Maxim Gorky and the Origins of Vpered

In 1902 Lenin discoverd that the Russian writer Maxim Gorky was sympathetic to the radical socialist parties of Russia, including the Social Revolutionaries and the RSDRP. “Everything you wrote about Gorky is very welcome,” he wrote an RSDRP agent in Moscow, “especially since money is desperately needed.” The agent, code-named Natasha, had been sent to Moscow from Geneva on Lenin’s orders to cultivate Gorky, who had donated some money to Iskra in 1901. In October 1902 she reported that Gorky wanted “to help us however he can, mainly with money, of course.” The result was that Gorky agreed to provide an annual contribution of five thousand rubles to the RSDRP, four thousand to Iskra and one thousand to the Moscow party committee.⁹

In breaking with the Mensheviks, Lenin had cut himself off from the major source of RSDRP financial support. His goal immediately became to recruit Gorky as a donor for the emerging Bolshevik fraction and its new journal, Vpered. On December 3, 1904, Lenin wrote Bogdanov that “to delay the foreign organ of the majority (for which only the money is needed) is inexcusable; whatever has happened, the amount of money we need, a few thousand, must be obtained to get started, or we shall fail.” Ten days later the Geneva Bolsheviks resolved to bring out Vpered as the weekly journal of “the majority,” and Lenin and Krupskaya fired off a number of letters to sympathetic party members requesting contributions to a kush or slush fund.¹⁰

The main hope for funds from inside Russia was Bogdanov. On December 15 Krupskaya wrote Bogdanov that Gorky wanted to meet him and that Gorky should be given a code name, despite his “lack of a conspiratorial sense.” On December 30 she repeated to Bogdanov the complaint about a “terrible lack of money” and the complete schism with the Mensheviks and urged him to make contacts with “the Muscovites.” In the meantime Bogdanov had written Lenin that Gorky “will give immediately three thousand rubles for our organ and promises even more in the future. . . . At the congress he will give another five thousand and promises to use all his connections to provide security on the material side.” In late December 1904 Gorky sent Bogdanov a check for seven hundred rubles; on January 19, 1905, he followed with another three thousand. The Bolsheviks were solvent.¹¹

As a consequence of Gorky’s generosity, the Bolsheviks were able to bring out the first and second issues of Vpered in January 1905. As Lenin pointed out in a letter to Bogdanov, Russian support greatly helped the Geneva publication:

We have finally started Vpered. The day after tomorrow number two comes out. The reception has been favorable and everyone is very efficient here. We think everything will turn out fine as long as we are not bankrupt. (We need 400 francs [150 rubles] for each number but we have only 1200 in all).

In these first months our need is hellish, since if we don’t have an accurate output, then the whole position of the majority suffers a great, hardly beneficial, blow. (Don’t forget this and drag out a little more, especially from Gorky.)¹²

At the same time Lenin was frustrated by Bogdanov’s lack of communication. He wrote Litvinov that Bogdanov should be scolded for only writing twice in the past month “not a line for Vpered. Not a word about affairs, plans, connections.”¹³

In fact, Bogdanov had been overtaken by the rush of events as the massacre of innocent Russian petitioners by the Tsar’s troops on January 22, 1905, ushered in a more radical phase of the revolution. Bloody Sunday marked the end of naive monarchism and faith in tsarist benevolence in the eyes of the Russian peasant and worker. It also provided Lenin and his Geneva circle with a signal for revolutionary action that found them quite unprepared. Events inside Russia outran Marxist theories in exile. Until November 1905 Lenin remained abroad and was therefore often out of touch with the dramatic events now unfolding inside Russia.

The Politics of Self-Sacrifice

Bolshevik collectivism had roots in long-standing Russian values of individual self-sacrifice. The suffering, martyrdom, humility, and sacrifice of Christ was deeply embedded in the texture of Russian religious thought and practice, and the lives of Russian saints were a litany of suffering. The Old Believers, heretics in the eyes of the official church for their adherence to their own version of the truth, suffered persecution for centuries at the hands of the government and sought escape in mass immolation, colonization, and, finally, economic mutual aid.

The Russian intelligentsia also exhibited a persistent delight in sacrificing the interests of the individual for the good of the collective, living and dead, past and future. “Outside our circle,” wrote the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky in 1841, “I have met excellent men of greater actuality than ourselves; but nowhere have I come upon men with such an insatiable thirst for life, with such enormous demands on it, and with such capacities for self-sacrifice for the sake of an idea. . . . Social solidarity or death,” concluded Belinsky, “that is my motto.”¹⁴

In his Historical Letters, written in 1869, Peter Lavrov called for a new generation of revolutionary heroes who would lose their individuality in the collective struggle for justice. “Vigorous, fanatical men are needed, who will risk everything and are prepared to sacrifice everything. Martyrs are needed, whose legend will far outgrow their true worth and their actual service.” The anarchist Michael Bakunin also urged “clear thinking and collective action.” “A voluntary, absolutely conscious and completely unforced sacrifice of oneself for the sake of all is,” wrote Dostoevsky in 1863, “a sign of the highest development of individual personality, its highest power, highest self-possession, and highest freedom of individual will.”¹⁵

In the 1870s Russian Populism produced numerous martyrs for the people, the narod, young men and women of high ideals who sacrificed family and career for a life of clandestine revolutionary activity. For them immortality lay in the collective remembrance of great deeds, such as the murder of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Russian Marxism had articulated the sacrifice of individual happiness for the class struggle. Plekhanov wrote: “Morality is founded on the striving not for personal happiness, but for the happiness of the whole: the clan, the people, the class, humanity. This striving has nothing in common with egoism. On the contrary, it always presupposes a greater or lesser degree of self-sacrifice.”¹⁶ Another convert from Populism to Marxism, Vera Zasulich, also urged the development of an ethos of collective “solidarity” of the proletariat through self-sacrifice, as opposed to the more authoritarian and Jacobin tendency embodied in the writings of both Marx and Lenin.¹⁷

Finally, Father Gapon, the priest who achieved great influence among St. Petersburg workers after 1900, articulated the vision of self-sacrifice as a link between Christianity and the labor movement.

Is it not my duty to sacrifice myself, my own “I,” for the sake and peace of those who brought me up? I also fathomed another truth—selfsacrifice. No wonder the symbol of our life is a cross. Only self-sacrifice of serious and enduring efforts for the welfare and spiritual peace of those closest to you as well as neighbors can bring an individual the so-called relative happiness, i.e., self-satisfaction. If an individual became permeated with this idea, he could be reconciled with the idea of predestination, with the yoke prepared for him by Life.¹⁸

Gapon’s speeches mesmerized thousands of Petersburg workers in the period leading up to Bloody Sunday and moved them in the language of the orthodox church, not Marxism. The Bolsheviks slowly realized that the most effective appeal was one which began, not with a quotation from Marx, but with the phrase “Father Gapon says.”

Maxim Gorky also expressed the spirit of self-sacrifice in his plays and novels. At the turn of the century Gorky was one of Russia’s best-known writers, a man of impoverished origins from the river trading town of Nizhny Novgorod. His writings evoked the broad soul of peasant Russia and the rapid growth of the new industrial towns with their restive proletariat and rising merchant and business classes. Gorky’s realistic and unvarnished portrait of Russian life among the “lower depths” of society, his reputation as a writer, and his financial success all made him a target of emerging radical political parties in Russia, parties that needed support. Both Gorky and Maria Andreeva were sympathetic to the Social Revolutionaries and the RSDRP after 1900, and Gorky soon became a crucial source of support for the Bolsheviks, as he had been for the RSDRP.

In 1902 Maria Andreeva became extremely active collecting funds for arrested students and organizing concerts to raise money for the radical movement, including Iskra. She was also a personal friend of several future Bolshevik leaders, notably L. B. Krasin, N. E. Bauman, and Yurii Krzhizhanovsky. In 1903 Gorky put Krasin in touch with the wealthy manager of an estate in Ufimsk, A. D. Tsiurupa, who became an RSDRP contributor. Gorky sent his own donations to Krasin in Baku. By 1904 Gorky and Andreeva were well known to the Okhrana, which described Gorky as a “very unreliable man politically” and searched Andreeva’s apartment for evidence that the Moscow Art Theater was a source of funds for Iskra.¹⁹

In early 1904 Andreeva separated from her husband and began living with Gorky in a civil marriage. She also joined the RSDRP and in the autumn of 1904 established contact with Litvinov in Riga, where she was performing in Chekhov’s “Uncle Vania” with the Moscow Art Theater. Between October and mid-December 1904, Gorky and Andreeva lived in Litvinov’s apartment. Through Litvinov they first heard of Lenin’s ouster from the RSDRP and of the emergence of a new Bolshevik fraction. By late December, M. N. Liadov had arrived in Riga from Geneva and persuaded Gorky that he should contribute money to help establish Vpered.²⁰

Krasin was the conduit for Gorky’s contributions to the Bolsheviks. On January 11, 1905, Gorky noted that he had sent Krasin’s brother Hermann, in Moscow, a check for two thousand rubles for Vpered. Two weeks later the Okhrana dutifully informed its Paris branch that “Gorky gave the central committee of the party a monthly subsidy of two thousand rubles, of which one thousand came from him personally and one thousand was collected by him from his friends.” The Okhrana also observed that Bogdanov—”by profession a physician”—was sending Gorky’s money to Lenin in Geneva, seven hundred rubles in December and three thousand more in January. The police were thus well informed about Bolshevik finances from the beginning.²¹

Shortly after Bloody Sunday, Gorky was arrested in connection with Gapon’s activities and incarcerated in the dread Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. The result was an international outcry against the imperial government, which together with the payment of ten thousand rubles bail by Gorky’s wealthy friend, Savva Morozov, resulted in the famous writer’s release from jail. Exhausted by their ordeal, Gorky and Andreeva left to recuperate in the Crimea.

Throughout 1905 Gorky became more deeply committed to the revolutionary movement growing inside Russia. In June he wrote a long letter to the priest Gapon, leader of the petitioners on Bloody Sunday, arguing that “the worker has no friends except workers, so the whole working class must be organized as a family.” The working class must not depend on the intelligentsia for its leadership, argued Gorky, a view that Lenin considered to be “sentimental socialism.” “Only socialism renews life in this world,” wrote Gorky, “and it must become the religion of the working man.” He continued:

We don’t need an independent workers’ party separate from the intelligentsia, but we must involve the largest possible number of conscious workers in the party, workers whose minds are unprejudiced and whose class consciousness has developed, become clear, and created a new man.²²

Gorky’s idea of a workers’ party transforming society through a socialist religion was not shared by Lenin. But Lenin did share with Gorky an enthusiasm for the peasant as an agent of democratic and revolutionary change, and a desire for an organization that would prevent a repetition of the sacrifices of Bloody Sunday.

Gapon, in his January 1905 petition to the Tsar, had fueled Gorky’s fire of enthusiasm with his rhetoric of sacrifice:

We have reached that frightful moment when death is better than the prolongation of our unbearable sufferings. . . . Would it not be preferable for all of us, the toiling masses of Russia, to die? Let the capitalists and officials, the embezzlers and plunderers of the Russian people, live and enjoy their lives. . . . Do not turn Thy help from Thy people. Lead them out from the grave of lawlessness, poverty, and ignorance. . . . There are two paths before us: one to freedom and happiness, the other into the grave. Sire, show us either of them and we will follow it, even if it leads to death. Let our lives be a sacrifice for suffering Russia. We do not regret this sacrifice, but offer it willingly.²³

Gapon’s call for self-sacrifice also provided an opportunity for Bolshevik self-promotion.

By the end of 1905 Gorky had established a number of publishing operations designed to enrich the Bolshevik treasury. Since 1902, Gorky had allowed his works to be translated by the “Slavic and Northern Literature House” in Munich, operated by two émigré socialists, Julian Marchlewski and Alexander Helphand (Parvus). According to the original agreement, Parvus and Gorky would each keep twenty percent of the income from this operation, and the remaining sixty percent would go to the RSDRP. But Gorky had received neither royalties nor an accounting from Parvus and was taking him to court. In September 1905 Gorky and Bonch-Bruevich seized the initiative and set up another publishing house, Demos, in Geneva; the purpose was to obtain money for the Bolsheviks by publishing Russian works in translation in Europe. In December 1905 Demos was moved to Berlin and reestablished as the publishing house of Gorky’s friend I. P. Ladyzhnikov, again to raise money for the RSDRP.²⁴

Throughout 1905 Gorky pursued a variety of schemes, including a “cheap library” for workers that would utilize publishing operations to disseminate socialist literature and simultaneously enrich the RSDRP treasury. The legal Bolshevik journal Novaya Zhizn’ (New Life), published in St. Petersburg in late 1905 was one product of Gorky’s efforts. Another was the use of the Znanie publishing house for the RSDRP’s Central Committee to publish in large numbers the “cheap library” books for workers. An agreement between Znanie and the Bolsheviks, represented by Krasin, was duly signed in October 1905, and a second legal journal, Bor’ba (Struggle), printed in Moscow.²⁵

All of this was complicated by the fact that in December 1905 Ladyzhnikov accused Parvus of embezzling 130,000 marks from the RSDRP and violating the 1902 agreement to publish Russian literary translations abroad and provide party funds. Parvus had disappeared to Italy with his mistress and the party’s share of the money. Lenin, Gorky, and Krasin demanded a party court of arbitration to bring Parvus to heel, and Gorky promised that Parvus’s political career was finished. Instead Parvus joined Trotsky in developing the theory of “permanent revolution,” based on the experience of 1905.²⁶

Despite these complications, by the spring of 1906 Znanie had succeeded in publishing thirty-six books and brochures with a total circulation of some seven hundred thousand copies. Novaya Zhizn’ also achieved a substantial circulation (50,000) but was outdone by the far larger circulation of Parvus’s and Trotsky’s Russkaya Gazeta (Russian journal). The literature of the Petersburg soviet, or workers’ council, of 1905 thus proved far more popular than the legal Marxism of a divided RSDRP.²⁷

Gorky also began to work out his theory of “god building,” the notion that socialism could become a surrogate religion for the masses. Life, he wrote, is a “struggle of masters for authority and of slaves for emancipation from the yoke of that authority.” In contrast to the soul-destroying culture of the West, Russia was a “god bearer” (bogonosets) among all peoples. The world of modern capitalism and the bourgeoisie was a world of individualism in which the “I” is always at the center, whereas socialists should strive to create a world of the collective, mankind, the people. Russian passivity and suffering should give way to a new heroism of the masses, too long deceived and suppressed by the church, the state, and the power of capital. “Only the people,” wrote Gorky, “have the energy of youth and the pathos of heroism, only the people’s strength, the eternal source of living energy can resurrect the country for a new life.”²⁸

Gorky’s philosophy of self-sacrifice was most clearly enunciated in 1906 in his novel Mother. The hero of the novel, Pavel, carries the invincible faith of both socialism and Christianity in his breast. Using the metaphors of the Christ-like collective, the revolutionaries write pamphlets for the village, “so the people will die for the cause.” As Rybin puts it, “let thousands of us die to resurrect millions of people all over the earth! That’s what! Dying’s easy for the sake of resurrection! If only the people rise!”²⁹

Throughout Gorky’s novel runs a strong current of religious martyrdom in which a bright socialist future will provide immortality for the individual through the collective memory. The individual revolutionary martyr can never die, because individual deeds live on in memory of others. And the reward of self-sacrifice lies in the future kingdom of justice. More than any other writer of the day, Gorky fused the traditional Russian vision of Christian collectivism with the new vision of industrial socialism appearing in revolutionary Russia. In so doing he became a key link between the manipulators of self-sacrifice, the Bolsheviks, and the Old Believer capitalists of Moscow.

Morozov Money and Bolshevik Finances

A major source of Bolshevik funds in the formative years of the fraction was the wealthy Moscow merchant Savva Timofeevich Morozov.³⁰ The leader of the Morozov merchant dynasty of wealthy Old Believers, Savva Morozov had contributed hundreds of thousands of rubles to the Moscow Art Theater and numerous other causes. Endowed with flashing eyes, a brusque voice, and an easy laugh, Morozov was an ebullient man of tremendous energy and willpower whose shrewd and calculating mind and enormous fortune enabled him to snub grand dukes and pursue his own interests with impunity. Among these interests were Maxim Gorky and the Bolsheviks.

Savva Morozov was a progressive industrialist. Since 1857, the Morozov textile mills in the town of Orekhovo-Zuevo near Tver had produced everything from army uniforms to calico dresses. After a strike in 1885 and his father’s death in 1889, Savva made every effort to insure the well-being of his own workers—new homes, good medical care, safety equipment, shorter working hours, and no punitive fines for misdemeanors on the job. The formation of an RSDRP committee in Tver and another strike in the factory in February 1904 pushed Morozov further in the direction of improving labor conditions and cooperating with the very socialism that sought to overturn his capitalist enterprise. He instituted a profit-sharing plan for his workers and made friends with Gorky, neither of which appealed to his mother, Maria Fedorovna, the major shareholder in the Morozov family operations.

Gorky first met Morozov in 1904 as a patron of the Moscow Art Theater and was struck by his Tatar face, his doctrine of hard work, and his interest in the organizing power of ideas. An occasional reader of Marx, Morozov was also familiar with chemistry and the new developments in nuclear physics. He viewed revolution as an inevitable part of Russia’s westernization and modernization in the industrial age. Only workers organized in a socialist manner, felt Morozov, could effectively oppose the more dangerous and destructive forces of peasant anarchism in Russia. Only western science and technology could harness the tremendous “potential energy” of Russia. Since 1902 Morozov had been donating two thousand rubles a month to the RSDRP and Iskra. In 1905 the Bolsheviks were determined to divert this generosity and selfsacrifice through Gorky to their own benefit.

In the winter of 1904–1905 Krasin, the Bolshevik electrical engineer who worked in one of Morozov’s factories, asked Gorky to approach Morozov about donating to the Bolshevik cause. Morozov, as a reader of Iskra, was already familiar with some of Lenin’s ideas and agreed to meet with Gorky and Krasin to discuss the matter. At the meeting Morozov offered to provide twenty thousand rubles a year to the Bolsheviks; Krasin boldly replied that twenty-four thousand rubles was a more appropriate figure. Thus began the monthly two-thousand-ruble donations funneled from Morozov via Gorky to Krasin, Bogdanov, and eventually Lenin.³¹

After the revolution Krasin recalled that “it was considered a sign of status in radical or liberal circles to give money to the revolutionary parties, and among those who made monthly donations of five to twenty-five rubles were not only wealthy lawyers, engineers, and doctors but also directors of banks and government officials.”³² Morozov, Krasin noted, contributed regularly to the party, the last time two days before his suicide on May 13, 1905, in a sanatorium near Cannes, France.

Morozov’s ultimate self-sacrifice was probably due to his mother’s decision to remove him as director of the Morozov enterprises in April 1905. In mid-April Maria Andreeva wrote that Morozov was in a deep depression, isolated from friends, neglecting his daily affairs, refusing to answer correspondence. In May Morozov sought refuge in the French sanatorium, where Krasin found him to be cheerful but deranged. Morozov told Krasin: “I know that you did not make such a long journey simply to inquire about my health.” Krasin admitted that “the party needs money, lots of money,” upon which Morozov thrust out a package saying “here is everything I have.”³³

Two days later Morozov shot himself through the heart. His griefstricken workers believed that Morozov had not died, but had given away his vast wealth and taken up the life of a wandering Christ-like holy man, traveling through Russia and spreading the true word among other factory workers. Gorky and Andreeva felt they had lost a noble friend and a great man, a man of energy and resourcefulness, but also a man easily influenced by others. “Like all very rich men,” wrote Andreeva, “he was very distrustful, suspicious, and stingy with people, but, once convinced, gave up his soul and rewarded a relationship for any small favor given to him.”³⁴ In the case of Bolshevism, Morozov in the end sacrificed his money, his soul, and his life.

The suicide of Savva Morozov did not mean the end of Morozov contributions to the Bolshevik treasury. At the third RSDRP congress in April 1905, Krasin pointed out that expenses were now running over six thousand rubles a month; “the committees have not paid the central committee, there are no systematic contributions, and the central committee cannot even establish a budget.” Regular contributions were essential, said Krasin, and the party “must live by its own means, and not on bourgeois charity.”³⁵ Yet in the spring of 1905 bourgeois charity was keeping the Bolsheviks going.

The place of Savva Morozov was now taken by N. P. Schmidt, a young nephew of Morozov, who had just come of age to inherit the Morozov furniture factory in Moscow. Both Morozov and Gorky were mentors of Schmidt, who read the works of Marx and Lenin, encouraged the Bolsheviks to send agitators into his factory, and used his wealth to improve working conditions. Schmidt’s radical enthusiams were shared by his younger brothers and sisters, Ekaterina, Elizabeth, and Aleksei. Together this family circle of very young and very wealthy Morozovs constituted a veritable treasury on which the Bolsheviks hoped to lay hands as soon as possible. According to Ekaterina, the “revolutionary wave submerging Russia swept over us,” and she became active in Marxist women’s circles and the RSDRP committee in Moscow.³⁶

On May 1, 1905, N. P. Schmidt reduced the work day in his factory from 11 1/2 to 8 hours. He also raised wages, introduced a fund to reimburse workers who were either sick or on strike, and opened a hospital inside the plant. Shortly thereafter Schmidt also became involved with the Moscow Bolsheviks and with Gorky. By October 1905 Gorky persuaded him to contribute fifteen thousand rubles as a loan with which Gorky could publish the legal Bolshevik journal Novayia zhizn’.³⁷

The revolutionary wave that inundated Russia in early 1905 provided the Bolsheviks with a flood of new sympathizers, especially in the wake of Bloody Sunday. Men like Krasin, Bogdanov, and Gorky moved easily in the well-to-do circles of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and were persuasive in their efforts to find wealthy donors. Morozov and Schmidt did not understand the fine points of socialist ideology or politics, but they did see in the Bolsheviks a party of energy and will capable of organized action against the hated tsarist regime. Bolshevik organization and fund raising thus met with great success because of the propensity for self-sacrifice articulated by Gorky, Morozov, and Schmidt. For all their European and Marxist rhetoric, the Bolsheviks thus laid claim to a rich Russian inheritance.

Engineer of Revolution: Leonid Krasin

Leonid Borisovich Krasin (1870–1926) was one of the most remarkable Bolshevik leaders before and after 1917. As a Russian, his wife Liubov later observed, he exhibited “the preeminent national characteristic— readiness for self-sacrifice.”³⁸ The Bolsheviks were supposed to be full-time professional revolutionaries; Krasin was an electrical engineer by day and a revolutionary in his off-hours. From the time he entered the St. Petersburg Technological Institute in 1887 until his death, Krasin was a major figure in the history of Russian social democracy, a middle-class professional engineer capable of organizing both charity and expropriation as mechanisms of self-sacrifice profitable for the Bolshevik treasury.

Krasin, like so many of his generation, became a Marxist in the 1890s, and first met Lenin in the socialist circle of M. I. Brusnev at the St. Petersburg Technical Institute. After a typical period of arrest, exile, and parental rescue, Krasin completed his engineering education at the Kharkov Technical Institute in 1900. He also worked part-time on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, then under construction. In June 1900 Krasin arrived in the sprawling and violent oil town of Baku on the Caspian Sea, where he went to work for another Marxist electrical engineer, R. E. Classon. Here they designed, constructed, and operated an electrical generating station for the oil industry. They also became involved in the Marxist circles of Baku and in smuggling copies of the new RSDRP journal Iskra from Europe into the Caucasus.

In 1901 Krasin set up an underground printing press in Baku to print illegal literature in Russian, German, Georgian, and Armenian. This secret printing operation was not known to either the police or the local RSDRP committee, and operated successfully until 1907. Here the technical know-how and financial aid of Krasin in matters of typesetting, paper, matrices, and inks combined with his revolutionary enthusiasms to produce a remarkable underground press. In October 1903 Krasin was coopted into the RSDRP central committee, and took over the key job of fund raising for the party. Even more important, two months later Krasin obtained through Gorky an interview with Savva Morozov, from which came both a two-thousand-ruble monthly contribution to the RSDRP and Krasin’s new job as manager of the Morozov factory power station at Orekhovo-Zuevo. In addition, Krasin succeeded in finding another wealthy source of revolutionary donations in the person of the actress Vera Kommissarzhevskaya, whom he met in Baku in 1903 and whose box office receipts helped keep the underground press operating.

By the summer of 1904 Krasin was running the Morozov power plant at Orekhovo-Zuevo. He was also under Okhrana surveillance as a well-known social democrat fund raiser, who received substantial donations from well-to-do lawyers, doctors, bankers, and engineers, as well as from his employer, Savva Morozov. In July 1904 Krasin attended a meeting of RSDRP committeemen in Moscow, where party factionalism was condemned and Lenin was deprived of his position on the central committee for attacking the Mensheviks.

The relationship between Morozov and Krasin was one of mutual admiration. For Krasin, Morozov was a thoroughly westernized Russian with great entrepreneurial drive and spirit, a “new type with a great future.” For Morozov, Krasin was an “ideal worker” and leader; “if one had thirty such men, they could create a party stronger than the German one,” felt Morozov. Both Krasin and Morozov believed that Russia could only achieve real progress through a combination of revolution and industrialism.³⁹

Bloody Sunday produced a sympathy strike at the Morozov plant, but Krasin was not there. Rather, he witnessed the dramatic violence in St. Petersburg, and shortly thereafter attended a meeting of the RSDRP central committee in Moscow at Andreeva’s apartment. After Gorky’s arrest, Krasin fled to Geneva. He then accompanied Lenin to London in April 1905 for the third party congress. Here he contacted other Bolshevik leaders, including Bogdanov and Lunacharsky, before going on to Cannes to see Savva Morozov. Shortly after Krasin’s visit, the wealthy and tormented Morozov committed suicide, leaving some one hundred thousand rubles to Maria Andreeva, who gave it to the Bolsheviks.⁴⁰

Krasin, not Lenin, initiated Bolshevik plans for armed units capable of striking against the Russian government in 1905. In January he set up under the central committee a “Military Technical Group” (Boevaia tekhnicheskaia gruppa) to supervise the illegal tasks of the party: gunrunning, explosives purchase and construction, and the arming of workers. Hand grenades, rifles, and dynamite were purchased in Western Europe and smuggled into St. Petersburg by the northern route via Stockholm and Helsinki. At one point Krasin even designed a bomb, although most work was carried out by two chemists code-named Alpha and Omega. A bomb laboratory was set up in Gorky’s apartment in Moscow and protected by Georgian bodyguards. Weapons were obtained from France, Bulgaria, and Macedonia.⁴¹

For Krasin, Bloody Sunday revealed a pressing need for action inside Russia, not émigré arguments in distant Geneva. At a meeting of the Moscow RSDRP committee in early February, Krasin recalled that “we considered it irrelevant to waste money and time, and to risk sending dozens of people abroad, in order to clear up what seemed to us to be inessential petty squabbles in Geneva between Lenin and his friends on one side and Plekhanov and the Menshevik ‘Iskraites’ on the other.”⁴² By the spring of 1905 Krasin had returned to Russia and joined Andreeva in plotting to transfer her funds as beneficiary from Morozov’s life insurance policy to the party treasury. By now Krasin’s role in the emergence of Bolshevism was taking shape; he would be the central figure inside Russia in procuring funds and weapons. In so doing he would prove to be a master in the art of transforming Russian selfsacrifice into Bolshevik financial solvency.

A. V. Lunacharsky and the Religion of Self-Sacrifice

Communism places man in his proper place. . . . Man as collectivist is immortal.

Only the individual is mortal.

—A. V. LUNACHARSKY, February 1918

A. V. Lunacharsky was another Bolshevik who saw great possibilities in appealing to the Russian penchant for self-sacrifice. Lunacharsky was a Marxist journalist and literary critic who absorbed much of the collectivist philosophy of his brother-in-law, Alexander Bogdanov, along with European positivism and socialism. For Lunacharsky, revolution meant not simply a political insurrection or the triumph of class struggle but the creation of a new proletarian culture, a surrogate religion of science that would some day enable man to conquer even death.⁴³

Lunacharsky’s religion of humanity flourished in his cultural activities after the revolution, when he became commissar of public enlightenment and an architect of the Lenin cult. Lunacharsky felt that death did not exist for a believing positivist. Death could be vanquished by the collective eternal memory of the transient individual. In 1918 Lunacharsky, mourning the death of another Bolshevik leader, said that “such men do not die; they rise from their graves in full armor, giants. Such victims never stay buried.” The Christ-like Bolshevik hero had “acquired life eternal” and “gone into the sleep of the immortals.” “Such men are immortal,” added Lunacharsky, “they are unkillable. They give their whole heart to a cause which is eternal.”⁴⁴

The parallel between European socialism and early Christianity was commonplace after the turn of the century, mainly through the writings of the leading German Marxist theoretician, Karl Kautsky. For Kautsky, early Christianity was a proletarian revolution against the slave economy of the Roman Empire. The widespread belief in the resurrection of the dead and the coming of the kingdom of God was a useful myth employed by both Jews and Christians. Jesus had died, but achieved his immortality through the church; socialist parties would carry on the work of self-sacrificing heroes of the labor movement.⁴⁵

There were other influences as well. From Ernst Renan, Lunacharsky acquired the notion that progress in history meant the scientific organization of humanity. Human knowledge and reason would ultimately “organize God” and provide a new priesthood of scientists reminiscent of St. Simon and Comte. The French writer Jules Romains also wrote about the great force of the collective and the fact that individuals may die but live on in collective memory; his doctrine of “Unanimisme” was popular in France after 1900 and his “Manuel de Déification” of 1910 articulated the same notions of “god construction” expressed by Bogdanov, Gorky, and Lunacharsky.⁴⁶

Contact with Bogdanov and Berdyaev in exile in Vologda made Lunacharsky a much more eclectic and independent thinker and writer than Lenin imagined a Bolshevik should be. In 1905, in fact, Lenin became an editor and censor of Lunacharsky’s prose. When Lunacharsky wrote in Vpered in January 1905 that he expected a “general strike organized by social democrats,” Lenin scratched out the words “general strike” and inserted “general uprising,” Nonetheless, Lunacharsky’s utopian and apocalyptic prose came through in his promise that “crowds of workers will march through the streets and squares, and students and city poor people will flock to their red banner.” In contrast with Lenin’s controlled and Aesopian writing style, Lunacharsky was poetic, ebullient, and romantic; syndicalist myth predominated over party authority as a means to encourage individual self-sacrifice.⁴⁷

Bloody Sunday convinced many Bolsheviks that the Russian people had lost their naive monarchist faith in the tsar and would be receptive to the appeals of socialism. M. N. Liadov was struck by Gapon’s appeal to the masses as a “revolutionary people.” He joined the march on the Winter Palace and reported the massacre to Bogdanov later. Lunacharsky wrote a pamphlet entitled “How the Petersburg Workers Marched to the Tsar” in which he noted that Gapon acted for “all the poor of Russia.” Published by Lenin and Bonch-Bruevich in Geneva, the pamphlet was addressed to peasants inside Russia, who presumably could read it. Lunacharsky urged his readers to refuse to pay taxes or serve in the army, to form revolutionary village committees, to demand their rightful land ownership, and to help overthrow the autocracy. Workers and peasants together should work toward a republic and then the “brotherly society” of socialism. Indeed, there was as much attention to Christ as to Marx in Lunacharsky’s pamphleteering. “Christianity, in all its forms, even the purest and most progressive,” he wrote, “is the ideology of the downtrodden classes, the hopelessly immobile, those who can expect nothing good on earth and cannot believe in their own powers; Christianity is also a weapon of exploitation.” But Gapon had shown that the Christian religion could also mobilize the masses to action.⁴⁸

Lenin did not appreciate Lunacharsky’s euphoric reaction to Gapon and his religion of labor. Since Lenin was in Geneva and Lunacharsky was not, Lenin remained a severe editor of Lunacharsky’s submissions to Vpered in early 1905. For example, Lunacharsky included the following passage in a February 1905 article:

An organization of professional revolutionaries as a closed and autonomous group—this is pernicious Jacobinism, but a solid and centralized party, closely connected with the proletarian masses, aspiring to enlighten and organize it and guide it by revolutionary demonstrations to its true interests—this is a social democratic party.⁴⁹

Lenin left this passage intact, but insisted on adding a subsequent sentence that noted: “Only hopelessly stupid people could conclude that we are becoming bourgeois Jacobins.”

Lunacharsky’s enthusiasm for Father Gapon and the politics of selfsacrifice articulated the deeper effect that the 1905 revolution had on the formation of Bolshevism. Founded in exile, Bolshevism as a political organization emerged out of the experience of revolutionary Russia, where its supporters included the proletariat, the professional intelligentsia, and even wealthy merchant sympathizers. Until November 1905 Lenin and Krupskaya remained in Geneva, while Bogdanov, Krasin, and the other Bolsheviks dominated fund raising and publishing inside Russia. For them self-sacrifice and collectivism were deeply stamped with the bloody impressions of that Russian winter, when Marxist theory seemed less relevant than Christian martyrdom in mobilizing the masses and obtaining financial support.