A people's tragedy

fn4 It was a doctrine that Lenin was to follow. During the famine of 1891 he opposed the idea of humanitarian relief on the grounds that the famine would force millions of destitute peasants to flee to the cities and join the ranks of the proletariat: this would bring the revolution one step closer.

fn5 The ‘thick’ literary journals had a similar influence in the Soviet period with publications such as Novyi Mir, which had a readership of tens of millions. They were also vehicles for political ideas in a system where open political debate had been banned.

fn6 Dostoevsky, who had himself belonged to the Petrashevsky revolutionary circle in the 1850s, used this novel to attack the mentality of the revolutionaries, especially the nihilists. Petr Verkhovensky, its central character, is clearly based upon Nechaev. At one point in the novel he says that it would be justified to kill a million people in the struggle against despotism because in the course of a hundred years the despots would kill many more.

fn7 Jews played a prominent role in the Social Democratic movement, providing many of its most important leaders (Axelrod, Deich, Martov, Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev, just to name a few). In 1905 the Social Democratic Party in Russia had 8,400 members. The Bund, by contrast, the Jewish workers’ party of the Pale, had 35,000 members.

fn8 The alias and pseudonym ‘Lenin’ was probably derived from the River Lena in Siberia. Lenin first used it in 1901.

fn9 The merchants of Yaroslavl’ had a long-established reputation, stretching back to the Middle Ages, for being much more cunning than the rest.

fn10 For the Marxists of the 1890s ‘propaganda’ meant the gradual education of the workers in small study groups with the goal of inculcating in them a general understanding of the movement and class consciousness. ‘Agitation’ meant a mass campaign on specific labour and political issues.

fn11 The First Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was held in 1898. This founding moment in the history of the party, which in nineteen years would come to rule the largest country in the world, was attended by no more than nine socialists! They met secretly in the town of Minsk, passed a declaration of standard Marxist goals, and then, almost to a man, were arrested by the police.

Chapter 5

fn1 The Orthodox Church, which had recently excommunicated Tolstoy, forbade the starving peasants to accept food from his relief campaign.

fn2 As he would throughout his life.

fn3 For this Struve was treated by the government as a defeatist. He was even approached by a Japanese spy.

fn4 It was organized by Boris Savinkov (1879–1925), who was later to become a minister in the Provisional Government.

fn5 At the end of January Gapon turned up in Geneva, where he fell in with the revolutionaries in exile. Their theoretical disputes were above him and, seduced by international fame, he soon left for London to write his autobiography. Having made himself a celebrity, Gapon had no more use for the revolutionary movement. In December he returned to Russia, where he supported the Witte government and even co-operated with the secret police against the socialists. In March 1906, for reasons that are unclear, he was brutally murdered by agents of the secret police, including his closest associate, who on 9 January had rescued him from the massacre at the Narva Gates.

fn6 The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks probably had something in the region of 10,000 members each by the end of 1905, although at this early stage party membership was not clearly defined. There are no reliable figures for SR party membership in 1905. But in November 1906 there were 50,000 members, compared with a total of 40,000 members for the two Marxist factions.

fn7 Since the professions had taken the lead in forming these unions, other blue-collar unions, even in Communist Russia, continued to be called ‘professional unions’ (profsoiuzy) rather than trade or industrial unions.

fn8 In 1893, when he was working in the Department of Police, Durnovo had ordered his agents to steal the Spanish Ambassador’s correspondence with his prostitute mistress, with whom Durnovo was also in love. The Ambassador complained to Alexander III, who ordered Durnovo’s immediate dismissal. But after Alexander’s death he somehow managed to revive his career.

fn9 The name was a derogatory one, adapted from the term ‘White Hundreds’, which was used in medieval Russia for the privileged caste of nobles and wealthy merchants. The lower-class types who joined the Black Hundreds were not in this class, hence their ironic nomenclature.

fn10 Among them, ironically, was A.A. Zarudny, who in 1917, as the Minister of Justice in Kerensky’s government, would imprison Trotsky on charges of state treason.