“To Prepare for a New Russian Revolution”
Abstract
By the beginning of 1911, Lenin concluded that the worst of the counterrevolution was over and that there were signs of a “revival.” The main task was to rebuild the decimated party, especially since there were influential voices who contended that an illegal organization wasn’t necessary—the “liquidators.” And no better opportunity, he argued, existed for doing that than the upcoming elections to the new Duma. In addition to party building, the elections birthed a new social democratic Duma group. Though slightly smaller than the previous, it proved to be a politically stronger fraction. Almost half, all Bolsheviks, were elected by industrial workers—an advance for Russian social democracy. If the five-year-long Third Duma was about the Russian party finding its parliamentary feet, the briefer Fourth was about putting that prior training into practice. From its convening in November 1912 to the onset of the First World War in August 1914, the Bolshevik wing of the party, under Lenin’s direction, accomplished more in the parliamentary arena in as short a time as any revolutionaries had ever done and, probably, ever since—and with more to come.
Keywords
Central Committee Election Campaign Social Democrat Labor Policy Russian RevolutionPreview
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Notes
- 1.V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 17 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), p. 278. Hereafter, citations from his Collected Works will be designated as in this case: 17, p. 278.Google Scholar
- 4.Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 27 (New York: International Publishers, 1975–2004), pp. 226–27. Hereafter, citations from the MECW are designated as follows: MECW 27, pp. 226–27. See LES1905, p. 28.Google Scholar
- 10.Nadezhda Krupskaya, Memories of Lenin (London: Panther Books, 1970), p. 199.Google Scholar
- 19.For useful details about the origins and course of Pravda, despite neither understanding nor agreeing with Lenin’s politics, see Ralph Carter Elwood, “Lenin and Pravda, 1912–1914,” Slavic Review 31, no. 2 (June 1972): 355–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 46.For some useful details, see R. C. Elwood, Inessa Armand: Revolutionary and Feminist (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 92–95. September 14 is inconsistent with other details Elwood supplies; see below, fn. 49. See also Robert B. McKean, St. Petersburg between the Revolutions: Workers and Revolutionaries, June 1907—February 1917 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 92, who claims that Armand and Safarov were not successful in one of their tasks: reviving the St. Petersburg branch.Google Scholar
- 52.A. Badayev, The Bolsheviks in the Tsarist Duma (New York: International Publishers, 1932), pp. 3–24. Trotsky suggests that the second edition of Badayev’s recollections bear the hand of Stalin, who wanted the book to put him in the best possible light given his conciliationist stances while working with the editorial board of Pravda (Stalin, pp. 143, 149)—ihus the reason I say the “instructions to the delegates” were “apparently” drafted by Stalin. The original Russian edition was published about 1929; therefore the 1932 International Publishers edition is probably a translation of the second edition.Google Scholar
- 70.On Badayev’s activities, much of which consisted of defending workers in St. Petersburg from the assaults of both bosses and the state, see Badayev, pp. 71– 99. For instructive details on how the two deputies from the Ukraine carried out this work in their constituencies, see R. C. Elwood, Russian Social Democracy in the Underground: A Study of the RSDLP in the Ukraine, 1907–1914 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1974), pp. 188–89.Google Scholar
- 104.Lenin’s opinion was warranted. It was later learned that Bernstein—and evidently with some complicity by Bebel—carried out the “greatest bowdleriza- tion” in the history of the Marxist movement; Roger Morgan, The German Social Democrats and the First International, 1864–1872 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 248.Google Scholar
- 115.Richard Pipes, ed., The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 39.Google Scholar