PART I
The development of revolutionary events in the tsarist empire, with the shifting of the proletarian uprising from Petersburg to the provinces of Russia and to the Lithuanian and Polish regions, has already removed all doubt about the fact that at present in the land of the knout we are dealing with, not a spontaneous, blind revolt of downtrodden slaves, but with a genuine political movement of the class-conscious urban workers, who are sticking together in the closest possible way, in an entirely unified manner, and who have come out onto the battlefield in response to the sudden signal from Petersburg. Here the Social Democrats are already standing at the head of the uprising.
And this is in keeping with the natural role of a revolutionary party at the outbreak of an open political mass struggle.
To win the leading position in the country where the revolution is going on, to skillfully make use of the first wins and losses in order to give guidance to the stream while in midstream oneself—that is the task of Social Democracy in revolutionary epochs. Not the beginning but the conclusion is what matters, and to directly affect the outcome of the revolutionary upsurge—that is the only goal that a political party can reasonably set for itself if it does not want to give in to fantastic illusions, overestimating itself, or to an indolent type of pessimism.
The extent to which this task of the party is successful, however, the extent to which the party rises to the occasion—that depends in the greatest degree on how widely Social Democracy has known how to make its influence felt among the masses in the prerevolutionary period, the extent to which it was already successful in putting together a solid central core [Keimtruppe] of politically well-trained worker activists with clear goals, how large the sum total of all its educational and organizational work has been. The events of the present in the Russian empire can only be evaluated and understood in the light of the previous paths taken by the workers’ movement, only from the perspective of the entire fifteen- to twenty-year history of Social Democracy [in the tsarist empire].
If the question is asked, “What part did Social Democracy have in the current revolutionary upsurge?” we must firmly state, first of all, that for a long time and right down to the most recent period no one at all except Social Democracy, no other element in Russia proper, was concerned about the working class, about its cultural and material advancement, or about its political education. The industrial and commercial bourgeoisie, in actuality, never bestirred itself as a class to attain even a lukewarm liberalism; and in the case of the liberals of the agrarian nobility, each stewed in his own juice, off in his own corner, and thus politically the liberals constantly moved along a virtuous straight and narrow path “between fear and hope.” As political educators of the industrial proletariat they simply do not come into view. To the extent that the radical and democratic intelligentsia, however, concerned themselves about the Russian people, and they did concern themselves especially in the 1860s and 1870s, they directed their activity as well as their sympathy exclusively toward the people of the countryside, the peasantry. These Russian liberals and democrats sought to exert a cultural influence as village doctors, village teachers, statisticians in the rural bodies of “local self-government” (the zemstvos), and even as rural squires.* The peasants and Mother Earth—for the intelligentsia, those were the leverage points for lifting Russia up, and that remained true well into the 1890s. The urban industrial proletariat, on the other hand, along with modern capitalism, they regarded as something essentially alien to the Russian people, as a destructive element, as a wounded or injured part of the body politic, harmful to the well-being of the people. Even in the first half of the 1890s the spiritual leader of “oppositional Russia,” the late [Nikolai] Mikhailovsky, at one time a brilliant writer, was then waging an all-out campaign against the Marxist teachings about the social significance of the industrial proletariat, and in the process he presented the evidence at hand, for example, the commercial popular songs [Gassenhauer] and such things [that had won favor in the cities], showing that the factory proletariat were contributing to the moral and intellectual degradation of the Russian “people.”
But even socialist trends of thought in Russia moved along the same lines until the 1890s. The terrorist organization People’s Will (Narodnaya Volya), based itself preeminently on the fiction of communal ownership of the land by the peasants and the supposed socialist mission of this “peasant commune,” and this outlook still had its hold in revolutionary circles up until the end of the 1880s† and kept their minds trapped in the limited field of vision of the old Narodnik outlook, which had an aversion to the urban proletariat. And all this remained true [into the 1890s], even though the political high point of the movement that based itself on the idea of terrorism as a tactic had been reached in 1881 with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II.
Under such circumstances, the task was to get the urban modern proletariat in Russia to fight for their own social and historical rights as citizens, and to point out to them their own social and economic significance, that within them there lay the slumbering kernel of a future revolutionary force, illustrating “the special connection between their status as wage workers and the political emancipation of Russia from tsarism.”* The heated theoretical struggle in written form against the Narodnik anti-capitalist theories, this fight over the reality of the existence of capitalism in Russia, the fight over the right to even recognize its existence [in Russia], and the fight over the role of the modern proletariat in Russian society took up almost the entire decade.
Only toward the beginning of the 1890s, the pro-terrorist trends and pro-Narodnik prejudices among the Russian intelligentsia were finally overcome so extensively and Marx’s teachings became so firmly implanted in people’s minds that it became possible to begin Social Democratic practical work.†
But then, as the difficulties of practical work began, certain agonizing missteps also cropped up. To start with, this practical work more-or-less naturally took the form of clandestine propaganda in small, closed workers’ circles. The Russian wage-worker proletarian, who was still quite raw, first of all had to be enlightened in a general sense, to be given the most fundamental elements of an education, before he would be capable of absorbing Social Democratic ideas. Thus, of necessity, propaganda work, with the emphasis on basic education, became transformed into an extremely slow-moving effort that made tortuous progress. Circles of five, ten, or twenty workers took years of time from the best of the combined forces of the Social Democratic intelligentsia. For a certain period of time in Russia, thanks to the conscientiousness and zeal with which this form of propaganda was pursued, with things always being carried to extreme lengths, even to the point of absurdity, an inevitable element of pedantry became mixed in with the educational work. The Social Democratic movement soon became aware that in these workers’ circles socialism had been twisted almost into a caricature of Marx’s teachings about class struggle. The workers in these circles were not becoming class-conscious, fighting proletarian activists, but rather something like learned rabbis of socialist doctrine, classic specimens of the well-trained “enlightened worker” who did not enter into the movement together with the masses as a whole. The opposite was true; they had been uprooted from their native soil and had become estranged from the masses.
“Grimly thorough”—that is how the first phase of Social Democratic propaganda work was evaluated and subjected to fierce self-criticism. It was judged and found wanting, and thrown out.
In place of this isolated “homework” assigned in workers’ circles studying socialism, a new slogan was raised—mass agitation, direct engagement in the class struggle. But under absolutist rule mass agitation and mass struggle in the absence of any rights or any permitted forms of political activity, without any possibility of approaching the masses [legally], with no freedom of assembly or freedom of association (including the right to form labor unions), this slogan seemed to be a call for “squaring the circle,” a crazy notion. It can be shown precisely from this example taken from the Russian experience that the material development of society is much more powerful and sensible than all sorts of “general laws” which have been instilled into the minds of many Western European Social Democrats, who regard them with holy reverence and with fixed expressions of awe on their stiff, yellow-parchment faces.
Mass struggle and mass agitation under absolutism proved to be possible after all; the problem of squaring the circle was first solved in Poland, where as early as 1890 the first Social Democratic organization made its appearance.* Obviously that first Social Democratic organization felt its way more-or-less empirically in relation to the economic struggle and was able to learn how to arouse a lively mass movement. The example of Poland was followed in Russia, and soon for the Social Democratic unions “the sky was hung full of violins.”† By means of fresh and energetic agitation, based on immediate material needs, the masses were readily brought into motion, and after a long series of small and large strikes the agitation reached a peak with the enormous strike [of 40,000 textile workers] in Petersburg in 1896. This mass outpouring was exclusively led by the Social Democrats,‡ and seemed to crown their efforts, giving a brilliant testimony of success to the second phase of Social Democratic work.
The only thing was, the movement again ran into a snag. What happened in particular this time was that the Russian Social Democratic cart, as it rushed forward, came to a dangerous turn in the road of a different kind. In Poland, the first purely “economic” phase of agitation was overcome as early as 1893, and it morphed into an outspokenly political Social Democratic movement, but in Russia both political issues and the idea of socialism were nearly swamped; they nearly disappeared in the heat of mass agitation, and what remained, hardly noticed in many cases, was the development of a flat and uninspired trade unionism with a narrowly conceived fight for higher wages as the ideal, with the emphasis on negotiations with the factory authorities instead of the fight against the capitalist system of wage slavery in general.*
And just as, earlier, the individual worker in a study circle was led to Marx by way of an academic course which quite often took a small detour through [Charles] Darwin and the roundworms and flatworms of Professor [Karl] Vogt,† similarly now the workers as a whole were supposed to be led to the class struggle, like a large classroom full of pupils being instructed with the help of visual aids—they would be instructed by the gendarmes, and by being beaten by the police during strikes, and would be forced to reach a lucid conclusion on their own—to the view that the elimination of absolutism was an unavoidable necessity. In this way the groundwork was also laid to a certain extent for the tsarist regime’s Zubatóv experiment.‡
The creatures involved at the head of these officially permitted workers’ organizations gave the workers the same kind of advice that the German imperial chancellor Count [Bernhard von] Bülow recently gave in the Reichstag to the striking mine workers in the Ruhr region.§
For the third time, the Russian Social Democrats subjected their own methods of agitation to merciless criticism, and a brusque turn toward clearly political mass agitation marked the end of the 1890s. The ground was now so well prepared, the working class showed itself to be so responsive, that the idea of political struggle blazed out like lightning. With the beginning of 1901 a new phase opened—mass political demonstrations—linked up with unrest at the academic institutions. Street demonstrations swept from city to city like a thunderstorm, clearing the air and making it possible to breath. From Petersburg in the north they swept southward from city to city, and likewise from the west, from Warsaw, eastward all the way to Tomsk and Tobolsk in faraway Siberia. And again the newly awakened revolutionary forces exploded into a mass strike—this time a political mass strike in the south of Russia, in Rostov-on-Don in [November] 1902.* In Rostov, day after day, 10,000–20,000 workers held assemblies under the open sky, surrounded by soldiers, where “newly baked, fresh out of the oven” Social Democratic orators improvised burning speeches, where tens of thousands erupted in response to the calls made by SD orators and [thus] gave a foretaste of the downfall of absolutism.
But already, for the fourth time, there arose a danger that the movement would again run into a dead end. In particular, it is characteristic of a healthy mass movement that if it does not want to slip backward, it must invariably keep striding forward, keep developing, onward and upward. And now the Russian workers’ movement was rising rapidly and intensively. After the first cycle of political street demonstrations there immediately arose before the Russian Social Democrats the frightening question: “What next?” One cannot simply keep demonstrating indefinitely. A demonstration is merely one moment, an overture, a question mark. The answer hovered on the tip of the Social Democrats’ tongues—but it was not easily spoken.
At that point, the war [with Japan] intervened.
With the war, the solution to the problem unfolded of its own accord. There was a word which in ordinary times, in an atmosphere of calm, a time of gray, plodding, day-to-day activity, would have a rather hollow ring to it, would smack of braggadocio [Renommisterei]. But with the beginning of the war it became a timely slogan, which awakened all vital spirits with the spark of life. It had the liveliest echo in the heart of the working class.
The Social Democrats of the entire empire agitated in harmonious unison with the events of the war. Providing suitable accompaniment to the thunder of cannons in Manchuria, they agitated for the idea of revolution, for open street fighting, for the proletariat to rise against tsarism. All articles in the Social Democratic papers, all the hundreds of thousands of Social Democratic leaflets—whether in Russian, Polish, Yiddish, Latvian, or other—and all gatherings concluded with a single idea: Proletarian uprising against tsarism. The agitating was done with bated breath, a certain anxious beating of the heart, a feeling of tightness in one’s chest. Because there is nothing simpler than a revolution once it has happened, but nothing more devilishly difficult than one that is still to “be made.” A thousand voices called for the revolution—and the revolution came.
It came as always “unexpectedly”—even though people had been preparing for it for roughly two decades. It came inaudibly, overnight, like a rising flood—with all kinds of floating logs and junk picked up along the way and being carried high on the swollen, angrily swirling waters.
Whoever believes that the flotsam and jetsam rushing by was directing the course of the flood may believe that Father Gapon was the originator and leader of the revolution in Russia.
PART II
It is enough, then, to know the history of the Social Democratic movement in Russia to be clear in advance that today’s revolution, no matter what form or outer expression it took to begin with, was not something shot out of a pistol, but rather grew up historically out of the Social Democratic movement, and that it constitutes a normal stage, a natural nodal point in the course of development of Social Democratic work, a point at which, once again, quantity is transformed into quality—a new form of struggle—an action that is reproduced in more intensified form on a higher rung of the ladder; it reproduced the Social Democratic–led mass rebellions of Petersburg 1896 and Rostov 1902.
If one reviews the history of the fifteen-plus years of Social Democratic practical activity in the Russian empire, then it does not appear as a series of zigzags, as it might have seemed subjectively at the time to Social Democrats active in the work there; it appears as an entirely logical course of development in which each higher stage arose out of the preceding one and would not have been conceivable without it. How bitterly the beginning phase of closed-circle propaganda work was criticized later by the Social Democrats themselves, but undoubtedly that labor of Sisyphus, which seemed so unpromising, produced a priceless reserve of enlightened individuals among the proletariat who later became sturdy load-bearers and solid points of support for the mass agitation based on the social interests of the working class. Likewise, the intensive economic agitation which shook up and stirred such wide layers among the workers, bringing the idea of class struggle to them on such a broad scale—precisely because of that, the later explicit and sharply accented political agitation found fertile soil. And so, it was possible to unleash the series of gigantic street demonstrations.
And all these phases of development taken together in their ever-increasing intensity and ever-expanding scope have created precisely the sum total of political enlightenment, capacity for action, and strenuous revolutionary exertion that led to the events of January 22 and the weeks since then. Without a doubt, it is solely as a result of the direct work of Social Democracy that such a strong feeling developed of everyone belonging together to the working class, of common class belonging for all proletarians in the tsarist empire, in spite of the promotion of every kind of national and ethnic hostility by the absolutist regime, so that the Petersburg uprising became a signal for a common universal uprising in all parts of the empire, a universal uprising of all the workers, not just in Russia proper but even more so in Poland and Lithuania, an uprising whose aims were held in common and whose demands were raised in common.
Of course, it does not follow that the Russian way should be the officially authorized way, that the historical path of the Social Democratic movement in Russia, described above, should be proclaimed as the best and only good and true way. Perhaps an even shorter and better way can be found or will make itself evident—especially now, after the fact. But social history remains an eternal primer and serves as an illustrative model which is given only once—but once it has been given, it follows, especially for Social Democracy, that the task is to learn to understand the paths of development taken so far in their actual specific inner logic, to learn and understand how things happened in each country and are still happening.
Obviously, military events and the crushing oppressiveness of absolutism, which had become unbearable, played a big and decisive role [in starting the revolution in Russia]. The only thing is that the very fact that the present war could bring about such an outbreak, the very fact that the oppressive quality of absolutism subjectively for the great mass of the industrial proletariat had become totally unbearable—while objectively this oppression had essentially always been the same as it was then—it is precisely here that the preliminary work of Social Democracy makes itself felt.
The Crimean War [1855–56] was no less devastating for official Russia, but in its day, it resulted only in the farce of the “liberal reforms” of the 1860s.* And this farce marked the exhaustion of Russian liberalism, displaying the equivalent of the total political force the Russian liberals were capable of exerting at that time, by themselves alone. The Russo-Turkish War,† which in terms of barbarically tossing tens of thousands of proletarian and peasant lives around—that was nothing by comparison with the present war.‡ The Russo-Turkish War in its day caused great unrest in Russian society, but that only hastened the “comeuppance” suffered by the People’s Will terrorist organization, and as the result of its blazing but brief and sterile existence, that experience revealed how little the revolutionary intelligentsia, which based itself on the liberal and democratic circles of “polite society,” was capable of accomplishing. The party of systematic political terrorism was in its day a product of disillusion about the incapacity for organization and action of the peasant masses of Russia. And thus that particular social class of the tsarist empire demonstrated its historical inertness.
So then, the present war was able to stamp its foot and produce a revolutionary mass movement out of the earth, which immediately shook the foundations of the entire fortress of absolutism. It was precisely this present war that lent so much power to the nearly two-decades-long propaganda effort. And it shook the vast empire because it found a readily prepared and enlightened modern working class that is in a position for the first time in the history of Russia to demonstrate by revolutionary action the logical revolutionary consequences of this war.
It is upon the foundations of the Social Democratic workers’ movement that the liberal stirrings and the democratic aspirations of the intelligentsia and of the progressive agrarian nobility first got an injection of blood and vitality, taking on some significance and acquiring some vigor. Then the proletarian revolution came precisely at the right moment—just as its predecessor of the time, the liberal zemstvo activity and the series of banquets held by the democratic intelligentsia in Russia, were threatening to shatter to pieces upon their own powerlessness, just when it was conceivable that a “deathly calm” was about to set in. Reaction would immediately be aware of that with the sure sense of smell of the ruling classes and which would encourage the rulers to put their foot down more firmly than ever. The muscular arm of the proletarian masses with one good shove set the cart rolling again, and in fact it gave the cart such a vigorous push that it cannot and will not come to rest before absolutism lies crushed beneath its wheels.
It is also true that in the tsarist empire, Social Democracy is not of the type that reaps where others have sown. It is true rather that Social Democracy deserves the credit for the sowing of revolutionary ideas and the giant work of cultivation of the proletarian soil. But the harvest also goes to all the elements in bourgeois society that represent progress, all the elements in world capitalist society—and not the least of these is international Social Democracy.