Lenin’s Geneva

Lenin, upon arriving in Geneva, discovered immediately that the Swiss lakeside city was full of syndicalist, anarchist, and Bolshevik exiles determined to carry on revolutionary activity from abroad. Many were Georgians. In the 1890s Russian anarchists, led by an Armenian doctor, Alexander Atabekian, had established an Anarchist Library in Geneva and published the works of Bakunin and Kropotkin. In August 1903 a group of young followers of Kropotkin established a journal, Khleb i volia (Bread and freedom), under the leadership of another refugee from the Caucasus, G. Gogelia (pseudonym K. Orgeiani), his wife, Lydia, and Maria Korn (Goldschmidt). From Geneva they smuggled their literature into Russia, and in 1905 became excited about the possibilities for “revolutionary syndicalism” inside the country.⁶

The leading Georgian Bolshevik was Mikhail Grigor’evich Tskhakaya. Born in 1865, Tskhakaya was the son of a priest, attended the Tiflis Seminary, and passed through the familiar route from Populism to Marxism in the 1890s. In 1891 he had established a commune in Tiflis with Maxim Gorky, before becoming active in the Georgian nationalist party, Mesami Dasi, and the RSDRP. In 1903 Tskhakaya worked closely with Krasin to establish a printing press and distribution network for Iskra, having just returned from five years of prison and exile. He attended both the third and fifth RSDRP congresses, and by 1908 was the senior leader of the Georgian Bolsheviks.⁷

Links between the Geneva and Caucasus Bolsheviks emerged in late 1904, as the Georgians felt especially pressed by the more popular Menshevik leadership in Georgia. Among the Georgians with whom Lenin and Krupskaya corresponded that winter was Joseph Stalin (Dzhugashvili), then a young seminarian in the Bolshevik underground cooperating with Vpered. Stalin did not attend the third RSDRP congress in London in April 1905, but Tskhakaya did; as the oldest delegate (age 40) he gave the opening speech. The freebooter style of Georgian politics was revealed by his comment: “Whoever heard of anyone voting in the Caucasus! We settle all our business in a comradely way. Five of us have been sent and the number of mandates doesn’t matter.” Democracy having been thus brushed aside, the Georgian Bolsheviks soon became leaders in the major underground activity of Bolshevism: expropriation.⁸

The Stockholm congress explicitly rejected “the expropriation of money from private banks as well as all forms of compulsory contributions for revolutionary purposes.” The London congress also resolved that the party must conduct an “energetic struggle against partisan activities and expropriations,” and disband all “fighting squads.” These resolutions had little effect on the Bolshevik Center, which continued its underground operations from Geneva.⁹

Even before Lenin arrived in Geneva the other Bolsheviks had established their own journal, Raduga, published from June 1907 until February 1908. Financed by a wealthy Armenian sympathizer, the journal had a syndicalist tone and involved most of the other Bolsheviks, including Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Shantser, and Gorky. Stanislav Volsky drew particular attention to revolutionary syndicalism as an “attack from the left” to which Marxists would have to respond without acquiring syndicalism’s “anarchist residue.” A substantial collection of stories, essays, and philosophical musings, Raduga only caught Lenin’s attention in the late summer of 1907; as of October he still had not contributed to the main Bolshevik journal in Geneva.¹⁰

In the spring of 1908 Lenin was in a difficult position. His writings were being confiscated and destroyed throughout Russia by police. Old philosophical differences with Bogdanov and the other Bolsheviks were reappearing, and the familiar life of a political exile was depressing. Even his own Bolshevik fraction was drifting away toward relativism and syndicalism. Gorky’s support for Bogdanov was especially troubling. “I am deeply convinced that you are wrong,” Lenin wrote Gorky in late March 1908; Bogdanov’s ideas were hostile, philistine, and priestly “from start to finish, from Mach to Avenarius.” Philosophical neutrality was no longer possible. A battle among the Bolsheviks was “absolutely inevitable.” Lenin wrote that it would be “useless” for him even to visit Gorky on Capri as long as Bogdanov was there; “I cannot and will not confer with people who are allowed to give sermons on the unity of scientific socialism and religion.” Party affairs must be kept separate from philosophy. Lenin planned to publish a “formal declaration of war” against the other Bolsheviks. Yet he still held out hope of a conference on Capri, but “only on the condition that I will not speak about philosophy and religion.”¹¹

Lenin was in a quandary. The twenty-fifth anniversary of Marx’s death prompted him to write an essay attacking revisionism in general and Bogdanov in particular as a “neo-mystical and neo-Berkeleyan revisionist,” a characterization borrowed from Plekhanov. He also alluded to political “revisionism of the left,” the revolutionary syndicalism of Arturo Labriola and Lagardelle, without mentioning Lunacharsky by name. Yet the very people he was attacking were the members of his own fraction, and valuable contributors to Proletarii. Without them Lenin was virtually a man without a party, “reading the accursed Machists for days on end” and trying to understand the defection of the other Bolsheviks.¹²

On April 19, 1908, Lenin wrote a final letter to Gorky, his last for eighteen months, and set out to confront his Bolshevik rivals on the island of Capri. Ostensibly the major differences were philosophical and political. But money played a central role in the impending separation of Lenin and the other Bolsheviks.

The Isle of Capri

“You must help me entice Lenin to come to Capri,” Gorky wrote Lunacharsky in January 1908. “By the way, do you have his address?” Gorky was currently more fascinated with the syndicalism of Lunacharsky and the imaginative philosophy of Bogdanov, recently expressed in his utopian novel Red Star, than he was in Lenin. For Gorky the important Bolsheviks were Bogdanov, the “wonderful thinker,” and Lunacharsky, “a living soul.” Bogdanov had recently summoned Gorky to Paris for discussions on the future of Bolshevism, and promised to visit him in Capri as well. Perhaps, Gorky suggested, Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, and Lenin could edit a new journal together.¹³

For this a conference was necessary. In February the Lunacharskys arrived on Capri as Gorky’s houseguests. Invitations went out to Lenin and Bogdanov to join them. But Lenin was being difficult, as usual. He refused to print Gorky’s essay “The Destruction of the Personality” in Proletarii, and replied with a long attack on Bogdanov’s philosophy. Bogdanov, in contrast, had published has collection of essays on Marxist philosophy, which Gorky found to be “superb.” Such Aesopian philosophical works helped fight idealism and mysticism, and could pass the censor without confiscation.¹⁴

In March, Lenin wrote Gorky that his visit to Capri had been delayed by the International Socialist Bureau investigation of the Tiflis Ex. In addition, an RSDRP “court of justice” had been convened on Capri to discuss disputes between Bogdanov and Lenin, presumably over the same matter; Lenin had sent Kamenev and Zinoviev to testify, rather than come himself. In contrast, Gorky recommended to Burenin that he begin reading all of Bogdanov’s works. Both Lunacharsky and Bogdanov were on Capri giving lectures to interested listeners, and Bazarov and Stepanov were on their way. It was time, wrote Gorky, to “summon Il’ich” to Capri.¹⁵

We know that Lenin spent the last seven days of April 1908 at Gorky’s home on Capri, after a train ride from Geneva to Naples and a boat trip to the island, and that the visit was far from idyllic. “I was on the island of Capri in April 1908,” Lenin wrote later, “and declared to all three comrades [Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, and Bazarov] my unconditional disagreement with them on philosophy.” This disagreement undoubtedly extended to politics and money as well. It was a visit punctuated by interminable chess games, acrimonious debate, mutual recrimination, and frequent argument. Finally Lenin told Bogdanov: “I am afraid we will have to separate for two or three years.” For the moment, at least, Lenin and the other Bolsheviks parted ways.¹⁶

Lenin playing chess with A. A. Bogdanov at Maxim Gorky’s house on Capri, 1908. From Vospomintmiia V. I. Lenina (Moscow, 1979), supplement.

Money was a major concern. Lunacharsky went on the lecture circuit to raise funds. Gorky cultivated his musical friends, the conductor Sergei Koussevitsky and the opera singer Fedor Chaliapin, for generous donations. Chaliapin promised to give twelve thousand roubles for a Bolshevik publishing operation, an encyclopedia; Krasin instructed Lunacharsky to collect the money if he could. Gorky’s own publishing operations, the Znanie and Ladyzhnikov houses, were in financial trouble. Ladyzhnikov had to borrow forty thousand marks from a wealthy sympathizer, M. S. Botkina. Matters of financial concern were thus primary during Krasin’s own visit to Capri in mid-June 1908.¹⁷

Gorky was engaged in reading Bogdanov’s voluminous writings, supplemented by the works of Locke, Hume, and Mach. The Russian intelligentsia, he complained, was now hostile to him, perhaps because they had failed the “test of nerves” in 1905. Gorky even expressed dissatisfaction with his own “god-building” novel lspoved (Confession) when it came out in Berlin in August. Alexinsky was asking for money to help a sick comrade; Gorky too complained that he was now “sick as an old dog.” By September 1908 Gorky was proposing that the Bolsheviks establish a “higher party school” on Capri to train Russian party members in philosophy, politics, and underground activity.¹⁸

Gorky also planned to engage the other Bolsheviks in the “collective initiative” of a great Russian encyclopedia and a series of books on Russian culture (the first, by Bogdanov on the “organization of human experience”). Gorky was particularly anxious to help Bogdanov publish his own works and to subsidize Lunacharsky’s new “History of Russian Popular Creativity.” A collection of essays on the philosophy of collectivism was also in the planning stage, half of the income to go to Bogdanov and Lunacharsky. Socialism, felt Gorky, must now be turned into a cult, because “its basic core—man’s consciousness of his connection with the masses—only grows stronger”; socialism was based on a “joyful, active feeling of kinship of all and each with everyone else,” a collective psychology most developed in the proletariat. Individualism, concluded Gorky, must perish.¹⁹

Lenin’s visit to Capri thus marked his isolation from the collectivist endeavors of Gorky and the other Bolsheviks. He was becoming equally isolated from the European socialist community, again over a question of money.

The Fels Loan and the International Socialist Bureau

Upon returning from Capri, Lenin and Krupskaya moved to a new apartment in Geneva on the Rue de Marechet, where they were shortly joined by Krupskaya’s mother and Lenin’s sister Maria. On May 16, 1908, Lenin left for London, where he spent three weeks at the British Museum reading books useful in his impending attack on Bogdanov and his philosophy. Lenin then wrote down a series of nine questions for Bogdanov: Did he recognize that Marxist philosophy was dialectical materialist? Did he realize that behind that theory lay a recognition that the external world existed and was reflected in the human mind? The entire philosophical inquisition was then read aloud on May 28 by Lenin’s proxy, Iosif Dubrovinsky, at a public meeting where Bogdanov and Lunacharsky were speakers. The resultant scandal was duly reported to the Okhrana; Lenin had fired the opening shot in his war on the other Bolsheviks.²⁰

Lenin was also being hounded by the International Socialist Bureau in Brussels to pay off the loan from Joseph Fels that had underwritten the London congress. Completely unexpected expenses and the sad state of party finances made this impossible, replied Lenin. The intelligentsia had deserted the party, and the remaining proletarians could not pay up. Scandal must be avoided at all costs. In addition, Lenin was trying to get funds from Camille Huysmans and the ISB to support Bolshevik delegates in the Duma at home. But Lenin refused even to pay the annual dues to the ISB, so Huysmans understandably withheld ISB support.²¹

By July Huysmans was increasingly perturbed. The Social Revolutionaries had paid their six hundred francs for 1908. Why not the RSDRP? Lenin again demurred. The Fels loan would be discussed at the next central committee plenum in August. In the meantime, payment would have to be delayed. As soon as the central committee met, the dues would be paid immediately. By late September Lenin had managed to send Huysmans six hundred francs (of nine hundred due) so that he was allowed to attend the ISB conference in Brussels in October as the RSDRP representative. Not until January 1909 did Lenin send Huysmans the final three hundred francs.²²

Things were not much better for the Bolsheviks inside Russia. Lenin himself was wanted by the police. RSDRP committees were losing members and divided on the question of whether or not to recall delegates from the Duma. In Moscow the RSDRP recallists (otzouisty), led by Shantser, were especially strong. Stanislav Volsky and other syndicalists were calling for a Bolshevik congress, a change in the Bolshevik Center, and even the expulsion of Lenin. In the summer of 1908 a St. Petersburg district RSDRP committee also voted to recall the Duma delegates. Numerous party conclaves attacked Lenin and the Mensheviks for their parliamentary participation, whereas Bogdanov and the other Bolsheviks found increasing support for their antiparliamentary rhetoric.²³

Litvinov, Krasin, and the Politics of Expropriation

Expropriation was the syndicalist and anarchist term for confiscating private property from the rich and giving it to the deserving collective, the workers. “We must have expropriation,” wrote Peter Kropotkin in 1891, “prosperity for all as an end, expropriation as a means.” For syndicalists and anarchists, expropriation also meant the gradual process of workers’ control over factories and labor unions; for the Bolsheviks, expropriation meant armed robbery.²⁴

In December 1905, a group of Bolsheviks raided a suburban bank near Tiflis and netted over two hundred thousand rubles for the revolutionary cause. Maxim Litvinov used the proceeds to purchase weapons abroad for Bolshevik fighting squads in the Caucasus. Litvinov’s enterprise, directed by Krasin, involved a Georgian connection with Switzerland. Litvinov and “comrades from the Caucasus” operated out of Zurich and Paris, taking orders for rifles from Lenin, getting money from Krasin, and buying weapons in Belgium (with the aid of Huysmans) for dispatch through Bulgaria and Macedonia to Russia. Most shipments followed the southern route to Georgia, from where they were taken to the northern cities as needed.²⁵

During 1906, the Bolsheviks and the Social Revolutionaries engaged in hundreds of robberies throughout Russia. The SRs netted nearly one million rubles in a robbery of the Moscow Mercantile Credit Bank in March, and the same from the Mutual Credit Bank of St. Petersburg in October. Krasin organized a number of “exes” (expropriations) in Tiflis and Baku that year, and Bogdanov some others in the Urals. The most successful Bolshevik bandit was Semen Arshakovich Ter-Petrosyan (1882–1922), alias Kamo. In March 1906, for example, Kamo and his group robbed a bank in Kutais using bombs manufactured in Krasin’s laboratory, killed a horse, wounded a cashier, and escaped with fifteen thousand rubles to Kamo’s apartment. From there the money, hidden in wine bottles, went to St. Petersburg for the Bolsheviks.²⁶

During the summer of 1906 Kamo went on a tour of Western Europe inspecting weapons factories with some Georgians. Together Kamo and Litvinov arranged to run guns through Bulgaria to the Caucasus, using money obtained by Krasin from the Ladyzhnikov publishing house in Berlin to buy weapons in Zurich. Litvinov also purchased a ship to transport the weapons. Shortly thereafter, a mail train robbery near Ufa in the Urals netted another 250,000 rubles, some of which went to the RSDRP central committee, the rest to the regional party organizations. In December 1906, the Paris Okhrana reported that Geneva had become the hub city for a network of gunrunning operations by Georgian and Armenian émigrés. Many of them were Bolsheviks.²⁷

The Bolshevik underground continued to function throughout 1907, despite Okhrana surveillance in Europe and Krasin’s arrest in May on the eve of the Tiflis Ex. But the police were closing in. Krasin’s network of fighting squads, established in 1905, was damaged by more arrests in June (including N. E. Burenin). Nevertheless, in July 1907 Litvinov had 910 cases of rifles and machine guns acquired through another Bolshevik, Ludwig Martens, later the first Soviet representative in the United States in 1919. Tskhakaya and the Geneva Georgians were now running an “Ideological Circle of Bolsheviks in Geneva” whose cover was the journal Raduga, but whose real purpose was to help Bolshevik illegals and their families escape from Russia.²⁸

The final emigration of the Bolshevik underground occurred in the winter of 1907–1908. Russian terror reached into Europe that autumn, when Russian revolutionaries from Geneva tried to rob the bank of Montreux. Anarchists were still sending weapons to Russia via Vienna and Odessa. But these were mere echoes of the violence of 1905. In March 1908 the Okhrana arrested Krasin at his house in Kuokkala, and jailed him in Vyborg; lacking sufficient evidence, the St. Petersburg prosecutor finally released him, and Krasin joined Lenin and the other Bolsheviks in exile. At thirty-eight, he now went to work for the German engineering firm of Siemens and Schukert, without entirely giving up his revolutionary career.²⁹ But the Bolshevik underground was now in exile, its activities and inheritances a matter of high intrigue. The lack of money had nearly been Bolshevism’s undoing in 1904; now the presence of money facilitated its collapse.

Kamo and the Tiflis Ex of 1907

On January 21, 1908, the Swiss Department of Justice reported to the Okhrana that the Geneva police had arrested four young Russian revolutionary exiles with money from a Russian bank holdup. Tipped off by the Munich police, the Swiss picked up Sara Ravich, Tigram Bagdasarian, Migram Khodzhamirian, and Viacheslav Karpinsky—all Bolsheviks associated with “the anarchist journal Raduga in Geneva.” Other arrests quickly followed in Stockholm, Paris, and other European cities. The architects of the Tiflis Ex had been unmasked.³⁰

The robbery of the Tiflis State Bank at 10:30 a.m. on June 12, 1907, caused a sensation in Russia and abroad. The Georgian capital, situated in a narrow valley of the Kura River, was known for its hot sulphur springs, its colorful Armenian and Persian bazaars, and as the headquarters of the first and second Caucasian Army Corps. Its streets were dirty and narrow, even the main Golovinsky Boulevard, which ended abruptly at the city center, Erevan Square.³¹

That morning Phaeton No. 155, an armed stagecoach with two bank officials and a convoy of four Cossacks, was bringing a load of bank notes, coins, and currency to the building on Erevan Square. A second Phaeton followed with three army officers and three additional Cossacks. Crossing Erevan Square they were suddenly assaulted by eight bombs thrown from different positions in the street and on rooftops. Amidst the panic of screaming and bleeding horses and bystanders, the armed robbers drove off with the lead Phaeton and 260,000 rubles in bank notes. The leader of the band, disguised as an observant police officer, quietly left dozens of severely wounded and dead citizens and rejoined his group. A few days later he left for Finland and with the loot stashed in lady’s clothing for its final destination—Lenin and the Bolshevik Center.³²

Since 1905 the mastermind of the Tiflis Expropriation, S. A. Ter-Petrosyan, alias Kamo, had been robbing banks around Tiflis under the direction of Krasin in order to raise money for the Bolsheviks. At first the police suspected the Social Revolutionaries. By July, the Okhrana was systematically watching all Georgians leaving Geneva for the Caucasus in the belief that they were involved. Kamo, having left the money for laundering with Krasin, joined Bogdanov, and Lenin in Kuokkala. He arrived unscathed in Berlin on September 28 under the alias Mirsky. He then moved on to Vienna, Belgrade, Sofia, and Zurich to meet with Maxim Litvinov, continually watched by the police who described him as “an extremely active and bold revolutionary terrorist, highly valued by all the Bolsheviks, even Lenin and ‘Nikitich’ [Krasin].” On November 9, 1907, Kamo was arrested in Berlin with dynamite hidden under his apartment floorboards, but no money from the Tiflis Ex. Where had it gone?³³

Police photograph of Kamo, Berlin, 1908. From L. Shaumian, Kamo (Moscow, 1958).

On November 13, 1907, the Paris Okhrana reported to St. Petersburg that the Tiflis Ex proceeds had all been shipped to “the Bolsheviks, and particularly into the hands of the well-known Krasin and Lenin (Ulianov).” No money had gone to the Mensheviks, who demanded that those involved be expelled from the RSDRP. Krasin, the Okhrana concluded, was “the soul of the whole business,” and Kamo was his willing accomplice. The Georgian Bolsheviks in Geneva were clearly involved (Tskhakaya and Raduga were mentioned by name), and the money was being laundered through the Ladyzhnikov publishing house in Berlin. The Okhrana predicted that the Bolsheviks would try to cash the Tiflis Ex bank notes in Europe in January 1908, precisely the time of Lenin’s arrival in Geneva.³⁴

In December 1907, the Bolsheviks shipped the bank notes from the Tiflis Ex into Europe, but were betrayed to the Okhrana by a provocateur, Ya. A. Zhitomirsky. Zhitomirsky, a medical student, was a member of the RSDRP in Berlin. He had also been receiving 250 marks a month since 1902 from the Russian police for his reports on the Bolsheviks. As a Bolshevik, Zhitomirsky was involved in weapons smuggling, the London congress, and several RSDRP central committee meetings; he reported everything—including the activities of Kamo—to the Berlin branch of the Okhrana. In December 1907 Zhitomirsky arrived in Berlin from St. Petersburg with some of the Tiflis Ex notes, and was promptly arrested with Kamo by the Berlin police, who hoped to preserve Zhitomirsky’s cover; he was promptly released.³⁵

The Okhrana was thus well prepared when the Bolsheviks, having meticulously forged new numbers on all the five-hundred-ruble bank notes, tried to cash in the Tiflis Ex loot at various European banks in January 1908. At one point fifteen Okhrana agents were tailing the organizer of the affair, Litvinov, who was finally arrested with bank notes in his own possession. But Litvinov was quickly freed because no evidence could be found linking him to the robbery. By late January alert bank tellers in Munich, Berlin, Zurich, and Paris had spotted enough notes on a list circulated by the Okhrana so that a number of Bolshevik agents were under arrest and the RSDRP was in turmoil. Kamo feigned insanity in prison so effectively (proclaiming himself Napoleon, singing German songs, and claiming to have consumed ten thousand gallons of vodka), that he escaped trial, was committed to an asylum in June 1908, and only in October 1909 was turned over to the Russian police and jailed in Tiflis.³⁶

The Tiflis Ex remained a major embarrassment for Lenin and the Bolsheviks throughout 1908. RSDRP party members were arrested in Tiflis, the Bolsheviks had lost a major source of income, and the Mensheviks were attacking them relentlessly for their criminal activities. In March 1908, the Paris RSDRP group resolved to oppose any further expropriations and disclaimed any party responsibility for the Tiflis Ex; twenty-nine members of the “Paris Bolshevik Ideological Group” promptly opposed the resolution. Lenin was trying to spring arrested Bolsheviks from jail with the help of lawyers and the ISB. Krasin and Litvinov were under Okhrana surveillance. All in all, the Tiflis Ex had not so much enriched the Bolshevik treasury as isolated the Bolsheviks as a criminal element within the RSDRP.³⁷

As if the Tiflis Ex affair were not enough, it was quickly followed by another Bolshevik scandal involving substantial sums of money: the Schmidt inheritance.

The Schmidt Inheritance

The Tiflis Ex introduced one discordant note into the relationship between Lenin and the other Bolsheviks; a second financial source of conflict was the Schmidt inheritance. On December 12, 1907, the Okhrana reported from Paris that N. P. Schmidt, having died in his jail cell a few months earlier, had bequeathed nearly a half million rubles to the Bolsheviks via his assistant, M. A. Mikhailov. Schmidt’s younger sisters, Elizabeth, 20, and Ekaterina, 24, had reportedly also been persuaded to turn their shares of the inheritance over to the Bolsheviks. But the inheritance was still in probate in Russia, the sisters appeared to be under some coercion, and it was unclear whether Schmidt intended his inheritance to go to the RSDRP or to the Bolshevik fraction. Again, a substantial sum of money further divided Lenin from the other Bolsheviks.³⁸

At the center of the Schmidt inheritance stood the shadowy figure of Viktor Konstantinovich Taratuta (1881–1929), known in the underground simply as Comrade Viktor. Taratuta’s wife, Olga, was an active anarchist; his nephew Ovsei was involved making bombs in Warsaw and Moscow in 1905. Viktor himself had an apprenticeship in the Jewish Bund, and later in Odessa and Baku branches of the RSDRP. In November 1905 Taratuta escaped from exile and arrived in Moscow, where he met N. P. Schmidt and began courting his sister Elizabeth. By the summer of 1906 Taratuta had become secretary of the RSDRP Moscow committee and was active in the Moscow underground; some socialists suspected that he was actually a police agent. In June 1906 Taratuta went to Odessa to arrange his wife’s release from jail, and in the autumn returned to Moscow amidst rumors that he had arranged to embezzle funds acquired by the Social Revolutionaries. Taratuta was forced out of the Moscow committee and became involved with the Bolsheviks.³⁹

By the winter of 1906–1907 Taratuta was deeply involved in the shadier side of Bolshevik fund raising, together with Bogdanov and Krasin. Generally this meant handling money from the expropriations. But in February 1907, Nikolai Schmidt was found dead in his Moscow jail cell. Suddenly a substantial part of the Morozov family fortune became of great interest to the Bolsheviks.⁴⁰

In prison Schmidt maintained his loyalty to the RSDRP and asked his lawyer and brother-in-law, N. A. Andrikanis, to make sure that in the event of his death all his property would go to the party. The Bolsheviks were determined to lay claim to it themselves. In June 1907, Taratuta, at Lenin’s urging, was elected to the RSDRP central committee. Despite his suspicious background, he spent the summer at Kuokkala with Lenin and Bogdanov while continuing his liaison with Elizabeth Schmidt. He also continued to funnel expropriation money to Bogdanov, while setting his sights on the Schmidt inheritance.⁴¹

In August 1907 Ekaterina Schmidt met Lenin at the Hotel Imperial in Stuttgart “on questions concerning my brother.” Lenin also met with Taratuta in Berlin that month and subsequently in Vyborg at a meeting to discuss the Schmidt inheritance. But in October Andrikanis and Mikhailov visited Gorky at his house on Capri to discuss the Schmidt inheritance, and in December Taratuta emigrated to Paris along with Elizabeth Schmidt. Thus, by the time of the scandal over the Tiflis Ex money in early 1908, it was still unclear who would control the Schmidt inheritance or how it would be exported once probated.⁴²

In May 1908, a Moscow court ruled that the Schmidt inheritance of 257,966 rubles was to be divided equally between the two young sisters, Elizabeth and Ekaterina. Presumably Elizabeth’s share would then be transmitted to the Bolsheviks via Taratuta; Ekaterina, however, was married to Andrikanis, whose political enthusiasms were not Bolshevik. To mediate the dispute over the inheritance, Krasin arranged a court of arbitration in Paris consisting of Social Revolutionaries representing the Bolshevik Center, on the one hand, and Andrikanis, on the other. To complicate the matter further, much additional property—perhaps two or three million rubles in stock and capital—remained with the Moscow court, which had the only legal document, a notarized letter from Schmidt leaving everything to Ekaterina.⁴³

On June 7, 1908, the Paris mediators agreed that Elizabeth’s entire share, 128,983 rubles, would go to the Bolsheviks. Only a part (43,983 rubles) of Ekaterina’s share would go to them, mainly to pay off old debts and legal fees connected with the December 1905 uprising in Schmidt’s factory. But there was another problem. As Krasin wrote Gorky in the autumn of 1908, the Bolsheviks had learned that Elizabeth would not receive any inheritance until and unless she married a “legal” husband, that is, a man not wanted by the Russian police, as Taratuta was. “It would be a real crime for the party,” wrote Krasin, “to lose under such exceptional circumstances just because we could not find a bridegroom.”⁴⁴

The struggle for party funds between Lenin and Taratuta, on the one hand, and Krasin, Gorky, and Bogdanov, on the other, now focused on the Schmidt inheritance. Taratuta attempted to obtain the inheritance for Lenin; Krasin and Bogdanov suspected Taratuta of being a provocateur. Krasin first proposed that Elizabeth marry N. E. Burenin, but Burenin declined. Krasin then suggested Alexander Mikhailovich Ignatiev (1879–1936), a veteran of Krasin’s Bolshevik underground whose father was a general and member of the Imperial State Council. Ignatiev had used his father’s estate in Finland as a staging point for smuggling weapons and literature into St. Petersburg. Having been involved in the Tiflis Ex, Ignatiev was now persuaded by Lenin to engage in another adventure: a fictitious marriage to Elizabeth Schmidt.⁴⁵

On October 24, 1908, Ignatiev and Elizabeth Schmidt were joined in holy matrimony at the Russian Embassy Church in Paris for the sole purpose of transferring Elizabeth’s inheritance to the Bolsheviks. Following the wedding, a St. Petersburg Bolshevik, S. P. Shesternin, withdrew Elizabeth’s inheritance and deposited it in the Credit Lyons Bank, which transferred it to Paris, where Elizabeth withdrew the money and gave it to the Bolsheviks. Taratuta recovered Elizabeth for himself, Ignatiev received funds sufficient to maintain himself in emigration as “Count Ignatiev,” and Lenin named Taratuta to the position of business manager of his Proletarii. Martov and the Mensheviks, of course, were as unhappy about the disposition of the Schmidt inheritance as they were about the Tiflis Ex.⁴⁶

But which Bolsheviks obtained the Schmidt inheritance? In 1909 Lenin refused to give Krasin money owed him from various Russian underground operations, and Krasin allied himself with Bogdanov against Lenin and his Bolshevik Center. Taratuta, in fact, had replaced Krasin as the comptroller of Bolshevik Center finances, bringing with him Elizabeth’s legacy. In addition, Taratuta attempted to recover the second half of the Schmidt inheritance, Ekaterina’s, from her husband, N. A. Andrikanis. By a combination of threats and court action, Taratuta managed in fact to obtain some of these funds. The Schmidt inheritance enabled Lenin to continue publishing Proletarii. It also further widened the gap between Lenin and the other Bolsheviks.⁴⁷

The Schmidt inheritance continued to plague Bolshevism into World War I. By 1912 Taratuta and Elizabeth Schmidt had retired to a quieter life at a San Remo sanatorium run by Plekhanov’s wife, where they raised their two children and gambled at the local casino. Presumably this desertion to the ranks of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by some of the largesse from the Schmidt inheritance. As late as December 1915 the Okhrana reported that the inheritance, by then under the control of three SPD trustees, was known as the “Morozov fund” and was still the object of contention among both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.⁴⁸

The Schmidt inheritance, like the Tiflis Ex money, was an important factor in Lenin’s disputes with the other Bolsheviks in 1908 and 1909. Behind the raging debates on the philosophies of Marxist materialism and empiriocriticism lay the politics of another kind of material: money.

Stalin against Lenin

Both the Tiflis Ex and Schmidt inheritance affairs were echoes of Bolshevik underground operations inside Russia since 1905. As a consequence, Lenin in exile found himself increasingly at odds with those veterans of the underground struggle who were now in prison or exile. One such veteran was Joseph Stalin.

The key link with the Georgian Bolsheviks in Geneva was Tskhakaya. In late July 1908 he received correspondence from jailed comrades in Baku, including Stalin, noting that they were “firmly convinced of the correctness of Ilich’s position” but were also “strongly interested in philosophy,” including the writings of Dietzgen, Plekhanov, and Bogdanov. Stalin called the dispute between Lenin and the other Bolsheviks a “tempest in a teapot,” but admitted that the “positive result” would be a “better acquaintance with the philosophical bases of Marxism.” Stalin also praised Mach’s philosophy, described Mach and Avenarius as “men of science,” and urged the Bolsheviks to develop Marxism “in the spirit of J. Dietzgen, recognizing the good sides of ‘Machism.’ “ Such thoughts could not have pleased Lenin.⁴⁹

Mikha Tskhakaya. From A. V. Maskulia, Mikha Tskhakaia (Moscow 1968).

After attending the London congress, Stalin returned to Baku as a labor organizer. Through Krasin, Stalin may well have been involved in the Tiflis Ex, although there is more speculation and assumption than evidence on this point. At any rate, Stalin in the summer and autumn of 1907 was closer to Krasin and Bogdanov than to Lenin. Like Bogdanov, Stalin felt that the “tide of our revolution is rising and not subsiding.” The underground organizations should be perpetuated, not liquidated. The RSDRP should use the Duma to convince the proletariat of the need for revolutionary violence, such as the strikes in the oil fields of Baku in early 1908. On March 25, 1908, Stalin was arrested, jailed, and then exiled to Siberia, but he remained in contact with the Georgian underground network in Geneva.⁵⁰

In May 1908 Tskhakaya wrote a four-page letter to Stepan Shaumian in Baku attacking Lenin and praising Bogdanov. In it he characterized Lenin as a “right Bundist” who wanted to abandon revolutionary tactics for legal operations; Tskhakaya argued that the Bolsheviks should be “hard as stone” and continue their illegal work, guided by the “brilliant philosophical work of Bogdanov, Bazarov, and Lunacharsky.” In November Shaumian wrote Tskhakaya that he had convinced the Baku Bolsheviks that Bogdanov was “really correct.” He expressed regrets that Bogdanov had left the editorial board of Proletarii. Yet Shaumian was “extremely sceptical” about Bogdanov’s philosophy, complained about the “hellish conditions” of penury among the Baku Bolsheviks, and in the end supported Lenin. Stalin also decided that “recallism” was a “deviation from strict Bolshevism,” but that such “accidential deviations” from “the other (‘orthodox’) part of our fraction, headed by Ilich,” should be tolerated. Reluctantly supporting Lenin, the Georgian Bolsheviks refused to condemn Bogdanov.⁵¹

In June 1909 Stalin escaped from his place of exile at Solovchegodsk and returned to Baku, where he led an underground existence until he was again arrested in March 1910. During this period, the Baku Bolsheviks remained in close touch with Geneva through Tskhakaya, who continued to support Bogdanov against Lenin. In August 1909 Stalin wrote an article complaining that the RSDRP was now in a “grave crisis,” without any “organizational cohesion.” The answer, he suggested, was closer party ties with the factories and the recruitment of “experienced and mature leaders from the ranks of the workers.” The Baku committee endorsed Lenin’s opposition to recallism, god building, and ultimatism, but protested against Lenin’s expulsion of Bogdanov and Lunacharsky from the editorial board of Proletarii.⁵²

Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism displeased Stalin when it came out in April 1909. Stalin was more interested in the latest writings of Bogdanov, where “in my view, some individual blunders of Ilich are correctly noted,” as were the differences between Lenin and Plekhanov. Stalin was well informed about émigré philosophical disputes, but by no means a supporter of Lenin.⁵³

In November 1909, Stalin wrote a letter to Proletarii complaining about the “incorrect organizational policy of the editorial board,” i. e., Lenin. Stalin admitted that the intra-Bolshevik squabble probably originated with money—”the loot of a large circle of rather insane ultimatist praktiki”—but concluded that “joint work is both permissible and necessary.” Stalin still valued the underground work of Krasin and Bogdanov and resisted Lenin’s schismatic tactics in dealing with them. He remained in this period a Bolshevik, but not always a Leninist.⁵⁴

Krasin against Lenin

Bolshevism began to disintegrate in June 1908 after Lenin’s visit to Capri, but Lenin wished to keep that fact a secret. He wrote Taratuta that nothing should be said about Bogdanov’s departure from the Proletarii editorial board and other intra-Bolshevik disagreements; “unconditional silence” should be maintained about “what has happened to the circle of Bolshevik Center members.”⁵⁵

The demise of the RSDRP was not unique in Europe at the time. Socialists everywhere faced the choice between parliamentary participation and more violent strike action. In Germany left-wing social democrats, led by Anton Pannekoek, attacked party opportunism in Bremen during elections for the Prussian Landtag. The Bremen left wing of the SPD was to remain a significant force for syndicalist tactics in Europe into the First World War.⁵⁶

Financial disagreements between Lenin and the Bolshevik underground again surfaced at meetings of the Bolshevik Center and the RSDRP in August 1908. The RSDRP central committee plenum in Geneva established a Foreign Bureau responsible to a Russian Bureau of the central committee inside Russia in an effort to subordinate émigré politics to party policy. The Mensheviks also pointed out again the illegality of Bolshevik expropriations, still under investigation by a party commission. Most important, Bogdanov and Krasin left the Bolshevik Center, whose financial affairs passed into the hands of Lenin, Zinoviev, and Taratuta. Money thus remained a source of conflict between Lenin and the other Bolsheviks.⁵⁷

In October 1908, many Bolsheviks sought to issue an ultimatum to the RSDRP Duma delegation that they subordinate their actions to the party and continue illegal activities outside the Duma. Lenin sharply condemned the ultimatists; Bogdanov, Aleksinsky, Krasin, Lunacharsky, and Shantser supported them. I. F. Dubrovinsky wrote Lenin from St. Petersburg that “Machist-recallist disasters” and “loudmouths” were creating an atmosphere of “disillusionment with Bolshevism” among workers. But there was little Lenin could do except refuse to cooperate with the other Bolsheviks in publishing activity and to continue writing his attack on them, Materialism and Empiriocriticism.⁵⁸

Shaumian wrote Tskhakaya from Tiflis in early November asking that Bogdanov be given “heartfelt best wishes” from the Georgian Bolsheviks. They felt that Bogdanov had acted correctly in leaving Proletarii and the Bolshevik Center, although they were sad that he had done so. They were also “sceptical or worse” about Bogdanov’s philosophy and afraid of a schism within Bolshevism. Bogdanov’s theory, they felt, “destroys Marx’s system.” They advocated fractional unity, but not under the banner of Bogdanovism.⁵⁹

In December 1908, Lenin and Krupskaya moved from Geneva to Paris, involving themselves in RSDRP and Russian émigré affairs, and distancing themselves from Bogdanov and Switzerland. The party itself, however, continued to disintegrate into rival Bolshevik, Menshevik, Polish, and Latvian fractions.

When Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism appeared in April 1909, philosophical disputes with the other Bolsheviks had again become a matter of money. The key figure was Krasin, now an engineer with Siemens and Schukert in Berlin, who imbibed the health regimen of yoga and yoghurt recommended by the Russian biologist Ilya Mechnikov. Krasin remained in touch with Gorky and Bogdanov, but quarreled with Lenin over money.⁶⁰

Krasin actually succeeded in cashing bank notes from the Tiflis Ex after the arrests of Bolshevik agents. At first the Okhrana thought that Krasin in this manner had obtained two hundred thousand rubles; in fact, the amount turned out to be closer to forty thousand. But Krasin had kept the money for his own circle of “recallists” and “ultimatists,” as Lenin called them, and was holding out on Lenin. “The right wing of the party,” reported the Okhrana, “headed by Lenin, protests against the violation of the party program and Krasin’s seizure of party funds.” ⁶¹

The Lbov Partisans and the “Sasha Letter”

One other echo of the Bolshevik underground heard in Europe in 1909 also involved money. At about the time of the Tiflis Ex, in July 1907, a group of underground party workers in the Urals gave six thousand rubles to the Bolshevik Center in return for delivery of weapons from abroad. A contract was duly signed between the Perm Partisan Revolutionary Detachment, headed by a man named Lbov, and the Bolshevik Center. Over the next few months this forest brotherhood, an uneasy coalition of Bolsheviks, anarchists, and Social Revolutionaries, went on the warpath, robbing a number of banks, factories, post offices, and wealthy citizens. The central committee of the Perm RSDRP group condemned the Lbov partisan tactics of expropriation, but Lbov had the support of the Bolsheviks, and he had a duly signed contract.⁶²

Unfortunately, the Bolsheviks never delivered the promised weapons. On March 18, 1908, the Bolshevik Center promised to pay back the Lbov money, or at least three thousand rubles of it, but did not. While the Okhrana believed that the Bolsheviks were planning more expropriations, including robbing a trainload of gold bullion near Cheliabinsk, anarchist “battle detachments” were still roaming the Russian countryside. In November 1908 anarcho-syndicalists based in Geneva robbed a bank in Bessarabia of eighty thousand rubles, and as late as August 1909 another bank robbery in the Urals town of Miass killed seven people. Thus the violence of expropriation continued in Russia even as the revolutionary wave receded.⁶³

The dispute between the Bolshevik Center and the Lbov partisans reached a climax in the spring of 1909. An anonymous article in Proletarii noted that worker adventurism in the Urals had played into the hands of the authorities by unnecessary violence and “exomania.” Spectacular robberies had been accompanied by a sharp decline in party membership. Lbov himself had finally been arrested, and the article criticized him for playing into police hands, perhaps even as a provocateur.⁶⁴

That summer a two-page “Open Letter to the Bolshevik Center” circulated among Russian socialists in Paris and Geneva, authored by the pseudonymous “Sasha.” The letter reviewed the whole sordid matter of the Lbov partisans and reminded the Bolsheviks that they still owed the group their six thousand rubles for undelivered weapons. But which Bolsheviks? Lenin asked for an official investigation of the Sasha letter by a “higher party organ” and linked it with Bogdanov and the recallists; Bogdanov charged that the letter was connected with Taratuta, himself a suspected provocateur. The Okhrana thought the letter provided further evidence of Bolshevik involvement in expropriations inside Russia.⁶⁵

The entire episode of the Sasha letter, like the Tiflis Ex and the Schmidt inheritance, marked the transformation of Bolshevik radicalism into émigré squabbling. But it also illustrated that the divisions between Lenin and the other Bolsheviks, often fought publicly in the realm of philosophy, were also grounded in fierce disputes over the political disposition of Bolshevik funds. Money continued to matter.