Читать книгу Lenin: A biography - Harold Shukman - Страница 21

When the Third Party Congress opened in London in April 1905, with Lenin as its chairman, he paid particular attention to questions of combat: he believed that tsarism was ‘rotten through’ and that it must be helped to crash to the ground. He made a long speech about armed uprising, tabled a motion on the issue, and tried to convince the delegates that a revolution was a real possibility.⁶³ Throughout this time, he kept up his criticism of the Mensheviks. When they called for active exploitation of a proposed assembly, Lenin insisted on a boycott, since in his view any parliament was nothing more than a ‘bourgeois stable’. When he read Martov’s article ‘The Russian Proletariat and the Duma’, published in the Vienna paper Rabochaya gazeta, he became enraged at his former comrade’s call to the Social Democrats to take part in elections to the tsarist parliament, and gave his reply in an article entitled ‘At the Tail of the Monarchist Bourgeoisie or at the Head of the Revolutionary Proletariat and Peasantry?’⁶⁴ The very notion of achieving socialist, democratic and progressive goals by means of reforms, parliament and legal social struggle was blasphemy. Lenin could not see the colossal possibilities of parliamentary activity. His speeches breathe hatred for the liberals and reformists, among whom the most dangerous in his view were of course the Mensheviks.

Lenin’s reaction to the October Manifesto, like that of Soviet historians thereafter, was that it was merely a tactical manoeuvre by the tsar and the bourgeoisie, engineered by the tsar’s brilliant prime minister, Count Witte. According to eye-witnesses, the tsar realized that in signing the document he was taking a step towards constitutional, parliamentary monarchy. The autocracy had retreated and given a chance for democratic development. Had the Social Democrats – not only Lenin – not at once labelled the Manifesto a ‘deception’, and had they instead fought to make it a reality, history might have been different. Instead, the Manifesto was interpreted as a sign of weakness, and Lenin prepared to return to Russia to help bury the autocracy. He was convinced the moment was approaching. His articles now bore such titles as ‘The Approach of the Dénouement’, ‘On the New Constitutional Manifesto of Nicholas the Last’, ‘The Dying Autocracy and the New Organs of People’s Power’.

The differences with the Mensheviks were temporarily pushed to one side. They, meanwhile, like all the liberals, were having second thoughts about changing the existing political structure by force. Even relatively conservative, intelligent politicians like Witte were saying, ‘Russia has outgrown her existing structure. She is striving for a legal structure based on civil liberty.’ Witte proposed that the tsar ‘abolish repressive measures against actions which do not threaten society and the state’.⁶⁵

The government’s concessions were, however, dismissed, tension rose, and the Bolsheviks forced events by exploiting the workers’ discontent. Lenin’s espousal of widespread violence and terror, however, pushed the Mensheviks further away from the idea of Party reunification. In September 1908, Martov wrote in exasperation to his friend and Menshevik comrade Pavel Axelrod: ‘I confess that more and more I think that even nominal involvement with this bandit gang is a mistake.’⁶⁶ They were both unwilling to make peace with sectarianism and conspiratorial methods. While keener on reunification than the Bolsheviks, they also wanted to retain democratic principles within the Party. As for Plekhanov, he had long decided that true reunification was impossible. In his view, Lenin regarded reunification as his faction swallowing up and subordinating all the other elements of Russian social democracy, and thus depriving the Russian revolutionaries of any democratic basis. Plekhanov pointed out that instead of underlining the common features shared by the two wings (which both had their roots in the labour movement), Lenin emphasized their differences, and was an incorrigible sectarian.⁶⁷

As the culmination of the Russian drama of 1917 approached, with defeats at the war front, hunger and chaos, the Bolsheviks concentrated all their energy on preparing the armed uprising. The Mensheviks meanwhile focused on peace and liberty, the Constituent Assembly and a new constitution, a strategy Lenin regarded as treacherous, for it weakened the revolutionaries’ chances of a victorious uprising. In the final analysis, the difference between the two factions boiled down to the Bolsheviks’ wanting socialism on the basis of a dictatorship, and the Mensheviks’ wanting it on the basis of democracy. In Fedor Dan’s words: ‘Menshevism stood for turning the struggle for “bourgeois” political democracy and its preservation into its first priority; while Bolshevism put the “building of socialism” at the top of its agenda, throwing overboard and attacking the very idea of a “routine democracy”.’⁶⁸

Dan, who outlived Lenin by nearly a quarter of a century and who knew him well, spent a good part of his life as the political and ideological leader of Menshevism, together with Martov, who died in 1923. Repeatedly arrested and exiled by the tsarist regime, he exerted great energy to preserve the democratic ideals of the RSDLP. His star reached its zenith in June 1917 when he co-chaired the Executive Committee of the All-Russian Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies (Ispolkom) with N.S. Chkheidze, was chief editor of Izvestiya, and with I.G. Tsereteli and A.R. Gots was one of the spokesmen of the democratic wing of Russian social democracy. Symbolically, it was Dan who opened the Second Congress of Soviets on 25 October (7 November) 1917, and when the Bolsheviks and Left Socialist Revolutionaries voted approval of the seizure of power that had just taken place, Dan protested by leaving the Congress together with the other Mensheviks.

For the next three years, the Menshevik leadership represented the democratic opposition, within the legal means permitted. Lenin, meanwhile, missed no opportunity to launch insulting attacks on his former comrades. Nevertheless, until 1920 the Mensheviks led a more or less legal existence, even if the term ‘Social Democrat’ became a dirty word. Then the Politburo launched open persecution, beginning with ‘semi-harsh’ measures. On 22 June 1922 it was decided that the political activity of ‘these accomplices of the bourgeoisie’ must be ‘curtailed’, and that this should be achieved for the time being by exile: ‘All People’s Commissars should be informed that Mensheviks, at present employed in commissariats and capable of playing any political role, should not be kept in Moscow, but dispersed in the provinces, in each case after enquiries have been made at the Cheka and Orgburo.’⁶⁹ At the same time, Mensheviks were being arrested throughout the country. Protests and appeals for release were sent to Lenin and the Politburo. On 14 October 1922, for instance, the Politburo unanimously voted against an appeal for the release of a group of Mensheviks.⁷⁰ The arrests continued.

Lenin was especially interested in Martov’s activities. In July 1919, in an article entitled ‘Everyone into the Struggle with [White General] Denikin!’, he wrote: ‘Martov and Co. think themselves “above” both warring sides [in the civil war], think themselves able to create a “third side”. This desire, even if sincere, is still an illusion of the petty bourgeois democrat who even now, seventy years after 1848, hasn’t learnt the alphabet, namely, that in a capitalist milieu there can only be the dictatorship of the bourgeosie, for the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot coexist with any third option. It seems Martov and Co. will die with this illusion.’⁷¹ When Martov and Dan were elected with other Mensheviks to the Moscow City Soviet in 1918, Lenin wrote on Kamenev’s report: ‘I think you should “tire them out” with practical tasks: Dan for sanitary work, Martov can look after canteens.’⁷² When, in the same year, Martov submitted the manuscript of his memoirs for publication through Gorky – there was still some latitude in such matters – Lenin had it censored.⁷³ Martov was under constant threat of arrest, but Lenin, perhaps because of their earlier friendship, held back. At the first sign that Martov wanted to go abroad, however, permission was granted, thus releasing Lenin from the dilemma, and enabling him to say ‘We willingly let Martov go.’⁷⁴

There had never been close relations between Dan and Lenin, and Dan was arrested in February 1921, and held in the Petropavlovsk Fortress in Petrograd (as St Petersburg had been called since 1914) for nearly a year. He was no stranger there, having ‘sat’ (i.e. been imprisoned) in 1896 before being exiled under the tsar. He was now accused of instigating the anti-Bolshevik uprising of soldiers and sailors on the fortress island of Kronstadt in the Baltic, once the spearhead of Bolshevik support, and faced possible execution. Instead he was sentenced to internal exile, in the words of the special Politburo resolution, ‘to some distant non-proletarian district where he can work in his speciality’.⁷⁵ Dan began a hunger strike, demanding the right to go abroad, and since the inflexibility of the Stalin era had yet to come, the request was granted.

Any real or imagined threat which arose in those years was invariably attributed to some ‘counter-revolutionary activity of the Mensheviks’, thus ensuring harsher treatment for them as a whole. On 28 November 1921, for instance, Trotsky reported to the Politburo that he had information about a counter-revolutionary coup being prepared in Moscow and Petrograd. It was headed by Mensheviks, SRs and ‘surviving bourgeoisie’. Trotsky was immediately appointed ‘Chairman of the Moscow Defence Committee’, and it was decided that ‘Mensheviks should not be released, and the Central Committee should be told to intensify arrests of Mensheviks and SRs’.⁷⁶ Whenever the Politburo returned to the subject of the Mensheviks its position hardened. On 2 February 1922 Stalin reported on imprisoned Mensheviks, as a result of which the Politburo issued a special order to the GPU, the successor to the Cheka, ‘to transfer to special places of imprisonment the most active and important of the leaders of anti-Soviet parties. Mensheviks, SRs and Anarchists at present held by the Cheka should continue to be kept in imprisonment.’⁷⁷

The Mensheviks tried appealing to Social Democrats in the West. The Cheka intercepted one such letter to the International Berne Conference and reported it to Lenin. He read it, and underlined the words: ‘the prisons are overflowing, the workers are shooting each other, many of our Social Democrat comrades have been shot’.⁷⁸ The Mensheviks’ Central Bureau also wrote to Lenin, asking for the ‘honest legalization’ of their party, but Lenin’s only response was to consign their appeal ‘to the archives’.⁷⁹ All that was left for the Mensheviks was to try, even from afar, to save something of the values of the revolution of February 1917 through their journal Sotsialisticheskii vestnik (Socialist Messenger), published first in Berlin, then in Paris and, when the war came, in New York, where it closed in 1965, as there were no more old Mensheviks left to run it.

The Bolsheviks meanwhile tightened the screws. It was not only the Menshevik leaders who were being imprisoned and exiled; rank and file members of the Party, most of them of the intelligentsia, were suffering various punishments and persecution. The radical wing of the revolution was finishing off the democratic wing. Not that the Mensheviks were blameless. They had not done well in the election to the Constituent Assembly, they had failed to rally significant numbers of liberal forces, and they had failed to get across the ideas they had advocated for decades. Theirs was a sad fate. With the help of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, Russian Social Democracy died both inside and outside the country quietly and unnoticed. Some of the Social Democrats, it is true, changed direction under the impact of international events. For instance, in 1936, in Paris, Dan recognized the Soviet Union as the main bulwark against fascism. He published Novyi mir (New World), and then after escaping in March 1940 to New York, aged seventy, he retired as chairman of the Foreign Delegation and as editor of Sotsialisticheskii vestnik and launched Novyi put’ (New Way). His break with Menshevism was complete by 1943. In Novyi put’ he as it were rehabilitated Stalin. In his last book, The Origins of Bolshevism, published in 1946, the old adversary of totalitarianism suddenly saw something positive in the forced collectivization of agriculture, and found himself unable fully to condemn the show trials of the 1930s, or the Hitler – Stalin Pact of 1939. He even stated that ‘the internal organic democratization of the Soviet system was not curtailed at its emergence’.⁸⁰ Dan’s capitulation was complete.

Thus ended the Bolshevik – Menshevik struggle. The Mensheviks had seen democracy as an end, the Bolsheviks merely as a means. The Bolsheviks wanted to create a mighty, enclosed party, while the Mensheviks had wanted a party or association of liberally thinking people who rejected coercion.