The First World War provided the key. The news that war had broken out at first caused shock among the Russian émigrés, followed by intellectual confusion, and finally the rapid growth of a defencist mood. A volunteer movement also sprang up as soon as war was declared. Many Russian émigrés in Paris, among them about a thousand Social Democrats, including Bolsheviks,44 were seized by patriotic fervour and rushed to join the French army. Most were drafted into the Foreign Legion, or languished in difficult circumstances because the French government did not know how to deal with them.45
On the other hand, a large group of Social Democratic internationalists, from both wings of the Party, soon emerged and began agitating against the imperialist war altogether. Prominent among them was Julius Martov, then living in Paris and editing a newspaper called Nashe slovo (Our Word). He called for the unification of all progressive forces in the struggle against the militarism of the imperialist powers and for an end to the war without reparations or annexations.46
The orthodox Bolsheviks took up a different position. When Lenin heard on 5 August 1914 that the German Social Democrats in the Reichstag had voted for the war budget, he declared, ‘From this day I am no longer a Social Democrat, I am a Communist.’47 The Bolsheviks would not formally change the name of the Party until their Seventh Congress in March 1918, when they became the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik). In 1914, however, Lenin was dissociating himself from the mainstream of European socialism, which in practical terms had suspended its political programme until the war was over, and was giving notice that he was bent on revolution, now more than ever. He did not, however, decline the help of the Austrian Social Democrat leader, Victor Adler, to get out of Austrian Galicia, where he had lived since 1912, in order to be physically closer to events in Russia, and to make his way to Switzerland, where he launched into a spate of writing. His first significant response to the war was a manifesto entitled ‘The Tasks of the Revolutionary Social Democrats in the European War’. In it he penned the phrase that was to become sacrosanct in Soviet historiography: ‘From the point of view of the working class and the toiling masses of all the peoples of Russia, the lesser evil would be the defeat of the tsarist monarchy and its troops, which are oppressing Poland, the Ukraine and many other peoples of Russia.’48 He went further in November 1914 when he wrote, ‘Turning the present imperialist war into civil war is the only proper proletarian slogan.’49
He was calling for the defeat of his own country, and for making an already hideous war into something even worse: a nightmare civil war. With the seizure of power in mind, this may have been a logical position to take, but from the moral point of view it was deeply cynical. Desiring the defeat of the Russian army was one thing from the safety of Berne; it was quite another for those lying in the blood-soaked mud of the trenches on the Eastern front. What Lenin wanted was to turn the whole of Russia into a theatre of war. No one took any notice of his call, no one wanted to think about civil war, and in any case nobody then believed in the socialist revolution. True, Martov had warned at the outbreak of war that out of factional fanaticism Lenin wanted ‘to warm his hands by the fire that has been lit on the world arena’.50 But no one had taken heed.
In a letter of 17 October 1914 to one of his most trusted agents, Alexander Shlyapnikov, then in Sweden, Lenin wrote: ‘… the least evil now and at once would be the defeat of tsarism in the war. For tsarism is a hundred times worse than kaiserism … The entire essence of our work (persistent, systematic, maybe of long duration) must be in the direction of turning the national war into a civil war. When this will happen is another question, it isn’t clear yet. We have to let the moment ripen and “force it to ripen” systematically … We can neither “promise” civil war nor “decree” it, but we are duty bound to work – for as long as it takes – in this direction.’51 Articles embodying this message began appearing in the émigré press over Lenin’s signature. Despite his sideswipes at ‘imperialist Germany’, there were those in Berlin who realized that they had a new ally living in Switzerland. Seeing that there was no realistic way by which to seize power, Lenin took the side of Russia’s enemy, while clothing himself in the garb of internationalism.
When the Russian people had been driven to the limit by the war, and state power in effect lay on the streets of the capital, the Bolsheviks obtained power with remarkable ease, in exchange for the promise of peace. Lenin’s call to civil war was forgotten, but having gained power, he felt he had to go further; socialism seemed so close. If yesterday’s men could be swept away, one could go on with the great experiment unhampered. Having given the people peace (however unreal and shortlived) and land (which would soon be taken back when Russia’s peasants were turned into twentieth-century serfs), Lenin also took back the liberty, such as it was, that he had promised.
The Bolsheviks survived because of their leader and because of their commitment to unbridled force. Lenin was the ideal leader in the situation. As Potresov was to write in 1937:
Neither Plekhanov nor Martov, nor anyone else, possessed the secret of Lenin’s hypnotic power over people, or rather his dominance over them. They respected Plekhanov, they loved Martov, but unswervingly they followed only Lenin as the sole undisputed leader. Lenin represented that rare phenomenon in Russia, a man with an iron will, indomitable energy, who poured fanatical faith into the movement and the cause, and had no less faith in himself … Behind these great qualities, however, there lurked great deficiencies, negative qualities, more appropriate perhaps in a medieval or Asiatic conqueror.52
What Lenin thought of Potresov he revealed in a letter to Gorky: ‘Such a swine, that Potresov!’53 Potresov had once been a close comrade of Lenin’s, and Lenin always kept his most savage invective for those who had deserted him.
In 1921 the Socialist Revolutionaries illegally published a pamphlet, at a time when it was just still possible to do so in Moscow. Entitled ‘What Have the Bolsheviks Given the People?’, it pointed out that the new masters had not fulfilled a single promise of their programme. Instead of peace, the country had been plunged into a bloody civil war lasting three years, and had lost some thirteen million people through the fighting, disease, terror or emigration. Famine raged, and the peasants were not sowing because they knew their grain would be confiscated. Industry lay in ruins. Russia had been cut off from the rest of the world and was shunned by almost everyone. A one-party dictatorship had been installed. The Cheka was a state within a state. The Constituent Assembly had been dispersed. The regime was conducting a war with its own people.54
One reason the Bolsheviks were able to survive was that their leader was himself capable of setting an example of merciless terror. For instance, in the autumn of 1920 he wrote to Krestinsky, a secretary of the Central Committee: ‘I suggest a commission be formed at once (one can do it secretly to start with) to work out extreme measures (in the way Larin proposed. Larin is right.) What about you plus Larin plus Vladimirsky (Dzerzhinsky) plus Rykov?* The preparation of terror in secret is necessary and urgent.’55 What need had the country of a regime that sought to achieve its aims by means of terror as state policy? Force was the style of the Bolsheviks and their leader. The paradox of Bolshevism – the Majorityites – was that theirs was a dictatorship of the minority, a fact observed by Martov in 1919 when writing a book on the intellectual and psychological origins of Bolshevism, which was published before completion by Fedor Dan in Berlin in 1923.
In 1923 Martov, who was terminally