrection. The Mensheviks geared themselves to " coordinating the actions" of the working class with those of the liberal
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "How the Socialist-Revolutionaries Sum Up the Revolution and How the Revolution Has Summed Them Up", Collected Works, Vol. 15, p. 340.
bourgeoisie, and objectively slowed down the development of the revolutionary struggle in a bid to turn the proletariat into a simple appendage of the liberal movement.
The Bolshevik Party was, as the events showed, the genuine vanguard of the working-class movement and the entire revolutionary people. The revolution, Lenin pointed out, corroborated all the fundamental theoretical tenets of Marxism and all the basic slogans of Bolshevism, and justified the Party's faith in the revolutionary Russian proletariat.^^1^^
THE PROLETARIAT---THE LEADING FORCE OF THE FIRST RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
The struggle waged by the proletariat against the autocraticlandlordist system became the mainspring of the bourgeois-- democratic revolution in Russia and determined the development of the liberation movement on the whole. Not a single other class or social group did as much to rid the country of autocratic oppression as the proletariat, the chief motive force of the revolutionary process.
In the early 20th century, there were some 17 million hired hands in Russia, including over 3 million factory workers, railwaymen and miners.^^2^^ The extremely difficult living and working conditions of the working class---the almost complete absence of labour protection, the 1C- to 12-hour working-day, meagre wages, life in overcrowded dirty barracks, scanty food, etc.---were complemented by the complete lack of political rights. The ban on strikes and coalitions deprived the workers of the opportunity to fight for an improvement in hiring and labour conditions. The tendency discovered by Marx toward the growth of poverty, oppression, enslavement, degeneration and exploitation inherent in the capitalist mode of production, operated with full force in tsarist Russia as it had entered the bourgeois stage of development. The working class did not have the possibility of legally expressing its class interests, of influencing public opinion, let alone openly and directly influencing state authority.
The very position of the working class objectively pushed it first and foremost into the struggle against absolutism, to establish such conditions in political life that would make it possible to fulfil proletarian tasks of the class struggle. The unbearably hard living conditions inevitably engendered sentiments of revolutionary protest in the working class. Advanced workers exhibited an interest
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "The Reorganisation of the Party", Collected Works, Vol. 10, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972, p. 32.
~^^8^^ E. E. Kruze, The Condition of the Working Class in Russia in 1900-1914, Nauka, Leningrad, 1976, pp. 42-45 (in Russian).
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53in gaining knowledge, in politics and socialism. The high concentration of the proletariat at big enterprises enabled it to unite and organise. Each important action by the workers had great political and social repercussions. The charge of social energy that the working class accumulated, its will to struggle and the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, all quite naturally made it the centre of attraction for all currents of the mighty popular movement spearheaded against tsarist despotism.
No matter how complex, and at times contradictory, the course of the working-class movement was during the years of the revolution, no matter what conflicting trends collided in it, the events of 1905-1907 indisputably attested to the fact that it was developing from lower forms of struggle to higher, from a free-wheeling process to an organised and conscious one.
The progress of the revolution reflected better than anything else the process of the political maturing of the working class, the overcoming of various misconceptions and prejudices which were due to the lack of maturity and experience and were cultivated in the working class by tsarism and the bourgeoisie. The leap forward which the Russian proletariat made in its development in 1905 becomes particularly evident when one considers that the revolution began with the Gapon Affair, which was an unsuccessful attempt by the tsarist government to gain control of the working-class movement and channel it into the course of "police socialism''.
In February 1904, Georgi Gapon, a priest, who was connected with the tsarist secret police, organised the Assembly of Russian Factory Workers of St. Petersburg. Taking advantage of the naive monarchistic and religious sentiments of a certain portion of the workers, the authorities hoped to use this organisation to reduce the working-class movement to peaceful, legal trade-unionism and to disprove the need for political struggle. By 1905, 11 sections of the Assembly had been functioning in St. Petersburg, numbering several thousand members. The workers protesting against their lack of rights did not immediately comprehend the actual designs of Gapon the impostor. However, under the impact of the crisis developing in the country, the mass working-class movement overstepped the narrow framework of Gapon's organisation and foiled his deceptive schemes.
In early January of 1905, a strike began at the Putilov Armoury, St. Petersburg's largest munitions plant. It was supported by other enterprises in the city. Within five days, from January 4 (17) to 8 (21), the number of strikers jumped ten-fold, to 150,000. The entire life of the city with a population of a million and a half was paralysed. In a bid to ease the atmosphere of mass dissatisfaction, Gapon proposed that the workers organise a religious procession to the Winter
Palace on Sunday, January 9 (22), to hand the tsar a petition containing a list of their needs and demands. The petition was discussed and signed at mass workers' meetings. "Everything was mixed together here---both the Gapon movement and the healthy seeds of the Social-Democratic ideas spawned during the last decade on this fertile soil," wrote the Bolshevik newspaper Vperyod, describing these meetings. "Social-Democrats, too, constantly spoke at the meetings. They were eagerly listened to (at least beyond Nevskaya Zastava; in other areas they sometimes met with a strong rebuff on the part of the Gapon people, and in some cases were even beaten up).... However, the idea of going to the palace with a petition captivated the minds to such an extent that it was impossible to light it.''^^1^^
On Sunday morning, January 9, over 100,000 festively dressed workers and their wives and children went to the Winter Palace, the tsar's residence, with the petition. In it they pleaded with Nicholas II to satisfy a number of their economic and political needs. However, troops, prepared beforehand, were sent out against the peaceful procession, the unarmed people were met with bullets and sabres. The naive belief in the tsar was shattered.
The call "To arms!" was the reply of the St. Petersburg proletariat. It sounded in revolutionary leaflets printed in the evening of the very same day. The next day the city went on strike. Of St. Petersburg's 600-plus enterprises, less than 30 operated. Between January 10 and 12, 1905, the strikes engulfed Moscow and several other industrial centres of the country.
The work which revolutionary Social-Democrats had done for years was not in vain. It was not fortuitous that the petition the workers carried to the tsar contained some demands from the RSDLP Programme. Nor was it fortuitous that Bloody Stinday, which began with a peaceful procession to the tsar's palace, ended with the first barricades flying the red revolutionary flags. The dialectic of the class struggle lay in the fact that in the atmosphere of the revolutionary crisis even such a brain-child of the secret police as the Gapon Affair in the final count proved objectively to be a spur to the revolution.
January 9 was a watershed in the history of the Russian proletariat. "The lesson of January 9 was a hard one," Lenin wrote, "but it revolutionised the temper of the entire proletariat of the whole of Russia.''^^2^^ The wave of worker protest action swept the country. According to conservative estimates, over 440,CCO persons participated in strikes in January 1905, more than in the entire decade prior
~^^1^^ Vperyod, February 1, 1905.
~^^2^^ V. I. Lenin, "Revolution Teaches", Collected Works, Vol. 9. p. 147.
PROLETARIAT IN RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 1905-07
55CHAPTER 1
to the revolution. Workers' actions acquired acute forms in the Baltics and the Polish lands where the economic and social oppression was supplemented by national oppression, which heightened the workers' hatred for tsarism. In Riga. Warsaw and Revel protest strikes were combined with massive demonstrations and accompanied by clashes with troops. The working-class movement from the very start of the revolution exhibited a profoundly internationalist nature, organically merging the struggle of different national contingents of the Russian proletariat into a single whole.
Marching in its front ranks were the metal workers. As a rule, descendants of more than one generation of skilled urban workers, they were distinguished for their higher cultural level, organisation, political awareness and tenacity in the struggle to attain their goals. These qualities made the metal workers, among whom the Social-Democrats worked successfully, the vanguard of the proletarian movement.
WThat with the mighty upsurge of the working-class movement in the country, students and the democratic intelligentsia stepped up anti-government actions, and the liberal opposition movement became more active. In February and March, the revolution reached
the countryside.
Between the January events and the upsurge of the working-class movement in the spring and summer, there lay an extremely important period marked by the ideological and organisational growth of the proletariat and its vanguard, the Bolshevik Party. Even though economic motives (wage increments, reduction of the working-day, improvement of living and working conditions) sometimes predominated, the proletariat was increasingly upholding more radical slogans, such as an eight-hour working-day, state insurance, and the formation of special bodies of representatives of the workers and management to examine labour disputes, monitor hiring and firing
practices, etc.
This period differed from the preceding one chiefly by the sharply increased political tinge of the movement. The Bolsheviks were making every effort to get the masses to embrace the demands for fundamental political freedoms, a countrywide Constituent Assembly and a democratic republic. They worked to enhance interest in politics among the working class. This resulted in a growth in the number of political strikes and strikers, and a rise in demand for Social-Democratic literature. Another consequence was a swelling of the ranks of the Bolshevik Party. In 1905, 60 per cent of its membership was comprised of workers.
The revolution put a new slant on a number of issues regarding the development and functioning of the proletarian party. Lenin pointed out that in any outcome of the revolution "all its real gains
will be rendered secure and reliable only insofar as the proletariat is organised".^^1^^ All Lenin's works of the 1905-1907 period are permeated with thoughts about heightening the party's leading role, expanding the membership and related organisations and about strengthening contacts between the vanguard and the masses. Lenin noted that as the revolution was getting under way, independent actions were developing everywhere, and the political awareness of the masses was growing, making it both possible and mandatory for the Social-Democrats to concentrate more and more on political leadership of the mass movement and on its organisation. To do so it was essential above all to expand and consolidate the party membership and the organisations closely related to the party. In February and March 1905, Lenin wrote about the need to make the most of all the concessions which were being wrenched from the autocracy, to explore new forms and methods of organisation attuned to the revolutionary situation, and not to stop half-way. He placed a special emphasis on drawing politically aware young people into the party. Lenin pointed out here that the lack of preparation of the new replenishment was nothing to be overly concerned about, that the party, a closely-knit organisation with its own Programme and Rules, would easily absorb it, all the more so since this would be facilitated by the revolutionary situation.
The Bolshevik party branches were becoming ever more closely bound up with the working masses. In 1905, committees of the RSDLP sprang up at large factories (in Moscow, for example, there were as many as 40 factory committees and 95 circles incorporating over 1,000 party members by the late summer of 1905).^^2^^
Simultaneously, party organisations of railwaymen, dockers and water-transport workers were being formed on the industrial basis. Organisations were being formed among artisans according to the craft principle.
As the proletarian party organisations grew stronger in large centres, their influence was spreading ever more widely through the emergent Social-Democrat circles. The course of the revolutionary movement was marked by the rapid growth of these circles and groups, on the basis of which independent district committees began to take shape in the summer of 1905. They engulfed a territory gravitating towards a large industrial centre irrespective of administrative division. Thus, the Moscow district organisation included a number of circles and groups located not only in Moscow Gubernia, but also in Vladimir, Tver and Ryazan gubernias. Such an organisation was internally subdivided along the railway tracks, which facilitated
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "New Tasks and New Forces", Collected Works, Vol. 8, p. 219.
~^^2^^ See Proletary, October 18, 1905.
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I
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communications. Local organisations developed substantially in the Central Industrial Region and the Urals, where many factories and plants were scattered over a wide territory outside big cities. RSDLP organisations conducted propaganda and organisational work not only among workers, but also among the peasants in the area, incorporating circles and groups of peasants and rural teachers.
The major events of the spring and summer upsurge of 1905 were the widespread May Day celebrations that involved work stoppages, demonstrations and rallies, a large-scale strike in Ivanovo-- Voznesensk and a strike turned uprising in Lodz. The two latter events marked the beginning of mass actions by the largest contingent of the Russian proletariat---the textile workers. Despite the fact that the economic situation of the textile workers was much harder than that of the metal workers, they were much slower to rise up in struggle. This was because most textile enterprises were scattered among "factory villages", and also because the textile workers were more closely connected with the land (most had recently migrated from the countryside), plus the characteristics of their mentality which had frequently come to the fore. However, revolutionary sentiments gradually caught fire with the textile workers as well.
The Ivanovo-Voznesensk strike began on May 12 (25), 1905 and lasted 72 days, engulfing as many as 70,000 workers all told. Initially, it was of an economic nature, but later it acquired a striking political trend. The strike was led almost completely by the Bolsheviks. Russia's first city Council (Soviet) of Workers' Deputies (assembly of authorised deputies) was formed during the strike. It immediately went beyond the bounds of the ordinary strike committee and proved itself to be the embryo of the new, revolutionary power: it organised the workers' militia and a combat unit, and formed ad hoc commissions in its own composition, which ran urban affairs (maintenance of order in the city, price control) and were also in charge of the distribution of funds received from the proletariat of other Russian cities.^^1^^ Attempts by the authorities to use armed force to disperse the strikers' rally, on June 3, outside the city by the Talka River, met with counter-actions: factory owners' houses were set on fire, and a barricade arose in one of the streets. The authorities retreated, frightened by the popular outburst. The bosses agreed to partial concessions. The strike not only led to an improvement of working conditions at a number of the city's factories and mills, it also exerted a tremendous influence on the growth of the workers' political
~^^1^^ See The First in Russia. The Ivanovo-Voznesensk City Soviet of Workers' Deputies of 1905 in Documents and Reminiscences, Sovetskaya Rossiya, Moscow, 1975, pp. 28-49, 238 (in Russian).
awareness. It developed new forms of the proletarian organisation: the Soviet of Workers' Deputies had become a real force which the tsarist authorities had to reckon with. It is not for nothing that an Ivanovo factory owner wrote at the time that a ``duocracy'' was in evidence in the city.^^1^^
In Lodz, the movement began with strikes, during which demands for higher wages and a shorter working-day were advanced. In June, the struggle reached its apex and approached a general strike which was growing into an insurrection. The dispersing of the demonstrations by the police and troops caused a rebuff by the proletariat. On the morning of June 22 (July 5), a Social-Democratic leaflet came out with the appeal: "Take to the streets, brothers!... Stage a general one-day strike! Down with the autocracy of murderers! Long live the revolution!" The workers who responded to the appeal of the Social-Democracy of Poland and Lithuania began to attack the police and small groups of troops, disarm them and erect barricades. More than 50 barricades topped with red flags and revolutionary slogans had been put up by the morning of June 23.^^2^^
For three days actual street fighting went on in the city: the troops repressed the almost unarmed defenders of the barricades. The workers of Warsaw, Sosnowiec, Czpstochowa and Dcjbrowa expressed their solidarity with the Lodz proletarians, and the RSDLP committees of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Minsk, Yekaterinoslav, Kharkov, Lugansk, Riga, Voronezh, Saratov and other cities also responded with leaflets. Lenin assessed the actions of the Lodz proletariat as follows: "... The workers, even those who are unprepared for the struggle, even those who at first confined themselves to defence, are now, through the proletariat of Lodz, setting a new example, not only of revolutionary enthusiasm and heroism, but of superior forms of struggle."3 Another indication of the growing revolutionary crisis in the country was the mutiny on the battleship Potemkin---the first irajor mutiny in the tsarist armed forces. On the eve of the decisive events of 1905, the Social-Democrats conducted propaganda work on the ships of the Black Sea Fleet. Formed in 1904, the Central Fleet Committee of the RSDLP or, as it was called, the "Sevastopol Sailors' Central", was preparing a revolutionary action in the Black Sea Fleet scheduled for the autumn of 1905. However, on June 14, the men of the battleship Prince Potemkin-Tavrlchesky, agitated by rumours about a strike of Odessa workers and indignant over the
~^^1^^ See The Revolution of 1905-1907. Documents and Materials, Politizdat, Moscow, 1975, p. 235 (in Russian).
~^^2^^ Ludwik Mroczka, Wladyslaw Bortnowski, Dwa powstania, Wydawnictwo Lodzkie, Lodz, 1974.
~^^3^^ V. I. Lenin, "The Struggle of the Proletariat and the Servility of the Bourgeoisie", Collected Works, Vol. 8, p. 537.
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59outrages perpetrated by the commanders, staged a mutiny. Command of the ship fell into the hands of the "ship commission" headed by Afanasy Matyushenko, a non-commissioned officer. True, the actions of the mutineers were not energetic enough---the crew was not able to establish contact with the insurgent workers of Odessa, disembark a landing force and stage mutinies on other ships of the Fleet. Eleven days later, running out of coal and foodstuffs, the Potemkin left for Constanta, Romania. The crew disembarked and became political emigres. Despite the failure of the mutiny, the very fact of the open insubordination to the authorities on the part of the sailors was of tremendous significance. The revolutionary events on the Black Sea were followed by other armed actions in the army and navy. Lenin had a very high regard for the revolutionary initiative of the Potemkin sailors. "The tremendous significance of the recent events in Odessa," he wrote, "lies precisely in the fact that, for the first time, an important unit of the armed force of tsarism---a battleship---has openly gone over to the side of the revolution .... Whatever its fate may be, the undoubted fact and the point of highest significance is that here we have the attempt to form the nucleus o1 a revolutionary army.''^^1^^
The upsurge of the proletarian movement in the country and the first mutinies in the army caused wide repercussions in the countryside. The peasant movement rapidly engulfed the country's central regions, the Polish lands and part of the Baltic area. A major hotbed of the peasant revolutionary struggle emerged in Georgia. In the period spanning May to August 1905 alone as many as 113 districts of European Russia, one-fifth of their total number, were swept by peasant unrest. Peasant actions were spearheaded against the landlords. The peasant movement also exhibited growing political awareness---chiefly in areas where contacts were established between peasants and the revolutionary Social-Democrats. The peasant unrest imparted a truly countrywide character to the incipient revolution. However, the centre of the struggle was definitely in the big cities, and the proletariat was its chief force.
As the working-class movement developed, it became increasingly clear that in the course of the revolution the strikes were acquiring a new quality, becoming mass revolutionary actions. They engulfed plants, towns and whole regions, holding the authorities and bourgeoisie in constant tension. During the intertwining economic and political strikes the proletariat advanced a number of general demands which were of vital importance for the widest strata of the
country's working population. The main thing, however, was that the mass strikes were now usually combined with political demonstrations and came right up to the point beyond which a peaceful strike becomes an uprising.
In the autumn of 1905, the revolutionary wave approached its apex, the countrywide strikes and armed insurrections. The September strikes in Moscow, the railway workers' general strike which began there on October 6(19) and which was the prologue of the AllRussia October Political Strike, the powerful November actions of the proletariat and, finally, the December armed uprising were milestones of the highest upsurge of the revolution.
The All-Russia October Strike began under the decisive influence and leadership of the Social-Democrats, the Bolsheviks in particular. In preparing for the strike, the Bolsheviks viewed it as a stage in the further revolutionary struggle. Lenin wrote, regarding the Central Committee's decision to boycott the Duma and stage the strike, that the focus of the campaign would be the slogan of insurrection and the formation of a provisional revolutionary government.^^1^^ This instruction of Lenin's was reflected in the Central Committee's Resolution on the State Duma. Its leaflet read: "The road to the revolution is clear---through a popular insurrection to popular rule.''^^2^^
The plans of the authorities to squelch the growing wave of the popular movement were stultified.
Fourteen railways held strikes on October 11, and on October 17, the strike paralysed the country's entire rail system. A general strike engulfed Moscow and St. Petersburg. Electric power stations, city transport and the telephone system ceased functioning. It took only 5 days for the strike to spread all over the country. Employees spontaneously introduced an eight-hour working-day at enterprises. Freedom of speech, the press and assembly was exercised without any formal permission on the part of the authorities.
The All-Russia Strike, in which 2 million industrial and office workers, students and representatives of the democratic intelligentsia took part, gave the national liberation movement an unprecedented scope. It gathered particular momentum in the Polish lands, in Latvia and in Finland. Armed struggle developed in the Ukraine and the Caucasus. This was a momentous democratic upsurge in which the vanguard role of the proletariat came to the fore. It pro-
~^^1^^ See V. I. Lenin, "To the Central Committee of the R.S.D.L.P.", Collected Works, Vol. 36, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1971, pp. 149-50.
~^^2^^ Bolsheviks Leading the All-Russia Political Strike in October 1905. Collected Documents and Materials, Moscow, 1955, p. 139 (in Russian); for details see N. A. Ivanova, Lenin on the Revolutionary Mass Strike in Russia, Nauka, Moscow, 1976, p. 102 (in Russian).
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "The Revolutionary Army and the Revolutionary Government," Collected Works, Vol. 8, pp. 561, 562. For details on the revolutionary events of the summer of 1905 see The Revolution of 1905-1907 in Russia, Mysl, Moscow, 1975, pp. 102-24 (in Russian).
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61ceeded under the slogans "Down with Autocracy!", "Long Live Political Freedom!" and "Long Live Armed Uprising!" The powerful upswing of popular indignation nipped in the bud the consultative Bulygin Duma, announced back in August 1905, and it wrested from the tsar the Manifesto of October 17 (30) promising to introduce fundamental political freedoms in the country, to expand the electorate and to impart a legislative nature to the future popular assembly.^^1^^
An important indicator of the new stage in the proletarian move ment and the entire revolution was the further development of the just emergent Soviets of Workers' Deputies. They were usually formed from strike committees, elective workers' commissions and assemblies of delegates which, as the revolution progressed, began to exercise democratic functions, won renown among broad strata of workers and became the embryo of the new, revolutionary power. "These bodies were set up exclusively by the revolutionary sections of the people," Lenin wrote. "They were formed irrespective of all laws and regulations, entirely in a revolutionary way, as a product of the native genius of the people, as a manifestation of the independent activity of the people which had rid itself, or was ridding itself, of its old police fetters.''^^2^^
Soviets became particularly widespread between October and December of 1905, i.e., precisely in the period when the revolution was most distinctly exhibiting proletarian features and when the people acutely sensed the need for bodies which could become leading centres of the armed struggle against the autocracy and replace the old, tsarist administration. Aside from St.Petersburg and Moscow, Soviets emerged in more than 50 cities and workers' settlements scattered all over the country.
The Soviets embodied the militant alliance of the Social-Democrats, non-party revolutionary-minded workers and the revolutionary petty-bourgeois democrats; the factory proletariat predominated in them. Thus, elected to the St. Petersburg Soviet were 562 deputies from 147 factories, 34 workshops and 16 trade unions of the capital. All told, the Soviet represented no less than 250,000 St. Petersburg workers. Among the deputies, 351 were metal workers, 57 textile workers and 32 printers; 65 per cent of them were members of the RSDLP, 13 per cent---SRs, and 22 per cent---without party affiliations (although most of them leaned towards Social-Democracy). Bolsheviks played the leading role in approximately 80 per cent of the Soviets.
Researchers have established the names of 1,709 deputies of 31 Soviets, among whom were 1,318 industrial workers (77 per cent), 73 white-collar workers, 56 representatives of trade unions of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, 12 medics, and 11 teachers and students.^^1^^ A number of Soviets also included peasants, soldiers and sailors. This social breadth and multi-party nature of the Soviets were, as Lenin pointed out, a boon rather than a bane for these organisations, which had become the true embodiment of the fundamental principles of leftist-bloc policy. Lenin stressed that the revolutionary Social-Democrats should strive to consolidate their position to the full in these mass proletarian organisations, which were to play a major role in introducing the working class and other democratic strata to the revolution and to Bolshevik ideas.
The practical work of the Soviets in the autumn of 1905 was multifarious. They organised strikes, introduced an eight-hour workingday at factories and plants, maintained public order, monitored the work of the municipal services, retail trade, etc.; the resolutions and orders of the Soviets enjoyed great authority among the masses. In their appeal to the workers, the officials of the Moscow Soviet wrote during the December armed uprising: "Remember, comrades, that we want not only to destroy the old system, but also to create a new one in which each citizen will be free from any and all coercion.... We shall prove that under our leadership the life of society will run more correctly; the life, freedom and rights of all shall be protected to a greater extent than they are today.''^^2^^
The main tendency in the development of the Soviets was their transformation into bodies of revolutionary democratic power, into headquarters for preparing the armed struggle which had become imminent in the country. It was only this role which could give the Soviets genuine strength and turn them into a real authority, and this is precisely what the Bolsheviks sought to do, sharply criticising the muddled stand of the Mensheviks, who were in effect minimising the Soviets' revolutionary role.
The development and consolidation of the proletariat's party organisations proceeded in step with the upswing and expansion of the people's revolution. In October 1905, when political freedoms had been won de facto, the RSDLP effectively emerged from underground. The period of the revolutionary upsurge was a time marked by the rapid swelling of the party ranks; the influx of thousands of workers who had risen to the revolutionary struggle was one of the vital preconditions for the reorganisation of the party. Lenin wrote in connection with the change in the situation: "Our Party has stagnated while
J The Leading Role of the Proletariat in the Three Russian Revolutions, Mysl, Moscow, 1975, pp. 88, 90 (in Russian).
~^^2^^ Bulletin of the Moscow Soviet of Workers' Deputies, December 9, 1905.
~^^1^^ For details see V. S. Kirillov, Bolsheviks Leading Mass Political Strikes During the First Russian Revolution (1905-1907), Politizdat, Moscow, 1976, pp. 172-211 (in Russian).
~^^2^^ V. I. Lenin, "The Victory of the Cadets and the Tasks of the Workers' Party", Collected Works, Vol. 10, p. 243.
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working underground.... It has been suffocating underground during
the last few years__ Forward, then, more boldly; take up the new
weapon, distribute it among new people, extend your bases, rally all the worker Social-Democrats round yourselves, incorporate them in the ranks of the Party organisations by hundreds and thousands."1 The restructuring of party organisations was now taking place on the basis of the consistent implementation of the principle of democratic centralism. Its tasks were outlined in the letter by the RSDLP Central Committee "To All Party Workers" of October 27, 1905, and in the first article written by Lenin after he had returned from emigration, entitled "The Reorganisation of the Party", which was published in the legal Bolshevik newspaper Novaya Zhizn in November 1905.
These documents keynoted, with due account of the political freedom won yet remaining relative, the task of preserving the clandestine party apparatus and developing alongside it new, open forms of a mass workers' party organisation, expanding the party ranks, introducing the principle of election everywhere, and overcoming the split in the Social-Democratic movement.
Centralism in the leadership of party organisations was now being combined with their restructuring on the basis of electivity from the grass roots to the top. The Bolsheviks had previously, too, made wide use of the principle of electivity for forming the higher levels of the party, but they considered it inadvisable to implement it everywhere in underground conditions. From the autumn of 1805 onward, absolutely all leading party organs locally began to hold elections and report regularly to the organisations that elected them. The procedure according to which they were set up was determined by local Rules, and differed from place to place, which reflected a search of the most advisable norms of intra-party life in the context of relative freedom. Co-optation was substantially limited. The number of elected committee members was several times that of the co-opted
members.
The opportunities for legal work which the revolution wrested from the tsar in October 1805 invigorated first and foremost, the work of factory party organisations in the main industrial regions. The Social-Democratic party organisation, based on territory and enterprise, rallied the proletarian masses, which had risen to conscious political struggle. In the new situation Lenin called for the establishment of legal strongholds of proletarian Social-Democratic organisations in the form of libraries, reading rooms, communal dining halls, etc. They were to serve as bases, independent as much
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "The Reorganisation of the Party", Collected Works, Vol. 10, p. 32.
as possible from the arbitrariness of factory owners and providing support for the persecuted Social-Democratic workers.
With the aid of legally organised shooting-ranges workers received an opportunity to learn how to handle weapons, which was for them, as Lenin put it, "very far from useless''.
The freer conditions in which the party worked, and the expansion of the sphere of action of the democratic centralism principle contributed to the changes in the structure of its local organisations. The role played by the general meeting of the membership or party conference increased in the spring and summer of 1905 on. But while in that spring and summer they were the consultative bodies at the top party level, the RSDLP Committee, and proclaimed decisions solely on individual questions on which the Committee wanted to know the opinion of party members, in the autumn the meetings and conferences began to be regular directive bodies, while the Committee became an executive body accountable to them.
The revolutionary endeavour of the membership advanced new forms of an open mass party organisation. They were, first and foremost, factory party assemblies which had united all party members working at a given enterprise. They met weekly, during strikes--- practically daily, and discussed politics, the local situation, issues pertaining to the economic and political struggle of the enterprise employees, and current party matters. (Shop party assemblies functioned at large plants.) The plant's RSDLP Committee and representatives of district and city committees reported to them periodically. The committee members were elected at the factory or shop party meeting.
``Party exchanges", which had emerged in the Northwest Territory during the years of the struggle for the formation of the party, became widespread in the summer and autumn of 1905 chiefly in the cities and workers' settlements in the South and Northwest. They were something like permanently functioning party conferences, regularly taking place at the same hour in the same place. Here one could listen to an out-of-town reporter, meet a committee member; find a speaker for a workers' meeting, and receive or give a party assignment. The attempts by the police to disperse these large meetings proved fruitless, as the oral nature of the exchanges work left no tangible evidence. Of course one had to be on the look-out for stool pigeons.^^1^^
Social-Democratic clubs appeared in the autumn of 1905 in workers' districts and organised political reports, theoretical reviews, talks, debates and shows. A club normally had a library. The high-
~^^1^^ See Proletary, August 16; October 4; November 18, 1905; Proletarskaya Revolutsiya, No. 2 (14), 1923, pp. 352-53.
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65est body of a club was the general assembly of its members, which elected a board and various commissions. The club's role in the party organisation differed in various regions: in some, such as in Nizhni Novgorod, it became the centre of the party organisation and its board played the role of the district party committee^^1^^; in others, such as in St. Petersburg and its environs, the club was an institution of the regional party organisation and functioned under the leadership and control of the RSDLP regional committee. In the workingclass suburbs, where the police did not risk appearing in the tumultous days of the revolution, party clubs operated virtually in the
open.
The democratic and mass nature, and the consistency of the new forms of the party organisation made for the invigoration of the work of the party members and for their participation in the debates on all issues of the party's political life and activity. The open character of such forms made it possible to influence the broad masses not affiliated with the party, educating them politically and recruiting new party members. Following the 1905-1907 revolution, the "party exchanges", suppressed by reaction, disappeared. The clubs held out as legal strongholds of the party, functioning under the guidance of its illegal organisation. The most solid gain of the building of the party during the period of revolutionary upsurge was the factory chapter, which existed under various names, such as factory assemblies, leagues and cells. The latter name, proposed by Lenin, gradually became the predominant one.^^2^^
The expansion of party membership did not lead to the dissolution of the party in the non-party mass; a guarantee of this was its revolutionary programme, consistent tactics, solid organisation and experience of work in the masses. The requirements party members had to be up to in revolutionary conditions were no less exacting than before. New conditions for membership were advanced subordination to all party decisions and regular payment of membership dues. Since the autumn of 1905, a prospective member of the Bolshevik Party had to be confirmed by the general meeting of the local organisation on the recommendation of two or three of its members, sometimes after a preliminary test period.
Thus, the tumultuous autumn days of 1905 were a time marked by the consolidation of the politically most aware portion of the proletariat; mass party organisations were formed which varied in form
~^^1^^ See The Revolutionary Movement in Nizhni Novgorod and the Nizhni Novgorod Gubernia, 1905-1907, Knizhnoye Izdatelstve, Gorky, 1955, pp. 155-56
(in Russian).
~^^2^^ See V. I. Lenin, "The Reorganisation of the Party", Collected Works, Vol. 10, pp. 33-35; V. I. Lenin to Olga Vinogradova, Collected Works, Vol.34, pp. 310-11.
but were uniform in essence. They stood apart for the high demands made of their members, strict discipline and centralisation, broad democratism and close ties with the general mass of workers. Lenin wrote the following about this period in Bolshevik history: "Despite the split, the Social-Democratic Party earlier than any of the other parties was able to take advantage of the temporary spell of freedom to build a legal organisation with an ideal democratic structure, an electoral system, and representation at congresses according to the number of organised members.''^^1^^ The decisions of the First ( Tammerfors) RSDLP Conference, which recognised "the principle of democratic centralism as indisputable", keynoted the need to implement the "broad elective principle with the provision of election centres with complete power in ideological and practical leadership, along with their removability, widest publicity and strict accountability for their actions".^^2^^
The formation of trade unions, a form of the organisation of the working class new to Russia, was also connected with the revolutionary events of 1905-1907. It was in the January and February 1905 strikes in the country's major industrial centres that workers spontaneously started forming organisations which were the beginnings of trade unions.
Metal workers' unions appeared in St. Petersburg, and somewhat later in Moscow, Kharkov, Nizhni Novgorod and in the Urals. Textile workers set up their own organisations as well. The AllRussia Rail Union was established in April 1905. By the autumn of 1905, there were some 40 trade unions with a total membership of over 30,000 functioning in St. Petersburg. Trade unions were created with particular intensity during the All-Russia October Political Strike of 1905, which opened up certain prospects for legal activity. The trade union movement gradually spread to almost all of Russia's big cities. Prominent Bolsheviks (A. Ye. Badayev, P. A. Japaridze, Ye. A. Dunayev, N. A. Yemelyanov, M. I. Kalinin, P. V. Tochissky, N. M. Shvernik and others) were active in it. In October 1905, on the Bolshevik initiative, the First All-Russia Conference of Trade Unions decided to convene an all-Russia congress of trade unions in December 1905 for the purpose of creating a nationwide trade union movement centre. Although the congress could not be held at the time set, the tendency towards unification persisted.
In November 1905, the Central Bureau of St. Petersburg's trade unions was organised. It actively cooperated with the St. Petersburg Soviet (representatives of the Bureau were members of it). Municipal metal workers' trade unions in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, Tula
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "Preface to the Collection Twelve Years", Collected Works, Vol. 13, p. 103.
~^^2^^ The CPSU in the Resolutions..., Vol. 1, p. 136.
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67and elsewhere in Russia were formed in 1906. Trade unions also emerged and developed in the ethnic areas. Some 10 trade unions were organised in October 1905 in Latvia, about 15 appeared between October and December 1905 in Lithuania, and sections of the Baku oil workers' union were set up in the summer of 1906 in Azerbaijan; in the autumn of 1906 several dozen Tiflis trade unions became incorporated in the City Council of Worker Deputies of Trade Unions. By early 1907, Russia had 652 trade unions with a total membership of 245,000 persons.^^1^^
After October 1905, it became particularly clear that the peaceful strike was no longer relevant. Uprising became the priority. Lenin called November and December 1905, a time when the country was witnessing the irreversible process of the development of the general strike into a nationwide armed insurrection, two great months of revolution. Problems of combat readiness of the party became particularly crucial in this respect. Recognising a victorious armed insurrection as a necessary vehicle in overthrowing the autocracy, the Bolsheviks mounted a struggle for the creation of revolutionary armed forces. Combat bodies of the party comprised their nucleus.
In January 1905, N. Ye. Burenin was commissioned by St. Petersburg Bolshevik Party secretary S. I. Gusev to form the Combat Technical Group; following the Third RSDLP Congress it came under the direct leadership of the Central Committee, whose representative was Central Committee member L. B. Krasin. The group's chief task was manufacturing weapons. Various types of bombs and ammunition were made and improved at great risk. It organised a number of instructor training schools, armouries posing as toy factories, photography shops and so on, and numerous arms depots. Weapons and ammunition were delivered by workers of the Sestroretsky arms factory under the management of N. A. Yemelyanov; they were purchased in Belgium, Germany, France and Switzerland and were shipped by Bolsheviks M. M. Litvinov and A. M. Ignatyev with the aid of Belgian, German and Finnish Social-Democrats, members of the Finnish Active Resistance Party, and others.
Following the example of the Combat Technical Group, the Southern Military Technical Bureau and the Moscow Military Technical Bureau of the RSDLP were subsequently formed under the Central Committee, as well as combat technical groups under a number of party committees.^^2^^
In the summer of 1905, local party organisations began forming workers' self-defence detachments and fighting squads. They guarded
~^^1^^ See Trade Unions of the USSR, Documents and Materials, Vol. I, Moscow, 1963, p. 177.
~^^8^^ For details see The First Combat Bolshevik Organisation, 1905-1907. Articles, Reminiscences and Documents, Moscow, 1934 (in Russian).
•workers' rallies and meetings, maintained order in working-class neighbourhoods, and rebuffed the perpetrators of pogroms. Lenin had a high opinion of these actions, stressing that they "constitute the organisation of an insurrection, the organisation of revolutionary rule, which matures and becomes stronger through these small preparations, through these minor clashes, testing its own strength, learning to fight, training itself for victory".^^1^^ In his articles and correspondence with leaders of local party organisations Lenin recommended developing initiative and supporting bold actions, and cautioned against formalism in organising fighting squads.^^2^^ While being highly secretive, they did not consist exclusively of Party members. At Lenin's advice, they admitted non-Party workers and students. The Bolshevik fighting squads concluded agreements on joint actions with the Socialist-Revolutionary and other squads.
November and December 1905 witnessed the particularly intensive formation, arming and training of workers' fighting squads (between 1905 and 1907 they existed in over 300 populated areas), and the intensification of revolutionary work in the army and navy.^^3^^ Thus, the idea of a nationwide armed uprising, which had been taking hold of the masses more and more, had acquired concrete forms. The Bolsheviks viewed combat organisations solely as the vanguard of the mass revolutionary army, which would play the role of leader and nucleus, but it would in no way replace the actions of the workers', peasants' and soldiers' masses. Such a mighty opponent as the autocracy with its repressive apparatus honed over the centuries could not be toppled by few and poorly armed militants.
Winning the army over to the side of the revolution was becoming particularly important in this regard. Lenin wrote during the period of the revolution: "The armed forces cannot and should not be neutral. Not to drag them into politics is the slogan of the hypocritical servants of the bourgeoisie and of tsarism, who in fact have always dragged the forces into reactionary politics....''^^4^^ Lenin demanded that utmost attention be accorded to the soldiers' demands, which were shared by the majority of the people, that they be brought together into a single, whole programme. The Bolsheviks' work among officers and men began long before the revolution with the creation of illegal Social-Democratic groups. Highly clandestine,
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "The Black Hundreds and the Organisation of an Uprising",. Collected Works, Vol. 9, p. 203.
~^^8^^ V. I. Lenin, "To the Combat Committee of the St. Petersburg Committee",. Collected Works, Vol. 9, pp. 344-45; "To Maria Essen", Collected Works, Vol. 34,. p. 361.
~^^3^^ L. T. Senchakova, The Combat Host of the Revolution, Politizdat, Moscow* 1975, pp. 186-94 (calculations by author; in Russian).
~^^4^^ V. I. Lenin, "The Armed Forces and the Revolution", Collected Work*, Vol. 10, p. 56.
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69these groups confined themselves to propaganda among a narrow circle of the more politically conscious soldiers, sailors and individual officers. With the start of the revolution, military organisations of the RSDLP were formed in large garrisons on the basis of these groups. There were 27 of them in 1905.^^1^^ They held soldiers' and sailors' meetings and secret gatherings, and distributed
leaflets.
At Lenin's instructions the Bolsheviks expanded propaganda among the troops, and formed cadres of politically conscious revolutionaries in the army. They made use of the legal press and illegal publications, oral propaganda and personal influence to show the soldiers and sailors the true path in the revolution. Lenin wrote on October 25 (November 7), 1905: "The revolutionary proletariat has succeeded in neutralising the army, after paralysing it in the great days of the general strike. It must now work to bring the army completely over to the side of the people.''^^2^^ At the same time, Lenin pointed to the fact that the soldiers' taking the path of the revolution could not be the result of persuasion alone. The army's ideological indoctrination was insufficient, he stressed; to fight for the troops was also a must at the moment of the uprising.^^3^^
The autumn of 1905 witnessed 195 mass revolutionary actions in the army, almost a third of which developed into various forms of armed struggle, including insurrections.^^4^^ The leading role in individual actions by the army was played by Bolsheviks I. F. Dubrovinsky, F. A. Sergeyev (Artem) and others. The name of Lieutenant P. P. Schmidt, the "socialist outside the party", who led the mutiny on the cruiser Ochakov in November 1905, won renown. In the autumn of 1905, soldiers began more and more resorting to such a form of protest as the strike, and refusing to execute police punitive functions, etc., simultaneously advancing a series of extensive democratic demands. These were, however, only the first steps in winning the army over to the side of the revolutionary people, for the majority of the soldiers at the time still blindly obeyed the orders of the tsarist commanders.
The leading and organising role which the Bolshevik Party played in the development of the revolution was implemented with the direct participation of Lenin, who had returned to St. Petersburg
from emigration on November 8 (21), 1905. He ran the work of the Central Committee and the St. Petersburg Bolshevik Committee, took part in conferences, wrote articles for the Bolshevik press, and guided the activity of the Bolshevik group in the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Deputies. Lenin was the inspiration behind the preparations for the armed uprising. His advice had an effect on the work of the Moscow Bolshevik Committee which took charge of this uprising.
The decision to propose to the Moscow Soviet to declare a general strike, which was to develop into an armed uprising, was unanimously adopted by the Moscow City and District conferences of Bolsheviks on December 5 (18), 1905. It was supported by the Moscow Soviet on the next day. This was preceded by a referendum of sorts, which was held by Moscow workers themselves directly at factories and which ascertained the proletariat's resolve to go ahead with the uprising. Recalling the atmosphere in which the decision to stage a strike and an uprising was taken at the Moscow Bolshevik conference, an eyewitness wrote: "...In December, there could not have been a force capable of holding back the Moscow workers. Never in my life had I observed such irrepressible revolutionary enthusiasm as on that night. The enthusiasm was tremendous, and what was most remarkable was the fact that not a single representative of a factory ever mentioned that we would strike if others would. No, everyone said: We would strike and develop the strike into an armed uprising at all costs, irrespective of whether or not others would do so.''^^1^^ On December 7 (20), a general political strike began in Moscow, in which 100,000 persons took part. On December 8 (21), over 150,000 in the city walked off their jobs. Work stoppages were registered not only at industrial enterprises and transport facilities, but also at institutions and in offices, shops, schools and theatres. Clashes with troops took place on December 7 and 8. By the logic of the struggle, the strike developed into an uprising.
The first barricades in Moscow appeared on the evening of December 9 (22), and by the next day they had encircled the entire centre of the city, cutting it off from the working-class districts. Non-proletarian strata of the population as well as the broad masses of the workers were drawn into the struggle. However, the combat forces of the fighting squads did not exceed 8,000, and many were not even armed, the organisation and leadership of the struggle lagged behind the upsurge of the movement. The insurgents were unable to win the garrison over to their side and impede the transfer of troops from St. Petersburg.
~^^1^^ Voprosy istorii KPSS, No. 11, 1965, p. 24.
~^^2^^ V. I. Lenin, "The First Victory of the Revolution", Collected Works, Vol. 9,
pp. 432-33.
~^^3^^ See V. I. Lenin, "The Army and the People", Collected Works, Vol. 11, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972, p. 87; "Lessons of the Moscow Uprising", Collected Works, Vol. 11, p. 174.
~^^4^^ V. A. Petrov, Essays on the History of the Revolutionary Movement in the Russian Army in 1905, Nauka, Moscow-Leningrad, 1964, p. 292 (in Russian).
~^^1^^ N. Rozhkov, A. Sokolov, 1905, Moskovsky Rabochy, Moscow, 1925, pp. 24-25 (in Russian).
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71The Moscow insurrection was of a mass, popular nature. Its participants heroically battled the tsar's troops. During the struggle, the fighting squads began to employ tactics of guerrilla warfare successfully. The barricades, which numbered over a thousand in Moscow in December 1905, impaired the movement of tsarist troops and protected working-class neighbourhoods from artillery fire. The fighting squads operated in small mobile detachments, from ambushes, not giving decisive battle with the superior enemy troops. They fought in this fashion until substantial reinforcements arrived in Moscow. It was only after the authorities sent some 20,000 troops and police up against the insurgents that the outcome of the struggle was decided in favour of the autocracy.
For nine days the Moscow proletariat fought with arms in hand in defence of its right to build a new life. "The unmatched heroism of the Moscow workers," Lenin wrote, "provided the toiling masses of Russia with a model in the struggle.''^^1^^ The Bolsheviks were in the midst of the masses during the strike and uprising. The Moscow Bolsheviks and their leaders, V. L. Shantser (Marat) and M. I. Vasilyev-Yuzhin, did extensive work in preparing for the workers' December action. Outstanding among the leaders of the December armed uprising were the Bolsheviks Z. Ya. Litvin-Sedoi, chief of staff of the fighting squads, I. F. Dubrovinsky, R. S. Zemlyachka, A. V. Shestakov, V. M. Zagorsky and M. V. Frunze, to name a few. Socialist-Revolutionary A. V. Ukhtomsky, an engine-driver and chief of the railwaymen's fighting squad, fought valiantly; N. P. Schmit, a factory owner in the Presnya district of Moscow, aided the Bolsheviks. Following Lenin's instructions, the Bolsheviks of St. Petersburg strove to do all in their power to aid the insurgents in Moscow.
The struggle of the Moscow workers was supported with armed actions by the proletariat in several other regions of Russia---in the Donbas, Rostov-on-Don, Yekaterinoslav, Kharkov, Sormovo and Motovilikha, and by uprisings in Siberia, Latvia and the Transcaucasus. In a number of cities, such as Novorossiisk, Krasnoyarsk and Ghita, ``republics'' of sorts were formed, where power actually belonged to the Soviets. The workers showed heroism and selflessness everywhere, valiantly repeating the feat of the Paris Communards who, as Marx put it, stormed the heavens. The Bolshevik Party marched at the head of the proletariat.
The December armed uprising debunked the capitulationist views of the impossibility of revolutionary forces waging an armed struggle in conditions of large cities against government troops armed
with sophisticated military hardware. The main battles unfolded in Presnya, where the Soviet of Workers' Deputies was in charge. The struggle reached such a frenzied pitch here that the tsarist punitive troops literally had to take many houses by storm. It is highly symbolic that the final appeal of the headquarters of the Presnya fighting squads to the workers contained the following words: "The future belongs to the working class. Generation after generation in all countries will learn staunchness from the Presnya experience... We are invincible! Long live the struggle and victory of the workers!''^^1^^
However, the realisation of the need for armed uprising was, according to Lenin, "not sufficiently widespread and firmly assimilated among the revolutionary classes"; the uprising "was not concerted, resolute, organised, simultaneous, aggressive".^^2^^ The preparations for it from the military and technical standpoints were clearly insufficient. The insurgents were unable to win the troops over to the side of the people; they were not active, bold and resourceful enough in the struggle for the vacillating troops. Moreover, tactical miscalculations (the insurgents chiefly waged defensive battles) were made. All this led to the defeat of the working class in December 1905. However, unlike the Mensheviks who declared through Plekhanov that the struggle was hopeless from the very outset and therefore they should not have taken to arms, the Bolsheviks arrived at a completely opposite conclusion, urging the masses to prepare for a new uprising, to take up arms again and again, and to fight more resolutely and energetically than they had done in the heroic December 1905.
The defeat of the December uprising did not mean the end of the revolution. It was not even clear whether its apex had been reached or a more powerful outburst of popular indignation was in the offing. This was why the Bolsheviks kept their slogan of armed uprising. In early 1906, they began forming broader Bolshevik combat party organisations and uniting them on a countrywide basis and in terms of large geographical areas.^^3^^
In November 1906, the initiative of the largest Bolshevik military and combat organisations resulted in the convening of the representative First Military and Combat Conference of the RSDLP, which mapped out their tasks and determined the Russian centre---the'
~^^1^^ The 1905-1907 Revolution in Russia. Documents and Materials, Part I, USSR Academy of Sciences Press, Moscow, 1955, p. 689 (in Russian). .10.70 V' !x Lenin> "Tne Revolutionary Upswing'*, Collected Works, Vol. 18,
iy/o, p. 107.
~^^3^^ For details see Military Organisations of the Russian Proletariat and the Experience of Its Armed Struggle, 1903-1917, Nauka, Moscow, 1974 pp 152-157 (m Russian).
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "Letter to the Workers of Red Presnya District of Moscow, December 25, 1920", Collected Works, Vol. 31, 1966, p. 535.
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73Interim Bureau of RSDLP Military and Combat Organisations.1 The provision of the party leadership with military and combat work was becoming particularly crucial. A plan which envisaged establishing ``equality'' between general proletarian organisations of the RSDLP on the one hand, and military and combat ones on the other was rejected at the conference. Lenin ardently supported this decision, stressing: "The unconditionally dominant character and deciding voice belong to the general proletarian organisation; the complete subordination of all military and combat organisations to
it__"^^2^^ It was on this basis that relations between party committees
and Bolshevik military and combat organisations were structured. Committee directives were recognised as binding for them. Its members were incorporated in the leading bodies of military and combat organisations with the right of deciding vote; their representatives, in turn, were delegated to the committee.
Headquarters or military councils with detachments of reconnaissance men, medical orderlies and technicians served as operative bodies of the preparation for the armed uprising. The Bolsheviks conducted systematic military training for party members.
The problem of the unity of the working class became more acute as the revolutionary struggle developed. The objective logic of the events and the pressure exerted by the working masses from below forced the leaders of Menshevik and national Social-Democratic organisations to coordinate actions with the Bolsheviks. By the autumn of 1905, the movement for unity among the Social-Democrats locally had progressed from separate practical agreements to the formation of federative councils, uniting, on a parity basis, representatives of Bolshevik committees, Menshevik groups, Bund committees, Social-Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPL) and the Latvian Social-Democratic Labour Party. Unification talks the Bolshevik Central Committee and the Menshevik Organising Commission held since July concluded in late December with the formation of the Joint Central Committee of the RSDLP and its single central organ---the newspaper Partiiniye Izvestia. The Bolsheviks' plan for the convocation of the Unity Congress on the basis of direct votes for delegates in proportion to the number of party members was adopted.
The Bolsheviks agreed to amalgamation or, to be more precise, ``semi-amalgamation'' with the Mensheviks at the Fourth RSDLP
Congress in April 19C6 because it was conducive to eliminating the split of Social-Democracy which was harmful to the cause of the revolution, and to the desire of the proletarian masses for a united working-class front. The Bolsheviks considered this demand of the workers fully legitimate, but they constantly stressed that the unification of the party was possible only if carried out on a principled, Marxist basis, that it has nothing in common with a mechanical merger of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Therefore, the movement for amalgamation within the RSDLP became feasible only when the Mensheviks, influenced by the first lessons of the revolution, took definite steps in the autumn of 1905 to recognise a number of Bolshevik tactical principles, particularly on the armed uprising issue.
The unification of the RSDLP at the Fourth (Unity) Congress in Stockholm (April and May 1906) took place on the basis of organisational principles advanced by Lenin. The new RSDLP Rules adopted at the Congress formalised Lenin's formulation of party membership and the building of all its organisations in accordance with the principle of democratic centralism. The Congress also settled the issue of uniting national Social-Democratic parties--- the SDKPL, the Latvian Social-Democratic Labour Party and the Bund---with the RSDLP. They received rights to autonomous organisations within the framework of the united party. The SDKPL and the Latvian Social-Democrats were supposed to conduct work among the proletarians of all nationalities in their respective areas. In order to unite the working-class movement internationally in the shortest time possible, the Congress agreed to a practical compromise and concessions to national organisations on a number of organisational and even policy-making issues in a bid to rapidly eliminate disagreements on them during joint work.^^1^^
The historical record corroborated the perspicacity of these moves. Admittedly, even afterwards heads of national Social-Democratic organisations wavered repeatedly, trying to play the role of arbiter in the struggle between the revolutionary and opportunistic trends in Russian Social-Democracy. However, the coalescence of most Polish, Lithuanian and Latvian Social-Democrats with the Bolsheviks locally prompted national organisations to gradually discard former special views on a number of policy-making issues and scuttle their separatist leanings. The Bund alone maintained its' nationalist position.
While having become a milestone in the struggle for the establishment of Leninist organisational principles, the Fourth RSDLP Congress was unable to bring the struggle to a victorious conclusion
~^^1^^ The CPSU in the Resolutions..., Vol. 1, pp. 192-202; The First Military and Combat Conference of the RSDLP. Minutes, Partizdat, Moscow, 1932 (in Russian).
~^^2^^ V. I. Lenin, "Apropos of the Minutes of the November Military and Combat Conference of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party", Collected Works, Vol. 12, 1972, p. 416.
~^^1^^ The CPSU in the Resolutions..., Vol. 1, pp. 158-59, 165-66, 178-82.
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75because of the small preponderance of the Mensheviks at the Congress, which did not reflect the correlation of party forces. The situation was complicated by the fact that they were also dominant in the Party's central bodies formed at the Congress. Praising the results of the Unity Congress, Lenin considered them the underpinnings for waging the further struggle for the implementation of the organisational principles of the new type of proletarian party. " Disagreements on organisation have been almost entirely eliminated," he pointed out. "There remains an important, serious and extremely responsible task: really to apply the principles of democratic centralism in Party organisations....''^^1^^
Following the Fourth (Unity) Congress, a restructuring of regional organisations took place in the RSDLP on the basis of democratic centralism. A single form replaced the variety of the past. The conference (congress) was the highest body of the regional RSDLP organisation. It elected the corresponding committee (bureau) for exercising leadership of autonomous local committees. The regional amalgamations encompassed virtually the entire country, and national Social-Democratic organisations also functioned enjoying their rights. A single structure for forming local party organisations was elaborated as well.
The Bolsheviks proceeded from the proposition that leadership of the workers' struggle aimed at the revolutionary solution of the urgent fundamental tasks of transforming society could be exercised only by the party of the proletariat, which was its solid revolutionary vanguard and political leader at all stages of its revolutionary activity. The entire record of the implementation of Leninist principles of party up-building confirmed the fact that such a vanguard's fighting capability could be ensured by unity between consistently Marxist, creative theory and practice, by the resultant ideological and political unity and organisational unity based on democratic centralism, the strictest party discipline, political awareness and energetic activity of each party member, and by a high sense of responsibility for the implementation of party policy. During both revolutionary upsurge and periods of slow decline in the revolution, the Bolsheviks remained such a revolutionary vanguard, irreconcilable to any form of splitting, political opportunism and theoretical revisionism.
Within the RSDLP organisations, which had amalgamated on the basis of the decisions of the Fourth (Unity) Congress, a fierce struggle was raging on issues of policy, tactics and organisation. Great damage was inflicted to the cause of the working class by the
opportunistic line of the Menshevik Central Committee and the RSDLP central organ. In these conditions, the Bolsheviks resumed printing in August 1906 their own mouthpiece, which came out until 1910 under the title Proletary (edited by Lenin) as the organ of the Moscow, St. Petersburg and several other RSDLP committees. The Proletary editorial board played the role of a Bolshevik centre. The Bolsheviks' struggle against the Mensheviks was waged within the RSDLP Central Committee, the Duma group and local organisations. It resulted in winning over the majority in local organisations to the Bolsheviks' side. As early as 1907. the Bolsheviks had a solid majority, and were supported by the SDKPL and the Latvian Social-Democrats.
The Mensheviks' obvious shift to the right in 1906-1907 made it necessary for the Bolsheviks to launch a campaign to convene the Fifth Party Congress (April and May 1907). Represented at this forum were 145 party organisations with a membership of 150,000. Proceeding from the experience of the revolution, the Congress endorsed a general party line which was elaborated by Lenin and other Bolsheviks and which was persistently pursued by them despite the Mensheviks throughout the 1905-1907 period. A struggle again unfolded at the Congress over issues pertaining to the party organisation of the proletariat. Behind the veil of demagoguery about consolidating ties with the working masses, the Mensheviks tried to push through the idea of a "labour congress" which would have meant replacing Social-Democracy with, or subordinating it to, a non-party, in effect liberal, labour organisation. Lenin pointed out that such principles, which were embraced by the anarcho-- syndicalists, reflected an opportunist and philistine weariness with the revolution, rejection of the political tasks of the working class, and a tendency "to weaken the class independence of the proletariat and subordinate that class to the bourgeoisie".^^1^^ The Bolsheviks countered this with a line, endorsed at the Congress, for organising trade unions, stepping up Party work in them and other labour organisations and institutions, and substantially bolstering the Party ranks with the proletariat. The Congress accepted the Bolshevik characterisation of the Social-Democratic Party as "the only organisation uniting the politically-conscious section of the proletariat, the vanguard leading the working class's struggle for a socialist system, and the political and economic conditions necessary for its realisation". It was stressed that the idea of a labour congress was definitely " harmful to the development of the proletariat as a class".^^2^^
The Mensheviks' attempts to attain the trade unions' neutrality as regards the Party and the independence of the parliamentary
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "Angry Embarrassment", Collected Works, Vol. 12, p. 331.
~^^2^^ The CPSU in the Resolutions..., Vol. 1, pp. 214, 215.
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "Report on the Unity Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. A Letter to the St. Petersburg Workers", Collected Works, Vol. 10, p. 376.
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77group of the Social-Democratic Party from its Central Committee were rejected as well. In addition, in pursuance of the line of the Third RSDLP Congress despite the Mensheviks, a decision was taken in accordance with which there no longer existed two centres---the Central Committee and Central Organ. In accordance with the Party Rules it adopted, the Congress, as its supreme body, was to elect the Central Committee, which would organise, lead and coordinate the entire activity of the Party and would also appoint the editors of the Central Organ.
The decisions of the Fifth RSDLP Congress concluded the stage (which embraced the period of the revolution) of the Bolsheviks' struggle to implement Lenin's principles of the party of the new type, and to unite the RSDLP on this basis. They affirmed the victory of Bolshevism.
The first stage of the revolution, its advance, ended with the defeat of the December armed uprising of 1905. The second stage of the revolution had begun, on a decline, although this was not discovered immediately at all.
The strike movement remained the main form of the class struggle during the period of the retreat of the revolution. Despite intensified tsarist repressions, the proletariat retreated slowly, continuing to fight. Twice---in the spring and summer of 1906 and the spring of 1907---it attempted to halt the offensive of reaction. Moreover, it was these new upsurges of the working-class movement, followed by the peasant movement, that maintained revolutionary sentiments in the country and considerably staved off the revolution's ultimate defeat. Awakened by the 1905 events, the more backward sections of the proletariat entered the struggle, as if taking over from the vanguard of the movement. In 1906, broad masses of the proletariat marked the May Day, and made an attempt to support the uprisings of sailors and soldiers in Kronstadt and Sveaborg in the Baltic which erupted in July. In the spring and summer of 1906. came a wave of strikes by mine and factory workers in the Donbas, and a strike by seamen of the merchant marine in Odessa.
The combat sentiments of the masses influenced the decisions of the Second All-Russia Conference of Trade Unions (February 1906), which took place illegally in St. Petersburg. Thus, the resolution on organisational questions stated that trade unions should not turn into charitable institutions, that their purpose was to be combat organisations of the workers for struggle against the capitalists. The delegates resolved to remit a large part of membership dues and all trade union income to a special strike fund.^^1^^
In a bid to check the further development of the revolutionary movement, the tsarist government was forced to legalise the trade unions: in March 1906, it issued the "Interim Rules on Trade Societies Instituted for Persons Employed in Commercial and Industrial Enterprises, or for Owners of These Enterprises". This law envisaged protective and police regulation of trade union activity: they were forbidden to fight for a shorter working-day and higher wages by means of strikes, and strike funds were banned. The trade unions only had the right to ``ascertain'' and ``coordinate'' the interests of the workers, distribute allowances from mutual assistance funds, etc. Many forms of amalgamating trade union organisations were outlawed as well.^^1^^
However, despite the Interim Rules, the trade unions under the RSDLP leadership continued to be strongholds of revolutionary work among the masses. Through the trade unions the Bolsheviks organised the struggle for higher wages and better working conditions. The trade unions were the initiators of new forms of strikes; so, in 1907, they organised a number of successful strikes at factories owned by the same firm in different towns (the strike of tea-packers in Moscow, Odessa, etc.). Between 1905 and 1907, trade unions in Moscow and St. Petersburg managed to have over 20 collective agreements concluded.^^2^^ The trade unions concentrated on aiding the unemployed, including those in other towns; thus, at the initiative of the Moscow textile workers' union, an assistance fund was formed in January 1907 for Lodz workers who had been subjected to a lockout.3 The trade unions also took part in the political struggle.
Another manifestation of the proletariat's stiff opposition to the mounting onslaught of the bourgeoisie was the movement of the unemployed---a response by the workers to the mass lockouts to which the capitalists were resorting more and more often at the time. The movement proceeded under the slogan "Work and Bread!" and was accompanied by demands for public works, free food, etc. Councils of unemployed appeared in a number of towns with representatives from revolutionary parties, trade unions and workers from operating enterprises.
The guerrilla warfare was a new form of the revolutionary movement during the period of the revolution's decline. Workers and members of revolutionary organisations fought with arms in hand against the violence of punitive detachments and the Black Hundreds, liquidated spies and provocateurs, etc. These actions were, in fact, a form of civil war in conditions "when the mass movement has
~^^1^^ For details see V. Ya. Laverychev, Tsarism and the Labour Issue in Russia (1861-1917-), Mysl, Moscow, 1972, p. 207 (in Russian). ~^^8^^ Ibid., p. 187. ^^3^^ Trade Unions of Moscow, Moscow, 1975, p. 49.
~^^1^^ Trade Unions of the USSR, Vol. 1, pp. 103-09.
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79actually reached the point of an uprising and when fairly large intervals occur between the 'big engagements' in the civil war".^^1^^
In 1907, the proletariat was already waging the final, rearguard battles, but even then the workers' strikes in St. Petersburg District, Vladimir Gubernia and Baku stood out for their staunchness, proving once again that the working class was the first to enter the struggle and the last to leave the battlefield.
The second stage of the revolution was the time when the Russian proletariat, with the autocracy still intact, nonetheless received an opportunity to employ parliamentary forms of struggle for its rights. True, the State Duma, the decision on the convocation of which was formalised by the tsarist manifesto of October 17 (30), 1905, was only peripherally reminiscent of a bourgeois parliament. The most important facets of state rule were removed from its sphere of competence, the ministers were answerable only to the tsar, and the Duma's budget rights were extremely curtailed. Elections to it were neither general, nor equal, nor direct or secret. The extent to which the electoral rights of the workers were limited can be judged from the fact that one vote of a landlord was equal to 45 workers' votes; moreover, only male workers of enterprises employing no less than 50 persons were allowed to vote.
However, no matter how fictitious and threadbare the promised freedoms were, the convocation of the Duma opened up for the proletariat a number of additional opportunities for class organisation and political education, for rallying around itself other sections of the working people, the peasantry above all, as well as for levelling criticism at the anti-popular policy of the tsarist government and the treacherous conduct of the liberal bourgeoisie. These opportunities were used in part by the working class and its Party during the proceedings of the First State Duma, which opened in April 1906.
The Social-Democrats boycotted the elections to the First Duma. Lenin wrote later that this step was a tactical blunder, since the elections were held during the revolution's decline. This blunder was soon corrected. Leadership in the First Duma was gained by the most ``left'' of the Russian bourgeois parties---the Constitutional Democrats (Cadets). Representing the interests of the country's bourgeois development, it constantly wavered between opposition to the autocracy and a desire to reach accord with it against the revolutionary people. It was the counter-revolutionary line that eventually took the upper hand in it. The big commercial and industrial bourgeoisie did not support the Cadets: it either teamed up with the Union of
October 17 (the Octobrist Party) or tried to form other party groupings which, however, dissolved quickly. After October 1905, the big Russian industrialists and bankers continued unconditionally to support the tsarist government and unequivocally came out against the revolutionary forces.^^1^^
However, the accord between the autocracy and the people which the bourgeois liberals had worked for proved impossible, and after 72 fruitless days of debate in the Duma the tsarist government dissolved in July 1906 what it termed the overly ``left'' first Russian ``parliament''. The Social-Democratic group of the Duma, which consisted of 18 deputies, was particularly odious to the tsarist . authorities. The group included 10 workers, who had passed in the elections without the sanction of the appropriate Party committees, and 8 Mensheviks, who had been elected in areas where the elections were held after the decision of the Fourth RSDLP Congress to lift the Duma boycott. The Menshevik nature of the work of the group, its overestimation of the Duma as the centre of the anti-government movement, the lack of political experience of the first labour deputies, their illusions about the possibility of joint actions with the Cadets---all this combined accounted for the series of mistakes which the representatives of the working class initially made in parliamentary activity. However, under the influence of criticism by the Bolsheviks, above all by Lenin, who closely followed each move of the Social-Democratic deputies in the Duma and urged them to work for unity of actions not with the Cadets but with the peasant deputies---the Trudoviks, the group began to act more decisively and consistently. To counter the half-baked Cadet bill on assemblies it tabled its own draft, which rejected any police restrictions on the freedom of people's assemblies. The attempt by the workers' deputies to establish contacts with their constituency and to develop extraDuma propaganda work was also a positive phenomenon. Substantial headway was likewise made in bringing together workers' and peasants' deputies of the Duma---the Trudoviks. Suffice it to say that in June 1906 they jointly filed 31 requests with the government.^^2^^ After the First Duma was dissolved the Social-Democrats and Trudoviks issued an appeal to the army and navy in which it called upon the soldiers and sailors to take the side of the people and train their guns on the criminal government. The Executive Committee of Left Groups which was formed by these groups proposed to the peasants to topple the government authorities and appropriate the manorial holdings. At the same time, however, the Social-
~^^1^^ See V. I. Lenin, "Guerrilla Warfare", Collected Works, Vol. 11, p. 219; for the international significance of the tactics of guerrilla warfare see Rodney Arismendi, Lenin, la revolution y America Latina, Ediciones Pueblos Unidos, Montevideo, 1970. pp. 429-83.
~^^1^^ For details see Ye. D. Chermensky, The Bourgeoisie and Tsarism During the First Russian Revolution, Mysl, Moscow, 1970 (in Russian).
~^^2^^ Istoriya SSSR. No. 4, 1973, p. 60.
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81Democrats, exhibiting a lack of consistency, also supported the Cadet slogan of "passive resistance" to the government.
In the Second State Duma, the activity of the workers' deputies was more effective and purposeful.^^1^^ The RSDLP group consisted •of 65 deputies, including 18 Bolsheviks. They had been elected in the largest of Russia's industrial centres, while the Mensheviks had got in chiefly through the votes of the petty-bourgeois electorate.
A fierce struggle between two political lines---the Bolshevik and the Menshevik---immediately developed in the Social-Democratic group. The Bolshevik parliamentarians established close contact with Lenin, who was in Finland at the time, as well as with the St. Petersburg Party Committee, and the proletarian masses. Following Lenin's instructions, the Bolshevik deputies set out to pursue leftist bloc tactics in a bid to reach accord with parties representing the interests of the peasants. The Mensheviks, on the contrary, tried to saddle the group with the opportunist line of "coordinating actions" with the Cadets. Through the Bolsheviks' efforts the Social-- Democrats managed in a number of instances to attract peasant represejntatives; thus, leftist-bloc votes scuttled the Cadets' amendment to the bill on aid to the unemployed which excluded strikers from among the recipients; a united front of workers' and peasants' representatives also emerged during the debate on food and agrarian issues. What especially brought the left groups together was the threat that the Second Duma would be dissolved, when, on the Social-- Democrats' initiative, they had decided to refuse to ratify the state budget.*
The Bolshevik deputies of the Second Duma launched extensive propaganda and organisational work among the masses. They frequently spoke before the workers and intensively corresponded with their constituencies. Special councils of factory representatives were set up in St. Petersburg and several other towns to maintain contact with deputies of the Duma. The Mensheviks, on the contrary, limited themselves chiefly to work in the Duma.
Yet, even this Social-Democratic group made a good number of mistakes and tactical blunders, the main responsibility for which lay with the Mensheviks. These mistakes were sharply criticised at the Fifth Congress of the RSDLP, where the revolutionary and opportunist line in the assessment of parliamentary work again clashed. The Bolsheviks considered it an important but by no means the principal form of the Social-Democrats' work. Harbouring no illu-
~^^1^^ For details see M. Pavlov, The Duma Tactics of the Bolsheviks During the 1905-1907 Revolution, Lenizdat, Leningrad, 1947; G. I. Zaichikov, The Duma
Tactics of the Bolsheviks, Vysshaya Shkola, Moscow, 1975 (both in Russian).
~^^2^^ Problems of the Leadership of the Proletariat in the Democratic Revolution (1905-February 1917), pp. 225-29.
sions about the possibility of the Duma's constructive legislative work under the autocracy, the Bolsheviks viewed the Russian `` parliament'' chiefly as a legal tribune for levelling criticism at the government and the liberals, a vehicle for unmasking the pseudo-- constitutional nature of the state system existing in Russia. Contrary to the parties of the Second International, where the parliamentary groups were relapsing more and more to reformist positions and frequently acted independent of party centres, the Bolsheviks insisted that the workers' deputies strictly submit to the Party decisions, and viewed everyday contact with the working class and the entire people as a guarantee of success. Thus, the Bolsheviks' revolutionary line on issues of parliamentary work, which also took into consideration the positive elements of revolutionary parliamentarianism in West European countries, was of fundamental importance for the worldwide working-class movement. The Fifth RSDLP Congress adopted a Bolshevik resolution on the State Duma assailing the opportunist tactics of the Mensheviks in the Duma. "For us," Lenin said, "there is only one, single and indivisible, workers' movement---the class struggle of the proletariat. All its separate, partial forms, including the parliamentary struggle, must be fully subordinated to it. For us it is the extra-Duma struggle of the proletariat that is decisive."1 Despite the calculations of the government, the Second Duma proved to be even more left than its predecessor. The struggle within the Duma was at a frenzied pitch. The land question---the most topical for Russia---was particularly hotly debated. The Bolsheviks, using Lenin's draft speech on the agrarian question in their statements, were the first to proclaim from the Duma rostrum the demand that all manorial holdings be confiscated, and urged the peasants to take the solution of this vital nationwide problem into their own hands.
On June 3 (16), 1907, the government, with the aid of a forged document provided by the police concerning a ``plot'' by the SocialDemocratic deputies against the existing system, dissolved the Duma; moreover, this act was accompanied by an illegal change of the statute of elections. The coup d'etat of June 3, 1907 marked the end of the first Russian revolution, the mainspring and leader of which was the proletariat.
The entire period of the revolution proceeded with the vigorous involvement of the working class in the struggle against the autocracy and the bourgeoisie. At enterprises under the factory inspection supervision alone 2,863,000 strikers were registered in 1905, 1,108,000 in 1906, and 740,000 in 1907. Even the latter, most mod-
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "The Fifth Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, April 30-May 19 (May 13-June 1), 1907", Collected Works, Vol. 12, p. 485.
6-0234
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83est, figure exceeds the maximum number of strikers in any of the three largest capitalist countries---the United States, Germany and France---during the entire 15-year period from 1894 to 1908.^^1^^
The overall picture of the struggle of all contingents of the industrial proletariat of European Russia in 1905 looks even more impressive; during this time over two-thirds of the workers took part in strikes (see Table 1).
During the revolution, the proletariat convincingly proved that it was the country's most revolutionary class. In addition, it was able to win the position of leader of all the workers and the exploited.
The first Russian revolution was a major test of Lenin's teaching of the leading role of the proletariat in the liberation movement. "When the Social-Democrats, from an analysis of Russia's economic realities, deduced the leading role, the hegemony of the proletariat in our revolution," Lenin wrote in 1807, "this seemed to be a bookish infatuation of theoreticians. The revolution confirmed our theory, because it is the only truly revolutionary theory. The proletariat actually took the lead in the revolution all the time. The SocialDemocrats actually proved to be the ideological vanguard of the proletariat.''^^1^^
Other working people's classes and social groups followed the proletariat in one way or other; they oriented themselves to its slogans and employed the forms of struggle and organisation it had elaborated. The proletariat's example inspired the peasants, office workers, democratic intelligentsia, students, soldiers and sailors; it heightened sentiments of protest and created a special atmosphere of revolution in which the most downtrodden and oppressed stood with their head held high.
The proletariat exerted an influence on the masses through legal and illegal Party literature, leaflets in particular, through the workers who travelled to the countryside, through meetings and rallies, military Social-Democratic organisations and student groups, cultural and educational societies, and the rostrum of the tsarist Duma. All these channels were employed to rally the working people in town and country around the working class and its party, to lead them on the road of struggle. A tremendous role in stirring the pettybourgeois masses was played by the strike movement and especially the highest form of proletarian struggle---armed uprisings.
The countryside followed the towns during the years of the revolution. It was not for nothing that Lenin wrote that the word `` striker'' had acquired an entirely new meaning among the peasants: it signified a rebel, a revolutionary, and the strikers themselves evoked trust and sympathy in the countryside.^^2^^ The reports of tsarist officials from different parts of the country frequently spoke of how unrecognisably the peasants had changed under the influence of workers who had come on visits or who had been exiled for revolutionary work, how difficult it was becoming to prevent them from taking
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "Revolution and Counter-Revolution", Collected Works, Vol. 13, p. 115.
~^^3^^ V. I. Lenin, "Lecture on the 1905 Revolution", Collected Works, Vol. 23, p. 243.
6*
Table 1
Russian Proletariat in the Strike Struggle, 1905 (European Russia)
Metal workers
Textile workers
Miners, iron-- andsteel workers
Railway workers
Others
Total
Total number of factory workers (thousands) . .
392.5
693.3
650.0
640.4
694.9
3,671.1
Number of strikers (repeats not included) . . .
300.7
473.6
279.8
640.4
392.3
2,086.8
Percentage of total number of workers of a branch
76.6
68.3
43.0
100.0
56.4
67.9
Total number of strikers (repeats included) . . .
1,011.3
1,269.5
723.5
1,126.4
879.4
5,010.1
Source: Historical Notes, Vol. 52, Institute of History, USSR Academy of Sciences, 1955 p. 182.
The particular staunchness of the advanced sections of the proletariat exerted an influence here. Whereas in 1905 economic and political strikes registered an identical number of participants, in 1906 there were many more political strikers than participants in economic strikes (650,000 against 458,000), and in 1907 the former exceeded the latter by more than 150 per cent (540,000 against 200,000). Among metal workers, in 1905 the number of political strikers substantially exceeded that of participants in economic strikes, while in the period of the highest revolutionary upsurge (the final three months of 1905) the proportion was 10 to 1.
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "Strike Statistics in Russia", Collected Works, Vol. 16, 1977, pp. 395, 413.
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85action against the landlords. Although the advanced workers still lacked the strength and means to exert an influence over the entire countryside, the ties between the proletariat and the peasantry were consolidating and augmenting from one day to the next.^^1^^ Many RSDLP committees formed special agrarian groups whose members travelled to villages and spoke at meetings and rallies, explaining the Social-Democratic programme to the peasants in a bid to rid them of the influence of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and liberals. The revolutionary activity of advanced workers in the countryside largely contributed to the consolidation of the alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry. As was pointed out at the conference of the Volga RSDLP District Organisation in October 1906, "the peasants are beginning to understand the necessity to combine the revolutionary struggle of town and country (workers and peasants). They believe that the signal for the uprising should be given by the workers. This signal is the general political strike (the railway strike in particular), which in the eyes of the peasants means an armed up-
-rising".^^2^^
The peasants were attracted to the urban workers; they attended their meetings and turned to the Soviets of Workers' Deputies for assistance. Following the example of the urban proletariat, they frequently staged strikes demanding easier land rent terms and higher wages for seasonal work on manorial holdings, and they took part in the guerrilla movement (Latvia, Georgia). The countryside was also receptive to the Bolsheviks' appeal to form revolutionary peasants' committees, the organisers of which were workers in many cases. An important form of the alliance between the working class and the peasantry were joint actions by workers' and peasants' deputies---Trudoviks---in the State Duma, the Bolsheviks doing everything in their power to rid the Trudoviks of the Cadets' influence.^^3^^ All this combined gave Lenin cause to draw the conclusion that during the years of the revolution the alliance between the working class and the peasantry with the leading role being played by the proletariat and its party was formed "scores and hundreds of times, in the most diverse forms ... from the vague and unofficial to definite and official political agreements".^^4^^
That the working class exerted an influence on the revolutionary struggle of the peasants was evidenced by the fact that the peasant
~^^1^^ P. I. Klitaov, The Revolutionary Activity of the Workers in the Countryside in 1905-1907, Sotsekgiz, Moscow, 1960, pp. 65, 92, 124, 125 (in Russian).
~^^2^^ The Second Period of the Revolution 1906-1907, Part II, Book II, Nauka, Moscow, 1962, p. 239 (in Russian).
~^^8^^ Problems of the Leadership of the Proletariat in the Democratic Revolution •{19OS-February 1917), Politizdat, Moscow, 1975, pp. 220-29 (in Russian).
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "The Aim of the Proletarian Struggle in Our Revolution", .Collected Works, Vol. 15, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977, pp. 371-72.
movement seemed to echo somewhat later the upswings and declines of the strike movement of the urban proletariat; moreover, the highest upsurge of the working class' struggle during the final four months of 1905 coincided with the period in which the peasants acted most intensively against the landlords. "In October 1905, at the very height of the revolution," Lenin wrote, "the proletariat was at the head, the bourgeoisie wavered and vacillated, and the peasantry wrecked the landed estates.''^^1^^
According to far from complete statistics, over 3,200 peasant actions took place in 1905, almost half of them at the height of the revolution; in 1906, the figure was 2,600, 60 per cent of them coming in May, June and July, i.e., the time of the upswing of the workingclass movement that spring and summer; the first half of 1907 witnessed approximately 900, 69 per cent of them taking place between April and July, when the working class made its last attempt to halt the decline of the revolution.^^2^^
An important component of the struggle for the leading role of the proletariat was the efforts to win the petty-bourgeois sections of the urban population over to the side of the working class. The alliance between the working class and the urban petty-bourgeois revolutionary democrats was particularly evident during the AllRussia October Strike, the November post and telegraph workers' strike, and the December armed uprisings. In 1906 and 1907, the proletariat and the Bolshevik Party exerted an influence on these strata during the election campaigns prior to the First and particularly the Second State Duma; they took advantage of the Duma rostrum for addressing the masses, and they also influenced them through the trade unions.
One of the proletariat's vital tasks during the revolution was its participation in the liberation struggle of the oppressed ethnic groups inhabiting the Russian Empire. Given the leading role of the working class the national liberation movement would be able to become an inalienable component of the struggle of the whole people for democracy and national equality under the slogan of the right of nations to self-determination. With the leading role of the bourgeoisie this would have inevitably degenerated into a narrow nationalist movement, which would threaten to divorce the working masses of national areas from the life-giving alliance with the Russian prole-
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "The Fifth Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, April 30-May 19 (May 13-June 1), 1907", Collected Works, Vol. 12, p. 459.
* S. M. Dubrovsky, The Peasant Movement in the 1905-1907 Revolution, Nauka, Moscow, 1956, p. 42 (in Russian). According to more complete estimates made by M. S. Simonova on the basis'of statistics available in Soviet historical literature, some 18,000 peasant actions took place during the revolution ( Historical Notes, Vol. 95, Institute of History, USSRE Academy of Sciences, 1975, p. 212, in Russian).
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87tariat and thus inflict irreparable harm to their fundamental national interests.
On the whole, the proletariat succeeded in paralysing the ambition of the national bourgeoisie to lead the national liberation movement. The revolutionary struggle of the working masses of the national areas---the Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic region, the Caucasus, Byelorussia, the Volga region, Finland and Central Asia--- were extensively supported by the Russian proletariat. Owing to this it became possible to put through a democratic constitution in Finland and lift martial law in Poland, introduce in a number of areas tuition and legal proceedings in the native language wiljhout preliminary permission, and other democratic measures. The national liberation movement in turn aided the Russian proletariat in its struggle against the autocracy. The 1905-1907 revolution laid a firm foundation for the cooperation among the peoples of Russia in their common struggle against tsarism which was to yield fruit in 1917. The mainspring and ideological leader of this cooperation was the Russian proletariat headed by the Bolshevik Party.
Thus, the proletariat was the leader of the popular struggle at all stages of the 1905-1907 revolution. The working class and the Bolshevik Party took the initiative in positing the most crucial issues in the life of society, and their selfless struggle for the workers' interests won them the trust and support of the entire people.
THE MAIN RESULTS AND INTERNATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE 1905-1907 REVOLUTION
The first Russian revolution was an important turning-point in the history of Russia and the entire world liberation movement. The reactionary autocratic regime buckled for the first time under the blows of the revolutionary forces. As a result, tsarism ceased being the chief bastion of international reaction. Moreover, thereafter the autocracy itself began to need support from without to preserve its wavering positions within the country and in the international arena. This created a completely new political atmosphere in the world and unleashed the initiative of the revolutionary forces.
The first Russian revolution drew into its orbit all the strata of the working population, and part of the army and navy; it engulfed the centre of the country and its outlying regions, and made tens of millions of workers and peasants of many nationalities energetic participants in the political struggle. In none of the previous bourgeois revolutions did the revolutionary endeavour of the popular masses attain such an upsurge and scope, nor did it enrich the practice of the liberation movement with such an abundance of new
forms of organisation and struggle. The 1905-1907 revolution in Russia was a big stride forward in the development of the world liberation movement, providing a brilliant example to workers in other countries. The Russian proletariat acted as the vanguard of the international proletariat, showing the prospects for the revolutionary struggle to come.
The Russian proletariat scored immediate, palpable gains. Suffice it to say that in 1905 70.6 per cent of all the strikes staged ended in complete or partial victory for the workers; in 1906, the figure was 66.5 per cent, and in 1907, when the movement was already on the decline, it was 42.3 per cent.^^1^^ Wages of factory workers rose by an average of 15 (per cent in 1907 over the 1904 level.^^2^^ Incomes also increased for other categories of workers, including farmworkers. The sizes and number of fines were sharply reduced under the influence of the strike movement. The bourgeoisie and tsarist authorities were also forced to agree to a somewhat shortened working-day at many private and state-owned factories. At most enterprises it now lasted 9-10 hours, and even 8 hours at some. As a result, the working week after the revolution was shortened to 50-60 hours (as against 75hours in the late 19th century).^^3^^ Even though the proletariat's position remained extremely difficult (especially considering the increase in prices for staple goods), the year 1905 "improved the worker's living standard to a degree that normally is attained during several decades".^^4^^
The tsarist authorities virtually had to permit economic strikes, abolishing the 1897 circular according to which the "unauthorised leaving of the job" was considered a criminal offence. Despite a number of substantial reservations impinging upon the workers' rights, the Interim Rules of December 2, 1905 were an important gain of the proletariat. The government was also forced to legalise the trade unions. Even more important was the fact that during the revolution the working class won, albeit for a short time, basic political rights and freedoms, and also received, according to the law of December 11, 1905, access to the State Duma (far from all workers, however, could take part in the elections).
The main thing were the changes which had taken place in the consciousness, mentality and in the very make-up of the workers. The proletariat had felt its strength and significance as a class, and
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "3trik3 Statistics in Russia", Collected Works, Vol. 16, p. 418.
~^^2^^ Reports of Factory Inspectors for 1910, St. Petersburg, 1911, p. XXXVII ^calculated by the author; in Russian).
~^^3^^ K. A. Pazhitnov, The Situation of the Working Class in Russia, Novy Mir, St. Petersburg, 1903, p. 233 (in Russian).
~^^4^^ V. I. Lenin, 'The Strike Movejasnt and Wages", Collected Works, Vol. 18, p. 259.
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89its faith in the tsar had been shattered. The workers had developed a lively interest in politics and the realisation of their own dignity. It was not coincidental that precisely in 1905 the proud word `` comrade'' emerged from underground groups to the streets and factories, and came into common usage.
The first Russian revolution was an important stage in the further consolidation of the proletariat as a major political force of countrywide scope, as the leader of all the working and the exploited people. These years witnessed the expansion and deepening of a process which had begun back in the 1890s, the process of combining scientific socialism with the mass working-class movement, the process of assimilating by the proletariat of the Bolshevik ideology, tactics and organisational principles.
Therefore, the first Russian revolution elevated the working class and its Party to a new level and prepared them for the subsequent struggle for democracy and socialism.
The 1905-1907 revolution, however, suffered defeat for a number of reasons. The proletariat was still unable to raise the majority of the people to the armed struggle against the autocracy. The actions of the workers, peasants, soldiers and sailors, and the democratic intelligentsia, as well as the national liberation movement of the oppressed peoples, had not yet merged into a single current. In conditions of mass, spontaneous protest, only "a minor part of the peasantry," noted Lenin, "really did fight, did organise to some extent for this purpose; and a very small part indeed rose up in arms to exterminate its enemies".^^1^^
Cohesion and organisation in the actions of the workers themselves was also insufficient. It was not fortuitous that Lenin pointed out that they "did not resolutely, widely and quickly enough pass to the aggressive economic and armed political struggle".^^2^^ Despite the tremendous ideological, political and organisational growth of the Russian proletariat during the revolution, it was still unable to put all its inner reserves into motion. A negative role was also played by the split in the working class, the opportunism of the Mensheviks and the insufficient Social-Democratic leadership of the spontaneous proletarian movement of such dimension.
Other factors contributing to the temporary victory of counterrevolution were the constant support the tsar received from the international bourgeoisie, the conclusion of peace with Japan in August 1905, and the treacherous stand of the Russian liberals.
Despite the defeat of the revolution, it is nonetheless difficult to overestimate the tremendous importance it held for the subsequent history of Russia's and the international working-class movement. It dealt a powerful blow to the autocracy and to the rule of the landlords and capitalists, and it added a glorious page to the history of the class struggle of the world proletariat. Assessing the significance of the revolutionary battles of 1905-1907, Lenin wrote: "Without such a 'dress rehearsal' as we had in 1905, the revolutions of 1917--- both the bourgeois, February revolution, and the proletarian, October revolution---would have been impossible.''^^1^^
The proletariat was forged and strengthened in the flames of the revolutionary battles, and a united contingent of workers of all of Russia's nations was formed. "It won the emancipation of the working masses from the influence of treacherous and contemptibly impotent liberalism. It won for itself the hegemony in the struggle for freedom and democracy as a pre-condition of the struggle for socialism. It won for all the oppressed and exploited classes of Russia the ability to wage a revolutionary mass struggle__"^^2^^
The events of 1905-1907 convincingly showed the tremendous role that the revolutionary Marxist party of the working class played in the struggle of the popular masses. The Bolshevik Party, which alone had a clear-cut, scientifically substantiated action programme, became the genuine embodiment of the leading role of the proletariat in the revolution. Raising aloft the banner of revolution, the Bolsheviks creatively developed Marxist teaching, combining it during the revolution with the mass proletarian and democratic movement. Moreover, not only did they teach the masses, they also learned from the masses themselves, carefully selecting all the valuable and historically promising elements that emerged as a result of the •awakening of the people to vigorous revolutionary endeavour.^^3^^
The talent of many fine Bolshevik Party figures came to the fore during the revolution, during which they showed their best in the ' various spheres of party work. History will never forget N. E. Bauman, who gave his life for the revolution, and whom Lenin called "the Party's executive technician, financier and transporter", L. B. Krasin, and many prominent Party organisers, such as M. A. Azizbekov, A. S. Bubnov, V. Ya. Chubar, M. V. Frunze, P. A. Japaridze, F. E. Dzerzhinsky, S. I. Gusev, Kamo (S. A. TerPetrosyan), S. V. Kosior, A. V. Lunacharsky, G. K. Orjonikidze,
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution", Collected Works, Vol. 15, p. 207.
2 V. I. Lenin, "The Historical Meaning of the Inner-Party Struggle in Russia", Collected Works, Vol. 16, p. 385.
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "The Third International and Its Place in History", Collected Works, Vol. 29, 1977, p. 310.
~^^2^^ V. I. Lenin, "The Historical Meaning of the Inner-Party Struggle in Russia", Collected Works, 'Vol. 16, p. 387.
a For details see N! N. Yakovlev, The People and the Party During the First Pusstan {Revolution, Mysl, Moscow, J965 (in Russian).
r
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91V. L. Shantser, and S. G. Shahumyan, P. G. Smidovich, 1.1. Skvortsov-Stepanov, S. S. Spandaryan, J. V. Stalin, Ya. M. Sverdlov, V. V. Vorovsky, Ye. M. Yaroslavsky, and others. An important role in the leadership of the struggle of the proletarian masses was played by a large group of worker-revolutionaries. They included F. A. Afanasyev and I. V. Babushkin, who died for the cause of the revolution; K. Ye. Voroshilov, M. I. Kalinin, G. I. Petrovsky, and many others. The Bolshevik cohort was headed by Lenin---the brilliant Marxist theoretician and leader of the working people, the founder and leader of the party of Russia's Communistte.
The role played by Lenin as a theoretician of the world revolutionary movement was especially manifest during the years of the revolution. His teaching of the leading role of the proletariat in the liberation movement, of the alliance between the working class and the peasantry, his conclusion on the need for a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry---on all these issues Lenin came forward with a fundamentally new approach during the xevolution, creating an integral theory of the development of the bourgeois-democratic revolution into a socialist one.
The contribution made by Russia's proletariat to the treasurestore of the collective experience of the working-class movement was also truly great. Revolutionary mass strikes and the combining •of them with armed uprisings, the tactics of revolutionary guerrilla warfare, left bloc tactics, the Soviets, the formation of which signalled "something great, something new and unprecedented in the history of world revolution",^^1^^ revolutionary parliamentarianism--- this is only a fraction of the list of important forms of struggle and the organisation of the masses with which the first Russian revolution enriched the theory and practice of world socialism. Russia, where the centre of the international revolutionary movement had shifted to, logically became a laboratory of new forms and methods of struggle which were later employed in other countries. "For the first time in world history," Lanin wrote, "the revolutionary struggle attained such a high stage of development and such an impetus that an armed uprising was combined with that specifically proletarian weapon---the mass strike. This experience is clearly of world significance to all proletarian revolutions.''^^2^^
Bolshevism became the model of the revolutionary party of the new type, one which was irreconcilable with any manifestations of •opportunism and dogmatism. It was not coincidental that during
the years of the revolution it won new important positions in the international working-class movement and received the support of revolutionary Social-Democrats in other countries. The experience of the Bolshevik Party acquired during the 1905-1907 revolution is truly vital as a model of a flexible, scientifically substantiated strategy and tactics of a revolutionary proletarian party in conditions of a popular revolution under imperialism.^^1^^ During the revolution, such cardinal problems of the international working-class movement were solved as the ensuring of unity of action in the revolutionary struggle, the leading role of the proletariat in the anti-imperialist movement, and concrete forms of political alliances between the revolutionary Marxist party and other left parties and organisations. Today Communists in many countries are successfully using the Bolshevik leftist bloc tactics, and Lenin's policy of the alliance of all democratic, anti-monopolistic forces. Ever relevant are the lessons of the struggle of the Bolshevik Party against right-wing opportunism and ``leftist'' revolutionism, whose representatives, like the Trotskyites, Socialist-Revolutionaries and anarchists in Russia, are trying to push the masses into untimely actions and to disorganise the ranks of democratic forces. Lenin's appeal to the Russian proletariat to master all the methods of struggle and forms of organisation, skilfully combining them and progressing from one tactical line to another in good time has never been so poignant. Highly significant are Lenin's tenets that during the period of the revolution the ideal proletarian party is the party which is able to raise the masses to resolute struggle to overthrow the outmoded social system and then to safeguard the gains of the people from the infringements of reactionaries. Today, when the role of the armed forces has heightened in the political life of a "number of countries, the experience of the Bolsheviks' work in winning the armed forces over to the side of the revolution is also topical. Also highly relevant are the cardinal ••conclusions made by Lenin about the leading role of the working iclass and its relations with its allies, and about the vital importance rof the new type of workers' party as the staunch leader of all wording people in the struggle for democracy and socialism. "The history of the first popular revolution in Russia is an inexhaustible source of creative inspiration, a school of political struggle for the generations of revolutionary fighters to come. Today, when the international working class is gaining the leading role in the broad and powerful general democratic, anti-imperialist movement, the historical experience of the first Russian revolution, and Lenin's ideas on the
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "Spasch oa the Dissolutioa oE the Coastituent Assembly Delivered to "the All-Russia Ceatral Executive Committee, January 6 (19), 1918", Collected Works, 1972, Vol. 26, p. 437.
~^^8^^ V. I. Lenin, "A Contribution to the History of the Question of the Dictatorship", Collected Works, Vol. 31, p. 341.
~^^1^^ For details see K. I. Zarodov, The Three Revolutions in Russia'and Our Times, Mysl, Moscow, 1977 (in Russian).
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Chapter 2
THE GROWTH
OF THE WORKING-CLASS MOVEMENT IN EUROPE, NORTH AMERICA AND JAPAN
leading role of the proletariat in the revolutionary struggle of the working masses become particularly topical.''^^1^^
The 1905-1907 revolution in Russia was a milestone in the development of world history. It was a catalyst for the advance of the working-class and national liberation movements and exerted a tremendous influence on the growth of revolutionary actions in many countries, shaking the entire world capitalist system in the process. "By its great and heroic struggle," Lenin wrote, "the Russian proletariat has made itself a talking point throughout the civilised world. The working class of Russia has by rights taken up its place in the workers' International, and it is safe to say that with every passing year its role in the international arena will be ever bigger and more important.''^^2^^
CONSOLIDATION OF THE INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY OF WORKERS
The years from 1905 to 1907 were a period marked by the upsurge of the working-class movement in many countries and by the expansion of international proletarian ties, particularly ties of solidarity with revolutionary Russia. Assistance to it was closely interwoven with the struggle for democratic freedoms and an improvement in the position of working people in other countries, while the Russian revolution exerted a powerful influence on the class struggle under way in them. The objective ground for such influence and hence the underpinnings of international proletarian solidarity were the community of interests and a certain similarity of the tasks of different national contingents of the working class, as well as the non-- proletarian strata following it.
The very first reports about Bloody Sunday and the expanding struggle of the proletariat of the Russian Empire evoked a stormy response abroad on the part of the working class. On January 23, the. Union des Syndicats de la Seine decided to hold a meeting devoted to the revolution in Russia, and issued the following statement to the Russian workers: "The working people of Paris, the city of revolution, are with you heart and soul, and address this appeal to you: Count on us! Our aid to you is ensured! Down with tsarism! Down with the exploiters! Long live the social revolution!''^^1^^ In Vienna, a large meeting convened on January 23 by the Social-Democrats in connection with the forthcoming opening of the parliament, turned into a rally devoted to the Russian revolution. The threats by a government official to close the meeting if the "revolution is celebrated in that fashion" did not produce the desired effect, but another rally was dissolved by the police for similar ``disturbances''.^^2^^ That same
Additional sources on the subject: The First in Russia. The Ivanovo-Voznesensk City Soviet of Workers' Deputies of 1905 in Documents and Reminiscences, Moscow, 1975; The Revolution of 1905-1907. Documents and Materials, Moscow, 1975 (both in Russian); L. Mroczka and W. Bortnowski, Dwa powstania, lodz, 1974; The Revolution of 1905-1907 in Russia, Moscow, 1975; The Revolutionary Movement in Nizhni Novgorod and Nizhni Novgorod Gubernia, 1905-1907, Gorky, 1955; Trade Unions of Moscow, Historical Essays, Moscow, 1975; Trade Unions of the USSR, Documents and Materials, Vol. 1, Moscow, 1963; Workers of Leningrad. 1703-1975, A Brief Historical Survey, Leningrad, 1975; The First Combat Bolshevik Organisation, 1905-1907, Articles, Reminiscences and Documents, Moscow, 1934; Military Organisations of the Russian Proletariat and the Experience of Its Armed Struggle, 1903-1917, Moscow, 1974; V. Ya. Laverychev, Tsarism and the Labour Issue in Russia (1861-1917), Moscow, 1972; Ye. D. Chermensky, The Bourgeoisie and Tsarism During the First Russian Revolution, Moscow, 1970; M. Pavlov, The Duma Tactics of the Bolsheviks During the 1905-1907 Revolution, Leningrad, 1947; G. I. Zaichikov, The Duma Tactics of the Bolsheviks, Moscow, 1975; K. I. Zarodov, The Three Revolutions in Russia and Our Times Moscow, 1977 (all in Russian).
~^^1^^ The CPSU in the Resolutions..., Vol. 2, p. 475.
* V. I. Lenin, "Russian Workers and the International", Collected Works, Vol. 41, Progress Publishers, Moscow, (1977, p. 303.
~^^1^^ L'Humanite, January 24, 1905.
* See S. V. Ovnanyan, The Upsurge of the Working-Class Movement in Austria (1905-1906), USSR Academy of Sciences Press, Moscow, 1957, pp. 75-76 (in Russian).
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94CHAPTER 2
WORKING-CLASS MOVEMENT IN EUROPE, NORTH AMERICA AND JAPAN f95
al proletariat.^^1^^ Responding to the desire of German workers to learn more about the Russian revolution, Rosa Luxemburg subsequently presented analyses of the Russian events in the press, and at meetings of party, trade union, women's and youth organisations.^^2^^ These events were also praised by Karl Liebknecht, who by then had won recognition as an energetic fighter against militarism and reformism. Speaking on February 12, 1905 before an audience of 2,500 in Leipzig, he defined the Russian revolution as "the turning-point in the history of the peoples of Europe".^^3^^ The Leipziger Volkszeitung, edited by Franz Mehring, wrote on January 23, immediately after the events of January 9 in St. Petersburg, that "the victory of the Russians is a German victory, a European victory, an international victory". Louis de Brouckere, a left-winger active in the Belgian Labour Party, predicted that the revolution in Russia "will not settle for the limited freedoms which we possess---bourgeois freedoms", that "it is even influencing us against our will.... If we come out W top of the situation we will make a decisive step forward in emancipating the working people.''^^4^^ In that period, too, the biggest socialist organisations in France in their manifesto adopted at a rally in Tivoli Hall stressed the international significance of the Russian revolution and enthusiastically noted: "The proletarians of Russia are fighting not only for their own goals---they are fighting for the proletariat of the entire world.''~^^5^^ Henrietta Roland-Hoist van der Schalk, who was a member of the left wing of the Dutch SocialDemocratic Party, viewed the struggle against the autocracy as a signal for the West European proletariat to storm the capitalist system.* Even members of the working-class movement who did not share the views of revolutionary Social-Democrats recognised the tremendous importance the 1905 Russian revolution had for the whole of world development. Victor Adler, who did much for the mass SocialDemocratic movement in Austria but strove to limit it to the framework of parliamentary struggle, wrote that it was difficult to forecast the consequences the revolution in Russia would have for Europe in general, as it created the feeling that the world was on the threshold of a critical time.^^7^^ In a message of greeting to the Russian people in
i Rosa Luxemburg, Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 1, Zweiter Haldband, Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 1970, S. 485-86.
p R;,YaV Yevzerov, I. S. Yazhborovskaya, Rosa Luxemburg. A Biographical £s*p, Mysl, Moscow, 1974, pp. 141-44 (in Russian).
R0 ,.KarJLiebknecht, Ausgewahlte Reden, Briefe und Aufsatze, Dietz Verlag, •Berlin, 1 yo2 T S. 84.
~^^4^^ Louis de Brouckere, (Euvres choisies, t. Ill, Fondation Louis de Brouckere, Anvers, 1956, pp. 255, 261.
L'ffumanite, January 27, 1905. • Die Neue Zeit, Bd. I, Nr. 7, 1905-1906, S. 215-16. Arbeiter-Zeitung, June 11, 1905.
day, speakers at rallies in Brno and Plzen expressed solidarity with the Russian proletariat.^^1^^ In Trieste, where on January 22 at a mass meeting of Italian and Slovenian workers speakers stated, during the discussion of the situation in Austria, that Russia was showing the way to the solution, demonstrations were held on January 23 and 24 outside the Russian consulate under the slogans: "Down with Absolutism!", "Long Live Socialism!''^^2^^ The resolution of a meeting held by the Serbian Social-Democratic Party (SSDP) in Belgrade on January 16 (29) stated that the victory of the Russian proletariat is simultaneously a victory for the Serbian working class, and an international victory.^^3^^ In Bucharest, a 2,000-strong rally held on January 24, 1905 was a milestone in the development of the proletarian movement in Romania; the workers later decided to mark this date every year.^^4^^
The labour press acclaimed the struggle of Russia's proletarians, qualifying it as the start of the revolution. "It Is Revolution" was the title of an article of the Leipziger Folkszeitung on January 23, 1905. On the same day, the headline of L'Humanite read "Revolution in St. Petersburg", and Jean Jaures expressed confidence in its triumph. The Vienna newspaper Arbeiter-Zeitung wrote on January 25 about the proletariat representing the Russian revolution, about its main hero. On January 15 (28),RabotnicheskiVestnik,ihe organ of the Bulgarian Labour Social-Democratic Party (BLSDP) (Tesnyaks) stated that the cause of the Russian proletariat is the cause of the workers of every country. The central organ of the Hungarian SocialDemocratic Party acclaimed the beginning of the revolution in Russia with the leading article entitled "We Salute the Revolution''.
The Social-Democratic parties and trade unions launched widescale efforts to explain the significance of the Russian revolution and to render it support. Particular credit in this work, in developing the movement of solidarity with the Russian proletariat is due to the revolutionary wing of the socialists. Rosa Luxemburg, who won great prestige in the Social-Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and among the ranks of the international working-class movement for her uncompromising struggle against revisionism and opportunism, attentively and inspiredly followed the progress of the revolution in Russia. She assessed the events of January 1905 as historic milestones in the liberation struggle of the entire internation-
~^^1^^ See The First Russian Revolution of 1905-1907 and the International Revolutionary Movement, Part I, Gospolitizdat, Moscow, 1955, p. 424 (in Russian).
~^^2^^ See Yu. A. Pisarev, The Liberation Movement of Southern Slav Peoples of Austria-Hungary, 1905-1914, USSR Academy of Sciences Press, Moscow, 1962, pp. 68-69 (in Russian).
^^3^^PadHuiKe Hoeunu, January 19, 1905.
~^^4^^ Documents din istoria mifcarii muncitoresti din Romania, 1900-1909 (hereafter DIMMR), Editura politics, Bucuresti, 1975, pp. 208-12.
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organisations held a mass meeting in conjunction with Russian SocialDemocrats. Many meetings were prepared by the joint efforts of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), the Independent Labour Party (ILP), and the trade unions. At a conference of the Committee of Labour Representation (CLR) it was decided to support the workers of Russia---to raise a fund "to aid the strikers in their noble struggle for freedom and to satisfy the needs of widows and orphans". The news-
1905, the United Congress of the Social-Democratic Party of Austria expressed the hope that their victory over tsarism would also strike a deadly blow to West European reaction.^^1^^
The movement of solidarity with the revolution in Russia was broadening in scope.
In late January-early February, meetings of solidarity with the Russian revolution were held in Berlin, Leipzig, Stuttgart and other German cities. In Berlin alone, there were 21 such meetings, in which thousands of workers took part.^^2^^
In France, rallies were held in support of the Russian revolution starting on February 18, 1905, in accordance with a decision of the Commission for the Uniting of the Socialist Forces. On the very first day, meetings and rallies were staged in 21 cities, and on one of the subsequent days, in 39 cities.^^3^^ France's progressive intelligentsia formed the Society of Friends of the Russian People, which mounted a propaganda campaign in support of the revolution, and against the tsarist autocracy.^^4^^
The events in Russia caused great repercussions in Italy, where a countrywide protest movement against tsarism, unprecedented in scope, took shape. It was mirrored in the press and parliament, in street demonstrations and meetings which were held not only in the capital and industrial and university centres, but also in small communes.^^5^^
Mass meetings ware organised in Vienna, Prague, Przemysl, Czernowitz, Lvov, Budapest, Ljubljana, Zagreb and other parts of Austria-Hungary. It is commonly held that the brisk invigoration of political activity here in January and February 1905 was largely due to the events of the Russian revolution.
The revolution immediately came into the focus of the British workers as well. In late January and February, mass meetings of solidarity were held in Glasgow, Northampton, London, Newcastle and Liverpool. In Whitechapel, a working-class district of London, labour
paper
Justice of the Social Democratic Federation wrote on Janu-
ary 28: "The hour has struck at last! After centuries of bondage and misery, the people of Russia has risen, and the throne of the Czar is shaking to its very foundations.''
Resolutions of solidarity with the Russian proletariat were adopted at mass meetings of workers in the United States. The American Society of Friends of Russian Freedom was formed. Figures prominent in the Socialist Party (SP), including Eugene V. Debs and Jack London, called for assistance to be rendered to Russia's working class and the Social-Democratic Party.^^1^^ In April 1905, the organ of the Socialist Party published an article by Bolshevik Isador Ladoff about the historical meaning of the events in Russia and the tactics of the RSDLP.^^2^^
Protest meetings were held in Sweden, organised by Social-- Democratic youth clubs. They were attended by prominent figures in the socialist movement, such as the leader of the right wing of Swedish Social-Democratic Party, Branting, and the leader of the left wing, Carleson.^^3^^ "The Japanese workers," attested Sen Katayama, "were profoundly interested in the development of the Russian Revolution, and the heroic fight and sacrifices of the Russian workers for the cause of revolution called forth the highest praise and admiration of the Japanese comrades.... The influence of the revolution of 1905 has been growing in the minds and thoughts of the workers of Japan and, strengthened by the November revolution, will bear fruit.''^^4^^ As the outstanding Bulgarian revolutionary Dimiter Blagoev pointed out, "the eyes of the entire organised proletariat are trained on the tremendous struggle which the Russian proletariat has begun against the Russian absolutism".^^5^^ There was not a national contingent of the
~^^1^^ Protokoll uber die Verhandlungen des Gesamtpirteitages der Sozialdemokratischen Arbeiterpartei in Osterreich. Abgehalten zu Wien vom 30. Oktober bis zum 2. November 1905, Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung Ignaz Brand, Wien, 1905, S. 85.
~^^2^^ Die Auswirkungen der ersten russischen Revolution von 1905-1907 auf DeutsMand, Bd. 2/1, Riitten und Loaning, Berlin, 1984, S. 69-78.
~^^3^^ A. Z. Manfred, Essays on the History of 18th-20th Century France, USSR Academy of Sciences Press, Moscow, 1931, pp. 436-37 (in Russian).
~^^4^^ For details see S. N. Gurvich, The Radical Socialists and the Working-Class Movement in France in the Early 20th Century, Nauka, Moscow, 1976, pp. 269- 74 (in Russian).
~^^5^^ K. F. Miziano, "Russo-Italian Relations in the Early 20th Century", in Russia and Italy, Nauka, Moscow, 1972, pp. 104-05, 119-23 (in Russian); Gastone Manacorda, Rivoluzione borghese e socialismo, Studi e saggi, Editori Riuniti, Roma, (975, pp. 204-08.
~^^1^^ Jack London, Dr. S. Ingerman et al., "The American Socialists for Contributions to the Social Democratic Party of Russia", The International Socialist Review, Vol. V, No. 8, February 1905, p. 495.
~^^2^^ Isador Ladoff, "Why Socialism Is a Power in Russia", The International Socialist Review, Vol. VI, No. 2, August 1905, pp. 395-99.
~^^3^^ Knut Backstrom, Arbetarrorelsen i Sverige, Andra boken, ``Arbetarkultur'', Stockholm, 1963, s. 37.
~^^4^^ International Press-Correspondence, Vol. 5, No. 76, October 26,1925, p. 1137.
~^^5^^ ^HMHTbp EjiaroeB, CtiHHeHHH, TOM 9, Hs^aTencTBO na
KOMyHHCTHHCCKa napTHH, Co(J)HH, 1959, CTp. 493.
7-0234
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(JWW), a new militant labour organisation in the United States, stressed in June 1905 the extreme importance of the struggle in Russia for the proletarian struggle in all countries. The Convention stated: "We ... express our solidarity with our Russian brother workers in their struggle, we express our sincere sympathy to the victims of violence, oppression and brutality and pledge our moral support, and also promise financial assistance, to the extent that we are able, to our persecuted, struggling and suffering comrades in far-off Russia.''^^1^^
The International Socialist Bureau undertook vigorous action in support of revolutionary Russia. On the initiative of the French Socialist Party, the Bureau Executive Committee issued an appeal, on January 31, 1905, to the workers and socialists of all countries to express their indignation over the tsarist autocracy and support the Russian revolution. In June 1905, the Executive Committee called for all means to be taken to demonstrate solidarity with the Russian proletariat. On a proposal by the International Socialist Bureau, in January 1906---on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday---mass meetings of protest against tsarism were held in many countries, as well as internationalist demonstrations of solidarity with the Russian proletariat. In October 1906, the International Socialist Bureau called upon the socialist parties to thwart the provision of foreign loans to the tsarist government. The significance of the Russian revolution was discussed by the International Socialist Bureau in March 1906, in June 1907, and at the first session of the newly formed Inter-- Parliamentary Commission of Socialists.^^2^^
The socialist, union and youth press continued to print numerous articles and material about the Russian revolution and impassioned debates on issues raised by it which were topical for the entire working-class movement.
Throughout the whole course of the revolution, labour parties and trade unions in many countries furnished material support to the Russian revolutionary movement. Thus, soon after the revolution in Russia started the Board of the Social-Democratic Party of Germany took a decision to send 10,000 marks for its needs; two-fifths of this amount was received by the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.^^3^^ Local organisations of the Social-Democratic Party of Germany also provided funds. Reminding its readers that the Russian workers were waging a struggle for the freedom of the Ger-
~^^1^^ The Founding Convention of the IWW. Proceedings, New York, 1969, pp. 213-14.
~^^2^^ Bureau Socialiste International. Comptes rendus des reunions. Manifestes et circulaires, vol. I (1900-1907), Mouton et Co., Paris-La Haye, 1969, pp. 129- 31, 156-57, 203-07, 222-29, 236-39, 283.
~^^3^^ Vorwarts, February 2, 1905; CPA IML, f. 17, op. 1, d. 375, 1. 1-2. 7*
world working class whom news from revolutionary Russia did not reach, who was alien to its struggle.
The solidarity campaign which began all over the world from the very outset of the revolution in Russia expanded and developed throughout the stormy 1905-1907 period. Its scope and depth attested to the growing feeling of proletarian internationalism, to the heightening awareness of the role which the Russian revolution was destined to play in the world liberation movement. Solidarity wa^ manifested in the demonstrations and mass meetings of sympathy for the Russian proletarians, in the resolutions of protest against the brutality of tsarism and against the support which the bourgeois governments of Europe were rendering it, in the articles in the labour press and by speakers from the rostrums of party and trade union congresses and parliaments, in the strikes, and in the collection of funds for Russia in its struggle. The solidarity movement was headed by national and international organisations.
The numerous resolutions labour parties, trade unions and other organisations adopted at the local and nationwide level voiced support for the struggle of their Russian class brothers. Such resolutions were adopted, for example, at the Social-Democratic Party of Germany congresses in Jena (September 1905) and Mannheim (September 1906),^^1^^ and at the Chalon Congress of the French Socialists (1905).^^2^^ Conferences of the Independent Labour Party, CLR and Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and trade unions of Britain expressed solidarity with the Russian proletariat in their resolutions.^^3^^ Enthusiastic support of the militant working class of Russia and its leader---the RSDLP---and wishes for victory in the near future were expressed at the 12th Congress of the Bulgarian Labour SocialDemocratic Party (Tesnyaks) in August 1905. Greetings were sent to the workers of Russia by many organisations of the French General Confederation of Labour (CGT), which contributed greatly to the campaign to support the Russian revolution. The resolution of the Founding Convention of the Industrial Workers of the World
~^^1^^ Protokoll iiber die Verhandlungen des Parteitages der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands. Abgehalten zu Jena vom 17. bis 23. September 1905, Berlin, 1906, S. 141-42; "Resolution zur russischen Revolution", Protokoll iiber die Verhandlungen des Parteitages der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands. Abgehalten zu Mannheim vom 23. bis 29. September 1906, Berlin, 1906, S. 473-74.
2 L'Humanite, October 30, 1905.
~^^3^^ Report of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Conference of the SDF on April 13th, 14th and 15th, London, 1906, p. 18; Independent Labour Party, Report of the Thirteenth Annual Conference ... April 1905, London, 1905, p. 32; Report of the Sixth Annual Conference of the Labour Party, Held in the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, London, on Thursday, February 15, 1906, and the Two Following Days, The Labour Party, Letchworth, 1906, p. 11; Justice, April 21, September 8, 1906.