Читать книгу Lenin: A biography - Harold Shukman - Страница 18

At the turn of the century, Russia was entering a period of turbulence. Peasants rioted against a system which piled debts on them and taxed their basic necessities excessively; workers went on strike for better conditions and wages and against police harassment; students were demanding autonomy for their universities and civil liberties for everyone; the professional classes – doctors, lawyers, teachers – were becoming increasingly vociferous in their demand for representative government; and the national minorities in the empire’s borderlands were organizing liberation movements. In 1904 the country stumbled into a war against Japan over control of Chinese territory in Manchuria, 6000 miles from European Russia, and by the middle of 1905 Russia’s resources appeared exhausted, and humiliation seemed certain. The whole of 1905 was consumed in strikes and demonstrations, and mutinous action in parts of the army and navy, and by the autumn Tsar Nicholas II was ready to concede reform: the creation of a State Duma, or parliament, and various promises of social legislation.

It was against this background of rising political activity that Lenin emerged from his exile in Siberia and threw himself into reorganizing the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party as a revolutionary body, prepared to overthrow the existing order. To justify the rôle of those who were to do the overthrowing, he created the idea of the ‘professional revolutionary’. In his extended essay What is to be Done?, a title he took from Chernyshevsky, he wrote that an ‘organization of revolutionaries must chiefly and above all include people whose profession is revolutionary activity’,¹ one of his main arguments being that it was ‘far harder to catch a dozen clever people than a hundred fools’. By ‘clever people’ he meant professional revolutionaries.² Published in Stuttgart in 1902,³ What is to be done? was Lenin’s grand plan to create a conspiratorial organization. Advancing the idea of an ‘all-Russian political newspaper’ as the basis for such a party, he envisaged a ‘network of agents’ – or ‘collaborators, if this is a more acceptable term’ – who would provide ‘the greatest certainty of success in the event of a rising’.⁴

He would certainly succeed in building his strictly disciplined organization, but after it had seized power he would find it difficult to discern where the Party ended and the security organs began. In April 1922, for instance, it was the Politburo that gave the state security organ, the GPU, the power to shoot bandit elements on the spot. In May they ordered that Patriarch Tikhon, the head of the Orthodox Church, be put on trial for allegedly obstructing the expropriation of Church property, and in the same month this élite of ‘professional revolutionaries’ sentenced eleven priests to be executed for the same reason. In August 1921 it was Lenin who initiated the creation of a commission to maintain surveillance on incoming foreigners, notably those involved in the American famine relief programme.⁵

The illegal, conspiratorial character of the Party predetermined the mutual penetration, if not fusion, of this ‘social’ organization and the state security organs. The process occurred officially and ‘legally’. One of Lenin’s most trusted agents, Yakov Ganetsky, wrote to Lenin on 10 October 1919 proposing ‘the closest possible ties between the Party organizations and the extraordinary [security] commissions … and to oblige all Party members in responsible posts to report to the … commissions any information they obtain by both private and official means and which might serve to combat counter-revolution and espionage. They should also actively help the … commissions by taking part in solving cases … being present at interrogations and so on.’⁶ Lenin could hardly have made the point clearer, when he stated, ‘A good Communist is a good Chekist [secret policeman] at the same time.’⁷