Gradually, between 1889 and 1894, Lenin moved towards the Marxist mainstream. But only temporarily. To begin with, like many provincial revolutionaries, he merely added Marx’s sociology to the putschist tactics of the People’s Will. The goal of the revolutionary movement was still the seizure of power but the arena for this struggle was to be transferred from the peasantry to the working class. Then, in his first major published work, The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), he squared the lessons of Marx’s work — that a capitalist stage of development was necessary before a socialist revolution — with his own preference for such a revolution in the immediate future through the bizarre (not to say preposterous) thesis that peasant Russia was already in the throes of capitalism, classifying no less than one-fifth of its peasant households as ‘capitalist’ and over half the peasants as ‘proletarians’. This was Tkachev dressed up as Marx. It was only after his arrival in St Petersburg, during the autumn of 1893, that Lenin came round to the standard Marxist view — the view that Russia was only at the start of its capitalist stage and that to bring this to its maturity there had to be a democratic movement uniting the workers with the bourgeoisie in the struggle against autocracy. No more talk of a coup d’étât or of terror. It was only after the establishment of a ‘bourgeois democracy’, granting freedoms of speech and association for the organization of the workers, that the second and socialist phase of the revolution could begin.
Plekhanov’s influence was paramount here. It was he who had first mapped out this two-stage revolutionary strategy. With it the Russian Marxists at last had an answer to the problem of how to bring about a post-capitalist society in a pre-capitalist one. After so many years of fruitless terror, it gave them grounds for their belief that in forsaking the seizure of power — which, as Plekhanov put it, could only lead to a ‘despotism in Communist form’ — they could still advance towards socialism. Lenin, in his own words, fell ‘in love’ with Plekhanov, as did all the Marxists in St Petersburg. Although Plekhanov lived in exile, his works made him their undisputed leader and sage. No other Russian Marxist had such a high standing in the European movement. His most famous work of 1895 — a stunningly reductionist interpretation of the Marxist world-view published under the pseudonym of Beltov and, like Marx’s Capital, slipped past the Russian censors with the esoteric title On the Question of Developing a Monistic View of History — ‘made people into Marxists overnight’. He was the Moses of the Marxists. His works, in Potresov’s words, brought ‘the ten commandments of Marxism down from Mount Sinai and handed them to the Russian young’.27
At first, Lenin made a bad impression on the Marxists in St Petersburg. Many of them were repelled by this short and stocky figure with his egg-shaped, balding head, small piercing eyes, dry sarcastic laugh, brusqueness and acerbity. Lenin was a newcomer and his musty and ‘provincial’ appearance was distinctly unimpressive. Potresov described him at their first meeting as a ‘typical middle-aged tradesman from some northern Yaroslavl’ province’.fn9 But through his conscientious dedication and self-discipline, his iron logic and practicality, Lenin soon emerged as a natural leader — a clear man of action — among the Petersburg intellectuals. Many people thought he was a decent man — Lenin could be charming when he wanted and he was nearly always personally decent in his comradely relations — and not a few people fell in love with him. One of these was his future wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, whom Lenin met around this time as a fellow propagandist in St Petersburg.28
The purpose of their propaganda was the education of a vanguard of ‘conscious’ workers — Russian Bebels like Kanatchikov, who would organize the working class for the coming revolution. But education did not necessarily make the workers revolutionary. On the contrary, as Kanatchikov soon discovered, most of the skilled and educated workers were more inclined to improve their lot within the capitalist system than seek to overthrow it. There was a growing tension between the mainly economic concerns of the workers and the political aims of those activists and intellectuals who would be their leaders. The Marxists were thus faced with the same dilemma which the Populists had confronted in relation to the peasantry after the mid-1870s: what should they do when the masses failed to respond to their propaganda? Whereas the Populists had been driven to isolated terrorism, the Marxists found a temporary solution to this problem in the switch from propaganda to mass agitationfn10 as a means of organizing — and in the process politicizing — the working class through specific labour struggles. The new strategy was pioneered in the Vilno strikes of 1893, where the Marxist intelligentsia, instead of preaching to the Jewish workers, participated in the strikes and even learned Yiddish to gain their support. Two of the Wilno Social Democrats, Arkadii Kremer and Yuli Martov, explained their strategy in an influential pamphlet, On Agitation, written in 1895: through their involvement in organized strikes the workers would learn to appreciate the need for a broader political campaign, one led by the Social Democrats, since the tsarist authorities would not tolerate a legal trade union movement. In St Petersburg the new plan was taken up by the short-lived but windily titled Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. It was organized in 1895 by a small group of Marxist intellectuals, Martov and Lenin prominent among them, who were arrested almost at once. However, its local activists could claim some credit for the big but unsuccessful textile strike of 1896, when over 30,000 workers came out in protest.
After a year in prison Lenin was sentenced to three years’ exile in Siberia (1897–1900). Unlike the ‘politicals’ of his own regime, Lenin was allowed to live in considerable comfort. For ‘health reasons’ he was allowed to choose where he would live, and he chose a remote village called Shushenskoe in the southern Minusinsk region, which was well known for its tolerable climate. He took several crates of books and even a hunting gun with him, and kept in constant touch with his comrades. To enable Krupskaya to accompany him he agreed to marry her. The wedding took place in a church, since the Russian government did not recognize civil marriages, although neither bride nor bridegroom ever referred to this embarrassing episode in their later writings.29
During Lenin’s exile the workers’ movement in Russia became increasingly dominated by the new trend of ‘Economism’. The Economists advocated concentrating on purely economic goals. Their aim was to improve the workers’ conditions within the capitalist system rather than seeking to destroy it. To begin with, it was the workers and local factory activists who expressed this view. They believed that the workers should be left alone to run their own affairs, free from the direction of the socialist intelligentsia. But increasingly the same ideas were taken up by the so-called Legal Marxists. Kuskova and Struve, their best-known leaders, were brilliant theorists. Influenced by Eduard Bernstein’s Revisionism, which was convulsing the German workers’ movement at the time, as well as by neo-Kantian ideas, they sought to challenge many of the basic Marxist doctrines. Like Bernstein, they denied that capitalism was leading to a worsening of the workers’ conditions. On the contrary, capitalism could be reconciled with socialism under a democratic system. The two would eventually converge. This meant that the workers should focus their efforts on reform rather than revolution. They should work within the law, in collaboration with the bourgeoisie rather than underground and in violent conflict with it.