Berezovo: A Revolutionary Russian Epic

By this point five years had passed since the RSDLP’s first Congress, and there was much dead wood to be cut away and questions to be settled. Whose definition of the Party membership would win: Nicolai’s or Jules Martov’s? What was the programme of the RSDLP to be? What was Iskra’s role? How many people should be on Iskra’s editorial board and who should they be? Everything had been riding on the Second Congress. To insist on the formation of a single revolutionary, conspiratorial party with Iskra as its mouthpiece had been comprehensible, but worrying. Placing all that power in the hands of a small group of people felt unwise, but a child would have recognised that Iskra was the least dysfunctional centre within the Party and that its contributors and supporters amongst the Congress delegates – the Iskraists as they called themselves – would accordingly decide all the main votes. Iskra was the only part of the Movement that knew what was going on; none of the groups back home in Russia had that kind of overview. The problem was that on the vital Membership question the Iskraists themselves were almost evenly split between supporting Nicolai’s fist or Martov’s open palm.

With an impatient shake of the head, Trotsky stepped out away from the draught of the open window and leant against the wall, recalling as he did so how efficiently the Second Congress had reversed Marx’s dictum; it had begun as a farce and repeated itself as a tragedy. It had opened in Brussels – that cul de sac of grandiose impotence and windbaggery – only to be swiftly closed down by the police. Avoiding arrest, the delegates had crossed the English Channel and reconvened the Second Congress in London, where it had quickly degenerated into a political bloodbath. In the end he had parted with Nicolai and, along with the majority of the Congress, had come down on the side of Jules Martov. After many hours of acrimonious debate the membership issue, they believed, was settled by 28 votes to 23 in favour of the wider definition of mass open membership. This was democracy in action. But Nicolai had refused to accept the outcome of the vote. New strategies were formulated by his clique of amongst the Iskraists. The 28 votes had included two “Economists” – who opposed Iskra representing the Party abroad – and five representatives of the Jewish Bund. The revolutionary purpose of the Party would be strengthened, Nicolai’s clique now argued, by the exclusion of the Economists and their bread and butter issues. The Revolution was delayed, so their argument went, and not hastened by the amelioration of workers’ pay and conditions. A vote showed that there was no support for the Economists’ primitive positions, and so they were expelled.

But what was there to do about the Jewish Bund? The Bund represented the largest, the most long lasting and the best organised grouping of politically aware workers within the RSDLP membership. In the immediate aftermath of the vicious pogrom in Kishinev the personal sympathies of many of the Congress delegates had initially been with the Bund.

Arise and go now to the city of slaughter;
Into its courtyard wind thy way;
There with thine own hand touch, and with the eyes of thine head,
Behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on mural clay,
The spattered blood and dried brains of the dead.

There had never been the slightest possibility that the Bund’s membership would bow to Party discipline, nor put themselves out for anything that did not advance the cause of their own People. On the contrary, they had come to the Congress with their own agenda, wanting to split the Party into different groupings and to be the sole representative of Jewish workers. With tragic inevitability, the Bund had dug its own grave by being too disputatious, keeping the discussions going until three o’clock in the morning in the hope of wearing the goyim out. Once it had become clear to them that there would be no room for a ‘Jewish Section’ within the Party, that Socialism meant full assimilation and much more besides, the Bund had no choice but to leave the Congress and stay out in the wilderness.