p Lenin was falsely accused of espionage and on July 25 (August 7) his house was searched. One of the gendarmes seized his manuscript on the agrarian question, mistaking the statistical tables for a secret 197 code. Lenin was ordered to appear before the military authorities at Nowy Targ, the county seat, on the following day. It was obvious that he would be arrested and tried by a military tribunal. He immediately warned the other Bolsheviks and wired a protest to the Cracow police.

p When he came to Nowy Targ, he was arrested and put in jail. There were many local peasants in the jail. Lenin won their respect by giving them legal advice and helping to obtain their release.

p While in prison Lenin thought over the Party’s tasks and tactics in connection with the imperialist war that had broken out. Questioned by the police, he replied that he was a correspondent and staff member of the St. Petersburg Pravda and had been a member of the Russian Social-Democratic Party for the last twenty years.

p News of his arrest by the Austrian authorities appeared in Russian newspapers and caused much alarm to his relatives and Party members. There was all the more reason for alarm because Russian troops were near Cracow and if the city was captured by the Russian army, Lenin would easily fall into the hands of the tsarist police.

p In fact, the latter were already anticipating that. The Police Department notified General Alekseyev, commander at the Southwestern front, that according to information in possession of the Ministry of the Interior, V. I. Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, was being held in custody in Cracow. Lenin, the police dispatch said, was one of the top leaders of the R.S.D.L.P., “with long years of participation in the revolutionary movement ... a member of the Party’s Central Committee and the founder of a distinct trend within the Party”. He was wanted by the police, and General Alekseyev was asked to “be good enough to order Lenin’s arrest" and place him “at the disposal of the Petrograd authorities".

p There were many strong protests from Polish progressives — the Social-Democratic leaders Hanecki and Bagotsky, Dr. Dhiski of Zakopane, a veteran of the Narodnaya Volya, the well-known writers Jan Kasprowicz, Wladyslaw Orkan and others.

p Nadezhda Konstantinovna appealed to the Austrian M.P.s Victor Adler and Hermann Diamant, who knew Lenin as a member of the International Socialist Bureau. They brought pressure to bear on the Austrian authorities and vouched for him. The espionage charge was so preposterous that even the Cracow police had to admit they had “no incriminating evidence to support the charge of espionage against Ulyanov”. That was the ignominious end of the 198 foul reactionary attempt to vilify and calumniate this great champion of the working class and the people.

p Upon his release on August 6 (19), Lenin immediately returned to Poronin by peasant cart, without waiting for a train. A week later the family moved to Cracow, where they obtained the necessary papers for the journey to neutral Switzerland, and left AustriaHungary. Lenin’s large library and many Party documents and manuscripts remained in Cracow and Poronin, which was a matter of great regret to him. Not until many years later was it possible to recover part of this valuable material which was presented by the Central Committee of the Polish Workers’ Party to the Central Committee of the CPSU.

p On August 23 (September 5), Lenin, Krupskaya and her mother arrived in Switzerland and took up residence in Berne. At first they rented a room, and then moved to a small flat with a tiny garden on the city’s outskirts, near the Bremgarten Forest.

p The war had exacerbated and brought to the fore the deeprooted contradictions in the socialist labour movement and showed that most of the leaders of the Social-Democratic parties and of the Second International were openly betraying the working class and the anti-war decisions of the socialist congresses.

p On August 4, 1914, acting in contravention to the will of the International, the Social-Democratic group in Germany voted with the bourgeois-landowner majority in the Reichstag in favour of giving the Kaiser government war credits amounting to 5,000 million marks. Thus, Siidekum, Scheidemann, Haase, Legien, Kautsky and other leaders of the German Social-Democratic Party and the Second International rejected the class struggle and proletarian internationalism in favour of “civil peace" and social-chauvinism, becoming obedient tools of German imperialism.

p Most of the official leaders of other socialist parties likewise came out in defence of their imperialist fatherlands. Emile Vandervelde, leader of the Belgian socialists and President of the International Socialist Bureau, Jules Guesde, Albert Thomas, and Marcel Sembat, leaders of the French socialists, accepted portfolios in the bourgeois, reactionary governments of their countries; in Britain the same road was taken by MacDonald and Hyndman. Plekhanov and Axelrod, in Russia, became ardent defencists.^^45^^ At the beginning of the war Martov criticised the social-chauvinist position of the German and French Social-Democratic parties, but soon shifted to Kautsky’s standpoint. The Second International shamefully collapsed and disintegrated.

p During this momentous crisis in the world working-class movement, the banner of proletarian internationalism was held aloft by the Bolshevik Party headed by Lenin. It alone set a worthy example of fidelity to socialism and proletarian internationalism leading the struggle of the working class of Russia against imperialism and the imperialist war. For Lenin and all other Bolsheviks the resolutions on the war, adopted by international socialist congresses, were a guide to action.

p On August 24-26 (September 6-8), 1914, the local Bolshevik group in Berne held a meeting at which Lenin set forth his views on what should be the Bolshevik attitude to the war. The Bolshevik Party took a firm, consistently internationalist stand on the war.

p Lenin used the theses adopted in Berne for a manifesto “The War and Russian Social-Democracy”. It gave a profoundly Marxist assessment of the war as an imperialist, predatory and unjust war of aggrandisement on both sides. The war was engendered by the conditions of the age of imperialism and arose as a result of the uneven development of capitalism, a change in the alignment of forces of the imperialist powers.

p Lenin and the Bolsheviks had done everything in their power to prevent war from breaking out. But “once the war is on, it is impossible to escape it. One must go and do one’s duty as a socialist”.  [199•*  Lenin advanced the slogan: Turn the imperialist war into a civil war. During war, he maintained, revolution signified civil war.

p The Lenin Manifesto stated that “from the standpoint of the working class and of the toiling masses of all the nations of Russia, the defeat of the tsarist monarchy ... would be the lesser evil”.  [199•**  It would undoubtedly facilitate the people’s victory over tsardom and, in its turn, this would enable the working class to move resolutely towards socialist revolution, towards liberation from capitalist slavery and imperialist wars. Lenin’s point of departure was that the policy of defeat of one’s own imperialist government should be pursued not only by the Russian revolutionaries, but also by the revolutionary Marxists of all the belligerent states.

p Lenin particularly denounced the shameful part played by the German Social-Democrats, the strongest and most influential party in the Second International. Its support of the imperialist war and betrayal of revolutionary Marxism and the socialist cause predetermined, in effect, the collapse of the Second International. For many 200 Emacs-File-stamp: "/home/ysverdlov/leninist.biz/en/1983/LB525/20070119/299.tx" years it had been considered the custodian and interpreter of the great theoretical heritage of the founders of scientific communism and had set the tone in the international socialist movement. The socialists of every country had faith in that party and in many cases had emulated it. And even after it had voted for war credits, the vast majority of the socialists did not fully appreciate the depths to which it had fallen and its betrayal of revolutionary Marxism, international proletarian solidarity.

p To the treacherous position of the German Social-Democratic leaders, Lenin opposed the genuine internationalist policy of the Bolshevik Duma representatives, who refused to vote for war credits, walked out of the Duma in token of protest and branded the policy of tsarism and the European governments as imperialist.

p He urged revolutionary Marxists to found a Third International that would be genuinely proletarian and free of opportunists and social-chauvinists, for only after a complete break had been made with these elements would it be possible to educate the working class in a truly internationalist spirit and prepare it for socialist revolution. Insofar as the bourgeoisie resorted to mass repressions against the proletariat, Lenin put before revolutionary Marxists the task of building up illegal communist organisations in all countries and conducting illegal propaganda among the masses.

p There was the pressing practical problem of printing the Central Committee Manifesto, and this, even in “neutral” Switzerland, was by no means easy. Moreover, there were difficulties in obtaining paper and finding a printshop and money. But all these difficulties were overcome.

p By decision of the Central Committee Bureau Abroad, the Central Party Organ, Sotsial-Demokrat, resumed publication in Geneva. No. 33 of the newspaper appeared on October 19 (November 1), 1914. It carried the Central Committee’s Manifesto on the War as its editorial. This issue, printed in 1,500 copies, was circulated among the Bolshevik groups abroad and smuggled into Russia via Sweden. It played an important role in the Party’s activities during the war.

The Manifesto was also put out as a separate pamphlet. The Bolshevik Party and the international labour movement thus received a clear programme of effective struggle against the imperialist war, tsarism and the bourgeoisie, a programme of struggle for the socialist revolution.