The London Congress and Parliamentary Politics

In early March 1907 A. V. Lunacharsky arrived at Lenin’s safe house in Kuokkala, Finland, and “spoke about his plans to study the latest in West European proletarian life, especially syndicalism.” Lenin proceeded to give Lunacharsky advice and to suggest what might be learned from such a study. At the same time Lenin began drafting a resolution for the impending fifth RSDRP congress in which he argued that “a most determined ideological struggle must be waged against the anarcho-syndicalist movement among the proletariat.”²

Lenin’s private interest in and public hostility toward syndicalism reflected his own ambivalence regarding the movement. Within his own circle Lenin now faced a substantial thrust in the direction of revising the teachings of Marx to make them accommodate the recent experience of revolution. Bogdanov had completed the third volume of his monumental book Empiriomonism and wished to revise Marxism along the lines of Joseph Dietzgen’s “religion of socialism.” Lenin was consulting the urbane Armenian adventurer and bank robber Kamo (S. A. Ter-Petrosian), then involved in planning more “expropriations” in Georgia. Lenin’s authority was threatened by independent thought and precipitous action inspired by the revolutionary wave which many other Bolsheviks thought had not yet receded.

The choice between parliamentary participation in the new Duma government of Premier P. A. Stolypin and underground revolutionary activity confronted the RSDRP at its fifth party congress held in London in June 1907. Russian socialists assembled here in great number (four hundred or so delegates), but they were a penurious lot. That the congress could afford to meet at all was due to the generosity of Joseph Fels, 54, a Philadelphia millionaire owner of the Fels-Naptha Soap Company and a follower of the single-tax advocate Henry George. Fels loaned the party seventeen hundred pounds to hold its congress, and 240 grateful delegates signed a note agreeing to repay the loan.³

The London congress, held from April 30 to May 19, 1907, was originally scheduled for Copenhagen but was cancelled by the Danish police. Instead the delegates ended up in the London Brotherhood Church, a labor church with a mixture of politics and religion that included Ramsay MacDonald among its members. Gorky found the church “unadorned to the point of absurdity,” but the RSDRP could not look a gift horse in the mouth. The London congress was the last major party congress before 1917 and included such diverse luminaries as Lenin, Bogdanov, Trotsky, Stalin, Martov and representatives of the Bundist, Latvian, and Polish parties.⁴

The Bolsheviks were a volatile minority at London. Their 89 voting members were outnumbered by a coalition of Mensheviks (88), Bundists (55), Polish-Lithuanians (45), and Latvians (26). But Bolshevism repre sented the urge to continue the revolutionary activity of 1905 and not to become coopted by the parliamentary opportunities of the Stolypin regime. The Bolsheviks were well known for their revolutionary activity in procuring weapons and money through various expropriations and forced donations; until 1910 the Bolsheviks continued to subsidize the St. Petersburg committee of the RSDRP at a rate of one thousand rubles a month, and the Moscow committee at half that rate. More squeamish comrades succeeded on May 19 in passing a resolution “on partisan activities” which decreed that “party organizations must conduct an energetic struggle against partisan activities and expropriations” and “all specialized fighting squads attached to party organizations are to be disbanded.”⁵

In response to this defeat and to the mood of squabbling, debating, and infighting that characterized the congress, Lenin proceeded to create a secret Bolshevik Center to coordinate continuing revolutionary activity advocated by Gorky and the Georgian Bolsheviks, including Kamo, Stalin, and Tskhakaya. The cover for this operation was the editorial board of the new Bolshevik newspaper Proletarii. However, the Bolshevik Center would soon have its own disagreements over the question of participation in the upcoming Duma elections.⁶

On June 3, 1907, responding to a two-year wave of violence and political assassination of public officials, Stolypin tightened government control with a coup d’etat that restricted the political activity of Russia’s new parliament, the Duma. In one stroke he prorogued the second Duma, arrested sixty-five social democratic delegates and exiled them to Siberia, and promulgated a new electoral law which greatly limited popular representation except for middle-class and gentry property owners. The RSDRP lost support accordingly. Many Bolsheviks now found themselves in jail or exile as the number of political prisoners in Russia increased from 86,000 in 1905 to 170,000 by 1909. The number of strikes declined as well, from 6,114 in 1906 to only 222 in 1910. Everywhere the Stolypin regime repressed revolutionary violence.⁷

Elections for the third Duma in the summer of 1907 deeply divided the RSDRP. A conference of the Moscow RSDRP committee voted fifty-nine to sixteen to boycott the new parliament and to recall delegates if elected. Under the leadership of Stanislav Volsky, a syndicalist, the Moscow RSDRP remained a hotbed of “recallism” and opposition to Lenin until 1909. In St. Petersburg the government continued to arrest party leaders throughout the 1907–1910 period. RSDRP membership declined sharply from 7,300 in June 1907 to 3,000 in early 1908, then to 1,000 in early 1909 and to only 600 by 1910. Similar drops in membership occurred in other Russian cities, and many of the departing members were the most literate and skilled workers. In July 1907 the English journalist William Walling reported that the Bolsheviks were “strongest in the Russian provincial towns” and “nearest the peasants,” apparently after a conversation with Lenin. Bolshevism, like the RSDRP in general, was being decapitated by government policies intended to destroy the revolutionary movement. For socialists, the choice between syndicalist direct action and parliamentary participation was a European phenomenon, but especially acute in postrevolutionary Russia.⁸

In mid-June 1907 Lenin left London for Russia and took up his cudgel against those who wished to boycott the Duma. He portrayed boycottism as a Social Revolutionary policy of “war on the old regime” which belonged to the “heroic period of the Russian Revolution.” Times had changed, argued Lenin, and the RSDRP should participate in parliamentary elections along with the bourgeois parties of the day. Yet Lenin stood very nearly alone within the Bolshevik fraction, since the other Bolsheviks were still drawn to syndicalism as a means to perpetuate the revolution.⁹

At the second all-Russian conference of the RSDRP, held in Finland in early August 1907, the Menshevik leader Fedor Dan agreed with Lenin that the party should participate in the Duma. In addition, he noted that the Bolsheviks “have acquired a method for themselves: the action directe of the syndicalists.¹¹ Lenin realized that Bolshevik attraction toward syndicalist direct action could threaten his own authority. He was understandably ambivalent. In November 1907 Lenin wrote an introduction to a pamphlet by Lunacharsky in which he noted that syndicalism was a natural reaction against the opportunistic tactic of parliamentary reform. Yet Lenin found Lunacharsky’s proposal for a General Labor Council that would include other socialist parties “rather unpractical.” Party authority was preferable to labor spontaneity.¹⁰

Privately, Lenin wrote Lunacharsky that Bolshevism “knows how to take everything living from syndicalism, in order to kill Russian syndicalism and opportunism,” adding that “only we can refute syndicalism with a revolutionary view.” By early 1908 Lenin was publicly defending Marxist orthodoxy against syndicalist collectivism. “We have conducted, are conducting, and will conduct,” he wrote in Proletarii, “a resolute struggle against any attempts to sow the seeds of syndicalism in Russia” at the expense of the “theory of revolutionary Marxism. . . . Those intellectuals who modishly sow the seeds of syndicalism in Russia will never see them brought to fruition.” By the autumn of 1908 Lenin was compelled by Menshevik criticism to disavow Lunacharsky’s syndicalist enthusiasms, responding that “your attempts to connect us with syndicalism will remain unsuccessful, Messrs. Revisionists.”¹¹

Lenin recognized that syndicalism was now a major influence on Bolshevism which threatened party authority and his own standing as leader. The other Bolsheviks, drawn to the syndicalist movement in Europe and America, were intrigued by a collectivist myth of the general strike and a religion of labor that could keep alive the experience of 1905. For Lenin, labor spontaneity threatened party authority. Indeed, between 1907 and 1910 the other Bolsheviks turned to syndicalism in politics and collectivism in philosophy, and Lenin very nearly found himself a man without a party.

Syndicalism: The French-Italian Connection

In Europe after 1900 syndicalism was an important political and intellectual trend which stressed the role of will, belief, and myth in making workers conscious of their collective desires. Revolutionary syndicalism threatened Marxist socialism by its call to violent action, rather than parliamentary reform, and its treatment of ideas as useful myth, rather than scientific truth. The word syndicat meant trade union, and syndicalism placed its hopes in workers, not political parties. Real Marxism meant class struggle between the expropriators and expropriated; strikes created working class solidarity.¹²

Syndicalists consequently placed their hopes in working class experience, not the authority of bourgeois political parties, even socialist ones. The strike was direct class action; the vote was indirect election of party representatives. The syndicalist revolution would not be a sudden seizure of political power, but the gradual expropriation of factories and industries until they were under workers’ control.

Syndicalists argued that Marxism had reached a dead end as a materialist social science and rationalist doctrine of revolution. They turned instead to the irrational vitalism of Henri Bergson, with its emphasis on memory, duration, and experience in shaping human activity, and to the sceptical pragmatism of thinkers such as William James and Bertrand Russell. Syndicalism was part of a general reaction against nineteenth-century materialism and positivism, the cult of rational progress and scientific knowledge. In the best tradition of Hume, Berkeley, and Kant the syndicalists stressed the primacy of ideas based on sensations of the world, not on an objective and external reality. Individuals were motivated by intuition, not reason, and therefore subject to the appeal of myth and idea. Syndicalism emerged in a Europe that was rediscovering the irrational.

Syndicalism involved direct action more than coherent ideology. Its leading proponent in France was Georges Sorel, who wrote on a regular basis for Lagardelle’s Movement Socialiste, a journal expressing the labor militancy of the CGT (Confédération Général du Travail). In early 1906 Sorel published a series of articles later gathered together as his most famous book, Réflexions sur la violence. Sorel argued that Marxism had become an “idolatry of words” instead of a revolutionary doctrine, and that only violent conflict would keep alive the catastrophic vision in Marx’s thinking, as opposed to its reformist inclinations. For Sorel, the key to worker radicalism was myth, which he defined as “the framing of a future in some indeterminate time,” as in the Christian Apocalypse. Myth and ideas, not reality, move the masses to action, and the most important of these is the myth of the general strike. In Sorel’s Hobbesian world of brute violence, the key to proletarian action was an “epic state of mind” created by intellectual leaders.¹³

Sorel’s doctrine was a doctrine of socialist self-sacrifice to the collective. “The cause for which one sacrificed one’s life was less significant than the personality created in the course of battle.” True syndicalist direct action would consist of losing oneself through participation in a “heroic movement.” “Only heroic movement—with its self-abnegation, its rejection of sensate indulgence, its emotional commitment, its self-sacrifice unto death is singled out from among all other activities as the ideal human condition.” Syndicalism as a mood of collectivist self-sacrifice thus had an understandable appeal in post-1905 Russia.¹⁴

The year 1907 marked the high point of European syndicalism. In April 1907 an international syndicalist congress met in Paris and included Sorel, Arturo Labriola, Robert Michels, and Hubert Lagardelle among its speakers. Lagardelle praised syndicalism as the most effective and cathartic form of socialism, an “outpouring of proletarian energy.” Sorel in a speech entitled “The Decomposition of Marxism” portrayed Marx as a maker of myth, not a scientist, and compared the future general strike to the Christian Apocalypse, an “advent of a world to come.” Revolutionary syndicalists, he noted, were like medieval monks, members of a holy order to save Marxism and socialism from decay and decomposition.¹⁵

At an anarchist congress held in Amsterdam in August 1907 Pierre Monatte, a French syndicalist, argued that “syndicalism does not waste time promising the workers a paradise on earth; it calls on them to conquer it and assures them that their action will never be wholly in vain. It is a school of the will, of energy and of fruitful thought. It opens to anarchism, which for too long has been turned in on itself, new perspectives and experiences.”¹⁶ But anarchist dreams of total individual freedom from the state and syndicalist myths of a proletarian general strike were also in conflict, and syndicalism in its class orientation was linked more to Marxism than to anarchism. In proletarian syndicalism lay Bolshevik opportunity and Leninist frustration.

During 1907 and 1908, France was wracked by strikes and other labor disorders, usually suppressed in bloody battles with the police. French syndicalism consequently became divided between “ultras” and “politiques,” between those advocating continuing strikes and those urging more cautious political reform. The choice between direct action and parliamentary participation created a crisis in French syndicalism. As a result by late 1908 the CGT was in considerable disarray as a radical force in French labor. Some syndicalists even collaborated with the royalist right and its political arm, Action Française.¹⁷

Among those pulled to the right was Sorel. In July 1908 he opposed further collaboration with Jean Jaurès, the socialist leader, and the CGT, as advocated by Lagardelle. Instead he began publishing articles in monarchist reviews and on October 31, 1908, announced his “immediate withdrawal” from Mouvement Socialiste. By 1909 Sorel was praising Action Francaise despite its obvious anti-Semitic and monarchist direction. In October 1908 Lagardelle wrote that “syndicalism is going through a sad crisis. On the one hand, the infantile stupidities of the ‘Guerre Sociale’ and noisy Herveism. We must have the courage to oppose those who call for buying revolvers at 50 sou and preparing an ‘uprising.’ On the other hand, there is pressure by the reformists for an alliance with the socialist party, where both Guesdists and Jaurists are completely against syndicalism.” In France, as in Russia, syndicalism was torn between revolution and reform, the strike and the ballot.¹⁸

In 1907 syndicalism was a worldwide phenomenon. In Great Britain John Turner founded the Industrial Union of Direct Actionists (IUDA), a syndicalist group advocating the formation of “one big union”; a year later the American Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) established a British branch, the Industrial League. In Japan the anarcho-syndicalist wing of the Japanese socialist party, the Nihon shakai-to, also was calling for direct action through the general strike, and socialists were deeply divided by the opportunities for parliamentary reform and government repression.¹⁹ But the major European center of syndicalism outside of France was Italy, another source of ideas for the Bolsheviks and Russian syndicalists.

In September 1904 a general strike occurred in Milan, sparked by agrarian disorders in Sicily. The strike leader was the syndicalist Arturo Labriola, who launched thereby a movement that spread throughout Italy. By 1906 an antireformist wing of the Italian Socialist Party had emerged, led by Labriola and Enrico Ferri. Italian syndicalism began in the peasant south of Italy and quickly moved into the cities of the north, encouraged by urban intellectuals steeped in Marxism. It did not approve of the antiauthoritarian individualism of anarchism or the insurrectionary Blanquism of Lenin. Instead, syndicalism in Italy focused on the general strike as a bonding experience for labor unions, a gradual maturation of worker consciousness through education, science, and propaganda. Yet its theories of vanguard leadership often resembled the views of Mussolini and Lenin.²⁰

Italian syndicalism emphasized both political organization and collective experience of workers through the labor union. Arturo Labriola saw in the syndicates of labor the nuclei of a future socialist society, and stressed the energy, will, self-reliance, and solidarity of workers. Enrico Leone also urged the proletariat to acquire the virtue of solidarity and self-sacrifice through strike experience, rather than political insurrection. In general, Italian syndicalism placed a greater emphasis on worker consciousness than irrational myth, shared a common distrust of political parties, and by 1906 formed a militant but declining minority within the Italian labor movement.²¹

In June 1907 the Italian syndicalists held a congress in Ferrara and announced that they were abandoning the Italian Socialist Party to form a new Federation of Autonomous Syndicalist Groups. Yet they claimed fewer than five thousand members, as contrasted with the thirty-four thousand members of the Socialist Party. They continued to criticize parliamentary participation and reform, and to advocate strikes, labor unions, and worker initiative as the means toward a socialist order. Enrico Leone argued that strikes, rather than a political party, would “raise the political consciousness of the proletariat” through direct action; he urged a return to the “true Marxist spirit” of class struggle as a way out of the crisis in socialism brought on by parliamentary reform. The politics of self-sacrifice would ultimately lead to an expropriation of the bourgeoisie by the proletarian collective. Through direct action the laboring classes would acquire a “new spirit of solidarity,” along with a “new ideology, a new conscience, a new morality.”²²

Italian socialists attracted by syndicalism included the young Benito Mussolini, a Marxist schoolteacher in Oneglia. Like Lenin, Mussolini believed in a vanguard party. Yet he also was greatly attracted by antiparliamentarism and Sorelian heroic self-sacrifice derived from myth. An avid reader of Labriola and Leone, Mussolini in 1908 saw myth as the motivating force for collective self-sacrifice and crowd psychology. By 1910 Mussolini’s early Marxism had given way to syndicalism, but with an additional commitment to the revolutionary party.²³

France and Italy were the major centers of European syndicalism in the years after 1905. But their influence through books and periodicals was widespread and significant, especially in America and Russia.

Solidarity Forever: The IWW

Our task is to develop the conscious, intelligent minority to the point where they will be capable of carrying out the imperfectly expressed desires of the toiling millions.

—Industrial Worker, November 1910

We have been naught—we shall be All!

—IWW version of the Internationale

We are the revolution.

—BILL HAYWOOD, 1912

Syndicalism reached America in the summer of 1905 with the founding congress in Chicago of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The IWW was a new coalition of left-wing socialists and radical workers, especially miners from the American West, that favored direct action over parliamentary politics. In the IWW, Marxist ideologues like Daniel De Leon mingled with militant labor radicals like Bill Haywood in an uneasy combination of party intellectuals and proletarians. IWW founding principles stressed one big general industrial union, including workers from all industries; a recognition of the primacy of class struggle over political participation; the power of collectivism and solidarity in rallying worker support; and the call for a national labor organization. In its rallying cry of “solidarity forever,” its dream of “one big union,” and its little red songbook, the IWW represented a syndicalist mood in American labor that gave a permanent legacy to the American left.²⁴

The IWW from the outset was enthusiastic about the Russian Revolution of 1905 as an example of militant labor at its collective finest. Haywood dreamed of American labor revolt along Russian lines. The first IWW congress resolved to “urge our Russian fellow workmen on in their struggle” and “pledge our moral support and promise financial assistance as much as lies within our power.” Maxim Gorky’s arrival in New York in April 1906 to raise money for the Bolsheviks played upon this enthusiasm. Gorky fired off a telegram to Haywood promising that “the day of justice and delivery for the oppressed of all the world is at hand,” and Haywood asked Gorky to “convey our best wishes to fellow workers in your native land.” “We welcome Maxim Gorky to America,” proclaimed the IWW’s Industrial Worker, “as a representative Industrial Unionist, as a missionary of order throughout the land . . . ; Gorky stands out clearly in the life of the Russian people for exactly what the Industrial Workers advocate in America.”²⁵

The IWW was divided, however, between socialist party and industrial union partisans. With Haywood in jail, the second (September 1906) and third (September 1907) conventions of the IWW witnessed the rise in influence of Marxist intellectuals led by Daniel De Leon, who saw the party, rather than unions, as the key to organizing the working class. By the time of the fourth IWW convention in September 1908, the IWW was deeply split between Marxist socialists and anarcho-syndicalists. De Leon was denied his seat at the convention, and the clause in proceedings calling for a political party was eliminated. De Leon’s ouster from the movement he had organized greatly disturbed Lenin.²⁶

Syndicalism in Russia

Syndicalism originated in Russia quite independently of Bolshevism. In 1903 anarchist followers of Michael Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin began to discover French syndicalism and the weapon of the general strike. Their center abroad was Geneva, and their journal was called Khleb i volia (Bread and freedom). Radical labor unions were romanticized as the keys to a revolutionary future, carrying on the daily struggle for economic gains and preparing for a future socialist society. Russian syndicalists called for an all-Russian labor union like the CGT in France. Fired by the experience of 1905, one syndicalist group, the South Russian Group of Anarcho-Syndicalists, led by D. I. Novomirsky, claimed some five thousand members. “God, if he existed,” commented one follower, “must be a syndicalist; otherwise Novomirsky would not have enjoyed such great success.”²⁷

Like the Bolsheviks, Russian syndicalists placed great emphasis on intellectual leadership of the workers. But they also shared an anarchist distrust of intellectual authority. Novomirsky wrote in 1905 that “socialism is not the expression of the interests of the working class, but of the so-called raznochintsy, or déclassé intelligentsia,” which he dubbed the “new deceivers of the people.” They distrusted the state and its political organ, the parliament, and preferred the general strike to the ballot box. Workers, not socialist intellectuals, must carry out the central task of the revolution, namely, the expropriation of the propertied classes. For Russian syndicalists, revolution was not a sudden seizure of power but a gradual expropriation of the land, factories, and other means of production of the capitalist order. Workers should not vote; they should engage in “gradual mass expropriation” of economic power.²⁸

In 1906 syndicalist ideas spread like wildfire across the pages of Russian radical literature. Translations of the writings of Sorel, Lagardelle, and Pelloutier, as well as Russian contributions, proliferated. P. Strelsky, in a book entitled The Self-Organization of the Working Class, called upon workers to organize themselves in labor unions and mutual aid societies, factory councils and soviets; their guiding principle should be “solidarity through organization.” The Social Revolutionary Victor Chernov noted that syndicalism had great attraction for those Marxists disappointed with social democracy and its “primacy of the party” and wishing to revive the revolutionary elements in Marx’s thought.²⁹

The most interesting syndicalist writer in Russia was Novomirsky, who attacked the scientific claims of Marxism and wished to organize the working class in a national federation of syndicates, or trade unions. Novomirsky argued that Marxist materialism was “essentially metaphysical,” whereas he wished to focus on man’s “energy of desire.” Like Bogdanov, Novomirsky sought to replace the authoritarianism of the bourgeois “I” with the collectivism of society. Harmony, not authority, was the final goal of society. Social democracy would lead to authority, centralization, and bureaucracy, a new kind of “collectivism.” Communism, on the other hand, would place authority in the hands of the workers, not the party, in a “free federation of Workers’ Associations” that would make the state, army, and police unnecessary.

Like European syndicalists, Novomirsky praised the virtues of direct action and attacked the constitutional dreams of parliamentary socialism and democracy. Social democracy, he argued, was an ideology of the bourgeois intelligentsia. Instead of party authority, Novomirsky called for a “general, universal expropriation not only of trade but also of industry, finance, and landed capital.” He urged a boycott of all state institutions, including the Duma, the army, and even the soviets. In the end Novomirsky was as much an anarchist as a syndicalist, but the mood he articulated left a deep impression upon the Bolsheviks.³⁰

Syndicalism was especially influential among Moscow social democrats in 1907. Bazarov, in his book Anarchist Communism and Marxism, stressed the importance of the general strike, following the example of industrial sabotage in Italy. “Revolutionary syndicalism,” he wrote, “represents a great step forward in comparison with pure doctrinal anarchism” because it utilizes a “systematic struggle” by the proletariat to overthrow capitalism. Yet the state would be a necessary institution under socialism, and syndicalism was “progressive only insofar as it has freed itself from the traditions of anarchism.”³¹

Not surprisingly, a Russian edition of Sorel’s Reflections on Violence appeared in 1907, translated by V. M. Friche, another Moscow social democrat. In a special introduction to the Russian edition, Sorel noted that socialism was in danger of degenerating; but “the same thing can happen to socialism as happened to the church, i.e., it can be resurrected every time that everyone thinks that it is very close to death.” For Sorel, the orthodoxy of materialism would have to give way to the myth of direct action if socialism were to survive as a political force.³²

Syndicalism encouraged Russians to boycott the Duma as a futile parliament. As a variation of socialist thought, syndicalism reached well beyond the anarcho-syndicalists themselves and into the ranks of the social democrats. Syndicalism offered a revolutionary alternative to anarchism; it emphasized the proletarian collective over the party, and expropriation over insurrection. But, as the liberal historian P. B. Struve pointed out, syndicalism also threatened socialism by portraying truth as myth, and Marxism itself as useful strategy, rather than as scientific orthodoxy. Lenin, too, recognized the importance of myth in galvanizing workers to action; the trick lay in portraying myth as truth.³³

Plekhanov against Syndicalism

The shrewdest observer of the Bolshevik drift toward syndicalism after 1905 was the dean of Russian Marxists, George Plekhanov. Like the Mensheviks, Plekhanov noted the affinity of Leninism for Blanquism and Jacobinism. In addition, he pointed out a much less recognized connection between Machism and syndicalism, a connection essential to understanding the collectivism of Bogdanov and the other Bolsheviks.

In August 1905, Plekhanov attacked the Bolsheviks for trying to revise Marx with the help of Mach. Lenin, Plekhanov charged, had no philosophical understanding of Mach and Avenarius, yet “perhaps even the Marxist Lenin began little by little to come under the influence of the Machists around him.” At this time Plekhanov did not use the term “Bolsheviks,” but rather “comrades grouped around the journal Vpered and now Proletarii.”³⁴

In the wake of 1905, Plekhanov again charged that the Bolsheviks were “Russian Blanquists” under the influence of such thinkers as Nietzsche, Mach, and Avenarius. As for Lenin, “the closer the railroad train carrying Lenin from the station ‘Marxism’ gets to the station ‘Blanquism,’ the more often this theoretician, if we can call him that, begins to speak of the peasant in the language of the Social Revolutionaries.” Lenin’s formula of an alliance between proletariat and peasantry did not sit well with Plekhanov, who charged that the term “Bolsheviks” now meant only ‘“former Bolsheviks’, i.e., people formerly in the majority at the second congress of the RSDRP who are now in the minority.”³⁵

In 1907 the situation changed dramatically. Lenin and Plekhanov discovered they faced a common danger in syndicalism. For Plekhanov syndicalism was another revision of Marx’s teaching, a deviation, an error, a heresy to Marxist orthodoxy; for Lenin syndicalism was a powerful current that threatened to sweep away his own control of the Bolshevik fraction of the RSDRP. Plekhanov, like the Mensheviks, had no trouble attacking syndicalism and Bolshevism directly; for Lenin, the problem was to disentangle himself from a movement appealing to many of his followers.

At the London congress in May 1907 Plekhanov noted in a speech that “in their tactics the Bolsheviks are paving the way for anarcho-socialism, without admitting it themselves. I would not be surprised if there were some syndicalists among them.” In an article published that summer Plekhanov argued that Bolshevism combined the dictatorial habits of Blanqui and the philosophical revisionism of Mach. The Bolsheviks, he asserted, “insulted me for pointing out their relationship to syndicalism,” although “there is much in common between ‘Bolshevism’ and syndicalism or anarcho-socialism.”³⁶

Bogdanov, not Lenin, responded for the Bolsheviks in an open letter to the journal Vestnik zhizni in July 1907 attacking Plekhanov’s interpretation of Marxism. As a result Plekhanov was asked by “some of my comrades” to reply to Bogdanov:

But I replied that it would be more useful to deal with Mr. Arturo Labriola, whose views were being peddled in Russia by your fellow thinker, Mr. Anatoly Lunacharsky, under the guise of a weapon “sharpened by the orthodox Marxists.” Supplied with an afterword by Mr. Lunacharsky, Labriola’s book prepared the way for syndicalism in Russia, and I preferred to work on that and to postpone meanwhile my reply to your open letter.

Lunacharsky’s translation of Labriola’s Reformism and Syndicalism appeared in Russia in 1907, and Lunacharsky considered syndicalism a “healthy reaction”against reformism. Plekhanov, however, charged that syndicalism and reformism were related revisions of Marx, that Labriola was “Bernstein’s cousin,” and that “this Lunacharsky has a strange ‘orthodox’ Marxism! Very strange!”³⁷

In 1908 Plekhanov precipitated a verbal war on Russian and Italian syndicalists. Labriola published a series of articles responding to Plekhanov’s “villainous attack” on him as an idealist, praising the “new revolutionary force of the Syndicate,” and distinguishing syndicalism from anarchism. Plekhanov then replied, in a review of a book by Enrico Leone, that syndicalism was basically identical with anarchism. The vanguard of the proletariat was no longer the party, but the syndicate. “Replacing Marxism with syndicalism,” concluded Plekhanov, “would be a great step backward for proletarian ideology.” Syndicalism was merely another form of revisionism, which was “naive” and had “no clarity of thought.” All good socialists and Marxists should oppose “the theory of ‘social myth’ proposed by Sorel” and the “old anarchist denial of politics” which lived on in syndicalist direct action.³⁸

Plekhanov’s attack made it difficult for many Bolsheviks drawn to syndicalist tactics to admit their enthusiasms. As Marxists and as social democrats, they shared a commitment to the vanguard party and the need for political participation as well as economic direct action. But they also needed ideological coherence in the wake of revolutionary defeat, and sought within Marxism those ideas that could be applied to a rapidly changing political world. Syndicalism threatened to capture the revolutionary spirit within Marxism. To prevent this, many Russian social democrats in 1907 turned to a little known proletarian philosopher and friend of Marx, Joseph Dietzgen, whose view of socialism as a religion of science promised to provide a useful Marxist myth without admitting any syndicalist associations. In Russian “Dietzgenism” lay the roots of Bolshevik collectivism, god building, and the proletarian culture movement, often Marxist in form but syndicalist in content. And Dietzgenism, like syndicalism, became a powerful element in Bolshevism that Lenin could neither destroy nor ignore.

Joseph Dietzgen and the Religion of Socialism

Marxism-Leninism has evolved into a secular religion. Unanimity around the Party has taken the place of communism in the Church; the vision of a regenerated humanity on earth, as the outcome of a collective effort to transform the world, has taken the place of the promise of individual immortality.

—Basile Kerblay, Modern Soviet Society, 1983 The teachings of socialism contain the material for a new religion.

—-JOSEPH DEITZGEN,

The Religion of Social Democracy, 1875

The idea that socialism was a surrogate religion entered Bolshevism long before 1917. Bogdanov and Lunacharsky assumed that the masses would give up their sense of self for the collective only under the influence of myth, religious or secular. Lenin also stressed the need for mass manipulation, although he did not admit publicly that it was essential to Bolshevik strategy. After 1905 Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Gorky, and other left Bolsheviks sought Marxist sources to justify the syndicalist and collectivist thrust of their movement. One major source was a friend of Marx, Joseph Dietzgen (1828–1888), whose notion that socialism was a future religion of science became very popular in Russian and German social democratic circles after the turn of the century.

Dietzgen was the Eric Hoffer of his day, a Rhenish tanner and self-taught philosopher of the proletariat. After the 1848 revolutions Dietzgen worked in both the United States (1848–1864) and St. Petersburg (1865—1869) as a tanner before returning to the Rhineland. In the 1870s Dietzgen wrote a number of articles for the Leipziger Volkstaat growing out of his 1869 book The Nature of Human Brain Work. Praised by Marx as “our philosopher,” Dietzgen enjoyed less popularity in his own lifetime than after 1900 when his ideas were rediscovered by European and American socialists.³⁹

Dietzgenism formed an essential component in the Bolshevik philosophy of “god building” (bogostroitel’stvo). Dietzgen argued that socialist theory formed the basis for a new religion, the “faith of the proletariat,” which would “revolutionize everything” and “transform, after the manner of science, the old faiths.” Science would be the new gospel for the coming revolution of industrial socialism, bringing ultimate salvation to long suffering humanity. Dietzgen, like Ludwig Feuerbach, argued that man had created God in his own image, and that Christianity had become a religion of resignation by the downtrodden to their oppressors. Bourgeois western civilization had created a dualism of mind and matter, rulers and ruled, idealism and materialism. This should be replaced by monism, a “systematic conception of the universe” that would substitute for religion in a socialist world. The key to monism, argued Dietzgen, was that “thinking and being, subject and object, exist in the domain of experience.⁴⁰

Like Mach, Dietzgen argued that we cannot have ideas without first having sense perceptions of the world around us. All knowledge is sensation-based. Knowledge is only a “relative truth” and “nature itself, the absolute truth, cannot be known.” Thought and ideas are therefore as real as matter, and all are part of a monist universe of experience that we know through our sensations. “Socialist materialism,” concluded Dietzgen, “is distinguished by the fact that it does not undervalue the human mind as the old materialists did, nor overvalue it as the German idealists did.”⁴¹ In Lenin’s Manichean universe one was either an idealist or a materialist; for Dietzgen and Mach, one could be a monist in a world of experience that did not distinguish between mind and matter.

Dietzgen’s relativism and collectivism were rediscovered by the European left around 1900 as a means of updating Marxism consistent with the radical changes in science and society. Dietzgen’s writings appeared in German and Dutch socialist journals, which called him an important proletarian philosopher who had “completed” Marxist thought and provided a useful weapon in the struggle against idealism and neo-Kantianism. Like William James’s “will to believe,” Dietzgen’s innate “religious feeling” suggested that men are generally moved by irrational emotion and a need for faith, and that socialism would have to recognize this side of human nature. The Dutch astronomer Anton Pannekoek was especially enthusiastic about Dietzgen’s “proletarian world view” as a weapon to combat the moderate parliamentary reformism of Eduard Bernstein and to provide a socialist religion that would help maintain the faith in the face of revolutionary failure.⁴²

Like syndicalism, Dietzgenism had great appeal for the American left before 1914, including the IWW. Dietzgen had lived in Chicago in the 1880s, where his writings were published in the only major socialist journal sympathetic to syndicalism, Charles Kerr’s International Socialist Review. Kerr published Dietzgen’s collected essays in 1906, and together with Ernst Untermann, a founder of the IWW and editor of Dietzgen’s writings, helped disseminate his ideas among American syndicalists and left-wing intellectuals.⁴³

In 1906 the Dietzgen revival continued with the publication of Dietzgen’s correspondence with Marx and Engels. Karl Kautsky, the leading German Marxist of the day, provided an imprimatur by writing that he believed in “the same materialist philosophy that Marx and Engels, on the one hand, and Joseph Dietzgen, in another way, but in the same sense, had founded.”⁴⁴ By blessing the new trinity of Marx, Engels, and Dietzgen, Kautsky provided Marxist legitimacy for the collectivist and syndicalist enthusiasm of a wide variety of socialists.

In 1907 Dietzgenism spread from Europe to America and Russia. Pannekoek wrote that Dietzgen had shown that “the mind transforms everything that it assimilates,” rather than copying reality, so that ideology had a crucial role to play in shaping the “political intelligence” of workers. Schools for workers could help “educate party members, insofar as it can be done, in the theory of socialism.” Other writers pointed out that Dietzgenism provided comfort for those coming from a religious background and seeking evidence of a “future life” through collective immortality and remembrance.⁴⁵

In 1907 and 1908 the International Socialist Review carried several articles arguing that Marxism and socialism were akin more to religious faith than to scientific truth. Absolute truth was impossible to know; all laws are really tentative hypotheses. Arturo Labriola repeated the point that “parliaments are not and cannot become the organs of a social revolution,” and Friedrich Adler enjoined American readers to consider the views of Ernst Mach.⁴⁶ This enthusiasm for socialism as religious myth, reflected in syndicalism, Dietzgenism, and Machism, represented an attempt by socialists everywhere to reradicalize Marx in the light of parliamentary politics, social legislation, and intellectual modernism. In Russia the Bolsheviks were especially interested.

The main editor of Dietzgen’s writings in Russia was a Bolshevik, Pavl Georgievich Dauge (1869–1946), a Latvian founder of the RSDRP in Riga who later lived in Moscow. Like Krasin, Dauge was a professional by day and a revolutionary by night, pulling Muscovite teeth as a dentist and serving as a liaison between the Moscow committee of the party and the Geneva exiles. Dauge first met Lenin in June 1904 in Lausanne, and again in January 1907 at Kuokkala. At this second meeting Lenin encouraged Dauge to continue his project of editing and translating the writings of Dietzgen for Russian readers. For Lenin, Dietzgenism was desirable as a strategy of legal Marxism, politics in the guise of philosophy, but undesirable as an errant route to the “swamp” of Machism.⁴⁷

In July 1906 Dauge wrote Dietzgen’s son, Eugen, that he was planning to translate his father’s works into Russian as soon as he had read the writings of Mach and Avenarius. Dauge believed that Dietzgen could serve as a Bolshevik Aesop; “in this way I thought we could use one of the legal possibilities to bring great benefit to the party.” Lenin approved Dauge’s plans to publish Dietzgen and wrote an introduction to a 1907 edition of Dietzgen’s correspondence with Marx and Engels. The project was short lived, however. By autumn 1907 Dauge had stopped publishing Dietzgen and had given all copies of his translations to the Moscow RSDRP committee “for distribution to workers.”⁴⁸

Dietzgenism did not escape the watchful eye of Plekhanov, who grumbled that to supplement Marx with Dietzgen’s philosophy was “completely impossible.” There were many similarities between the ideas of Dietzgen and Bogdanov, who were idealists, not Marxist materialists. “Dietzgen, in fact,” wrote Plekhanov, “begins to resemble the very ‘original’ philosophy of Mr. Bogdanov.” One could hardly compare the “code [kliuch] of Joseph Dietzgen with the method of Karl Marx.”⁴⁹

Both Dietzgen and Mach argued that the world of experience was accessible to all individuals through their sensations. Politically this implied that the proletariat could know as much by its own experience as the party could tell it, since experience and consciousness could not be differentiated. Just as Dauge was drawn to Bogdanov in this respect, Lenin was repelled by the idea and turned for philosophical support to Plekhanov. Bogdanov’s Essays on the Philosophy of Marxism, published in January 1908, devoted an entire essay to Dietzgen’s philosophy, comparing Dietzgenism to ideas of Mach and Avenarius. In the same volume, Lunacharsky called for a new “proletarian monism” and “new religious consciousness” like Dietzgenism, or Sorel’s syndicalist philosophy of “social myth.”⁵⁰

By 1908 Dietzgenism was a significant influence on those Bolsheviks who sought a new collectivism through useful myth that would mobilize the masses for action. European socialists like Karl Liebknecht, Franz Mehring, and Karl Kautsky were also reading and discussing Dietzgen. Kautsky, puzzled by the internecine quarrel over philosophy in the RSDRP in 1909, wrote that he found “no essential difference between the world views of Dietzgen and Marx. And Mach stands very close to Dietzgen.” The Dutch socialist Henriette Roland-Holst also saw in Dietzgenism a “democratic proletarian logic” and “dialectical proletarian materialism” that could guide the proletariat to “social peace” by stressing the “relativity of all things and differences, all opposites and values.” Another Dutch socialist, Hermann Gorter, found in Dietzgenism a “new truth” and “philosophy of the proletariat” that would help revolutionize worker consciousness through “intellectual propaganda.”⁵¹

The debate over Dietzgenism continued even after 1910. Ernst Untermann defended Dietzgen’s ideas against the “narrow Marxism” of Plekhanov and Mehring, arguing that the monism of Dietzgen anticipated the empiriocriticism of Mach and Avenarius and concluding: “Forward with Marx, Engels, and Dietzgen!” In May 1913 Lenin wrote an article in Pravda in which he called Dietzgen “one of the most outstanding social democratic writer-philosophers in Germany,” despite the fact that Dietzgen “does not always provide a true exposition of the works of Marx and Engels.” For Lenin, Dietzgen was a materialist, but one whose relativism made him “muddled” and led to Machist “mistakes.”⁵²

Dietzgenism, like syndicalism, led European socialists in the direction of myth rather than truth, relativist hypotheses about social revolution rather than scientific predictions. Marxist predictions of endless class struggle had not materialized, and social reform was undercutting revolutionary warfare. The proletariat needed a religion of socialism and a myth of the general strike more than a social science predicting inevitable but always distant capitalist collapse.

The Russian Apocalypse

Syndicalism and Dietzgenism were only two of many forms of collectivist and quasi-religious thinking that swept over Russia after 1905. For many, the revolution of 1905 brought dark premonitions of an end to history, an imminent apocalypse, and a spiritual and cultural revolution that would transcend all worldly limits, including death itself. Dietzgen, like Comte and Spencer, anticipated a religion of science that would undergird socialism. But many other artists, writers, and thinkers looked to the symbolic and the occult for a deeper vision of reality and truth. For a time religious revivalism became intellectually respectable, even on the left.

The end of the nineteenth century produced a deep sense of crisis and imminent catastrophe for many European thinkers. The speed of modern life, with its new airplanes, telephones, and wireless communication, led to the transformative rhetoric of futurism, to new ways of conceptualizing space and time, and to a new interest in divine wisdom, the occult, and religion. In Russia the philosopher Vladimir Soloviev ruminated on the end of the world, and prophesied the coming of Antichrist in the form of hordes from the East who would overrun Europe, but would be followed by a spiritual awakening and resurrection of the dead as proof of the existence of God in a materialist world.⁵³

The symbolist poets and painters of Russia were also preoccupied with religious motifs, including the riddle of death. In his stories Leonid Andreev explored themes of immortality and the evolutionary links between generations of individuals; he prophecied salvation from death through transcendence of the self in the collective immortality of remembered achievement and conscious participation in the cosmos. The philosopher N. F. Fedorov expounded on man’s ongoing struggle against death; science, culture, and collective labor together would ultimately produce the “death of death” through resurrection of the dead. The Social Revolutionary writer Boris Savinkov, in his psychological portrait of a terrorist entitled The Pale Horse (1913), described death as a “crown of thorns” toward which the revolutionary felt “strangely indifferent,” with neither joy nor pride at dying for the cause. Many other Russian intellectuals became obsessed with death, probing the Bible, local monks, and new occult movements such as theosophy and anthroposophy for answers. In some cases this led to pessimism and inaction, in others, to collectivist utopianism.⁵⁴

For A. I. Izgoev, writing in the collection of essays Signposts (1909), Russian youth needed a new ideal of “love for life” to replace the dread of death—”or that revolutionary work which leads to it.” The revolutionary ethos of individual self-sacrifice to the collective, said Izgoev, amounted to a “love for death.” “Death is inevitable, and we need to teach people to meet it calmly and with dignity. But this is quite different than teaching people to seek death, to evaluate each thought and action from the point of view of whether or not it threatens one with death.”⁵⁵

Yet attitudes toward death were more optimistic on the Russian left than Izgoev made out. Their roots lay in the Enlightenment and in nineteenth-century positivism, with its belief that science could conquer all problems, including death. Darwinism had given socialism an evolutionary explanation for collectivism in which “every living object is an association, a collectivity” and “it is the individual who lives for the species, the only eternal reality of life.” New discoveries in cell biology suggested that individuals were all cells of some larger community, that cells are continually being regenerated, and therefore that the cell is “as immortal as man.” The biologist Felix Le Dantec wrote that individuals may die but species do not, because “evolution has never been interrupted by death.” He even predicted the construction of living cells from inorganic matter.⁵⁶ A wide variety of European thinkers thus suggested that individuals belonged to a monist universe of eternally existing species and matter which lived on even after its members perished.

The Russian left was influenced both by symbolist preoccupations with “god seeking” (bogoiskatel’stvo), as they called it, and by European positivism and science. Alexandra Kollontai, a leading RSDRP feminist, wrote in 1905 that “we overthrow the former gods in order to set up in their place our deity—society.” This urge toward “god building” (bogostroitel’stvo) was less an imitation of symbolism than an answer to it. For Kollontai, socialism provided a new proletarian culture of collectivism which celebrated the virtues of “solidarity, unity, self-sacrifice, subordination of particular interests to the interests of the group.” Another socialist, N. A. Rozhkov, felt that in the future the science of medicine would guarantee collective immortality and indefinite prolongation of life: “Men who lived many centuries ago will be resurrected in the chemical laboratory. And, of course, they in turn will resurrect those whom they knew and loved. The task of immortality will finally be carried out. We must try to be worthy of future resurrection.”⁵⁷

The notion of socialism as a religion of collectivist self-sacrifice was widespread after 1905 and represented a powerful current of thought among the Bolsheviks. For Lenin, such thinking ultimately led to idealism, fideism, and other “swamps” of heretical deviation. But for Lunacharsky they became fused in a new vision of collectivism that combined syndicalist politics with a socialist religion of the future.

Lunacharsky and the Religion of Collectivism

Lunacharsky appears to have discovered syndicalism and the ideas of Joseph Dietzgen in the spring of 1905. Enthusiastic over the appeal of Father Gapon, Lunacharsky placed great hopes in the mass strike and political myth as mechanisms for mobilizing the working classes of Russia. Between May and September 1905 Lunacharsky wrote a series of articles on “the mass political strike” in which he cited the works of Lagardelle and other syndicalists, but found the idea of a general strike as the means to power to be “naive” and a “pernicious utopia.” The mass strikes in Holland, Italy, and Russia in 1904 were a useful “new method of struggle” only if properly organized to take advantage of the “spontaneous solidarity” of workers. After the revolt on the battleship Potemkin in June 1905, Lunacharsky continued to advocate the mass political strike as an “opportunity for the proletariat to level a terrible blow at the power of its enemy,” yet dismissed Lagardelle’s vision as an anarchist dream and Henriette Roland Holst’s idea of the general strike as a “foolish utopia.” Yet Lunacharsky thought strikes were essential, and criticized “orthodox” and “narrow” Marxists for ignoring them.⁵⁸

Maxim Gorky and Arturo Labriola, Italy, 1906. From L. P. Bykovtseva, Gor’kii v ltalii (Moscow 1975).

Lunacharsky’s ambivalence toward syndicalism—anarchist in tone, but better than Marxist hair-splitting and inaction—was resolved after he joined Bogdanov and Gorky in exile. When Gorky settled in Italy, he discovered syndicalism and immediately set about reading the works of Lagardelle and Arturo Labriola. In November 1906 Gorky met Labriola twice, first in Naples and a few days later on Capri, just as Bogdanov arrived for a visit.⁵⁹

In May 1907 Gorky met Lenin in Berlin in connection with the establishment of a Bolshevik publishing operation. Lenin, in need of money, was effusive in his praise of Gorky’s new proletarian novel, Mother. After spending three weeks in London in June, Gorky and Andreeva returned to Capri where Gorky, Lenin, Bogdanov, and a number of other Bolsheviks began planning a series of publishing projects designed to fill the Bolshevik treasury. As for Lunacharsky, his Russian edition of Labriola’s Reformism and Syndicalism had been confiscated by the censor, and he had moved to Florence, where he was “energetically working on syndicalism.”⁶⁰

We know from Lunacharsky’s letters to his wife, written at the Stuttgart congress of the Second International in August 1907, that he was increasingly interested in syndicalism. Lenin, felt Lunacharsky, was personally very friendly but at the same time “talks viciously about syndicalism.” Having been designated the RSDRP representative to a commission on “the syndicalist question,” Lunacharsky felt that “Lenin also agrees” that trade unions could “play a decisive role from the angle of the social revolution itself.” In the commission Lunacharsky argued that socialist parties and trade unions must work together to draw the “young workers movement” away from “trade unionism and other childhood diseases.” With Lenin absent, the commission voted through a resolution “in a truly syndicalist spirit.”⁶¹

Lunacharsky told Lenin that a break between Lenin and the other Bolsheviks over the issue of syndicalism would be a great mistake. Lenin was already preparing to emigrate to Western Europe again, as political persecution worsened inside Russia. Lunacharsky was happy that Lenin agreed to pay him to write articles as his “chief ideological agent abroad,” but admitted later that his interest in syndicalism in 1907 alarmed Lenin.⁶²

Both Gorky and Lunacharsky were moving toward a new philosophy of collectivism. “I saw Lunacharsky,” Gorky wrote a friend in November 1907, “and he is writing a book on religion and working on another. This other one is terribly interesting in its theme and will enjoy great success, I’m convinced of that. Very powerful. It involves the approximation of Bolshevism to syndicalism, i.e., about the possibility of joining socialism with anarcho-socialism.” Bogdanov and Lunacharsky in Gorky’s view were “the beauty and power of our party, people who give us great hope” in a revolutionary future.⁶³

In his writings after the Stuttgart congress, Lunacharsky waxed eloquent about the “heroic strike battle of the Russian proletariat.” The Mensheviks were opportunists, the Bolsheviks were monists. Lunacharsky admitted that “Sorel and his cothinkers” could not “embrace Marx’s ideas entirely.” But syndicalists and Marxists both desired to create a “mass economic organization,” despite occasional syndicalist “mistakes.” In Moscow everyone was talking about a general strike, and yet the RSDRP had no organization. For Lunacharsky, the best political organization would be a “confederation of syndicates” to encourage “collectivism” among workers. The RSDRP, proposed Lunacharsky, needed a “General Workers’ Council” to bring party and trade unions together in a common “class syndicalist organization.” Such a syndicalist organization would be a “natural development of Bolshevism.”⁶⁴

Lenin was not amused. In November 1907 he wrote that Lunacharsky’s views were “infinitely far from the views of Russian syndicalists, Mensheviks, and Social Revolutionaries.” But the “inattentive or hostile reader” might easily conclude that Lunacharsky was in league with “Frenchmen or Italians” and some unnamed “Russian muddlers.” Lenin admitted that the Bolsheviks should study syndicalism and the “Russian revolutionary experience” of 1905. But Lunacharsky’s proposal for a General Workers’ Council, said Lenin, was a completely impractical adventure.⁶⁵

In December 1907 Plekhanov attacked Lunacharsky for his interest in syndicalism. Plekhanov opposed any cooperation between a Marxist party and the trade unions. In an Aesopian interpretation, Gorky wrote Lunacharsky that a Plekhanov article attacking syndicalism “is directed not so much against [Arturo] Labriola as against you—although more is said about Labriola.” Lunacharsky responded that the Russian Revolution was doomed unless socialists acted to channel the “energy of the rising masses” through the organizational use of “mass psychology.” Not the orthodoxy of Marxist dogma, or party organization, but the experience of strike was needed. “The way to do this is through a revised and purified syndicalism,” Lunacharsky concluded.⁶⁶

From Stuttgart to Geneva

Lunacharsky was not alone in being deeply affected by the Stuttgart congress of the Second International. For the August 1907 gathering was the high point of organized European socialism in the years before the Great War, a meeting place for left-wing groups from all over the world. It was also an assembly deeply divided regarding opportunities for reform of bourgeois society and the proper ideology for class struggle and revolution. Syndicalism was a major issue at the congress. The general strike appeared deeply threatening to the inactive and the self-satisfied among the delegates. Marxist orthodoxy, defined by German social democracy, encountered French and Italian syndicalism.⁶⁷

The Bolsheviks were well represented at Stuttgart by Lenin, Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, and others. Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg led a movement of the left to proclaim that, in case of a European war, socialists would use all possible means, including the general strike, to guarantee the downfall of capitalism. But aside from proclamations, nothing came of it organizationally. Lenin did, however, make contact with syndicalism and Marxism in America through Daniel De Leon and representatives of the IWW. He even found time to wire a telegram to Bill Haywood, still in jail in America, sending fraternal greetings and expressing solidarity with the American proletariat. Lenin also met the Dutch socialists who would play an important role a decade later in establishing the communist Third International.⁶⁸

Lenin succeeded in becoming the representative of RSDRP on the International Socialist Bureau, the executive body of the Second International, and in keeping involved with the work of other national parties. He also obtained five thousand marks from the SPD for the impending election campaign for the third Duma (as did the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries). This heightened Lenin’s desire not to boycott the Duma elections as suggested by Bogdanov and the other Bolsheviks.⁶⁹

The threat of syndicalism was thus modified by the acquisition of funds. We shall see that Lenin’s public acceptance of SPD largesse came at the same time as the successful Bolshevik robbery of the Tiflis State Bank and the hot pursuit of the Schmidt family inheritance, and deepened the division with the Mensheviks over questions of party finances. Plekhanov noted that the Bolsheviks were obviously well off, since they had financed the London congress with the Fels loan and “still have a serious resource in Gorky.” Plekhanov also received money from the SPD and duly turned it over to the RSDRP central committee. Lenin did not.⁷⁰

Upon returning to Finland from Stuttgart, Lenin promptly discovered that the new rules of the game established by Prime Minister Stolypin would make effective political activity inside Russia increasingly problematic. During the summer of 1907, the St. Petersburg police were planning to initiate extradition proceedings to get Lenin out of Finland— assuming they could locate him—and requested Lenin’s file from the Okhrana. On July 6, 1907, the Department of Police included Lenin on a list of persons subject to search and arrest. A few weeks later they learned from the Moscow Okhrana that Lenin was living in Finland.⁷¹

By October Lenin was planning to move the Bolshevik journal Proletarii abroad. He and Krupskaya were still in their safe house at Kuokkala “in the little company of good friends”—the Bogdanovs, I.F. Dubrovinsky, N.A. Rozhkov, and G.D. Leitesen. Lenin’s desire to emigrate increased when the police arrested members of the Moscow Central Bureau of Trade Unions and uncovered stacks of Lenin’s pamphlets. In November greater Okhrana surveillance forced Lenin and Krupskaya to move to a new hiding place in a suburb of Helsinki and then on to Stockholm and Geneva. Lenin’s “second emigration” had begun.⁷²

Emigration did not answer the question of RSDRP policy toward the new Duma. In late October 1907 a conference of fifty-seven party members at Terioki, Finland, resolved to continue to use the RSDRP Duma delegation as a party tribune, and not to boycott the Duma. Lenin, voting with the Mensheviks and the majority, realized this would mean a “war against the boycottists”—including the other Bolsheviks. Lenin, Bogdanov, and Krasin agreed that it was time to move Proletarii and other Bolshevik enterprises abroad to escape the police. This included the entire secret Bolshevik Center set up at London six months earlier. But there agreement ended, and in January 1908 Lenin began a period of political struggle in which his greatest rivals and enemies were members of his own Bolshevik fraction.⁷³

On November 25, 1907, the Berlin police raided a Bolshevik headquarters at Pankstrasse 52b, the apartment of Osip Piatnitsky. For months they had worked with the Okhrana to identify the perpetrators of the great “Tiflis Ex” bank robbery and the location of the loot. Now they uncovered amidst the piles of illegal literature by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Bebel, and Kautsky a stash of pistols and ammunition sufficient to produce Berlin headlines about a “secret anarchist depot.” The Bolsheviks, sniffed Axelrod in a letter to Martov, were obviously anarchists, and not socialists, a criminal element within the RSDRP that could no longer be tolerated.⁷⁴

As Axelrod knew, syndicalism led the Bolsheviks not merely to revisionism and anarchism but to crime. The syndicalists urged direct action through strikes and, finally, the “expropriation” of the capitalist class through workers’ control of factories and enterprises. For Lenin and the Bolsheviks, expropriation was not a theory of a revolutionary future or a useful myth, but real direct action: the use of terror and intimidation to expropriate the rich, as individuals and institutions. The syndicalist wave inundated Russia at the same time the Bolsheviks and Lenin embarked upon their most daring expropriation of all: the June 1907 robbery of the Tiflis State Bank.