The illegal, conspiratorial character of the Party predetermined the mutual penetration, if not fusion, of this ‘social’ organization and the state security organs. The process occurred officially and ‘legally’. One of Lenin’s most trusted agents, Yakov Ganetsky, wrote to Lenin on 10 October 1919 proposing ‘the closest possible ties between the Party organizations and the extraordinary [security] commissions … and to oblige all Party members in responsible posts to report to the … commissions any information they obtain by both private and official means and which might serve to combat counter-revolution and espionage. They should also actively help the … commissions by taking part in solving cases … being present at interrogations and so on.’6 Lenin could hardly have made the point clearer, when he stated, ‘A good Communist is a good Chekist [secret policeman] at the same time.’7
As had become their custom, late on the morning of 10 January 1905 Lenin and Krupskaya were making their way to the city library in Geneva, where they were then residing. On the steps they ran into Anatoly Lunacharsky and his wife, who told them the wonderful news that revolution had broken out in St Petersburg. They all ran to Lepeshinsky’s émigré restaurant, where the events were already being discussed excitedly. Lenin proposed a joint meeting with the Mensheviks, on condition that only one speaker from each side take the floor, and two days later the two irreconcilable factions met. Lunacharsky spoke for the Bolsheviks, Fedor Dan for the Mensheviks. But each side was more intent on preventing the other from scoring a success than on discussing realities. When Dan hinted darkly at ‘splitters’, Lenin gave a signal and the Bolsheviks walked out.8
Everything Lenin had written until now had been devoted to the problems of preparing for revolution: creating a party, formulating its programme, exposing tsarism. Now it was necessary to write about the revolution itself. Even if it was somewhat embarrassing that the popular workers’ leader Father Gapon, who had built up a large following in St Petersburg, was closer to events than ‘real’ revolutionaries, Lenin was fascinated by the priest, who seemed to have been pushed into the revolution only by the suffering he shared with his flock. Gapon in fact had since 1904 been working in close cooperation with the secret police, whose object had been to divert the workers from revolution by helping them in their struggle for economic gains. Lenin did not believe Gapon was a provocateur and he inscribed his 1905 Geneva pamphlet, ‘Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution’, ‘To Georgy Gapon with respect, from the author’.9 In an article in the January issue of Vpered entitled ‘The Priest Gapon’, he wrote: ‘Gapon may be a sincere Christian socialist and perhaps it was precisely Bloody Sunday that pushed him onto a fully revolutionary path.’ He concluded that a cautious attitude was called for.10 ‘Bloody Sunday’, 22 January 1905, had been the occasion of a huge procession of workers and their families, led by Gapon, towards the Winter Palace, to petition the tsar for help. Troops guarding the approaches to the city centre were ordered to fire into the crowds, after repeated warnings, and some eight hundred were killed and many more wounded. It was an event which not only shocked world opinion, but also triggered the violence and disorder of the rest of the year.
It would appear, from everything that has been written about him by Soviet historians, that there was no field of social life which Lenin did not ‘enrich’, ‘refine’, ‘formulate’ or ‘illuminate’. But let us dwell here only on his theory of socialist revolution, such as it was.
Analysing the entrails of capitalism, Marx had stressed that the coming of proletarian revolution depended wholly on the material conditions of hired labour. For him, revolution was a social fruit that must ripen. While agreeing in principle with this idea, Lenin, believing that only the conscious activity of individuals could guarantee the success of the revolution, shifted the stress onto forcing the process by energizing the masses, by organizations and parties. In principle, he regarded the improvement of the workers’ conditions and the realization of socialist goals by evolutionary, reformist means, as impossible. For him the main thing was to create the institution of control. In January 1917 he wrote that contemporary society was ripe for socialism, ripe for control ‘from a single centre’.11 Reforms, he wrote, were ‘a side effect of the revolutionary class struggle’.12 Throughout his writings, he speaks of the decisive rôle of the conscious masses, classes, parties, leaders. Circumstances were important only in order to legitimize the settling of these problems by force of will.
Even though the First World War, and Russia’s fortunes in it, dramatically altered the political situation, and led to the downfall of the tsar and the formation of a liberal Provisional Government, Lenin must have known the Mensheviks were right when they said in 1917 that Russia was not ripe for socialist revolution. Yet he was prepared to exploit the opportunity for his own party to seize power in October. The alternative was for the Bolsheviks to occupy the position of an extreme wing with little influence in the forthcoming Constituent Assembly, planned by the Provisional Government and actually convened in January 1918. Lenin therefore leapfrogged the classic Marxist scheme, ignoring ‘objective conditions’, as well as a host of homegrown and European Social Democrats who were committed to a parliamentary process. He was cleverer than they, for he recognized that the war had not only been the chief cause of the February revolution which finished off the Russian Empire, but would also dash the hopes that had been aroused then. He exploited the war by moving it in effect from the trenches of the Eastern front to the Russian plains in the shape of revolution and civil war, and in doing so, he altered the disposition of political forces. It was this strategy that led to the redrawing of the map of the world, brought into being mighty movements in all continents, and held the minds of statesmen in tension and fear as to whether the world revolution would occur.
Like all the Russian leaders, Lenin was hypnotized by the French Revolution. Peppering their articles and speeches with terms like ‘Girondistes’, ‘Jacobins’, ‘commissars’, ‘Convention’, ‘Thermidor’, ‘Vendée’, they were not merely paying homage to the French revolutionaries, but were also emulating them, as they tried to remake history for themselves. In a telegram of 30 August 1918, the day he was nearly assassinated by the Socialist Revolutionary Fanya Kaplan, Lenin told Trotsky in Sviyazhsk to use the most extreme measures against senior commanders who showed lack of strength: ‘They should be told that from now on we are applying the model of the French Revolution and will put on trial and even shoot … the army commander at Kazan and the other top commanders.’13 The French revolutionaries applied terror in the name of liberty, of course, whereas Lenin did so in the name of power.
At the height of the First World War, Lenin came to the unexpected conclusion that ‘the victory of socialism is possible first in a few or even one individual capitalist country’.14 It would have been hard to disagree, had he meant the seizure of power, rather than the victory of socialism. Shortly thereafter, he set forth one of his fundamental theses even more forcefully, namely that ‘socialism cannot conquer simultaneously in all countries’.15 This, too, would have been a rational assertion, but for the minor matter of what it was he meant by ‘socialism’, and the question