Nor were the Bolsheviks immune to the factional splits that crippled all the socialist parties after 1905, despite the Soviet (and anti-Soviet) myth of a unified party under Lenin’s command. As with the Mensheviks and SRs, the most heated argument among the Bolsheviks concerned the use of legal and illegal methods. All Bolsheviks were agreed on the primacy of the revolutionary underground. But some, like Lenin, also wanted to exploit the available legal channels, such as the Duma and the trade unions, if only as a ‘front’ for their own mass agitation; whereas others, like Bogdanov, Lenin’s co-founder of the Bolshevik faction, argued that this would only encourage the workers to believe in ‘constitutional illusions’. The conflict was mixed up with two other issues: the Bolsheviks’ controversial use of ‘expropriations’ (i.e. bank robberies) to finance their activities; and the desire of many Bolsheviks, especially among the rank and file, for the two Social Democratic factions to mend their differences and reunite.
Yet the consequences of 1905 were set to divide the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks even more than the Party Congress of 1903. It was only after 1905 that the rival wings of the Social Democratic movement emerged as two distinctive parties, each with its own political culture, system of ethics, philosophy and methods. Lenin’s tactical shifts made all the difference. The basic tenets of the Bolshevik political philosophy had already been formed by 1903, but it was only after 1905, as Lenin digested the practical lessons of the failed revolution, that its unique strategic features began to emerge. Hence Lenin’s reference, fifteen years later, to the 1905 Revolution as a ‘dress rehearsal’ for the Bolshevik seizure of power.82
As Lenin later came to see it, three things had been made clear by 1905: the bankruptcy of the ‘bourgeoisie’ and its liberal parties as a revolutionary force; the immense revolutionary potential of the peasantry; and the capacity of the nationalist movements in the borderlands to weaken the Empire fatally. He argued for a break with the orthodox Marxist assumption, held as a matter of faith by most of the Mensheviks, that a backward country like Russia would have to go through a ‘bourgeois-democratic revolution’, accompanied by several decades of capitalist development, before its working class would be sufficiently advanced to take power and install a socialist system. It was not true, Lenin claimed, that the workers would have to follow the lead of the liberal ‘bourgeoisie’ in overthrowing Tsarism, since they could form a revolutionary government of their own in alliance with the peasants and the national minorities. This concept of working-class autonomy was to become a powerful weapon in the hands of the Bolsheviks. When the workers renewed their strikes and protests after 1912 they turned increasingly to the leadership of the Bolsheviks, whose support for militant action against the ‘bourgeoisie’ matched their own growing sense of working-class solidarity in the wake of 1905.
Trotsky advanced a similar idea in his theory of the ‘permanent revolution’ which he had taken from the Marxist theoretician Parvus and developed from his analysis of the 1905 Revolution, Results and Prospects. Although still a Menshevik (pride prevented him from joining Lenin’s party), Trotsky’s theory fitted better with the revolutionary Bolshevism which he would espouse in 1917 than with the mainstream of Menshevism, as voiced by Plekhanov and Axelrod, which insisted that the bourgeois revolution was a prerequisite of real socialism.fn11 The Russian bourgeoisie, Trotsky said, had shown itself to be incapable of leading the democratic revolution. And yet this feebleness of capitalism’s own agents would make it possible for the working class to carry out its revolution earlier than in the more advanced countries of the West. Here was historical paradox raised to the level of strategy. To begin with, the Russian Revolution would have to win the support of the peasants, the vast majority of the population, by allowing them to seize the gentry’s estates. But as the revolution moved towards socialism, and the resistance of the ‘petty-bourgeois’ peasantry increased, further advance would depend on the spread of revolution to the industrial countries of the West, without whose support the socialist order would not be able to sustain itself. ‘Workers of the World Unite!’
In this aspect of his theory — and in this alone — Trotsky remained a Menshevik. For the one thing which united all the various strains of the Menshevik credo after 1905 was the belief that in the absence of a socialist revolution in the West the revolutionary struggle of the Russian working class was bound to fail without the support, or at least the neutrality, of the bourgeoisie. This, in the view of the Mensheviks, demanded a flexible approach to the liberal parties after 1905; it was in their mutual interests to campaign for the dismantling of the despotic state and the establishment of a democracy. The years in which the Duma operated would serve as the last test for this experiment in political reform.
6 Last Hopes
*
i Parliaments and Peasants
The State Duma finally opened on 27 April 1906. It was a hot and sunny day, one of many in an exceptional Russian spring, and it was with some discomfort that Vladimir Obolensky, the elected deputy for the district of Yalta, squeezed himself into his old tail-coat and set off by carriage for the Winter Palace, where the new parliamentarians were to be received in the Coronation Hall. The Tsar and the Duma deputies regarded each other with the utmost suspicion, both being reluctant to share its power with the other. So the whole occasion was marked by a hostile posturing from each side, as if all the pomp and ceremony, the bowing and genuflections, were really delicate manæuvres in a beautifully camouflaged battle.
Nicholas had already scored the first victory in having the deputies come to him, not he to the Duma, for the opening ceremony. Indeed it was not until February 1916, in the midst of a grave political crisis, that the Tsar finally deigned to make an appearance in the Tauride Palace, the seat of the Duma. And as if to underline this royal supremacy, the Coronation Hall of the Winter Palace was sumptuously furnished to greet the parliamentary deputies. The throne was draped in ermine with the crown, the sceptre, the seal and the orb placed at its feet on four little camp-stools. The miraculous icon of Christ was placed, like a holy protector, before it, and solemnly guarded by a retinue of high priests. The deep basses of the choir, dressed in cassocks of crimson and gold, sang verse after verse of ‘God Save the Tsar’, as if on purpose to keep the congregation standing, until, at the height of the fanfare’s crescendo, the royal procession arrived.
On one side of the hall stood the great and the good of autocratic Russia: state councillors, senators, ministers, admirals, generals and members of the court, all of them turned out in their brilliant dress uniforms dripping with medals and golden braid. Facing them were the parliamentary leaders of the new democratic Russia, a motley collection of peasants in cotton shirts and tunics, professional men in lounge suits, monks and priests in black, Ukrainians, Poles, Tatars and others in colourful national costumes, and a small number of nobles in evening dress. ‘The two hostile sides stood confronting each other’, recalled Obolensky. ‘The old and grey court dignitaries, keepers of etiquette and tradition, looked across in a haughty manner, though not without fear and confusion, at the “people off the street”, whom the revolution had swept into the palace, and quietly whispered to one another. The other side looked across at them with no less disdain or contempt.’ One of the socialist deputies, a tall man in a worker’s blouse, scrutinized the throne and the courtiers around it with obvious disgust. As the Tsar and his entourage entered the hall, he lurched forward and stared at them with an anguished expression of hatred. For a moment it was feared that he might throw a bomb.