Lenin went on disputing with Martov right up to October 1917, if a constant stream of abuse can be called disputing. Martov was intransigent. Inclined by nature to compromise, he felt no urge for conciliation. He had long ago come to believe that the socialism Lenin wanted had nothing in common with justice, or moral principles, or the humane origins of socialist thinking. Knowing he had already lost, he summed up the ‘interim’ accounts of 1917 in horror. He wrote to a friend, N.S. Kristi:
It is not merely the deep belief that it is senselessly utopian to try to plant socialism in an economically and culturally backward country, but also my organic inability to accept the Arakcheev-style [barracks] concept of socialism and the Pugachev-style [violent] notion of class struggle which are being generated by the very fact that they are trying to plant a European ideal in Asiatic soil. The resulting bouquet is hard to take. For me, socialism was never the denial of individual freedom and individualism, but on the contrary, their highest embodiment, and the principle of collectivism I always saw as opposed to ‘the herd instinct’ and levelling … What is happening here is the flourishing of a ‘trench – barracks’ variety of quasi-socialism, based on the ‘simplification’ of everything … 103
Martov’s internationalist wartime position of ‘revolutionary defencism’ contrasted markedly with Lenin’s defeatism and Plekhanov’s patriotism, and was perhaps a truer and more noble one to take. The outbreak of war found Martov in Paris. In his small newspaper, Golos (The Voice), and later in Nashe slovo (Our Word), his constant cry was ‘Long live peace! Enough blood! Enough senseless slaughter!’ He maintained this position after returning to Petrograd in May 1917, arguing against defeatism and against turning the war into a civil war, but also against chauvinism, and so he was often under attack from both sides. I.G. Tsereteli, a Social Democrat who played a leading rôle in 1917, recalled Martov saying in the summer of that year: ‘Lenin is not interested in questions of war and peace. The only thing that interests him is the revolution, and the only real revolution for him is the one in which the Bolsheviks have seized power.’ Martov wondered what Lenin would do if the democrats, i.e. the Provisional Government, managed to make peace: ‘He would no doubt change his tactics and preach to the masses that all the post-war misfortunes were due to the criminal democrats because they ended the war too soon and didn’t have the courage to carry it on to the final destruction of German imperialism.’104
In June 1918 the Executive Committee of Soviets (VTsIK) voted to expel the Right SRs and Mensheviks. When they were asked to leave the meeting, Martov leapt up and began shouting curses at the ‘dictators’, ‘bonapartists’, ‘usurpers’, ‘putschists’, all the while struggling unsuccessfully to get his coat on. Lenin stood, white-faced, watching in silence. A Left SR sitting next to Martov began laughing and poking his finger at Martov, who, coughing and shouting, managed at last to get his coat on and leave, turning as he did so to hurl at his mirthful tormentor: ‘You may laugh now, young man, but give it three months and you’ll be following us.’105
Martov nevertheless remained an orthodox Marxist all his life. He believed that the socialist revolution could be an innovative and refreshing act of creativity, but he could not accept the Leninist monopoly and the Bolsheviks’ reliance on coercion and terror. In defeat, he naively believed that the revolution could be clean and moral and bright. When Red and White Terror clashed to produce a monstrous wave of violence, Martov wrote a pamphlet called ‘Down with the Death Penalty’. In it, he stated:
As soon as the Bolsheviks came to power, having announced the end of the death penalty, from the very first day they started killing prisoners taken in battle during the civil war, as all savages do. To kill enemies who have surrendered in battle on the promise that their lives will be spared … The death penalty has been abolished, but in every town and district various extraordinary commissions and military – revolutionary committees have sentenced hundreds and hundreds of people to be shot … This bloody debauchery is being carried out in the name of socialism, in the name of the teaching which proclaimed the brotherhood of people labouring for the highest goal of humanity … A party of death penalties is as much an enemy of the working class as a party of pogroms.106
As if to prove Martov right, in November 1923, after his death, the Politburo reviewed the ‘Turkestan question’. Central Committee member Jan Rudzutak, a Latvian, reported that Basmachi (anti-Bolshevik forces) chieftains had been invited to talks with the local Soviet authorities. They had been promised their lives were not in danger, and that a special conference would find ways of settling the conflict peacefully. One hundred and eighty-three chieftains had turned up. They were arrested at once, and 151 of them were sentenced to be shot. The first on the list had already been executed when Moscow intervened. The Politburo regarded the action as ‘inopportune’, nothing worse.107
If Martov’s arguments were moral, Lenin’s were purely pragmatic. On 31 January 1922 he wrote to Unshlikht: ‘I cannot possibly attend the Politburo. I’m feeling worse. But I don’t think there’s any need for me. It’s only a matter of purely technical measures to help our judges intensify (and speed up) repression against the Mensheviks …’108 Martov had no hope of influencing the Bolshevik leadership towards humanizing their policies. If his political death was noisy, his physical death was quiet and sad, like a guttering candle. Seriously ill, in the autumn of 1920 he was allowed by the Politburo to leave for Germany, where he founded Sotsialisticheskii vestnik. In his last article, he foresaw that the Bolsheviks would leave the scene and be replaced in Russia by a ‘democratic regime ruled by law’. He died of tuberculosis on 24 April 1923, not yet aged fifty. Perhaps it was as much the collapse of all his ideas as his constant smoking that killed him off.109
People like Martov wanted the course of revolution to be like a river, peaceful, smooth and broad, while Lenin’s followers saw it as a waterfall, cascading from on high. The party Lenin created soon became an order, after October 1917 a state order. Not a monastic or chivalrous order, but an ideological one, and until his death nobody had the slightest doubt that Lenin had the absolute right to be the master of this order. He had not, however, taken account of the fact that a party such as his could survive only within a totalitarian system, a fact demonstrated by the events of August 1991.
* Vyacheslav Plehve, Nicholas II’s Interior Minister, was assassinated in 1904. Peter Stolypin was the Prime Minister from 1906 until he was assassinated – in the tsar’s presence – in 1911.
* Larin, whose real name was Mikhail Lurie, was a top official in the economic apparatus. Alexei Rykov was in charge of the Council for the National Economy.
On the evening of 1 August 1914, Germany declared war on Russia. When mobilization was declared, the whole nation rallied to the tsar. Plekhanov expressed a strong desire to defend the fatherland, and even Trotsky, who was not a defencist, wrote in the Paris newspaper Nashe slovo (Our