INTRODUCTION

To a historian who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s it is difficult to realize that the Soviet Union developed from a political movement, Bolshevism, that was not only authoritarian and monolithic but also polycentrist and collectivist. Stalinism suggested a linear succession of individual authority in which the infallible ideas of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin all merged into a single orthodoxy. Hierarchy, command, organization, despotism, autocracy, and totalitarianism all were said to characterize a Russian and Soviet political tradition in which the dominance of the individual leader was matched by the passivity, docility, and self-sacrifice to the collective in an ever-modernizing society.

This study of the early years of Bolshevism suggests a quite different conclusion. Lenin certainly envisioned a revolutionary party in which organizational efficiency would transform class struggle into political and social revolution. But the reality of Bolshevism was quite different—a fractious and divided movement of émigré intellectuals and white-collar professionals who continually disagreed over matters of ideology, organization, and money. That Lenin was able to channel such disparity into revolutionary success was a tribute to his political genius and sagacity in the face of continual conflict and division among the other Bolsheviks. The identity of Bolshevism and Leninism was itself a kind of wishful thinking or retroactive mythology.¹

For Bolshevism and Leninism were not identical before 1917. Bolshevism was a radical movement of Marxist intellectuals from the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDRP) associated with the revolution of 1905 and its aftermath. Whereas Lenin spent all but two years of the period 1900–1917 in exile in Western Europe, other Bolshevik leaders led a mobile underground existence inside Russia. They formed a heterogeneous collective of middle-class intellectuals and professional revolutionaries. They did not recognize Lenin as the undisputed, or even primary, leader of their movement. Their common bond was Marxism, but their interpretation of the meaning of Marx’s ideas varied widely.

Leninism developed as a political doctrine and style based on Marxist orthodoxy as Lenin understood it, with the help of such luminaries as G.V. Plekhanov and Karl Kautsky. The other Bolsheviks were drawn to modernist currents in European thought, notably relativism in science and syndicalism in politics. Led by the doctor-philosopher A.A. Bogdanov and the electrical engineer L. B. Krasin, the other Bolsheviks sought to revise Marx’s ideas for an age in which myth and hypothesis played as great a role as truth and fact. Bolshevism was therefore in constant tension in its formative years between the authoritarianism of Lenin and the collectivist ideas of the other Bolsheviks. Ultimately, this was a creative tension that enabled Lenin to direct a revolution that only appeared to be spontaneous in its mass appeal in 1917. Lenin in the end dominated Bolshevism, and created a successful revolutionary party that combined Jacobinism and collectivism, conscious party authority and manipulated popular myth.

Bolshevism has traditionally been identified with Lenin because of Lenin’s canonization in the Soviet Union at the expense of the reputations (and sometimes the lives) of the other Bolsheviks. The party and its members are measured in virtue according to their supposed Leninist behavior and standards. In addition, much early party history has been written either by old Bolsheviks who sought to play down their disagreements with Lenin or by Menshevik rivals who assumed that Lenin’s dominant personality and voluminous writings represented the views of the other Bolsheviks. Such was rarely the case.²

Lenin’s famous dichotomy between consciousness and spontaneity existed within, as well as outside, Bolshevism. The other Bolsheviks had their own consciousness, and favored the manipulation of ideology rather than obedience to party authority. For them, consciousness was a function of individual human experience and varied accordingly from one individual to another. Like many other words in the Bolshevik vocabulary, the word “experience” was a code word. It alluded to the general strike and the view that workers needed strike experience in order to gain revolutionary consciousness. Lenin saw revolution as a form of war in which a vanguard party of disciplined professional revolutionaries seized power; the other Bolsheviks saw revolution as a cultural transformation of human minds, so that the masses would think in terms of the socialist collective, not the bourgeois individual. In the formative years of Bolshevism Lenin’s “I” competed with the collectivist “we.”³

Put another way, Lenin’s authoritarianism belonged to a conspiratorial Jacobin tradition in Europe and Russia that emphasized the seizure of power by an elite in an armed uprising, while the other Bolsheviks were drawn to the syndicalist ideal of worker solidarity through the collective experience of the general strike. In this sense, Bolshevism was a fusion of Jacobinism and syndicalism, Lenin’s revolutionary authority and Bogdanov’s collectivist myth, which proved to be a volatile combination in 1917 and a source of intraparty tension afterwards.⁴

Reading through Bolshevik texts written before 1917, the historian must appreciate that the written word was doubly Aesopian. That is, ideas were disguised to evade the censor, and also to evade rival socialists’ suspicions of anarchism, syndicalism, and other revisions of orthodox Marxist doctrine. The most famous example of Aesopian writing was the great debate between Bogdanov and Lenin over philosophy after 1905, a debate that was also about party politics and money, neither of which could be discussed openly in print. Behind the philosophy of empiriocriticism lay the politics of syndicalism and the intrafractional struggle for party funds; behind Lenin’s self-styled materialist orthodoxy lay the politics of dictatorship.

Lenin in his writings portrayed the other Bolsheviks as idealists, revisionists, and even anarchists. But in contrast to the antistate individualism of the anarchist tradition, the other Bolsheviks shared a common commitment to what they called “collectivism.” In regard to party organization, collectivism meant the dominance of the party collective, such as the Central Committee, over the will of any individual, such as Lenin. Ideologically, collectivism meant that some Bolsheviks were inclined toward syndicalism, the belief in the efficacy of the mass strike and direct action guided by useful myth. Philosophically, collectivism entailed what Gorky called “god building,” the creation of a new socialist religion of science, a cultural myth capable of making the collective believe in their own “we,” rather than in the individualist bourgeois “I.” Collectivism was a loosely linked body of ideas that set itself against individualism in the name of an ethic of self-sacrifice.⁵

Combined with Lenin’s authoritarianism, Bogdanov’s collectivism made up a second ideological thrust of Bolshevism. Organized authority through a revolutionary party depended on a collectivist myth believed by the masses. The Lenin-Bogdanov dispute in 1907–1910 over “Machism” and philosophy thus reflected a deeper division within Bolshevism between Leninism and collectivism, a division that forms the subject of this book.⁶ In its political language, Bolshevism was divided between Lenin’s esoteric cryptography and V. D. Bonch-Bruevich’s quasireligious mass propaganda. In its theory of party organization, Bolshevism was divided between Lenin’s Jacobin vanguard and Bogdanov’s ideological collective. In terms of party finances, Lenin’s willingness to accept the patronage of Gorky, Old Believer millionaires, and German socialists contrasted with the other Bolsheviks’ thrust toward expropriation, by violence if needed, of bourgeois wealth from banks and individuals.⁷ Ideologically there was a division between Lenin’s view of Marxism as absolute truth and Bogdanov’s view of Marxism as effective myth. Finally, the Bolshevik vision of revolution was divided between Lenin’s underground conspiracy in preparation for class war and Bogdanov’s vision of cultural experience. These divisions, of course, were both destructive and creative, producing frequent tensions and, ultimately, revolutionary success.

At the heart of the division between Lenin and the other Bolsheviks lay the question of the role of the individual. The archetypal professional revolutionary, in Lenin’s mind, was Lenin himself, whose full-time occupation was revolution; the consequence of this thinking, as Trotsky and Rosa Luxembourg pointed out in 1904, was a political system dominated by one man ruling with the aid of a cult of personality and an obedient party. For the other Bolsheviks the ultimate political act was self-sacrifice for the good of the collective, an act of transcendence in which the bourgeois individual self vanished in the worship of all. Under Stalin the fusion of two traditions, authoritarian individualism and self-sacrificing collectivism, reached a climax in the terrible purge years, when terror and confession merged into a single world of the Gulag Archipelago. Death became commonplace, suicide the handmaiden of murder, and collective immortality the myth that supported Stalin’s cult of personality. Yet the idea that the individual human being could and should be sacrificed to the socialist collective characterized Bolshevism from its inception and formed the necessary complement to Leninist authority.

This book traces the history of Bolshevism from its origins in 1904 until the outbreak of World War I, by which time Lenin had taken over control of what was left of the movement. While Lenin’s importance is recognized, I have chosen to focus on the long-neglected ideas and actions of the other Bolsheviks in order to show that Lenin was one revolutionary among many in a fractious, polemical, and divided political movement, not the undisputed leader of an obedient party. Lenin was a Bolshevik, but Bolshevism was more than Leninism and not all Bolsheviks were Leninists.

I have deliberately avoided the story of Lenin’s rise to power in 1914–1917, a subject in itself, but have included a final chapter on his 1920 polemic with the other Bolsheviks over the issue of syndicalism. Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism articulates many of the ideas derived from his prerevolutionary experience, and is an echo of that experience.