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

Home , Duma, Georgi Plekhanov, Mensheviks, Peter Struve, Pyotr Stolypin

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

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.

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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

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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 electoral 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 socialist 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. The agrarian and budget questions figured significantly in Lenin’s strategy, which involved hands-on assistance to the Bolshevik Duma deputies. His success was a factor in the dissolution of the Second Duma by the Czar and his prime minister, Pyotr Stolypin, on June 3, 1907, register- ing the end of the “Russian Spring.” The accompanying arrest of the 55 RSDLP Duma deputies underscored that fact. Last, a by-product of the fight with the Mensheviks over electoral blocs and the comportment of the RSDLP’s Duma fraction was the beginning of the codification of the norms of democratic centralism. Chapter 1 of this volume, “‘Legal and Illegal Work’: The Third Duma,” begins with Lenin’s response to the regime’s decree for conven- ing a Third Duma, which lasted from 1907 to 1912. The ukase, which authorized even more undemocratic elections, provoked a major debate within the Bolsheviks that lasted for four years—to boycott or not to boycott the elections and the Duma. Another long-lasting debate had to do with how to make the Duma party group more accountable to the party. Lenin, who led the argument against boycotters, also had to debate those who effectively wanted to withdraw the Duma party group because of its x Preface initial missteps. To be convincing about the need for a Duma party group, he had to provide more hands-on leadership, including, for example, the writing of their speeches. Throughout these debates was the much- related issue of how to ensure that the party—functioning underground in a police state—made democratic decisions to which the Duma group would be held accountable. But that required a unified party, which the RSDLP certainly was not. Two mainly Bolshevik leadership meetings in Paris between 1908 and 1909 resulted in the 18-member party fraction being more politically effective. By the end of the Third Duma in June 1912, the RSDLP, with Lenin in the lead, had made major gains in the art of doing legal and illegal work simultaneously and thus challenging those party members, the liquidators, who called for an end to illegal work. Elections to the Fourth Duma in 1912 took place in the context of a revival of the revolutionary movement, the theme with which Chapter 2, “‘To Prepare for a New Russian Revolution’: The Fourth Duma,” com- mences. Despite the still-in- place undemocratic election procedures, the RSDLP won 13 seats, equally divided between Bolsheviks and Menshe- viks, to the new Duma; in the Third Duma the Mensheviks had been dominant in the fraction. This chapter describes the election campaign, particularly the gains the Bolsheviks made among the working class at the expense of the Mensheviks—foreshadowing Bolshevik success in 1917. The critical role of their newspaper Pravda in organizing the Duma party group and publicizing its activities is also detailed. Bolshevik success came despite, first, the actual and later formal split in the Duma party group between them and the Mensheviks; second, the fact, unbeknownst to them, that the head of their Duma party group was a police agent; and, last, the arrest of the their party group once Russia entered the First World War—due to their antiwar activities. In all this, Lenin’s leadership was indispensable. During this period the already existent differences between his approach to doing electoral work and those of Western Euro- pean social democracy became increasingly clear. The two quite different votes on funding the war in August 1914 by the Russian Duma deputies in contrast to social democrats in Western European parliaments dramati- cally registered this fact. A new revolutionary situation opened with the overthrow of the monarchy in February 1917, which saw almost immediately the revival of the soviets. Chapter 3, “The ‘Great War,’ 1917, and Beyond,” details Lenin’s arguments and actions in defense of soviet governance as a democratic form of representative government— in the tradition of the Paris Commune—superior to that of the Duma and the Provisional Govern- ment leading up to the October Revolution and afterward. It reveals that Preface xi he was flexible on the question prior to October and helped organize Bolshevik participation in elections to Dumas at the municipal level. The circumstantial evidence is that such involvement was crucial in explaining the Bolshevik-led triumph in 1917. I claim to have connected, for the first time, the dots between the revolutionary politics of Marx and Engels and the strategy and tactics that Lenin employed, through the utilization of the electoral and parliamentary arenas, for successfully leading the Bol- shevik triumph both in October and afterward. While strongly defend- ing soviet governance after October, Lenin argued against revolutionaries in other countries who dismissed participation in bourgeois democratic parliaments. His Left- Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder is given special attention, because he argued that Bolshevik experience in Duma work was “indispensable” for its success in October 1917. Finally, this chapter looks at what happened to Lenin’s electoral strategy after his death with the Stalinist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and the consequences for the Communist or Third International. In the Conclusion, I summarize the narrative in both volumes and then interrogate the four arguments around which it is woven to see if the evidence I present is convincing (in “A Critical Review of the Relevant Literature,” I continue the critique I began in LES1905 of literature that disputes the evidence I employ to make my case). I then speculate on and offer an explanation for why this most outstanding and easily accessible dimension of Lenin’s politics has received so little attention from either friends or foes. Last, I return to the opening theme and rationale of the book— that is, its relevancy for current politics. Does Lenin have anything to offer present- day activists such as those in Tahrir Square? I employ a just- published book, The Question of Strategy: Socialist Register 2013, a series of essays about current political movements/developments around the world, to do just that. A recurrent theme in many of the essays is exactly the dilemma that Lenin addressed— to participate in and/or abstain from the electoral arena. I argue that virtually all the 24 authors and editors, a number of whom are on the front lines of struggle, would benefit from knowing about Lenin’s Marxist electoral strategy. This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments

I want to recognize and thank the many people who helped to make this book possible, roughly in the order in which they provided assistance. First, to the volunteers who put and maintain online the Lenin Collected Works, to whom I’m truly indebted. Not only did their labor facilitate the production of the book, but it makes it easier for readers to verify my citations. For those I know personally, Sergio Valverde, a PhD student in my department of political science at the University of Minnesota, gave me the first opportunity to present the project in a public setting at the Minnesota Political Theory Colloquium he organized in the fall of 2011. The feedback I received was most valuable, especially from my colleague Elizabeth Beaumont. What I say about the outcome of the Russian Revo- lution in Chapter 3 in the second volume and how to position Lenin in relation to it is in many ways a response to the thoughtful questions she raised. About a year later, Linda Hoover organized a group presentation for the Minnesota Marxist Book Club where I was able to share what I’d written, about half of the manuscript, with her, Michael Livingston, Dean Gunderson, and Amit Singh. That too was quite rewarding, not only on matters of content relevant to activists in that milieu, but also on stylistic issues I hadn’t considered. In the meantime, Bob Braxton, a longtime acquaintance with editorial and revolutionary political experience, volunteered to give me feedback on the first three chapters in the first volume. His advice and suggestions, for which I’m forever grateful, have informed the subsequent chapters in various ways. Joseph Towns IV also provided invaluable editorial input on the four chapters in the first volume as well as raising important questions about formulations in the manuscript that required clarification to make for a more readable narrative. And to Carl Voss, who read the Preface and Conclusion, the rumors about your superb editing skills were indeed true. No one was more helpful in pointing me toward the mainstream literature I interrogate in “A Critical Review of the Relevant Literature” than Theo Stavrou, distinguished professor of Russian history at the University of Minnesota. Another colleague, Bud Duvall, took time from his very busy schedule as chair of the Department of Political Science to help me think through the logic of my fourth argument as I was writing the Conclusion. Last, to my longtime comrade and companion, Natalie Johnsen Morrison, the best of xiv Acknowledgments the working class, whose constant injunction was to make this accessible to the working class, your forbearance and patience will forever be appre- ciated. Of course, I am ultimately responsible for what found its way into the book, but without the supportive and ever watchful staff at Palgrave Macmillan, that would not have been possible.