Revolutions - 10.28- The Spark

Episode Date: January 20, 2020

To build a fire one first needs a spark.

Hello and welcome to Revolutions. Episode 10.28, The Spark. So welcome back. I hope you've had a chance to listen to our Revolutions podcast update. But if you couldn't wait to get back into the story, then that update will be waiting for you when you're done with this episode. Now, we left our story at the dawn of the 20th century with the various factions and the radical Russian underground simultaneously trying to unify their efforts. while also staking out ideological territory to define what the true path to revolution really was, and most importantly, what it was not. Today we will start grappling with the most historically significant of these efforts,

the attempt to unify the recently formed, but still at this point entirely theoretical, Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. This attempt was spearheaded by Lenin and his Orthodox Marxist comrades. Now, we last left Lenin and Krupskaya and Martoff and the other leaders of the Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class at the end of episode 10.24. And they had all been exiled to Siberia. Now, exiles to Siberia came in two broad forms, either hard labor in work camps or just being ordered to go live in some remote village that you were not allowed to leave. Since the crimes, our young radicals stood accused of, amounted to merely distributing civilians. Inversive literature, their sentences were all administrative exile to remote Siberian villages rather than hard labor.

But still, not all remote Siberian villages were made equal. Probably thanks to the Ulyanov's being legal members of the nobility, Lenin wound up a sign to a plum village down in the south, in a region called the Italy of Siberia, thanks to its relatively mild climate. So though it was a tiny, dung-strewn village in the middle of the step, it was hardly unbearable. And to a certain degree, Lenin enjoyed his exile. The mail service was regular, even if it was months behind the times, and he was constantly getting shipments of books and clothes and other material from home.

He was able to complete his first major theoretical work, the development of capitalism in Russia, in between hunting and fishing expeditions. Meanwhile, you will recall that also at the end of episode 10.24, Lenin proposed marriage to Comrade Krupskaya, and when she was finally sentenced for her own crimes, she and her mother were both allowed to join Lenin, beginning their three-person cohabitation that would continue for the rest of all their lives. Mother and daughter arrived in Siberia in May 1898, and Nadia and Vladimir were officially married in July.

Now, their marriage was often described both then and now. as cynically proposed and politically convenient. But it was not without affection, loyalty, and the regular ups and downs of married life. And they were husband and wife. Comrade Martoff, meanwhile, drew the short straw. He received a much harsher sentence to a tiny village in the northern tundra just south of the Arctic Circle.

We're talking minus 50 degrees in the winter, swarming with mosquitoes in the summer. Martoff's three years in exile were defined by physical discomfort, mental isolation, and poor health. Martoff's village received exactly nine male deliveries a year, and he was starred for information and any connection to the outside world. But despite limited contact, Lenin and Martoff were able to correspond with each other, and their friendship and partnership grew, even as they remained physically separated. They were also both able to use the same old invisible ink and hidden message. and otherwise innocuous books routine, to stay informed and even contribute to the political

debates among their free comrades back in Russia, which is how both Lenin and Martoff followed with increasing distress the rise of revisionism and economism and legal Marxism. Their own letters, both to each other and back home, expressed outrage at the spread of these heresies, and they resolved to do something about it once they were free. Lenin's three-year sentence finally ended at the end of January 1900, and though Krupskaya still had another year to go, she had been arrested and sentenced later, there was never any question of Lenin staying in exile while she finished her term. He had work to do. So he left while she and her mother stayed behind.

Martov's exile, on the other hand, wrapped up at the same time Lenin's did, and the two comrades, who had hardly spent more than a few days under the same room, roof together, now rejoined one another and made plans to refound the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party on a firm, united footing. And to this end, Lenin made contact with Pyotr Struv, and attempted to find enough common ground with the legal Marxists to create a national newspaper that could espouse a single unified social democratic message. But the legal Marxist drift towards reformist liberalism was in full effect, and they were no longer able to see eye to eye on fundamental questions. Their unification was impossible, and henceforth they would be rivals

for the hearts and minds of the radical intelligentsia. With the split now permanent, and the authorities keeping a very close eye on him, Lenin concluded he could do more abroad than he could at home. He applied for permission to leave the country and found his passport quickly approved. There was nothing the authorities liked more than energetic radicals going abroad and sinking into the lethargy of an emigre's life far from St. Petersburg and Moscow. Now, during his exile in Siberia, Lenin had maintained contact with allies in those emigre communities who still believed in holding the orthodox line against revisionist economism, since they had essentially invented and defined that orthodox line. And we're talking here about the original emancipation of labor group

of Prahanov, Zasulich, and Axelrod. What Lenin now proposed, and what the Emancipation of Labor Group agreed to, was the foundation of a national newspaper that could become a focal point for social democratic organizing and a way to spread information, ideas, and solidarity throughout the Russian Empire. This new national newspaper would combine their forces, the intellectual and moral authority of the old guard, with the energy and fighting spirit of the New Guard, and together they would restore sanity to the social democratic underground. Now, despite Lenin's misgivings, Martoff elected to stay behind in Russia while Lenin departed for Switzerland and then Germany in July of 1900. But if the proposed newspaper was going to have an audience, it needed points of distribution and allies inside of Russia.

And so Martoff spent the next year traveling around, making contacts, organizing allies to receive and distribute the newspaper when it started publishing. By the fall of 1900, the work of organizing writing. and publishing this new newspaper was underway, and it even now had a name. They called it Iskra, or The Spark. Eskra had multiple functions. First and foremost, it would establish an Orthodox-Marxist line of attack on the Tsar and his regime, and create a national narrative within which local social democratic groups could fit their own local struggles. Second, but equally important, was emphasizing that Orthodox Marxist,

line of attack, which meant going after divergent and heretical strains in the radical underground. And this meant not just liberal-leaning economism and revisionism inside the Marxist sphere, but also reviving their traditional attacks on the neurotist socialist revolutionaries and the anarchists, because if they were going to take down the czar and usher in a social revolution, they were going to have to do it with right theory and right action. Third, as we'll discuss more in a minute, Iskra was also meant to serve as the new foundation of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, which, despite being technically founded in 1898, didn't really exist yet.

ISCRA was meant to give form and focus and unity to the kind of National Social Democratic Party that the Iskra leadership deemed essential to the revolution. That leadership team was a six-person self-appointed editorial board, which is always described as a balance between the Old Guard and the New Guard. The old guard was, of course, Plahanov, Zasulich, and Axelrod. The new guard was Lenin and Martoff and this other guy, Alexander Petrasov, who was their comrade in the union of struggle and had been arrested and exiled and freed alongside Lenin and Martoff.

And though Petrissov is obviously important enough to be on the board of Iskra and would be around all the way through the revolution of 1917, he positively radiates, plus the other guy, energy. So let's just leave him as the other guy and not worry about him. This six-person editorial board of Iskra represents something of a generational transition inside the movement. Though Plahanov was still only in his mid-40s, this is the period where he starts to go from father of Russian Marxism to something more like grandfather of Russian Marxism. And though in the early period of the paper, Plahanov believed he would remain the dominant personality, his younger colleagues were not interested in deferring to Poughanaf's will and ego the way Zazulich and Axelrod always were.

They respected Plahanov enormously. They honored his life and work, but they would not be his ciphers. And in an important early showdown, the New Guard carried a proposal to base Eskra in Munich, Germany, rather than in Switzerland. Now, this was partly to keep the paper in neutral territory. Switzerland was so full of long-established factions inside the Russian colony that publishing the paper there might inhibit Isker's ability to be something new rather than just the continuation of something old.

But publishing the paper in Munich was also a bid by the younger editors to stop it from falling under the domineering thumb of Plihanov. So the first issue of Isker was published in December 1900, and it would be the first of 51 issues printed over the next. three years. By the spring of 1901, Martoff and then Krupskaya had both joined Lenin in Munich, and they all devoted all their attention to the paper. Iskra devoted its column inches primarily to three main topics. First, a relentless denunciation of the Tsarist regime.

Second, relentless attacks on revisionism and economism as false bourgeois traps they must not fall into, and third, sharing news about activities and successes of comrades who were sending in reports from their local areas. Taking its cues from Lenin's own rhetorical style, Eastgro was blunt and sarcastic and satirical. They mercilessly skewered everyone. Axelrod sometimes complained that they needed to be a bit more diplomatic in their approach to potential allies. But in Lenin's mind, the unification of the Social Democrats was not about creating a big enough tent for everyone to feel welcome, but to delineate a set of principles and objectives that would bring clarity and purpose to everyone's activities. But as I said earlier, the point of ESCRA was not

simply to be a journalistic and intellectual organ per se. It was meant to be the nucleus of a Social Democratic political party that did not yet exist. So while half the work was writing and editing, the other half was building up a network to distribute ISCRA in Russia and defend its editorial line. and this network was meant to become the organizational skeleton of a fully realized Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. And with Lenin, as the one most interested in this particular aspect of the paper, and Krubskaya acting as principal secretary, the network of agents and contacts and comrades that they started organizing took orders from and sought advice from Lenin and Krupskaya. And the couple was very successful at both distributing the paper and winning the loyalty of dedicated agents across Russia, and they were encouraged to adopt a with us or against us mentality.

And thanks to all this, its subscription list grew and spread. At its peak, they were printing 8,000 copies of each new issue. Eastro was unquestionably the single largest and most successful revolutionary newspaper of the time of any of the revolutionary creeds or sex or organizations. And whether you love them or hated them, everyone now had to reckon with this new Iskra Party. Alongside the regular work of putting out the paper, Lenin wrote a condensed summary of all the ideas that were now being espoused piecemeal in Iskra. And he named his manifesto after his own favorite novel, What is to Be Done?

Now, the short book opens with its most immediate purpose, which is staking out the superiority and necessity of orthodox Marxist revolution, as opposed to revisionist reformers and opportunists in the West, who were now horror of horrors, joining governmental ministries, as if a real socialist could cohabitate in a government with a bunch of bourgeois liberals. But the later sections of what is to be done wound up being more historically important, as it outlined Lenin's theories and strategies and tactics for organizing a revolutionary party, and it became essentially the practical handbook of Bolshevism. And here, Lenin himself revised Marx a little bit, saying that the

proletariat was never on their own and spontaneously going to produce the leaders or the revolutionary consciousness necessary for them to play their historical role in overthrowing capitalism. So they needed guidance and leadership. But Lenin also believed that both sides of this equation, the intelligentsia and the workers, would if left of their own devices both drift in their own way away from revolution. The intelligentsia would sink into their comfortable bourgeois habits and embrace reformist liberalism, as was happening with revisionism and the so-called legal Marxists. Meanwhile, the workers would be seduced by the immediate fruits of mere trade unionism. So what was needed to keep everyone on track was a network of professional socialist revolutionaries

drawn from the intelligentsia who would not abandon the socialist faith, but who would commit to keeping the workers focused on the real prize, political and social revolution. And though he was talking about committed, professional, fully dedicated revolutionaries, Lenin opposed the creation of a People's Will-style elite vanguard party, who had simply given up on getting the people on board. Lenin's understanding of historical materialism meant that the revolution would ultimately be a mass movement. The problem was that under the prevailing laws of the Russian Empire, organizing a mass worker party, was illegal.

so they would have to do the next best thing. Create the skeleton of that party, so that when the Tsarist regime crumbled under the weight of its own contradictions and incompetence, as it must, the party would be ready to rapidly scale the party up into a mass movement. The dictatorship of the proletariat was still never meant to be a Jacobin-style revolutionary dictatorship. This was all about the people rising up from below, rather than a small group of elite revolutionaries issuing decrees from above. Just as Lenin was finishing what is to be done, the heat in Germany got turned up a bit

as the authority started getting annoyed at reports of their brazen smuggling operations. So the Board of Eastgrove voted to relocate from Munich to the greater freedom of London. The move to London marked the end of whatever honeymoon period they all enjoyed together. Plahanov and Axelrod, still living in Switzerland, started to recognize how little influence they had on the daily running of the operation, while Lenin proceeded to take on an even greater role. He and Krupskaya continued to lead the project of organizing and operating agents back in Russia, and more and more everyone came to the realization that by accident or design, Lenin and Iskra were becoming synonymous.

But in Lenin's defense, he was a workaholic who was 100% committed to Iskra in a way that the others just weren't. Axelrod and his wife were both sick and he lived in Zurich. Plahanov was always more interested in theory than in practice. Verazas Asulich was an increasingly passive partner, and Martoff, though still young and energetic, was also more concerned about developing himself as a writer and a theorist, not a publisher and an organizer. Plus, he was personally unhappy in London and spent as much time as possible traveling around to confer with emigre groups in Germany and Switzerland and France to build up support for Iskra among the exiled intelligentsia.

So the long hours and necessary work of actually putting the paper to bed fell on Lenin's indefatigable shoulders. His reward for bearing this burden is that he often called the shots. And one of the shots he called in late 1902 was extending an invitation to an up-and-coming young writer who had recently escaped from his own Siberian exile to come to London and join the operation. And though this up-and-coming young writer was born Leif de Vidovich Bronstein, and had written articles under a variety of pen names. When he showed up on Lenin and Krupskaya's doorstep in October of 1902, his passport bore the name, Trotsky.

Leif de Vidovich Bronstein was born on October the 26th, 1879, making him about 10 years younger than most of the other people we've recently introduced. He was the fifth child of a prosperous Ukrainian Jewish family, though, like Martoff, he grew up without any major attachment to the Jewish faith. His father was not religious at all, and the family spoke Russian and Ukrainian rather than Yiddish. The boy showed enough precocious intellectual promise that when he was eight years old, his parents sent him off to live in Odessa with middle-class cousins, where he would receive a better and more worldly education. And they were right about his intellectual abilities, but from time to time regretted the worldly part of his education.

Young Bronstein was smart and well-liked, though also will. and egotistical. He had no interest in sports or roughhousing, but enjoyed shredding everyone, teachers, and students alike in debates with a self-confident, sarcastic wit. He once got himself kicked out of school for joining in the disrespectful booing of a hated teacher, but was readmitted the next year. His sins at this point were merely behavioral rather than political or criminal. And at least until he was an older teenager, Bronstien showed no interest in politics and seemed aim for the safe intellectual harbors of a university math department. But this all changed in 1896 when he was sent to do a final year of school in the Black

seaport of Mikhailayev. This was the same year his future comrades were already so deep in radical organizing that they had to follow the great strikes in St. Petersburg from their prison cells. Meanwhile, Bronstien was still just a smart-mouth teenager, and his smart mouth was about to get a lot smarter. In Mikhailaya, he fell in with a more nonconformist set that congregated in an orchard, rented by an old radical veteran of the 1870s, who hosted all-comers for tea and free discussion. Free discussion, which was never so conspiratorial or actively seditious, that the police spies who periodically sat in other gatherings had any real problem with. It was in this orchard that Bronsteen met a young woman named Alexandra Sokolofskaya.

Sokolovskaya was the one participant in these meetings who openly self-identified as a Marxist. Himself, currently falling under the thrall of the romantic neurotic ideas about the heroic power of the individual over the march of historical materialism and its seeming erasure of the individual spirit, Bronstein spent most of his time ridiculing her Marxism. But Sokolovskaya's counter-arguments, and his own further reading, slowly ate at Bronstine's early intellectual and political assumptions. By the middle of his final year in school, he abruptly switched sides and converted to Marxism. Though he did not know it, he was well on his way to becoming one of its greatest and most influential apostles. Bronstine's political bent naturally worried

his parents, and they were relieved when he went off to the University of Odessa, and, as I said, the relative safety of the math department. But he did not stay long at university, and soon left for the unsafety of a life in politics. Inspired by the strikes of 1896 and the recent move towards a worker-focused agitation method of the Vilna program, Bronststein and his friends, including his former sparring partner turned comrade, Alexander Sokolovska, organized what they called the Southern Russian Workers' Union in the spring of 1897, focusing most especially on the 10,000 or so dock workers of Mikhailayev. To this end, they started up a little newspaper. in which Bronstein discovered how great of a writer he actually was.

The pamphlets and papers he wrote started to get circulated around, and they did the trick. People started signing up. Membership in the party grew. Enough so that the authorities took notice. Though it did take them a while to realize that this was really just some independent kids on a DIY project, then a group linked to the larger and more established radical networks. But the success of the union proved to be its undoing. It couldn't be ignored. It had to be dealt with. So in January 1898, a police sweep picked up 200 members, including Bronstein. He was still just 18 years old. He spent the next two years held

in various jails and prisons, uncharged, and awaiting arbitrary administrative sentencing. The early part of this incarceration was spent in solitary confinement to break his spirit, but as it turns out, he had a capacity for endurance to go along with his capacity for writing and speaking and organizing. Eventually, Bronstine was transferred up to an overcrowded prison in Moscow where he met other more established and experienced revolutionaries who put more radical literature into his hands, oversight in these prisons being lax thanks to indifference and bribery.

And it was here that he first read Lenin's development of capitalism in Russia. He also found in this prison his old sparring partner turned Marxist comrade, Alexander Suckel of Skaia. She too was there awaiting her. own administrative sentence. And in the summer of 1899, the two agreed to get married. Now, like the union of Lenin and Krupskaya, the ratio of convenience to affection is hard to pin down. Now, certainly, it probably started with a calculation that a marriage would allow them each to have a companion in their expected Siberian exile, but they also wound up having a couple of

kids together, so it wasn't a strictly platonic marriage of convenience. Their sentence was finally handed down in 1900. Four years in Siberia. So at pretty much the same moment Lenin and Martoff are traveling back home, Bronstein, still just Bronstein, was shipping out to four years in Siberian limbo. During the next few years, Bronstein read everything he could get his hands on, finally reading, for example, Capital by Karl Marx, which he had not yet ever gotten his hands on. He joined in the lively debates among the social democratic exiles that was allowed to proceed more or less and disturbed by the ineffectual authorities. This community was far enough along that there was even a social democratic Siberian union that he joined and wrote pamphlets for. He managed to get his

letters and articles and literary criticism and observations printed in various journals under various pseudonyms, and he developed a reputation as one of the best writers in the whole scene. Meanwhile, he and Suckelovskaya bounced around between different assigned villages and had two children together. In 1902, a copy of what is to be done and a box full of back issues of Iskra arrived. And here, he found ideas expressed that he himself had been groping towards on his own. And only halfway through his term of exile, but four and a half years since he had last tasted freedom, Bronstien longed to get back into the action.

So when an opportunity arose to smuggle him out of Siberia, he took it. and he apparently took this opportunity to escape alone with the full support and encouragement of Suklofskaya, now the mother of his two children. The escape would prove to be the amicable dissolution of their brief marriage, though they would remain on friendly and mutually supportive terms for the rest of their lives. So, leaving his wife and kids in Siberia, Bronstein hid in a hay cart and then followed a series of contacts West using a fake passport. needing to slap a name on this document, he wrote down the name of one of his original jailers in Odessa. Trotsky. So it was Bronstien who went to Siberia, but Trotsky, who came out. And when he got out, he started traveling around, making new friends and contacts,

many of whom knew the reputation of this young writer from Siberia, and they sent back reports to Lennon in London saying we have this remarkable talent. What should we do with him? And Lennon sent his response. Tell him to present himself at the Iskra office in London. There's work to be done. Not wasting any time, Trotsky crossed the border and headed to Britain in October of 1902, finally showing up unannounced on Lennon and Krupskaya's doorstep in the wee hours of the morning, with not even enough money to pay the cab driver. Trotsky's arrival did not really shift the dynamic too much at Iskra, much to Lenin's chagrin. Trotsky was well-liked by everyone, and his talents were under

And after just a few months, Lenin proposed that Trotsky be added to the editorial board, an initiative supported by everyone else. But co-opting a new member onto the board required unanimity, and Plahanov would not have it. He was still holding tenuously to his status as leader of Russian Marxism, and he did not want to hand Lenin the gift of a loyal and deciding vote in Iskra matters. Not that Trotsky's vote would have impacted the next really big decision the editorial board voted on anyway. The others were sick of being based in London, and with plans well underway to hold a second party Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party underway, they decided it was better to consolidate their own group. In March 1903, they voted to

move their headquarters to Switzerland. Lennon objective and voted no, but he was the only nay. And so, Iskra moved to Switzerland. And that takes us to the brink of a small gathering. at the time that became a huge event in retrospect. Next week, we will discuss the second-party Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, and really the first time anything like a Congress was actually held, seeing as how the quote-unquote first Congress was nine guys in a house who were all soon arrested. Now, you would think, as I've outlined things here today, that the natural battle line would be drawn between the two alphas, Lenin and Plihonov.

the upstart versus the master, the new guard versus the old guard, the student versus the teacher. But it wouldn't go down like that. Lenin and Pughanov would form an alliance that would define the party. And instead, the major battle line would be drawn between new factions and old friends, factions that would soon be dubbed the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks.