In his desperate efforts to prevent the dictatorship of the ‘professional revolutionaries’, Plekhanov consciously went about his own political self-destruction: ‘Are the interests of the workers always and in every respect opposed to the interests of the capitalists? In economic history has there never been a time when these interests coincided? Partial coincidence generates cooperation in certain areas. Socialist and non-socialist elements can realize this limited agreement in social reforms.’90 All this was complete heresy to Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
In effect, Plekhanov’s last articles, on the eve of the October coup, represent a new conception of socialism. Having for decades defended the class approach of the dictatorship of the proletariat at congresses of the Second International, he was now revising many of his previous principles. He had become not only a ‘defencist’, but also a ‘reformist’, terms of Leninist abuse which were equalled in derisiveness only by that of ‘plekhanovist’. In March 1920, when Lenin was informed that a revolutionary tribunal in Kiev had sentenced one I. Kiselev to death and that he was appealing to Lenin for help, Lenin wrote to Krestinsky, the local Bolshevik in charge: ‘The sentence of death on Kiselev is a very urgent matter. I used to see him in 1910–14 in Zurich, where he was a plekhanovist [Lenin’s emphasis] and was accused of several vile things (I never knew the details). I caught a glimpse of him here in Moscow in 1918 or 1919. He was working on Izvestiya and told me he was becoming a Bolshevik. I don’t know the facts.’ In the end Lenin left it to Dzerzhinsky to telephone Krestinsky and decide the issue. Dzerzhinsky replied with a note for the file: ‘I’m against interfering.’91
Coming face to face with Russian reality, Plekhanov must have shuddered; after all, he himself had penned the clause on the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Party programme, and he had uttered the famous maxim ‘The good of the revolution is the highest law’, in effect opening the sluice gates of unmitigated violence. Nor could he live down the fact that at the beginning of the century he had said that if after the revolution the parliament turned out ‘bad’, it could be dispersed ‘not after two years, but after two weeks’. In essence, it was Plekhanov’s formula that the Bolsheviks applied when they dispersed the Constituent Assembly in January 1918.
Valentinov recalled that when Plekhanov came to Moscow, he went on an excursion to the Sparrow Hills outside the city with a small group of friends. The photographs taken of him with Vera Zasulich are both beautiful and sad. Valentinov recalled that Plekhanov was moved and, taking Zasulich’s hand, recalled a moment in the lives of two other revolutionaries: ‘Vera Ivanovna, ninety years ago virtually on this spot Herzen and Ogarev took their oath. Nearly forty years ago, in another place, we also swore an oath that for us the good of the people would be the highest law all our lives, do you remember? We are obviously going downhill now. The time is coming soon when someone will say of us, that’s the end. It’ll probably come sooner than we think. While we are still breathing, let us look each other in the eyes and ask: did we carry out our oath? I think we did, honestly. Didn’t we, Vera Ivanovna, carry it out honestly?’92 Eight months later Plekhanov died, and shortly thereafter, so did Zasulich.
At a meeting of the Politburo in July 1921, Public Health Commissar Nikolai Semashko raised the question of erecting a monument to Plekhanov in Petrograd. The Politburo’s response was both neutral and positive, leaving it to Semashko to discuss the matter with the Petrograd Soviet, since it was in a sense also a municipal matter.93 Then the question arose of help for Plekhanov’s family, which was living in straitened circumstances abroad. On 18 November 1921 Lenin proposed that ‘a small sum’ of 10,000 Swiss francs be given to the family as a one-off payment. At the same time it was decided without explanation that the much larger sum of 5000 gold roubles be paid to the family of Karl Liebknecht, the German Social Democrat assassinated in Germany in 1919.94 Perhaps it was because Liebknecht’s widow Sofia, a Russian by birth, had been more insistent in her appeals to Lenin. She had written that her ‘father had had an estate at Rostov on Don, including three houses and shares worth about 3 million roubles. I should have had about 600,000 roubles, but the house was nationalized. Give me about 1,200,000 marks for myself and my children. I must free myself of material dependence … I’m choking with cares … Give us security once and for all with this round sum, I beg you! Oh, free me from dependency, let me breathe freely. But don’t give me half, only the whole sum.’ After agreeing to 5000 roubles in gold, Lenin wrote on the file: ‘Secret, for the archives.’95 In fact, Zinoviev had already sent Sofia Liebknecht a box of stolen gems worth 6600 Dutch guilders and 20,000 German marks.
Nikolai Potresov, who had been close to Plekhanov for much of their lives as revolutionaries, marked the tenth anniversary of Plekhnov’s death with an essay. It seemed, he wrote, that Plekhanov had gone home only ‘to see with his own eyes Russia being chained up again. And with what chains! Forged by the proletariat! And by whom? By his former pupils! It is hard to imagine a worse punishment … like King Lear, he was thrown out and betrayed by his own children.’96 Rather than as the Master of the Order, or as the leader of the Party that he had created with Lenin, Plekhanov entered history as the prophet of the Bolshevik disaster.
It was common for Russian revolutionaries to adopt aliases and pseudonyms, often choosing them randomly or perhaps for dramatic effect. ‘Lenin’, as has been noted, probably derived from the River Lena in Siberia; Iosif Dzhugashvili, a Georgian, adopted ‘Stalin’, which suggested a man of steel; Lev Bronshtein chose ‘Trotsky’ because it was the name of one of his prison warders. Often a new name was a matter of simple security, to obtain a new passport, to evade capture or to throw the police off the scent. Aliases were particularly prevalent among revolutionaries of Jewish origin, since a Russian name might provide a more effective disguise. Thus it was that Julius Osipovich Tsederbaum was to become known as ‘Yuli Martov’.
Martov died in Berlin in 1923, but his political death came on the night of 25 October 1917, during the Second Congress of Soviets. The Soviets were perceived as non-Party bodies, general assemblies of socialist opinion where deputies from workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ committees gathered to formulate their resolutions calling on the Provisional Government to leave the war, to delay sending troops to the front, and similar demands, including of course to hand over power. In the course of 1917, however, as war-weariness grew and the Bolshevik message generated a greater response, the Soviets remained non-partisan in name only: in effect, they became almost wholly Bolshevik bodies, especially in Petrograd and Moscow.
When the Second Congress of Soviets met, the Provisional Government under Kerensky had just been overthrown by the Bolsheviks, though they had ostensibly acted in the name of the Soviets. Any hope that the Congress would produce a solution to the crisis, preferably by forming a broad socialist coalition government, was dashed before a word was spoken. The composition of the Congress was probably a fair reflection of the situation in the country at large: of 650 delegates, about three hundred were Bolsheviks, while another eighty or ninety were Left Socialist Revolutionaries. The other Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks amounted to about eighty each, and the remaining hundred were either unaccounted for or were genuinely non-partisan.
Fedor Dan opened the meeting, and the Bolsheviks and Left Socialist Revolutionaries – a splinter from the main Party and more in harmony with the Bolsheviks – took up their places on the platform in proportion to the number of their delegates. The Mensheviks refused to occupy the four places