At times the Bolsheviks had very considerable funds at their disposal, some of it legitimate in origin, some of it not. Some came from local Party committees in Russia, who in turn gathered it from their members and supporters: on the eve of the 1905 revolution, there were probably 10,000 paid-up members of the Party altogether. In his memoirs, the former Bolshevik A.D. Naglovsky wrote that in the summer of 1905 he was sent by the Kazan committee to Geneva to hand over 20,000 roubles to Lenin and await instructions.136 In fact, the origins of such money were tortuous. Lenin himself frankly admitted after the revolution: ‘The old Bolshevik was right when he explained what Bolshevism was to the Cossack who’d asked him if it was true the Bolsheviks stole. “Yes,” he said, “we steal what has already been stolen.”’137
At the 4th Congress of the RSDLP in 1906, at which the two factions were meant to have reunited, a fierce struggle took place between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks over whether such ‘expropriations’ in the interests of the revolution should be countenanced. The Bolsheviks proposed that armed raids on banks be allowed. The Mensheviks opposed this vigorously, and succeeded in passing their own resolution. Nevertheless, the robberies continued, with Lenin’s knowledge. Krupskaya, who was well informed on the subject, wrote frankly that ‘the Bolsheviks thought it permissible to seize tsarist treasure and allowed expropriations’.138 At the centre of this bandit venture stood the Bolsheviks Iosif Dzhugashvili (Stalin) and Semyon Ter-Petrosyan (Kamo). The operation was run by Leonid Krasin, a highly qualified electrical engineer.
The biggest ‘expropriation’ took place at midday on 26 July 1907 on Yerevan Square in Tiflis (Tbilisi), Georgia. As two carriages carrying banknotes to the bank entered the square, a man in an officer’s uniform jumped out of a phaeton and starting shouting orders. From nowhere, a gang of ‘expropriators’ emerged, throwing bombs and firing shots. Three people fell dead by the carriages, and many more were wounded. Sacks containing 340,000 roubles were rapidly thrown into the phaeton, and in three or four minutes the square was deserted.139
The stolen banknotes were of large denominations, and the Bolsheviks were not able to convert them all even by the time of the revolution. Those who attempted to do so, as Krupskaya recalled, were arrested. ‘In Stockholm they picked up Strauyan of the Zurich group, in Munich, Olga Ravich of the Geneva group and Bogdasaryan and Khodzhamiryan who had just left Russia, and Semashko in Geneva. The Swiss burghers were terrified to death. All they could talk about was the Russian expropriators.’140 The Tiflis operation was the most ambitious of all those carried out by the radical wing of the RSDLP. Other ‘expropriations’ included the seizure of large sums from the steamship Nikolai I in the port of Baku, and the robbery of post offices and railway ticket offices. Officially, the Bolshevik Centre was not involved, but part of the loot was sent by Dzhugashvili and Ter-Petrosyan to the Bolsheviks,141 and Lenin paid small ‘Party salaries’ – sums ranging from 200 to 600 French francs – to the dozen or so members of his inner Party nucleus, the Bolshevik Centre.142
There are many unpublished documents in the Lenin archives concerning financial affairs, some of them requiring careful deciphering. One thing is clear enough, however: Bolshevik money was under Lenin’s control. He taught himself to handle money and to keep all kinds of bills and invoices, and detailed lists of his own expenses, often of trivial amounts. There is, for instance, a ‘personal budget’ for 3 July 1901 to 1 March 1902, running to thirteen pages.143 Money figures in much of his correspondence with the family. His earnings from the pamphlets and newspaper articles he wrote for the revolutionary press formed a small, if not negligible, part of Lenin’s income, as his literary output was of interest to only a few people. It was his family and Party ‘injections’ taken from the donations of rich sympathizers that supported him.
Formally, Lenin stood aside from the ‘expropriations’, preferring, as in many of his ventures, to remain off-stage. His speeches and editorials, whether published in his own weekly, Proletarii, founded in 1906, or in other revolutionary organs, however, reveal a more ‘balanced’ position on the ‘expropriations’ than a simple prohibition. For instance, six months after the 4th Congress, which had condemned ‘partisan actions’, he wrote: ‘When I see social democrats proudly and smugly declaring, “We are not anarchists, we’re not thieves or robbers, we are above all that, we condemn partisan warfare,” I ask myself if these people realize what they are saying.’144 He had earlier stated that the combat groups must be free to act, but with ‘the least harm to the personal safety of ordinary citizens and the maximum harm to the personal safety of spies, active Black Hundreds, the authorities, the police, troops, the navy and so on and so forth.145 The Black Hundreds were ultra-rightist organizations, with such names as the Union of Russian Men, the Russian Monarchist Union, the Society for Active Struggle against Revolution and Anarchy. Rabidly anti-Semitic and anti-Western, they organized virulent press campaigns, as well as violent physical attacks, against the liberal and socialist movements.
In 1911, Kamo (Ter-Petrosyan) was in Lenin’s sitting-room in Paris, eating almonds and recounting the details of his arrest in Berlin in 1907, when the authorities had caught him trying to transport explosives and weapons. He had spent the last four years in prison in Germany, feigning insanity. Krupskaya recalled that ‘Ilyich listened and felt so sorry for this selflessly brave, childishly naive man with such a burning heart, willing to do great deeds … during the civil war Kamo found his niche and again performed miracles of heroism.’146 Kamo did not know that he and his ilk were merely blind tools of the Bolshevik Centre, needed to acquire money ‘for the revolution’ by whatever means. For the Bolsheviks violence and ‘exes’ were part of a wide range of methods to be used as the need arose. It is likely, however, that the ‘exes’ were one of the main sources of the Party’s pre-revolutionary funds, under the control of Lenin’s trustees Krasin, Bogdanov, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Ganetsky and a few others. This explains how his mother’s ‘injections’ into her son’s personal budget were regularly topped up by his ‘Party salary’, which though not great, was no less than the average wage of a European worker. According to Valentinov, the maximum Party salary for the Bolshevik leaders was fixed at 350 Swiss francs.147 This was the amount Lenin stated he received every month, while not declining the money his mother went on sending him right up to her death in 1916.
A major source of funding, both to the Party coffers and for Lenin’s personal needs, came from private benefactors. At the turn of the century the Russian social democrats, like the liberals, enjoyed a certain degree of sympathy, not only from sections of the intelligentsia, but also from a number of industrialists, who looked to the revolutionaries for liberation from the conservative attitudes of the autocracy. The relationship sometimes took on bizarre form. The ‘N. Schmidt affair’, for instance, sometimes seemed like a detective story, and even now aspects of it are unclear, as the papers relating to the case were carefully concealed for many years. The official version has always been that the ‘affair’ took place for the good of the Bolshevik cause. In Krupskaya’s words, the funds which came from this source provided a ‘sound material base’.