The slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’ had been replaced by ‘All Power to the Bolshevik Party’, while the Politburo possessed powers beyond those of any emperor. In 1919, it ordered that hostages should be shot if there were any more incidents of bombs being thrown at the civilian population;57 that anyone failing to hand in weapons within an allotted period should be severely punished, even executed.58 In April 1920 Lenin and Stalin (as People’s Commissar for Nationalities) signed a cable to their emissary in the Caucasus, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, forbidding self-determination for Georgia.59 Lenin also ordered the arrest of the delegates at an All-Russian Zionist conference being held in Moscow, as well as the publication of compromising material on them.60 The list is endless. It is noteworthy that the Politburo, which at times had up to forty items on its agenda, rarely dealt with strictly Party affairs. The Party had become a state organ.
The system created by Lenin in turn soon created a new type of man in whom, in Berdyaev’s words, the motives of strength and power displaced those of love of truth and compassion.
This new man, perfectly suited to Lenin’s plan, became the material of the Party organization and took over the vast country. Alien to Russian culture, their fathers and grandfathers had been illiterate and devoid of all culture, living solely by faith. The people had sensed the injustice of the old order but had borne their suffering meekly and humbly … But the time came when they could take no more … Their mildness and humility became savagery and fury. Lenin could not have carried out his plan of revolution and seizure of power without this revolt in the soul of the people.61
Lenin’s political approach was the negation of traditional democratic institutions, such as parliament, the resort to purely revolutionary methods, the idolizing of force. Combined with a powerful mind, strong will and the conviction that he was right, it was an approach that exerted a powerful attraction on those who believed in the possibility of making a leap from the kingdom of want into the kingdom of liberty. In 1904, in ‘Forward or backward?’, replying to Lenin’s ‘One Step Forward, Two Steps Back’, Martov wrote:
Reading these lines, breathing as they do a petty, at times senseless personal malice, amazing narcissism, blind, deaf, unfeeling fury, endless repetition of the same old meaningless ‘fighting’ and ‘scathing’ little words, one becomes convinced that this is a man who is fatally compelled to slide further down the slope onto which he stepped ‘spontaneously’ and which will take him straight to the full political corruption and shattering of social democracy.62
The Party went on splitting itself, expelling ‘factions’, ‘deviations’ and ‘platforms’, incapable because of its fanaticism of seeing these as differences of opinion rather than obsessions, as creative endeavours rather than fossilized dogma. The splits continued until, by the beginning of the 1930s, all that was left was a Stalinist monolith that was utterly incapable of changing. The situation could only lead to disaster.
When the Third Party Congress opened in London in April 1905, with Lenin as its chairman, he paid particular attention to questions of combat: he believed that tsarism was ‘rotten through’ and that it must be helped to crash to the ground. He made a long speech about armed uprising, tabled a motion on the issue, and tried to convince the delegates that a revolution was a real possibility.63 Throughout this time, he kept up his criticism of the Mensheviks. When they called for active exploitation of a proposed assembly, Lenin insisted on a boycott, since in his view any parliament was nothing more than a ‘bourgeois stable’. When he read Martov’s article ‘The Russian Proletariat and the Duma’, published in the Vienna paper Rabochaya gazeta, he became enraged at his former comrade’s call to the Social Democrats to take part in elections to the tsarist parliament, and gave his reply in an article entitled ‘At the Tail of the Monarchist Bourgeoisie or at the Head of the Revolutionary Proletariat and Peasantry?’64 The very notion of achieving socialist, democratic and progressive goals by means of reforms, parliament and legal social struggle was blasphemy. Lenin could not see the colossal possibilities of parliamentary activity. His speeches breathe hatred for the liberals and reformists, among whom the most dangerous in his view were of course the Mensheviks.
Lenin’s reaction to the October Manifesto, like that of Soviet historians thereafter, was that it was merely a tactical manoeuvre by the tsar and the bourgeoisie, engineered by the tsar’s brilliant prime minister, Count Witte. According to eye-witnesses, the tsar realized that in signing the document he was taking a step towards constitutional, parliamentary monarchy. The autocracy had retreated and given a chance for democratic development. Had the Social Democrats – not only Lenin – not at once labelled the Manifesto a ‘deception’, and had they instead fought to make it a reality, history might have been different. Instead, the Manifesto was interpreted as a sign of weakness, and Lenin prepared to return to Russia to help bury the autocracy. He was convinced the moment was approaching. His articles now bore such titles as ‘The Approach of the Dénouement’, ‘On the New Constitutional Manifesto of Nicholas the Last’, ‘The Dying Autocracy and the New Organs of People’s Power’.
The differences with the Mensheviks were temporarily pushed to one side. They, meanwhile, like all the liberals, were having second thoughts about changing the existing political structure by force. Even relatively conservative, intelligent politicians like Witte were saying, ‘Russia has outgrown her existing structure. She is striving for a legal structure based on civil liberty.’ Witte proposed that the tsar ‘abolish repressive measures against actions which do not threaten society and the state’.65
The government’s concessions were, however, dismissed, tension rose, and the Bolsheviks forced events by exploiting the workers’ discontent. Lenin’s espousal of widespread violence and terror, however, pushed the Mensheviks further away from the idea of Party reunification. In September 1908, Martov wrote in exasperation to his friend and Menshevik comrade Pavel Axelrod: ‘I confess that more and more I think that even nominal involvement with this bandit gang is a mistake.’66 They were both unwilling to make peace with sectarianism and conspiratorial methods. While keener on reunification than the Bolsheviks, they also wanted to retain democratic principles within the Party. As for Plekhanov, he had long decided that true reunification was impossible. In his view, Lenin regarded reunification as his faction swallowing up and subordinating all the other elements of Russian social democracy, and thus depriving the Russian revolutionaries of any democratic basis. Plekhanov pointed out that instead of underlining the common features shared by the two wings (which both had their roots in the labour movement), Lenin emphasized their differences, and was an incorrigible sectarian.67
As the culmination of the Russian drama of 1917 approached, with defeats at the war front, hunger and chaos, the Bolsheviks concentrated all their energy on preparing the armed uprising. The Mensheviks meanwhile focused on peace and liberty, the Constituent Assembly and a new constitution, a strategy Lenin regarded as treacherous, for it weakened