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Lenin's Electoral Strategy from 1907 to the October Revolution of 1917

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Lenin's Electoral Strategy from 1907 to the October Revolution of 1917 Lenin’s Electoral Strategy from 1907 to the October Revolution of 1917 This page intentionally left blank Lenin’s Electoral Strategy from 1907 to the October Revolution of 1917 The Ballot, the Streets— or Both August H. Nimtz lenin’s electoral strategy from 1907 to the october revolution of 1917 Copyright © August H. Nimtz, 2014. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-39378-4 All rights reserved. First published in 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-48371-6 ISBN 978-1-137-38995-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137389954 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Nimtz, August H. Lenin’s electoral strategy from 1907 to the October Revolution of 1917 : the ballot, the streets—or both / August H. Nimtz. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 1870- 1924. 2. Russia— Politics and government— 1894–1917. 3. Soviet Union— History— Revolution, 1917–1921. 4. Political parties— Russia— History— 20th century. 5. Politics, Practical— Russia— History. I. Title. DK254.L46N563 2014 324.47'07509041— dc23 2013039399 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: March 2014 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Preface vii Acknowledgments xiii 1 “Legal and Illegal Work”: The Third Duma 1 2 “To Prepare for a New Russian Revolution”: The Fourth Duma 49 3 The “Great War,” 1917, and Beyond 97 Conclusion 145 Appendix A: The Fifth (All- Russian) Conference of the RSDLP 193 Appendix B: Conference of the Extended Editorial Board of Proletary 195 Appendix C: Explanatory Note of the Draft of the Main Grounds of the Bill on the Eight- Hour Working Day 199 Appendix D: The Sixth (Prague) All- Russia Conference of the RSDLP 205 Appendix E: The Election Platform of the RSDLP 209 Appendix F: The National Equality Bill 215 Appendix G: The Petrograd City Conference of the RSDLP (Bolsheviks) 217 Appendix H: Excerpt from “The Constituent Assembly Elections and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” 219 Appendix I: Second Congress of the Communist International, 1920 223 A Critical Review of the Relevant Literature 233 Notes 247 Bibliography 269 Index 273 This page intentionally left blank Preface This volume completes the narrative that began in Lenin’s Electoral Strategy from Marx and Engels through the Revolution of 1905: The Bal- lot, the Streets—or Both (hereafter, LES1905)— a narrative informed by four arguments:1 The first is that no one did more to utilize the elec- toral and parliamentary arenas for revolutionary ends than Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov—Lenin. The second argument is that Lenin’s position on the “streets” versus the “ballot box”— no, it wasn’t either/or— was squarely rooted in the politics of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Third, the historic split in international Marxism between communism and social democracy was long in place before the Guns of August 1914 exploded, owing in large part to two very different conceptions of how Marxists should comport themselves in the electoral/parliamentary arenas— with Lenin on one side and what would become twentieth- century social democracy on the other side. The last claim is that the head- start pro- gram the founders of the modern communist movement gave Lenin on electoral politics goes a long way toward explaining why the Bolsheviks, rather than any other political current, were hegemonic in October 1917. When Russia’s toilers took to the streets at the beginning of 1905 to challenge the three- hundred- year- old rule of the Romanov dynasty, Lenin was soon given the opportunity to apply lessons distilled by Marx and Engels on the revolutionary usage of the electoral process. Forced to make concessions to the masses in motion, Czar Nicholas II, Europe’s last absolute monarch, did what his predecessors had never done— institute tentative steps toward representative democracy. But Russia’s first parliamentary experiment was born with handcuffs that limited its powers. While the liberal Constitutional Democratic Party, or Cadets, was willing to take part in the democratically hobbled national par- liament, Lenin’s party, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), was ambivalent. The divide that surfaced soon after its birth in 1903 between the Bolshevik wing—to which Lenin belonged— and the Menshevik wing— to which Georgi Plekhanov, the titular founder of Russian social democracy and Lenin’s one- time mentor, belonged— manifested itself on this question. The latter agreed to participate in the elections to the Duma but not to take their seats if elected. The Bol- sheviks, in contrast, called for a complete boycott, a stance that Lenin viii Preface reluctantly agreed to. But when the Duma convened in April 1906, he immediately embraced the 18 Menshevik deputies who were elected in order to influence their conduct as a party group or fraction in what would be Russia’s First State Duma. Russia’s first experiment in representative governance lasted only three months. Granted under duress, Nicholas felt less pressure to keep the Duma in place as the revolutionary mobilizations unleashed in 1905 began to subside in the spring of 1906. Though always willing to accom- modate themselves to Nicholas, the Cadets, the largest bloc of the almost five hundred deputies in the Duma, increasingly constituted a thorn in the side of the monarchy. The land question was the unbridgeable divide. Any attempts by the Cadets, however feeble, to ameliorate the deplorable position that the mass of peasants faced were seen by the landlord class, at whose head stood the Czar, as a mortal threat to their interests. Hence Nicholas’s implacable resistance to any kinds of reforms—intransigence that the Cadets bent to. Lenin did all he could to encourage the RSDLP’s Duma fraction to expose the prevarications of the Cadets on the land question as well as other issues. The pronouncements of Peter Struve, a Cadet leader and one- time “Marxist,” were special targets of his polemics. Lenin’s intent, utilizing the rostrum of the Duma, was to convince the peasants, repre- sented by the Trudovik deputies, that only the proletariat and not the liberals were their real allies. But if the Cadets were prone to bend to Nicholas et al., the Mensheviks were prone to bend to the Cadets. They concurred with Lenin and the Bolsheviks that a bourgeois and not a social- ist revolution was on the immediate agenda in Russia, but they disagreed, profoundly, on which bourgeois layer to look to for that revolutionary project. Whereas Plekhanov and the Mensheviks were prone to look to the liberal bourgeoisie that the Cadets sought to represent, Lenin insisted that it was with the peasantry that Russia’s proletariat should seek to forge an alliance for making the bourgeois democratic revolution. Toward that end he waged, much to the consternation of the Mensheviks, an incessant campaign to expose the democratic shortcomings of the Cadets. While the latter were willing to compromise with Nicholas on the land question, the Trudovik deputies were increasingly less inclined to do so— a differ- ence that Lenin, through his efforts to influence the RSDLP deputies, did all he could to deepen. Nicholas aided and abetted this effort because he wasn’t willing to grant the few crumbs that the Cadets had called for. He’d had enough of the democratic experiment. On July 8, 1906, the monarch sent the Duma packing but called for a new one to convene in February the following year. Preface ix Unlike for the First Duma, Lenin decided that the Bolsheviks should not boycott the elections to the Second Duma and waged a campaign to get his wing of the RSDLP on board. Once they did, at least the major- ity, the task then was to conduct an election campaign that upheld the principle of independent working- class political action. That proved to be a challenge because of Menshevik/Cadet claims that a vote for the RSDLP would split the left/progressive vote and allow the most reac- tionary party, the “Black Hundreds,” to be elected. Only a vote for the Cadets, the “lesser of the evils,” as the Mensheviks argued, could prevent that outcome. Lenin crunched the numbers and spilled a lot of ink to dis- pute that claim. He also insisted on fidelity to the decision adopted at the RSDLP 1906 congress that only in the second round of elections could the party enter into electoral blocs, and then only with the Trudoviks and the peasant- oriented socialist party, the Socialist Revolutionaries. The election results, Lenin felt, vindicated his intransigence. The Second Duma, as Lenin foresaw, was more to the left than the First—setting the stage for another confrontation between the crown and Russia’s democratic opening. He immediately sought to provide leadership for the 65 RSDLP deputies. He constantly resisted the Men- shevik wing of the party and the Duma fraction—most of whom were Mensheviks— that wanted to collaborate with the liberal Cadet party. His goal, largely fulfilled in the end, was to win the peasant Duma deputies away from the Cadets toward the Bolshevik perspective.
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