Progressive Labor Party aims to become a mass revolutionary party, with hundreds of thousands of members leading millions of workers in a violent communist revolution. Yet today our Party is very small. This is a contradiction! Since we are a Leninist party, it is important to recall how the Bolsheviks faced this same contradiction. 

At the beginning of the 20th-century, workers in Russia suffered under harsh work discipline, unsafe conditions, and great poverty. Between 1890 and 1910, the populations of St. Petersburg and Moscow nearly doubled, resulting in overcrowding and poverty for a new class of industrial workers. The Crimean War and subsequent conflicts led to food shortages across the vast empire. One famine killed 400,000 workers (History.com).

In January 1905, a workers’ protest was met with gunfire, killing hundreds. This “Bloody Sunday Massacre” unleashed a revolt and country-wide strikes. The first workers “soviets” (Russian for “councils”) were formed. In response, the Tsar’s government promised reforms, including worker delegates in a “duma,” or parliament. While many of these reforms would soon be withdrawn, the working class learned a valuable lesson. The Bolshevik Party, led by Vladimir Lenin, was proven correct. Reforms were limited and temporary; the whole rotten system needed to be overthrown.

Leading up to the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917, there were three periods of upsurge in the class struggle: in 1905, from 1912 to 1914, and earlier in 1917. During each one, they became a mass party of tens of thousands of workers and channeled the upsurge into a revolutionary situation. Each upsurge was preceded and (except for the last one) followed by a period of repression, a lull in the class struggle, and political retreat. 

Despite arrests, police infiltration, and mass withdrawal from their party, the Bolsheviks preserved their illegal revolutionary work throughout these periods of retreat. As a result, they were prepared for the next period of upsurge. To see how they did this, we will examine these periods in turn. The present article deals with the years around 1905.

Founded in 1898, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) began as a small group of intellectuals and a few workers in St. Petersburg (later Leningrad, now St. Petersburg again). Most of its leaders wanted to open it to everyone who “considered himself a member.” To attract the greatest number of militants and radicals, they argued, they needed a loosely organized party that focused on immediate reforms and downplayed the call for revolution. 

The RSDLP’s model was the German Social-Democratic Party (German abbreviation SPD). This was the largest of all the parties in the Second International, which had been founded in 1889. The SPD was based in legal trade unions and included many members from the petty bourgeoisie. 

Reformism and class betrayal

Despite its roots in revolutionary Marxism, the SPD worked for legal reforms. It abandoned the goal of revolution and proposed that capitalism could be voted out of existence or could gradually evolve into socialism, which was seen as an intermediate step toward communism. The Second International held an important debate over this question. The SPD’s political bankruptcy is portrayed in Jack London’s 1907 novel, The Iron Heel. 

When the First World War broke out in 1914, “socialist” parties like the SPD abandoned internationalism and supported their own ruling classes, sending their members off to kill their class brothers.  In 1918, SPD leaders worked with the German Army to kill the revolutionary leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karla Liebknecht, who had quit the sellout SPD and formed the Spartacus League. 

Lenin and a Party of professional revolutionaries 

Lenin insisted on an entirely different approach:

I assert 1) that no revolutionary movement can endure without a stable organization of leaders that maintains continuity; 2) that the wider the masses are spontaneously drawn into the struggle … the more urgent the need of such an organization, and the more solid this organization must be ... 3) that such an organization must consist chiefly of people professionally engaged in revolutionary activity... (What Is To Be Done, 1903)

Lenin believed that “opening the floodgates” of party membership would reinforce opportunism and reformism. Arguing that militancy must be led by revolutionary theory, he advocated for democratic centralism, the subordination of all party members to the general revolutionary line and to the party’s leading organs,composed of dedicated and experienced revolutionaries.

Lenin insisted that revolutionary activity was essentially illegal, regardless of what the laws said, and it was therefore essential to develop underground and secret work. Bolsheviks concentrated their efforts on organizing among the working class. The young Joseph Stalin spent years organizing workers in the Caucasus and publishing illegal Bolshevik materials, for which he was several times exiled to Siberia.

In 1903, the RSDLP split into Bolshevik and Menshevik factions. Despite their name (“Bolshevik” means “majority”), Lenin’s group was the smallest by far. In January 1905, there were at most 500 Bolsheviks in St. Petersburg, the center of Russia’s heavy industry, against 1,500 Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks were at least as outnumbered in the industrial Caucasus area.

The “Revolution of 1905”

In 1905, in a number of major cities, the workers set up “Councils (“soviets” in Russian) of Workers’ Deputies.”  In St. Petersburg, where the working class was the largest and most concentrated, the Mensheviks controlled the Soviet and cooperated with the liberal bourgeoisie. In Moscow, however, the Bolshevik-led Soviet went on the offensive, leading an armed insurrection in December 1905 that quickly spread to other cities before being crushed. During the same year, the RSDLP enrolled “tens of thousands of workers, students, intellectuals, and others” (Rigby) as class struggle mushroomed. 

By 1906, the Mensheviks, eager to work in the Tsar’s phony Duma (parliament), wanted to abolish all illegal revolutionary party work. Lenin, by contrast, insisted that this work was more vital than ever in a period of general retreat. In June 1907 came the “Stolypin reaction” and an end to liberalism. Most intellectuals quit the Party; many workers also left or were arrested. The Bolsheviks were left with “only a few thousand members” (though many were now factory workers), of whom only about 150 were seasoned cadres. But their discipline and struggle against all opportunism meant that the nucleus of future uprisings was preserved.

The experience of 1905 proved that a small but strictly disciplined party with a correct political line could turn an upsurge in class struggle into a revolutionary situation, recruiting thousands of workers and leading tens of thousands in armed struggle against capitalism. It also showed that opportunism can build a larger party  in the short run but eventually spells defeat for workers, even under favorable circumstances. The truth of this lesson would be hammered home again during the high tides of class struggle in 1912-14 and in 1917.

(Sources’ Rigby, T. H. Membership in the C.P.S.U.; McNeal, Bride of the Revolution; Lenin, What Is To Be Done? and other writings; History of the C.P.S.U.(b), Short Course)