Revolutions - 10.45- The Disunity Congresses

Episode Date: February 28, 2021

Unity Congress more like DISunity Congress, amirite? sponsor: audible.com/revolutions.

Hello and welcome to revolutions. Episode 10.45, the Disunity Congresses. The differences between the two factions of Russian Marxism, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, is often with some justification portrayed as petty bickering over ultimately microscopic differences. This starts to feel very true when you zoom out to the macro level and find them agreeing with other about far more than any of them collectively agreed with the SRs or the Liberals to say nothing of conservatives and reactionaries. These differences are also sometimes portrayed as entirely about personality conflicts and personal

grudges. And while I think it is true that the original Bolshevik-Menshevik split at the Second Party Congress in 1903 was driven largely by personality, as we saw in episode 10.29, there were some differences in principle. And in subsequent years, the differences became larger and more solidified, differences in theory, tactics, strategy, and goals. So today, we are going to draw out some of those distinctions and make them explicit, so that when we get to 1917, we will understand why everyone is behaving the way they are behaving, and why the differences between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks actually do matter. To trace these distinctions,

let's briefly go back to the end of the Revolution of 1905. Over the course of the year, the rift between the two factions often healed at the local level because they were all ultimately Marxist Social Democrats working towards the same goal. And rank-and-file members in Russia were rarely as committed to factional disputes as the leading emigrays like Lenin, Martoff, and Pranov. Throughout the Revolution of 1905, Bolsheviks and Mention. coordinated, worked together, and often re-merged their local committees into single-unified structures. And as I mentioned in passing last week, in April of 1906, party leaders convened an all-party

Congress in Stockholm, Sweden, meant to truly reunify the party. Nobody on either side wanted a permanent breach, but they did have major differences of opinion, and that is what we are here today to discuss. So let's start with some big picture stuff. Both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks agreed that the revolution of 1905, or what they were for the moment, simply calling the revolution or the Russian revolution because they didn't know it would later be relegated to be merely the revolution of 1905, was the bourgeois democratic revolution predicted by historical materialism.

This was the transition from a despotically medieval mode of production to a democratically capitalist mode of production. All of them further anticipated that following the bourgeois democratic revolution would come the proletarian socialist revolution, and that second revolution was their true ultimate aim as Russian Marxists. But they all understood they needed to pass through one revolution to get to the other, because the proletarian socialist revolution would be driven by mass organization and mass uprisings, made possible by the legalization of democratic political activity and the promulgation of civil rights like freedom of speech and assembly and the press. The ambitiously revolutionary liberal bourgeoisie would be the ones to topple

the Tsarist autocracy and open the door for the proletariat to organize and sweep themselves into power in an anticipated second revolution ending with the dictatorship of the proletariat, which, remember, they understood to me not the rule of the few over the many, but for the first time in world history, the rule of the many over, well, I guess just the many, the many ruling the many. But the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks disagreed sharply on the implications of all this in Russia and what the tasks of the party were in this moment. The Mensheviks, led by Plahanov and Pavel Axelrod, who had been at this since the founding of the Emancipation of Labor Group way back in the 1880s, believed it meant that at this stage,

the liberal bourgeoisie were the revolutionary class. They must be the leaders of this first revolution, and it was the job of the party and the urban proletariat and the rural peasantry to support them in their work. It is emphatically not the job of the party or the proletariat to attempt to seize power for themselves at this moment. This would be premature and nonsensical by the plain reading of Marxist historical materialism,

which they all considered themselves leading experts, in. Lenin, however, and the Bolsheviks generally had a different take, based on the realities of the Russian Empire at the turn of the 20th century. The Russian bourgeoisie, in their mind, simply did not have the juice to get this first revolution done, at least not the way that the British bourgeoisie had been able to do it in the 17th century, or the French bourgeoisie had been able to do it in the 18th century. They just did not have the physical numbers, the political clout, or the economic might. The Russian bourgeoisie were still weak and wobbly as newborn calves.

So the Mensheviks may be sticking to the theory, but it didn't really pertain in practice. At the Congress in Stockholm, Lenin said, and I'm quoting here, they were constantly being misled by the essentially erroneous idea, which is really a vulgarization of Marxism, that only the bourgeoisie can independently make the bourgeois revolution. or that only the bourgeoisie should lead the bourgeois revolution. The role of the proletariat as the vanguard and the struggle for the complete and decisive victory of the bourgeois revolution is not clear to the right-leaning social democrats. In this, Lenin was talking about the Mensheviks.

Lenin did not think the proletariat and the peasant should follow bourgeoisie leadership to make the revolution. He believed that in the Russian context, they were the ones who had to do the job them themselves. Now, one of the other big differences between them we talked about last week, and this was how do we treat the Duma? Do we participate in elections or not? The Bolsheviks, though not Lennon personally, were more supportive of boycotts, just treating the whole thing like a giant farce, while the Mensheviks endorsed running candidates for office and working in and with the Duma. And this kind of tracks with a general poll between the two factions, that the Menchivics are constantly going to lean towards legal politicking, while the Bolsheviks are going to keep pushing for armed illegal uprisings.

But we talked about that last week, and we're going to clarify a bit more in a couple minutes, so let's just keep moving. Another big source of disagreement at this Stockholm Congress was the land question. Both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks agreed that whatever else this revolution meant, the reorganization of property relations would be a key component. it was going to mean the end of the old medieval estates and the archaic lord peasant dynamic. Martov, Plihanov, and the Mensheviks, however, favored a policy called municipalization. Essentially that meant local agricultural committees, democratically elected and operated, would take control of the land in their local jurisdictions. Martoff especially articulated that the benefit of this was that Russia had to be.

had no real history with democratic institutions. And these proposed local agricultural committees would be a good way to build up those institutions and give everybody some experience with democracy at the local and regional level. Plahana, for his part, thought it was a good idea because the economic foundation of the Tsarist autocracy was its sweeping claim that it owned all the land in the Russian Empire. So what they were proposing was to take that sweeping economic power and control away from the central government, and that would shatter the economic foundation of the autocratic government and help advance Russia towards a truly democratic state. Lenin, meanwhile, personally favored a project of nationalizing all the land, which means dispossessing

everyone of everything and consolidating and holding property at the national level, not the local level. Now, this is partly because he wanted a thoroughgoing social and economic revolution that would break up the anachronistic local systems and village dynamics along with everything else. It would also, in his mind, create a blank slate that would allow for the kind of agrarian capitalist productive transformation to take place that would allow for the future socialist order to exist, because Lord Almighty was traditional, Russian agricultural, very unproductive. Nationalization meant rationalization and modernization, and it would truly accomplish the work

of the political, economic, and social revolution they all sought. The Mensheviks believed nationalization was not just wrong, but positively counter-revolutionary. Pavel Axelrod especially countered Lenin by saying if the revolution embarked on a project of nationalization, it would create two enormous interrelated problems. First, it would be such an abrupt provocation that it would almost certainly invite a massive reaction, paving the way for the restoration of the overthrown czars because they're all assuming the czars are overthrown at this point. Axelrod believes strongly that a policy of municipalization would be inoffensive enough to not spark

that backlash, since all those villages and communes out there would have their land given to them not taken away from them. Second, even if Russia did endure a period of restoration, which had after all happened in both Britain and France after their giant revolutions, cementing municipalized and locally controlled property would prevent the restored czar from wielding the kind of power that he had wielded before the revolution. Lenin's response to this gets at his own larger vision for what's really happening, and this is the critical point, even more than just what they're going to do about the land. He scoffed at the idea that they needed to worry about not provoking a backlash or being overly

tentative in order to avoid a post-revolution czarist restoration, because the quote-unquote Russian revolution was just one facet of the international socialist revolution. So the true task of the Russian revolutionaries right here at the beginning of the 20th century, more than anything else, was toppling the czar, taking out one of the pillars of European conservatism, an institution that provided money and spies and troops that kept the Western proletariat in check. Socialists across Europe, in the West and in Russia, believed that the toppling of the Tsar would be the starting pistol for the long-awated socialist revolution in Western Europe.

And Lenin said that alone was the only thing that could guarantee the survival of Russian democracy, let alone Russian socialism. He said, and I'm quoting again here, I would formulate this proposition as follows. The Russian Revolution can achieve victory by its own efforts, but it cannot possibly hold and consolidate its gains by its own strength. It cannot do this unless there is a socialist revolution in the West. Without this condition, restoration is inevitable, whether we have municipalization or nationalization or division of the land.

Our Democratic Republic has no other reserve. than the socialist proletariat of the West. This statement and this idea is going to become a very thorny problem for a victorious Lenin down the road when that Western socialist revolution fails to materialize. So the debate over the land question was resolved at the Stockholm Congress by endorsing a mixed compromise proposal where they would seek to nationalize the land but then divide it and parcel it out at the local level. Now, this was a compromise nobody was particularly happy with,

but the point of talking about it here is that the debate illuminated some of the different visions and strategies and ideas separating the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. And, I should mention, the fact that they came to a compromise, neither of them was particularly happy with, shows that they were still trying to keep the party unified. But overall, I think we can say so far that the Mensheviks are adhering to an orthodox Marxist line, as it's all been traditionally understood, with Lenin and the Bolsheviks more willing to adapt and modify it to the current conditions of Russia and Europe. In terms of their immediate factional conflict, though, the main upshot of this Congress in Stockholm is that the Mensheviks routinely commanded a majority of the votes, and they took control of the Central Committee, and they had their way on most issues.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks, though, did not meekly accept Menshevik control of the party. And by early 1907, they were lobbying hard for yet another party Congress. They said that they wanted to resolve further issues and policies, but it was seen by the Mensheviks as a transparently bad faith attempt by Lenin and his comrades to pack a new Congress with their delegates to wrest control of the party back from the Mensheviks. And it probably was. But the Bolsheviks successfully organized enough calls from local groups that the Menshevik Central Committee relented, and they called for an all-party Congress for April 1907.

This would be the 5th Party Congress, and it roughly coincided with the beginning of the 2nd Duma. Everybody still with me? Good. The 5th Party Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party was by far the biggest to date, and the biggest for some time to come. Now, every book I read seems to give me ever so slightly different numbers, but the number of delegates is usually pegged right around 330. For comparison, that acrimonious second Congress we talked about was just over a hundred delegates.

Now, this reflected both the growth of the party, which now stood at about 70,000 active members, but also because for the first time they were including Marx's social socialized. Democratic parties from other nationalities who had voted to join one large empire-wide party. So that meant 45 delegates from Poland, including Rosa Luxembourg, about 30 delegates from Latvia, and another 60 Jewish bundists who remarged with the party after a few years of organizational estrangement. This Congress was meant to really reunify and resolidify all the social democratic parties in the Russian Empire. And everybody was there.

Plahanov, Martov, Axelrod for the Mensheviks, while the Bolsheviks were led by Lenin and included many of the core Bolsheviks who would go on to form the Soviet Union, guys like Zinov and Kamenev and Stalin. This Congress was originally meant to meet in Copenhagen. But as the delegates started showing up, the Russians put heavy pressure on the Danes to forbid their gathering, and the Danes relented. So the delegates had to scramble at the last minute and move up to the relatively free safety of London. When they got there, they hastily arranged lodgings and a meeting hall, and wound up meeting, very ironically, in a Fabian church

frequented by elite British conservatives. Short of cash and scrambling to pay for the rental fees and their lodgings, they eventually got help from a sympathetic German-American soap manufacturer named Joseph Fels, who agreed to lend the party 1,700 pounds as long as every delegate signed a promissary note, which they did, all of them using aliases. Now, when all these Russian revolutionaries showed up in London, their presence and purpose was known to the British press, and the delegates were hounded by local photographers, basically the original paparazzi, taking pictures. and treating them as curiously exotic animals from a strange and foreign land,

and many of them donned disguises and snuck in through the back door to avoid being photographed and identified by the Russian authorities. This Congress was meant to be conciliatory and unifying, but from the jump, the atmosphere was acrimonious, hostile, and at times approached outright fistfights. One delegate named Angelica Balabanova said that the Congress was defined by an all-absorbing and almost fanatical spirit of factionalism. They couldn't even agree on what to call it, because calling it the quote-unquote fifth-party Congress implied recognizing the legitimacy of a Congress that had been called back in April 1905, but which had been boycotted by the Mensheviks. So right off the bat, they had to sidestep that debate.

and agree to refer to it only as the London Congress. But at least they came to a compromise, although this was just about the only thing they managed to compromise on. There were many things on the agenda in London. The party's attitude towards the Duma, the attitude towards the cadets, whether to organize non-party worker congresses, what their attitude towards combat brigades and expropriations would be,

and then just organizationally and structural, what kind of party did they want to be. There was very little agreement, and in these debates at the Congress in London, we will find the rest of the divisions that will ultimately, permanently, rupture the party. Now, because Lenin and the Bolsheviks

held an edge in the delegate count, and because all the delegates from Latvia and Poland and Lithuania all pretty much voted with the Bolsheviks, Lenin pressed his advantage very hard, which only further poisoned relations and led to more bad blood. So we're going to talk about their principal differences here, but let's not kid ourselves. A lot of this is still about personality.

But one way or the other, this unity congress is going to be nothing but a disunity congress. So to start, let's talk about what they thought about the Duma. As we talked about last week, Lenin himself personally endorsed participation in elections and the Duma, and was happy the Social Democrats now had a few dozen delegates working in the Second Duma. Most of his fellow Bolsheviks, though, were very skeptical of this, and none of them saw eye-to-eye

with the Mensheviks about what those delegates ought to be doing. The Mensheviks believed they were there to use the Duma to advance the bourgeois revolution, to support the liberal cadet attempts to forge a real legislative body in a democratic constitutional system, rather than just have it descend into being Stilippen's consultative ministry of raising issues. Instead, the Mensheviks supported the idea of using the Duma to possibly, I don't know, generate legislation that would advance democracy and socialism in Russia. But just to be very, very clear about this, Martov, for example, advocated legal party work and working in the Duma. But that did not mean he was giving up on clandestine illegal activity.

Martoff actually said that only revisionists on one side and anarchists on the other ever said that legal politics and illegal revolutionary activity were incompatible. And on this, he and Lenin agreed. They both thought that both approaches were necessary to get the job done. But despite endorsing elections and legal party work, Lenin was still pretty cynical about the Duma, and he believed that they should only use it as a space for agitation and organization and propaganda. Mostly, Lenin wanted them to make a bunch of trouble. That the party instructions to the delegates should be, do not work with the liberals and do not work with the government to pass bills,

but instead do everything in your power to heighten the conflict between the Duma and the Tsar's government and relentlessly criticized the cadets at every opportunity to expose the liberals as class enemies of the people, not their leaders, which was a mantle they were trying to dawn. Lenin wanted to heighten class conflict and avoid at all cost anything resembling class collaboration. He did not want the proletariat or the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party to give itself over to mere reformist parliamentarianism or become just like an electorate for the liberals to draw from. That was not the point of engaging with the Duma. This, of course, brings us to one of the biggest divides in the worldview between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.

The Mensheviks, from Axelrod and Martoff on down, believe that at this stage the liberal cadets were their allies, or at least they should be. The party should work with them, not against them, support them, not try to dominate them or undermine them. The Menshevik believed this was vital revolutionary work because the liberal cadets represented the bourgeois element of Russia. society, which in their minds was the revolutionary class of the First Revolution. Working together under cadet leadership, they would all topple the Tsar. So in the mind of the Mensheviks, if anything was counter-revolutionary, it was Lenin's insistence that they not only not ally with the liberals, but actively attack them. But Lenin and the Bolsheviks were implacably hostile to the liberals. Lenin said the cadets were simply there to advise the Tsar on the best methods of strangling the people.

They were not a revolutionary force in the Russian context, but a reactionary one. In the Russian context, the democratic revolution must be accomplished by an alliance of workers and peasants. They were the only ones who could successfully carry it to its conclusion. The cadets were just a bunch of reformers who were only interested in preventing revolution, not advancing it, even if it was on their own behalf. This was a fight Lenin and the Bolsheviks won decisively, and the Congress voted that the official position of the party was that the cadets were counter-revolutionary and must not be aligned with.

The party could make alliances with SRs and Trudeviks, but that was it. The Mensheviks lost this vote and shook their head. They could not believe Lenin and the Bolsheviks were turning their backs on what seemed to be the clearest and most obvious task of the party at this stage. stage of the revolution. Another big Menshevik idea that Congress decisively shot down was the idea of organizing independent worker congresses. This was the brainchild mostly of Pavel Axelrod.

Axelrod had long been concerned that after all these years, the party still remained almost entirely composed of a bunch of intellectuals. The events after the dissolution of the first Duma in 1906, when the party attempted to raise boycotts and strikes among the proletariat, and they found themselves ignored, was very demoralizing. Whatever power or influence they thought they had gained over the workers in 1905 was really just all in their heads. Axelrod wanted the party and the proletariat to become unified,

to collaborate, to invite the full and real participation of the workers. And everywhere he looked inside the party, he again saw people just like him. a bunch of intellectuals. So his idea was to promote non-party workers' congresses that would be by the workers and for the workers and allow them to participate in the movement on their own terms, give them something to join that wasn't just a bunch of nerdy intellectuals, and that would eventually lead to the integration of the party apparatus

with these worker congresses to create something like a huge legal labor party modeled on the German Socialist Party. Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and frankly, most of the delegates at the London Congress hated this idea. They said, we are the proletarian entity you are talking about. It is our task to organize the workers under the party as it presently exists. That's why we exist. It is not to build a whole separate structure outside the party. Plus, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were very skeptical that the workers were anywhere close to ready for the kind of political leadership that Axelrod was

expecting of them. Even in Western Europe, most workers were not yet class-conscious socialists capable of doing the kind of necessary work expected of revolutionary leadership. Inviting them in would simply disrupt the policies of the party organization. It would be a massive mistake. It would almost certainly devolve into mere economism or trade unionism, begging for slightly better wages and slightly fewer hours, but forever under the untouched hegemony of their masters. So the party rejected the idea of these worker congresses, leaving Axelrod and Martoff very demoralized and very afraid of where the Bolsheviks were taking the party. The debates over the Duma and the cadets and these worker congresses really starts to reveal the gravitational

direction that each side is pulling itself. The Mensheviks, are clearly inclined to pursuing regular legal party work. They wanted to seek allies among the liberals move towards the center. They wanted to create a mass party of workers to contest elections and then use the Duma to enact beneficial legislation. They believe they should abandon completely, at least for the moment, the idea of armed insurrection and trying to overthrow the Tsar, which Martoff called putchism,

and which Pohanov called adventurism, and which they associated with people's will-style terrorism, which had been discredited for like 20 years. They continued to accuse Lennon and the Bolsheviks of embracing those retrograde ideas and seeking to turn the party into a tight conspiratorial unit. On the question of combat brigades and armed insurrections and expropriations, which the Bolsheviks tended to favor, it sounded a lot like the Bolshevik ideal was to turn the party into a tightly disciplined group that acted more like a secretive military structure than an open political party.

Why else were they so hostile to worker congresses and mass organizing? Because it would dissolve the power of the elite vanguard dictatorship that Lenin clearly wanted to lead. This, at least, is what they said. But while it is true, Lenin still believed they did not live in a world of political freedom and that the vital necessary work of illegal clandestine activity was incompatible with the kind of open engagement and invitations to participate favored by the Mensheviks, because bringing too many people in too fast would invite in spies, and agents provocateur, and informers, and basically guarantee the death of all their clandestine and illegal activities.

Plus, the not presently class-conscious workers would actually act against the party and against the revolution, not for it. But the idea that Lenin was pursuing this strictly neo-Jackabin people's will-style elite vanguard party dictatorship stuff is not true. And here I am very influenced by Lars Lee's book on Lenin, which blows up a lot of these old myths. because while the Mensheviks accused the Bolsheviks of being a dictatorial vanguardist party, all through these years, Lenin was relentlessly and emphatically arguing that the revolution would be won by a mass uprising. And in fact, he could turn right around and accuse his Menshevik antagonists of themselves being out of touch and ignoring the people. Because while they talked a lot about the proletariat, they ignored completely the peasants. Lenin believed the Russian peasants were essential to any Russian revolution, and in this,

he was far more populist and inclusive and non-elitist than his Menshevik adversaries. In 1906, he wrote a pamphlet attacking a liberal for discounting the role of the masses and the crowds and the purpose of mass participation in politics. In 1908, an American named William Walling came and toured Russia and wrote a book called Russia's Message, The True World Warwick. import of the revolution. It offered a snapshot of where everyone was at in 1908, and Walling himself was mostly sympathetic to the peasants and had SR tendencies, and much later opposed the Bolsheviks after the revolution of 1917. But in 1908, he looked around at the Russian

Marxists and said that he much preferred Lenin to his opponents, specifically because of how much Lenin talked about the need for the peasants to rise up and participate and be included in the revolution. Now, it's true Lenin did not believe they would be the leaders of the revolution. The way that he saw it going is that the party would organize and lead the proletariat, and the proletariat would be the advanced class leaders, and the peasants would be their followers. But they were all necessary components. The revolution could never be accomplished by just the proletariat alone, and certainly not just the party alone. Lenin was not some people's will vanguardist who disdained the revolutionary potential of everybody but a select few, who would then

do the work for everyone using terrorism, and after toppling this art, set up a little party dictatorship that would do the revolution. And if you ever hear somebody who happens to be doing a podcast about the French Revolution tell you about Gracchus Babuf and say that Lenin was a van mangardist, well, tell that guy that he was wrong. On virtually all fronts at the Congress in London, Lenin and the Bolsheviks carried the day, because as I said, most of the nationality groups were with them. The one big exception to this is what we talked about last week, because everybody at the Congress seemed eager to condemn and get away from the mere criminality of bank heists.

All those expropriations, people were against them. even a majority of the Bolshevik delegates, and they voted overwhelmingly to prohibit expropriations. This vote, of course, came just a few weeks before the Taflees Bank robbery, which Lennon approved of, and which they did not call off, even though they had just been explicitly told it was against party rules. Lenin and Stalin would spend the rest of their lives distancing themselves from the Taflees bank robbery, partly to avoid getting kicked out of the party for so flagrantly ignoring this vote in the Congress in 1907. The viciousness of the debates at the Congress led many delegates to become discouraged and disenchanted, and some of them just outright quit and went home.

The Unity Congress turned out to mostly be a step-by-step repudiation of the entire Menshevik approach, and the Mensheviks were not very happy about this. There would be no worker congresses, no alliance. with the liberals, no decisive move towards legal party politics, and Lenin, in his inimitable way, was not particularly generous with his victories. He just rammed this down their throats. So certainly personality continues to divide the leadership. They personally do not like each other for a number of different snubs and slights and insults. But there are now, as we have just seen a lot of principles and ideological splits that are taking them in two different directions

and which will ultimately lead to a complete divorce in the years to come. But before we leave the Marxists who they're emigre squabbling for a bit, there is one huge new thing we need to introduce. And next week we will introduce it, because a lot of these debates presuppose the two-stage structure of the revolution. First, the bourgeois democratic revolution, then the proletarian socialist revolution. But at the Congress in London, Leon Trotsky recently escaped from exile in Siberia, made a short speech and introduced a new theory he had been developing over the past few years that would cut through the Gordian knot of the two-stage dynamics.

There were not two revolutions in stages. There was one revolution. Permanently.