Lenin and the Russian workers' Revolution

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The Bolsheviks combined an underground party with the use of 'legal' newspapers e ebb and flow of revolution pe ty FE5O the sp dr th ha er look at retreat that followed After living in Munich id London, Lenin was in mora whon the reunin. mary storm actually oke in Russia.

On January 22 1905 ousands of workers, essed in their Sunday ist and carrying religious ons, marched to the lar's Winter Palace in Petersburg to present a tition to ask for "amnes, civil liberties, higher ages, the gradual grantg of land to the peasany and the convocation of a instituent Assembly" Led by the priest Gapon, ese "unfortunate reviled aves" , as they called emselves, proceeded :acefully towards the man ey saw as their protector, e Tsar. Suddenly the ›ssacks were unleashed rainst hem. Over 1,000 ere slaughtered and over 000 injured.

Strikes immediately read throughout Russia, awing in the soldiers, e sailors, and the peasItry. Throughout 1905 ass revolutionary struggs engulfed Russia.

Although the liberal surgeoisie seemed to ive gained control of the ovement, strikes broke it once again towards the Id of 1905, and it was this assive upheaval that eated the first Soviet of 'orkers' Deputies.

Soviets The soviets were counis set up by the workers , draw the threads of the fferent struggles togeth• and unify them, to link e factory organisations, combine the employed id the unemployed, and short to be the 'parliaent' of the working class • not, however, one rest-. g on a sham democracy ith elections every five ars, but on a real demoacy knowing the right of orkers to recall the deputs to the Soviet and at will ect new ones.

Quickly the Soviet in Petersburg became (with on Trotsky as its chairan) the focus of the rength and power of the orking class, and an altertive autbority to the TsarThe first moves of the 1905 Revolution were led by a priest -Father Gapon Th ist state. It was to the Soviet that the working class looked for leadership and organisation. Into it was channelled the energy and aspirations of the class.

The Russian workers had improvised the form of democratic self-organisation which the working class needs as it begins to rouse itself and challenge the ruling class's power in society. Soviets reappeared in the 1917 October Revolution. After World War 1 soviets sprang into existence in East Europe and Germany.

In 1956 the great working class uprising in Budapest against Stalinism could find no better form of self-organisation in a struggle for power than the workers' council. At Gdansk in 1980 the workers created a powerful soviet-style 'parliament' This universality proves that the soviet, invented in 1905, was not merely a Russian or an ephemeral form of proletarian organisation, but the necessary form for overcoming the atomisation of the proletariat and simultaneously the best organisational network for democratic working class rule in society.

In St Petersburg the Bolsheviks did not at first know how to evaluate this new form of organisation. But Lenin, though he could not then know its full historical significance, quickly grasped the soviets' importance in the struggle of the working class, and could not wait to get to St Petersburg himself to see and direct events from close at hand. Moving first to Finland, he arrived towards the end of the year in St Petersburg.

Once again, Lenin's unshakeable sense of the concrete led him to translate what he saw into an answer to the question, 'what is to be done?' And once again the answer was in terms of party organisation.

Here was an opportunity 'to develop our activities in the most extensive and audacious manner" • But first the party had to develop many legal aspects of work while maintaining an underground apparatus. It had also to open its doors, hitherto rigorously guarded against easy entry, to the recruitment of thousands of workers and ensure that workers took leading positions on all the committees.

•Recruit This was no reversal of the view that consciousness and system were the fundamentals of the revolutionary party - on the contrary, it was precisely because in the previous three years the Bolsheviks had achieved this that they could now recruit without any danger of dilution. -"The working class is instinctively, spontaneously Social Democratic" , declared Lenin in the first article he wrote on returning, adding, "and more than ien years' work by Social Democracy has done much to transform this spontaneity into consciousness"

Here and elsewhere, he introduced essential qualitications and modifications into the ideas of 'What is to be Done?' *developing those ideas in the light of the experience of the working class struggle.

The party, Lenin realised, must not be like a priest reciting sacred and unchanging texts. It must always be the organised richness of the experience of the working class, given sense and direction through the science of Marxism.

By 1906, especially after the defeat of the Moscow insurrection in December 1905, the storm was dying down. Soon Tsarism was victorious and most of the revolutionary leaders were once again forced into exile, Lenin himself going to live in Paris.

Everywhere there was "demoralisation, split, discord, renegacy" ,. with "mysticism serving as a cloak for counter-revolution". It was now, in this period of black reaction, with the revolutionaries increasingly isolated, that the lessons of the 1905 Revolution were drawn and the political tendencies in the working class movement were hammered into their final shape.

And now too the Bolshevik Party, which was to lead the proletariat to victory within a decade of the decisive defeat of 1907, was forged.

Lenin summed up what happened after Tsarism had defeated the 1905 revolution: 'Victorious Tsarism is compelled speedily to destroy the remnants of the pre-bourgeois, patriarchal mode of life* in Russia. Russia's development along bourgeois lines marches forward with remarkable rapidity... Revolutionary parties must complete their education. They have learned to attack. Now they must learn... how to retreat properly"

But for the revolutionaries, to learn to retreat, to face the situation of massive depression in the aftermath of defeat, to adopt tactics appropriate to this new situation, to go down again into the underground after the open work possible during the revolution - this was indeed difficult. Reorientation and re-education of the revolutionaries proved a bitter task to accomplish, specially against the background defeat and consequent demoralisation.

Two fronts The whole period was fo Lenin taken up with a battl on two fronts, against bot! ultra-right and ultra-lef tendencies. In the heat o the revolution the Bolshev iks and Mensheviks had re united. After the defea new divisions emerged. 4 section of the Menshevik: became open reformists and a section of the Bolshe viks reduced themselves t ultra-left posturing, whic! threatened, no less than thi reformist Mensheviks, ti make the revolutionar tasks impossible.

Thé Bolshevik ultra-left: were known as the 'otzvo ists' (recallists), and led b: Bogdanov, Alexinski, an! Lunacharski. The Socia Democrats had : success fully boycotted the undem ocratic Tsarist Duma (parl unions, but never to imit either the activity or the propaganda of the workers' party to what Tsarism permitted. That would have been to surrender the ideological, political and organisational independence of the workine class.

Once again, an apparently technical question of organisation represented really crucial issues, as the eventual evolution of the liquidators into full-blown reformists demonstrates.

'The proletariat is revolutionary only insofar as it is conscious of and gives effect to [the] idea of the hegemony of the proletariat.. To preach to the workers that what they need is 'not hegemony but a class party' slogan Piritski, ne a liquidationist] means to betray the cause of the proletariat to the liberals; it means preaching that Social-Democratic labour policy should be replaced by a liberal labour policy" • (By a 'class party', the liquidationists meant a party sociologically working class and narrowly confined to bread-and-butter working class issues within existing society).

The struggle on both fronts culminated for Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the Prague conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party at the beginning of 1912. Together with a group of 'Pro-Party Mensheviks' , the Bolsheviks decisively cut off the Liquidators. Thereafter RSDLP was essentially the old Bolshevik faction.

Now, after years of depression and isolation, the Russian labour 'movement began to revive, particularly after the shooting of striking workers on the Lena Goldfields. In 1912 Lenin moved from Paris to Cracow (in Russian-ruled Poland), to be as near as possible to the struggle in Russia. The Bolsheviks began to reap the rewards of their combination of legal and illegal work. In 1912 they began to publish Pravda as a paper.

Continued week iament) during the revolution, when mass struggle provided its own alternative. Now, in retreat, it became necessary to change tactics, to learn to utilise even a reactionary undemocratic Tsarist parliament for socialist propaganda.

Lenin, in alliance at first with the Menshevik section of the party; advocated such use of the Duma. Eventually he overcame the at first almost unanimous Bolshevik resistance; the continued revolutionary depression made the need for. change increasingly obvious:

Except to the hard-core 'ozzvoists'. Their ultraleftism, threatening to reduce the revolutionary party to self-isolation and unrealism, was linked with a retreat into mysticism. They tried to develop socialism as a sort of religion. Eventually they were expelled from the Bolshevik faction.

The Menshevik reformists, the 'Liquidators' , unlike the otzvoists who were their mirror opposites, wanted to confine themselves entirely to open work within Tsarist legality, liquidating the underground party. Legal trade unions were now possible, and on this basis they increasingly argued, in effect, for the creation of a working class party of reforms.

Lenin wanted to make the fullest use of all possibilities for legal work, such as in the Duma and the La wat -noons da limit legal daily

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Socialist Organiser no.1.09 November 18 1982 Page 13

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In the second part of their series, Andrew Hornung and John

Lenin's activity th 1905 Revolu tion and in the years of defeat and