Notes
1. August H. Nimtz, Lenin’s Electoral Strategy from Marx and Engels through the Revolution of 1905: The Ballot, the Streets—or Both (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). See the Preface there for an elaboration on the book’s arguments, structure, style, rationale, and sources.
1. Geoffrey A. Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma, 1907–1914 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 44.
2. V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 15 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), pp. 457–58. Hereafter, citations from his Collected Works will be designated as in this case: 15, pp. 457–58.
3. 13, p. 21.
4. Ibid., pp. 25–26.
5. Ibid., p. 35.
6. Ibid., pp. 42–43.
7. Ibid., pp. 44–48. Victoria E. Bonnell, Roots of Rebellion: Workers’ Politics and Organizations in St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1900–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 338–44, provides evidence that Lenin was essentially right about the “upswing” in Moscow—that it was indeed “partial” and that the Bolsheviks who thought it signaled a new upsurge were wrong.
8. 13, p. 59.
9. For a few details, see Alfred Levin, The Third Duma, Election and Profile (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1973), pp. 46–47.
10. Richard Pipes, ed., The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 36.
11. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 46 (New York: International Publishers, 1975–2004), pp. 197–98.
12. 13, p. 81.
13. Ibid., pp. 85–86.
14. See August H. Nimtz, Lenin’s Electoral Strategy from Marx and Engels through the Revolution of 1905: The Ballot, the Streets—or Both (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 30–31. Hereafter, the first volume is referred to as LES1905.
15. 13, pp. 90–91.
16. See LES1905, p. 11.
17. Though critical of Bebel’s actions, these were “the mistakes of a person with whom we are going the same way” (34, p. 371; see also 13, pp. 164–65). Regarding “agitation among the youth,” see Lenin’s article on the experience of Social Democratic parties in doing such work: 41, pp. 204–7.
18. 13, pp. 91–93.
19. Nadezhda Krupskaya, Memories of Lenin (London: Panther Books, 1970), p. 145.
20. Hosking, p. 42.
21. Alfred Levin, The Second Duma: A Study of the Social-Democratic Party and the Russian Constitutional Experiment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1940), p. 341.
22. 15, p. 502n119.
23. Hosking, p. 43.
24. 13, p. 518.
25. This, and the following, draws on Levin’s account in The Third Duma, which provides some details on the RSDLP campaign, the difficulties they faced, and the election itself (pp. 85–111)—despite his tendentious spin on Lenin. It reveals that the Russian-language edition of the Lenin Collected Works is more informative than the English edition.
26. Levin, The Third Duma, p. 71.
27. Ibid., p. 98.
28. Ibid., pp. 100 and 104.
29. Ibid., p. 107. This is a telling admission from someone who didn’t agree with Lenin’s revolutionary working-class approach to the electoral process.
30. 13, pp. 123–33.
31. Ibid., p. 518n75.
32. Ibid., pp. 146 and 519n77.
33. Ibid., p. 140. For background, see pp. 133–34.
34. Ibid., pp. 153–60.
35. For the larger context and useful details, see Hosking, ch. 8, “Towards the First World War.”
36. 13, pp. 479–84.
37. 15, pp. 220–29.
38. Ibid., pp. 22–27.
39. Ibid., pp. 17–21.
40. Ibid., pp. 155–57.
41. 13, pp. 52–53.
42. 15, pp. 291–300.
43. Ibid., pp. 36–37.
44. Ibid., p. 353.
45. Ibid., pp. 325 and 328.
46. Ibid., pp. 352–53.
47. Krupskaya, p. 161.
48. 15, pp. 422–23.
49. Ibid., p. 413. There is a not-too-subtle difference in the tone of the two articles. While praising the fraction, the one in Proletary points to a few weaknesses, though constructively so. I suspect Lenin wrote it with an eye toward those Bolsheviks who were skeptical about Duma work.
50. Ibid., pp. 431–32 and 451. Regarding Leninological spin on what happened, see “A Critical Review of the Relevant Literature: Chapter 1.”
51. 41, p. 228.
52. Ibid., p. 227. In a letter at the end of August, Lenin mentions his indispensable “work on the Promotion Commission for the Duma Social-Democratic group, which has its headquarters in Paris” (15, p. 476).
53. 16, pp. 24–28.
54. Ibid., p. 64.
55. Ibid., p. 69.
56. Ibid., p. 151.
57. Was this “subcommittee” the “Promotion Commission” that Lenin earlier referred to (15, pp. 352–53)?
58. 16, pp. 110–16.
59. See, for example, Lenin’s 1917 “Postscript” to his The Agrarian Program of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1905–1907 (13, pp. 430–31).
60. See Hosking, ch. 4, for details.
61. 16, pp. 176–78.
62. For details, see Hosking, pp. 106–16.
63. 16, p. 81.
64. Ibid., pp. 173–75. In addition to his article, Lenin evidently gave a lecture, probably in Paris to the large exile Russian community, in which he included “Support of the revolutionary movement in Persia—protest against the Finnish campaign” (41, p. 231).
65. 16, pp. 198–205.
66. Ibid., p. 33.
67. Ibid., p. 390. Kautsky, Neue Zeit’s editor, refused to print Lenin’s response—not for the first time.
68. In a letter to Maxim Gorky about six months later, Lenin confirmed that the “Mensheviks predominate in the Duma group” (34, p. 446). He also revealed that working with the Menshevik deputies was one thing; working with the Menshevik leaders like Plekhanov was another. The only distinction Lenin thought worth making about the fraction concerned the attitude toward the liquidationists: “The liquidationist Zhivoye Dyelo counts among its permanent contributors two members of the group in the Duma—Astrakhantsev and Kuznetsov.* In the anti-liquidationist Zvezda there are eight members of the group—Voronin, Voiloshnikov, Yegorov, Zakharov, Pokrovsky, Predkaln, Poletayev, and Surkov. Two members of the Duma, Chkheidze and Gegechkori, contribute to neither of these organs. One (Shurkanov) contributes to both (*Until recently there was also Belousov. Now this extreme liquidator . . . has resigned from the group in the Duma. The latter has publicly warned all the voters of this; and has demanded his resignation from the Duma. A minor example showing to what lengths consistent liquidationism goes at times!)” (17, p. 545).
69. 16, pp. 34–35.
70. Ibid., pp. 305–12.
71. Ibid., pp. 347–51.
72. 17, pp. 173–78.
73. Ibid., pp. 253–56.
74. Ibid., p. 172.
75. Ibid., p. 256.
76. Ibid., pp. 338–41.
77. Ibid., p. 524.
78. Ibid., pp. 471–72. The only Leninologist who at least pays attention to Lenin’s State Duma work has a different opinion. See “A Critical Review of the Relevant Literature: Chapter 1.”
1. V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 17 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), p. 278. Hereafter, citations from his Collected Works will be designated as in this case: 17, p. 278.
2. Ibid., p. 397.
3. Ibid., pp. 278–83.
4. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 27 (New York: International Publishers, 1975–2004), pp. 226–27. Hereafter, citations from the MECW are designated as follows: MECW 27, pp. 226–27. See LES1905, p. 28.
5. Ibid., p. 219.
6. 17, pp. 421–23.
7. Ibid., p. 436.
8. Ibid., p. 569.
9. Ibid., pp. 378–84.
10. Nadezhda Krupskaya, Memories of Lenin (London: Panther Books, 1970), p. 199.
11. On the inevitable debate about who was or was not invited, see Lenin’s informative letter in 35, pp. 25–26.
12. 17, pp. 468–71.
13. Ibid., p. 473.
14. There was a two-line resolution about Pravda but not the later and more well-known one. It referred to the newspaper Trotsky published in Vienna; the Conference annulled an agreement the Central Committee had concluded with him in January 1910. Trotsky, it should be noted, called a “unity” meeting in Vienna in August for those grouped around Pravda as an alternative to the Prague Conference. The so-called August Bloc, as it became known, proved, however, to be a feckless challenge to what Lenin had organized. As Lenin accurately predicted, “Let someone try to set up a different R.S.D.L.P. with the liquidators! It would be laughable” (35, p. 26). On Trotsky’s later admission that Lenin was right and his conciliationist position was wrong—“its profound erroneousness had been long ago demonstrated in both theory and practice”—see his Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence (New York: Universal Library, 1941), p. 112.
15. 17, p. 481. For the Leninological view of the conference on this and other points, see “A Critical Review of the Relevant Literature: Chapter 2.”
16. 35, pp. 34–35.
17. 17, p. 616.
18. 18, pp. 17 and 102.
19. For useful details about the origins and course of Pravda, despite neither understanding nor agreeing with Lenin’s politics, see Ralph Carter Elwood, “Lenin and Pravda, 1912–1914,” Slavic Review 31, no. 2 (June 1972): 355–80.
20. 35, p. 23.
21. Ibid., p. 26. See also Lenin’s letter to Gorky, May 27, 1911 (34, p. 446), regarding the reality of Zvezda.
22. 18, p. 207.
23. 43, p. 769; Elwood, “Lenin and Pravda, 1912–1914,” p. 358n11.
24. 18, pp. 111–14.
25. Ibid., p. 120.
26. 35, p. 40.
27. Ibid., p. 20.
28. In addition to Pravda, a new version of Zvezda appeared with a new name, Nevskaya Zvezda [The Neva Star], a weekly that lasted until October 1912.
29. 35, pp. 40–41.
30. Ibid., p. 48.
31. Ibid., pp. 42–43.
32. Elwood, “Lenin and Pravda, 1912–1914,” p. 364. For more details, see Trotsky, Stalin, pp. 138–42, who contends Stalin did so for opportunistic reasons.
33. 18, pp. 136–42.
34. Ibid., p. 239.
35. Ibid., p. 199.
36. Ibid., pp. 196–97.
37. Ibid., pp. 237–38.
38. 17, p. 482.
39. 18, p. 310.
40. Ibid. p. 335.
41. Ibid., pp. 339–40.
42. Ibid., p. 352.
43. Ibid., p. 353.
44. Krupskaya, p. 208.
45. “For at least a couple of days on end Ilyich pumped us full of instructions”—cited in Trotsky, Stalin, p. 142.
46. For some useful details, see R. C. Elwood, Inessa Armand: Revolutionary and Feminist (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 92–95. September 14 is inconsistent with other details Elwood supplies; see below, fn. 49. See also Robert B. McKean, St. Petersburg between the Revolutions: Workers and Revolutionaries, June 1907–February 1917 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 92, who claims that Armand and Safarov were not successful in one of their tasks: reviving the St. Petersburg branch.
47. 35, p. 58.
48. 18, p. 348.
49. McKean, p. 138. For very useful data on the election of the factory delegates, see pp. 134–38. His interpretation of the entire process, less a victory for the Bolsheviks (pp. 131–40), differs from that of Badayev’s account.
50. Lenin labeled one of the three Mensheviks, P. Sudakov, a “turncoat,” charging that he had been duplicitous in the lead-up to the elections. He initially “‘sided with Pravda,’ [but on] the next day,” after the elections, he flirted with the liquidationists; 41, pp. 266–67.
51. Elwood, Inessa Armand, pp. 94–95, says that she was involved in these negotiations when arrested. While the details he supplies makes that a credible claim—making her role even more significant—it is inconsistent with the dates that Badayev gives, even taking into account the Old and New Calendar differences.
52. A. Badayev, The Bolsheviks in the Tsarist Duma (New York: International Publishers, 1932), pp. 3–24. Trotsky suggests that the second edition of Badayev’s recollections bear the hand of Stalin, who wanted the book to put him in the best possible light given his conciliationist stances while working with the editorial board of Pravda (Stalin, pp. 143, 149)—thus the reason I say the “instructions to the delegates” were “apparently” drafted by Stalin. The original Russian edition was published about 1929; therefore the 1932 International Publishers edition is probably a translation of the second edition.
53. Although Badayev didn’t elaborate on the campaign, Lenin provides some details and suggestions on how the Bolsheviks should respond to defend his election; see 18, pp. 428–29.
54. 18, p. 505.
55. 35, pp. 61–62.
56. 41, p. 269.
57. 18, p. 460.
58. Ibid., pp. 493–518.
59. Ibid., p. 438.
60. 35, p. 103.
61. Ibid., pp. 424–26. Lenin suggested that the Bolshevik deputies along with the St. Petersburg branch of the party issue a statement, which he drafted, to correct the “mistake” (ibid., p. 428).
62. Ibid., pp. 413–23.
63. Badayev, pp. 43–44.
64. Ibid., p. 52.
65. 18, pp. 460–61. Another legal venue that Lenin insisted that the Bolsheviks participate in—that can only be noted here—were the elections for the boards of the “workers’ sick benefit funds,” a palliative the regime threw at the workers in a futile attempt to quell disquiet; see the resolution, “The Insurance Campaign” (pp. 461–62). According to Krupskaya, Lenin “attached great importance to the election and believed that the election campaign would strengthen our contacts with the masses” (p. 226).
66. The three provisions were later lost. Related here is what the editors of the Lenin Collected Works provide—18, p. 636n178, which is consistent with other documentation. Badayev remembers, “after a lapse of fifteen years” (p. 63), somewhat differently. But the two accounts are not, as I suggest next, necessarily incompatible.
67. Badayev, pp. 58–64.
68. 35, p. 70.
69. Ibid., p. 84.
70. On Badayev’s activities, much of which consisted of defending workers in St. Petersburg from the assaults of both bosses and the state, see Badayev, pp. 71–99. For instructive details on how the two deputies from the Ukraine carried out this work in their constituencies, see R. C. Elwood, Russian Social Democracy in the Underground: A Study of the RSDLP in the Ukraine, 1907–1914 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1974), pp. 188–89.
71. 35, p. 65. This challenges Badayev’s claim, “From the moment that the fraction was formed it made newspaper work one of its chief tasks” (pp. 179–80).
72. It’s interesting to note that the resolution was first published in 1956, three years after Stalin’s death.
73. 41, pp. 272–73.
74. Badayev, p. 64.
75. 35, pp. 78–79.
76. Ibid., pp. 82 and 86.
77. Ibid., p. 93.
78. 19, p. 64.
79. 35, pp. 93–96.
80. Ibid., pp. 88–89, 99–100.
81. Krupskaya, pp. 200 and 225; Lenin’s later article about Chernomazov, 23, pp. 362–64; Elwood, “Lenin and Pravda,” p. 374, and Russian Social Democracy in the Underground, pp. 182–83.
82. 35, p. 111.
83. Elwood, “Lenin and Pravda,” p. 376.
84. For details, see the resolution that Lenin and the Bolshevik deputies composed: 19, p. 425. Regarding McKean’s claim that Lenin’s charges were “mostly demonstrably false” (p. 141), see “A Critical Review of the Relevant Literature: Chapter 2.”
85. 18, pp. 530–31.
86. 35, p. 95.
87. 19, pp. 44–46.
88. 41, p. 275.
89. 19, p. 492.
90. Ibid., p. 424.
91. Ibid., pp. 425–26.
92. Ibid., pp. 458–74.
93. Ibid., p. 472. As for McKean’s claim that these facts were “the flimsiest of pretexts [for the split] . . . which were mostly demonstrably false” (p. 141), see “A Critical Review of the Relevant Literature: Chapter 2.”
94. 20, pp. 538–39.
95. For informative details on how the fraction and Pravda assisted the Baku oil workers’ strike in 1914, for example, see Badayev, pp. 168–69.
96. Badayev, p. 126.
97. Ibid., p. 132.
98. 18, p. 365.
99. 19, p. 56.
100. Ibid., p. 274.
101. 41, p. 276.
102. 19, p. 547; 20, p. 64.
103. 20, pp. 254–58.
104. Lenin’s opinion was warranted. It was later learned that Bernstein—and evidently with some complicity by Bebel—carried out the “greatest bowdlerization” in the history of the Marxist movement; Roger Morgan, The German Social Democrats and the First International, 1864–1872 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 248.
105. 19, pp. 553–54.
106. Ibid., pp. 298–99. See Chapter 1.
107. 36, p. 243.
108. Ibid., p. 235.
109. 43, pp. 406–7.
110. Badayev, p. 174.
111. Ibid., p. 135.
112. Ibid., pp. 149–50.
113. 31, p. 45.
114. Badayev, p. 163. Much has been made of Lenin having been duped by Malinovsky. See “A Critical Review of the Relevant Literature: Chapter 2,” for a discussion.
115. Richard Pipes, ed., The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 39.
116. Badayev, p. 177.
1. New scholarship reveals that Nicholas was the real instigator and that the “Guns of August” actually began in July. See Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). McMeekin’s research sustains Lenin’s long-held charge about the Czar’s imperial ambitions.
2. Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution (New York: Viking, 1996), p. 293.
3. V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 21 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), p. 29. Hereafter, citations from his Collected Works will be designated as in this case: 21, p. 29.
4. 35, pp. 177–78.
5. A. Badayev, The Bolsheviks in the Tsarist Duma (New York: International Publishers, 1932), p. 198.
6. For an informative historiography of the declaration, see D. A. Longley, “The Russian Social Democratic Statement to the Duma on 26 July (8 August) 1914: A New Look at the Evidence,” English Historical Review 102, no. 187 (July 1987): 599–621. Longley (pp. 607–8) questions Badayev’s claim about the censorship of the declaration.
7. The St. Petersburg branch of the party did issue a statement that made no concessions to the patriotic fervor. See “Petersburg Bolshevik Appeal against the War,” in Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary International: Documents: 1907–1916, The Preparatory Years, ed. John Riddell (New York: Pathfinder, 1986), pp. 131–32.
8. Badayev, pp. 200–202 (including note).
9. Ibid., pp. 206–7. See Robert B. McKean, St. Petersburg between the Revolutions: Workers and Revolutionaries, June 1907–February 1917 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 362–64, for details on the differences among the Mensheviks.
10. Longley, p. 617.
11. 35, p. 165.
12. Ibid. See Badayev, pp. 207–8, for the response. McKean says that Lenin “in as yet unpublished correspondence, criticized the Bolsheviks’ reply to Vandervelde” (p. 366). That wouldn’t be inconsistent with Lenin’s comment in his letter of October 17 if McKean is referring to a draft response. Unfortunately, McKean doesn’t let his readers know what he has apparently seen that might suggest otherwise. See “A Critical Review of the Relevant Literature: Chapter 3,” for a discussion of McKean.
13. 21, pp. 16–17.
14. Ibid., p. 18.
15. According to Trotsky, “Not one of the Russian organizations or groups of the party took the openly defeatist position which Lenin came out for abroad” (The History of the Russian Revolution [New York: Pathfinder Press, 2009], p. 59).
16. 21, pp. 30–31.
17. Badayev, p. 212. Regarding McKean’s suggestion that the “amendments” repudiated Lenin’s revolutionary defeatist stance (p. 360), see “A Critical Review of the Relevant Literature: Chapter 3.” Figes’s claim that “Lenin had imposed his views” on the fraction and the party (p. 294) is addressed there as well.
18. 35, p. 175.
19. Badayev, p. 220.
20. Ibid., pp. 223–32.
21. 21, p. 322.
22. Ibid., p. 256.
23. Ibid., p. 323.
24. Ibid., p. 176.
25. Ibid., p. 258.
26. Ibid., pp. 401–2.
27. Ibid., p. 482n164. For more details on the elections and a different interpretation, see McKean, pp. 380–84. Another but considerably less significant legal arena were the workers’ insurance boards. Though Lenin made no mention of them, a few supplemental elections to them took place at the beginning of 1916 and the Bolsheviks scored some successes; see McKean, pp. 401–3, for details.
28. 21, pp. 401–2.
29. 35, p. 235.
30. For details, see Farrell Dobbs, Teamster Bureaucracy (New York: Pathfinder, 2002).
31. 21, pp. 251–56.
32. 22, pp. 169–78.
33. Lenin lived in Switzerland for seven years (though not consecutively) beginning in 1895. It was during his last stay, August 1914 to April 1917, that he participated in Swiss working-class politics as a member of the Swiss Social Democratic Party.
34. 23, pp. 141–42.
35. Ibid., p. 253.
36. Ibid., pp. 289–90.
37. Ibid., pp. 292–93.
38. Ibid., pp. 324–31 and 352.
39. 24, p. 86.
40. Ibid., pp. 22–25.
41. See “Paris Commune (1871),” MIA: Encyclopedia of Marxism: Glossary of Organisations, http://marxistsfr.org/glossary/orgs/p/a.htm#paris-commune.
42. 24, pp. 38–39.
43. Ibid., p. 69.
44. Ibid., pp. 44–53.
45. Ibid., pp. 210–11.
46. Ibid., p. 181.
47. This is Trotsky in his own words from his rare book Lenin (1925) in the Trotsky Archives (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1925/lenin) and at variance with the account in Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879–1921 (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), pp. 255–56.
48. 24, p. 543.
49. Deutscher, pp. 84–97; Trotsky, “Report of the Siberian Delegation,” Trotsky Archives, http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1903.
50. 35, p. 285.
51. See Krupskaya’s point about Lenin’s ability to “approach the opponent of yesterday as a comrade” (Nadezhda Krupskaya, Memories of Lenin [London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970], p. 217). The record of the 14-year estrangement reveals that Lenin made more overtures for reconciliation than Trotsky.
52. 24, pp. 241–42.
53. Ibid., pp. 295–96.
54. Ibid., pp. 311–12.
55. Ibid., p. 334.
56. Ibid., pp. 373–74.
57. 25, pp. 18–26.
58. Figes, pp. 397–98.
59. 25, p. 155.
60. For the best eyewitness/participant account, see Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, pp. 501–82.
61. 25, pp. 179–80.
62. See LES1905, ch. 3.
63. 25, pp. 310–12.
64. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, p. 795.
65. There are, it seems, two party resolutions possibly composed by Lenin—which I haven’t seen—and apparently never translated into English that would no doubt be of significance. At the Sixth Congress of the RSDLP (Bolshevik) at the end of July, there were two agenda items, “Elections to the Constituent Assembly” and “Elections,” and, probably, resolutions that codified the decisions taken. Regarding the meeting, see 25, pp. 526–30. As for the official record of the congress, see Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), p. 329n1.
66. 24, pp. 97–101.
67. Ibid., pp. 471–73.
68. Ibid., p. 512.
69. Ibid., p. 511.
70. William G. Rosenberg, “The Russian Municipal Duma Elections of 1917: A Preliminary Computation of Returns,” Soviet Studies 21, no. 2 (October 1969), pp. 131–63.
71. Ibid., p. 162.
72. Quoted in Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, p. 92.
73. Krupskaya, pp. 303–6.
74. 24, pp. 211–12.
75. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, pp. 523–24.
76. 25, p. 308.
77. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, p. 795.
78. 24, p. 245.
79. 25, pp. 427–29.
80. Krupskaya, p. 163.
81. 25, p. 497.
82. 25, p. 374. On August 25 the Czarist commander of the army, General Kornilov, launched, with a wink and nod from Kerensky, a counterrevolutionary putsch that was soon put down owing to mass mobilizations led by the Bolsheviks—a decisive turning point in the Russian Revolution.
83. 26, p. 19.
84. 27, p. 25.
85. 26, p. 25. It is no accident that Lenin reemploys “parliamentary cretinism” at this moment. He had been reading, as his letter to the Central Committee “Marxism and Insurrection” shows, Marx and Engels on the German Revolution of 1848. That was the context in which they coined the term. See LES1905, ch. 1.
86. Ibid., p. 33.
87. Ibid., pp. 54–55.
88. 41, pp. 446–48.
89. Ibid., pp. 597–98n554; 25, p. 530n97.
90. 12, pp. 109–12.
91. For useful details on the election campaign, see Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), pp. 62–69.
92. Ibid., p. 416n50, on data on peasant meetings that demonstrated more support for soviet governance than the Constituent Assembly.
93. 26, pp. 437–39. Regarding Robert Service’s allegations about Lenin’s supposed attitude toward the Constituent Assembly, see “A Critical Review of the Relevant Literature: Chapter 3.”
94. 29, p. 311.
95. 29, pp. 485–86. Exit polls for the 2012 US presidential election indicated that 59 percent of voters said the economic system favors the rich.
96. 28, p. 272.
97. Ibid., p. 256. It is to be noted that the Czar and his family were denied the right to vote by the new government that came to rule in March 1917.
98. 29, p. 125. In the United States, four states permanently disenfranchise ex-felons. In Florida it is estimated that nearly a quarter of its voting-age black population is not eligible to vote because of a felony record.
99. Ibid., p. 184.
100. Ibid., p. 125.
101. Ibid., pp. 371–72.
102. Ibid., pp. 107–8.
103. About the data, “[H]is point of view was by no means as biased as one might expect, for he consciously sought in the figures the lessons they contained for his party, whether flattering or otherwise, and his deductions constitute a thoroughgoing and penetrating analysis of the results.” Oliver Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls: The Elections to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, 1917 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 6.
104. 30, pp. 265–66.
105. 21, p. 253.
106. 27, p. 146.
107. Regarding the debate at the Second Congress on this issue, see John Riddell, ed., Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite! Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, 1920 (New York: Pathfinder, 1991), pp. 420–82.
108. 31, p. 21.
109. Ibid., p. 27.
110. Ibid., p. 36.
111. Ibid., p. 61.
112. Ibid., p. 64.
113. Ibid., p. 98.
114. Riddell, Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite!, p. 459.
115. 31, p. 65.
116. Riddell, Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite!, p. 769.
117. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), pp. xiii–xiv. I thank Howard Kling for bringing this to my attention.
118. 32, p. 48. For details, see George Fyson, ed., Lenin’s Final Fight: Speeches and Writings, 1922–23 (New York: Pathfinder, 1995).
119. Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power, ch. 2, also subscribes—looking at other factors—to a contingential argument.
120. Robert Daniels, ed., A Documentary History of Communism, vol. 2 (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), p. 116.
121. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, p. 1193.
122. Just as in the 1930s, the current global capitalist crisis has shaken the confidence of defenders of liberal democracy. Symptomatic is the May 2013 report of the Transatlantic Academy, “The Democratic Disconnect,” as well as the cover story for that month of the British monthly Prospect, “Has Democracy Had Its Day? Electoral Politics Has Had a Bad Decade.”
1. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 10 (New York: International Publishers, 1975–2004), p. 284. Hereafter, citations from the MECW are designated as follows: MECW 10, p. 284.
2. David Riazanov, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: An Introduction to Their Lives and Works (New York: Monthly Review, 1973), p. 100.
3. Robert Service, Lenin: A Political Life, vol. 2 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 353n32. On the retrieval of the materials in 1920, see Helen Rappaport, Conspirator: Lenin in Exile (New York: Basic Books, 2010), p. 253.
4. Israel Getzler, Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1967), ch. 6, pp. 113–37, provides inter alia a few details on Martov’s Duma work.
5. MECW 6, p. 519.
6. Hal Draper, The Adventures of the Communist Manifesto (Berkeley: Center for Socialist History, 1994), p. 321, argues convincingly that Engels substituted “whenever” for “as soon as” in the aforementioned sentence for the 1888 translation of the Manifesto that he supervised. He did so to acknowledge that the expectation in the original 1848 document about the bourgeoisie was not fulfilled.
7. MECW 10, p. 284.
8. MECW 27, p. 271.
9. Leon Trotsky, The Young Lenin (New York: Doubleday, 1972), p. 187.
10. V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 21 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), p. 16. Hereafter, citations from his Collected Works will be designated as in this case: 21, p. 16.
11. My article, “A Return to Lenin—But without Marx and Engels?” Science & Society 73, no. 4 (October 2009): 452–73, details how Lenin began to have second thoughts about the German party before August 1914.
12. V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 13 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), p. 81. Hereafter, citations from his Collected Works will be designated as in this case: 13 p. 81.
13. I elaborate on this point in “A Critical Review of the Relevant Literature: Conclusion.”
14. Leon Trotsky, “The Class, the Party, and the Leadership,” Marxists.org (1940), http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/xx/party.htm.
15. For the best-known example of the claim that the subjective factor was inconsequential in the Russian Revolution, Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979), see “A Critical Review of the Relevant Literature: Conclusion.”
16. I’ll always remember the student in my Cuban Revolution class at the University of Minnesota in 2008 who, after reading the Second Declaration and being persuaded by it, seemed skeptical about the presentation of the vice-presidential candidate for the Socialist Workers Party that year whom I invited to speak to the class. The essence of his question was, Didn’t her candidacy legitimize the capitalist electoral process? Alyson Kennedy, the candidate, drew on the legacy that her party inherited in response. That moment was motivation in part for writing this book.
17. Joe Hansen’s “The Seven Errors Made by Che Guevara,” in Dynamics of the Cuban Revolution: The Trotskyist View (New York: Pathfinder, 1978), is most instructive on the consequences of this turn.
18. The focus here is on books that claim to be overviews of Lenin’s life. Therefore, works such as Paul LeBlanc’s Lenin and the Revolutionary Party (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1990) or Lars Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? in Context (Leiden: Brill, 2006), which respectively look at Lenin’s organizational ideas and his famous book, are not discussed here.
19. Neil Harding, Lenin’s Political Thought: Theory and Practice in the Democratic and Socialist Revolutions (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009), p. 25. While it’s possible to treat his book as sympathetic to Lenin, his Leninism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996) is a different story. There he repeats the standard anti-Lenin formulas—for example, the “elitist and anti-democratic disposition of Leninism” (p. 174). These failings, he asserts, can be traced to Marx and Engels; the central claim of the book is that “Leninism was authentic Marxism” (p. 6). As for what he thinks of “authentic Marxism,” his tendentious and dishonest review of my Marx-Engels book (Democratization 8, no. 2 [Summer 2001]) leaves no doubt.
20. Alan Woods, Bolshevism: The Road to Power: A History of the Bolshevik Party from the Early Beginnings to the October Revolution (London: Wellred Publications, 1999). That he hardly acknowledges Lenin’s Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, in what poses as a thorough reading of Bolshevism, is telling—an egregious attempt to turn Lenin into a supporter of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution.
21. Christopher Read, Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (London: Routledge, 2005).
22. Lars T. Lih, Lenin (London: Reaktion Books, 2011).
23. At the panel that the two of us participated in at the Historical Materialism Conference in London, November 2012 (which is somewhere in cyberspace), I asked Lih if he had an explanation for the silence. He didn’t reply. I posed the same question shortly afterward in an email, and he wrote that he would get back to me with an answer. I’ve yet, as of August 2013, to receive his response.
24. I am thankful to my colleagues at the University of Minnesota, of different generations, who responded to my informal inquiry about which texts introduced them to Lenin.
25. Bertram D. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical History (New York: Stein and Day, 1984).
26. See “A Critical Review of the Relevant Literature: Chapter 2” regarding a most egregious fabrication performed by Wolfe on one of Lenin’s texts.
27. Alfred G. Meyer, Leninism (New York: Fredrick A. Praeger, 1957).
28. “A Critical Review of the Relevant Literature: Chapter 2” also critiques some of Meyer’s misrepresentations.
29. Louis Fischer, The Life of Lenin (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 523.
30. Robert Service, Lenin: A Political Life, vols. 1–3 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985–1995).
31. See “A Critical Review of the Relevant Literature: Chapter 2” for details. In Service’s Lenin: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), the pickings are even slimmer. It’s worth noting that Service’s Trotsky: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2009) has rightly reaped scathing criticism for its shoddy scholarship driven by a political agenda.
32. Richard Pipes, ed., The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). For the most informed critical review, see Lars T. Lih’s review of Pipes’s collection, which he compares with the more complete, 420-document, and more accurately translated and less tendentious Russian edition, in Canadian-American Slavic Studies 35, nos. 2–3 (Summer/Fall 2001): 301–6.
33. Leo Panitch, Greg Albo, and Vivek Chibber, eds., Socialist Register 2013: The Question of Strategy (Pontypool, Wales: Merlin, 2013).
34. Ibid., p. xi.
35. Charles Post, “What Is Left of Leninism? New European Left Parties in Historical Perspective,” in Socialist Register, pp. 175–97.
36. 33, pp. 430–31.
37. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972), p. 186.
38. Ibid.
39. Post, p. 179.
40. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). I predicted as much in my “Class Struggle under ‘Empire’: In Defence of Marx and Engels,” International Socialism no. 96 (Autumn 2002): 47–70.
41. In September 1973, the Social Democratic government of Salvador Allende in Chile was overthrown in a coup d’état headed by General Augusto Pinochet and supported by the US government. Though the working-class masses asked to be armed to defend his government and the conquests they had made, Allende declined, saying the military in Chile, unlike elsewhere in Latin America, had always respected civilian rule.
42. See my “Class Struggle under ‘Empire’: In Defence of Marx and Engels.”
43. Atilio Borom, “Strategy and Tactics in Popular Struggles in Latin America,” in Socialist Register, p. 249.
44. Ibid., p. 253.
45. Michalis Spourdalakis, “Left Strategy in the Greek Cauldron: Explaining Syriza’s Success,” in Socialist Register, pp. 108; Aristides Baltas, “The Rise of Syriza: An Interview,” in Socialist Register, pp. 131–32.
46. Hillary Wainwright, “Transformative Power: Political Organization in Transition,” in Socialist Register, pp. 138 and 143.
47. Forever etched on my brain when I first read them more than thirty years ago are the all-so-instructive lines in Leon Trotsky’s The History of the Russian Revolution (New York: Pathfinder Press, 2009) about the decisive moments in the drama of 1917: “The Bolsheviks did not summon the masses for the April demonstration. The Bolsheviks will not call the armed masses into the streets at the beginning of July. Only in October will the party finally fall in step and march out at the head of the masses, not for a demonstration, but for a revolution” (p. 369).
48. Baltas, p. 124.
49. At the end of 2012, Syriza held a national conference to begin the process of transforming itself into a political party, and the differences between those who want to moderate its message in order to become the governing party and those who want to stay with the radical vision quickly manifested itself. Engels’s comment made in 1887 about a workers’ party “getting bourgeois” is apropos: “It is a misfortune that overtakes all extreme parties as soon as the day for them to become ‘possible’ draws near.” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 48 (New York: International Publishers, 1975–2004), p. 115. Hereafter, citations from the MECW are designated as follows: MECW 48, p. 115. In his speech to the party convention in July 2013, Alexis Tsipras made a number of proposals about the electoral process and party discipline but didn’t make clear if Syriza’s parliamentary group would be subordinate to the will of its rank and file.
50. Post, p. 191.
51. Susan Spronk, “Twenty-First Century Socialism in Bolivia: The Gender Agenda,” in Socialist Register, p. 259.
52. In the draft I mistakenly wrote “1912”; I probably had in mind the Lena goldfields strike in Siberia, when miners there—like the gold and platinum miners in South Africa—went out on strike and helped revive the revolutionary process in Russia leading eventually to 1917.
53. Mandela, evidently, according to new revelations prompted by his death on December 5, 2013, had in fact been a member of the SACP. See Bill Keller, “Nelson Mandela, Communist,” New York Times, December 8, 2013, p. 8.
54. Longtime SACP leader Joe Slovo’s 1989 document “Has Socialism Failed?,” written as the USSR and its sycophant regimes in Eastern Europe were about to implode, appeared to be the analysis that many thought provided an explanation for what went wrong with the Stalinist option. In hindsight, admittedly, it could never have been an honest discussion, because there were too many skeletons in the SACP’s closet and too many people were still alive who were responsible for them being there. Former SACP leader Raymond Suttner’s recent denunciation of the ANC/SACP/COSATU alliance for its venality, “South Africa: The Tripartite Alliance Has Sold Its Soul,” Mail & Guardian, September 27, 2013, is telling. Like Slovo’s document, it fails to get to the root of the problem—the counterrevolutionary character of Stalinism.
55. The latest news from South Africa suggests this may now be underway. The largest trade union—Numsa, the miners—announced that it would break with the Triple Alliance and “would seek to start a socialist party aimed at protecting the interests of the working class.” See Lydia Polgreen, “South Africa’s Biggest Trade Union Pulls Its Support for A.N.C.,” New York Times, December 20, 2013.
56. MECW 50, p. 236.
57. August H. Nimtz, Marx, Tocqueville, and Race in America: The “Absolute Democracy” or “Defiled Republic” (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), p. 213. I didn’t employ a crystal ball for my prediction about the crisis but the analysis that the US Socialist Workers’ Party began making with the 1987 Wall Street stock-market crash.
58. Thomas Sugrue’s op-ed piece in the New York Times (December 14, 2012) about the Michigan defeat is accurate about the failed course of the once-powerful United Auto Workers union: “[T]hey have used their dwindling resources to influence elections . . . rather than confronting employers directly. At a moment when the voting machine has replaced the picket line as the last bastion of union strength, right-to-work advocates hope to weaken what remains of the movement’s clout. Without a strong voice representing them, Michigan workers will remain outmatched in what was already a tough defensive battle for economic security.”
59. Joan Sangster and Meg Luxton, “Feminism, Co-optation and the Problems of Amnesia: A Response to Nancy Fraser,” in Socialist Register, p. 303.
60. Barbara Epstein, “Occupy Oakland: The Question of Violence,” in Socialist Register, pp. 72–74.
61. 33, p. 431.
62. “If from the outset the democrats come out resolutely and terroristically against the reactionaries, the influence of the latter in the elections will be destroyed in advance.” MECW 10, p. 284.
63. Alex Callinicos, “Alain Badiou and the Idea of Communism,” in Socialist Register, p. 341.
64. “Inevitable” (or, in its original German, unvermeidlich) appears only once in the Manifesto, at the very end of Part One, immediately followed by Part Two, “Proletarians and Communists,” about the latter’s tasks.
1. Original text available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/5thconfr/3.htm.
1. Original text available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1909/confreeb/part3.htm.
2. [Footnote from source] Vlasov—A. I. Rykov.
3. [Footnote from source] The private meeting—a meeting of Leninist Bolsheviks called by Lenin on the eve of the conference of the extended editorial board of Proletary. Lenin gave the meeting full information concerning the state of affairs in the Bolshevik section and the struggle against the otzovists, the ultimatumists and the god-builders. The theses contained in Lenin’s report formed the basis for the resolutions adopted by the conference of the extended editorial board.
1. Original text available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1909/oct/00b.htm.
2. [Footnote from source] The first part of the first chapter of the explanatory note should include a popular account, written in as propagandist a manner as possible, of the reasons in favour of the eight-hour working day, from the point of view of the productivity of labour, the health and cultural interests of the proletariat, and the interests in general of its struggle for emancipation.—Lenin
3. [Footnote from source] Zubatov, S. V.—colonel of gendarmerie and chief of the Moscow Secret Police, who carried out a policy known as “police socialism.” In 1901–03, on his initiative legal workers’ organisations were set up in order to divert the workers from the political struggle against the autocracy. Zubatov’s activity in setting up legal workers’ organisations was supported by V. K. Plehve, Minister of the Interior. Zubatov tried to direct the working-class movement towards the achievement of purely economic demands and, to make the workers think that the government was ready to meet their demands. The first Zubatov organisation was set up in Moscow in May 1901 under the name “Society for the Mutual Assistance of Workers in Mechanical Industry.” Zubatov organisations were set up also in Minsk, Odessa, Vilna, Kiev and other cities.
4. [Footnote from source] Jules Guesde, Le Problème et la solution; les huit heures à la chambre, Lille. (The Problem and Its Solution; the Eight-Hour Day in Parliament—Ed.)
5. [Footnote from source] M. Schippel, Sozial-Demokratisches Reichstagshandbuch (Social Democratic Handbook to the Reichstag—Ed.) Berlin, 1902, pp. 882 and 886.
6. [Footnote from source] Parvus, Die Handelskrisis und die Gewerkschaften. Nebst Anhang, Gesetzentwurf über den achtstundigen Normalarbeitstag. München: 1901 (Parvus, The Trade Crisis and the Trade Unions. With appendix: Bill on the Eight-Hour Normal Working Day Munich, 1901.—Ed.)
7. [Footnote from source] On the question of the gradual introduction of the eight-hour working day Parvus says, in our opinion quite rightly, that this feature of his Bill arises “not from the desire to come to an understanding with the employers but from the desire to come to an understanding with the workers. We should follow the tactics of the trade unions: they carry out the reduction of the working day extremely gradually for they are well aware that this is the easiest way to counteract a reduction of wages” (Parvus’s italics, ibid., pp. 62–63).—Lenin
1. Original text available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1912/6thconf/efd.htm.
1. [Footnote from source] Lenin wrote “The Election Platform of the R.S.D.L.P.” in Paris, early in March 1912, shortly after the Prague Conference. “The Election Platform” was published in Russia by the Central Committee of the Party as a separate leaflet and distributed in 18 localities including the main working-class centres. Reprinted from the leaflet, it appeared as a supplement to No. 26 of Sotsial-Demokrat. It was also reprinted by many local Bolshevik organisations and by the Russian Bureau of the C.C. of the R.S.D.L.P. in Tiflis. The significance of this document is dealt with by V. I. Lenin in his article “The Platform of the Reformists and the Platform of the Revolutionary Social-Democrats.” Original text available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1912/mar/00c.htm.
2. [Footnote from source] Khodynka Tsar—at Khodynka Field on the outskirts of Moscow, a carnival was arranged on the occasion of the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II on May 18, 1896. Criminal negligence on the part of the authorities led to a tremendous crush in which about 2,000 people lost their lives and tens of thousands were injured.
3. [Footnote from source] The law of March 4, 1906—temporary regulations providing for a certain freedom of associations, unions and meetings, but which at the same time laid down a number of obstacles, and in fact reduced the law to a scrap of paper. It gave the Minister of the Interior the right not only to suppress associations and unions, but also to refuse official recognition to new unions.
1. Original text available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/mar/28.htm.
1. Original text available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/petcconf/22b.htm.
1. Original text available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/dec/16.htm.
1. Original text available at http://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/2nd-congress/ch08a.htm.
A Critical Review of the Relevant Literature
1. For a useful introduction to this literature, see “Review Forum: Documentary History and Political Parties,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 107–232.
2. Robert Service, Lenin: A Political Life, vol. 1 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 186.
3. Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution (New York: Viking, 1996), pp. 388–89.
4. Nadezhda Krupskaya, Memories of Lenin (London: Panther Books, 1970), p. 172.
5. V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 31 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), p. 35. Hereafter, citations from his Collected Works will be designated as in this case: 31, p. 35.
6. Robert B. McKean, St. Petersburg between the Revolutions: Workers and Revolutionaries, June 1907–February 1917 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 131.
7. Service, vol. 2, p. 18.
8. 18, p. 494.
9. Geoffrey A. Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma, 1907–1914 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 183.
10. Service, vol. 2, p. 18.
11. Ibid., p. 19.
12. Ibid., p. 24.
13. McKean, p. 84.
14. Leon Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence (New York: Universal Library, 1941), p. 112.
15. McKean, p. 141.
16. Ibid., p. 525n37.
17. Service, vol. 2, p. 50.
18. Louis Fischer, The Life of Lenin (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 83. But Fischer couldn’t resist at least one fabrication. He claims that Lenin, despite Malinovsky’s plea that he do so, did not attend his trial (p. 84). In fact, he did, according to R. C. Elwood, Russian Social Democracy in the Underground: A Study of the RSDLP in the Ukraine, 1907–1914 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1974), p. 66.
19. Richard Pipes, ed., The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 37–38. According to Pipes, “Lenin pretended in 1917 that he had had no contact with Malinovsky after he resigned from the Duma” (p. 24). That claim is contradicted by Lenin’s point that the investigating commission, of which he was a member, “arranged personal confrontations with Malinovsky” (p. 37).
20. Trotsky, Stalin, p. 151.
21. Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, vol. 2 (New York: Monthly Review, 1977–90), p. 653.
22. Pipes, pp. 31–32.
23. 21, p. 172.
24. Figes, p. 294.
25. McKean, p. 361.
26. 21, p. 280.
27. Service, vol. 2, p. 304.
28. 6, p. 31.
29. Figes, p. 507.
30. Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), p. 208.
31. Ibid., inter alia, pp. 194–204.
32. Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 17.
33. Ibid., p. 206.