Bologna against Longjumeau

During the winter of 1910–1911, Lenin and Plekhanov proposed to the students at the Bologna School that they come to Paris for a better education in Marxist theory. But relations between the school and the “school committee” of the RSDRP in Paris remained strained; recriminations and ultimata failed to resolve issues of politics or money. In March 1911 Lunacharsky had to borrow funds from Vpered to cover the deficit in Bologna. The Vpered circle was beginning to disintegrate; Shantser died in Russia, and Pokrovsky departed for historical scholarship. Talk of a coming “proletarian culture” could not disguise the fact that the collectivist group, like the Leninist circle, was in disarray. Even Bogdanov began drifting away from politics.²

In May 1911 F. I. Kalinin noted that “the Leninists have organized a school.” The site this time was Longjumeau, a suburb of Paris, and the school was modeled on Capri and Bologna. Eighteen students (RSDRP party workers) attended classes from June to August 1911, and of the 147 lectures they heard, Lenin gave 56. Zinoviev, Kamenev, Riazanov, and Lunacharsky also contributed, although Gorky, Plekhanov, and the Mensheviks declined. Kalinin noted that “the Leninists remain isolated from all tendencies,” and that Bogdanov had drifted away from Vpered.³

As the organization of Longjumeau School indicated, Lenin still had considerable sums of money under his control, despite the long plenum. Kalinin claimed that Lenin had subsidized Tyshko and the Poles with six thousand francs, and that Lenin still had in his possession eighty thousand more, half of which he hoped to use in the upcoming Duma campaign. As the RSDRP began planning a party conference that summer, Lenin would clearly be a factor. Plekhanov saw a conference as futile now, and predicted the “final breakup of our party.” The RSDRP in 1911 had become a collection of émigré intriguers, cut off from Russia, arguing over money, and calling each other names. At Longjumeau, as one student pointed out, Lenin had behaved like a “blinded, medieval, fanatical cardinal, who burns in the name of Christ all heretics, even when they are not heretics.” Lenin had to learn to coexist with “syndicalists like Volsky and Lunacharsky” who supported the “Italian movement.” But would he?⁴

The Bologna School convened again in the summer of 1911, giving lectures and training party workers for illegal work in the Urals region. Lunacharsky wrote Kautsky and the trustees that summer to ask for money, claiming that Lenin was responsible for the party schism. But Kautsky claimed neutrality and denied that Lenin still had funds under his control. Talk of a unity conference of the RSDRP sounded more and more unreal. The party had become, wrote Rosa Luxemburg, a “handful of fighting cocks” who “scream for the ears and souls of the German trustees,” and little more.

Nevertheless, plans went forward for a party conference. In September 1911 the RSDRP central committee urged all fractions to “fight for an all-party conference against the schism, against two conferences and two parties.” The Vpered circle felt cheered by reports that inside Russia citizens were eagerly reading their literature, and that a branch had been established in Baltimore, Maryland, of all places. Kalinin even claimed that in Kiev and other cities “they are introducing resolutions against Lenin’s activities.”⁵

The picture was not bright. D. Z. Manuilsky hoped that the Paris Vpered circle might ally with Plekhanov and receive some funds from the trustees; he charged that the “Leninist type of bandits” were now “completely isolated from the party and have no money.” He noted that Bogdanov had not yet returned the money belonging to Vpered, and that the group had split into two factions, one in flight from politics, the other continuing to dream about proletarian culture and syndicalism. Kamenev criticized Lunacharsky for wanting “not only to build a god, but to build a party,” but the possibility of rebuilding Bolshevism as an organization seemed remote. Bolshevism had degenerated from a struggle over philosophy to a struggle for money.⁶

Lenin and the Trustees

From its inception the RSDRP was a little brother of the Socialist Party of Germany (SPD), which provided political and economic support, and thus expected to have a voice in party orthodoxy and finances. In 1908 the SPD held a secret tribunal to consider the case of Parvus, who owed money to Gorky and the Bolsheviks. In 1910, as Lenin put it, the Bolsheviks had been “dissolved as a fraction” and their funds surrendered to three SPD trustees, who could dole it out only for legal enterprises— publishing a journal, rather than robbing a bank, for example.⁷

In March 1911, Klara Zetkin complained that she had still not actually received any money from Lenin, who visited her that month in Stuttgart. An SPD ultimatum to Lenin produced no results. “Reliable people report,” Axelrod helpfully wrote Kautsky, “that Lenin and Co. still have hidden away at least one hundred thousand rubles of the party for their cliquish purposes, which will probably enable him to pursue his plans without party funds.” By July 1911, Lenin had turned over considerable sums to the trustees. They had agreed to let him have thirty thousand francs to hold a party conference. The Mensheviks were outraged.⁸

Lenin cleverly argued that he had held the money until then “not as a representative of the Bolsheviks, but as a member of the [RSDRP] central committee.” When he tried to give Kautsky money in February 1911, he refused to accept it. On July 7, 1911, the National Bank of Paris, at Lenin’s written request, transferred the money (or some of it) to the trustees. Leo Jogisches wrote Kautsky that Lenin wanted only to “use the chaos in the party to get the money for his own fraction and to deal a death blow to the party as a whole before any plenum can meet.”⁹

The trustees were thoroughly confused. Kautsky wondered why Lenin did not want a party conference to settle the matter. How else could the trustees find an “authority outside the central committee with whom the trustees can deal”? If anything, the trustees inclined toward Lenin. Kautsky saw no alternative. Zetkin criticized Martov’s brochure published after the long plenum, and said she supported the “tactical firmness of the Bolsheviks, and especially you [Lenin] personally.” Accused by the Mensheviks of making decisions in Lenin’s favor, the trustees denied interfering in the “organizational conflict of our Russian comrades” but maintained that they would “decide into whose hands the party funds trusted to us should go.”¹⁰

At the Jena congress of the SPD (September 1911), Axelrod did his best to convince the trustees that funds should be transferred to the Mensheviks. Trotsky made similar efforts. But both were denied by Kautsky, who increasingly sided with Lenin, as did Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg. Zetkin praised Lenin as a “very worthy man” who had “given up all the money in his possession,” and promised to “decide this business in favor of the Bolsheviks. My personal opinion is that formal and de facto justice is on their side.” In fact, all three trustees were increasingly tired of arguing with the Russians. In the autumn of 1911 they all resigned: Mehring on October 2, Kautsky on October 18, and Zetkin on November 16.¹¹

The frustrated Lenin now decided to take them to court. His purpose was to recover what amounted to half of the funds acquired from the Schmidt inheritance and other sources; he had already kept control of half himself. His supporters were G. L. Shklovsky, a Bolshevik living in Bern, Switzerland, and two leading Swiss socialists, Karl Zgraggen and Karl Moor. Zgraggen, like Lenin, was a lawyer. (In 1917 he would help transport Russian revolutionaries back to St. Petersburg by sealed train.) In addition, Lenin retained two more lawyers: George Ducos de la Haille, a militant Paris socialist and Dreyfusard, and Emile L. D. Vinck, another socialist from Brussels. Lenin began compiling a bibliography of all works on courts of arbitration and contracts in order to support his case.¹²

In late October 1911 Lenin wrote Zetkin, the last remaining trustee, that the retirement of the other two trustees made the contract with the Bolsheviks null and void. She had no right to make decisions, threatened Lenin, and must “return the money to the one from whom you received it, i.e., me.” If he received no reply, said Lenin, he would take legal action. In November Zetkin resigned, despite (or because of) Lenin’s ultimatum that she come to a “peaceful settlement” or face “open warfare.” She also tried to get Taratuta to turn over additional money from the Schmidt inheritance that was not under Lenin’s control.¹³

Immediately after the retirement of the trustees, Kautsky and Zetkin wrote Lenin a letter in which they noted that the right to the trust fund was an open question. Only an agreement between the central committee of the RSDRP and the Bolsheviks could resolve it, since they were the parties to the 1910 contract, or treaty, signed at Paris. Civil court proceedings, said Zetkin, might justify Lenin’s claim. But she also threatened to bring the entire matter before the Second International and make it public. Lenin, of course, maintained his “exclusive right to the monies held by Zetkin.”¹⁴

“If the fate of the party until now has been decided in Paris,” wrote Sergo Ordzhonikidze in late 1911, “now it is decided in Berlin.” The RSDRP was in receivership to the SPD. The Mensheviks, the central committee, and the Foreign Bureau were all running out of money. Ordzhonikidze, on Lenin’s instructions, demanded that Zetkin give him ten thousand francs to convene a new party conference. To hold Bolshevik funds was illegal, Lenin reminded Zetkin. The Okhrana reported that Zetkin held some eighty thousand francs remaining from the Schmidt inheritance, but that Zetkin would not return the money to Lenin until the RSDRP achieved reunification. In December 1911 that seemed most unlikely.¹⁵

The Prague Conference

In January 1912 Lenin managed to convene a conference of his supporters in Prague that has gone down in history as the Prague conference of the RSDRP. In fact, it consisted of twelve Leninists and two Mensheviks. They promptly elected a new RSDRP central committee composed of one Menshevik, Lenin, and four Leninists: Ordzhonikidze, Zinoviev, S. S. Spandarian, and F. I. Goloshchekin. The other member was a loyal Leninist and an agent of the Okhrana, R. V. Malinovsky. Within a year of the conference Lenin was arbitrarily to “coopt” six more supporters, including Stalin. In addition, the editorial board of the RSDRP central organ, Sotsial-demokrat, was composed of Lenin, Kamenev, and Zinoviev. The conference resolutions were all authored by Lenin, including one that terminated a subsidy to Trotsky’s Vienna Pravda. The Prague conference was not a victory for Bolshevism, but for Lenin.¹⁶

Having declared themselves the RSDRP, Lenin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev signed a statement that they were the “Bolshevik representatives with whom the central committee concluded its agreement at the plenum of January 1910.” They, not the Bolshevik collectivists, were the rightful claimants of the “property of the Bolsheviks.” They argued that the transfer of funds to the central committee had been “conditional”; the Mensheviks had violated the agreement, and the trustees had resigned. The money held by Klara Zetkin thus belonged to the RSDRP, which now meant that it belonged to the Leninists.¹⁷

The other Bolsheviks—Bogdanov, Krasin, and Kamo, who escaped from jail in Tiflis and arrived in Brussels in December 1911—also claimed money acquired from the Tiflis Ex of 1907. At a stormy meeting in Paris, Kamo argued that Lenin, Krasin, and Bogdanov had no right to the fruits of expropriation. He also accused Taratuta of being a provocateur. Bogdanov claimed that the Vpered group had never withheld funds from the Bolshevik Center, charging that “certain members” (Lenin?) had tried to burn notes from the Tiflis Ex. Whatever the truth of the matter, Krasin now left Berlin to head the Siemens and Schukert office in Moscow, and Kamo returned to Tiflis to begin planning more bank robberies. On September 24, 1912, Kamo robbed the Tiflis post office and was promptly arrested. The Bolshevism of 1905 virtually expired.¹⁸

Having achieved a victory at Prague, Lenin went to Berlin in February 1912 to see Kautsky and demanded the money held by the trustees. Failing in this, Lenin began legal proceedings. He wrote Zgraggen that the 1910 agreement was now “no longer in force.” He proclaimed that until 1910 “I held the money,” which had been given to him by Elizabeth Schmidt, whose brother Lenin characterized as “a Bolshevik who died in jail.” A meeting of other RSDRP fractions in Paris in late February disagreed. Lenin’s “fractional activity,” they charged, had “finally antagonized every national organization and party tendency except the Leninist.” Lenin’s seizure of power at Prague would be brought before the ISB. He had split the party and usurped control. His resolutions were mere “biased information of schismatics.”¹⁹

Isolated from the party he claimed to dominate, Lenin turned to Gorky. “We have finally succeeded,” Lenin wrote him, “despite the liquidator rabble, in resurrecting the party and its central committee. I hope you are as happy as we are at this.” In March 1912 Gorky visited Lenin in Paris, complaining that he no longer had any money. Lenin told Gorky that the party now had a “healthy treasury.” The two men continued to correspond over the following months as Gorky turned away from Bogdanov to Lenin as the most likely leader of a revolution in Russia.²⁰

The Prague conference in the eyes of the Vpered circle was illegitimate, a meeting of the “Leninist fraction” without any support inside Russia. On the eve of elections to the fourth Duma, Lenin had launched a “fratricidal war” when what was needed was unity and cooperation. But that was precisely the point. At Prague Lenin had achieved in name what he had not achieved in fact, legitimate control of the RSDRP. Lenin now claimed the mantle of Russian Marxism as well as of Bolshevism.²¹

Lenin against Bolshevism

In May 1912 Lenin wrote his lawyer, de la Haille, explaining the background of the trustees, whose court of arbitration, he argued, no longer existed. Lenin urged a return to the status quo of January 1910. “Zetkin should return the money to Lenin, from whom she received it,” he claimed. He also enclosed a letter from Elizabeth Schmidt, who had executed her brother’s will giving his inheritance to “the political fraction headed by Lenin.” Lenin promised to pay de la Haille five thousand francs if he could get Zetkin to return the money by August 1. “I myself was a lawyer,” mused Lenin. “I studied French law and German law, regulating arbitration court relations. I have no doubt that Zetkin is completely wrong.”²²

In the meantime the SPD promised to provide the RSDRP twenty-five thousand marks toward the coming Duma elections, but only if the party was reunited. The Vpered circle was running out of “donations” provided by the Miass expropriation and demanded money from Bogdanov. The Mensheviks wanted another court of arbitration to obtain some of the fifty thousand marks still held by Zetkin. Trotsky and Lenin were conducting their own campaigns to obtain the money. Bogdanov’s calls for “collectivism” in financial matters fell on deaf ears. Kautsky and the Mensheviks wanted to expel Lenin from the ISB and were dissuaded only by thoughts of the unfavorable publicity that would result.²³

With nothing to lose, Lenin openly pursued his attack on syndicalism and on the other Bolsheviks. Under the pseudonym “I,” Lenin wrote an article for Trotsky’s Pravda arguing that syndicalism was a “nonsocialist extreme” fashionable in Italy. “The syndicalists incline to anarchism, succumb to revolutionary phrasemongering, destroy discipline in the workers’ struggle, reject the use of a parliamentary tribune by the socialists, or defend withdrawal from it.” At the same time, Lenin claimed that all money held by the trustees rightfully belonged to the “Lenin group” of Bolsheviks, and not to the “small individual group” around Vpered whose inclinations were more syndicalist than socialist.²⁴

Trotsky made one final attempt to unify the RSDRP, but the Vienna conference (August 1912) of thirty-three party members failed to unite the anti-Leninists. Trotsky hoped to unify the party and strengthen its ties with Russia; he also opposed the “dictatorship” of the German trustees over party funds, and unsuccessfully tried to obtain them for himself. But Trotsky was hardly the leader around whom the dissident blocs and fractions of the RSDRP could unite. The party now existed in name only.²⁵

The RSDRP ended the year 1912 deeply divided. Axelrod unsuccessfully tried to get Kautsky to support the “non-Leninist direction” in the Duma elections without success. Huysmans complained that the ISB had received no party dues from the Russians since 1908. De la Haille was making no progress toward acquiring funds for Lenin, and Lenin’s August 1 deadline had long passed. One of the Duma delegates elected by Bolshevik supporters in October 1912 was Malinovsky, a police agent. And Lenin complained that inside Russia he had “no publishing connections at all.”²⁶

In January 1913 Lenin wrote Gorky a long letter venting his frustrations. Rumors abounded that the Vpered circle wanted to return to the Bolshevik fold. Well and good, said Lenin, but cautioned: “Do remember the last ‘goodbyes’ with Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, and Bazarov on Capri in the spring of 1908. You recall I said that we must separate for two or three years, and M. F. [Andreevna] as chairman protested furiously, calling me to order, and so on.” Now five years had gone by, and the Bolsheviks were still in disarray. Lenin was unsure whether or not Bogdanov and his friends were “capable of learning from the difficult experience of 1908–1911 at all.” For as Lenin correctly surmised, the Vpered circle was also in a state of decline.²⁷

The End of Vpered

Tomorrow I expect to take a trip to the planet Mars, and if so, will immediately commence to organize the Mars canal workers into the IWW, and will sing the good old songs so loud that the learned stargazers on earth will once and for all get positive proofs that the planet Mars is really inhabited.

—JOE HILL, the day before his execution, 1915

Mars, the red planet, was the setting for Bogdanov’s utopian socialism in Red Star (1907). In 1911 Bogdanov wrote a second Martian utopia entitled Engineer Menni which again imagined a socialist society, massive canal construction, and a planned economy. A Plan of Great Works transformed the entire planet, nationalizing the land from the peasantry, and collectivizing all individuals into a “single rational organism of humanity.” New institutions included a Council of Syndicates, workers’ schools, a Workers’ Encyclopedia, and a “universal organizational science.” Bogdanov thus expressed syndicalist ideas disguised as science fiction. Lenin found the novel to be only “Machist idealism.” Gorky found it “not so bad, for the legal press,” but maintained his distance from the Vpered circle.²⁸

The latter claimed branches in all major European cities and inside Russia. But Vpered was mainly a collection of Russian socialist émigrés who were neither Mensheviks nor Leninists. Revolution was on the wane all across Russia, and Gorky noted a wave of suicides among the youth; socialism had broken up into sectarian splinter groups. In November 1912 Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Bazarov, and Alexinsky all agreed to write for a new RSDRP journal in St. Petersburg entitled Pravda. Gorky and Lenin were also involved, Lenin supporting the collectivists despite his distaste for the writings of Bogdanov and Lunacharsky. Once again, attempts at cooperation proved fruitless.

In February 1913 Lenin moved to Cracow (a city in Austrian Poland) and promptly began protesting against Bogdanov’s participation in Pravda. “Under the guise of Marxism,” Lenin complained, Bogdanov wanted to “conduct an anti-Marxist, idealist philosophy (Machism).” Bogdanov’s ideas were a scandal, “archstupidity,” said Lenin. “You can’t make anything out of this mush,” he added. “I read his Engineer Menni. The same Machism: idealism, so vague that neither a worker nor a stupid editor at Pravda could understand it. No, this Machist is hopeless, as is Lunacharsky.”²⁹

Bogdanov’s massive tome on a General Organizational Science which appeared in 1913 and articulated his world view of “tectology” was no more pleasing to Lenin, who complained that “cooperation with Bogdanov is impossible.” The Pravda circle in St. Petersburg was making deep inroads into the local metalworkers’ union, largely with the aid of police agent Malinovsky. Many members of the union’s board were Bolsheviks; but they were not Leninists.³⁰

“Nothing new with us,” wrote Krupskaya in April 1913. “The Plekhanovites are eagerly ‘allying’ themselves with the Bolsheviks, and the Vpered group is about to self-destruct.” Lunacharsky was imagining a future proletarian culture; Bogdanov was writing articles on the Taylor System of time-and-motion study in factories. Under the Aesopian title “From a Dictionary of Foreign Words,” Bogdanov also wrote in Pravda about Bolshevik tactics and strategy. Like the syndicalists, he argued that “a partial strike even when prolonged sometimes simply wastes energy, when a general strike would quickly attain success.” Properly educated by “energy, together with experience,” workers could someday gradually take over the state. Bogdanov denied that he was a recallist, or that he had any connection with the Vpered group. Lenin wrote Pravda that Bogdanov’s views were anti-Marxist heresy.³¹

Lunacharsky left the Vpered group in June 1913, leaving it in control of a few supporters of Lenin and Plekhanov. Lenin claimed to be a centrist, wrote Bogdanov, but he was continually “correcting his role in the Bolshevik split.” Lenin charged that Bogdanov was a liar who supported “empiriomonism and other nasty things that disgrace a proletarian party.” Pravda refused to print Lenin’s letters and articles. By July 1913 the journal was closed by the censor, Bogdanov had left its editorial board, and Lenin was more concerned with paying for Krupskaya’s surgery in Switzerland.³²

By the end of 1913 the old Bolshevik circle was virtually nonexistent. Bogdanov and his wife had left for Moscow and given up émigré politics entirely. Lunacharsky was expelled from Germany in February 1914 as an “undesirable foreigner” because of his inflammatory speeches to Russian students in Berlin. The Vpered group had disintegrated. Lenin wrote Gorky urging him to emancipate himself from all god building and god seeking, different forms of “self deception” and “contemplating one’s navel” that differed “no more than a yellow devil is different from a blue devil.” Gorky remained on Capri, tired of émigré politics and philosophical name-calling.³³

Lenin’s closest companion was the Okhrana agent Roman Malinovsky, with whom he traveled through Europe in January 1914. By this time Malinovsky was on a retainer of one hundred rubles a month from the police, to whom he reported on a regular basis. In May 1914 Malinovsky was revealed to be a police spy. He promptly resigned from the RSDRP Duma delegation and left for Poland to visit Lenin. Aside from Krupskaya and Malinovsky, Lenin was now quite alone.³⁴

The German Legacy

Lenin continued to pursue the funds held by the SPD with little success. Sceptical lawyers demanded documentary proof that Lenin had any right to the money. Lenin bombarded them with promises of fees and strident claims. He persuaded other Bolsheviks to write August Bebel to ask for help. But Bebel died in the summer of 1913, and de la Haille and Zgraggen were having doubts of their own. De la Haille wrote Zetkin that Lenin claimed to have a mandate from a Bolshevik fraction that was “nonexistent” and noted that Lenin was “not qualified to reclaim the funds on deposit.” In addition, Lenin complained that he was running out of money.³⁵

For a time it looked like Kautsky might be able to bring Lenin together with the trustees at the Jena congress of the SPD but he could not. Zetkin said that no conference was needed, since the exact terms were spelled out in a contract between the “Lenin group” and the RSDRP central committee. She told Axelrod that “the deposit in question is not the private property of comrade Lenin and his fraction, but the collective property of the RSDRP.” Such financial collectivism hardly impressed Lenin, who instructed Karl Zgraggen to sue the trustees in court. The Mensheviks and other party fractions were no more successful than Lenin.³⁶

Lenin continued to keep the party divided because he hoped to claim the disputed party funds for himself. He feared that the ISB might succeed in reunifying the party where the SPD had failed. “Our business is not progressing well,” Lenin wrote de la Haille in February 1914; the SPD wanted to create a new court of arbitration (“a completely stupid proposal”)—perhaps a lawsuit would scare them into returning the money. Instead, the ISB and the SPD were now seriously considering drumming Lenin out of the European socialist movement.³⁷

By March 1914 the Mensheviks and the SPD were suggesting an ISB conference at which the matter of the German money would be settled once and for all. When the conference convened in Brussels in July, no fewer than 28 delegates claiming to represent 10 separate RSDRP fractions showed up. Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Litvinov all refused to attend, so Lenin sent as his proxy his close friend Inessa Armand. Lenin furiously wrote that “they only want to scold me” and instructed Armand to demonstrate that “only we are the party.” There was talk of expelling Lenin and the Bolsheviks from the Second International. Vandervelde and Kautsky wished to put the matter before the impending August conference of the International; Plekhanov charged Lenin with stealing party funds. The ISB unanimously condemned Lenin’s “disorganizing role” in the RSDRP and was seriously considering his expulsion, when outside events intervened: Europe went to war.³⁸

On the eve of World War I, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were a tiny and divided fraction of an equally divided socialist party. They had neither unity nor money. Their leadership was divided between European émigrés and exiles in Siberia. Yet on the eve of war there was also great labor unrest inside Russia; strikes were increasing in number and violence and “the syndicalist leaders enjoy a high reputation,” as one socialist put it.³⁹ Lenin was in virtual isolation politically, but therein lay precisely the advantage of flexibility in responding to a violent world where mass collectivism craved individual authority.

War and Revolution

With the outbreak of World War I, Lenin and the other Bolshevik emigres in Germany and Austria-Hungary headed for neutral Switzerland. Viktor Adler succeeded in getting Lenin released from Austria by persuading the police that he was, indeed, an enemy of the Russian government. The war saved Lenin from probable expulsion from the Second International at its August 1914 Paris conference, which was canceled. Charles Rappaport, a French socialist, noted that Lenin was an “incomparable organizer” of “iron will” who “sees in capital punishment the only means of assuring the existence of the social democratic party.” Lenin was a “Social Democratic Tsar, who regards himself as a super-Marxist, but who is, in reality, nothing but an adventurer of the highest order.” Yet Lenin was now the least of the worries of European socialist parties, whose support was melting away in the face of nationalism and patriotic worker support for governments. The great general strike expected to follow the outbreak of war never materialized.⁴⁰

In Swiss exile Lenin remained isolated from his own fraction. The Vpered circle reconstituted itself in Geneva, joined by Lunacharsky who arrived from Paris. The Second International was virtually defunct, and there was talk of creating a third. Lenin found greater support for his idea that the war should be transformed into a civil war and a social revolution. When his old comrade Parvus arrived in Zurich in May 1915, complete with cigars, blondes, and champagne breakfasts, Lenin found a new source of potential support. But the Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries, and Trotsky were also moving to Switzerland, which became a microcosm of Russian émigré politics by the summer of 1915. The Vpered group called for a Third International to replace the Second, and sharply attacked Plekhanov’s defense of the Russian government as the lesser evil. “We want only that the proletariat consider itself a great power, with its own policy of war and peace—peace between nations, and war between classes.”⁴¹

The Zimmerwald conference of September 1915 brought together in a Swiss village near Bern representatives of all the RSDRP fractions (including Lenin, Trotsky, Martov, and Axelrod) except for the Vpered circle. Lenin proposed to use five thousand francs from the money held by the SPD “incorrectly and illegally” in order to help organize the internationalists among the socialists. But Zetkin was unwilling to release any of the funds, which still remained under her control at a Stuttgart bank at the end of 1915.⁴²

In February 1916 Lenin moved from Bern to Zurich and began writing a new book under contract with Gorky and Pokrovsky. Gorky planned a series of works under the Aesopian title “Europe before and during the War” which would pass the military censorship in different countries and be socialist in content. Lenin had completed the manuscript and sent it on to Pokrovsky in Paris, proposing that he publish it under the usual pseudonym, presumably V. Ilin. The original idea was that Lenin would write an introductory volume to the series, which would include volumes by Lunacharsky (on Italy), Zinoviev (on Austria-Hungary), Pokrovsky (on France), and so forth. The result was Lenin’s Imperialism.⁴³

Lenin encountered a second level of censorship. The publisher, the Parus house, wanted to shorten Imperialism by deleting Lenin’s attacks on Kautsky. The manuscript arrived in St. Petersburg belatedly (the first copy had been intercepted and read by the French military censor), and Lenin refused to cut it. The editors of the firm, after all, were Mensheviks; even Pokrovsky criticized the book as “Plekhanovite.” But Lenin had no choice; the title remained the Aesopian “Contemporary Capitalism” and the passages on Kautsky were cut, to be resurrected as The Renegade Kautsky after the 1917 revolution. Again, Lenin faced a “vile bloc” of Machists and Mensheviks who refused to publish his writings or to provide any money.⁴⁴

In December 1916, Lenin received his royalties, but was unhappy with his book. “My fate,” he added, “is one military campaign after another—against political stupidity, banality, opportunism, etc. This since 1893.” But he thanked Pokrovsky for saving his brochure from further editing by Gorky and his friends.⁴⁵

When news of the Russian Revolution reached Switzerland in March 1917, the Bolsheviks began to regroup. Lunacharsky left for Zurich to see Lenin, and found him still gloomy about revolutionary possibilities. He advised Lenin not to accept the offer of transportation to Russia by German train because it would give Lenin’s enemies a “cheap and convenient weapon against him.” Lenin refused the advice, embarking on his famous trip to the Finland Station.⁴⁶

In 1917 Lenin and the other Bolsheviks were able to work together toward a successful seizure of power in a moment of spontaneity and mass unrest which no other political party was prepared to manipulate. As in 1905, syndicalism remained a central element in Bolshevik thinking, even in Lenin’s. Bogdanov reemerged from self-imposed isolation to produce revolutionary pamphlets calling for proletarian struggle and an end to World War I. Lunacharsky became active in the Petrograd Soviet and worked together with anarchists and syndicalists in forming worker committees. Even Lenin saw that the distinction between Bolshevism and syndicalism was at this point academic. In State and Revolution, written in August 1917, he called for the “expropriation of the capitalists, the conversion of all citizens into workers and employees of one huge ‘syndicate’—the whole state—and the complete subordination of the whole of the work of this syndicate to the really democratic state of the Soviets of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies.” ⁴⁷

In 1917, after years of waiting and struggle, Lenin had triumphed over Bolshevism. While the tension remained, between individual authority and collectivist myth, it was a creative tension, facilitating both party organization and mass propaganda. Lenin was a public proponent of “workers’ control” in 1917. When accused of being a syndicalist, he protested that “this argument was an example of the stupid schoolboy method of applying Marxism without studying it, just learning it by rote.” Syndicalism, he added, “either repudiates the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, or else relegates it, as it does political power in general, to a back seat. We, however, put it in the forefront.”⁴⁸ In 1917, Lenin continued to realize that the most effective syndicalist and collectivist myth was one articulated as orthodox Marxist truth.