CHAPTER : STRUGGLING TO PLAY A PART. Stalin had been right about the establishment of the State Duma: it was part of a

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1 CHAPTER : STRUGGLING TO PLAY A PART Stalin had been right about the establishment of the State Duma: it was part of a strategy to divide, weaken and ultimately crush the revolutionary movement in Russia. And as a seductive ploy it was effective. Not only did it woo bourgeois liberals away from more radical and popular elements, but it also aggravated old splits and fostered new ones within Social Democracy. Though both Mensheviks and Lenin s adherents were drawn to take part in the Duma, they wrangled incessantly over how they should behave there. Should they cooperate with other parties, attempt to legislate, or just use the Duma as a forum for radical agitation? A further blow to Party unity came from a group of left Bolsheviks, centered on Central Committee member A. A. Bogdanov and writers for the journal Vpered! (Forward!), who were dissatisfied with Duma participation. Bogdanov represented a serious challenge to Lenin s control over the Party s left wing, and Lenin responded by concentrating fire on Bogdanov and driving him from the Party. On the right, another challenge came from the so-called Liquidators, who, intimidated by the effectiveness of the tsarist regime s repression of underground activity and lured by the tempting legal opportunities it dangled, wanted the Party to close down its illegal organizations and focus solely on legal activities. Recognizing the Liquidators as a threat to the revolutionary character of Social Democracy, Lenin fought vigorously to exclude them too from the Party. All this infighting had shattered the Party s fragile unity, a fact that Stalin decried in his August 1909 blast blaming the leadership for the Party Crisis. While his critical assessment of the Party leaders fueled his belief that he would make a truer and better leader, the disarray within the Party made it more difficult for Koba to position himself within it. At Tammerfors the choices facing him had been relatively simple; with every new year they became increasingly complex.

2 2 The conflict between Lenin and Bogdanov posed a difficult problem for Koba. He had considerable affinity with the left Bolsheviks, 1 rooted in a shared belief that conditions in Russia could lead only to a renewal and intensification of revolution and, correspondingly, that evolutionary progress toward real democratic reforms was impossible. Both Koba and the left Bolsheviks accordingly gave priority to preparations for an armed uprising and regarded participation in the Duma as a dangerous mistake that misled the masses about the true nature of the tsarist regime and the struggle against it; Koba and the Bogdanovites also were of like mind about the need to prepare workers to take control of the Party from intellectuals. Quickly grasping the essence of the emerging rift between Lenin s Duma politics and Bogdanov s harder brand of Bolshevism, Koba showed his preference for the latter. In the Georgian s critique of the 1907 Party Congress in London, where he mentioned Lenin only as someone within the framework of Menshevism and Bolshevism, he favorably reported Bogdanov s hard-line remarks at considerable length. 2 Despite Koba s affinity for much of left Bolshevism, he held aloof from the group. He viewed its concern with literary and philosophical matters as wasteful and irrelevant; in particular the god-building ideas of Vperedist A. V. Lunacharsky troubled him. The introduction of religious elements into socialism, Koba criticized, was unscientific, contrary to Marxism s implacable struggle against religion, and harmful for the proletariat. What most distanced him from the left Bolsheviks, however, was probably his firm commitment to Party discipline, which led him to reject the radically antiparticipation notions of Recallism and Ultimatism to which the Bogdanovites lent support. Though Koba certainly wished that the Party had never decided to take part in the Duma, and though he tried to reverse that decision, while it was Party law he believed it was the duty of loyal Party members to accept at least nominally use of the Duma for anti-government agitation under the direction of the Central Committee. Concern for Party discipline also led Koba to rebuke Bogdanov in August 1909 for declaring that he would

3 3 not submit to the authority of the editorial board of the Bolshevik journal Proletarii, which functioned as a Bolshevik high command. Nonetheless, Koba authored on behalf of the Baku Party committee a resolution protesting Lenin s campaign to expel Bogdanov from the Party. 3 Though the driving force behind Lenin s efforts to crush Bogdanov was his fear that Bogdanov s anti-duma, pro-insurrectionist politics were a threat to him, he disguised his campaign against his rival as a crusade to protect Marxist materialism from being corrupted by a heretical philosophical doctrine Bogdanov espoused known as empiriocriticism. Commenting on the dispute in several letters beginning in 1908, Koba expressed some appreciation for Bogdanov s philosophic ideas and repeatedly termed the dispute a tempest in a teacup. More important, he questioned what purpose the tempest served and implied that illogic, deceit and egotism were among several individual faults which the affair revealed in Lenin. 4 These remarks suggest that harsh judgments of Lenin s character and intellect helped shape Koba s negative view of him, along with Lenin s privileged background, émigré status and political mistakes. 5 In late 1910, when the remaining left Bolsheviks were in sharp decline, Koba distanced himself further from them, saying that they were no longer of much interest and that if they did not wake up one of these days he would be content to let them stew in their own juice. 6 But he did not abandon the effort, which he had had shared with them, to establish within Russia an authoritative Social Democratic newspaper and central office to manage practical work within the country. Indeed, four times between January 1910 and March 1912 he re-iterated the demands he had made in August 1909, 7 eventually winning a partial victory in April 1912 with the creation in Saint Petersburg of Pravda. This daily newspaper was established at the behest of the Bolshevik Duma deputies to reach the broad masses of working people. 8 Koba even arrived in the capital (having escaped from internal exile) in time to assist with pre-publication tasks and to write the statement of the paper s purpose Our Aims that appeared in the maiden issue on April For

4 4 Pravda he announced two paramount objectives. [F]irst and foremost, he insisted, the paper should call for unity at all costs, for peace and cooperation within the movement. Social Democrats, he insisted, had to recognize that they had more points of agreement than of disagreement. 10 Second, it should serve as a training ground for new worker-writers the Russian Bebels that he wanted. Strengthening the Party by unifying it and by making it more proletarian had long been in the forefront of his desires. Our Aims has been interpreted as a sign that Koba favored unity of the Bolsheviks with the Liquidators on the extreme right of the Party. 11 Though this is an absurd charge, there were important differences between Koba s thinking about the Liquidators and Lenin s. Regarding Liquidationism as a grave threat, Lenin attacked it incessantly, usually leveling savage personal abuse against its spokesmen. When a faction of the Party s Menshevik wing, the so-called pro-party Mensheviks led by Plekhanov, also renounced the Liquidators, Lenin applauded, and by the Spring of 1909 Bolsheviks and Plekhanovites were cooperating in opposing the enemy on the Right. But from the outset Lenin insisted that the Bolsheviks maintain their separate identity indeed, they should entrench their positions even more deeply and continue to fight most strenuously against Menshevik deviations from the policy of revolutionary Social Democracy. 12 Accordingly, he consistently referred to the joint anti-liquidationist activity of Bolsheviks and pro-party Mensheviks as only a rapprochement between the two groups, not as a step toward their unification. 13 Plekhanov, Lenin stated in May 1910, was never a Bolshevik. We do not and never will consider him a Bolshevik. 14 For Lenin, then, the fight against Liquidationism obliged the Bolsheviks, having rallied tightly together, to accept a temporary alignment with the pro-party Mensheviks, but nothing more. For Koba, on the other hand, the way to combat Liquidationism was to stand for principle, not to make war on the Liquidators and thereby exacerbate intra-party feuds, with all their attendant suspicions, rivalries and personal animosities. However idealistic

5 5 and naïve this approach may seem, it was Koba s way of asserting that he, not Lenin, would define the ground on which he would stand. Consequently, though Koba was well practiced in the art of personal abuse, from mid-1907 through 1912 he refrained totally from the name-calling that pervaded Lenin s attacks on the Liquidators. Possibly Koba believed that Lenin s heavy-handed campaign was backfiring by generating sympathy for his victims and pushing moderates toward the Liquidators instead of drawing them toward the Bolsheviks. Koba preferred to employ a more positive approach. Koba also diverged from Lenin in speaking not of rapprochement but of unity, which he predictably described as an imperative need. 15 On various occasions, he qualified the unity he sought as that of all genuine Party elements (January 1910), of all those, irrespective of group, who believe that an illegal Russian Social Democratic Labor Party is needed (March 1912), or of only Bolsheviks and pro-party Mensheviks Unity on the basis of dissociation from anti-party elements, from Liquidators! (October 1912). 16 These statements exclude the Liquidators from the unified Party Koba wished for, but they also indicate that he desired going beyond rapprochement to bring about unity of Bolsheviks with anti-liquidationist elements, especially pro-party Mensheviks. Believing that centers of advanced industry promoted Bolshevik views while Liquidationism had become the ideological atmosphere in less industrial towns, 17 he called in January 1910 for a general Party conference including special representation for the big centers where large masses of the proletariat are concentrated and for the illegal Party organizations which actually exist and function, but excluding any corresponding representation for legal organizations. 18 At the end of the year he repeated the call for a conference, provided the Plekhanovites agree. 19 In proposing this conciliatory condition he displayed a comradely, un-leninist attitude toward the pro-party Mensheviks and a desire to broaden and improve the relationship with them. Koba s desire for greater Party unity reflected, of course, his long-standing belief that unity gave strength while disunity caused weakness. He was quick to seize upon

6 6 signs of growing violence and radicalization in 1912 (such as the shooting down of strikers in the Lena goldfields, mass hunger strikes by political prisoners protesting brutal prison administrators, and the execution of naval mutineers) to argue that the revolution was imminent and hence that it required greater unity of the forces opposed to tsarism. 20 The approaching elections to the Duma that year also made the imperative necessity of uniting the Party more strikingly evident to him, 21 a view which is hardly surprising in a man who from the first had seen the Duma as designed to divide and weaken the revolutionary forces. Koba s hostility to Lenin s leadership probably also helped inspire his quest for a unified and thus broader Party. What right had Lenin to decide who could be a Social Democrat? Were his political sins any less serious than those of Bogdanov, Plekhanov, or other Social Democratic leaders? And if the Party were broader, would not Lenin s voice be less dominant? Promoting the idea of uniting with the pro-party Mensheviks was one purpose of a letter Koba wrote at the end of 1910 from his place of exile in Solvychegodsk to a connection in Paris, who, via another contact, would transmit the letter to Lenin. 22 Koba began by offering praise of Lenin a shrewd fellow [who] knows where the crayfish hide in the winter for masterminding the bloc with Plekhanov. The Lenin-Plekhanov line, and it alone, answers to the real interests of the work in Russia, which demand that all real Party elements should rally together, he said, concluding that the bloc is the only means by which [the Party s legal] organizations can be cleansed of the garbage of Liquidationism. Further ingratiating himself with a dismissive remark about the Vperedists, Koba smuggled into his text a suggestion that Lenin s strategy could bring about unity with the pro-party Mensheviks. Acknowledging that the Lenin-Plekhanov bloc was not a merger and that therefore the Bolsheviks must have their own group, he offered the view that It is quite possible that in the course of work the Bolsheviks will completely tame the Plekhanovites, but that is only a possibility. In any event, we must not go to sleep and wait for such a result, even if it is a very probable one.

7 7 The more united the Bolsheviks act, the more organized they are in their actions, the greater the chances of taming the pro-party Mensheviks. 23 Koba was taking the heart of Lenin s position the need for a separate, unified and vigilant Bolshevik organization as a defense against compromise and suggesting that it could be transformed into a magnet to draw the Plekhanovites back to Party principle and into unity with the Bolsheviks. But Koba could only plant the seed and hope that it would grow in Lenin s mind. It did not. The appeal in Koba s letter to Lenin s vanity had another, more mundane and immediate objective. Since March 1910 he had been in prison and then in exile, and he wanted Lenin to authorize his escape. Echoing his 1909 article on the Party crisis, he stressed that the most important thing is to organize work in Russia around a strictly defined principle. The history of our Party, he maintained, shows that disagreements are ironed out not in debates, but mainly in the course of the work, in the course of applying principles. Accordingly, our immediate task, the one that brooks no delay, is to organize a central group (in Russia) to co-ordinate the illegal, semi-legal and legal work. If the Plekhanovites and Leninists unite on the basis of work in Russia, he concluded, they can afford to ignore all reproaches, no matter from what quarter they come. Who could carry forward this program within Russia? Koba suggested that he was available. I have another six months to go here, he said, but If the need for Party workers is really acute I could get away at once. 24 It was up to Lenin to decide whether Koba s presence was needed. Koba s desire to escape his exile and his hopeful anticipation that Lenin would authorize it are evident in another letter he wrote from Solvychegodsk not quite a month later, in late January He told Party acquaintances in Moscow that We are stifling here without anything to do. I am literally choking. Lenin and Co., however, are calling me to one of two centers, without waiting for the end of the term. But though he expressed this as fact, his next words reveal it was only a hope: if there is a great need (I await their answer), then, of course, I ll fly the coop. Lenin s slowness in responding (or

8 8 so it must have seemed to Koba) apparently annoyed the Georgian and provoked him to harsh comments about the emigration. We have heard, of course, he wrote about the tempest in a teacup abroad. The blocs of Lenin-Plekhanov on the one hand and of Trotsky-Martov-Bogdanov 26 on the other. The workers attitude toward the first bloc is favorable, as far as I know. But in general the workers are beginning to look disdainfully on abroad : Let them crawl on the wall to their hearts content, but as we see it, whoever has the interests of the movement at heart must get to work; the rest will take care of itself. In my opinion, that s the best thing. Koba probably intended that his outburst reach Lenin s ears in order to stir him to action. There is no doubt, though, that he genuinely and deeply felt the attitudes that he expressed, via the mouths of the workers, toward the émigré leadership. 27 Whether Koba intended it or not, his tantrum did reach Lenin s ears. In early June 1911, Lenin, in France, asked Stalin s Georgian colleague Sergo Ordzhonikidze if he had ever heard the phrase, tempest in a teacup abroad. Then he criticized Koba for his nihilistic little jokes and his immaturity as a Marxist, though he allowed that he had some good recollections of Koba and had appreciated some of his writings. 28 Lenin s wife, Krupskaya, wrote to Ordzhonikidze on February 9 of the following year concerning a letter that Koba evidently had recently sent to Lenin. 29 The contents of her letter, like Lenin s earlier chat with Ordzhonikidze, were meant to be transmitted to Koba. Noting that Koba develops his own point of view, she regretted that he was out of touch with current affairs. For example, she noted that he had not been at the conference of Leninists her husband had held in Prague the preceding month. Were it not for this, she felt that his letter could make an impressive impact. 30 Krupskaya s suggestive remarks clearly made at Lenin s direction extended to Koba the prospect of a bright future in the Bolshevik organization if he fell into line behind Lenin. Ordzhonikidze had the opportunity to relay the messages later in February when he visited Koba to tell him that following the Prague Conference Lenin had co-opted him as a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee and its Russian Bureau. 31 At this time, apparently, Koba s escape was authorized, and he effected it on the last day of the month. 32

9 9 Precisely how Koba reacted to the messages Ordzhonikidze conveyed to him is not known. Though he perhaps did not feel particularly honored that his new status as a member of the Central Committee had been bestowed by Lenin, and though he may have resented the fact that recognition of his leadership qualities had been so long in coming, he probably welcomed his appointment. It afforded him increased hope that his voice would be heard at the highest level in the Party, and it gave him greater authority for working within Russia. As for the suggestion that he think less on his own and fall into line with Lenin s viewpoint and the decisions of the Prague Conference, certainly there was no possibility that he would become a loyal little Leninist. He would maintain his independence, decide which decisions taken at Prague were correct and which were incorrect, and continue to follow his own judgment about what needed to be done. The Prague Conference was a highly irregular gathering Lenin had engineered consisting of twelve voting delegates from local Bolshevik groups inside Russia, 33 two voting pro-party Mensheviks (attending despite Plekhanov s opposition), plus Lenin and three other non-voting Bolshevik émigrés. Despite or precisely because of its narrow, unrepresentative character, it proclaimed itself an all-party conference of the RSDLP and the supreme organ of the Party. Following Lenin s dictates, it established a new, overwhelmingly Leninist Central Committee with authority to determine representation at future Party congresses; declared Lenin s journal Sotsial-Demokrat the Party s authoritative Central Organ ; affirmed the importance of strengthening the Party s illegal organizations and expanding their influence over legal activities; declared Liquidator groups excommunicate; and threatened to proscribe other groups that did not submit to the authority of Lenin s Central Committee. In short, Lenin s conference hijacked the Party ideologically and organizationally. Thus would Lenin solve the problem of disunity. The conference also reaffirmed the absolute necessity of participation in the State Duma. 34

10 10 Though the proceedings in Prague generally seem to have gone smoothly for Lenin, there evidently was some discord about the question of relations between Bolshevik and other Social Democratic groups inside Russia. Insisting that the process of consolidating the Party was progressing satisfactorily everywhere, 35 Lenin seems to have wanted to choke off any calls from below (such as Koba was making) for greater action toward unity with other groups. The conference s resolution on reports from local Party organizations took note that everywhere at the local level, without a single exception, Party work is being conducted jointly and amicably by Bolsheviks and pro-party Mensheviks in particular, but also by Russian members of the Vpered group wherever the latter exist, and by all other Social Democrats who recognize the necessity of an illegal RSDLP; all work is conducted in the spirit of defending Party principles and of fighting against liquidationism. To this merely descriptive statement, the conference added a vague and evasive expression, written by Lenin, 36 of its conviction that, with the revival of the workers movement, energetic work will continue in strengthening the old and building new and sufficiently flexible organizational forms which will help the Social Democratic Party to struggle for the old revolutionary goals and methods under new conditions. 37 Just what these words prescribed is hard to say, but it does not appear to have been active efforts toward unity with other groups. Significantly, when Lenin defended the conference to the International Socialist Bureau against attacks by other Russian Social Democratic groups, 38 he failed even to mention this resolution alone of all those the conference adopted. Instead, he gave the false impression that the conference had represented practically all the organizations, both Menshevik and Bolshevik, active in Russia at the present time. For Lenin, then, there was no disunity with the Party and thus no need for a cure. The only problem had been that many groups abroad more or less adhering to socialism but entirely divorced from the Russian proletariat and its socialist activity had been absolutely irresponsible in claiming to represent the RSDLP or [to] speak in its name. 39 And that problem had been resolved to his satisfaction at Prague.

11 11 What Koba thought of the Prague Conference is suggested by a pamphlet, For the Party! which he wrote in Baku in early March 1912 following his escape from banishment. 40 It is possible that Lenin s idea for the Conference had been inspired by Koba s suggestion in January 1910 of a Party conference tilted toward the Bolsheviks and other illegals. Nevertheless, the reaction of the new Central Committee member does not appear to have been particularly enthusiastic. Somewhat evasively, Koba called the conference a clear symptom of the Party s regeneration 41 and one of the striking expressions of [the] awakening of the proletariat s interest in political life, but he did not portray the conference as a force in regenerating the Party or even mention any of its decisions. He did point out, however, that the approaching elections to the Duma made the imperative necessity of uniting the Party still more strikingly evident, though he did not explain whether he meant greater unity was needed to make a stronger showing in the elections or to withstand the corrupting effects of parliamentarism. The main thrust of his argument, moreover, clearly revealed that he continued to regard the Duma as irrelevant for revolutionaries. Noting that the conditions of life for the workers must be improved, he asked how can all this be done if not by means of general economic actions which are still prohibited? Enumerating many basic rights that were still to be won, he asked how can all this be won if not by open political actions, by means of demonstrations, political strikes, etc? And pointing to the chronic starvation and devastating famine which gripped Russia, he exclaimed that The country must be saved from pauperization and demoralization! But can all this be done without overthrowing the entire edifice of tsarism from top to bottom? And how can the tsarist government, with all its feudal survivals, be overthrown, if not by a broad, popular revolutionary movement led by its historically recognized leader, the socialist proletariat? Koba s words allowed the Duma no role in Russian life or in bringing about the triumph of the coming revolutionary upheaval. This was fully consistent with his long-standing opposition to participation, which early in 1912 he had reiterated by once again urging the Party to boycott the Duma. 42 But again his call was in vain. Party discipline constrained

12 12 Koba from overtly criticizing the Prague Conference s endorsement of participation; however, he continued to wage his guerilla war of words by skillfully smuggling into his text both a long expression of his belief in the superiority of revolutionary struggle over parliamentary politics and a call for Party unity. Instead of championing Duma politics in his pamphlet, Koba stressed what still needed to be done. What mattered in addition to the revolutionary consciousness of the broad strata of the people and the class consciousness of the proletariat was to create a strong and flexible proletarian Party that will be able to unite the separate efforts of the local organizations in one common effort and thereby direct the mass revolutionary movement against the main fortifications of the enemy To set to rights the Party of the proletariat so that the proletariat may worthily meet the coming revolutionary actions. Djugashvili had said much the same thing in 1906, and evidently the Party still had not yet been set to rights in his view. But how to accomplish this? Allowing that in a reunified Party local organizations must give their systematic support to the Central Committee and engage in joint work with it, Koba emphasized that unification and revitalization of the Party would come not from above but from below. Let us, he said, do all in our power to put an end to organizational dispersion! Let the Social Democratic workers in every town and in every industrial center, all those, irrespective of group, who believe that an illegal Russian Social Democratic Labor Party is needed, join together in local Party organizations! Let the machines that unite the workers in a single army of the exploited let those very machines unite them in a single Party of fighters against exploitation and violence! And let the local organizations thus formed not shut themselves off in isolation, but let them constantly intervene in all matters connected with the struggle of the proletariat, from the most petty, ordinary affairs to the biggest and most extraordinary And as he had since 1909, Koba once again urged that our comrades the workers not be daunted by the difficulties and the complexity of the tasks that fall exclusively on them because of the absence of intellectual forces. Totally unnecessary modesty and fear of unaccustomed work must be cast aside once and for all; one must have the courage to undertake complex Party tasks! It does not matter if a few mistakes are revealed along the way; you will stumble once or twice and then you will become accustomed to striding forth freely. Bebels do not drop from the skies, they grow up from the ranks in the course of Party activity in all its aspects

13 13 In Koba s view the dynamo that must drive the rebirth of the Party was the hard work, dedication, struggle and courage of our comrades the workers. The Party did need an influential Central Committee connected by living roots with the local organizations, systematically keeping the latter informed and linking them up together, but without the support of the local organizations the Central Committee will inevitably be converted into a cipher, and the Party will be reduced to a fiction. An emphatic call for a regenerated, underground United Russian Social Democratic Labor Party closed his message. For the Party! subtly and cleverly implied Koba s own point of view on key issues beneath a veil chiefly a tone from which readers might infer that he supported the decisions of the Prague Conference. 43 Saying nothing openly critical of the conference, he offered a few ambiguous words of praise for it and more substantial support for the Central Committee, of which he was now a member. He even found something good to say about Duma participation: it strikingly demonstrated the need for greater Party unity! The substance of his remarks, however, was his own: the belief that revolutionary activity was the only way to move forward, the conviction that Party unity was essential to make revolutionary advances, and the faith that only a grass-roots workers movement and the emergence of worker-leaders could revitalize and unify the Party. Without these, Lenin s conference and his Central Committee and his Party would mean nothing. Any doubt that Koba intended to ignore Krupskaya s advice to abandon his own point of view was dispelled in April by the lead article he wrote for Pravda s maiden issue with its appeal for Social Democrats to yield to one another in the quest for unity in the proletarian class struggle, for unity at all costs. 44 In Our Aims he repeated his observation that the upcoming Duma elections underscored the necessity of uniting in a single class organization and once more as so often in the past urged workers to overcome their fear of stumbling and to develop into writers and leaders. The important thing, concluded the man who had attacked émigrés for crawling on the wall, was that

14 14 all together [we] set to work! Our path is bestrewn with thorns, he warned, But the thorns will not daunt us if in the future Pravda continues to enjoy the sympathy of the workers that it now has. 45 Between 1907 and early 1912, Koba had labored to chart his path through a Party torn by fratricidal conflict and compromised by departures from fundamental principles. In none of its factions could he find an agreeable home. On the left, the Bogdanovites had refused to accept basic Party discipline, the only glue available to preserve Party unity. Thus, despite the attraction of their militancy and their principled stand against the Duma, they were not a viable alternative to Lenin. On the right, the Liquidators rejected the very revolution that for Koba was the purpose of the Party and his life. The various shades of Mensheviks all erred in various ways: by shelving insurrectionism, by championing the Duma, by urging reform and cooperation with bourgeois democrats, by glossing over questions of principle in search of a sham unity. The combative Leninists came closest to Koba s concept of a revolutionary Party, but Lenin too had strayed from first principles. All Social Democratic factions, moreover, were dominated by émigré intellectuals who crawled on the wall instead of doing the hard work of laying the foundations in Russia on which to build the revolution. In the crazy house of words that the Party had become, Koba struggled from his remote outposts to hold high the flag of principle so that those Social Democrats who were not hopelessly lost might rally around it. Disgusted with factions, he would try to rebuild a unified Party by starting with one principle, the most basic principle: commitment to the militant revolution that was the whole purpose of the Party. Surely, as he said in Our Aims, Social Democrats could put aside their factional disagreements and recognize that they all held this purpose in common. It appears he hoped that if this most fundamental of all agreements could be achieved, then step-bystep the Party might be reinvented. His efforts, however, were in vain: no one in the leadership heeded his call. But he was heard by the Okhrana (the tsarist secret police),

15 15 which wanted disunity within revolutionary ranks: no sooner had the first issue of Pravda hit the streets than Koba was back under arrest, to be sent once again into silent exile On the basic views of the left Bolsheviks, see especially John Biggart, Anti-Leninist Bolshevism : the Forward Group of the RSDRP, Canadian Slavonic Papers 23 (1981): ; Avraham Yassour, Lenin and Bogdanov: Protagonists in the Bolshevik Center, Studies in Soviet Thought 22 (1981): 1-32; Williams, Other Bolsheviks; and the several articles and discussion in the special issue on Alexander Bogdanov, Russian Review 49, no. 3 (1990): Stalin s attitude toward Bogdanov s views is discussed in van Ree, Stalin s Organic Theory of the Party. 2 SW, 2: He also approvingly reported remarks by another future left Bolshevik, G. A. Alexinskii (2:60-61). 3 SW, 2: Proletarii s editorial board had expelled Bogdanov from the Bolshevik faction in February See extracts from the letters in P. N. Pospelov et al., eds., Vladimir Il ich Lenin. Biografiia, 2 nd ed. (Moscow, 1963), , and I. Dubinskii-Mukhadze, Ordzhonikidze (Moscow, 1963), (emphasis in the original). Also Tucker, Stalin, 149; and S. G. Shaumian, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, 2 vols. (Moscow, ), 1: Stalin had become aware of Lenin's deceitfulness at their first meeting in 1905, when Lenin misrepresented his own proposal on participation in Duma elections as that of others. 6 SW, 2:216-17; Smith, SW, 2:187-88, 202-5, 217, Stalin evidently was not impressed by the Central Committee s January 1910 resolution on the establishment of a Russian Board to carry out any part of the Central Committee s work within the country. (RDCPSU, 1:136.) 8 See Ralph Carter Elwood, Lenin and Pravda, , Slavic Review 31 (1972): Lenin s role in the founding of the paper was limited essentially to providing some funds on behalf of the Central Committee. 9 In 1922 Stalin recalled meeting in the middle of April 1912 with two Social Democratic Duma delegates and two writers and reaching agreement concerning Pravda s platform and putting together the first issue of the newspaper. Significantly, his account does not accord Lenin any role in founding the paper. SW, 5: SW, 2: Koba s desire for harmony within the movement is also evidenced by the nearly total elimination from his writings after 1907 of open attacks on individual Menshevik leaders. 11 E.g., Medvedev, Judge, 34; S. A. Andropov, Boevoe oruzhie partii (Leningrad, 1962), 31, where Stalin s position is called a big mistake ; and Ocherki istorii Leningradskoi organizatsii KPSS. Chast 1: 1883-oktiabr 1917gg. (Leningrad 1962), 342, which calls Stalin s position an erroneous line inconsistent with Lenin s.

16 16 12 LCW, 15: See, for example, LCW, 15:433, 16: 101, , , 17: LCW, 16: For example, SW, 2:221-22, SW, 2:204, 222, Readers may recall the similar analysis in Koba s report on the London Party Congress of the sources of differences between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. 18 SW, 2:193-94, SW, 2: See, for example, 2:231-32, , , and SW, 2: Slightly variant texts are in SW, 2:215-18, and Smith, SW, 2: Tucker, Stalin, , also reads this part of Koba s letter as an implicit bid for inclusion in the Russian center he advocated. 25 Partial text in Dubinskii-Mukhadze, 92-93; more extensive translated text in Smith, Stalin is lumping together as a bloc the three major critics of Lenin: Bogdanov, Martov of the Liquidators, and Trotsky, who sought to achieve a unity which included the Liquidators. 27 Hyde, , also recognizes Stalin s letter as a criticism of the whole breed of expatriate Social Democrats, including Lenin. 28 Dubinskii-Mukhadze, Lenin s use of the phrase tempest in a teacup abroad indicates that it was Koba s January 24, 1911 letter, which he had seen; Stalin s other known mentions of a tempest in a teacup did not specify that it was abroad. On the dating of this meeting, see VILBK, 2: Unfortunately, nothing is known about the contents or even the topic of this letter; but see note 41, below. 30 Voprosy istorii KPSS (1964), no. 10: SW, 2:432; also Smith, 251. If Koba did not learn of Krupskaya s letter at this time, he surely learned of it in early April when he met Ordzhonikidze again (SW, 2:433).

17 17 32 SW, 2: One of these delegates was Zinoviev, who had taken a vacation from emigration. 34 The resolutions are in RDCPSU, 1: L. A. Slepov and S. A. Andronov, Prazhskaia konferentsiia RSDRP i bor ba bol shevikov za edinstvo partii, Voprosy istorii KPSS (1965), no. 2: The resolution is identified as Lenin s work in LCW, 17: RDCPSU, 1: The protest of other groups, including so-called Bolshevik conciliators, may be found in RDCPSU, 1:158. Lenin, of course, attacked the critics, saying they count for nothing in Russian Social Democracy (LCW, 17:544). 39 LCW, 17: All quotations from this pamphlet are from SW, 2: ; 6,000 copies were printed and distributed to organizations within Russia (2:410). 41 Emphasis added. 42 Letter evidently to Lenin, about early 1912, quoted (with erroneous citation) in Medvedev, Judge, 33. This letter may be the one Krupskaya referred to when she wrote to Ordzhonikidze in February. 43 Lenin evidently did just this, for he distributed the pamphlet along with one of his own (SW, 2:410). 44 Elwood ( Lenin and Pravda, 364) notes that the policy stated in Our Aims would mean a reversal of the decisions taken at the Prague Conference and that the editors of Pravda apparently were seeking to reunify the party against Lenin s wishes. 45 SW, 2: It is probable that Stalin s characterization of our path as bestrewn with thorns reflects identification with Jesus, especially as this characterization was made in association with his standard plea for workers to develop into Bebels, as had been his previous allusion to becoming like Christ walking on the water. Considering that Stalin was trying to spread a message that few would hear, it would have been natural and apt for him to recall the parable of the sower, in which Jesus counseled that sometimes the seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up, and choked it, and it yielded no fruit. (Mark 4:7; also Luke 8:14.) References to sowing good seed (or, in the case of enemies, to sowing bad seed) are fairly common in Stalin s writings (see, for example, SW, 1:35, 80, 82). In this instance Stalin s Biblical allusion signified his Christlike confidence that his seed would survive the thorns and groweth up, and become greater than all herbs, and shooteth out great branches (Mark 4:32). 46 See the Appendix to this chapter concerning Stalin s possibly blaming Lenin for his arfrests in 1911 and 1912.