Zinoviev and a few younger Bolsheviks. To fight the ideological aberrations of his comrades, Lenin concentrated for a time on pure philosophy; in 1909 he wrote a critical essay, "Materialism and EmpirioCriticism."

The squabble among the remnants of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party abroad reached its last stage in 1912; a small Bolshevik conference, convened in Prague in January 1912, put an end to coexistence with the Mensheviks.40 Of the 15 delegates who attended, 3 were police agents. But the Central Committee elected at the conference was, finally, a pure Bolshevik body. Among the members elected at the conference were Grigori Zinoviev and the police undercover agent, Roman Malinovski; on Lenin's suggestion, Stalin, still little known in Bolshevik ranks, was admitted ("co-opted") to the leading body after the conference ended.

The eight Bolshevik deputies in the State Duma constituted the only "legal" representation of the party in Russia but, their intellectual horizon being limited, the level of their political pronouncements was primitive. The few trade unions still existing, remnants of the revolutionary years, were another field of Bolshevik activity in Russia. Though organized mainly under Menshevik leadership, the unions were "utilized" to some extent by the Bolsheviks as a legal cover for political activity. The Bolshevik attitude toward the trade union movement tended to subordinate it to the party's committees; these tactics had been elaborated by Lenin in 1906-07. Lenin opposed the independence of the trade unions from the party; he advocated “as close as possible and lasting ties between the trade unions and the Social-Democratic [Bolshevik] party." "Closest rapprochement between trade unions and the party is the only correct principle," he said in 1907.11

7. Stalin's Emergence

A degree of political revival, after 5 years of recess, began in 1912, especially after the strike of gold miners in the Lena fields in Siberia. Local troops had opened fire on the striking workers, killing more than 200. As the news spread over the country, political strikes broke out for the first time since the revolutionary era. This new upsurge of the revolutionary movement, however, remained limited.

The Bolsheviks took part in the elections to the fourth Duma in 1912. Six of the deputies of the Duma (which was to last until the revolution of 1917) belonged to the Bolshevik faction. Among the Bolshevik

40 From 1912, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks had separate organizations, each claiming to be the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party.

"Lenin, Predislovie k Sborniku "Za Dvenadtsat Let" (Preface to the Collection of Articles "For Twelve Years") (September 1907), Sochineniya, vol. XIII (1947), p. 92.

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deputies, Roman Malinovski was the most active. An undercover agent of the police, he had entered the legislature with the approval of his police superiors. His fiery speeches against the government, often written or edited by Bolshevik leaders abroad, were made with the consent of the chiefs of police. A large number of revolutionaries of various groups, known to Malinovski, among them Stalin and Bukharin, were betrayed, arrested, and deported. When a new chief of police decided that an end must be put to this situation, Malinovski was ordered to quit the Duma. He resigned. Rumors about the agent-provacateur began to spread. Lenin refused to believe that one of his best men inside Russia was a traitor, and he protected Malinovski by his authority. It was not until 1917, when the police archives were opened by the new regime, that the truth came out. Malinovski was executed in 1918.

In the years 1912-13 a new leader was rising who was eventually to reach the summit of party power-Iosif (Joseph) Dzhugashvili (alias Stalin), who had belonged to the Bolshevik movement since its very beginnings but was little known beyond Social-Democratic circles in the Caucasus and did not become a member of the central party bodies until February 1912. Dzhugashvili, who was born in December 1879 in Gori, Georgia, was the son of a cobbler; his mother was the daughter of a former serf. He entered a parochial school in 1888 and a Greek-Orthodox seminary in 1894. This seminary, like other Russian colleges and universities, was a nursery of revolutionary activity and propaganda. Within a few years Dzhugashvili was a member of a Marxist group (his official biographers claim that as a boy of fifteen he had already belonged to a Marxist circle). His real activity dated from about 1901, with his collaboration in Brdzola (an illegal Georgian periodical) and his membership in the Tiflis Social-Democratic Committee. He was arrested in the fall of 1903 and exiled to Siberia, but he escaped a few months later and returned to the Caucasus in February 1904.

Stalin was not a great thinker, speaker, or writer, but he possessed a strong personality embodying traits suited to the emerging Bolshevik movement. A passionate hater of his enemies, he exercised neither restraint nor mercy. Heir to age-old Caucasian traditions of vendetta and disdain for human life, he conceived the revolution in the most violent and bloody contours. He was taken over completely by a passionate fight against all political moderation, and especially against the Mensheviks (his native Georgia was a Menshevik stronghold). To him any means were good if they led to the "lofty goal"; he took part, as an organizer, in the Tiflis robbery described above. The Caucasian Committee of the Social-Democratic Party expelled him because of his participation in this "expropriation."

In April 1908 Stalin was arrested, kept in prison for eight months, and then exiled. From then on, until 1913, there were intermittent episodes of arrests and "illegal work." From 1911 on he was active in St.

Petersburg; in February 1912 he became a member of the Central Committee. In early 1912 Pravda (Truth) emerged as a Bolshevik newspaper in the capital; Stalin and the young Vyacheslav Molotov were among its first editors. In November and December 1912 Stalin made visits to Lenin in Cracow, where, under Lenin's guidance, he wrote his "Marxism and the National Question."

In March 1913, betrayed by Malinovski, Stalin was arrested for the last time. This time he was deported to the village of Kureika, in the Arctic Circle, from which no escape was possible, and he spent the next few years as an exile; he did not return to St. Petersburg until after the upheaval in 1917.

The guiding role in the Bolshevik movement during these last prewar years was played by three Russian émigrés-Lenin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. In 1909 Lenin moved from Geneva to Paris, where he lived with the Zinovievs. In 1912 he and Zinoviev moved to Cracow (Austrian Poland), to be near the Russian frontier: this made it easier to organize transportation of printed materials and crossings from Russia and back. Kamenev returned to Russia in 1913.

8. World War I and Lenin's Defeatism

It was not until the World War broke out, in August 1914, that bolshevism acquired its definitive traits. The break with the socialist parties of Europe and the Socialist International paralleled the generation of a new set of ideas about war, revolution, defense, and defeat which in the following decade became tenets of the Bolshevik-Communist movement. Lenin and Zinoviev, having been expelled from Austria after the war started, moved to Switzerland. The political line of the Western socialist parties, which proclaimed, as their course in war, defense of their respective countries, and which voted appropriations for war in their parliaments, aroused passionate protests from Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Defeatism became the Bolshevik slogan. Each socialist party, Lenin said and wrote, must strive for the defeat of its country's armies. Defeat in war was the road to revolution. As far as Russia was concerned

.. by far the lesser evil would be the defeat of the Tsar's armies and the Tsar's monarchy, which oppresses Poland, the Ukraine, and a number of other people of Russia.

42

Among the slogans formulated by Lenin at the beginning of the war were the following:

struggle against the tsarist monarchy and the Great-Russian, PanSlavist chauvinism, and advocacy of a revolution in Russia as well as of

"Lenin, "The Tasks of Revolutionary Democracy in the European War" (September 1914), Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1927-45), vol. XVIII (1930), p. 63.

the liberation and self-determination of the nationalities oppressed by Russia, coupled with the immediate slogans of a democratic republic, the confiscation of the landowners' lands and an eight-hour work-day.13

The crime of war, Lenin reiterated, is the inevitable product of capitalism at its highest and final stage, "imperialism." A nonbelligerent capitalism is impossible. To prevent wars, capitalism must be overthrown; the overthrow of capitalism is a social revolution. Pacifism, which implies the illusion of a peaceful capitalism, must be attacked; the foreign war must be transformed into a civil war-a revolution:

Turning the present imperialist war into civil war is the only correct proletarian slogan."

The first steps towards transforming the present imperialist war into civil war are: 1) absolute refusal to vote for war credits and resignation from bourgeois Cabinets; 2) complete rupture with the policy of "national peace" (bloc nationale, Burgfrieden); 3) creation of an illegal organisation wherever the governments and the bourgeoisie abolish constitutional liberties by introducing war emergency laws; 4) support of fraternisation among the soldiers of the belligerent nations in the trenches and in the theatre of war in general; 5) support of every kind of revolutionary proletarian mass action in general.

One of the forms of deception of the working class is pacifism and the abstract preaching of peace. Under capitalism, particularly in its imperialist stage, wars are inevitable. . . .

...

Propaganda of peace at the present time, if not accompanied by a call for revolutionary mass action, is only capable of spreading illusions, of demoralising the proletariat by imbuing it with belief in the humanitarianism of the bourgeoisie, and of making it a plaything in the hands of the secret diplomacy of the belligerent countries. In particular, the idea that a so-called democratic peace is possible without a series of revolutions is profoundly mistaken.45

Propaganda of revolution must be carried to the armies: the troops must be urged to turn their arms against their own officers:

The slogans of Social-Democracy must now be: First, an allembracing propaganda of the Socialist revolution, to be extended also to the army and the area of military activities; emphasis to be placed on the necessity of turning the weapons, not against the brother wage-slaves of other countries, but against the reaction of bourgeois governments and parties in each country. . .

43 Ibid., p. 64.

46

"Lenin, "The War and the Russian Social-Democracy" (October 1914), Collected Works, vol. XVIII (1930), p. 82.

45

Lenin, "Conference of the Sections of the R.S.D.L.P. Abroad" (March 1915), Selected Works, vol. V, pp. 134, 135.

46

Lenin, "The Tasks of Revolutionary Social-Democracy in the European War" (September 1914), Collected Works, vol. XVIII (1930), p. 63.

Life is marching, through the defeat of Russia, to a revolution in Russia, and through that revolution and in connection with it, to civil war in Europe. Life has taken this direction.""

With violent passion the Lenin group turned against the "Social Patriots" ("Social Traitors," "Social Chauvinists")-the moderate socialists, and against their general "illusion” that under capitalism wars could be avoided, in particular civil wars:

war.

Socialists cannot, without ceasing to be Socialists, be opposed to all

. . civil wars are also wars. Anyone who recognizes the class struggle cannot fail to recognize civil wars, which in every class society are the natural, and under certain conditions, inevitable continuation, development and intensification of the class struggle. All the great revolutions proved this. . . .

...

... the victory of Socialism in one country does not at one stroke eliminate all war in general. . . . Socialism. . . . will achieve victory first in one or several countries, while the others will remain bourgeois or prebourgeois for some time. .

Only after we have overthrown, finally vanquished, and expropriated the bourgeoisie of the whole world, and not only of one country, will wars become impossible. And from a scientific point of view it would be utterly wrong and utterly unrevolutionary for us to evade or gloss over the most important thing, namely, that the most difficult task, the one demanding the greatest amount of fighting in the transition to Socialism, is to crush the resistance of the bourgeoisie.

Our slogan must be: The arming of the proletariat for the purpose of vanquishing, expropriating and disarming the bourgeoisie.48

False, senseless, and hypocritical are all the phrases about a war of defence or about the defence of the fatherland on the part of the great powers (read: the great beasts of prey) that are fighting for domination over the world, for markets and "spheres of influence," for the enslavement of peoples! 49

Lenin turned repeatedly against those who supported the cause of the Allies against Germany because Germany had started the war. This was of no importance, Lenin emphasized; and by refusing to consider this phase of the history of the war, he tended to disregard Germany's guilt:

The question as to which group dealt the first military blow or first declared war is of no importance in determining the tactics of the Socialists.

"Lenin, "The Defeat of Russia and the Revolutionary Crisis" (October 1915), Selected Works, vol. V, p. 153.

48

Lenin, "The War Program of the Proletarian Revolution" (1916), The Essentials of Lenin (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1947), vol. I, pp. 741-744.

Lenin, "Opportunism and the Collapse of the Second International" (1915), Collected Works, vol. XVIII (1930), p. 387.