In December 1903, there were only 360 members of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in St. Petersburg (supporters of both Bolshevism and Menshevism). During the winter of 1904, the membership declined considerably,¹ and by the beginning of 1905, it was less than 300. However, the outbreak of the 1905 Revolution gave an impetus to party growth. Thus, in its Report to the Third Congress of 1905, the St. Petersburg Committee claimed a total Bolshevik membership of 737.² The Menshevik Iskra claimed in April 1905 that the Mensheviks had 1,200–1,300 members in St. Petersburg.³ So total party membership in St. Petersburg in the middle of 1905 was some 2,000. By January 1907, the Bolsheviks had 2,105 members, and the Mensheviks 2,156—a total of 4,261.⁴ In Moscow, the numbers attached to the Social Democratic Party rose from 300 in November 1904, to 8,000 in September 1905—a 25-fold increase in less than a year.⁵

A similar growth in membership occurred all over the country. On the evidence of reports presented to the second Congress (1903), membership of the party could not have been more than a few thousand—excluding the Bund.⁶ However, by the time of the fourth Congress in April 1906, it is estimated that membership had grown to 13,000 for the Bolsheviks and 18,000 for the Mensheviks.⁷ By 1907, the total membership of the party had increased to 150,000: Bolsheviks, 46,143; Mensheviks, 38,174; Bund, 25,468; the Polish party, 25,654; and the Latvian party, 13,000.⁸

The party had become a basically working-class party, with very few intellectuals indeed; “Young Russian workers…now constitute nine-tenths of the organized Marxists in Russia,” wrote Lenin in May 1914.⁹ Of the intellectuals, he wrote in 1912,

The bulk of the “educated” and “intellectuals” of so-called society…nine-tenths or perhaps 99 out of 100 practice…renegacy with such furious success as to become millionaires, but nine-tenths, or perhaps 99 out of 100, practice the very same renegacy, beginning as radical students and ending up holders of “cushy jobs” in some office or other, in some swindle or other.¹⁰

At the end of March 1913, Lenin wrote to L.B. Kamenev, “All the ‘intelligentsia’ are with the Liquidators. The mass of the workers are with us, but the workers are producing their own intelligentsia with the greatest difficulty. Slowly and with difficulty.”¹¹ And on December 20, 1913, in a letter to V.S. Voitinsky, he wrote, “the intelligentsia have cleared off (and good riddance to the whores) and the workers have found their own feet against the Liquidators.”¹²

Badaev, describing the work of the St. Petersburg Party Committee, again and again referred to the lack of intellectuals in the party. “Leaflets are of great importance and the committee devoted much effort to perfecting its machinery for their printing and distribution. The committee consists entirely of workers, and we write the leaflets ourselves and have difficulty in finding intellectuals to help in correcting them.”¹³ S.V. Malyshev, secretary of Pravda in 1914, until he was arrested, stressed how difficult it was to

know how to organize and manage a working-class newspaper. We had never been able to go to school. We were all semi-literate Bolsheviks—we all put off studying until we were imprisoned, as we nearly always were. There, day after day, we wrote out declensions, verbs, subordinate clauses and participles. When we were released from prison, we sat down at a secretary’s or editor’s desk on party orders.¹⁴

The class composition of the Bolshevik Party corresponded with its class program. Outside the party, splits, combinations, and further splits were the order of the day. But the Bolsheviks, with their roots deep in the masses, did not suffer any splits, or even any individual expulsions, in the years l912–14. The mighty force of the masses welded the Bolshevik Party together.

Groups that have no mass roots are bound to vacillate in practice. Lenin remarked:

Instead of a firm, clear line which attracts the workers and is confirmed by living experience, narrow circle diplomacy reigns in such groups. The absence of contact with the masses, the absence of historical roots in the mass trends of Social Democracy in Russia…and the absence of a consistent, integral, clear and absolutely definite line tested by many years of experience, i.e., lack of answers to the questions of tactics, organization and program—such is the soil on which narrow circle diplomacy thrives, and such are its symptoms.¹⁵

He made the same point elsewhere: “In politics in general and in the working-class movement in particular only those trends which exercise mass influence can be taken seriously”;¹⁶ “Politics without the masses are adventurist politics.”¹⁷

Whereas the 1905 Revolution greatly boosted the growth of the party, during the period of reaction it nearly disintegrated. There are no reliable figures for the period, but in 1910, the total membership was probably no larger than it had been before the 1905 Revolution. However, as the period between the end of the first revolution and the rise of a new revolutionary struggle was a comparatively short one—a matter of four or five years—many workers who left the party during the period of reaction later rejoined.

The Bolsheviks now reaped the fruits of their labors in the underground. The few who had held out now recruited thousands. In fact, history proved that it was easier to move from a thousand to ten thousand members than from tens, as in the early 1890s, to a thousand. Lenin and his coworkers had the capacity to make inroads into the masses and to make use of the legal opportunities, without for one moment sacrificing their political intransigence and their uncompromising revolutionary principles.

The “instability” and stability of Bolshevism

The history of Bolshevism provides evidence of instability and discontinuity—largely inevitable consequences of the illegal conditions under which the party operated.

A veteran Bolshevik activist estimated that, owing to police intervention, the average life of a Social Democratic group at the beginning of the century was only three months.¹⁸ A report in 1903 from Tver, a small town on the railway line between Moscow and St. Petersburg, and an important center of Russian Social Democracy, claimed that there was a very rapid turnover of membership in workers’ circles: “a large number came regularly, others after attending once or twice left the circle.”¹⁹ Similarly, Lenin wrote in November 1908, “the average ‘life expectancy’ of the revolutionaries during the first period of our revolution [1905] probably does not exceed a few months.”²⁰

The higher bodies of the party were no more stable. Members of the Central Committee and its agents were, in fact, even more exposed to police persecution. Very few of them remained at liberty inside Russia for any length of time after returning from abroad. Of the Bolsheviks of the first rank, Dubrovinsky, Goldenberg, Tomsky, Breslav, Shvartsman, Serebryakov, Zalutsky, Stalin, and Sverdlov were all arrested within three months of their return to Russia. Ordzhonikidze, Inessa Armand, Goloshchekin, Kamenev, Piatnitsky, and Spandarian were arrested within a year. Only four escaped arrest altogether: Belostotsky, Zevin, Malinovsky, and Iskraiannistov, of whom the last two were police agents. Only 15 remained at liberty inside Russia for a year or more: Rykov, Kostrov, Belostotsky, Zevin, Goloshchekin, Spandarian (as his period at liberty was exactly a year, I have included him in both lists), Lobova, Shvartsman, Rozmirovich, and the six Duma deputies. This state of affairs is not surprising: as we have remarked, there was no conference of the Bolsheviks at which at least one police agent was not present!²¹

Party committees were very unstable. Thus it took years for a Russian Bureau of the Central Committee to be set up—this was finally achieved early in 1912.²² A St. Petersburg Committee was not established until November 1912.²³ A committee had been established in Moscow in the summer of 1912, but had collapsed by the spring of 1913.²⁴ In the spring of 1914, Krupskaya was complaining of a virtual collapse of party organization.²⁵ In July 1914, three members of the St. Petersburg Party Committee were police agents.²⁶ Between January and July 1914, the committee was reduced by arrests no less than five times. As we have seen, the party committees were not homogeneous; they frequently vacillated and were quite often in conflict with Lenin.

Major changes took place in the top leadership of the party. In the years 1896–1900, Lenin’s allies were Martov and Potresov. Between 1900 and 1903, Plekhanov, Axelrod, and Zasulich were in the leadership. During the split of 1903–04, Lenin remained on his own. In 1904, he was joined in the leadership by Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, and Krasin. These three then broke with Lenin and eventually left the party (Krasin in 1907, and the others in 1909). The leadership was then made up of Lenin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. During the events of 1917, these two opposed the October insurrection and broke with Lenin.

Why was there this quick turnover among the leadership? The very process of selecting people to lead the party has dangers inherent in it. The people coming to the top are naturally inclined to shape their methods of work, their thinking, and their behavior to fit the specific, immediate needs of the time. The Russian revolutionary movement underwent many changes in course, as a result of changes in the class struggle. A leader who adapted himself to the immediate needs at one stage found himself out of step at the next turn. For instance, Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, and Krasin fitted the period of the rising revolutionary storm of 1905. But they could not adapt themselves to the period of reaction and the slow advance afterwards. Zinoviev and Kamenev learned the hard way that it was a mistake to exaggerate the immediate revolutionary possibilities, that one had to undertake the slow, systematic work of organization and agitation during the period of reaction, and the following period of small deeds—Duma activity, the insurance campaign, and so on. When it came to the stormy events of 1917, Zinoviev and Kamenev were found wanting.

The committeemen did not have to take key policy decisions, whereas the top party leadership did. Hence the higher his place in the party, the more the leader was likely to adapt to immediate circumstances, and the more conservative he became. To repeat Herbert Spencer’s observation: every organism is conservative in direct proportion to its perfection. This applies equally to political organizations. Thus virtue turns into vice. Lenin was unique among party leaders in his capacity to adapt, while relentlessly continuing to pursue the same aim—workers’ power.

The fact that, despite all these factors encouraging instability, the party survived with all the vigor it did, was due to its deep roots in the class, to its being a real mass workers’ party. Of course all magnitudes are relative. A 1922 Bolshevik Party census covering 22 gubernias and oblasts showed that 1,085 members had joined the party before 1905.²⁷ A rough estimate puts the number at about double for areas excluded from the census. Allowing for the fact that a large number of party members must have lost their lives during the revolution and the civil war, we see a considerable continuity of membership between 1905 and 1922. These were the cadres who gave the party its stability. For a party working under illegal conditions, in a country where the industrial proletariat numbered only some 2.5 million, a cadre organization of several thousand surviving for many years is a remarkable achievement.

St. Petersburg, the vanguard

St. Petersburg played a dominant role in the development of the Bolshevik Party and the proletariat in the years 1912–14—providing a foretaste of the 1917 events.

However, it did not have this importance in 1905. During the 1905 Revolution the Mensheviks were stronger than the Bolsheviks in St. Petersburg, while the relative positions were reversed in Moscow. Even in the years immediately after the revolution, the Bolsheviks did not do very well in St. Petersburg. This was especially true in the district of Vyborg, in the northwest part of the city, the center of the most modern engineering industry. In 1907, Lenin referred to the “Vyborg district, the Menshevik stronghold.”²⁸ In the election to the St. Petersburg Committee held on March 25, 1907, the Mensheviks obtained 267 votes in Vyborg, while the Bolsheviks received only 155. In the Neva district, where the Putilov works were situated, the Mensheviks got 231 votes and the Bolsheviks 202. As against this, in Okruzhov, the Bolsheviks got 300 votes and the Mensheviks 50.²⁹

To add to the Bolsheviks’ difficulties in St. Petersburg, in the years 1905–07, they were challenged for influence among industrial workers by the Social Revolutionaries, heirs of the Narodniks. In the second Duma elections in 1907, 17 Social Democrats (plus one Social Democratic sympathizer) were elected in St. Petersburg, as electors against 14 Social Revolutionaries. The Social Revolutionaries were most successful in the very large factories—nine of their worker electors came from two giant factories (the Semyanikovki zavod and the Obukhovski zavod). Taking the four largest factories, we get the following picture: The total number of electors elected was 14, of whom 11 were Social Revolutionaries and 3 Social Democrats. In the small factories, 15 Social Democrats and 3 Social Revolutionaries were elected. The Social Democrats’ main support was in the medium-sized factories, with 50–100 workers.

The reason why the Social Revolutionaries fared so well in the large factories was the immaturity of the working class in general and in particular that of the large factories, which had a high proportion of unskilled workers who had recently come from the villages.

During the years of reaction, the cadres of the Social Revolutionary Party fell victim even more than the Mensheviks to the diseases of the intelligentsia—instability, pessimism, factionalism, Liquidationism—and the party almost ceased to exist in St. Petersburg. The Mensheviks suffered a similar fate.

The St. Petersburg workers meanwhile matured in the vicissitudes of the struggle. “He who has been whipped is worth two who have not,” goes a peasant proverb often quoted by Lenin. The years of revolution and reaction developed the consciousness of the advanced section of the Russian working class, whose spearhead was in St. Petersburg. The St. Petersburg strike record was well ahead of Moscow’s, although there were only half as many industrial workers in St. Petersburg as in Moscow. The number of strikers in St. Petersburg in 1905 was 1,033,000, while in Moscow it was 540,000.³⁰ In St. Petersburg, wages were nearly twice as high as in Moscow. The leading district was Vyborg, a name that is destined to reappear many times.

The Bolsheviks, relentlessly pursuing their work in the underground during the years of reaction, gradually gained ascendancy in the working class. From 1912 onwards, they were well ahead in the leadership of the workers of St. Petersburg. In Trudovaya Pravda of July 2, 1914, Lenin could write,

During the past few years, St. Petersburg has been at the head of the working-class movement. While the proletariat in some (now few) parts of the provinces cannot yet rouse themselves from the lethargy of 1907–11, and in other parts are only just taking the first steps to fall into line with the St. Petersburg proletariat, the latter has reacted to all events of concern to the working-class movement. The St. Petersburg proletariat is in the forefront.³¹

The growth of the class struggle was reflected and assisted by the rise of Bolshevism in St. Petersburg.

The experience of the months of the 1905 Revolution had left a deep impression in the hearts and minds of millions. This was particularly true of party members, even those who deserted the party during the period of reaction and were slow to rise again from their torpor. Thousands of ex-party members kept not only their memories, but also much of the literature, pamphlets, and papers of the intoxicating days of the revolution. In the years 1912–14, with the new revolutionary struggle, they rejoined the party in thousands. And while in 1905 and 1906, the Mensheviks had the edge over the Bolsheviks, in 1907, there was a small shift in favor of the Bolsheviks, who gained the upper hand among the organized workers, especially in St. Petersburg.

The figures that we quoted in the last chapter of the numbers of workers’ groups making donations to Pravda, and the numbers of letters and reports sent to the paper, show clearly that in the years 1912–14, the Bolsheviks became a mass revolutionary party (in the context of the size of the industrial working class). In August 1913, Lenin estimated party membership as something between 30,000 and 50,000.³² However, this was probably an exaggeration.

Nevertheless, Lenin could justifiably say, “The party is where a majority of the class-conscious worker Marxists who take an active part in political life are to be found”³³; “For the first time, a real, proletarian foundation for a real Marxist party is being securely laid”³⁴; “The only source of strength of the working-class movement—and an invincible one at that—is the class-consciousness of the workers and the broad scope of their struggle, that is, the participation in it of the masses of the wage-workers.”³⁵

The Director of the Police Department confirmed Lenin’s evaluation of the strength of Bolshevism in 1913.

During the past 10 years...the most energetic, courageous elements, capable of tireless struggle, resistance and constant organization, have been...the organizations and persons concentrating around Lenin.... The permanent organizational heart and soul of all party undertakings of any importance is Lenin.... The faction of Leninists is always better organized than the others, stronger in its singleness of purpose, more resourceful in propagating its ideas among the workers.... When during the last two years the labor movement began to grow stronger, Lenin and his followers came closer to the workers than others, and he was the first to proclaim purely revolutionary slogans.... The Bolshevik circles, nuclei and organizations are now scattered through all the cities. Permanent correspondence and contacts have been established with almost all at the factory centers. The Central Committee functions almost regularly and is entirely in the hands of Lenin…. In view of the aforesaid, there is nothing surprising in the fact that at the present time the assembling of the entire underground party is proceeding around the Bolshevik organizations and that indeed the latter really are the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.³⁶

While Lenin was expressing optimism and confidence in the mass roots of Bolshevism, Martov was complaining about the organizational weakness of Menshevism. Thus, in September 1913, on receiving the news of a Bolshevik victory in the elections of the Union of Metal Workers, Martov wrote to Potresov:

I am dejected by the story of the Union of Metal Workers which exposes our weakness even more than we are used to. It is altogether likely that in the course of this season, our positions in Petersburg will be squeezed even further. But that is not what is awful. What is worse is that from an organizational point of view, Menshevism...remains a weak little circle.³⁷

More than half the copies of Pravda were sold in St. Petersburg. In the collections for Pravda between January 1 and May 13, 1914, St. Petersburg gave 13,943.24 rubles, collected by 2,024 workers’ groups, out of a total of 18,934.10 rubles collected by 2,873 groups. Thus, St. Petersburg accounted for 70 percent of the groups and 74 percent of the money collected. Of all the workers’ groups that collected donations for workers’ papers in St. Petersburg, 86 percent gave to Pravda, while only 14 percent donated to the Menshevik paper. As against this, in the provinces, 32 percent of workers’ groups supported the Mensheviks.³⁸

The Bolshevik Party organization was impressively strong in St. Petersburg in the years 1912–14. By December 1911, a letter in Rabochaya Gazeta (a popular paper edited by Lenin and published in Paris) stated that links between the various party cells had been established, and that a St. Petersburg Committee had been formed. It had links with the following districts of the city: Narvsky, Vyborsky, Petersburgsky, Gorodskoy, and Vasileostrovsky. Of these, the organization in Vasileostrovsky was the best, as there were both borough and sub-borough committees operating.³⁹

At the end of January 1913, a meeting of the executive of the Petersburg Committee was held, which adopted the following plan for the structure of the city organization: a wide democratic Petersburg Committee, elected where possible, with no more than a third of its membership co-opted, and a narrow conspiratorial executive of three members; the latter to be mainly co-opted, in the interests of safety and continuity of activity, the co-options to be ratified by the St. Petersburg Committee. The committee acquired ever more influence. Workers’ organizations of every kind considered it to be the only authoritative local organization of the RSDLP.⁴⁰

By the end of 1913, the organization had become more firmly based. Every borough had a group, and there were representatives on the committees from more and more boroughs. The Petersburg Committee now had regular meetings every two or three weeks, and its executive was very active. This was composed of three members and two candidates, of whom three were workers and two were intellectuals. It met twice a week and discussed the current situation and what the party’s response should be. The executive also maintained contact with the Central Committee abroad and informed them of all activities in the city.

In September 1913, Badaev reported to the Poronino Bolshevik Conference on the Bolshevik organization in St. Petersburg and the nature of the work it carried out. His report gives a clear description of the existing state of affairs, which was obviously regarded as very satisfactory.

All activity in the St. Petersburg District is now controlled by the St. Petersburg Committee, which has been functioning since autumn last year. The committee has contacts at all works and factories and is informed of all developments there. The organization of the district is as follows: At the factory, party members form nuclei in the various workshops and delegates from the nuclei form a factory committee (at small factories, the members themselves constitute the committee). Every factory committee, or workshop nucleus in large factories, appoints a collector who on each pay-day collects the dues and other funds, books subscriptions for the newspapers, etc. A controller is also appointed to visit the institutions for which the funds were raised, to see that the correct amounts have been received there and collect the money. By this system, abuses in the handling of money are avoided.

Each district committee elects by secret voting an executive commission of three, care being taken that the committee as a whole should not know of whom the executive commission actually consists.

The district executive commissions send delegates to the St. Petersburg Committee, again trying to ensure that the names should not be known by the whole district committee. The St. Petersburg Committee also elects an executive commission of three. Sometimes, for reasons of secrecy, it was found inadvisable to elect the representatives from the district commission and they were co-opted at the direction of the St. Petersburg Committee.

Owing to this system, it was difficult for the secret police to find out who are members of the St. Petersburg Committee, which was thus enabled to carry on its work, to guide the activities of the organizations, declare political strikes, etc.⁴¹

The linchpin of the organizational structure of the St. Petersburg party as well as the party at the national level was the group of Duma deputies. The fact that this group was headed by a police agent—Malinovsky—and that all its other members were arrested shortly after the outbreak of the war, shattered the structure. But this is part of the later story.

Outside St. Petersburg the state of party organization was very poor indeed, even in 1914. Thus, Krupskaya wrote to Elena Stasova on February 21, 1914,

The illegal organization is cut to ribbons. There are no solid regional centers. The local organizations are cut off from one another and in the majority of cases everywhere there are only workers in the organizations, the [professional revolutionaries] have vanished long since. There are no secret addresses anywhere, nor any such conspiratorial practices.⁴²

In organizational terms, the Bolsheviks in St. Petersburg were streets ahead of their comrades elsewhere. In many towns, the Bolsheviks did not even separate organizationally from the Mensheviks until well after the February Revolution of 1917.

In such workers’ centers as Ekaterinburg, Perm, Tula, Nizhni-Novgorod, Sormovo, Kolomna, Yuzovka, the Bolsheviks separated from the Mensheviks at the end of May. In Odessa, Nikolaev, Elizavetgrad, Poltava and other points in the Ukraine, the Bolsheviks did not have independent organizations even in the middle of June. In Baku, Zlatoust, Bezhetsk, Kostroma, the Bolsheviks divided from the Mensheviks only towards the end of June.⁴³

In fact, 351 party organizations remained joint Bolshevik-Menshevik organizations, in many cases until as late as September 1917.⁴⁴

As we shall see, in 1917, the local organizations frequently reproached the Central Committee—not without justification—for concerning itself only with Petersburg.

Revolutionary high tide on the eve of war

We have already noted that the number of political strikes in the first half of 1914 approached that of 1905. The May Day demonstration of 1914 was far larger than those of previous years. In St. Petersburg, 250,000 workers went on strike, and in Moscow about 50,000; strikes also took place in a number of provincial towns.

The arch-reactionary Duma deputy Puriskevich, speaking on May 2, gave this impression: “We are witnessing remarkable scenes; we are passing through a period strikingly similar to 1904. If we are not blind we must see that despite certain differences there is much in common between what is happening now and what took place in 1904. We must draw the necessary conclusions.”⁴⁵

The St. Petersburg Bolsheviks called for a strike and demonstration on July 7 in protest against the shooting of workers a few days earlier.

On the morning of July 7 the city looked as it had done during 1905. With very few exceptions, factories and works were closed and about 130,000 workers were on strike. The workers poured into the street and the police patrols were totally unable to control them; they could only manage to prevent any demonstration on the Nevsky Prospect. In order to avoid any “scandal” in the presence of the French president, huge police forces were concentrated there to prevent workers reaching the center of the city. The movement was not confined to mere demonstration. The normal traffic was interrupted; tramcars were stopped and passengers forced to alight, and the controls were removed. Workers filled the cars and prevented them from moving. Later in the day the men at one of the tramway depots joined the strikers…. Workers had lost all fear of the police; they put up a vigorous fight against the police brutality, and many hand-to-hand fights took place.

The same evening the city governor and the minister of the interior had an urgent consultation on the events of the day and decided to take strong measures. The next morning the city governor issued a proclamation warning the population of the consequences of these disorders and reproducing, in effect, the famous order issued by Trepov in 1905: “Spare no cartridges.”

In spite of this there were no signs of slackening and the movement continued to grow during the following days until July 12. The number of strikers increased to 150,000, and on July 9 barricades were seen in the streets of St. Petersburg. Tramcars, barrels, poles, etc., served as material for the construction of barricades which were built mainly in the Vyborg district. All traffic was interrupted and in many areas the workers had complete control of the streets.⁴⁶