In Switzerland, Lenin immediately set to work to deal with the failure of the Socialist International to honor its anti-war platform.
It had been a fundamental maxim of the international socialist movement that the interests of the working class cut across national borders and that the “proletariat” would under no circumstances spill blood in the capitalist struggle for markets. The Stuttgart Congress of the Socialist International, convened in August 1907, in the midst of an international crisis, devoted a great deal of attention to militarism and the threat of war. Two tendencies developed, one led by Bebel, which favored opposing war and, if war did break out, struggling for its “early termination.” The other trend was represented by three Russian delegates—Lenin, Martov, and Rosa Luxemburg, who, drawing on the Russian experience of 1905, wanted the socialists to take advantage of the fighting to unleash an international civil war.121 At the latter’s urging, the congress resolved that in the event of hostilities, it would be the duty of the workers and their parliamentary deputies
to intervene in favor of its speedy termination and to do all in their power to utilize the economic and political crisis caused by the war to rouse the peoples and thereby to hasten the abolition of capitalist class rule.122
This clause represented a rhetorical concession by the right-wing majority to the left-wing minority to paper over their differences. But Lenin was not satisfied with the compromise. Pursuing the same divisive tactic which he had employed in the Russian Social-Democratic movement, he set out to split off from the more moderate majority of the Socialist International an intransigent left, committed to exploiting a future war for revolutionary purposes. He opposed a pacifist policy aimed at stopping hostilities endorsed by most European socialists: indeed, he wanted war very badly because war presented unique opportunities to make revolution. Since such a stance was unpopular and inadmissible for a socialist, Lenin refrained from expressing it publicly. But once in a while, as in a letter to Maxim Gorky written in January 1913, during yet another international crisis he wrote: “A war between Austria and Russia would be a most useful thing for the revolution (in all of Eastern Europe) but it is not very likely that Franz Joseph and Nicky will give us this pleasure.”123
Once the war broke out, socialist parliamentarians of both the Allied and Central powers reneged on their pledges. In the summer of 1914 they had spoken passionately for peace and brought masses of demonstrators into the streets to protest the drift to war. But when hostilities began, they fell in line and voted in favor of war budgets. Especially painful was the betrayal of the German Social-Democrats, who had the strongest party organization in Europe and formed the backbone of the Second Internationaclass="underline" the unanimous vote of their parliamentary delegation for war credits was a stunning and, as it turned out, near-fatal blow to the Socialist International.
Russian socialists took the pledges of the International much more seriously than their comrades in the West, in part because they had shallower roots in their native country and took little patriotic pride in it and in part because they knew they had no chance of coming to power except by exploiting “the economic and political crisis caused by the war” posited by the Stuttgart resolution. Apart from the patriarchs of the Social-Democratic movement, such as Plekhanov and L. G. Deich, and a number of Socialists-Revolutionaries in whom the clash of arms awakened patriotic sentiments (Savinkov, Burtsev), most luminaries of Russian socialism remained faithful to the antiwar resolutions of the International. This the Social-Democratic and Trudovik (SR) deputies in the Fourth Duma demonstrated with their unanimous refusal to vote for war credits—the only European parliamentarians, save for the Serbians, to do so.
On arrival in Switzerland, Lenin drafted a programmatic statement, called “The Tasks of Revolutionary Social Democracy in the European War.”124 After accusing the leaders of German, French, and Belgian Social-Democracy of betrayal, he outlined an uncompromisingly radical platform. Article 6 of “The Tasks” contained the following proposition:
From the point of view of the working class and the toiling masses of all the peoples of Russia, the least evil [naimenshee zlo] would be the defeat of the tsarist monarchy and its armies, which are oppressing Poland, the Ukraine, and a number of peoples of Russia …*
No other prominent European socialist expressed himself publicly in favor of his country losing the war. Lenin’s startling call for the defeat of Russia inevitably brought charges that he was an agent of the German Government.†
The practical conclusion of Lenin’s statement on the war was spelled out in the seventh and final article of his theses, which called for energetic agitation and propaganda among the civilian and military personnel of the belligerent nations for the purpose of unleashing a civil war against the “reactionary and bourgeois governments and parties of all the countries.” Copies of this document were smuggled into Russia and in November furnished the Imperial Government with grounds for closing down Pravda and arresting the Bolshevik Duma delegation. One of the lawyers who defended the Bolsheviks on this occasion was Alexander Kerensky. Tried on lesser charges than treason, which could have cost them their lives, the Bolsheviks were sentenced to exile, which all but put the party out of the picture until the February revolution.
The thrust of Lenin’s program was that the socialists were to strive not to end the fighting but to exploit it for their own purposes: “The slogan of ‘peace’ is incorrect at this moment,” he wrote in October 1914. “This is a slogan of philistines and priests. The proletarian slogan must be: civil war.”125 Lenin would remain faithful to this formulation throughout the war. It was much safer for him to uphold it in neutral Switzerland, of course, than it was for his followers in belligerent Russia.
Aware of Lenin’s war program, the Germans were eager to use him for their own purposes: after all, Lenin’s call for the defeat of the tsarist armies was tantamount to an endorsement of a German victory. Their main intermediary was Parvus, one of the leaders of the St. Petersburg Soviet in 1905, the originator of the theory of “uninterrupted revolution,” and more recently a collaborator with the Union for the Liberation of the Ukraine. Parvus had one of the most impressive intellects in the Russian revolutionary movement as well as one of the most corrupt personalities. After the failure of the 1905 Revolution, he concluded that a successful revolution in Russia required the assistance of German armies: they alone were capable of destroying tsarism.* He placed himself at the disposal of the German Government, using his political connections to amass a sizable fortune. At the outbreak of the war he resided in Constantinople. He contacted the German Ambassador there and outlined to him the case for using Russian revolutionaries to promote German interests. His argument was that the Russian radicals could achieve their objective only if tsarism were destroyed and the Russian Empire broken up: since this objective happened also to suit Germany, “the interests of the German Government were … identical with those of the Russian revolutionaries.” He asked for money and authorization to communicate with Russian left-wing émigrés.126 With the encouragement of Berlin, in May 1915 he contacted Lenin in Zurich: familiar with Russian émigré politics, he knew that Lenin was the key figure on the left and that if he won him over the rest of the Russian anti-war left would fall in line.127 For the time being, the plan failed. It was not that Lenin objected to dealing with the Germans or felt qualms about taking money from them—he just would not negotiate with a traitor to the socialist cause, a renegade and “socialist chauvinist.” Parvus’s biographers suggest that in addition to personal dislike of Parvus, Lenin may also have feared that if he struck a deal with him, Parvus “would eventually acquire control of Russian socialist organizations, and, with his financial resources and his intellectual ability, be able to outmaneuver all the other party leaders.”128 Lenin never publicly referred to this encounter.