Lenin: A biography

Fedor Dan opened the meeting, and the Bolsheviks and Left Socialist Revolutionaries – a splinter from the main Party and more in harmony with the Bolsheviks – took up their places on the platform in proportion to the number of their delegates. The Mensheviks refused to occupy the four places allotted to them, in protest against the Bolshevik seizure of power that had taken place the previous night. Martov called out that it was a time for common sense to prevail, for the coup to be repudiated and for talks to take place to form a coalition government. It looked as if the Congress might swing his way, but then Trotsky made a speech which saved Lenin’s line, and the delegates swung sharply to the left. His voice hoarse from a cold and from his incessant smoking, Martov’s nerve snapped and he declared: ‘We’re leaving!’ His supporters shouted and stamped their feet in the face of their defeat. It was not the Bolsheviks who had snuffed out Martov’s candle: it was his own decision to leave the Congress.

There had never been a place for Martov in the order created by Lenin at the beginning of the century. Lenin personified the leadership of an iron vangard; Martov was a Russian Don Quixote who expected a following not of Party troops but of an amorphous association. Lenin had proved the better leader, always with his eye on the political goal, while Martov, a naive romantic, had been sustained by the idea of injecting democratic values into the socialist programme.

Widely regarded as one of the most intelligent, and most approachable, of the best-known members of the RSDLP, Martov was born in 1873 into a middle-class Russian Jewish family in Constantinople, where his father was engaged in commerce and acting as the Turkish correspondent for two leading St Petersburg journals. His mother was Viennese, and the atmosphere in the Tsederbaum household was one of liberal enlightenment and tolerance. In 1877 the family moved back to Odessa.

The early 1880s in Russia was a time of mounting hostility to all things foreign, as the assassination of Alexander II in March 1881 had prompted the widespread belief that Russia’s new social evil was of foreign, Western origin. As a child Martov witnessed the atmosphere of hatred against the Jews when a pogrom was unleashed in Odessa, and however wholeheartedly he was to become a part of the Russian revolutionary movement, he never lost the sense that he had come from, and would remain part of, an oppressed and despised minority. The family moved to St Petersburg in 1882, and in 1889, when he was sixteen, Julius entered high school, where he formed strong bonds of friendship with the sons of the intelligentsia he found there.97

He was already a committed Populist when he was admitted to St Petersburg University in 1891, and he was soon arrested for voicing seditious ideas. Released after several months, he was expelled from the university, and in 1893 was rearrested and sentenced to two years’ exile from St Petersburg and any other university city. He spent 1893–95 in Vilna (Vilnius), which was both the centre of traditional East European Jewish culture and a hotbed of working-class organization. Martov arrived just at the moment when the leaders of Jewish workers’ groups were changing their tactics from intensive teaching circles to mass agitation. That is, instead of raising the general educational level of a few workers, who then tended to want to enter the ranks of the intelligentsia themselves, or to exploit their new-found culture to acquire professional qualifications, the idea was to gather large numbers of workers at secret meeting places and to convey one or two simple ideas, such as the injustice of low wages or poor conditions, and thus hope to ‘agitate’ them sufficiently to take strike action or to demonstrate for better conditions.

The new approach was highly successful, and when Martov returned to the capital in 1895, he spread these ideas. With Lenin, whom he met at that time, he formed the Union for the Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class, but in 1896, like his new comrade, he was arrested and exiled to Siberia. Released in 1900, he went abroad and collaborated with Lenin, Potresov, Plekhanov and Axelrod on their new newspaper, Iskra. Until 1903 it seemed Martov and Lenin were the perfect team. They each brought to the partnership experience in the organization of illegal groups and the formulation of ideas for wide consumption which, together with Plekhanov’s more sophisticated writing, created a newspaper that many workers, intellectuals and local organizers were eager to read, risking arrest and Siberian exile for the privilege. What Martov did not know, however, was that during these years of preparation Lenin had been encouraging his agents to use any means necessary to detach local social democratic committees from their existing loyalties, and to make them acknowledge Iskra as the sole ideological and organizational centre of Party activity. Martov naturally wanted Iskra to prosper, but he conceived of the forthcoming Second Party Congress as an opportunity to bind all of the existing social democratic elements into a single, broad-based party. It was only in the course of the Congress itself that he realised that Lenin’s idea was to exclude from the Party all but those elements which acknowledged the editors of Iskra as the leadership.

At the Second Congress, which took place in Brussels and London in the summer of 1903, it appeared that Martov’s prospects were bright. After Plekhanov, he emerged as the most significant delegate, although Lenin’s voice became more confident as he gained supporters. Millions of Soviet citizens, schooled in a history smoothed beyond recognition, believed that the split in 1903 into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks was over the organizational question – or, more precisely, point one of the Party Statutes on membership. Schoolmasters, professors and army commissars all parroted, ‘Lenin wanted to create a party-citadel, a party-fighting unit. Martov preferred to create an amorphous, diffuse formation which could never have achieved Communist aims.’ Ironically, the last point was undoubtedly true. As for the ‘party-citadel’, that was not Lenin’s aim. The real issue was whether the Party was to be an order or a democratic body. Lenin was proposing that a member would support the Party by material means as well as by ‘personal participation in one of the Party organizations’. Martov’s formula was less rigorous: apart from material support, a member was obliged to give the Party ‘regular personal support under the guidance of one of its organizations’. According to Stalin’s Short Course on the history of the Party, Martov wanted to ‘open the door wide to unstable non-proletarian elements … These people would not be part of the organization, nor be subject to Party discipline or carry out Party tasks, nor face the associated dangers. Yet Martov … was proposing to recognize such people as Party members.’98 Stalin perhaps also believed it was an ‘organizational question’. Political ‘softness’, for Martov, meant not only a readiness to compromise, it also signified understanding the need for a union with high morality. And it was this, not the organizational question, that separated him from Lenin forever: the conflict was dominated by moral rather than political imperatives.

Martov, who had previously been in step with Lenin and had voted with him on all the points of the programme, suddenly ‘rebelled’ during the twenty-second session, not only over the membership issue, but on almost everything else. His rebellion was to last for the rest of his life. Although Lenin’s proposal received twenty-three votes to Martov’s twenty-eight, Lenin dominated in all further contests.

As we have seen, Martov virtually began his political life as an activist among the Jewish Social Democrats who were to found the Jewish Workers’ Union (known by its Yiddish name as the Bund) in 1897. In terms of scale alone, the Bund was to become an impressive social force. In 1904 it could count more than 20,000 members, or more than twice the number in the ‘Russian’ Party organizations.99 For Martov in the early 1890s, the Jewish organizations had seemed the most important force for attaining civil equality for the Jews.100 By the time of the Second Congress, however, he had become strongly opposed to what he now saw as Jewish separatism. The Bund, however, supported Martov at the Congress against Lenin until the majority of the delegates voted against giving it the status of sole representative of the Jewish workers in the RSDLP. Together with the delegates of Workers’ Cause, another dissident group, the five Bundists walked out, leaving Martov’s side a true minority.

In his relations with the young Vladimir Ulyanov, Martov had begun to observe certain features which in the end would make the chasm between them unbridgeable. He mentioned this in his ‘Notes of a Social Democrat’, which was published in Berlin, remarking that Lenin ‘did not yet have, or had in lesser measure, the confidence in his own strength – never mind in his historical calling – that was to emerge so clearly in his mature years … He was then twenty-five or twenty-six years old … and he was not yet full of the scorn and distrust of people which, I believe, is what made him into a certain type of leader.’101

In practice, until the revolution of 1917, Lenin strove for his main idea of creating a monolithic, centralized party. He never doubted that he would indeed come to power, and what would follow. The Party-order would already be in existence. It would not evaporate. Was this not a threat to the future? He did not think so, and anyone who did was worthy only to join Martov. All those in favour of an iron guard, and willing to fight and smash, were welcome in his party; those who were not could go to Martov’s ‘flabby monster’.102

Lenin went on disputing with Martov right up to October 1917, if a constant stream of abuse can be called disputing. Martov was intransigent. Inclined by nature to compromise, he felt no urge for conciliation. He had long ago come to believe that the socialism Lenin wanted had nothing in common with justice, or moral principles, or the humane origins of socialist thinking. Knowing he had already lost, he summed up the ‘interim’ accounts of 1917 in horror. He wrote to a friend, N.S. Kristi:

It is not merely the deep belief that it is senselessly utopian to try to plant socialism in an economically and culturally backward country, but also my organic inability to accept the Arakcheev-style [barracks] concept of socialism and the Pugachev-style [violent] notion of class struggle which are being generated by the very fact that they are trying to plant a European ideal in Asiatic soil. The resulting bouquet is hard to take. For me, socialism was never the denial of individual freedom and individualism, but on the contrary, their highest embodiment, and the principle of collectivism I always saw as opposed to ‘the herd instinct’ and levelling … What is happening here is the flourishing of a ‘trench – barracks’ variety of quasi-socialism, based on the ‘simplification’ of everything … 103

Martov’s internationalist wartime position of ‘revolutionary defencism’ contrasted markedly with Lenin’s defeatism and Plekhanov’s patriotism, and was perhaps a truer and more noble one to take. The outbreak of war found Martov in Paris. In his small newspaper, Golos (The Voice), and later in Nashe slovo (Our Word), his constant cry was ‘Long live peace! Enough blood! Enough senseless slaughter!’ He maintained this position after returning to Petrograd in May 1917, arguing against defeatism and against turning the war into a civil war, but also against chauvinism, and so he was often under attack from both sides. I.G. Tsereteli, a Social Democrat who played a leading rôle in 1917, recalled Martov saying in the summer of that year: ‘Lenin is not interested in questions of war and peace. The only thing that interests him is the revolution, and the only real revolution for him is the one in which the Bolsheviks have seized power.’ Martov wondered what Lenin would do if the democrats, i.e. the Provisional Government, managed to make peace: ‘He would no doubt change his tactics and preach to the masses that all the post-war misfortunes were due to the criminal democrats because they ended the war too soon and didn’t have the courage to carry it on to the final destruction of German imperialism.’104

In June 1918 the Executive Committee of Soviets (VTsIK) voted to expel the Right SRs and Mensheviks. When they were asked to leave the meeting, Martov leapt up and began shouting curses at the ‘dictators’, ‘bonapartists’, ‘usurpers’, ‘putschists’, all the while struggling unsuccessfully to get his coat on. Lenin stood, white-faced, watching in silence. A Left SR sitting next to Martov began laughing and poking his finger at Martov, who, coughing and shouting, managed at last to get his coat on and leave, turning as he did so to hurl at his mirthful tormentor: ‘You may laugh now, young man, but give it three months and you’ll be following us.’105

Martov nevertheless remained an orthodox Marxist all his life. He believed that the socialist revolution could be an innovative and refreshing act of creativity, but he could not accept the Leninist monopoly and the Bolsheviks’ reliance on coercion and terror. In defeat, he naively believed that the revolution could be clean and moral and bright. When Red and White Terror clashed to produce a monstrous wave of violence, Martov wrote a pamphlet called ‘Down with the Death Penalty’. In it, he stated:

As soon as the Bolsheviks came to power, having announced the end of the death penalty, from the very first day they started killing prisoners taken in battle during the civil war, as all savages do. To kill enemies who have surrendered in battle on the promise that their lives will be spared … The death penalty has been abolished, but in every town and district various extraordinary commissions and military – revolutionary committees have sentenced hundreds and hundreds of people to be shot … This bloody debauchery is being carried out in the name of socialism, in the name of the teaching which proclaimed the brotherhood of people labouring for the highest goal of humanity … A party of death penalties is as much an enemy of the working class as a party of pogroms.106

As if to prove Martov right, in November 1923, after his death, the Politburo reviewed the ‘Turkestan question’. Central Committee member Jan Rudzutak, a Latvian, reported that Basmachi (anti-Bolshevik forces) chieftains had been invited to talks with the local Soviet authorities. They had been promised their lives were not in danger, and that a special conference would find ways of settling the conflict peacefully. One hundred and eighty-three chieftains had turned up. They were arrested at once, and 151 of them were sentenced to be shot. The first on the list had already been executed when Moscow intervened. The Politburo regarded the action as ‘inopportune’, nothing worse.107

If Martov’s arguments were moral, Lenin’s were purely pragmatic. On 31 January 1922 he wrote to Unshlikht: ‘I cannot possibly attend the Politburo. I’m feeling worse. But I don’t think there’s any need for me. It’s only a matter of purely technical measures to help our judges intensify (and speed up) repression against the Mensheviks …’108 Martov had no hope of influencing the Bolshevik leadership towards humanizing their policies. If his political death was noisy, his physical death was quiet and sad, like a guttering candle. Seriously ill, in the autumn of 1920 he was allowed by the Politburo to leave for Germany, where he founded Sotsialisticheskii vestnik. In his last article, he foresaw that the Bolsheviks would leave the scene and be replaced in Russia by a ‘democratic regime ruled by law’. He died of tuberculosis on 24 April 1923, not yet aged fifty. Perhaps it was as much the collapse of all his ideas as his constant smoking that killed him off.109

People like Martov wanted the course of revolution to be like a river, peaceful, smooth and broad, while Lenin’s followers saw it as a waterfall, cascading from on high. The party Lenin created soon became an order, after October 1917 a state order. Not a monastic or chivalrous order, but an ideological one, and until his death nobody had the slightest doubt that Lenin had the absolute right to be the master of this order. He had not, however, taken account of the fact that a party such as his could survive only within a totalitarian system, a fact demonstrated by the events of August 1991.

* Vyacheslav Plehve, Nicholas II’s Interior Minister, was assassinated in 1904. Peter Stolypin was the Prime Minister from 1906 until he was assassinated – in the tsar’s presence – in 1911.

* Larin, whose real name was Mikhail Lurie, was a top official in the economic apparatus. Alexei Rykov was in charge of the Council for the National Economy.

3 The Scar of October

On the evening of 1 August 1914, Germany declared war on Russia. When mobilization was declared, the whole nation rallied to the tsar. Plekhanov expressed a strong desire to defend the fatherland, and even Trotsky, who was not a defencist, wrote in the Paris newspaper Nashe slovo (Our Word) (formerly Golos, The Voice) that to preach the defeat of tsarist Russia made no sense, since that would mean advocating the victory of reactionary Germany. Only Lenin sensed intuitively the improbable, fantastic chance of achieving his hopes.

As patriotism sank in the mud and blood of the trenches, and hopes for victory faded, Lenin grew confident that neither Tsar Nicholas nor Kaiser Wilhelm would emerge from the war without a revolution. The intelligentsia, both in Russia and Germany, cursed the war and called for peace. But while each side hoped that its own army would not be defeated, only Lenin saw the war as an indispensable ally.

Unlike the peasant in his soldier’s cloak, enduring gas attacks, or the prisoner of war in Saxony, or the impoverished family in the city, Lenin observed the war from the Russian émigré’s grand circle, at first in Poronino and Vienna, and then in the neutral comfort of Berne and Zurich. How did the leader of the future Russian revolution fill the time during its prologue? Did he prepare himself for the rôle he was to play? Was he confident of the outcome? Until the February revolution, he led the quiet life of a man used to living far from home and not very much concerned with domestic cares. Life for Lenin in those years meant writing hundreds of letters to a relatively limited circle of people, among them his close Bolshevik associates Alexander Shlyapnikov, Alexandra Kollontai, Karl Radek, Grigory Pyatakov, S. Ravich, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, and his friend and benefactor Maxim Gorky. A large part of his correspondence was with Inessa Armand, he being in Zurich, she in Clarens on Lake Geneva near Montreux. It was an emotionally charged exchange between two very close people who, though they discussed revolutionary matters, tried to give each other something more than routine reports, more than confirmation of the posting of books or organizing links between Russia and Scandinavia.

Lenin spent a lot of time studying the works of Hegel, Aristotle and Lassalle, as well as Napoleon and Clausewitz, he read Victor Hugo’s poetry and occasionally took Krupskaya to the local theatre. They were able to relax at a moderately priced spa in the mountain resort of Flums in St Gallen. When he was not writing letters, resting, holding meetings, travelling or rowing with his opponents, Lenin wrote articles, pamphlets and more substantial works such as ‘Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism’. Since the post from Russia was slow, he got his news from The Times, Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Le Temps, and he gained the growing impression that an earthquake was approaching in Russia. The nation’s weariness of the hardships imposed by the war and constant defeats was reaching a critical point, although what lay beyond even Lenin did not suspect.

In early January 1917 he gave a lecture at the People’s House in Zurich on the twelfth anniversary of the 1905 revolution. The audience, mostly students, was sparse, and the lecture was boring, prolonged and largely descriptive. Lenin emphasized the fact that in 1905 the scale of civil unrest had been insufficient to topple the autocracy: ‘The peasants burned up to 2000 estates and divided the livestock among themselves … Unfortunately, this was only one-fifteenth of what they ought to have destroyed … They did not act with sufficient aggression, and that is one of the main causes for the failure of the revolution.’ He rushed on speedily through his notes, expressing the view that 1905 would remain ‘the prologue to the approaching European revolution’. He did not mention Russia as the scene of imminent rebellion, and also declared that the revolution would not come soon, concluding: ‘We old folks may not live to see the decisive battles of the coming revolution.’1

Democratic February

The two chief causes of the February revolution were the unsuccessful progress of the war and the weakness of the regime. Ostensibly, the Russian state collapsed suddenly, but its foundations had been eroded long before. As for the war, despite strategic failures, Russia’s position was not hopeless. The front had been stabilized far from the Russian capital and other vital centres. A breakthrough by General Brusilov in the summer of 1916 had given the people hope in the possibility of an honourable outcome. Far-sighted politicians saw that Germany could not win, especially as the United States seemed likely to enter the war on the Allied side.

To be sure, Social Democratic agitation had its effect on the war-weary army, and the Germans managed to get Bolshevik-style propaganda into the Russian trenches, which would help the Kaiser rather than Russia. President of the Duma Rodzianko wrote in his memoirs that ‘the symptoms of the army’s disintegration could be felt already in the second year of the war … Reinforcements from reserve battalions were arriving at the front with a quarter of the men having deserted … Sometimes, echelons bound for the front would halt because they had nothing left but officers and subalterns. Everyone else had scattered.’2 Socialist agitation among the peasants who were unwilling to fight was extremely effective, and the Bolsheviks were making their own independent contribution to the disintegration of the Russian army. On the whole, however, Russia had not yet exhausted her material and human resources on a war that came to seem increasingly just as the German occupation of her territory endured, especially since it was Germany that had started the war.

But the regime proved incapable of governing in a critical situation. Nicholas II’s decision on 6 August 1915 to assume the post of Supreme Commander did not help. Almost the entire cabinet of ministers had protested that the tsar’s decision could threaten both him and the monarchy.3 Nicholas was adamant, however, and departed for Staff Headquarters, leaving the capital to the hostile and venal groupings that had formed in his own entourage. In a country accustomed to one-man rule, the ‘domestic peace’ proclaimed by the Duma when war broke out soon evaporated.

Events in the capital developed their own momentum. On 27 February (12 March New Style) 1917, crowds broke into the Tauride Palace, where a Provisional Committee of the Duma was meeting. By the evening of the same day another claimant to power had emerged, namely the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, hastily convened by the Party organizations. Paul Milyukov, the leader of the Constitutional Democrats, and soon to become Foreign Minister in the post-tsarist government, later wrote: ‘The soldiers appeared last, but they were the masters of the moment, even if they did not realize it themselves.’ They did not behave like conquerors, but rather like men fearful of the consequences of having disobeyed orders and killed their commanding officers. ‘They were even less sure than we that the revolution had succeeded. They wanted recognition and protection.’4