p In Switzerland Lenin worked persistently to weld together the Bolshevik Party forces. The Party had to work in particularly difficult conditions. The tsarist government began persecuting Bolshevik organisations and their committees with unprecedented fury. Members of illegal Party organisations were arrested and exiled in their thousands. All Bolshevik newspapers and other periodicals were closed. Most of the trade unions and many cultural and educational societies were dispersed. Lenin’s contacts with Russia, which had been broken by the war, were re-established with considerable difficulty, in a roundabout way. Mail from Russia reached Switzerland very rarely.

p Lenin and Krupskaya found themselves in straightened material circumstances. Lenin lost a great deal of weight and grew very thin. “We shall soon lose all our old means of subsistence,” Nadezhda Konstantinovna wrote to Lenin’s sister, Maria Ulyanova, on December 14, 1915.

p However, despite all the difficulties and deprivations Lenin worked with indomitable energy to get the Party activities going properly and unite the Bolshevik groups abroad. He toured the Bolshevik organisations in Switzerland, flaying in his lectures the Mensheviks, Bundists and Trotskyites and explaining the meaning of the Central Committee Manifesto.

p At first Lenin refused to believe the rumour that Plekhanov had become a defencist. When he learned that Plekhanov, who had moved from Paris to Switzerland, had addressed a meeting in Geneva and was to address another one in Lausanne on September 28 (October 11), 1914, he decided to attend it. Plekhanov’s speech was indeed a plea for support of the war. Though there was a large audience, Lenin was the only one to ask for the floor. On mounting the platform he did not offer to shake hands with Plekhanov, and in his speech referred to him as the “reporter” and not as “ comrade”. This was immediately noted by the audience. In the ten minutes at his disposal, Lenin could only set out the chief points of the Bolshevik Manifesto and the chief arguments against the defencists.

p To enable him to deal with the problem in greater detail, it was decided to arrange a lecture on “The Proletariat and the War" in the same hall, the Lausanne People’s House, on October 1 (14). The hall was packed long before the lecture was due to begin. Lenin was in buoyant, fighting spirits. He showed up the social 202 nature of the war as an imperialist war of aggrandisement on both sides. The lecture was followed with rapt attention and was an undoubted success.

p The following day Lenin arrived in Geneva, where his lecture on “The European War and Socialism" had already been announced, and where he delivered it with equal success. He repeated this lecture in Clarenz and Zurich, and also spoke in Berne, giving a critical analysis of Martov’s lecture on the war.

p Lenin’s chief aim was to develop Party activity in Russia herself. He succeeded in arranging regular correspondence with members of the Central Committee in Petrograd, in re-establishing the C.C. Bureau there and in establishing contact with the Party organisations in Russia and with individual revolutionaries, who were opposed to the war. A. Shlyapnikov, resident in Stockholm as representative of the St. Petersburg Committee and the Central Committee, kept Lenin in regular contact with the organisations in Petrograd and other parts of Russia.

p Bolshevik activity abroad, and even more so in Russia, aroused the fury of the imperialists and their ideological servitors. A slander campaign was launched against the Bolsheviks not only by the Russian bourgeoisie, but also by the Anglo-French bourgeoisie and the “socialist” press, which accused them of “anti-patriotism”. Lenin emphatically rejected this slander. His brilliant article “On the National Pride of the Great Russians”, published in Sotsial- Demokrat, explained what patriotism meant and how it should be combined with internationalism.

p The internationalist socialist tasks of Russian revolutionary Marxists, Lenin explained, did not run counter to the correctly understood national interests of the working people of Russia. “The interests of the Great-Russians’ national pride (understood, not in the slavish sense),” he wrote, “coincide with the socialist interests of the Great-Russian (and all other) proletarians.”   [202•* 

p Lenin called upon Marxists to educate the working class in a spirit of proletarian internationalism, consistent democracy, complete national equality, and the right of all nations to self- determination.

p On February 14-19 (February 27-March 4), 1915, he presided over a conference in Berne of the R.S.D.L.P. Organisations Abroad and delivered a report on “The War and the Tasks of the Party". 203 The conference resolutions on major issues, framed by Lenin, set out concrete measures for converting the imperialist war into a civil war: voting against war credits and resignation of socialists from bourgeois governments; no agreements with the bourgeoisie; total rejection of the “national peace" policy; building of illegal organisations wherever legal activity was impeded; support of fraternisation at the front; support of every revolutionary proletarian mass action.

p In pursuance of the Berne decisions, the Bolshevik organisations in Russia developed extensive illegal revolutionary activity in the working-class centres, the navy and the army. After its initial victories, the tsarist army began to sustain defeats on all the major fronts. Its retreat from Galicia in the spring of 1915 was soon followed by the loss of Poland, part of the Baltic provinces and of Byelorussia. Millions of refugees fled to the interior of the country. The staggering burden that the war put on every working-class family and the soaring prices caused mounting discontent with the tsarist government and the bourgeoisie, which was battening on war contracts.

p The Bolsheviks led the working-class fight, organised protest meetings of workers and urban population generally, drawing new sections of the population into the movement, and showing them the direct connection between the high prices and the war policy of the tsarist government and the bourgeoisie. Already in August- September 1915, the political character of the economic strikes became more and more pronounced.

p Lenin was therefore fully justified in stating, in his article “ Socialism and War" (1915), that the proletariat was the only class in Russia “that has not been infected with chauvinism”. The Russian working class refused to conclude a “class peace" with the bourgeoisie, and did not follow the social-chauvinists. It supported the policy of the Bolshevik Party, which never wavered in its duty to the International steadfastly holding aloft the banner of internationalism.

p The Bolsheviks were also active in the navy and the army. Lenin attached the greatest importance to Bolshevik work among the troops. The army, he said, had absorbed the flower of the popular forces; in it were concentrated millions of peasants, most of them poor peasants, and a large section of the workers. By their persevering work in the tsarist army, the Bolsheviks were forging a fighting alliance of the working class and the peasantry and preparing the masses for the second revolution.

p The Bolsheviks proved to be ready for the struggle against the war and the overthrow of the imperialist government in their own country, because they had built up an efficient organisation capable of leading the masses against the imperialist war and imperialism.

p Headed by Lenin, the Bolshevik Party was the leading force that could initiate the mustering of all Left socialist groups in the international working-class movement under the banner of revolutionary Marxism and undertake to organise a new proletarian International that would be free of opportunism. From the very outset of the war Lenin worked with his usual energy and perseverance to create a solid nucleus of the new, truly militant, revolutionary organisation of the world proletariat. He embarked upon a relentless struggle against the overt opportunists, and the covert ones - supporters of Kautsky in particular.

p Lenin saw the danger of Kautskyism chiefly in the fact that while justifying the “middle”, Centrist and, essentially, opportunist line of the socialist parties, it styled itself before the working class as the “Marxist centre" in the International. Kautsky screened his defencist stand with regard to the imperialist war with internationalist slogans and references to Marx, even though they concerned a different epoch and wars of a different nature.

p “Kautskyism,” Lenin wrote, ‘is not fortuitous; it is the social product of the contradictions within the Second International, a blend of loyalty to Marxism in word, and subordination to opportunism in deed.”   [204•* 

p Kautsky’s Centrist stand was supported by L. Trotsky, L. Martov, N. Chkheidze and others in Russia, Henriette Roland-Hoist in the Netherlands, R. Grimm in Switzerland, J. Longuet and A. Pressemane in France, T. Barboni in Italy, Kh. Rakovski in Rumania, and so on.

p In the socialist parties, side by side with the social-chauvinist and Centrist trends, there was a third trend represented by Left, internationalist elements. With unflagging attention Lenin kept an eye on the stand of each Left group, on the activities of each genuinely Left socialist leader. He corresponded with many of them, helping them with advice, patiently and in a comradely way pointing out their errors in a number of issues, explaining why and how opportunism had to be combated and drawing them closer to him.

p An abridged text of the Central Committee Manifesto on the War was published in the Swiss La Sentinelle in November. Lenin at 205 once sent this important document to the International Socialist Bureau and to French, German, British and Swedish Social- Democratic newspapers.

p He welcomed the stand of the Italian Socialist Party, which in the early period of the war did not succumb to chauvinism, condemned the treacherous conduct of the German Social-Democrats and expelled a group of social-chauvinists and renegades (Mussolini and others). This stand was supported by the overwhelming majority of the Italian working class. In Switzerland, where Lenin took an active part in the socialist movement, a Left socialist nucleus was gradually being formed.

p A conference of Italian and Swiss socialists met in Lugano, Switzerland, on September 27, 1914, and at Lenin’s request discussed his theses on the war. A number of the principles contained in these theses were incorporated in the conference resolution. The Lugano decisions, though not consistently internationalist and revolutionary, nonetheless represented a first step towards a revival of international proletarian contacts.

p The imperialist war was opposed also by the revolutionary socialists of Bulgaria, the tesnyaki^^46^^ led by Dimitr Blagoev, and by the Serbian Social-Democrats. When Lenin learned that the Serbian Social-Democratic deputies had voted against war credits, he publicly declared that they had discharged their proletarian internationalist duty. He soon established direct contact with the Bulgarian and Serbian revolutionary Social-Democrats and helped them follow a consistent internationalist line.

p Lenin was in regular correspondence with D. Wijnkoop, Anton Pannekoek and other Left-wing socialists in Holland grouped around the newspaper De Tribune. He also established contact, through Alexandra Kollontai and A. Shlyapnikov, with leaders of the Left-wing socialists in Norway and Sweden. In the war years the Swedish Left-wing socialists were a fairly strong body-they published three daily newspapers and had thirteen members in Parliament.

p Lenin was especially gratified at the news that Eugene V. Debs, leader of the American socialist Left wing, had come out in active opposition to the imperialist carnage and advocated civil war for socialism. The U.S. Government sentenced this outstanding labour leader to ten years’ imprisonment for his anti-war activities.

p Lenin closely followed the rise and development of the Left opposition in the German Social-Democratic Party. He enthusiastically welcomed the news that the revolutionary socialists in Germany — 206 the Internationale group, the forerunner of the Spartacus League, headed by Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, Franz Mehring, J. Marchlewski, Leo Jogiches (Tyszka) and Wilhclm Pieck-had taken a firm stand against the war. Liebknecht, Lenin said, had set an example to all internationalists by voting in the Reichstag against war credits.

p Lenin was fully aware that the Left forces in the West were still extremely weak and that their campaign against chauvinism and for internationalism was still feeble, disunited and not always sustained. But he had unswerving faith in the inevitable victory of proletarian internationalism throughout the world labour movement.

p A conference of socialists of the Allied countries (Britain, France, Belgium, Russia) met in London on February 14, 1915. The Bolsheviks were not invited, but Lenin drew up a draft declaration of the Bolshevik Central Committee and M. Litvinov, the representative of the Bolsheviks on the I.S.B., was instructed to read it at the conference. The declaration demanded that socialists resign from the bourgeois governments of Belgium and France, that socialists in the Allied countries abandon the “civil peace" slogan, refuse to vote for war credits and to support Russian tsarism. The conference chairman prevented Litvinov from reading the declaration to the end. Litvinov handed it to the chairman and walked out of the conference in protest, declaring that the Bolsheviks would take no part in this social-chauvinist forum.

p The discussions in the press, at meetings and at Lenin’s own lectures, his correspondence and talks with Left-wing socialists of various countries, and the debates at the women’s and Socialist youth conferences, held in Berne in March-April 1915, made it plain to Lenin that in the West the Lefts were still strongly influenced by the Centrists on basic issues of war, peace, revolution and socialism. He knew that unity of the Lefts on a platform of revolutionary Marxist theory and tactics could be achieved only by carrying on a resolute struggle against Kautsky’s falsification of Marxism and by painstaking explanatory work.

Kautsky and the other Second International revisionists contended that the new developments in capitalism made the basic propositions of Marx’s Capital “obsolete”. It was, therefore, essential not only to safeguard revolutionary Marxism against renewed revisionist distortions, but to develop it further by analysing the new features of social development and the new experience of the proletarian class struggle. Lenin wrote: “The world’s greatest movement for liberation of the oppressed class, the most revolutionary class in 207 history, is impossible without a revolutionary theory. That theory cannot be thought up. It grows out of the sum total of the revolutionary experience and the revolutionary thinking of all countries in the world. Such a theory has developed since the second half of the nineteenth century. It is known as Marxism. One cannot be a socialist, a revolutionary Social-Democrat, without participating, in the measure of one’s powers, in developing and applying that theory, and without waging a ruthless struggle today against the mutilation of this theory by Plekhanov, Kautsky and Co.”   [207•*