On June 3, 1907, Premier Stolypin of the Russian Tsar’s government canceled the reforms that the regime had granted to contain the 1905 Revolution. Stung by the defeat of the armed uprising and betrayed by reformism, the Russian working class fell into several years of relative apathy.
But the 150 or so underground cadre of the Bolshevik party kept functioning illegally. Revolutionary work never stopped, despite the repression that for months at a time blocked contact with Lenin (in exile after November 1907) or even among Bolshevik committees within Russia.
The Bolsheviks ‘’retreated in good order,’’ as Lenin said. He and the underground Bolsheviks fought off demoralized internal forces that pushed for an alliance with the sellout Mensheviks, while thousands of others (including almost all of the intellectuals) quit the party. It was their perseverance in illegal revolutionary work, under the most dangerous and discouraging conditions, that set the stage for the dramatic Bolshevik upsurge from 1912 to 1914.
On April 4, 1912, in the Siberian gold fields, the Tsar’s troops shot down 500 workers. This atrocity sparked nationwide political strikes. A half-century later, Leopold Haimson, an anti-communist “expert” at Columbia University, acknowledged “the reception that the workers gave, as the war approached, to Bolshevik as against Menshevik appeals” (Slavic Review. 1964, p. 629).
After 1905, the Mensheviks’ aim was to become an officially tolerated and open labor party along the lines of the German Social-Democratic Party, the largest of all the parties in the Second International. The Mensheviks led such class-collaborationist labor organizations as the bourgeoisie permitted to exist.
Like the leaders of the AFL-CIO today, Menshevik leader Julius Martov hoped in 1909 for a more progressive Duma (parliament) to legally “protect” open labor unions. Since the Mensheviks wanted to abandon illegal revolutionary party work, the Bolsheviks called them “Liquidators” -- a label the Mensheviks accepted.
When the strike wave hit, the Mensheviks tried to hold it back. As the business journal Russian Review noted in 1913, “The Mensheviki point out the harmfulness of mere disorderly and inconsiderate striking” -- the bosses’ term for political strikes -- “but the movement continued its plunging, incalculable way.”
The working class rallied to the one and only force that had never yielded its opposition to capitalism: the Bolsheviks. Thousands of workers joined. Even the Menshevik lzgoev admitted that Pravda’s impact on the St. Petersburg working class in 1912 and 1913 was a “most impressive sight.”
The Mensheviks were driven from all positions of influence. In the fall of 1912 “Bolshevik candidates won in six of nine labor curiae (constituencies) in Russia, including all six of the labor curiae in the major industrial provinces” (Haimson, p. 630). They replaced Mensheviks in the Metalworkers’ Union, the workers’ insurance councils, by 1914, even in the “labor aristocracy,” the Petersburg Printers’ Union.
By July 1914, the Bolsheviks a significant majority of the governing boards of the trade unions in St. Petersburg and Moscow. At “a meeting of the Menshevik faction in the Duma, in late January, 1914, the Georgian deputy, Chkhenkeli, observed in an equally catastrophic vein that the Mensheviks appeared to be losing all of their influence, all of their ties, among the workers” (Haimson, Slavic Review, December 1964, p. 632).
Menshevik writers themselves admitted defeat. “Menshevism caught on too late to the reviving danger of Leninism,” wrote Martov in November 1912, “and overestimated the significance of its temporary wholesale disappearance.” As Bulkin, a Menshevik mis-leader of the Metalworkers Union said after being unseated:
Led by the Bolsheviks, the masses have chased the Liquidators, these valuable workers, out of all leading institutions … The experienced pilots of the labor movements have been replaced by ones who are inexperienced, but close in spirit to the masses . .. Bolshevism ... has found its support in the masses’ state of mind.
Unlike 1905, when the Mensheviks controlled the Soviet there, St. Petersburg (later Leningrad, now St. Petersburg again after the fall of the Soviet Union) was now the center for militancy. This was “undoubtedly in part,” concludes Haimson, “because of the Petersburg workers’ great exposure to Bolshevik propaganda and agitation,” and “a long-standing exposure to revolutionary and specifically Bolshevik indoctrination” (p. 637).
The Bolsheviks’ illegal work permitted them to continue. Police informers did succeed in penetrating their highest ranks. In July 1914, one Bolshevik Duma (parliament) delegate and three of the seven members of the Petersburg City Committee were cops. Dozens of arrests swept away leading cadres. “Yet even under these conditions the Bolshevik Party apparatus managed to survive, to retain some old and recruit some new members” (p. 637).
Lenin fought the ever-present opportunist tendency to neglect illegal work. As quoted by a secret police report, Lenin said:
Our victory, i.e., the victory of revolutionary Marxism, is great ... But this victory has its limits ... If we want to hold our positions and not allow the strengthening labor movement to escape the party’s sway ... we must strengthen, come what may, our underground organizations. We can give up a portion of the work in the State Duma which we have conducted so successfully to date, but it is imperative that we put to right the work outside the Duma.
In July 1914, the Bolsheviks called for a nationwide general strike. On July 9, rank-and-file Bolshevik workers insisted it was time ‘’finally and without delay to issue a call to go over to an armed uprising …” Their leaflet ended: “Our motto is -- hail the relentless struggle against the government and the capitalists! Down with capital! Comrades, get ready! Hail socialism!” A week of armed struggle ensued before the uprising was put down.
According to the anticommunist Leopold Haimson, even if World War I, which began two weeks later, had not further weakened the tsar’s monarchy, a Bolshevik-led socialist revolution was likely.(Slavic Review, March 1965, p. 1).
Next: The culminating upsurge of 1917.
