Lenin and Plekhanov against Bolshevism

In July 1909 Lenin published in Proletarii the resolutions of the editorial board meeting and accused Bogdanov of “breaking away from us” by trying to organize a “workers’ school” on Capri without Lenin, a “fraction breaking away from the Bolsheviks.” Lenin’s main ally was now Plekhanov, who announced his break with the Mensheviks in an open letter proclaiming that “only one way is possible—the strengthening and broadening of our illegal party organization and struggle for ideological influence over it.” Whether or not Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism had encouraged Plekhanov’s attraction to Bolshevism, the two were now allies in a war on Machist heresy and syndicalist politics.¹

Lenin was not idle that summer. He signed an agreement with the Kuklin Library in Geneva to move to Paris all 137 boxes of books and archives. He publicly protested the trip of Tsar Nicholas II to Europe and tried to get the ISB to do likewise. He became involved with A. M. Ignatiev in an abortive plot to kidnap the tsar from Peterhof, using the imperial convoy of Kuban Cossacks, then told Ignatiev to cease and desist in this violent adventure. He watched helplessly as the by-elections to the third Duma produced some victories for the “recallists” among the RSDRP. And he tried to negotiate with Trotsky in Vienna to join the editorial board of Proletarii and to have Trotsky’s Pravda printed on its Paris presses.²

The negotiations with Trotsky fell through, and Lenin raged against the Capri School. What was this “band of riff-raff of Maksimov [Bogdanov] and Co.” doing on Capri anyway? Was this “gang of adventurists” running some kind of brothel there? “A complete break and war” with Bogdanov’s circle “are now stronger than with the Mensheviks,” he protested. Bogdanov’s syndicalist tactics of boycotting the Duma might have been appropriate in 1907, but certainly not in 1909. This was anarchism, Jesuitism, and deception. In October Lenin noted that even Viktor Taratuta had now declared himself “for Geneva,” that is, a Bogdanov supporter; “I think that is wrong,” Lenin wrote V. A. Karpinsky. “We will not go to Geneva.”³

By the autumn of 1909 Leninism and Bolshevik collectivism were becoming increasingly distinct political philosophies. Party workers in St. Petersburg noted that this was, in part, a difference between emigres and praktiki inside the country. Proletarii distinguished between “old” and “new” Bolshevism. Bogdanov charged that Lenin had now “passed over to a Menshevik point of view of parliamentarism.” In fact, Lenin did share with the Mensheviks a great hostility to Bogdanov’s collectivism. Martov called Lunacharsky’s theory of a socialist religion “reactionary heresy” and a “complete break with the materialist basis of scientific socialism.” L. O. Axelrod (“Ortodoks”) charged that Bolshevism had become a kind of empiriocritical demagoguery, dogma and propaganda joined in revolutionary romanticism. But whereas Martov associated Bolshevism with Sorelian myth and syndicalist direct action, Lenin did not. He preferred to attack collectivist philosophy, which he abhorred, but not syndicalist politics, which he had for a time admired.⁴

Plekhanov, however, continued to make the connection between Bolshevism and syndicalism in a way that Lenin would not. The “religious sermons” of Bogdanov and Lunacharsky, he noted, were “not so foreign to politics.” “Mr. Lunacharsky,” he sniffed, “generally watches very attentively to see what the demand is. When there was a demand for syndicalism, he hastened to walk hand in hand through our literature with the well-known Italian syndicalist Arturo Labriola, whom he passed off as a Marxist on more than one occasion.” Lunacharsky’s god building was just another “modish game.” Gorky and Lunacharsky had begun with the idea that God was a fiction, and now recognized humanity as a new God. This was un-Marxist. But the revolt against Marxist authority was also an inclination toward revolutionary syndicalism, “the illegitimate daughter of anarchism.”⁵

The Organization of Collectivism

In 1908 Gorky praised Bogdanov as a great “organizer of ideas” that reflected the “collective experience” of the Russian proletariat. By January 1909 Gorky, Bogdanov, and Lunacharsky were planning a new collection of essays on the “philosophy of collectivism” which would, naturally, not include Lenin among its authors. Krasin, Pokrovsky, and Bazarov were all to be involved, if they were willing. What did they mean by collectivism?⁶

Collectivism and socialism stressed the well-being of society over the individual. Moreover, as Ludwig Feuerbach pointed out in The Religion of Humanity, socialism had a religious dimension; “God is man, man is God,” he wrote, and through the “idea of the species” man could build for himself a kind of collective religion of humanity. Ernst Haeckel, the German Darwinist, also argued that the individual was only a “tiny grain of protoplasm in the perishable framework of organic nature”; in a monist universe, there was no division between mind and matter, science was only an approximation of truth, and man’s immortality was not individual but cosmic. Nature, of which man was a biological part, was eternal.⁷

Many nineteenth-century European socialist thinkers connected the idea of the individual self with private property, and saw socialism as a substitute religion that would do away with bourgeois individualism. This was particularly true in England, where positivism—the faith in the unlimited power of science to control nature—led many to the ethical socialism of the Labor Churches and Fabianism. Winwood Reade, a freethinker, in his book The Martyrdom of Man (1872) argued that Christianity would have to be replaced by socialism in a manner that would give up the belief in the individual soul and its immortality. Sidney Webb wrote that “we must abandon the self-conceit of imagining that we are independent units and bend our proud minds, absorbed in their own cultivation, to this subjection to the higher end, the Common Weal.” Annie Besant, the theosophist, also urged “generous self-sacrifice to the common good.”⁸

Another English socialist, E. Belfort Bax, called for a new “religion of socialism, a sense of oneness with the social body” and a “readiness to sacrifice all, including life itself, for the cause.” Bax’s ideal individual was the “Russian nihilist or the Paris workman [who] in deliberately exposing himself to certain death, believing in no personal immortality,” still sacrifices himself for the cause. The American socialist Edward Bellamy in his book The Religion of Solidarity (1874) argued that individuality was a prison from which man must escape into universal solidarity; individualism leads to fear of death, whereas self-sacrifice and social solidarity provides a kind of immortality.⁹

We have seen that many Bolsheviks sought to counter a Russian mood of symbolist decadence, individual mysticism, and general gloom with one of collective humanism, drawing upon the ideas of Joseph Dietzgen. The Moscow Bolsheviks were especially articulate. In 1908 Shuliatikov attacked the emerging Russian avant-garde’s obsession with death as a consequence of bourgeois decline; more positively, V. M. Friche predicted a future “collectivist society” in which theater would give way to the cinema, providing the masses with “collective festivals” (often on film), including mass parades and choral concerts. Such festivals, argued Bazarov, would appeal not to the idea of individualism (a German import to Russia), but to a new proletarian consciousness.¹⁰

Gorky and Lunacharsky were the main Bolshevik proponents of a new collectivist religion. People have always created their gods, argued Gorky, and bourgeois society had created its individual gods and heroes to justify a world of private property. But this was cynicism. “Not T but ‘we’—here is the principle on which the personality should be emancipated. Then, finally, man will feel himself to be the incarnation of all wealth, of all the world’s beauty, of all experience of humanity and spiritually the equal of all his brothers.” An “integral personality” would be possible only in a world where the line between the hero and the crowd disappeared, through a “religion of humanity” based on mutual respect.¹¹

In early 1908 Gorky wrote an essay entitled “The Destruction of the Personality,” but Lenin refused to publish it in Proletarii. According to Gorky, “the collective does not seek immortality; it has it. The personality, maintaining its position as lord of the people, needs to learn for itself the thirst for eternal life.” Individualism created individual and immortal gods. Bourgeois society was degenerating into hopeless cynicism, witnessed by an increase in mental illness and suicide. Contempo rary Russian literature was full of themes of individual death. Hope lay in collective immortality. “There is no personal immortality, and we all inevitably disappear, in order to yield on earth to people stronger, more beautiful, more honest than we, people who will create a new, beautiful, clean life and, perhaps, by the miraculous power of their united wills, will defeat death.”¹²

Lunacharsky, too, sought a religion of collectivism that would produce a victory over death. Citing Mach, he called for the immortality of creative, remembered acts, expressed through the ideology of the working class. “Man does not need God,” he wrote. “Man himself is God. Man is a god for man. He does not need personal immortality, since his immortality is the life of the species and hope in eternal victory of life over dead matter.” For the individual, real salvation from death would come through humanity as a collective; “here a real victory over death is possible.”¹³

In 1907 Lunacharsky began writing a long, rambling tome entitled Religion and Socialism. Published in 1908 and 1911 in two volumes, the book articulated a “proletarian world view” that was indebted to Feuerbach and Dietzgen, as much as to Marx and Engels. Lunacharsky argued that scientific socialism was a religion of humanity and compared it with various other world religions. Like Comte, Lunacharsky worshipped the god of science and rationalism but also praised religion’s “festive power.” Like Kautsky, he saw Christ as a proletarian leader of the downtrodden masses of Galilee, an “ideology of the tormented poor of Jerusalem and the Jews in general.” Early Christianity resembled revolutionary communism, an apocalyptic revolt of the propertyless classes against Roman authority. Collectivism for Lunacharsky meant a proletarian religion appealing to mass psychology through festival and myth. As to theory, Lunacharsky praised Bogdanov as “the only Marxist philosopher continuing the pure philosophical tradition of Marx.”¹⁴

In the spring of 1909 Bogdanov and his supporters published their Essays on the Philosophy of Collectivism. In it they defined collectivism as “the world view of the proletarian class—the embryo of a universal ideology for a future society.” Bogdanov described truth and reality in relative terms as that which reflects collective experience; his suggestion that 2x2 = 4 is only a convenient metaphor, not a true statement, presaged Orwell’s subsequent example of 2 + 2 = 5 as correct party logic in his novel 1984. The future belonged to the scientific and technical intelligentsia as organizers of nature along the lines of a “collectivist conception of experience.” Collectivism was the true philosophy of Marxism, based on proletariat, not party. “The working class as a social system does not exist unless the proletariat is organized into a party, syndicates, etc.”—a living collective.¹⁵

Bogdanov’s relativism and syndicalism were shared by Lunacharsky. Collectivism, he pointed out, often demands “the sacrifice of an individual.” A future socialist society would provide numerous collective projects that would require individual sacrifice under a “plan.” Whereas anarchism is an individualist utopia, syndicalism offers a form of collectivism where a “socialist, purely proletarian spirit predominates.” What is needed is an “international confederation of workers’ syndicates” to organize the proletariat and link the socialist parties of different nations. “The syndicate and the union of syndicates,” concluded Lunacharsky, “right up to their international confederation, are both the consequence and the justification of the proletariat’s collectivist inclinations.”¹⁶

Bolshevik collectivism was a matter of philosophy and religion, but also of politics. Collectivism meant the Bolshevik collective, not Lenin’s individual authority, and syndicalist unity with the trade unions, not party dictates. Yet collectivism was also authoritarian, not democratic, grounded in the authority of manipulated myth, if not party hierarchy. The other Bolsheviks were not democrats. Proletarian morality, as Stanislav Volsky pointed out, was a matter of sacrificing self to the “fighting proletariat.” The individual is to be transformed into a conscious supporter of the collective. The bourgeois “I” will give way to the proletarian “we,” expressed in “proletarian psychology, proletarian consciousness, and proletarian morality.” Solidarity will become the “obligatory norm.” The “new man” of socialism will be “free, bold, and young.” Yet Volsky imagined a future “morality of an armed camp” in which enemies of the revolution would “probably perish, if not as physical beings, in any case as independent creative forces.”¹⁷

Collectivism was a part of the Bolshevik answer to the neo-Kantian individualism expressed by the liberal intelligentsia in its 1909 volume of essays Vekhi (Signposts). As we have seen, this continued a debate begun in exile in Vologda at the turn of the century. But collectivism also provided a political focus for those Bolsheviks drawn to European syndicalism who sought to use the power of myth, more than authority, to build a new socialist society.

N. E. Vilonov and the Capri School

In January 1909 the Okhrana reported a new organization in Geneva, the “Fund for Directing Workers to Russia.” Its purpose, they assumed, was to facilitate revolutionary activity by supplying money and passports for illegal travelers. They also noted that “recallism” was especially strong in Moscow, and that some connection between that area and Europe was emerging. They were correct.

N. E. Vilonov, at 26, had spent his early adulthood in the workers’ cause. Active in Kiev labor circles since the turn of the century, he was a “Leninist before Lenin,” a voracious reader who believed in party organization and peasant propaganda. Like Lenin, Vilonov owed a debt to Populism, Jacobinism, and the Social Revolutionary party. Unlike Lenin, he envisaged a real workers’ party in which radical intellectuals would play a lesser role than workers themselves. Like Bogdanov, Vilonov held a utopian vision of a collectivist future. In the winter of 1908–1909, after a period of revolutionary activity in the Urals region, Vilonov emigrated to Europe and discovered Gorky and Bogdanov.¹⁸

In February 1909 Vilonov wrote his wife Maria that he and Gorky were planning to start a school for party workers on Capri, adding that “the theoreticians have agreed and the money will be found.” In fact, Bogdanov had approved the plan and sent it to Lenin in Paris, asking that it be printed in Proletarii. Lenin was predictably furious. “If you have the money for setting up such a school,” he told Bogdanov, “then give it to us, and we will set it up, but in Paris, not on Capri.” Taratuta supported Lenin. Vilonov found the Paris idea to be “nonsense,” because Capri was cheaper and “better conspiratorially.”¹⁹

In March 1909 Gorky urged Bogdanov to break with Lenin and come to Capri. “The ideology of the party, its true ideology,” he wrote, “is empiriomonism.” Bogdanov should come to Capri to “complete his system” of philosophy. He should get away from people like Lenin, “individualists with the psychology of police agents.” The way to resolve the crisis with Bolshevism was to establish a new “philosophy of collectivism” and a psychological and political reorganization of the party” under the leadership of Bogdanov, not Lenin. Bogdanov agreed.²⁰

The idea of bringing Russian “students” to a “school” on Capri masked a project to “train organizers and propagandists” for future party work inside Russia. Party workers from Moscow and the Urals would be brought to Capri for several months in the summer and returned to Russia to “strengthen the intellectual energy of our party.” The Stolypin regime had decimated the RSDRP now; many members were in jail or exile. Those still active had little knowledge or training in Marxist philosophy or party organization.²¹

Gorky hoped to rally the other Bolsheviks around Bogdanov. He wrote Pokrovsky in Finland, urging him to join them in publishing a “workers’ encyclopedia” on Capri. Bogdanov was very upset at his impending “expulsion” from the fraction by Lenin; “I would advise you and A. A. [Bogdanov] and anyone else who is ‘expelled’ to remove yourselves immediately so that by autumn each can find his own location.” Pokrovsky agreed that the present party crisis was a catastrophe and consented to talk with Bogdanov about coming to Capri. He added that in the struggle between Lenin and Bogdanov, “the victor will be the man who first sees reality.”²²

The Capri School was funded by Gorky’s wealthy friends (including the opera singer Fedor Chaliapin) but not supported by the Moscow RSDRP committee. Lenin wrote the committee warning them that the Capri School was connected with “god building,” and true Bolsheviks should not associate themselves with “an enterprise whose Bolshevik and Marxist character is insecure.” Bogdanov replied that Proletarii had ample opportunity to organize such a school, but had done nothing. He and “comrade Gorky” had served the party for many years. They would now organize their own Bolshevik group.²³

In Moscow, arrangements were in the hands of Stanislav Volsky and Vilonov’s wife. Party workers were recruited and given round-trip train tickets to Capri via Berlin and Naples. Volsky was arrested in May 1909 (but allowed to emigrate the following October), and Lunacharsky showed little enthusiasm for coming to Capri. Vilonov wrote his wife that he was sorry about Volsky’s “illness” (arrest) and warned her to beware of Lenin’s lies—”only one thing is accurate: his desire to break up the school.” Bogdanov hoped to get students even from outside Moscow. But plans were still in jeopardy.²⁴

In June 1909, as Lenin was reading Bogdanov out of the Bolshevik Center, the Capri School continued to take shape. Trotsky wanted Gorky to write an article on the project for Pravda, but warned that “it is impossible to make leaders in a laboratory.” Vilonov left Capri for Moscow, and discovered the desperate need for literate party workers in industrial areas; some Moscow Bolsheviks agreed to support the school only if controlled by the Bolshevik Center. But that Center was now split, with Krasin and Bogdanov declaring their independence, and the thirteen students who left Moscow for Capri in July were thoroughly confused. Grigor Alexinsky wrote Vilonov that “I don’t know who is a Leninist and who is not.”²⁵

In late July the students arrived in Vienna, where Trotsky gave them a tour of local art museums. Vilonov hoped to recruit Trotsky as a lecturer, although Trotsky was lukewarm about the idea. M. N. Liadov, a long-time party leader, announced in Proletarii his break with Lenin and the editorial board and his departure from the Bolshevik Center. By early August students arrived on Capri, where an organizational meeting was held to elect a governing council. On August 5 the “First Higher Social Democratic School for Workers” formally opened.²⁶

The Capri School featured lectures by Bogdanov, Gorky, Lunacharsky, and others on a wide variety of topics. In his lectures on the trade unions, Lunacharsky spent some time discussing revolutionary syndicalism, much to the dismay of more orthodox Marxists. Usually students would study in the morning, attend lectures in the afternoon, break for dinner, and spend evenings learning about “practical work,” presumably illegal activities. Sundays were for rest and recreation. Bogdanov became a guide in Marxist matters, and his wife a mother hen to the students. Gorky and Lunacharsky taught debating. Liadov gave a series of lectures on the history of the RSDRP; Pokrovsky lectured on the history of Russia. Syndicalism again found its way into the lectures of Alexinsky (“on syndicalism and finances”). The students wanted to hear Lenin, who, of course, refused to come to Capri. Instead, he suggested that the students move to Paris. The school council voted to do so if Lenin provided three thousand francs toward expenses; he did not.²⁷

The Capri School was fraught with controversy from the moment it opened. Trotsky criticized it for sponsoring an idea of “true Bolshevism” that was “sectarian.” Andreeva was increasingly protective of Gorky and hostile to Bogdanov and Lunacharsky. The “Sasha” letter demanding that the Bolsheviks return money to the Urals bank robbers created further division as a possible police provocation; the Okhrana was well aware of the school’s activities, intercepting its mail and planting an agent (A. S. Romanov) among the students. Then there was Lenin.²⁸

Lenin wrote a letter to the Capri School in the name of the Bolshevik Center in mid-August 1909 asking for “details” of school operations, hinting at financial aid, and suggesting that students might want to move to Paris. I. F. Dubrovinsky refused to lecture on Capri, saying that he was still “solid with the Proletarii editorial board”, i.e., Lenin. Lenin wrote Tomsky that the school was just a brothel for “recallist nonsense.” Finally, in September a group of students admitted that the Capri School was not really a party school at all, but a “private enterprise;” the council denied that it was “destroying the unity of the Bolshevik fraction” and agreed to move to Paris if Lenin would foot the bill.²⁹

Lenin responded to Capri School students with a conciliatory letter inviting them to Paris. The Capri School was really the “new center of a new fraction,” he noted, dubbing them “Bogdanovites.” When Bogdanov learned that Vilonov and five students were planning to join Lenin, he became furious and expelled them from the school. They promptly left for Paris. “Organizational and political questions,” observed Alexinsky, “now divide not so much Bolshevism from Menshevism, but left Bolsheviks (recallists, ultimatists) from rights (Lenin and the Proletarii editorial board).”³⁰

By November 1909 Lenin had succeeded in splitting Bolshevism even further. “I don’t know if you are a ‘Vperedist’ or a ‘Leninist’ or something else,” Andreeva wrote Ladyzhnikov in Berlin, “but if you value A. M. [Gorky] come here as soon as you can. I warn you that I am now, in the words of Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, and Co., a ‘vile old lady’; they even tried to declare me insane and I won’t play any more games with them.” Gorky was ill, and Lenin wrote him a soothing letter apologizing for thinking he belonged to Bogdanov’s “new faction” when, of course, he did not. Gorky even invited Lenin to Capri. By December Bogdanov had resigned from the council, declaring his hostility to Lenin’s “authoritarianism.” The council voted 7–4, with one abstention, not to accept the resignation of “the most valuable leader of the school.”³¹

But it was too late. Bogdanov left for Paris in December 1909, and he and Lunacharsky no longer had Gorky’s support. The Paris Okhrana duly reported this break, and the collapse of the Capri School, to St. Petersburg. Bogdanov, in an open letter to the RSDRP, formally declared the formation of a new faction around a revived Vpered, the same name as the original Bolshevik journal of 1904. Lenin promptly attacked them as “anti-Marxists” hiding under the collectivist labels of “proletarian philosophy” and “proletarian culture.” In a letter to Gorky, Lenin called Bogdanov’s new group “nihilists” who had not yet learned that the words and methods of 1905 were no longer applicable. He also admitted that the schism between the collectivists and Lenin was “no less deep than that between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.”³²

The Long Plenum

In the winter of 1909–1910 Bolshevism virtually disappeared as an organized fraction of the RSDRP. The “long plenum” of the RSDRP central committee, which convened in Paris from January 15 to February 5, 1910, was intended to unify the disparate party fractions: Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Poles, Bundists, and Trotsky’s Vienna circle. Instead the long plenum became a theater of mutual recrimination, leaving Lenin isolated and Bolshevism in receivership.

European socialism was still deeply divided on issues of reform and revolution. Marxist rhetoric no longer served to reconcile parliamentary participants and advocates of the syndicalist strike. In Holland majority socialists faced a revolt of the radicals around the journal Tribune, including future Comintern luminaries Henriette Roland-Holst, Hermann Gorter, and Anton Pannekoek. Expelled from the party, the Tribunists formed their own party, and petitioned the ISB for membership; Kautsky and Lenin supported them, but to no avail. Ironically, the Dutch left resembled collectivism more than Leninism, urging the use of the mass strike to raise proletarian consciousness.³³

Similar issues divided Russian socialists gathered in Paris. Bogdanov and Shantser, representing the new Vpered fraction, succeeded in having it recognized as a party “editing group.” Lenin promptly attacked them for opposing the “party line” with anti-Marxist views, and succeeded in having Dubrovinsky replace Bogdanov on the central committee. But Lenin’s victory was short-lived. Noting the “sharp crisis” in the party and the “decline of mass struggle” and “flight of the intelligentsia from the party” inside Russia, the plenum voted to subsidize Trotsky’s Pravda, to allow Bogdanov and his supporters to participate in the organization of a new party school, and to include Vpered in the “general system of party literary activity abroad.”³⁴

Most important, the plenum forced Lenin to dissolve his operations, including the Bolshevik Center and Proletarii. A “Declaration of the Bolsheviks” agreed to eliminate the center, to cease editing Proletarii, to transfer seventy-five thousand francs to the RSDRP central committee and another four hundred thousand francs to three SPD trustees, Franz Mehring, Karl Kautsky, and Klara Zetkin. These substantial sums, representing the loot from the Tiflis Ex and the Schmidt inheritance, would become the object of Lenin’s incessant attention and litigation for the next several years. The fact that the RSDRP entered German receivership also helps explain Lenin’s subsequent hatred for “the renegade Kautsky” who engineered the demise of Bolshevism.³⁵

To make matters worse, Martov made public the end of Bolshevism, as well as its past indiscretions. In a pamphlet published shortly after the Paris plenum, Martov included a resolution condemning “certain comrades” for “destroying party discipline.” Lenin was excluded from the RSDRP central committee, and a Russian Bureau was established to emancipate the RSDRP from a “foreign clique” of émigrés and to bring more praktiki into its operations. More distasteful, Martov told the story of the Lbov partisans and the Bolshevik double cross in the weapons deal. For the Mensheviks, the transfer of illegal Bolshevik funds to the trustees was a compromise; they wanted them to go to the central committee. But they applauded the dissolution of Bolshevism as an organized party fraction.³⁶

Lenin wrote his sister Anna Elizarova that attempts to make peace with the Mensheviks had failed. “We have closed down the fraction’s organ and will move more aggressively toward unification,” he promised. But the division between Lenin and the other Bolsheviks was not so easily eliminated. The agreement with the trustees on money matters was signed with the Bolsheviks, but it was by no means clear whether that meant Lenin or Bogdanov.³⁷

The Taratuta Affair

Bolshevik expropriations and other money matters were also the object of an RSDRP party court investigation of Viktor Taratuta in the spring of 1910. On February 2, 1910, the first of seven hearings was held in Paris to discuss charges that Taratuta was a police agent-provocateur, responsible for the arrest of Kamo and other participants in the Tiflis Ex. Martov and the Mensheviks were the main prosecutors. They excoriated the Bolshevik Center for its illegalities after 1907. The whole affair dragged on into 1911 before the court finally dismissed the accusations against Taratuta for lack of evidence. Taratuta declared his innocence, arguing that Bogdanov had started the rumors as part of his campaign against Lenin. Whatever the truth of the matter, in July 1910 a real Okhrana agent, Roman Malinovsky, filed his first report on RSDRP illegal activity inside Russia, leading to numerous arrests; yet he was soon to become a leading figure in the party itself, and a confidant of Lenin.³⁸

The Taratuta affair indicated that the division between Lenin and the other Bolsheviks reached deep into the Russian underground. Stalin at first referred to this division as a “tempest in a teapot,” and showed signs of supporting Bogdanov against Lenin. By December 1910 Stalin decided to cast his lot with Lenin. In a letter intercepted by the Paris Okhrana, Stalin wrote that Bogdanov and the Vpered group should either wake up or “stew in their own juice”; party unity was now a necessity, and “the line of the Lenin-Plekhanov bloc is the only correct one.” Lenin was a “shrewd peasant” (umnyi muzhik) who could most effectively lead the Bolsheviks in the future.³⁹

By January 1911 Stalin appears to have become a Leninist at last. “You have certainly heard about the ‘tempest in a teapot,’” he wrote a party member in Moscow; “the Lenin-Plekhanov bloc, on the one hand, the Trotsky-Martov-Bogdanov bloc, on the other. The workers’ attitude toward the first bloc, I know, is favorable.” Under the misconception that Bogdanov was allied with the Mensheviks, Stalin agreed to support “Lenin & Co.” But he also voiced the usual complaint of the praktiki that “émigré squabbling” was only helping to destroy the Bolshevik underground inside Russia.⁴⁰

The Taratuta affair, like the Paris plenum, marked a defeat for Lenin. Despite his virtual alliance with the Mensheviks on matters of philosophy, he had completely lost control of his own fraction and its finances. To make matters worse, Bogdanov and his supporters were now laying claim to the mantle of Bolshevism themselves.

Vpered and “Left” Bolshevism

In December 1909 the remnants of the Capri School began to reorganize around Bogdanov and a new journal, Vpered. Bogdanov made clear that he was laying claim to the legacy of Bolshevism. Among Bogdanov’s supporters were Lunacharsky, Gregor Alexinsky, F. I. Kalinin, Stanislav Volsky, Gorky, Pokrovsky, Liadov, Shantser, and several Capri School students. At Paris in January 1910 they achieved central committee recognition as a “literary group.” This enabled them to “fight openly to revive the unity of Bolshevism.”

Bogdanov still controlled some of the money from the Tiflis Ex, although how much is unclear. With it he proposed to set up a new party school under the RSDRP central committee that would include all the various fractions. But unity was highly unlikely. In March 1910 Alexinsky accused Lenin of “selling out and betraying Bolshevism” by handing over its money and its authority at the Paris plenum. Lenin replied that the Vpered group was “stupid” and wrote Vilonov, now on his deathbed in a Swiss sanatorium, that he was glad Vilonov had rejected Mach in favor of Marx and materialism. Lenin also sought to split Bogdanov’s new circle by making amends to Gorky; Lenin wrote him that Bolshevism was in great danger of perishing, but promised that “we will resurrect the Bolshevik fraction again.” How Lenin intended to do this was unclear.⁴¹

The Vpered group in May 1910 dispatched an open letter to “comrade Bolsheviks,” presumably written by Bogdanov. The letter accused Lenin of “surrendering all Bolshevik positions, one after another,” to the Menshevik-dominated RSDRP. This was “uncontrolled bossing by irresponsible persons” who were simply “ideological Mensheviks.” Bolshevism was now completely cut off from events inside Russia and was in danger of dying out. It was necessary to “reconstruct the Bolshevik fraction on a new basis,” namely, “the collective, not individual personalities.” Thus did Bogdanov lay claim to Bolshevism and accuse Lenin of being a Menshevik.⁴²

Despite his isolation (Dubrovinsky was arrested in June 1910), Lenin was able to maintain some support from a distance inside Russia. Letters reached him saying that Materialism and Empiriocriticism had helped put an end to “philosophical uncertainties” for party members. Lunacharsky wrote an entire pamphlet disclaiming Lenin’s label of “god builder”; but people remembered the label better than they remembered Lunacharsky’s disclaimer. Lunacharsky wrote openly that the RSDRP was “experiencing a deep crisis”; Lenin continued to proclaim his own orthodoxy.⁴³

In another pamphlet the Vpered group reviewed the history of Bolshevism since 1905. The fraction was clearly threatened by schism; unity was needed. Yet this unity should be based on the assumption of continuing revolutionary possibilities; “all the conditions which led the proletariat along the road to revolution are still there, and even more strongly in effect.” True Bolshevism was the most correct application of Marxism to Russian reality. The key to its success was proletarian consciousness, based on experience and articulated in ideology. The party was the vanguard of the proletariat and should lead the way to a “dictatorship of proletariat and peasantry.” Organization should come from below, not above, through democratic centralism, where “leading collectives, starting with the factory and ending with the central committee, elect gatherings of organized workers.” The illegal fighting organization of 1905 should not be liquidated, nor should illegal labor unions. Different opinions should be tolerated within the party, and the proletariat should become the “leader of the whole democracy.”⁴⁴

For Lenin, such talk of proletarian democracy by a dozen or so émigré workers and intellectuals was nonsense. Their “scientific socialism” merely covered up “empty thoughts.” Talk of a proletarian democracy and proletarian culture was a disguise for “Machism and recallism.” In fact, the first issue of Vpered, which appeared in July 1910 in Paris, billed itself as a “popular workers’ journal,” calling for labor solidarity and collective energy on the part of the proletariat. It also praised Italian syndicalists as “young and energetic fighters for the workers’ cause” and, in an article entitled “How Not to Keep Accounts,” attacked Lenin for giving up Bolshevik money to the German trustees. As Lenin correctly noted, behind the talk of proletarian culture lay the politics of syndicalism and the sordid tale of party funds.⁴⁵

The Vpered circle continued to articulate the philosophy of collectivism in the name of Bolshevism. Collectivism was now redefined as “proletarian culture,” a collectivist ideology that would create a class-based proletarian science, art, music, and literature. Bogdanov continued to argue that the “fetishism of private property” and the bourgeois self would give way to the “needs of the collective.” Technology, party, and labor unions would create an “all-proletarian collectivism” that would include a “new conception of truth” for workers. Truth was relative, like any other “ideological form.” It was only a tool in the “struggle with nature.” “The meaning of truth,” concluded Bogdanov, “is to change the world according to the needs and tasks of its collective subject.”⁴⁶

Collectivist relativism stood in sharp contrast to Lenin’s conception of materialist absolute truth. Bazarov claimed that Lenin’s materialism was only an inverted idealism, a superfluous and contradictory copy theory of reality that led to a philosophical “blind alley.” The materialism of Lenin and Plekhanov had “very little in common with Marx’s philosophy.” M. N. Liadov argued that in 1905 the RSDRP had been a real collective of workers; now “all these Plekhanovs, Lenins, and Martovs” were merely squabbling émigrés out of touch with the “collective proletarian movement” inside Russia. Menshevism was “intelligentsia individualism”; Bolshevism was “proletarian partiinost’” (party spirit). “A proletarian movement,” concluded Liadov, “can only be led by a conscious proletarian social democratic party; only the friendly collective creativity of conscious proletarians can recreate a proletarian party.” ⁴⁷

Thus collectivism in theory was distinguished from both Leninism and Menshevism. The collectivists were organizing a school in Bologna, Italy, for workers to strengthen ties between émigré Bolsheviks and Russian praktiki. Theoretical differences again were sharpened by syndicalism and money.

The Bologna School

The Capri School never really disbanded. Its key members— Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Liadov, Stanislav Volsky, and Alexinskycontinued to maintain themselves as a circle of Bolsheviks around the journal Vpered. In June 1910 they also began to plan a new workers’ school at Bologna, using funds stolen by Urals Bolsheviks from a bank in Miass in the summer of 1909. “The money was really transferred,” recalled one participant, “not because the Urals people wanted to enter this school as students, but mainly because they wanted to organize a party-propaganda school abroad, to prepare party workers for Russia.” F. I. Kalinin was put in charge of the new school, which consisted of a four-room apartment in Bologna occupied by the Bogdanovs and Lunacharskys.⁴⁸

While Bologna claimed to be a party school, it had the support of neither the RSDRP central committee nor Lenin. The Okhrana had three agents in place, so that when students returned to Russia they were promptly arrested. The initial plan was for local RSDRP organizations inside Russia to choose students for a four-month term, and for instructors to be representative of the different RSDRP fractions. But when the school opened on November 21, 1910, it consisted of Bogdanov and his friends—Lunacharsky, Liadov, Volsky, Alexinsky, Gorky, Pokrovsky and seventeen students.⁴⁹

The collectivists proved to be poor organizers. Pokrovsky and Vladimir Menzhinsky soon left because of Bogdanov’s constant attacks on Lenin. Gorky declined to lecture, as did Karl Kautsky. Trotsky participated for a month, but proved to be arrogant, if brilliant, and “tried to dislodge our pupils from their extreme left viewpoint.” Trotsky also objected to the syndicalism he discovered there. Mutual collective education, including practical work in propaganda, conspiracy, and agitation, soon degenerated into fractional infighting. And there was the usual (and justified) fear of police provocation.⁵⁰

Syndicalism, like Bolshevism, was on the wane in 1910. Bologna was the site of a congress of Italian syndicalists in December, where Georges Sorel publicly announced his withdrawal from the movement because “syndicalism has not realized its expectations.” Privately Sorel wrote a friend that “syndicalism is falling apart” and that he was “happy no longer to have any connection with the revolutionary movement.” Sorel’s drift to the right seemed to confirm Lenin’s fear that syndicalism masked idealism and reaction. Lenin naturally refused to participate in the Bologna enterprise, but agreed to lecture to the students if they came to Paris.⁵¹

Like the Capri School, Bologna proved an abortive attempt to organize Bolshevism without Lenin. Bogdanov’s attacks on Lenin became a “sad polemic,” as Menzhinsky put it, and “new combinations with Trotsky have apparently produced little to cheer about.” Karl Kautsky praised the school for its attempt to raise proletarian consciousness and solidarity. But he urged its participants not to limit themselves to illegal activities outside parliament; this could lead to the disorganization of the working class. The best example of this process was French syndicalism.⁵²

The Bologna School was an intriguing experiment. It had the support of a socialist municipal government, and of Garibaldi University, of which it was a temporary department. As treasurer, Lunacharsky could do little about the final three-thousand-franc deficit except cover it with money from Vpered. In early 1911 the school disbanded and moved to Paris, home of Bogdanov’s great nemesis, Lenin. To make matters worse, Lenin was repairing relations with Gorky, further splitting the collectivists into small circles incapable of reconstituting the Bolshevik movement they remembered.

Gorky against Bogdanov

The Capri School ended cordial relations between Gorky and the other collectivists. “Why are you nagging me all the time about ‘Bolshevism?’” he wrote a friend in January 1910. “You are an attentive reader. Bolshevism is as dear to me, insofar as the monists run it, as socialism is dear and important to me, because it is the only way man can most rapidly arrive at a deep and complete consciousness of his personal human achievement. I don’t see any other way.” Gorky—the poet of the proletariat’s “collective soul,” as the future head of the Cheka, Felix Dzherzhinsky, called him—clearly imagined a Bolshevism closer to the Old Believers and Stenka Razin than to Marx. Nevertheless, within a few months Gorky was breaking off relations with Bogdanov and moving closer to Lenin. Why?⁵³

For one thing, Andreeva was now thoroughly disgusted with Bogdanov and Lunacharsky. They were her “enemies,” trying to have her committed to a psychiatric ward and break up her relationship with Gorky. The Bolshevik circle of 1905 was now destroyed. “What a fate for everyone,” Andreeva complained. “S. T. [Morozov] shot himself, A. M. [Gorky] became an empiriocritic, and I . . . ? My God! Only A. M. has emancipated himself and removed all his chains.” Gorky, Andreeva continued, had parted company with Bogdanov and his circle, “although in principle he still agrees with them, still the connection has been severed.”⁵⁴

In March 1910, Gorky wrote Bogdanov that they should no longer correspond. In contrast, Gorky invited Lenin to visit Capri, which he did during the first two weeks in July. This time, in contrast to April 1908, the visit was quite pleasant. Together with Gorky and Andreeva, Lenin enjoyed going to see movies at a nearby “Edison theater,” toured the museums of Naples, and visited Pompei and Mount Vesuvius. Fiaving dispensed with Bogdanov, Lenin and Gorky began to build a new relationship.⁵⁵

Gorky and Lenin continued to correspond in 1910, and Lenin was naturally attracted by the great writer’s financial resources. Gorky felt that Bogdanov, however interesting as a writer and a thinker, was personally unstable and rude. Gorky was tired of “playing politics.” He now praised Lenin highly, seeing in him a better leader for Bolshevism. He donated five hundred francs to Lenin and Plekhanov for their new journal, Rabochaia gazeta. As for Bogdanov, Gorky wrote him in December 1910 that, much as he respected Bogdanov as a thinker and a revolutionary, he could no longer be “a private in your army.”⁵⁶

In January 1911, Lenin moved the entire “Library and Archive of the RSDRP” from Geneva to Paris, removing it from Bogdanov’s control. Lenin and Krupskaya had packed up these materials in November 1905 for safekeeping. Much of the collection was then shipped to Russia; the rest was now in Lenin’s hands. In January and March 1911 Gorky came to Paris to see Lenin, undoubtedly to provide support for Lenin’s own school for party workers at Longjumeau outside Paris. Lenin told Gorky he wanted nothing more to do with “the rogue Trotsky,” nor was unification with the Mensheviks possible. Certainly they should have nothing to do with Bogdanov and the Vperedists.⁵⁷

Bolshevism without Lenin was no more successful than Leninism without the other Bolsheviks. Bolshevik collectivism always threatened to abandon Marxism for syndicalism; Leninist authoritarianism inclined towards Jacobin dictatorship and Menshevik parliamentarism. Perhaps the shrewdest observer of this dilemma was Lenin’s ally George Plekhanov.

In August 1909 Plekhanov noted that the “schism in the camp of the Bolsheviks” was a good thing if it could facilitate RSDRP party unity. Lenin, a weak Marxist, faced a bewildering array of opponents— “mystics and empiriomonists, god builders and supermen”—whose theories inclined them toward “anarchosyndicalism, recallism, and other isms.” Bogdanov was not really a Marxist at all, and Plekhanov hoped that Lenin and the Bolsheviks would surgically remove the cancer of syndicalism. If the Mensheviks agreed not to liquidate the illegal underground party structure, then perhaps unity was possible between Lenin’s Bolshevism and Plekhanov’s Menshevism.⁵⁸

Plekhanov realized that this unification was unlikely. “The success of the liquidators in the Menshevik camp is directly proportional to the mistakes of the sectarians from the Bolshevik camp,” he complained. Bogdanov’s collectivism was foggy philosophy and utopianism; Lenin was a throwback to Populist Jacobinism, a Blanquist, close to the Social Revolutionaries. “Whatever my differences with the Bolsheviks,” he wrote, “we have in common a party point of view. In saying this, I have in mind the Leninist crowd of Bolsheviks and not Maximov’s [Bogdanov’s] crowd, which represents the anarcho-syndicalists and not the social democrats.” Plekhanov admitted that Lenin had made many mistakes; but Lenin was correct to reject both the liquidation of the underground party by the Mensheviks and the reactionary idealist philosophy of the collectivists.⁵⁹

Plekhanov thus attacked syndicalism in politics and Machist idealism in philosophy. Syndicalism was utopian socialism and anarchist “putschism”; Machism and empiriomonism were un-Marxist and idealist. Lenin attacked the philosophy, but not the politics, of the other Bolsheviks, for it was philosophy, and not politics, that linked those Bolsheviks with certain Mensheviks. From the Social Revolutionary point of view, Lenin had helped create Bolshevism, but had now become a Menshevik, in alliance with Plekhanov. Of course Lenin did not admit this. “A proof by opposites: to Lenin’s left are the recallists; recallists are anarchists; therefore Lenin is a Bolshevik.”⁶⁰

In what state, then, was Bolshevism by early 1911? Bogdanov and Lunacharsky had gone their own way with the Vpered circle of collectivists, relativists in philosophy and syndicalists in politics. What he called the “bitter experience of 1908 to 1911” convinced Lenin that unification with the Mensheviks was impossible. Lenin declared that a state of war existed, but with whom? Politically, both the RSDRP and the Bolshevik fraction had disintegrated into a bewildering collection of individuals and circles scattered across Europe and Russia. Bolshevism seemed not to exist. Yet there was a good reason to maintain the useful fiction of Bolshevism. For the German socialist trustees controlled substantial sums of money to be returned on that happy day when the fissiparous Russians could reunite. Until then, it would remain the object of continuous coveting and intrigue, and the master of the intriguers was Lenin.