The Revolutionist [according to Nechaev's program] is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property nor even a name of his own. His entire being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion—the revolution. . . . Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he has severed every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world; with the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose-to destroy it. . . . He despises public opinion. He hates and despises the social morality of his time, its motives and manifestations. Everything which promotes the success of the revolution is moral, everything which hinders it is immoral. . . . The nature of the true revolutionist excludes all romanticism, all tenderness, all ecstasy, all love.2

When a student member of the group, one Ivanov, turned unruly, Nechaev persuaded four other members to carry out an alleged order of the "committee" to get rid of the dangerous enemy. On November 21, 1869, Ivanov was killed in the cellar of the Petrov Academy. The society was soon apprehended, and 67 men were brought to trial. Nechaev himself escaped to Switzerland, where he lived illegally for several years until he was extradited to Russia as a common criminal. In Russia he was tried in 1872 and sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment. The leader of the second revolutionary group was Peter Tkachev, a Russian émigré and outstanding political writer of the 1870's. Tkachev took up residence in Switzerland after spending over a year in prison.

Neither in the present nor in the future [he wrote] can the people, left to their own resources, bring into existence the social revolution. Only we revolutionists can accomplish this. . . . Social ideals are alien to the people; they belong to the social philosophy of the revolutionary minority.

We should not deceive ourselves [said Tkachev] that the people, by its own might, can make a social revolution and organize its life on a better foundation. The people, of course, is necessary for a social revolution. But only when the revolutionary minority assumes the leadership in this revolution.

*

Then, utilizing its authority, the minority introduces new progressive and Communist ideas into life. In its work of reformation, the revolutionary minority need not rely upon the active support of the people. The revolutionary role of the people ends the instant they have destroyed the institutions which oppressed them, the instant they have overthrown the tyrants and exploiters who ruled over them. . . .*

The first Russian Marxist group emerged among Russian émigrés in 1883. This was the "Liberation of Labor," whose outstanding leaders were Georgi Plekhanov and Paul Axelrod. For a long time, however,

'S. Nechaev and M. Bakunin, Catechism of a Revolutionist, as quoted in David Shub, Lenin (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1948), p. 11.

'Peter Tkachev, as quoted in Bertram D. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution (New York; The Dial Press, 1948), p. 156.

Tkachev, as quoted in Shub, op. cit., pp. 54 and 14.

the group exerted little influence upon Russian intellectuals, and it was not until the early 1890's that it began to achieve its first successes in the revolutionary underground. Putting their hopes and expectations in the industrial workers, the Marxists had to oppose the old Populist philosophy. "The revolutionary movement [Plekhanov wrote] can triumph only as a revolutionary movement of the working class. There is not, nor can there be, any other way."

The Marxists were able to win numerous followers in Russia and, by the end of the 1890's, to constitute themselves a political party. A small conference held in Minsk in March 1898 (later called the First Party Congress) announced the formation of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP). One of the pioneers of Marxism inside Russia was a young man by the name of Vladimir Ulyanov, known to history as Lenin.

2. Vladimir Lenin and the Origins of Bolshevism

Vladimir Ulyanov was born on April 22, 1870, into the family of a school inspector in Simbirsk, on the Volga. The five children-three boys and two girls-received a good education. Vladimir, an able and industrious student, had been imbued with revolutionary ideas from early youth, as had his two brothers and two sisters. The execution of his brother Alexander in 1887 was a strong factor in the development of his extreme revolutionary inclinations. At the age of 17, within a few months after he had entered Kazan University, he was arrested and expelled because of his political activity. For the next few years he lived at home. In 1891 he was permitted to take the examinations in law at the St. Petersburg University; he passed the examinations and was thereafter admitted to the bar. Two years later he joined a pioneer Marxist ("Social-Democratic") circle in the capital. In April 1895 he went abroad for several months. In Switzerland and France he met a number of political émigrés, among them the two founders of Russian Marxism, Plekhanov and Axelrod. When he returned to Russia in the fall of the same year, the 25-year-old Lenin was a mature political leader of considerable stature.

The years that followed witnessed a large wave of strikes of Russian industrial workers; the strikes were unprecedented. Small socialist groups emerged-students' and workers' organizations for propaganda and Marxist education. Lenin was active in these circles until he was again arrested. He spent 14 months in prison and on his release was deported to Siberia and did not return to Europe until 1900, when a new

*The Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party is also referred to in this work as the RSDRP, the initials of the Russian name of the party, Rossiiskaya Sotsial-Demokraticheskaya Rabochaya Partiya.

wave of the oppositionist and revolutionist movement was in progress. After a short period in Russia, Lenin left for Germany and Switzerland, where, with a few friends (Plekhanov, Axelrod, Martov, Potresov, Zasulich), he started the newspaper Iskra (The Spark) in December 1900. The paper was intended for illegal distribution in Russia and to serve to link the emerging underground groups there with the leading group abroad.

Lenin and the other Russian Marxist leaders took over from Marx the philosophy of the great "social revolution" which would put an end to the era of capitalism and inaugurate the epoch of socialism-communism. The main force in this revolution would be the industrial working class, and the leaders would be the Marxist party. The victory of the social revolution would establish a temporary "dictatorship of the proletariat”—another slogan taken over from Marx. Suppression of adversaries by every means, although never emphasized, was part of the new philosophy.

In its application to Russia, this theory was modified by its Russian adherents. Backward Russia, unlike the advanced nations, was suffering "not so much from capitalism as from its insufficient development"; Russia must first experience a capitalist phase, develop new industries, increase the size of its "proletariat" and go through the motions of a "bourgeois democracy" before the social revolution could come about. Russia was "to boil in the capitalist kettle." Lenin vehemently disputed the thesis of the Populists that the Russian peasantry could serve as the basis of a socialist transformation. His main work (actually his only serious economic work) entitled Development of Capitalism in Russia, written in 1896-99 attacked the Russian "utopian" socialists; it depicted a long course of economic growth under capitalist conditions, the formation of new classes, differentiation of the peasantry into various strata, etc.

In July 1903 a new convention (officially termed the Second Congress) of the RSDLP was held. It opened in Brussels, but was transferred to London when the Belgian police requested the delegates to leave. The conference, which lasted about a month, is generally viewed as marking the birth of bolshevism. Of the two factions which opposed one another at the Congress, the extreme leftist (Leninist) group, had a relative numerical though unstable advantage and was therefore called Bolsheviki (a word coined by Lenin from Bolshinstvo, meaning the majority). The other faction were the Mensheviks (minority). More or less in accord in their political philosophy and long-range aims, the two groups were violently opposed in regard to ways and means of action, that is, "tactics" and organizational issues.

In the political strategy of the emerging Bolshevik movement the central role was to be that of the "professional revolutionist”—the revolu

tionist who devotes himself entirely to his political and party work. The party itself must be a strictly disciplined small union of adherents acting on orders from the supreme body, the party's Central Committee.

the organisation must consist chiefly of persons engaged in revolutionary activity as a profession . . . in a country with an autocratic government, the more we restrict the membership of this organisation to persons who are engaged in revolutionary activities as a profession and who have been professionally trained in the art of combating the political police, the more difficult will it be to catch the organisation.

*

The most grievous sin we have committed in regard to organisation is that by our primitiveness we have lowered the prestige of revolutionaries in Russia. A man who is weak and vacillating on theoretical questions, who has a narrow outlook, who makes excuses for his own slackness on the ground that the masses are awakening spontaneously, who resembles a trade union secretary more than a people's tribune, who is unable to conceive of a broad and bold plan, who is incapable of inspiring even his opponents with respect for himself, and who is inexperienced and clumsy in his own professional art-the art of combating the political police-such a man is not a revolutionary but a wretched amateur!"

And then Lenin proceeded to formulate a slogan which best expressed his belief in the power of an underground conspiracy to overturn the political system of a great country:

"Give us an organisation of revolutionaries, and we shall overturn the whole of Russia!"?

We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and are under their almost constant fire. We have combined voluntarily, precisely for the purpose of fighting the enemy, and not to retreat into the adjacent marsh, the inhabitants of which, from the very outset, have reproached us with having separated ourselves into an exclusive group and with having chosen the path of struggle instead of the path of conciliation.

Lenin's concepts of the role of the party in a sense forecast the party's assumption of dictatorial power after the revolution had been accomplished.

In its development up to the revolution of 1917, bolshevism followed Leninist theories and endowed the party leaders with dictatorial power. In 1904, long before the revolution, young Leon Trotsky, then a violent opponent of Lenin, had complained in a pamphlet, Our Political Aims, that in Lenin's scheme:

"V. I. Lenin, "What Is To Be Done?" (1901-02), Selected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1943), vol. II, pp. 139, 141.

Ibid., p. 141.

'Ibid., p. 33.

the party organization takes the place of the party, the Central Committee replaces the party organization and finally the "dictator" replaces the Central Committee."

After the successful Bolshevik revolution in 1917, the party's Central Committee did indeed become the new government, while Lenin, the supreme leader of the party, took on the stature of a dictator.

To understand the Communist conception of the role of the party, we must draw

an analogy between the Bolshevik party and the officer corps of an army. The rank-and-file soldiers, comprising at times millions of men, are merely the material in the hands of the commanders. A few thousand officers, trained from youth and making it their career, constitute the nucleus of a modern army, which, when necessary, is transformed, through mobilization, into a vast force of many millions. When this army is again contracted to a minimum, a great part of the officer cadres may be maintained. The rebirth of the German army after Versailles became possible only because the army was given the right to maintain four thousand officers. Such has always been the Bolshevik concept of a party: an officer corps which organizes its army; not a party according to the Western idea, which chooses its commanders. Soldiers do not choose their own generals.

The Bolshevik idea of a party is akin to the steel framework in modern architecture. The framework is erected first; then it is covered with bricks. Sometimes, even, the brickwork may be removed and a new building erected upon the old steel framework. To be sure, it is impossible to attain the objective without support from the masses, just as it is impossible to live in a structure consisting only of steel girders and rafters. But everything rests upon a framework. The party is the framework and the people are the necessary, but secondary, element.10

In this Bolshevist view of the relationship of party and people there was implied the development of bolshevism into a secluded order of "professional revolutionaries" guided by a single aim and recognizing no legal or ethical barriers to achieving the good of the party:

Fifty years ago... the Bolshevik party (at that time termed the Bolshevik faction) consisted of a few thousand men and women, devoted to their cause. The great majority were not workers-in all probability there were more members from the ranks of nonworker families than manual la

As the revolution developed, however, tens of thousands flowed into the various revolutionary parties, including that of the Bolsheviks. When the revolution had attained its high point-October-December, 1905 these parties, among them the Bolsheviks, had enrolled masses of people, with scores of organizations and countless sympathizers. Then,

'N. Trotsky [Leon Trotsky], Nashi Politicheskie Zadachi, Takticheskie i Organizatsionnye Voprosy (Our Political Aims, Tactical and Organizational Questions) (Geneva: published by the RSDLP, 1904), p. 54.

10

David J. Dallin, The Changing World of Soviet Russia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956), pp. 226, 227.

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