The history of the Russian revolutionary movement knows several major instances of leaders of revolutionary organizations allowing some of their members to enter into relations with the political police as secret informers, in the hope that in return for giving the police some insignificant information, these party spies could extract from it much more useful information for the party.111
When he testified before a commission of the Provisional Government in June 1917, Lenin hinted that, indeed, he may have used Malinovskii in this manner:
I did not believe in provocateurship in this case and for the following reason: if Malinovskii were a provocateur, the Okhranka [sic] would not gain from that as much as our party gained from Pravda and the whole legal apparatus. It is clear that by putting a provocateur into the Duma, removing for him the rivals of the Bolsheviks, etc., the Okhranka was guided by a crude image of Bolshevism—I would say a comic book caricature: the Bolsheviks will not organize an armed uprising. To have in hand all the threads, from the point of view of the Okhranka, it was worth anything to get Malinovskii into the Duma and the [Bolshevik] Central Committee. But when the Okhranka achieved both these objectives, it turned out that Malinovskii had become one of those links in the long and solid chain connecting our illegal base with Pravda.*
Although Lenin denied knowledge of Malinovskii’s police connections, this reasoning sounds like a convincing apology for employing a police agent to further the party’s objectives—that is, exploiting to the maximum the opportunities for legal work to win mass support when no other means were available.† When Malinovskii went on trial in 1918, the Bolshevik prosecutor indeed pressured tsarist police witnesses to testify that Malinovskii had done more harm to the tsarist authorities than to the Bolsheviks.112 The fact that Malinovskii returned of his own free will to Soviet Russia in November 1918, when the Red Terror was at its height, and demanded to see Lenin strongly suggests that he expected to be exonerated. But Lenin had no more use for him: he attended his trial but did not testify. Malinovskii was executed.
In fact, Malinovskii had performed for Lenin many valuable services. His help in the founding of Pravda and Nash put’ has been mentioned. In addition, in his Duma speeches he read texts written by Lenin, Zinoviev, and other Bolshevik leaders: prior to delivery, he submitted these to Sergei Vissarionov, the deputy director of the Police Department, for editing.113 By this means, the Bolshevik message was spread nationwide. But above all he worked assiduously to prevent the reunification of Lenin’s followers in Russia with the Mensheviks. When the Fourth Duma convened, it transpired that the seven Menshevik and six Bolshevik deputies acted in a more cooperative spirit than either Lenin or the police desired: they behaved, in fact, like a single Social-Democratic delegation, as was usually the case when Lenin was not personally present to sow discord. Keeping them apart and thus weakening them was a mission to which the police assigned high priority: according to Beletskii, “Malinovskii was ordered to do everything possible to deepen the split in the parties.”114 It was a case of the interests of Lenin and the police coinciding.‡
Lenin’s dictatorial methods and his complete lack of scruples alienated some of his staunchest supporters. Tired of intrigues and squabbles, caught in the prevailing mood of spiritualism, some of the brightest Bolsheviks began to seek solace in religion and idealistic philosophy: in 1909, the dominant tendency in Bolshevik ranks came to be known as Bogostroitel’stvo, or “God building.” Led by Bogdanov, the future head of “Proletarian Culture,” and A. V. Lunacharskii, the future Commissar of Enlightenment, the movement was a socialist response to Bogoiskatel’stvo, or “God-seeking,” popular among non-radical intellectuals. In Religion and Socialism, Lunacharskii depicted socialism as a type of religious experience, a “religion of labor.” In 1909, the proponents of this ideology established a school in Capri. Lenin, who found the whole development utterly distasteful, organized two counterschools, one in Bologna, the other in Longjumeau, near Paris. The latter, established in 1911, was a kind of Workers’ University, in which workers sent from Russia underwent systematic indoctrination in social science and politics: the faculty included Lenin and his two most loyal followers, Zinoviev and Kamenev. The inevitable police informer, this time disguised as a student, reported that the instruction at Longjumeau consisted of
mindless memorization by the pupils of snatches of lessons, which in their presentation bore the character of indisputable dogmas and which in no way encouraged critical analysis and a rationally conscious absorption.115
By 1912, after Martov’s public revelations of Lenin’s unscrupulous financial dealings and his use of money, much of it illicitly obtained, to achieve domination, the two factions gave up the pretense of being one party. The Mensheviks felt that the Bolshevik actions compromised the Social-Democratic movement. At the meeting of the International Socialist Bureau in 1912, Plekhanov openly accused Lenin of theft. But although the Mensheviks professed to be appalled by Lenin’s resort to crime and slander and by his admission that he deliberately misled workers about them, and although they castigated him as a “political charlatan” (Martov), they refrained from expelling him, whereas Struve, whose only sin was to sympathize with Eduard Bernstein’s “Revisionism,” they got rid of in no time. Little wonder Lenin would not take them seriously.
The final break between the two factions occurred in January 1912 at Lenin’s Prague Conference, following which they never again held joint meetings. Lenin appropriated the name “Central Committee” and appointed one consisting exclusively of hard-line Bolsheviks. Although the breach at the top was complete, rank and file Mensheviks and Bolsheviks inside Russia more often than not worked together and continued to view each other as comrades.
Lenin spent the two years preceding the outbreak of World War I in Cracow, from where he was able to maintain contact with his Russian followers. Either just before or immediately after the start of the war, he entered into a relationship with an agency of the Austrian Government, the Union for the Liberation of the Ukraine, which in return for his support of Ukrainian national aspirations paid him subsidies and assisted his revolutionary activities.116 The Union received funds from both Vienna and Berlin and operated under the supervision of the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. One of the people involved in its activities was Parvus, who in 1917 would play a critical part in securing Lenin passage through Germany to revolutionary Russia. An accounting statement submitted by the Union, dated Vienna, December 16, 1914, contains the following entry:
The Union has given support to the Majority faction of Russian Social-Democracy in the form of money and help in the establishment of communications with Russia. The leader of that faction, Lenin, is not hostile to Ukrainian demands, as demonstrated by his lecture, reported on in Ukrainische Nachrichten.117
50. Lenin: Paris 1910.
This connection proved very useful to Lenin when the Austrian police arrested him and Grigori Zinoviev (July 26/August 8, 1914) as enemy aliens and suspected spies. Influential persons in the Austrian and Polish socialist movements, among them Jacob Ganetskii (Haniecki, also known as Fürstenberg), an employee of Parvus’s and a close associate of Lenin, intervened on their behalf. Five days later, the viceroy of Galicia in Lwow received a cable from Vienna advising him that it was not desirable to detain Lenin, who was identified as “an enemy of tsarism.”118 On August 6/19, the Cracow Military Procurator telegraphed the district court in Nowy Targ, where Lenin was incarcerated, ordering his immediate release.119 On August 19/September 1, Lenin, Krupskaia, and Krupskaia’s mother, on a pass from the Austrian police, left Vienna for Switzerland in an Austrian military mail train—a means of transport unlikely to be made available to ordinary enemy aliens.120 Zinoviev and his wife followed two weeks later. The circumstances of Lenin and Zinoviev’s release from an Austrian prison and the manner of Lenin’s departure from Austria indicate that Vienna regarded them as valuable assets.