Tsar v. the ‘Narod’: Prelude to the Russian Revolution in the Early 20th Century

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The first blow in the struggle had been struck a century earlier.

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By Dr. Neil Faulkner
Late Research Fellow
University of Bristol

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Introduction

Revolutions always take the world by surprise. Often, the revolutionaries themselves – always a small minority before the revolution actually begins – are the most surprised of all. And always, the revolution confounds expectations: it invariably plays out differently from the way in which revolutionaries imagined it would. The great German philosopher Georg Hegel – who inspired Marx – remarked that ‘The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the coming of the dusk.’ He meant that wisdom follows from experience; first is the deed, then the understanding. So it was with the Russian Revolution.

Until it happened, hardly anyone could figure out how it would happen – even though anti-Tsarist revolutionaries had been debating the issue for almost a century. However, the false preconceptions mattered, because they affected how people acted when the revolution finally arrived. Things then unfolded very quickly, and people struggled to think clearly amid the profusion of events and cacophony of opinions. So they fell back on prior assumptions. Unable to keep pace with the actual revolution, they acted according to their preconceived notion of how the revolution ought to be. In this way, old ideas that did not correspond to real experience became a barrier to progress. To understand the clash of rival factions during 1917, therefore, it is useful to know something of the prehistory of the Russian revolutionary movement.

The first blow in the century-long struggle between Tsarism and the Russian Narod (‘people’) had been struck on 14 December 1825. There was a new tsar, Nicholas I, and the soldiers were to take their oath of allegiance in St Petersburg’s Senate Square. That allegiance was contested, and for some six hours loyalist and rebel soldiers confronted one another across the open space. Then, as the sun went down, the rebels having rejected a summons to surrender, cannon were trained on them and the square was finally cleared. The Decembrist Revolt had collapsed with hardly a shot fired. About 600 conspirators were later investigated. Of these, five were hanged and a hundred or so exiled to Siberia.

Colonel Paul Pestel, one of the Decembrist leaders, said of their failure that ‘We wanted the harvest before we had sown.’ The British minister in St Petersburg concurred, writing, in an analysis that was both accurate and prophetic, that ‘The late conspiracy failed for want of management, and want of a head to direct it, and was too premature to answer any good purpose, but I think the seeds are sown which one day will produce important consequences.’

Though the eighteenth-century Russian Enlightenment had been a shallow affair, noble officers campaigning against Napoleon had been brought face-to-face with the relative backwardness of their own society. They found themselves commanding an army of serfs and fighting an army of citizen-soldiers. And when they followed the retreating French into the heart of Europe, marching eventually into Paris itself, they saw a new world in the making. So they began plotting for change. And being officers and gentlemen, they imagined that an aristocratic conspiracy would suffice. The abolition of serfdom and a republican constitution were to be achieved by a military coup. The Decembrist Revolt was the failed revolution of men like Leo Tolstoy’s character Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace: idealists with a sense of noblesse oblige.

The conspirators were a minority of their class, and lacked support from other classes. Even their own ranks were shaky: they haemorrhaged defectors, and then hesitated in the breach that fateful December day.¹ But they were not forgotten. ‘From a spark a flame will flare up’, wrote one of the exiled Decembrists in reply to a sympathetic poem addressed to them by Alexander Pushkin. And in 1900, when Russian Social Democrats founded a revolutionary newspaper, they called it Iskra – ‘The Spark’ – because they looked back in admiration to their Decembrist forebears. Grigori Zinoviev, a leading Bolshevik, considered them ‘the cream of the aristocracy’, men who had ‘detached themselves from their class, broken from their families, abandoned privileges, and joined battle with the autocracy’.²

The Radical Intelligentsia

In the wake of the failed revolt, Russian radicalism retreated into the intimacy of the salon. It was the currency of the intelligentsia – writers, professional men, liberal bourgeois, young nobles – not yet of the common people. Alexander Herzen (1812–70) was one its brightest stars. To find the freedom to speak out, he chose permanent exile. He was in Paris during the 1848 Revolution, and his magazine, The Bell, which circulated inside Russia, was later published in London. When radical students were expelled from St Petersburg University, he wrote to tell them where they should go:

From all corners of our enormous land, from the Don and the Ural, from the Volga and the Dnieper, a moan is growing, a grumbling is rising. This is the first roar of the sea-billow, which begins to rage, pregnant with storm, after a long and tiresome calm. V Narod. To the people. That is your place, O exiles of knowledge.³

Here was an idea: to the Narod. And Herzen’s cry would call forth a generation of revolutionaries with just that aim: the Narodniks.

Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828–89) was another icon of radicalism. Arrested in 1862 and incarcerated for almost two years in the Peter and Paul Fortress, a grim Tsarist prison in St Petersburg, he there wrote his greatest work, What is to be Done? He was then sent to hard labour in Siberia for 20 years. Chernyshevsky represented a change of tone in the radical intelligentsia. The ‘men of the forties’, like Herzen, had been liberal romantics, whereas the ‘men of the sixties’ were social revolutionaries. ‘I do not like those gentlemen who say “Liberty! Liberty!” and do not destroy a social order under which nine-tenths of the people are slaves and proletarians’, wrote the young Chernyshevsky in his diary. ‘The important thing is not whether there is a tsar or not, whether there is a constitution or not, but that one class should not suck the blood of another.’⁴

Though only a minor character in What is to be Done?, Rakhmetov, a renegade young noble, became a role model for two generations of Russian revolutionaries. Seeking to be ‘loved and esteemed by the common people’, he was an extreme ascetic, eating only simple food, working as a barge-hauler, avoiding drink, and remaining celibate. He read voraciously, but chose only original works, and was deliberately brusque of manner to avoid wasting time on formalities and trivia. Cher-nyshevsky presents Rakhmetov as a new and special type:

They are few in number, but through them the life of all mankind expands; without them it would have been stifled. They are few in number, but they put others in a position to breathe, who without them would have been suffocated. Great is the mass of good and honest men, but Rakhmetovs are rare. They are the best among the best, they are the movers of movers, they are the salt of the salt of the earth.⁵

Chernyshevsky’s image of the revolutionary as heroic champion of the people appealed to his readers because it idealised their own situation. In the distant past, the peasants had risen in revolt under leaders of their own class – under Razin in the 1670s, Bulavin in the 1700s, Pugachev in the 1770s. But between the defeat of Pugachev in 1775 and the outbreak of revolution in 1905, there were no peasant revolts in Russia. The popular movements of the eighteenth century had lacked leadership: but the radical intelligentsia of the nineteenth century lacked a movement.

The intelligentsia is not a class. A class is formed by economic processes and social relationships centred on exploitation. The intelligentsia is merely a social layer defined by occupation, education, and lifestyle. Mass mobilisation of an entire social class – the peasantry or the proletariat (the industrial working class) – can transform society. The intelligentsia has no such power. Because it is concerned with the creation and dissemination of ideas, it may generate critiques that give expression to a range of discontents, especially where the institutions of civil society – as opposed to those of the state – are underdeveloped. The intellectuals can then become – or imagine themselves to have become – ‘the voice of the people’. But critique, however trenchant, cannot be acted upon unless it connects with social forces powerful enough to overcome the resistance of vested interests. This was the impasse confronting Russia’s radical intelligentsia throughout the nineteenth century.

For sure, the number of professionally trained persons was rising – with the expansion of both the state bureaucracy and the industrial economy, from some 20,000 to 85,000 between 1860 and 1900. Almost 50,000 of these were eventually employed by local government institutions (the zemstva) as teachers, doctors, engineers, agronomists, and statisticians. To meet the demand for professional labour, turn-of-the-century Russia had 52 institutions of higher education and 25,000 enrolled students. This enlarged intelligentsia met in the zemstva, the colleges, and numerous semi-clandestine discussion ‘circles’, where they debated the polemics published in a plethora of radical periodicals known as ‘fat journals’.⁶

But there was no unified view in this intermediate social layer. Nobility and intelligentsia overlapped, especially in a country where the landowning class traditionally dominated state service. The upper echelons of government were still aristocratic, the bureaucracy was organised in a rigid hierarchy of ranks and titles, and most men of education, irrespective of social origin, sought advancement within this framework. Many, unsurprisingly, were out-and-out reactionaries, espousing a mystical conservative-nationalist Pan-Slavism, which translated in practice into support for Tsarism, Russian Orthodoxy, and the ‘Black Hundreds’ (semi-official paramilitary bands of anti-Semitic thugs). These, for sure, were a minority, but most members of the elite, whether noble or bourgeois, were moderates; at best, they might be anti-Tsarist liberals who advocated parliamentary government.⁷ This strand in Russian life would eventually find its main political expression in the Constitutional Democratic Party (the Cadets), a liberal bourgeois organisation founded in 1905. Only a minority of Russian intellectuals favoured social revolution. But it was among this group that debate raged about how the autocracy could be overthrown and Russia transformed. And it was from this group that virtually all senior revolutionary leaders emerged.

Most of the radicals were Narodniks (‘Populists’). Russia, even in 1914, remained predominantly a country of agriculture and peasants, and the traditional, pre-capitalist village commune (the mir) seemed to offer a model for wider social reform. The Narodnik vision was of a peasant revolution to overthrow the Tsar, the landlords, and the priests, and of a post-revolutionary utopia based on villages, free farms, and local production.

But how were the dark masses of the Russian countryside – the peasants (muzhiks in Russian) – to be stirred into action? In 1874, about 2,500 radicals literally ‘went to the people’, travelling into the countryside, often wearing peasant dress, to agitate among villagers for revolution. Some – like those who immediately denounced the Tsar or denied God – were reported to the authorities. Others – focusing on economic grievances – got a better hearing. But that was all: no organisation was built, no struggle sparked. Even so, the authorities took no chances, treating the whole movement as an attempted revolution, and by the autumn they had more than 1,500 young people under arrest. A second ‘going to the people’ the following year had similar results.⁸

Other methods were attempted. On 6 December 1876, a small demonstration – probably no more than a few hundred – assembled in front of Kazan Cathedral in St Petersburg to hear a young student called Georgi Plekhanov deliver a speech and unfurl a red banner inscribed ‘Land and Liberty’. Among those present were advocates of ‘propaganda of the deed’. Frustrated by the inertness of the villages, they argued for campaigns of terrorism to jump-start the revolution. Their thinking was muddled, but the gist was that terrorism would destabilise the state, expose its weakness and repressive character, and inspire the peasants with examples of heroic action. The Kazan Cathedral demonstration was, of course, broken up by the police. ‘Land and Liberty’ then became the name of a secret underground organisation. But the group soon split. The supporters of ‘Black Partition’ argued for propaganda in the countryside, but this faction soon faded away. The supporters of ‘People’s Will’ (Narodnya Volya), on the other hand, about 200 strong, carried out a series of high-profile assassinations, culminating in a bomb attack which killed Tsar Alexander II in 1881.⁹

It did not work. The modus operandi of terrorists requires them, in the interests of security, to cut their links with the masses, who, even if they approve, are left mere spectators. The state, on the other hand, can use ‘outrages’ to justify intensified repression against all forms of opposition. So it was now. Even the assassination of a tsar failed to trigger revolution. What it did instead was to give the government its excuse for constructing a fully fledged police state during the following decade. All political activity was effectively banned, and a greatly expanded police apparatus was granted unlimited powers of surveillance, search, arrest, interrogation, imprisonment, and exile to deal with ‘crimes against the state’. To help track down tiny numbers of revolutionaries, the work, movements, and pastimes of ordinary citizens were made dependent on official authorisation and hedged around with restrictions. To stop a handful of gunmen, nothing was to be permitted to any of Russia’s 130 million inhabitants without a licence, a passport, or a government stamp.¹⁰

The most heroic of the intelligentsia had tried to bring down Tsarism with a proclamation and a bomb. All they had achieved was to conjure a police state that destroyed them. The muzhik masses they had wished to rouse remained in political slumber. Why was this?

The Peasantry

Peasant life was shaped by agricultural routine and social isolation. The long, cold winter was spent largely indoors, in family log-cabins warmed by earthen stoves, doing craftwork and repairs, resting and sleeping, telling stories, getting drunk. Spring would come suddenly with the thaw, the ice breaking on the rivers, the waters flooding across the fields, the frozen land turning green in their wake. Then, through the short growing season from April to September, toil was relentless. Typically, Russian peasants operated a three-year cycle, one field sown with spring oats, a second with winter rye, a third left fallow: a primitive, low-yield, medieval system.¹¹

The villages were haunted by poverty, hunger, and disease. Horses provided the sole source of power, yet in the 1880s one-quarter of the peasants did not own one: they were forced to pull their own ploughs. ‘Your majesty has 130 million subjects’, Witte wrote to the Tsar in 1898. ‘Of them, barely more than half can live; the rest vegetate.’ As a 1905 police report explained:

‘Very often the peasants do not have enough allotment land, and cannot during the year feed themselves, clothe themselves, heat their homes, keep their tools and livestock, secure seed for sowing, and, lastly, discharge all their taxes and obligations to the state, the zemstvo, and the commune.’¹²

The joint family and the village commune constituted almost the whole of the peasant’s social ambit, one in which he submerged his own identity, and from the security of which he viewed the outside world with suspicion. Most were loyal to their ‘Little Father’, who would surely receive them warmly if they took their complaints to the palace, and would be as angry as they if only he knew the injustices perpetrated by landlords and officials in his name. The more devout found adequate expression for their weary fatalism in the rituals of Russian Orthodoxy, all incense, icons, and ignorance. Most could not read, and few journals in any case reached the villages. The more broken-spirited took to the bottle.¹³ Little wonder that the Narodnik missionaries of the early 1870s, exotic creatures from another world, had hit a wall.

Yet there was brooding discontent in the hearts of the muzhiks. Serfdom had been abolished in 1861, and the authorities’ fear of revolt had been a motive. ‘It is better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait for the time when it will begin to abolish itself from below’, Tsar Alexander II had explained to a gathering of Moscow notables in 1856. Another motive was the lamentable condition of the Russian armed forces. In the wake of the disastrous Crimean War, the Tsarist state had urgent need to raise the quality of its military conscripts: browbeaten serfs made bad soldiers.¹⁴

But the hopes of peasants for a better life – for both the abolition of serfdom and a ‘Black Partition’ that would give every man a decent-sized farm – were dashed. The Emancipation Edict turned out to be a landlord’s charter. Nobility, gentry, and rich farmers retained two-thirds of the land, including most pasture and woodland. The result was that in European Russia, while the 30,000 richest families owned 76 million hectares, some 10.5 million peasant households owned only a fraction more, 82 million, between them. Even the one-third allocated to the peasants had to be paid for. The government advanced 80 per cent of the cost to the landlords, but required the peasants to pay this back in the form of ‘redemption payments’ over a period of 49 years. The remaining 20 per cent of the purchase price was paid directly to the landlords by the peasants in money or in kind. In consequence, the post-emancipation peasantry was crippled by both land shortage and debt repayment. Most, therefore, remained in thrall to big landowners, the politico-juridical compulsion of serfdom now replaced by economic compulsion. The effect was to deepen the poverty of the villages. Chronic undernourishment raised the death rate by almost a third between 1800 and 1880. Travellers in the Russian countryside around 1900 found the muzhik sullen and hostile.¹⁵

The abolition of serfdom had another effect: it hastened the development of capitalist farming, widening the division in the villages between a minority of rich peasants (kulaks) and the rest. The process was analysed by the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin in The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1898). One in five peasants, he observed, constituted a rural ‘petty-bourgeoisie’ (a class of small-business owners); these were evolving into a class of capitalist farmers. They had large farms, often supplemented by rented land, well supplied with horses (for traction), cattle (for manure), and farm implements (like metal ploughs); and they would often hire additional labour at busy times. Fully half the peasants, by contrast, owned too little property for even basic subsistence. They were forced to rent land, hire out their labour, supplement income with craftwork, or join the great southward migration of poor labourers each spring in search of work on the commercial estates of the Ukraine. For Lenin, ‘the real trend of economic development of the peasant members of village communes is precisely in the direction of the creation of a rural bourgeoisie [a class of big-business owners] and of forcing the mass of the poorest farmers into the ranks of the proletariat [a class of wage-labourers]’. Instead of the village commune being a short-cut to socialism, as the Narodniks envisaged, ‘the new economic organism which is emerging from the shell of serfdom in Russia is commercial agriculture and capitalism’.¹⁶

Others, too, noticed this trend. But where Lenin detected revolutionary potential in the emerging rural proletariat, the Tsar’s ministers identified potential allies in the peasant petty-bourgeoisie. With the spring thaw in 1905, the peasants had joined the revolution, looting and burning estates, seizing the land they had been so long denied. Once order was restored, the government undertook a belated agrarian reform, abolishing redemption payments, allowing peasants to consolidate holdings and leave the commune, and providing funds for the purchase of additional land. The village thereby lost control over land and labour as peasant farms were privatised and deregulated. Instead of communal control over pasture and woodland, and periodic redistribution of arable, farms became the exclusive private property of individual peasants. Altogether 12 million peasant households and 130 million hectares were involved. By 1916, independent peasants owned two-thirds of the cultivated land in private possession in European Russia, had leases on most of the rest, and held 90 per cent of the livestock.¹⁷ Stolypin, the minister chiefly responsible for this policy, was, according to Lenin, attempting ‘a bourgeois evolution of the landlord type’; his aim was ‘to turn the old autocracy into a bourgeois monarchy’ by providing the Tsar with a base of support among a new class of agrarian entrepreneurs.¹⁸

He failed (and Lenin misjudged how far he had got). The peasants gained confidence and strength from the concessions won in 1905, and they would join the revolution in 1917 to finish the business, seizing the forests of the state, the fields of the big landlords, and the warehouses of the commercial estates – liquidating, that is, remaining large-scale property in rural Russia.¹⁹ Instead of the village being divided against itself, rich peasants against the rest, locked in a new, modern kind of class war, it marched as one to settle old scores inherited from the feudal past. The middle peasants still had land and wanted more. The poor peasants dreamed of a farm of their own. Neither Stolypin’s attempted ‘embourgeoisement’ of the rich peasants nor Lenin’s imagined ‘proletarianisation’ of the poor had yet fractured the medieval solidarity of the village.

Russia’s peasants were still, as Marx had once described those of France, ‘a sack of potatoes’: not a collective per se, but a mass of individuals bound together as a class by the actuality or the hope of petty-proprietorship.

In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their cultural formation from those of the other classes, and bring them into conflict with those classes, they form a class. In so far as these small peasant proprietors are merely connected on a local basis, and the identity of their interests fails to produce a feeling of community, national links, or a political organisation, they do not form a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name … They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.²⁰

The peasants were the overwhelming majority of Russian society, but they were scattered, isolated, and parochial in outlook. They were capable of revolutionary action: 1905 had proved that. But they considered their revolution complete when they had seized the land and divided it up. And if the towns remained unconquered, the Tsarist state would survive; and in that case, sooner or later, the soldiers would come to ‘restore order’ in the villages. Successful revolution required centralised national leadership. Who was to provide this?

The Social Democrats

Peasant revolt was an essential condition of the Russian Revolution. Without it, the army, formed overwhelmingly of peasant-conscripts, would remain loyal and shoot down the revolutionaries. But it was not a sufficient condition, for peasants, an amalgam of petty-proprietors rather than a class collective, could not create their own revolutionary party and leadership. They had to be led from the outside – by the towns.

The Narodniks had grappled unsuccessfully with this problem. While exaggerating the revolutionary potential of the peasantry, and the socialist character of the village commune, they had imagined themselves, a small party of radical intellectuals, as sufficient to trigger a peasant land-war, either by speeches or direct action. By the early 1880s, under intensified police crackdown, it was clear they had failed. And some of the Narodniks of the 1870s now became the Social Democrats of the 1880s. The most important of these was Georgi Plekhanov, who, in 1883, founded the Emancipation of Labour Group in St Petersburg and, also that year, published the first major work of Russian Marxism, Socialism and the Political Struggle.²¹

All Social Democrats – as socialists in general tended to be known a century ago – were agreed that the coming revolution would not be led by the countryside, but by the towns. Beyond that, however, there was disagreement. Most believed that Russia’s backwardness meant that only ‘bourgeois revolution’ was possible. It would – so the argument went – overthrow Tsarism, establish parliamentary democracy and civil liberties, and sweep away the survivals of feudalism in town and country. Capitalism would then develop rapidly, creating the preconditions, in the long run at least, for a further revolution to achieve socialism. But who would lead this initial ‘bourgeois revolution’? Two factions emerged around this question.

The more moderate – known as ‘Mensheviks’ – argued that the liberal bourgeoisie, represented after 1905 by the Cadet Party, would spearhead the struggle against Tsarism, and that it was the job of Social Democrats to support them, while avoiding any ‘excesses’ or ‘extremism’ that might fracture the class alliance between (liberal) capitalists and (socialist) workers. ‘Therefore,’ argued the Mensheviks, ‘Social Democracy must not aim at seizing or sharing power in the provisional government, but must remain the party of the extreme revolutionary opposition.’ To do otherwise, to seek state power itself, would be disastrous, because the Social Democrats ‘would not be able to satisfy the pressing needs of the working class, including the establishment of socialism, … and … would cause the bourgeois classes to recoil from the revolution and thus diminish its sweep’.²²

The more radical faction – known as ‘Bolsheviks’ – argued the opposite, claiming that the Russian bourgeoisie was small, weak, heavily dependent on Tsarism and foreign capital, and, as a class of big property-owners, terrified by the prospect of revolutionary upheaval; consequently, the revolution, albeit necessarily ‘bourgeois’ in its immediate historic purpose, would have to be led by the working class in alliance with the peasantry. ‘The only force capable of gaining a decisive victory over Tsarism’, declared Lenin in Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (1905), ‘is the people, i.e. the proletariat and the peasantry … The revolution’s decisive victory over Tsarism means the establishment of the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.’²³

The phraseology was unfortunate. It had been the common practice of revolutionaries since the time of Marx, however, to describe any form of people power as a ‘dictatorship’. The implication was neither autocracy nor even minority rule; on the contrary, all revolutionaries were democrats. The term was used to express the idea that the majority – the working people organised democratically – would have to impose their will on the defeated ruling classes by force. But there was a far greater problem with Lenin’s formulation, ‘the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’: the logic was tortuous. He seemed to be saying that only the workers and peasants could be relied upon, but having made the revolution, it would be the bourgeoisie – the capitalist class – that would end up in charge and reap most of the benefit.

He was, however, right about one thing: in 1905, at the first sound of gunfire, the Cadets had run for cover. At the beginning of the year, leading Cadet Peter Struve had declared that ‘every sincere and thinking liberal in Russia demands revolution’. By its end, in the wake of the October-November mass strikes, he spoke instead of ‘the pernicious anarchy of the Russian revolution’.²⁴

But there is no question that Lenin’s formulation, however accurate its assessment of the bourgeoisie’s timidity, harboured a contradiction. Why would the workers, if they were to lead the revolution, impose upon themselves and their peasant allies a self-denying ordinance, handing over the power they had won to their class enemies, restricting themselves to the democratic reforms permitted by ‘bourgeois revolution’, postponing socialism to some distant and uncertain future?

It was the young Leon Trotsky, almost alone among Russian revolutionaries, who grasped the full implications of 1905.²⁵ His point of departure was the unity of the world, and the way in which economic and political competition had forced Tsarism into a belated attempt to catch up through a programme of rapid industrialisation funded by the state and foreign banks. The result was an exceptionally extreme example of ‘combined and uneven development’: on the one hand, an absolute monarch, a police state, a primitive agricultural system, an impoverished peasantry, a weak native bourgeoisie; on the other, a technologically advanced industrial sector of giant factories, and a concentrated, combative, politicised working class. The Bolsheviks appreciated some of the implications. Only the proletariat had the potential to lead the revolution. Only mass strikes in the cities could detonate peasant revolt. Only then would the army mutiny and the Tsarist state disintegrate. But there they had stopped. It was Trotsky – not at the time a Bolshevik (he joined the faction only in the summer of 1917) – who saw further.

To complete and consolidate the victory of democracy over autocracy – to prevent the forces of reaction regrouping to crush the revolution – the proletariat would have to establish a workers’ state. Any such state, being class-based, could not be other than an organ of proletarian interests – supporting workers’ control of the factories, peasant control of the land, and the dispossession of the rich. Anything less, indeed, would compromise the victory, for it would leave property and power in the hands of class enemies, and, by limiting their gains, would undermine the willingness of the workers and peasants to defend the revolution.²⁶ Thus, to Lenin’s formulation of ‘the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’, Trotsky counterposed ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’. In opposition to the schematic conception of two revolutions, different in character, separate in time, he envisaged ‘permanent revolution’ – that is, a revolution that would not stop part-way, but would instead spill across Russia’s borders to the rest of Europe, and would, at the same time, create a popular mass movement of such power that it would strike down all forms of class privilege and inaugurate a new democratic-egalitarian social order. Trotsky’s argument, in short, was that a Russian democratic revolution would inevitably ‘grow over’ into an international socialist revolution.²⁷

The Proletariat

In ascribing such primacy to the working class, the theory of permanent revolution was making an exceptionally bold claim. Despite record industrial growth rates since 1890, the Russian proletariat remained relatively small. Trotsky’s own estimate was that it comprised about a sixth of the population by 1914, up to 25 million people in all, but that most of these were either village-based rural poor or wage-labourers in small businesses in minor towns, often living and working in their employer’s house. The core proletariat – workers in large urban enterprises – numbered only about 3.5 million. Two-thirds of the industrial workers, moreover, were located in just three regions, St Petersburg, Moscow, and the Ukraine. Many of these were new arrivals. The composition of the proletariat reflected rapid industrialisation: many workers were young, many were women, and many retained strong links with the countryside from which they had recently migrated.²⁸

Exploitation in the new factories was extreme, and conditions in the fast-expanding industrial quarters appalling. Wages were usually insufficient to support a family. Twelve hour days were common. The accident rate was 11 percent per year in the mines, 4 percent in the factories. Discipline was maintained by fines and even corporal punishment.

Aleksei Badayev, one of six Bolsheviks elected to the Duma, the Tsarist parliament, in 1912, reports numerous abuses. On 12 March 1914, for example, he was called to the Treugolnik plant in St Petersburg, where 13,000 mainly women workers were employed making rubber galoshes. They worked a ten-hour day, without a dinner break, some for as little as 40 kopeks, the price of a loaf of black bread. The owners were making 10 million roubles in profit a year.

That morning, a new polish had been issued for galoshes … which emitted poisonous gases. Shortly afterwards, scores of women began to faint. Terrible scenes followed: in some cases the poisoning was so strong that the victims became insane, while in others blood ran from the nose and mouth. The small, badly equipped first-aid room was packed with bodies, and fresh cases were taken into the dining-room, while all who were able to move were sent out of the factory. ‘If they drop down there, the police will pick them up’ – so ran the cynical excuse of the management.²⁹

Housing in the workers’ districts was equally stygian. The Baku oil-workers, for instance, were herded into barracks of such squalor that it was, according to one of the bosses, impossible ‘without horror and trembling’ to pass by them. ‘The workers, all in greasy, soot-covered rags, covered with a thick layer of grime and dust, swarm like bees in the extremely dirty and congested quarters. A repulsive smell hits you as soon as you try to approach the window.’

The St Petersburg and Moscow workers generally lived in suburban tenements, but these were no less monstrous. The following is typical of municipal reports at the time:

The apartment has a terrible appearance, the plaster is crumbling, there are holes in the walls, stopped up with rags. It is dirty. The stove has collapsed. Legions of cockroaches and bugs. No double window-frames and so it is piercingly cold. The lavatory is so dilapidated that it is dangerous to enter and children are not allowed in. All the apartments in the house are similar.³⁰

Russia’s rulers, eager to catch up industrially with the Western powers, made a virtue of the people’s poverty. ‘The Russian peasant is much less demanding than the Western European or more particularly the North American worker,’ proclaimed Witte, ‘and a low wage for Russian enterprise is a fortunate boon, which complements the riches of Russian natural resources.’³¹

But matters were not so simple. Uprooted from the countryside and plunged into a satanic process of break-neck capital accumulation, Russia’s young workers fought back in successive waves of mass strikes, each mixing economic struggle and political protest, each stronger and more threatening than the last – the first in the late 1870s, the second in 1896–7, the third in 1903–6, a fourth beginning in 1912. Each time, the workers were hit by savage repression, and each time they learned lessons – about the bosses, the police, and the narks, about unity and solidarity, about whom they could trust in their own ranks, about how to organise and fight. Above all, they learned that economics and politics were inseparable: that when one fought the boss for a living wage, one faced the truncheons and sabres of the Tsarist state. So the fight in the workplaces turned the more determined of the proletarian militants into political revolutionaries – creating a new kind of Russian ‘intelligentsia’: one formed of self-taught ‘worker-intellectuals’.

The old radical intelligentsia – recruited from the educated elite – had peeled away from the underground movement after 1905. Lenin sneered that nine-tenths of them, perhaps as many as 99 percent, had gone off to become millionaires, get a cushy office job, or make money in some sort of swindling. ‘Young Russian workers’, he wrote later, ‘now constitute nine-tenths of the organised Marxists in Russia.’³² This was the general view. Alexander Shlyapnikov, himself a worker-intellectual as well as a leading underground organiser, put it thus: ‘The place of the petty-bourgeois intellectuals and student youth was taken up by the intellectual proletarian with calloused hands and highly developed head who had not lost contact with the masses.’³³ Leaflets, newspapers, and pamphlets – smuggled in and circulating illegally – would be read out in small clandestine gatherings and then passed on until they were in tatters and dropped to pieces. Such was the thirst for radical ideas that the underground struggled to satisfy it, especially in the war years, under intensified police repression. ‘The demand for illegal socialist literature’, recalled Shlyapnikov,

was so great that the poor illegal technology could not meet it. Private initiative came to its aid. Every sort of manuscript, hectographed or retyped copy of individual proclamations, articles from illegal publications abroad, etc., circulated among the workers. A typewritten copy of Lenin and Zinoviev’s The War and Socialism [a pamphlet] was passed from hand to hand around Moscow. Social Democrat and Communist [newspapers] were such luxuries that 50 kopeks or a rouble would be paid for one reading. There were demands for hundreds of copies of Communist, and workers would readily put aside three roubles of pay for a copy.

When the underground printing presses could not produce enough, ‘enthusiastic amateurs existed who would copy out whole pamphlets by hand’.³⁴

Much nonsense has been written about Lenin and the Bolsheviks. He has been caricatured as a ruthless and manipulative authoritarian, his followers as the cult-like dupes of a man set upon personal dictatorship and fulfilment of a messianic mission. Thus, the argument runs, the roots of Stalin’s Gulags are to be found in the ‘democratic centralism’ of Lenin’s party. The caricature has many facets. One is the claim that Lenin set out to build – and succeeded in building – a party in which middle-class intellectuals presided over working-class foot soldiers. The opposite is true: the Bolshevik Party of 1912–17 – the largely new party that emerged as the Russian labour movement recovered from the defeat of 1905 – was, both by intention and in actuality, overwhelmingly working class in composition and thoroughly democratic in nature. What is true is that the building of that party was first and foremost the achievement of Lenin. And because his achievement is so contested and misconstrued, we must give the rise of the Bolsheviks – the party that made the revolution – detailed attention.

Endnotes

1. Kochan and Abraham 1962/1990, 152–60.
2. Zinoviev 1923/1973, 17, 71.
3. Chamberlin 1935/1965, 22–3.
4. Chamberlin 1935/1965, 25–7.
5. Chernyshevsky 1863/1961, ix‒xviii, 221–61, esp. 241.
6. Pipes 1974/1977, 261–5.
7. Fitzpatrick 1982/1984, 16–17.
8. Kochan and Abraham 1962/1990, 215–6.
9. Serge 1930/1972, 25–6; Kochan and Abraham 1962/1990, 216–19.
10. Pipes 1974/1977, 305–13.
11. Pipes 1974/1977, 141–4.
12. Kochan 1967/1970, 57–8.
13. Pipes 1974/1977, 155–62.
14. Kochan and Abraham 1962/1990, 182.
15. Lenin 1908/undated, 148; Kochan and Abraham 1962/1990, 193; Pipes 1974/1977, 164–8.
16. Lenin 1898/undated, 200, 207, 231–2, and passim.
17. Kochan and Abraham 1962/1990, 270–1; Pipes 1974/1977, 169.
18. Kochan 1967/1970, 142.
19. Pipes 1974/1977, 169.
20. Marx 1852/1869/1973, 238–9.
21. Cliff 1975/1986, 25.
22. Cliff 1975/1986, 197.
23. Cliff 1975/1986, 198.
24. Cliff 1975/1986, 146–7.
25. The main exception to this generalisation is the role played in the early development of Trotsky’s thinking by Alexander Israel Helphand (aka Parvus). Trotsky met Parvus, a Russian Jewish exile 12 years his senior, in Munich in 1904. He later attributed to Parvus ‘the lion’s share’ of the thinking behind his own theory of permanent revolution. See Cliff 1989, 80–7.
26. Cliff 1989, 126–31.
27. Cliff 1989, 80–7, 123–39.
28. Trotsky, 1932–3/1977, 33–4, 55; Kochan 1967/1970, 35–6.
29. Reed 1926/1977, 274; Badayev 1929/1987, 143–4.
30. Kochan 1967/1970, 37–9.
31. Kochan 1967/1970, 40.
32. Cliff 1975/1986, 353–4.
33. Le Blanc 1993/2015, 171–2.
34. Shlyapnikov 1923/1982, 92, 156.

Bibliography

• Chamberlin, W. H., 1935/1965, The Russian Revolution: Volume I, 1917–1918, From the Overthrow of the Tsar to the Assumption of Power by the Bolsheviks, New York, Universal Library.
• Chernyshevsky, N. G., 1863/1961, What is to be Done?, New York, Vintage Books.
• Cliff, T., 1975/1986, Lenin, Vol. 1: Building the Party, 1893–1914, London, Bookmarks.
• Cliff, T., 1989, Trotsky: Towards October, 1879–1917, London, Bookmarks.
• Kochan, L., 1967/1970, Russia in Revolution, London, Paladin.
• Kochan, L. and Abraham, R ., 1962/1990, The Making of Modern Russia, London, Penguin.
• Le Blanc, P., 1993/2015, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party, Chicago, Haymarket.
• Lenin, V. I., 1898, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, in Selected Works, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1, 219–385.
• Lenin, V. I., 1908, The Agrarian Question in Russia at the End of the 19th Century, in Selected Works, 1, 137–217.
• Pipes, R ., 1974/1977, Russia Under the Old Regime, Harmondsworth, Penguin.
• Reed, J., 1926/1977, Ten Days That Shook the World, Harmondsworth, Penguin.
• Serge, V., 1930/1972, Year One of the Revolution, trans. P. Sedgwick, London, Allen Lane.
• Shlyapnikov, A., 1923/1982, On the Eve of 1917, London, Allison & Busby.
• Trotsky, L., 1932–3/1977, The History of the Russian Revolution, London, Pluto.
• Zinoviev, G., 1923/1973, History of the Bolshevik Party, from the Beginnings to February 1917, London, New Park.

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Chapter 2 (27-51) from A People’s History of the Russian Revolution, by Neil Faulkner (Pluto Press, 03.15.2017), published by OAPEN under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.