A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

Yet the consequences of 1905 were set to divide the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks even more than the Party Congress of 1903. It was only after 1905 that the rival wings of the Social Democratic movement emerged as two distinctive parties, each with its own political culture, system of ethics, philosophy and methods. Lenin's tactical shifts made all the difference. The basic tenets of the Bolshevik political philosophy had already been formed by 1903, but it was only after 1905, as Lenin digested the practical lessons of the failed revolution, that its unique strategic features began to emerge. Hence Lenin's reference, fifteen years later, to the 1905 Revolution as a 'dress rehearsal' for the Bolshevik seizure of power.⁸²

As Lenin later came to see it, three things had been made clear by 1905: the bankruptcy of the 'bourgeoisie' and its liberal parties as a revolutionary force; the immense revolutionary potential of the peasantry; and the capacity of

the nationalist movements in the borderlands to weaken the Empire fatally. He argued for a break with the orthodox Marxist assumption, held as a matter of faith by most of the Mensheviks, that a backward country like Russia would have to go through a 'bourgeois-democratic revolution', accompanied by several decades of capitalist development, before its working class would be sufficiently advanced to take power and install a socialist system. It was not true, Lenin claimed, that the workers would have to follow the lead of the liberal 'bourgeoisie' in overthrowing Tsarism, since they could form a revolutionary government of their own in alliance with the peasants and the national minorities. This concept of working-class autonomy was to become a powerful weapon in the hands of the Bolsheviks. When the workers renewed their strikes and protests after 1912 they turned increasingly to the leadership of the Bolsheviks, whose support for militant action against the 'bourgeoisie' matched their own growing sense of working-class solidarity in the wake of 1905.

Trotsky advanced a similar idea in his theory of the 'permanent revolution' which he had taken from the Marxist theoretician Parvus and developed from his analysis of the 1905 Revolution, Results and Prospects. Although still a Menshevik (pride prevented him from joining Lenin's party), Trotsky's theory fitted better with the revolutionary Bolshevism which he would espouse in 1917 than with the mainstream of Menshevism, as voiced by Plekhanov and Axelrod, which insisted that the bourgeois revolution was a prerequisite of real socialism.* The Russian bourgeoisie, Trotsky said, had shown itself to be incapable of leading the democratic revolution. And yet this feebleness of capitalism's own agents would make it possible for the working class to carry out its revolution earlier than in the more advanced countries of the West. Here was historical paradox raised to the level of strategy. To begin with, the Russian Revolution would have to win the support of the peasants, the vast majority of the population, by allowing them to seize the gentry's estates. But as the revolution moved towards socialism, and the resistance of the 'petty-bourgeois' peasantry increased, further advance would depend on the spread of revolution to the industrial countries of the West, without whose support the socialist order would not be able to sustain itself. 'Workers of the World Unite!'

In this aspect of his theory — and in this alone — Trotsky remained a Menshevik. For the one thing which united all the various strains of the Menshevik credo after 1905 was the belief that in the absence of a socialist revolution in the West the revolutionary struggle of the Russian working class

* F. I. Dan and E. I. Martynov had also broken with this old Menshevik view (which went back to the 1880s). Their theory of the 'unbroken revolution', which they advanced in the newspaper Nachalo during the autumn of 1905, differed little from that of the 'permanent revolution'.

was bound to fail without the support, or at least the neutrality, of the bourgeoisie. This, in the view of the Mensheviks, demanded a flexible approach to the liberal parties after 1905; it was in their mutual interests to campaign for the dismantling of the despotic state and the establishment of a democracy. The years in which the Duma operated would serve as the last test for this experiment in political reform.

6 Last Hopes

i Parliaments and Peasants