The Art of Secret Writing

“Languages are ciphers, wherein letters are not changed into letters, but words into words, so that an unknown language is decipherable.”

—BLAISE PASCAL, Pertsees, No. 45

On March 1, 1887, a group of six young men were arrested on the fashionable Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg in connection with a plot on the life of Tsar Alexander III. One of them was carrying a thick Medical Dictionary inside which was found dynamite and bullets tipped with strychnine. Among the plotters was Lenin’s brother, Alexander Ulyanov, whose subsequent arrest and execution helped turn Lenin toward a revolutionary career and a war against the hated autocracy. Symbolically, an apparently harmless book concealed secret weapons in that war.¹

The art of cryptography, or secret writing, is an ancient technique for protecting secrets from an enemy while communicating information to an ally. Since the Renaissance, communication by code and cipher has become a normal part of diplomatic relations among nations in times of peace and war. In the twentieth century, cryptanalysis has produced great successes, including the breaking of German and Japanese codes during World War II. After World War I, communication by cipher became a highly mechanized and mathematical art, later performed with the aid of computers and satellite communication; before World War I it was still a secret craft conducted by the “black chambers” of the European powers and their police with the aid of only the human brain and occasional chemical and x-ray techniques.²

The Bolsheviks in 1904 utilized secret communication techniques common in prisons and revolutionary circles in nineteenth-century Russia. Both ciphers (the substitution of one letter or symbol for another) and codes (the use of words with hidden meanings) disguised messages that could pass the censor while retaining forbidden meanings. A particularly popular method of secret communication was to hide a message within a book, either by steganography (hiding a message by writing in invisible inks or lemon juice), or by reference to a specific page, line, and letter using ciphers, or by oblique and coded word meanings. The Bolsheviks used books both to encipher messages in party correspondence and to conceal political meaning in the guise of philosophy, economics, or statistics. Packages of books frequently carried secret messages; legally published tomes conveyed a second level of revolutionary meaning. Any book might carry a double meaning, overt and covert.

Lenin and his wife, N. K. Krupskaya, were both adept at cryptography and the use of Aesopian language to evade the censorship. Lenin’s publications and correspondence generally concealed as much truth as they revealed, in ways that only the initiated could understand. In this sense Lenin was no different than Marx or Engels, who also employed parody, satire, and allusion to evade the Prussian censorship in the 1840s. Marx could not publish some of his economic writings until he emigrated to London in the 1850s. He lengthened works such as The Holy Family and The German Ideology in order to avoid the more strict censorship applied to shorter texts.³ The writings of Marx and Engels employed an esoteric language forced upon them by the censor that made their writings ideal for publication in Russia. Marxism was both a revolutionary doctrine and a collection of evasive written texts that could pass the censor while conveying a revolutionary message to the initiated Marxist.

Since the eighteenth century, Russian writers had employed fables, allegories, and double meanings to criticize their government without subjecting themselves to prosecution and arrest. The Aesopian language of oblique criticism is a rich Russian tradition that extends from Krylov to Solzhenitsyn. In the prerevolutionary period, notes Bertram Wolfe, “men found means of conveying a criticism of the regime through a statistical monograph on German agriculture, through the study of a sovereign four centuries dead, the review of a Norwegian play, the analysis of some evil in the Prussian or some virtue in the British state.”⁴

An enciphered letter from N. K. Krupskaya in Geneva to the Kursk committee of the RSDRP, March 1905. From Perepiska V. I. Lenina i rukovodimykh im uchrezhdenii RSDRP s partiinymi organizatsiiami, 1903–1905 gg., volume 3 (Moscow, 1977).

In the 1840s Russian radicals published a Pocket Dictionary of Foreign Words that was filled with foreign revolutionary ideas in various guises. Under the entry “naturalism” one could find reference to the writings of Fourier, St. Simon, and Owen; under the entry “ocean” appeared the ideas of James Harrington.⁵ Yet, as A. V. Lunacharsky noted in 1902, the Pocket Dictionary appeared legally in Russia but allowed for the dissemination of socialist ideas.⁶ In 1872 the Russian censorship permitted government publication of Marx’s Capital as a “strictly scientific work” despite its “clearly socialist direction”; noted the censor: “Few will read it, and still fewer understand it.” The censorship omitted Marx’s portrait, but published his ideas.⁷

The revolutionary author N. G. Chernyshevsky was a master of the legal publishing of illegal ideas. Chernyshevsky’s techniques of Aesopian language were as important to Lenin as the concept of an elite revolutionary party. Throughout Chernyshevsky’s Victorian novel What Is to Be Done and other writings runs the thread of radical ideas in oblique form. Chernyshevsky was a master of metonymy, speaking of one subject in terms of another. It took an alert reader to know that the “author of an article on Pushkin” was the radical literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, or that by “ancient buildings” Chernyshevsky really meant Fourier’s socialist community phalansteries, or that by the “necessities of life” he meant arrest by the police.⁸

“You don’t understand it,” said Vera Zasulich in 1904, “and it’s difficult to understand. Chernyshevsky was hampered by censorship and he had to write in allusions and heiroglyphs. We were able to decipher them, but you, the young people of the 1900s, don’t have this knack. You read a passage in Chernyshevsky and you find it dull and empty, but in fact there is a great revolutionary idea concealed in it.” In his writings Chernyshevsky generally included a “sort of key” to help the reader decode his message. Among Chernyshevsky’s best decoders was Lenin.⁹

In the 1890s, after an early exposure to the Jacobin and terrorist ideas of Russian Populism, Lenin became a Marxist. He also adopted the then popular tactic of revolutionary authors known as “legal Marxism,” the publishing of long, obscure, and statistical articles and books capable of legally passing the censor. The September 1894 test case of this tactic was the publication of P. B. Struve’s Critical Notes on the Development of Capitalism in Russia. Other Marxist tomes followed quickly, including G. V. Plekhanov’s On the Question of the Development of the Monist View of History (December 1894), where the alert reader immediately recognized that the word “monist” really meant Marxist, and Lenin’s own The Development of Capitalism in Russia, published under the pseudonym V. Ilin.¹⁰

In addition to legal Marxism, Lenin also utilized the conspiratorial Populist tradition of secret communication by code and cipher. The essence of underground communication in revolutionary Russia was the use of relatively common and harmless words to carry a second revolutionary meaning. Thus a “hospital” was really a prison, and any inquiry about one’s health was an inquiry about one’s incarceration, any “illness” being an arrest. “Warm fur” meant illegal literature; “handkerchiefs” meant passports; a “journal” was a double-bottomed suitcase used to smuggle literature. Towns assumed code names: Moscow was “Grachevka” and Saratov was “Babylon.” Finally there were the ubiquitous aliases (Lenin had dozens of them), such as “Friend No. 1” or “Phenomenon” for Maxim Gorky and “Absolute” for Elena Stasova, another Bolshevik.¹¹ The purpose of this Aesopian vocabulary was simply to enable apparently innocuous books and correspondence to carry a hidden meaning to the knowing reader.

Lenin also inherited from Populism a number of conspiratorial cipher techniques common in Russian jails. Getting letters out of prison in nineteenth-century Russia was often achieved by writing in plaintext in invisible ink or lemon juice between the lines of an ordinary letter or book. Equally common was the use of ciphers such as the “Polybius square”:

By utilizing this very simple cipher method, a prisoner could convey a message by tapping on cell walls so that any two numbers indicated a letter by designating a column and row. Thus the word “hello” could be tapped out as: 23 15 31 31 34.¹²

A slightly more complex method involved the use of a keyword, which when enciphered and added to the enciphered plaintext word, would produce a second level of encipherment. Thus, using the Polybius square and the keyword “arise” (11 42 24 43 15), one might encipher the word “bomb” as follows:

Repeating the keyword, one could thus encipher any long message either by tapping or by putting the cipher on paper.¹³

Prison codes and ciphers were in common use among Populist revolutionaries of the 1860s and 1870s, as recalled by Peter Kropotkin:¹⁴

From all sides I heard knocks with the foot on the floor: 1,2,3,4 . . . 11 knocks, 24 knocks, 15 knocks; then an interruption, followed by 3 knocks and a long succession of 33 knocks. Over and over again these knocks were repeated in the same succession, until the neighbor would guess at last that they were meant for ‘kto vy?’ (Who are you?), the letter v being the third letter in our alphabet. Thereupon conversation was soon established, and usually conducted in the abridged alphabet; that is, the alphabet being divided into 6 rows of 5 letters, each letter is marked by its row and its place in the row.

This use of the “quadratic alphabet” also appeared in Arthur Koestler’s well-known fictional work on the Stalinist purges, Darkness at Noon:¹⁵

While Rubashov was memorizing the numbers, he tried, being out of practice, to visualize the square of letters with the 25 compartments—5 horizontal rows with five letters in each. No. 402 first tapped 5 times— accordingly the fifth row: v to z; then twice; so it was the second letter of the row: w. Then a pause; then two taps—the second row, f—j; then 3 taps—the third letter of the row: h. Then 3 times and then 5 times; so fifth letter of the third row: o. He stopped. WHO?

Needless to say, such techniques became well known to jailers and political police, who routinely opened mail, exposed hidden messages, deciphered enciphered ones, and employed their own secret means of communication.¹⁶ That did not stop codes and ciphers from becoming part of the political language of the Russian underground and of Lenin’s writings.

Lenin as Cryptographer

Vulgar revolutionism fails to see that words are action too.

—V. I. LENIN, Two Tactics of Social Democracy

In her memoirs Krupskaya continually refers to the great conspiratorial skills of Lenin, beginning in the 1890s in St. Petersburg. “He taught us how to write in books with invisible ink,” she recalled, “or by the dot method; how to mark secret signs, and thought out all manner of aliases. In general, one felt the benefit of his good apprenticeship in the ways of the Narodnaya Volya Party. “ At one point Lenin “showed us how to use cipher and we used up nearly half a book.”¹⁷

In the 1880s, Krupskaya was an ardent Tolstoyan who believed in the virtues of asceticism, worked side by side with peasants in the fields, and helped in “correcting” books such as The Count of Monte Cristo for a popular and barely literate readership. Lenin, while in prison or in contact with former prisoners, absorbed the usual tactics of Russian underground conspiracy—pseudonyms, ciphers, codes, dots under letters of books in invisible ink—and through his correspondence he extended them to his entire family. His mother and sisters frequently communicated with him by secret means. “I sent books twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays,” recalled his sister Anna after Lenin had returned from exile in 1896: “In each package of books was one with an enciphered letter—with dots or dashes in pencil inside individual letters of the alphabet.”¹⁸ In this manner the requests for books in Lenin’s correspondence and his effusive thanks after receiving them were all part of a system of secret family communication by book code, courtesy of the Russian postal service.

Anna Elizarova was especially informative about Lenin’s use of these techniques of encipherment:

Chemical letters provided greater freedom; in them, besides purely business matters, one could find stories about the latest party news, congresses, and conferences, brief—2 or 3 words—characterizations by Vladimir Ilich of people and trends within the party, qualities rarely used by him in open conversation, decisive opinions. But these letters were destroyed after reading, and not one, understandably, has come down to us. They were written in letters between the lines or, more often, between the lines of books, journals, and clippings. When Vladimir Ilich, enumerating the books he had received, writes that some Diary of the Engineers’ Congress or Archive Clipping “was very interesting and Aniuta sends her special thanks,” then this means that it was, of course, written in chemical letters.¹⁹

In addition to writing in invisible ink in books, Lenin often would use a book code where a keyword indicated a particular page of a particular book, and each pair of numbers indicated a letter of the alphabet that would be found by a specified line and letter in that line. As Anna Elizarova recalled, Lenin and Krupskaya employed this method from the 1890s down to 1917:

Usually Ilich, wanting precision and economy of style, would introduce a special sign indicating the page of an enciphered letter so one would not have to burrow and search through the books. One would encounter the first sign, say, on page 7. This was a thin pencil stroke, and by multiplying the number of lines by the number of letters in the next line, one would get the correct page; so, if one noted the 7-th letter in the 7-th line, one would go to page 49, where the letter began. . . . This method, changing the page from time to time, was used by us constantly, and even in the letters written by N. Krupskaya just before the revolution in 1915 and 1916, I could determine from the sign the place of a letter within a book.²⁰

These techniques explain Lenin’s apparently voracious reading habits exhibited in his correspondence, where he often requested new editions of Turgenev in German translation and other obscure reading matter. For each book contained a message to be deciphered that was quite different than the one contained in the legal published text. The sending of secret letters and the mailing of books became a major activity of Lenin and Krupskaya in their editorial work for the RSDRP.

The northern route for smuggling illegal writings and weapons from Europe to Russia ran through Stockholm and Helsinki to St. Petersburg. A common method for sending secret messages was to establish an ordinary text, such as Edward Bellamy’s utopian socialist novel Looking Backward, as the codebook, and then to use ciphers to indicate a given alphabetical letter in the text. Having agreed on a common page, sender and receiver could communicate by specifying pairs of numbers, each pair indicating the line on the page and the number of letters from the left. In this way by October 1900 Lenin was able to use the commonplace and apparently innocuous journal Family Pictures as a vehicle to send correspondence and articles from Iskra to party members inside Russia. Chemical letters (correspondence written in invisible ink between the lines) were also reasonably safe, felt Lenin, as long as they did not reveal a person’s identity: “Don’t write any initials in your correspondence, please,” Lenin warned one RSDRP correspondent in London: “The master [police] knows them, although the mail here is completely reliable.”²¹

By 1902 Lenin and Krupskaya were using a number of well-known and readily available books to send enciphered messages to Russia, among them a biography of Spinoza, a volume of Nekrasov’s poetry, and a novel by Nadson entitled Mother.²² They were not alone. To assist émigré socialists with their correspondence, another Russian Marxist, Vladimir Akimov (V. P. Makhnovets), published in Geneva in 1902 a book entitled On Ciphers. In it he described in detail various methods of enciphering messages. Akimov also warned that improper and careless use of codes and ciphers by a revolutionary conspirator could lead the police to comrades inside Russia and even to “the destruction of an entire organization.” Hoping to show his “young comrades” the art of cryptography, Akimov described in detail dot-dash methods of highlighting letters in a book, how to use keywords and cipher systems such as the Polybius square, chemical steganography with invisible ink, and book codes.²³

Akimov was spelling out in detail what Lenin only hinted at in his well-known pamphlet What Is to Be Done? published in Stuttgart by the Dietz Verlag in February 1902. Lenin followed his mentor Chernyshevsky in urging the organization of a conspiratorial elite of professional revolutionaries to overthrow the Russian autocracy; he also advocated a socialist party consciousness that would overcome the revisionist and reformist tendencies associated with a more spontaneous labor movement. Lenin noted that Aesopian language was essential:

In a country ruled by an autocracy, with a completely enslaved press, in a period of desperate political reaction in which even the tiniest outgrowth of political discontent and protest is persecuted, the theory of revolutionary Marxism suddenly forces its way into the censored literature and, though expounded in Aesopian language, is understood by all the “interested.”²⁴

In case the alert and interested reader did not get the reference to Chernyshevsky in Lenin’s book title, he later appended a brief note on Chernyshevsky at the end of his 1909 book Materialism and Empiriocriticism, this time in the philosophical guise of a great Russian materialist thinker.

Secret correspondence had its problems. Krupskaya complained about one correspondent that “his letters are very difficult to understand, since he muddles up the ciphers terribly and shortens words too much.”²⁵ Another correspondent included the entire cipher system in the letter itself, undoubtedly a great help to the police who opened the letter. In 1903 the Tver RSDRP committee wrote to Iskra that “the cipher is the new book by Adler, On Unemployment. The sum of the numerator and the denominator equals the page number.”²⁶ The Jewish labor organization, the Bund, also employed ciphers in correspondence within Russia at this time. The Bund published a book entitled The Enciphered Letter in which the author warned of an army of spies and provocateurs among the socialist exiles, and praised Saltykov-Shchedrin as a master of the “Aesopian letter” with its talk of family trifles and the weather, laden with revolutionary meaning for the initiated.²⁷

During the summer of 1904, while Lenin was trying to create his own band of followers within the RSDRP in Geneva, another party member, L. A. Fotieva, began helping Krupskaya with RSDRP correspondence at the rate of some three hundred letters a month. Fotieva’s job, she later recalled, was to “decipher the enciphered part of the text and rewrite . . . then one had to write the text of a letter to be sent to Russia, encipher the most secret part of it, write the whole letter chemically between the lines of an ordinary letter written earlier that would not arouse the suspicion of the Okhrana. Often the letters we received had mistakes in their ciphers, and we had to spend a long time deciphering them.” Codes and keywords were changed without their knowledge; chemical messages did not emerge from the steam of the samovar. Throughout it all Lenin was an avid cryptographer and observer of Krupskaya’s own skills with enciphering and deciphering messages. In addition to messages hidden in books and correspondence, émigré newspapers often carried cryptic messages in their classifieds, with “expressions understood only by the addressee.”²⁸

Ciphers and codes were a routine part of RSDRP communication with Russia. “The code with Bolshak,” wrote Lenin to the Tver committee in November 1904, “is a Gambetta cipher: the South American states, 34.b and in the middle,” apparently referring to a map in an atlas. “I am sending on Khariton’s keyword,” wrote N. E. Burenin to Krupskaya in May 1905: “I shall encipher in a simple way, starting with the first letter.” Burenin went on to describe the Swedish-Finnish transport and smuggling route and the latest shipment of bombs and revolvers from Bulgaria. A few years later, in November 1909, Lenin received a letter from a party member in Reval suggesting that the two men correspond by chemical underlining in the books written by Lenin’s great rival for control of the Bolshevik fraction, A. A. Bogdanov. “You can encipher in A. Bogdanov’s Empiriomonism,” wrote the correspondent, because “I have the third edition of volume one, the second edition of volume two, and the first edition of volume three.” It was agreed that each would underline in invisible ink the appropriate letters beginning on page 100. In this way the most turgid book on philosophy could become a Bolshevik codebook.²⁹

Censorship and Authority

This pamphlet was written with an eye to the tsarist censorship. Hence, I was not only forced to confine myself strictly to an exclusively theoretical, particularly economic analysis of facts, but to formulate the few necessary observations on politics with extreme caution, by hints, in an allegorical language—in that accursed Aesopian language—to which tsarism compelled all revolutionaries to have recourse whenever they took up their pens to write a “legal” work.

—V. I. LENIN, introduction to Imperialism Petrograd, April 1917

What was the system of censorship with which Lenin and the Bolsheviks had to cope before 1917? Throughout the nineteenth century the Imperial Russian government had established elaborate censorship controls over all private printing presses in order to ensure that forbidden words concerning religion or politics did not reach the literate public. This goal was accomplished by preventing before publication the appearance of any words unacceptable to the censor in a manuscript. The censor himself was often a writer working for the government. Having discovered forbidden words, the censor might forward them to a superior for possible judgment or prosecution in the courts. Or he might simply issue a warning to the editor or the writer. He might also order a journal closed down. In any event, under preventive censorship the crucial period in a book’s publication was the period immediately prior to its printing, when the author sought to evade the censor by providing an acceptable, yet still radical, text for publication.

Until 1905 the relevant censorship guidelines were set down in the Censorship Statute issued by the Minister of the Interior in 1865 during the Great Reforms of Tsar Alexander II. The statute provided two broad categories of censorship: one for religious works, which came under the jurisdiction of the Ecclesiastical Censorship of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, and another for secular writings. If a work was considered religious in content, it underwent stricter surveillance and prepublication review. The Ministry of the Interior kept a general catalogue of “forbidden books,” not unlike the Index of the Catholic Church in Western Europe.

Length, rather than brevity, was advisable in any book. The longer the text, the less severe the censorship, on the assumption that the readership was small for a long book and large for a short book. The 1865 statute exempted from preliminary censorship “all original writings consisting of no fewer than ten printed signatures [galley proof pages]” and “all translations consisting of no fewer than twenty printed signatures.”³⁰ As a consequence, Lenin and other Russian Marxists became adept at writing long books of apparently dry and harmless content under a legal pseudonym.

The 1905 revolution in Russia broadened considerably the freedom available to Russian writers, editors, and publishers. At first the Ministry of the Interior, which controlled both the police and the censorship, simply forbade any unauthorized news about the “worker question” in 1905, a year of tumultuous political strikes and labor unrest that began with the Bloody Sunday demonstration of January 22, 1905. Nevertheless, a flood of illegal publications began to inundate Russiaas the year wore on. Although the October Manifesto, which prom-ised representative government and civil rights in Russia, did not alleviate the censorship, printers, publishers, and booksellers lobbied extensively for greater freedom and less censorship. Amid a wave of mass protests and strikes at the end of the year 1905, they boycotted publications approved by the censor and published uncensored books themselves.

After the disturbances of late 1905, the Russian censorship virtually collapsed. Printers in cities had been especially active in strikes and trade unions that year and provided a literate vanguard for labor disorders. As a result, the system of preliminary censorship that had been in effect gave way to a less organized strategy—to prosecute writers, editors, and printers after publication, rather than before. Between October 1905 and December 1906, the Chief Administration of Press Affairs closed down 371 periodicals and 97 printing plants; in the courts prosecution of censorship cases led to 607 fines or jail sentences for publishers, editors, and writers. Thus, the censorship continued to function after 1905, but without stricter prepublication controls.

New censorship conditions demanded a new strategy of censorship evasion. Collections of articles by different authors were easier to publish, and more difficult to prosecute, than books by a single author. When thousands of copies of an undesirable book were published, they were subject to confiscation and destruction. More than 350 new publishing houses sprang up between 1905 and 1909, many of them “flying operations” that printed a few pamphlets before being closed down. The same publishing enterprise often bore several different names, as did radical newspapers, in order to confuse the censor and the police. Texts were printed at one plant and book covers at another; the real printer’s name and address were usually falsified or omitted. Literary and philosophical titles were given to political texts. Despite such strategies, the police continued to deal harshly with the outpouring of publications that characterized Russian society after 1905.³¹

The Bolsheviks operated within the legal limits of the censorship, as well as outside them. Censors kept a “systematic index” of all literature confiscated each year, including works by Lenin and other Russian revolutionaries.³² Bookstores sympathetic to the radical movement were raided by the police; apartments were searched; illegal books and pamphlets were seized and destroyed. The crackdown became particularly intense after the June 1907 establishment of greater restrictions on political activity by Prime Minister P. A. Stolypin. The danger of arrest and heightened censorship drove Lenin back into his Geneva exile after an attempt to publish his collected writings through the Zerno house in November 1907 led to their confiscation by the police.³³

By 1904 Lenin already had considerable experience dealing with the Russian police and censorship. He was a frequent user of Aesopian language, pseudonyms, allegory, ciphers, and codes in both correspondence and book publishing. Lenin’s techniques of writing adapted Marxism to Russian conditions, and placed a peculiar stamp on Bolshevik writing and political language that has persisted into the Soviet period. Given a world of double meanings, legal and illegal, permissible and impermissible, any political text could be understood only by its context known to the alert reader. Bolshevik political language consisted not of statements of truth, but allegories of deception, and Lenin’s writings remain enigmatic and cryptographic to the uninitiated.

Yet Lenin was not the only architect of Bolshevik political language, which often carried messages to a much broader and less informed public. Lenin’s texts were written for the alert reader, usually a party member. Other Bolsheviks developed a different type of political discourse, the language of useful myth. They sought to convey their own collectivist philosophy, not Lenin’s authority, to the urban and rural masses of Russia in order to mobilize them to action. The language was often Marxist, but combined with popular and religious motifs. Myth was a powerful element in Russian folk culture, as well as a tactic of European syndicalism. And in 1904 the Bolsheviks most attentive to the use of myth to mobilize the masses of Russia were V. A. Posse and V. D. Bonch-Bruevich, not Lenin. Through Posse and Bonch-Bruevich the legal Marxist and Aesopian techniques of Russian literature were transformed into the collectivist propaganda of Bolshevism.

V. A. Posse and the Syndicalist Myth

From its inception Marxism was haunted by the specter of anarchism, and then syndicalism. Marxism placed great emphasis on authority, consciousness, and science in its claim to predict the ineluctable process of class struggle and revolution in history. Yet the dream of a world without property and state authority persisted in the ideas of Pierre Proudhon, Michael Bakunin, and Georges Sorel, radical thinkers who stressed not the determinate forces of history and social classes, but the spontaneous revolutionary actions of individuals. What Marx called pejoratively “utopian” socialism, as opposed to “scientific,” remained a prominent current of European socialist and radical thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of its central tenets was that socialism was not a scientific truth contained in books, but a collective myth based on the experience of individuals. Upon this distinction rested a crucial difference between Lenin and the other Bolsheviks in matters of political language. Lenin wished to reach party workers through books and esoteric correspondence; other Bolsheviks hoped to convert the Russian masses to Marxism through a more popular literature of socialist myth.

The distinction was not new. Marxist authority, defined in texts, always had its rivals in anarchist spontaneity, articulated in myth and in deed. But for Marx and Engels, authority was essential to the organization of the class struggle against the powers of capitalism.

“As soon as something displeases the Bakuninists,” wrote Friedrich Engels in 1871, “they say it’s authoritarian, and thereby imagine they have damned it forever.” For Marx and Engels, the making of a revolution demanded authority, precisely the element lacking in the Paris Commune of 1871. As Engels put it in criticizing “Pope” Bakunin in 1872:

Do what you like with authority, etc., after the victory but for the struggle we must unite all our forces in one fascio and concentrate them at one point of attack. And when I am told that authority and centralization are two things that should be condemned under all possible circumstances, it seems to me that those who say so either do not know what a revolution is, or are revolutionaries in name only.

Authority, claimed Engels, was crucial to revolutionary organization, and those socialists who raised the banner of antiauthoritarianism were simply confused admirers of the mythical general strike.³⁴

Around 1900 the anarchist movement that spawned individual violence against heads of state began to give way in Europe to a new and more collectivist workers movement known as syndicalism. Based on the emerging French trade union (syndicat) movement, syndicalism attacked Marxism for its incessant failure to produce a revolutionary catastrophe, and for the tendency of many socialists to urge a policy of gradual parliamentary reform that might win from capitalism through the legislative assembly what workers failed to win in the streets. The centerpiece of syndicalism was the general strike, that national refusal of workers to tolerate evil labor conditions, which would paralyze capitalist society and lead ultimately to a confederation of labor unions capable of replacing the state.

One rebel against Marxist orthodoxy and authority was Georges Sorel. Like Eduard Bernstein, Sorel in 1899 was highly critical of the Marxist tendency to theory rather than action. “It is one thing,” he wrote, “to make social science and another to inspire men’s spirits.” Socialism as a doctrine, felt Sorel, was “finished,” unless it could provide tangible successes in the war on capitalism. Such successes could be attained, Sorel came to believe, only through a sustained effort by workers to achieve the general strike, a mythical goal that could inspire revolutionary action even without concrete and present results.³⁵

Sorelian syndicalism as it emerged after 1900 in Europe was more a doctrine about the proletariat than for it. Much of syndicalism was confined to the pages of socialist journals, where the violent strikes of the day were chronicled. Syndicalism, like Marxism, was a doctrine created by bourgeois intellectuals. But syndicalism differed from Marxism in two respects: first, it emphasized action by workers, not words by politicians; second, syndicalism was tolerant of, rather than hostile toward, the church and religion, including Catholicism. For syndicalists, the collective belief in revolutionary myth, rather than individual knowledge of revolutionary doctrine, drove men toaction.

Georges Sorel called for a new war against the state led by an elite of socialist monks providing new moral values for the masses. He opposed the primacy of politics represented by Jacobin authority, the “Blanquist conspiracy” led by “red Jesuits.” Sorel also opposed the politics of parliamentary participation, with its endless debates and inaction. The proper mission of syndicalism, felt Sorel, was to produce a new proletarian culture with the aid of self-sacrificing heroes in search of surrogate immortality. Their goal was an entirely new set of values that could transcend those of bourgeois society, and their means was the general strike.

We shall have ample opportunity to return to syndicalism in the pages that follow. For the moment, suffice it to say that around 1900 syndicalism began penetrating Russia through the pages of legal Marxist and socialist journals. Among them was the journal Zhizn’ (Life) edited by V. A. Posse, an important forerunner of Bolshevism and its political language. Posse was a radical journalist who had passed through the usual phases of Populism and Marxism only to end up as a leading propagator of syndicalism. His journal, Zhizn’, was originally published legally in St. Petersburg at a time when both Populists and Marxists discovered the potential of the “revolutionary proletariat” of Russia’s burgeoning towns and cities.³⁶

In the early 1890s Posse studied at the University of Jena, where he imbibed the scientific “monism” of the German Darwinian Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel was a widely read popularizer of the biological sciences who argued that all matter, organic and inorganic, was connected in a single whole that could be defined on an elaborate scale of evolutionary progress. Like Aleksander Bogdanov, Posse came to Marxism from a background in medicine and biology, and his organic metaphors persisted even as his doctrinal enthusiasms changed.

By the late 1890s Posse was making a living as a journalist in St. Petersburg writing for the journal Nachalo (Beginning), edited by P. B. Struve and funded by the wealthy patroness of radical causes Aleksandra Mikhailovna Kalmykova. Among his cojournalists were the venerable G. V. Plekhanov and the young Lenin. In 1898 Posse founded Zhizn’ and was able to attract a number of good writers to it, including Maxim Gorky. Posse’s editing policies produced constant brushes with the Russian censorship, and a sharp eye for the useful application of Aesopian language.

In 1901 Posse shifted his published operations abroad to escape the censorship. In search of money and contributors, he operated first from London, then Paris, and finally in 1902, Geneva, where he met Lenin.

Before leaving London, Posse discovered V. D. Bonch-Bruevich and through him Tolstoyanism and the antistate proclivities of the Russian sectarians and Old Believers. Bonch also put Posse in touch with a young and very wealthy Russian couple, Grigorii Arkadevich Kuklin, age 21, and his wife Maria, age 25; Kuklin had recently fled Russia with an enormous library and 100,000 rubles in treasury certificates in order to escape military conscription. After Plekhanov made an unsuccessful attempt to secure the Kuklins’ largesse for Iskra, Bonch persuaded them to aid Posse and Zhizn’. This they did by handing ten thousand rubles to Bonch in a London hotel in order to start a new revolutionary journal directed against the Russian autocracy of Nicholas II, especially by utilizing the dissident religious sects.

Free of censorship and well subsidized, Zhizn’ then reappeared in Paris in the winter of 1901–1902 as an illegal émigré journal. Within a few months it moved to Geneva, where Posse met Lenin: “a man pushing forward and not knowing how to defend himself except by going on the attack,” recalled Posse. To Posse, Lenin seemed like some kind of mystic sectarian, a khlyst perhaps, whose asceticism was exceeded only by his total self-confidence and self-assurance. Both Bonch and Posse were impressed by Lenin, whose Jacobinism and drive for revolutionary organization seemed more fruitful than the sporadic political terror of the peasant-oriented Social Revolutionaries. Not surprisingly, the attraction the Zhizn’ circle held for Lenin at this time was not its ideas, since he disdained both syndicalism and religion, but Posse’s money acquired from the Kuklins. Zhizn’ claimed to be a “social democratic” journal, but its central mission was to galvanize the “revolutionary proletariat” into action. Its articles were eclectic and included essays by Marx, the French syndicalist Hubert Lagardelle, the socialist Jules Guesde, and Wilhelm Liebknecht. Songs and poems illustrated the appeal of proletarian culture, and the strike movement in Europe, America, and Russia was chronicled in detail.

As an émigré journal, Zhizn’ operated outside the Russian censorship and carried on a running battle against it. “The censored Russian press,” it wrote, “does not reflect, but covers up, real life. It does not enlighten, but deceives, the reader.”³⁷ Aesopian strategies of legal Marxism were no longer necessary; the goal of Zhizn’ was to reach a broad popular peasant and proletarian audience of readers that would some day constitute a popular front against the hated Russian government. Through its pages ran a spontaneous enthusiasm for the role of strikes in building worker solidarity and pointing the way toward a collectivist society of altruism and self-sacrifice.

In Paris, Posse encountered a number of French syndicalists, including Hubert Lagardelle. Posse promptly commissioned Lagardelle to write an essay for Zhizn’ on the need for antiwar propaganda among French troops; the army, wrote Lagardelle, was like a vampire, sucking the blood of the very workers who composed it.³⁸ In addition, Posse was able to use the Paris editorial offices of Lagardelle’s journal, Le Mouvement Socialiste, to receive letters and manuscripts.

Posse favored the ultimate abolition of all private property and the establishment of some form of workers’ control over factories, a view common among European syndicalists of the day. He gradually moved away from socialism and Marxism, to which he had never adhered in any very orthodox fashion, toward what he called communism, a federation of proletarian communes, no conscription, and a general strike in the event of a world war. For Posse, the great enemy was the state, and its overthrow demanded a broad front of social groups acting collectively. After the 1917 Russian Revolution, Posse compared his own views with Lenin’s State and Revolution; Bonch referred to Posse as “our anarcho-Bolshevik.” In fact, Posse’s ideas reflected the growing syndicalist movement of Western Europe.

As a syndicalist, Posse emphasized direct action through the general strike. In October 1902, when Geneva streetcar workers began a strike that nearly paralyzed the city, closing factories, transportation, and newspapers, Posse was elated. The idea of an international general strike, he wrote, did not seem so impossible a dream now. The key to success was organization of the workers, wrote Posse, not through a political party, but through the experience of the general strike. “Successful general strikes,” he concluded, “need the organization of the working class, but such organization itself develops most rapidly out of ‘general strikes.’”³⁹ Not the imposition of authority, but the experience of action would transform worker energy into solidarity and organization.

However much they wanted his money, the Bolsheviks were generally suspicious of Posse’s ideas at first. Gorky felt that Posse was mistaken in thinking that, as émigré writers, “we can successfully play the game of Herzen and Bakunin.”⁴⁰ An old friend of Posse, Gorky refused to join him in emigration. Plekhanov was equally hostile to Posse’s interest in religion. “Zhizn’,” Plekhanov wrote Lenin, “on almost every page talks about Christ and religion. In public I shall call it an organ of Christian socialism.”⁴¹ Politically, Plekhanov felt that Posse had not supported Iskra in its battle with the rival social democratic journal Rabochee Delo (Workers’ cause) and should be punished for such heresy. Yet Lenin did not at the time share Plekhanov’s hostility to Zhizn’, and remained interested in both its syndicalism and its money.

In late December 1901 the Zhizn’ publishing operation was liquidated and its assets divided. Kuklin, still in possession of at least twenty-five thousand rubles, agreed to subsidize a project of Posse to publish popular socialist pamphlets as a “library of the Russian proletariat,” using the Zhizn’ printing press; Bonch-Bruevich, on the other hand, had become enthusiastic about the émigré RSDRP circle in Geneva, including Lenin and Krupskaya, and wanted to transfer Zhizn’ operations over to Iskra. Lenin, eager to obtain a printing press and a “slush fund,” agreed to print some of Bonch’s essays on the Russian sectarians in Iskra; he also hoped to obtain access to the Zhizn’ network of distribution inside Russia.⁴²

The split between Posse and Bonch led to the organization in 1903–1904 of the very first Bolshevik publishing operation by Bonch and Lenin. Posse, with the aid of Kuklin’s money, printed a monumental book entitled The Theory and Practice of Proletarian Socialism (1905), in which he articulated his syndicalist theories of the “expropriation of the expropriators,” the general strike, proletarian solidarity, and a Russian “communist party” that would include the Social Revolutionaries.⁴³ Rejected by Russian social democrats, Posse continued his publishing operations after 1905 with Kuklin’s support but remained an isolated propagator of syndicalist and communist ideas quite removed from the Russian socialist and labor movements. He died in 1940. But his interest in syndicalism was not lost on Lenin and the other Bolsheviks.

V. D. Bonch-Bruevich and the Language of God

“What do you think of Bonch?” Lenin wrote Plekhanov in January 1903. “Our ‘net gain’ was just the two of them—not very much! There is the liquidator (see Zhizn’ No. 6) Mr. Kuklin. Make his acquaintance through Bonch—couldn’t we squeeze something out of him?” Surely, mused Lenin, Kuklin ought to come up with ten thousand rubles or so just because Lenin had defended Zhizn’ in the past year from attacks by other social democrats. If Iskra needed money, here was a likely source.⁴⁴

Vladimir Dmitrievich Bonch-Bruevich (1873–1955) was a Russian scholar in exile who had spent most of his life studying the writings of Leo Tolstoy and the life of Russian religious sects.⁴⁵ A quiet intellectual, Bonch’s main occupation was the publication and distribution of books to the peasant masses of Russia. Like Krupskaya, Bonch had been a follower of Tolstoy in the 1890s and had helped in the illegal distribution of works such as The Kingdom of God Is within You in Moscow and the provinces. His interest in religious publications had gotten him into trouble with the censorship even as a teenager, and he had already been arrested and exiled as a result. In 1899 Bonch left Russia and traveled to Canada, where he lived among the Dukhobors and other sectarians whose refusal to pay taxes or serve in the army made them anathema to the Imperial Russian government and drove them abroad. In his writings for Posse and Zhizn’ Bonch continued to focus on those dissident religious groups in Russian society who proved willing atgreat personal risk to put the law of God above the laws of Nicholas II. Like Lenin, Bonch saw in Russian sectarians a valuable revolutionaryally.

Marxism as a doctrine of social revolution placed its hopes on the urban proletariat, not the peasantry. Yet Russian Populists, and Lenin after them, recognized the key role of the peasant in any revolutionary enterprise, in the best tradition of Stenka Razin and Pugachev. They noted the violent alienation of the Old Believers from the official state church, dating from the seventeenth century, and sought to turn it to their own revolutionary purposes. Russian religious dissent appealed to Bolshevism even before that movement had acquired a name.

In 1901 Bonch settled among the Russian socialist émigrés of Geneva and became secretary of a new Russian museum which sought to collect the memoirs, correspondence, and other writings of Russian revolutionaries. He also became involved in the production of Zhizn’ where he wrote articles on the sectarians. In them Bonch noted the importance of Aesopian language as a means for circumventing the censorship and reaching a broad audience. Russia, he wrote, was in a revolutionary mood, and would soon produce a “street battle of an awakened people.”⁴⁶ To arouse the masses required a new political language that would appeal to their religious instincts and turn them against the state. Socialists could organize the people by persuading them that the government was “Satan” and that “all men are brothers” in the eyes of God. Social democrats must go to the villages and win over the sectarians to their cause with pamphlets that the people could understand in their own language. Secret and illegal congresses of Old Believers were now being held annually, and sects like the Stundists and Dukhobors were subject to increasing police surveillance and persecution. The result was a unique opportunity for Russian social democrats to spread propaganda in the Russian countryside.⁴⁷

In 1902 Lenin persuaded Bonch that Iskra and the RSDRP had a brighter future than did Posse’s tiny circle, and Bonch left Posse and the Kuklins for his new friends. Lenin was most interested in inheriting the Zhizn’ transport group and its smuggling operations, which he hoped to use for getting Iskra into Russia. He was less interested in Bonch’s plan for a Russian library of revolutionary books and periodicals, but agreed to print Bonch’s essays on the sectarians in Iskra.⁴⁸

Out of their publishing operation emerged Bolshevism. In August 1903 the famous second congress of the RSDRP assembled in London, and produced the well-known split between the Menshevik supporters of Martov and the Bolshevik supporters of Lenin. One resolution, drafted by Lenin and Plekhanov and approved by the congress, stated that Bonch would edit an RSDRP journal directed toward the sectarians under the control of the Iskra editorial board.⁴⁹ The resultant journal, Rassvet (Dawn), appeared in January 1904 in Geneva.

In his writings Bonch called on his Russian readers to band together with the RSDRP against the autocracy to obtain a “time of freedom” that would cast off the yoke of age-old authority.⁵⁰ The outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in early 1904 presented a new opportunity for struggle. Posse called for general strikes throughout Russia. The crucial point, wrote Bonch, was to exhort the sectarians in a political language that they could comprehend:

If the proletarian-sectarian in his speech requires the word ‘devil’, then identify this old concept of an evil principle with capitalism, and identify the word ‘Christ’, as a concept of eternal good, happiness, and freedom, with socialism.⁵¹

The masses, Bonch argued, were inherent believers in religious myth; throughout history people had engaged in “god creation” (bogotvorenie) to sustain their spiritual life. According to sectarian psychology, Christ was not a single individual but a “collective concept.” Socialists should appeal to this religious collectivism in their writings.

In addition to Rassvet, Bonch and Lenin established a “Library and Archive of the RSDRP” in Geneva.⁵² They quickly set about collecting materials, opening a reading room, and providing a socialist meeting place for exiled Russians. Most European cities had their Russian colony of students and political exiles, where libraries and reading rooms provided a political focus and attracted police attention. In the Geneva library Lenin could immerse himself in the writings of Russian revolutionary and Populist thinkers, among them Tkachev and Sergei Nechaev, Jacobin and terrorist leaders of the previous generation. He could scan the writings of Marx and Engels, Guesde and Lassalle, Kautsky and Plekhanov, along with runs of revolutionary journals, such as Nabat and Obshchina. With the aid of Kuklin, who donated much of his own library, the collection by 1905 contained 4,760 volumes and 2,000 documents.

In June 1904 the Menshevik-dominated central committee of the RSDRP decided to cease publication of Rassvet, but Lenin and Bonch refused. “I consider the closing of Rassvet premature,” wrote Lenin, “and I propose to continue the experiment.”⁵³ Bonch and Lenin now established their own publishing operation, “Vladimir Bonch Bruevich and N. Lenin, Publishers.” Supported by Kuklin’s money, they were also able to gain control of the library and archive.

By the autumn of 1904 Lenin had been ousted from the editorial board of Iskra. In the name of “the majority,” Lenin and Bonch brought out a series of political pamphlets by newly acquired supporters such as A. A. Lunacharsky and A. A. Bogdanov.⁵⁴ They also used the library as a base for distributing party literature to be smuggled into Russia, and issued a bulletin to solicit new acquisitions. In the meantime Iskra refused to publish Bolshevik resolutions, and Bolshevik publications claimed to represent the RSDRP.

Bolshevism was not yet an organized faction. Rather, it was a loosely associated group of Geneva Russian socialists. Only in the winter of 1904—1905 would the Bolsheviks, with the aid of Gorky’s money, acquire their own journal. Vpered (Forward). Until then they remained a library, a restaurant, and a small publishing house. In January 1905 Bonch left Geneva and returned to Russia. He traveled from town to town setting up yet another publishing operation for the RSDRP, a series of legal publications also entitled Zhizn’ printed in Berlin. Income went into the party treasury. Assisted by Gorky and his friends I. P. Ladyzhnikov and K. P. Piatnitsky, Bonch’s enterprise became a valuable Bolshevik book outlet and source of funds in the lean years after the 1905 revolution. In 1906 Bonch opened a publishing house in St. Petersburg also named Vpered and a bookstore, both linked to the central committee of the RSDRP through the revolutionary engineer Leonid Krasin. In addition to these publishing operations, Bonch continued to pursue his scholarly investigation of Russian religious sects, and to note the link between religious mysticism and communism, the “Christian communism” of the Russian villages and the future world of socialism.⁵⁵

V. I. Lenin and V. D. Bonch-Bruevich, Moscow, October 1918. From Vospominaniia V. I. Lenina (Moscow, 1979), supplement.

Between 1907 and 1917 Bonch lost contact with Lenin, despite Bonch’s role in Bolshevik publishing operations, such as the journals Zvezda (Star) and Prosveshchenia (Enlightenment) in St. Petersburg. Only in 1917 did they renew acquaintances when Bonch allowed Lenin to use his St. Petersburg address for conspiratorial correspondence. After the revolution Bonch served as administrative secretary of the National Economic Council (Sovnarkom). Ironically this gentle advocate of religious community and collectivism also became one of the chief architects of the cult of the individual hero Lenin. At Lenin’s 1924 funeral Bonch arranged the details, chose the inscription over the mausoleum, and orchestrated the great outpouring of portraits, films, photographs, and sculpture of the dead leader.⁵⁶

As for Bonch’s pet project, the Geneva party library, most of it vanished into the hands of Lenin and Krupskaya, despite the fact that it was established under the auspices of the RSDRP central committee. When Lenin left Geneva for St. Petersburg in the autumn of 1905 he was concerned about the fate of this remarkable collection of materials on the Russian revolutionary movement, many of them bibliographical rarities, preserving the Populist and Jacobin world of his brother Alexander. Books and periodicals were packed into 132 boxes in Geneva in the winter of 1905—1906 and shipped off to Stockholm for safekeeping by Swedish socialists sympathetic to the Bolsheviks. A suitcase of rare manuscripts remained in Geneva, and was removed by Lenin to Paris in December 1910. Both ultimately found their way to Russia after 1917.⁵⁷ Ironically, this library was the property of the wealthy young patron of Posse and Bonch-Bruevich, Kuklin, who died in May 1907, not realizing that his books and his money had become resources of the Bolsheviks in their war of words on Tsarist autocracy.

Lenin and Bonch represented two forms of political language crucial to Bolshevism in its early years. From Populism Lenin borrowed techniques of Aesopian and cryptographic communication useful for initiates of a revolutionary party where only the alert reader would discern the plaintext meaning of a secret language in code and cipher. Cryptography, the handmaiden of war and diplomacy, became the servant of revolution. From European syndicalism and Russian religious sectarianism Posse and Bonch derived a tradition of mythmaking, of quasireligious collectivism designed for the masses.

From the beginning Bolshevik political language consisted of both authoritarian orthodoxy and ever-changing myth, different techniques for converting mass spontaneity into party consciousness. Lenin sought an esoteric language for a party elite; Bonch espoused an exoteric language for believers in a common religious culture. Both strategies contained elements of Marxism, Populism, and syndicalism, and their fusion enabled Lenin and the other Bolsheviks to build a new political organization for the new twentieth century. In the beginning was the word, and the word became the party, but in neither case was Lenin the arbiter of his own movement, Bolshevism.