Revolutions - 10.24- The Union of Struggle for The Emancipation of the Working Class

Episode Date: December 2, 2019

Relationship Status: Lenin, Plekhanov, and Martov are all on the same side. This won't always be the case. Sponsor: casper.com/revolutions

Hello and welcome to revolutions. Episode 10.24, the Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. Last time we introduced Julius Martoff and a new theory of organizing for the Russian Marxists, agitation, not propaganda, which Martoff would then carry with him to St. Petersburg when his two years administrative exile in Vilna finally wrapped up in the autumn of 1895. In today's episode, he will arrive, bearing this new strategy, and then join with other Marxists in the capital to form a new group who would agitate their way towards the revolution they all dreamed of.

Now, one of Martov's key allies in this project is going to, of course, be Lenin, and it is in the course of today's episode that these two future friends turned future rivals will meet for the first time. So, what has Lenin been up to? Well, while Martoff was trumpeting the same. success of the new program of agitation to his comrades in Vilna in May of 1895, Lenin was off on his first trip abroad, on a mission he undertook on behalf of his comrades in St. Petersburg to make contact with the now legendary old guard emigre marxists of the Emancipation of Labor

Group, our old friends, Gregori Prejanov, Verza Sulech, and Pavel Axelrod. When Lenin submitted his travel paperwork to the authorities, he claimed that this was a vacation he undertook for his health, which wasn't totally made up. He had been very sick in April of 1895 and did actually need to recuperate. But the authorities didn't really care whether it was a lie or not. Lenin was well known to them, and they happily stamped his papers to get him out of the country. Because maybe if they were lucky, he would just decide to never come back, which would be all right with them. So in the last week of April, 1895, Lenin departed on what would be a four, month tour through Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and France. His most important object being linking

up with the Emancipation of Labor Group. Now, we left this group back in episode 10.17, round about 1890. And I wrapped up episode 10.17 by saying, and I'm quoting myself now, it's fair to say that by the dawn of 1890, the Emancipation of Labor Group had zero influence on socialist politics at home or abroad. But much to every single, shock, the forces of history turned in their favor. Plahanov suddenly appeared to be a mad prophet who had predicted a great flood and who everyone had laughed at until the flood suddenly came. End quote.

So having spent the 1880s publishing their interpretations and translation of Marx into the void, the Vita system had come along and made Marxism suddenly very relevant to this younger generation, like Lenin and Krupskaya and Martoff. not that the Emancipation of Labor Group yet had any formal ties to any distributors or allies inside of Russia. Their work was smuggled in and passed around, but it was all very haphazard, like the kids who would go on holiday with their families and come home with trunks full of illegal books. These books would then be passed around hand-to-hand inside of reading and discussion circles, but there was no permanent, stable distribution link.

One of the reasons Lenin was undertaking his mission to find the emancipation, of labor group was to forge just such a permanent stable distribution link between Switzerland and Russia. So even as late as 1895, the emancipation of labor group was still just as small as they had always been. It was still just the three of them, Plihanov, Zasulich, and Axelrod. And this is not to say they could not have built a larger organization inside the emigre community had they wanted to. They just did not want to. The triumvirate of Plihanov, Zazer. Sulech and Axelrod, conceived of the emancipation of labor group as a close-knit intellectual brain trust that must remain compact in order to maintain ideological coherence and purity.

Coherence and purity, as defined mostly by Plahanov. So they were happy to meet with potential supporters or followers or people who might like to spread their work, but they were never going to offer you membership in the group. And one way to think about this is that they basically conceived of themselves as something like a modern rock band, cranking out albums. If you like a band, you support the band. You go to their concerts, you buy their albums and tell your friends. But just because you like a band doesn't mean you get to join the band. But young radicals at the time didn't really have any concept of this.

Being invited to join parties and circles and groups was a fairly normal thing. So it often came as a disappointing shock to fans who came around to Prahanov being like, oh man, I dig your stuff. Where can I sign up? And Plahanov would say, hey, great, buy some books, spread the word. But no, you don't get to join the band. And then they would leave and he would go back to writing. Now, there were pluses and minuses to this approach, but for sure the biggest plus, at least in

Plahonov's mind, was that he never had to share songwriting duties with anyone. Is it time for me to let this metaphor go? Yes, it is time for me to let this metaphor go. You get it. While they were busy not expanding their ranks in the early 1890s, Plahanov was hard at work on what became one of his most important books. The Development of the Monist View of History, which was meant to be the definitive articulation of historical materialism for a Russian audience. written under a pseudonym. The title, the development of the monist view of history, was intentionally designed to be unwieldy and boring, to hopefully slip it past the censors.

And it worked. Just as they had done with capital, the bureaucrats in the censor's office decided the development of the monist view of history was a snooze fest and they let it be published legally in Russia. Once it started making the rounds, though, it turned out to be a real hit. The Monist view became the basic textbook explanation for historical materialism, leaving readers with a clear argument why the Marxists were so focused on this growing urban proletariat as the key to the future socialist revolution.

And it turned out to be a must read for all budding socialist revolutionaries. One of those budding socialist revolutionaries was, of course, Lenin. And a 25-year-old Lenin arrived in Switzerland in May of 1895, moderately indefinitely indefinitely. intimidated by the prospect of meeting the great Plahanov, the Moses of Marxism. Plahanov, for his part, seems to have appreciated Lennon's appreciation of his work, at least once it became clear that Lennon did not want to, like, join the band. Lenin was instead offering his services as a representative of supporters inside Russia who could help spread the ideas up Pohanov and the other members of the Emancipation of Labor Group.

And this was the perfect moment to really flood the intellectual. market with Marxism, because the Vita system was in full swing by this point, which really did seem to be proving that Marx and historical materialism were dead right. So Pluranoff and Lennon worked out an arrangement in principle, and Lennon departed with a stack of letters of introduction written by Plahanov that would open doors for young Lennon throughout Europe. Though in the future, they were almost never in the same place at the same time, Lennon and Plahonov would spend the next ten years or so basically on the same side. So this meeting in May of 1895 was the beginning of an effective partnership.

But Prehanov also recognized in Lenin something that Lenin probably recognized in himself already. A potential rival for the title leader of the Russian Marxists. This concern was deepened a little bit when Lenin moved along to Zurich to stay for a week with Pavel Axelrod. And Axelrod straight up said, I think we found our leader in Russia. So Lenin and Axelrod hung out for about a week and got to and know each other, they read and discussed various articles and books and ideas. And Lenin was very pleased when Axelrod commented on a collection of articles Lenin had brought with him, saying that he liked one in particular, which just so happened to be the one written

by Lenin under another pen name. They also discussed the role in relationship of those revolutionaries inside Russia to those outside Russia. And they agreed that when the revolution came, that the center of leadership had to be inside Russia, that the best of the way for emigre outfits like the Emancipation of Labor Group to help the revolution would be, as Axelrod put it, to act as a fortified redoubt overlooking a great battlefield. They would be able to take in the whole picture, give strategic advice, and protect the most precious valuables. Axelrod did not really agree with many of his fellow emigres, who, in their kind of arrogant

insular myopia, believed that the people inside Russia should be the foot soldiers, while the emigres should be the generals. Axelrod thought this was kind of crazy. If nothing else, it was a supremely inefficient way to run a revolution, which is almost by its very nature a rapid fire event that will require instantaneous decision-making on the ground. Lenin agreed wholeheartedly. So agreed on this point, Lenin departed. And it would come as a bit of a shock to Axelrod to find Lenin making the opposite case just a few years later. Of course, that was after Lenin had been driven into exile himself, which I'm sure had nothing to do with his change of hearts. After his stay in Switzerland, Lenin moved on to Paris, where he met with other emigre radicals. The most important of these audiences being with the legendary Frenchman Paul Lafarge, the veteran of the Paris Commune, who had fled to London in the aftermath of the Bloody Week, and who soon thereafter married Karl Marx's daughter, Laura. Sitting there with this communard and the daughter of Marx, Lenin listened to their stories with rapt attention.

And the Paris Commune in particular would be a historical event he would often return to, in his own writings. Aside from this meeting, Lenin enjoyed his time in Paris as best he could, though his health did start to deteriorate. He suffered headaches and insomnia, and eventually he had to make his declaration to the Russian authorities that he was traveling abroad for his health. True. With an infusion of cash from his always supportive mother, Lenin returned to Switzerland where he

recuperated at a spa before heading back to the battlefield in Russia. Lenin returned to St. Petersburg in early September. 1895, looking forward to implementing a program he had discussed with the Emancipation of Labor Group, linking together the 20 or so currently separate Marxist reading circles in and around St. Petersburg, and then linking that linked group to the emigres abroad. It was going to be the beginnings of the beginnings of a Social Democratic Party. Maybe. It was in the service of this project that Lenin first met Martoff, who returned from his exile, in October of 1895, bearing the new gospel of the Vilna program and eager to make it work in St. Petersburg.

Now up until now, Lenin himself had mostly been doing polemical work against the Philistine neurotists, who could not see that they were the past and Marxism was the future. He had also done some propagandizing among the workers, though he didn't really enjoy it. He was a writer, a debater, and a leader, not a schoolteacher. So though he did enjoy the intellectually stimulating, life of a salon radical, he saw in the Vilna program a straightforward way to advance the revolutionary character of the working classes, because in the end, the working classes were going to be expected to do their revolutionary work as a class, as a mass movement. This was not supposed to be

about an elite intellectual vanguard. Lenin agreed that focusing on specific factory grievances would help show the workers living examples of the theory of the exploitation of labor outlined by Marx. Lenin also agreed that prodding the workers towards strikes by socialist agitation would give those workers necessary experience in a fighting spirit that would serve them well in the revolution to come. So the leaders of the various Marxist discussion groups in St. Petersburg got together and founded this thing called the Union for the struggle of the emancipation of the working class. The union adopted Martoff's recommended strategy. Talk less. Listen more. Publish leaflets, not books. Focus on lived reality, not abstract theory. Your audience is the

workers, not other coffee house radicals. Now, the actual membership of this coordinating union of struggle was never very big, maybe 20 members and all. Lenin and Martoff both sat on the central committee where they implemented Martoff's strategy. Their first task was to go out among the workers and find out what their grievances actually were. So they printed and distributed questionnaires for people to fill out that they hoped would allow them to cobble together a list of complaints that might motivate the workers to go on strike. And this did generate some useful information.

And the members of the union also attempted to supplement this with direct personal interviews. But as we've discussed, many of the members of the Union of Struggle were white-collar, middle- and upper-class intellectuals. They'd come around asking these potentially sedentious. as questions of the workers and be met with understandably tight-lipped suspicion from those workers. But Krupska was assigned to one of the poorest working class districts, and thanks to her years of experience and connections as a night school teacher, she was able to come back with reliably detailed information about pay, conditions, and hours. And one of the most interesting things to

come out of this exercise in gathering information was that the managers had a habit of imposing fines on workers for any number of infractions. So their already pitifully low hourly wages were, in reality, even lower than that, because their pay was routinely docked. Lenin, with his training as a lawyer, would soon be writing up a 44-page booklet explaining to the workers their rights with regards to these fines. But that was the last thing he was able to do as a free man, because as he sat down to get started on the first issue of a new newspaper they hoped to get going, Lennon was arrested. For as much as our young revolutionaries enjoyed playing cloak and dagger, dodging surveillance and meeting secretly, and writing to each other in secret codes with

invisible ink and all the stuff you find in a standard-issue spy novel, the Akrana was watching them pretty much the whole time. Lennon was well known. He had been tracked in and out of Europe. The authorities knew about his false bottom trunk that he used to bring home illegal literature. But as long as Lenin and his comrades posed no immediate threat, it was better to just wait, monitor them, gather more information, more names, and more plans, and most especially wait until they did something you could really nail them to the wall for. Now, the reason the authorities knew so much about them is because they had spies, informants, and agents provocateur liberally sprinkled around keeping tabs on everyone. Among the founders of the Union of Struggle was a certain dentist who was just such a spy. Now, the problem of police spies was one of the biggest hurdles that Lenin and his comrades struggled to overcome. It's one of the biggest problems any revolutionary group struggles to overcome.

You can't trust nobody, because if you trust nobody, then you're just a paranoid crank hiding out in a studio apartment afraid to talk to anybody. You're not a revolutionary of the people. but you also can't trust everybody, because for sure some of your comrades are police spies. Of course they are. Now, in his novel, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which is a manual for revolution dressed up as a space adventure, Heinlein recommend making friends with a sentient and basically omniscient supercomputer who will be able to identify such police spies, group them together in their own cordoned-off revolutionary cells where you can feed them disinformation.

But in the absence of a sentient and basically omniscient supercomputer, spies are going to get in. You just have to trust your instincts, trust evidence that they are spies if and when it does come in, and then go with your guts. In these early days especially, Lenin tended to err on the side of being too trusting. So, because they trusted this dentist, everyone wound up arrested before they got a chance to do much of anything in 1895. Now, the authorities finally decided to go from surveillance to arrest in November 1895 because some factory workers did start a brief strike, and the authorities became concerned that maybe this new union of struggle group was having an impact. So the dentist spy tipped

off his handlers that the six principal editors of the new underground newspaper would all be in the same place at the same time on December the 8th. The police raided the rooms, and Lenin and five of his comrades were carried away. About a month later, A second sweep picked up Martoff and a bunch of others. Now, not all the members of the Union of Struggle were in custody. Groupskaya kept her name clear, as did some of the younger members, and they tried to carry on with their agitation work. And though it was difficult, it was not impossible to stay in contact with their imprisoned comrades.

As we saw last week, the people running the prisons and detention centers were not exactly committed to their jobs, and for the entirety of 1896, while Lenin and Martoff and friends were held in the preliminary detention facility, which is where you were held without trial until your sentence was handed down, they freely accessed their comrades on the outside without too much difficulty. They used coded language and invisible ink and hidden notes smuggled into the binding of books because the inspectors at the detention facility never tried too hard to stop it. And in between this regular correspondence, Lenin, for example, was able to return to more abstract theoretical ideas, beginning work on his first contribution

to Russia and Marxism, the development of capital in Russia. A Lenin's principal facilitator in all this was Krupskaya, who was still on the outside and who had taken a job as a copyist in the railroad administration. She happened to have a co-worker who was a non-movement family friend of the Uyanovs, who could somewhat innocuously visit Lenin in prison. So people would send letters to Krupskaya at her office, she would write or encode things into books and letters, hand them off to this family friend who would then take it all into Lenin. And it was in this way that everybody inside prison was able to cheer on the strikes of 1896. These great strikes were, of course, blamed on the socialist agitators, and the socialist agitators were happy to take credit for it. But in fact, the strikes were quite spontaneous and undirected by anyone inside the union of struggle.

The 1896 St. Petersburg textile workers' strikes were something of a watershed in retrospect, and their importance only grew in time, as it seemed to be proving what Karl Kautzky had said in which the Vilna program was working towards, the merger of the blue-collar worker and the white-collar socialist, into a single movement. The strikes lasted for three weeks in May and June 1896, and were the largest industrial worker actions in Russian history to date. The strike specifically hit the textile industries in St. Petersburg where you found the lowest paid, least educated, and most maltreated workers. These people were doing 12 to 14 hour days and miserably hot conditions doing monotonous activity. It began as a small walkout of just a few workers in one single textile plant, but quickly spread to 20 more factories and in the end included at a minimum 18,000 workers and at a maximum 30,000, depending on what source you're looking at.

Half of these workers were men and half of these workers were women. And it was a big moment in Russian labor history, and the liberal professor turned liberal politician, Pavlmelyakov, who we talked about back in episode 10.20, said that the 1896 strikes were when the Russian masses first stepped on to the revolutionary stage. The first action started on May the 23rd, 1896, when about 100 very low-grade assistants walked off the job

and demanded pay for the recent plant closure that had coincided with the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II, who, I should mention, we will be catching back up with next week. Now, in addition to this recent affront, they were also demanding back pay related to this additional 20 minutes of unpaid labor that employers had started adding to the end of the day back in 1887. This is just 20 minutes that were tacked on to the end of the day that you weren't paid for. It was as literal an expression of the exploitation of surplus labor as you could get. The next day, these hundred assistants were joined by about 100 spinners at the plant who further demanded a shorter workday.

Now, this first plant would remain shut down until June the 5th. In the meantime, word of this strike spread to other workers as they talk to each other at canteens or in parks or at shared boarding houses, and it became very apparent very quickly that these workers understood the importance of getting as many factories as possible to catch the contagion. of strike. Just as a single worker is isolated without his or her co-workers, a single factory is isolated without other factories also joining in. So over the last week of May 1896, the strike spread to the 600 workers in this factory over here, then the 700 in that factory over there, eventually

reaching something like 20 factories and all, and as I said, somewhere between 13 and 30,000 workers. Now, these strikes were not started by the union of struggle. But when, when, you were the same, they got going, the remaining free members of the union did what they could. And principally, that meant helping spread the word and make sure other people knew what was happening. This turned out to be extremely helpful because previously, the authorities had just been able clamp down on all information about an isolated factory strike to stop the contagion of strike from spreading. But they were unable to do this in 1896. So for three weeks, St. Petersburg had to deal with tens of thousands of workers refusing to work, and the textile industry

basically shutting down. Now in the end, no great victory was really won here. Some small concessions were extracted and the factories restarted. Now another follow-on strike in early 1897 did eventually lead to a maximum hour law being passed by the government later in 1897. But the importance of the 1896 strikes weren't just about what specific demands they extracted. They were peaceful and disciplined and seemed to be both spontaneous and widespread, which indicated prior organization and planning. And given that on agitation had just come out, it seemed like the merger between the workers and the socialist was in fact taking place. And even if we know in retrospect that that merger was not fully consummated in 1896, it certainly showed that things were heading in that

direction, which terrified conservatives, exhilarated radicals and made cautious liberals ring their hands and beg for reform. And working-class demonstrations, strikes, and direct actions would only pick up steam as Russia's embrace of industrialization continued, and everyone pointed themselves towards these shockingly massive confrontations of 1905. But 1905 is still a little ways off, though I promise we are moving towards it quicker than you might realize, certainly quicker than anyone in Russia realized. But before the revolution could come, the members of the Union of Struggle were going to have to become exiles and emigres. Krupskaya was finally identified as a revolutionary and arrested in August of 1896, and she

too got placed in the preliminary detention facility. Then they all sat in custody until the end of January 1897, when their sentences were handed down. And they all agreed these sentences were surprisingly lights, just three years exile in Siberia. They even got three days' freedom in St. Petersburg to arrange their affairs and prepare for their trip. And it was over these three days that Lenin and Martoff apparently cemented their lasting friendship. In the few months they had worked together at the end of 1895, they hardly knew each other. They were still strangers. And they were kept separate in the preliminary detention facility.

But here in these last 72 hours, they bonded. Even if they had been apart, they had gone through something together. Their spirit was unbroken, and both of them were as committed to the cause as ever. So they agreed to ride out their three years in exile without making any attempt to escape, and then they would meet back up and plot their next move. Among the last-minute arrangements Lenin made before he had to depart east was to write a small message in Invisible Inc. to Krupskaya, who, being arrested later than the others was still in prison. The invisible note was a marriage proposal. Vladimir and Nadia had now known each other and worked together for nearly three years,

and they liked each other and respected each other. But most importantly, if she agreed to marry him, then their union would be recognized by the state, and she would be allowed to come join Lenin in Siberia, where they could continue their work, and if nothing else, keep each other company. She agreed. Now, the marriage of Lenin and Krupskaya would never be the stuff of romance novels. And down the road, it will become emotionally complicated, but they will remain loyally married until death did them part. So next week we will ship these revolutionaries off to Siberia, but keep the story in St. Petersburg

to pick back up with newlyweds, whose marriage, for better or for worse, was more like something out of a romance novel. They really truly loved each other as man and wife. And I am talking here about Nicholas and Alexandra, who were opening their reign as emperor and empress of Russia by telling all those whose hopes for progress, reform and change, hopes which had been raised by the elevation of the young Tsar, that those hopes were hopeless. No, no, no, you silly heads, there will be no progress, reform, and change. There will be only orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. And isn't that simply marvelous?