“The Other Bolsheviks”
LEONID KRASIN AND THE
REVOLUTION OF 1905
The Russian Revolution, if you look at it even from a distance, is a splendid revolution. It has been going on for a long time. You and I shall die some time, but it will go on living. Fact. You’ll see.
—MAXIM GORKY, 1906
The Russian Revolution of 1905 played a crucial role in the formation of Bolshevism, although the Bolsheviks played only a minor role in the revolution. For syndicalism, the central experience of a revolutionary situation was the general strike. The Bolsheviks, too, in later years would speak of the great “experience” of 1905 as a learning experience based on the labor unrest that swept over Russia that year.
Lenin spent most of the year fulminating in Genevan exile. Only in November did he arrive in St. Petersburg, to discover that the real Bolshevik committee work was being done by Bogdanov and Krasin, and that the émigré Bolshevik-Menshevik split did not deter mutual cooperation at the local level inside Russia. Moreover, the Bolsheviks were more attuned to the syndicalist mood of the urban masses, culminating in a national general strike in October, than they were to Lenin’s calls for an armed insurrection. In 1905 Lenin was still immersed in exile politics, while Bolshevism was being shaped by revolutionary experience.
Throughout 1905 Lenin theorized about a revolution in Russia led by a peasant majority, rather than an urban proletarian minority. In April 1905 Lenin called for the “energetic support” of “all revolutionary measures taken by the peasantry,” including land seizures. The Mensheviks chided Lenin for his un-Marxist approach, but mass violence that summer tended to confirm Lenin’s political sense, if not his doctrinal orthodoxy, laid down in his July pamphlet Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution. The martyrdom of Bloody Sunday and peasant support for the Social Revolutionaries convinced Lenin that an all-Russian revolution must take advantage of the restive and impoverished village as well as the expanding city. How this was to be done was an open question.1
The View from Afar
In the early summer of 1905 Lenin and Krupskaya were increasingly confused about developments inside Russia. After the last issue of Vpered came out in Geneva on May 18, Lenin began working to take over the central organ of the RSDRP, Proletarii, which began publication that same month. By June Lenin was complaining to comrades inside Russia that the party had no money, that Bogdanov was not writing, and that the International Socialist Bureau (ISB) had given nine thousand francs to Plekhanov to distribute among the rival RSDRP fractions.2
German social democrats, in the meantime, were attempting to impose unity on their recalcitrant and fissiparous Russian brethren. The doyen of the SPD, August Bebel, requested such authority from the International Socialist Bureau, noting that the RSDRP was now divided into a number of groups engaged in émigré hair-splitting on doctrinal issues, rather than party work inside Russia. Karl Kautsky, on the other hand, urged Bebel not to call openly for RSDRP unification and argued that Bolshevik-Menshevik differences were really insignificant. Behind the scenes, however, Kautsky admitted that the split was a great misfortune and advocated reconciliation. But in July, Lenin rejected Bebel’s proposal for an SPD court of arbitration on the Bolshevik-Menshevik split and demanded that he receive half of the money given to Plekhanov by the ISB.3
Lenin was equally irritated with the Bolshevik fraction inside Russia. The RSDRP had no good organization, he complained, no leadership, no unity. What was Bogdanov doing? Was he cooperating with the Mensheviks? The syndicalist Stanislav Volsky was added to the central committee—who was he? Why wasn’t Lunacharsky sending more articles for Proletarii? And so forth and so on.4
On August 2, 1905, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks agreed to divide evenly all foreign contributions to the RSDRP, but the SPD refused to allow this. Instead the Germans proposed a complicated division of funds (Bolsheviks and Mensheviks 22.5% each, Poles 20%, Bund 20%, Letts 15%) which only widened political differences. Throughout Europe, Parvus and other German socialists were collecting funds “for the Russian revolution.” Yet Lenin complained to the RSDRP central committee in mid-August that “we have no money. The Germans won’t give. If you don’t come up with three thousand rubles, we have had it.”5
The Moscow Literary-Lecture Group
In April 1905 the third RSDRP congress resolved to organize a “literary propaganda group” inside Russia that would create “pamphlet literature for use among the peasantry.” Aroused by the excitement and violence of Bloody Sunday, the social democrats called for an armed uprising, mass political strikes, and “temporary combat agreements,” with the Socialist Revolutionaries.6 Consistent with these resolutions, the Moscow committee of the RSDRP began producing mass political literature under the leadership of a circle of Moscow intellectuals.
A central figure in Moscow at the time was the syndicalist writer A. V. Sokolov, who wrote under the name of Stanislav Volsky. In December 1904 Volsky had edited a journal Golos truda (Voice of labor) in the town of Rzhev near Moscow. In March 1905 the journal was moved to Moscow because of police surveillance, and placed under the editorship of V. L. Shantser (Marat) (1867–1911). The son of an Austrian engineer, Shantser had been active in Marxist study circles in Odessa in the 1890s before coming to Moscow in 1900 and enjoying the usual indignities of arrest and imprisonment. Shantser knew Bogdanov and Skvortsov (Stepanov) from exile days; he also knew Maxim Gorky, N. P. Schmidt, the young historian M. N. Pokrovsky, and other members of the wealthy Morozov family. Shantser became N. P. Schmidt’s spiritual father in matters Marxist and utilized the family library for his research. He also became the chairman of the Moscow RSDRP committee and by 1905 was channeling thousands of rubles each month to the party from wealthy sympathizers.7
These increasingly ample funds went to finance the new “literary-lecture group” established in the spring of 1905 by the Moscow RSDRP committee to engage in mass propaganda. The group was established on April 9 at the apartment of P. G. Dauge, and included Pokrovsky; Skvortsov (Stepanov); V. Ya. Kanel, a doctor; M. G. Lunts, a writer; V. M. Shuliatikov (Donat), a literary critic; V. M. Friche; N. A. Rozhkov; and numerous other Moscow intellectuals.8 Friche was a prolific writer expelled from Moscow University for his Marxist politics, a coeditor of the Moscow Pravda, and the translator and editor of Sorel’s Reflections on Violence (1907).9
The Moscow literary group was a diverse collection of Marxist intellectuals, not a party cell. V. M. Shuliatikov had developed a Marxist critique of culture, which he portrayed as a reflection of class struggle. Art, literature, and philosophy were merely a “capricious game” played out by the clash of “material aspirations and interests.” Shuliatikov called for a new “proletarian world view,” rather than an authoritarian political party, to articulate the interests of the working class. Volsky also felt that ideas were the key to maintaining the proletarian revolution. The proletariat was the self-sacrificing vanguard of the Russian people, and the general strike its mobilizing experience. Marxist ideas, not party ideology, united the Moscow literary group, but the varying interpretations of these ideas often fostered individuality and disunity.10
During the summer of 1905, the Moscow committee was able to establish its own publishing house, Kolokol, thanks to the generosity of a millionaire merchant, E. D. Miagkov. Miagkov gave the RSDRP fifty thousand gold rubles and promised one hundred thousand more, on condition that published literature would be equally divided between Marxist and Populist writers. To ensure this, one series of pamphlets was edited by the RSDRP, a second by the Social Revolutionaries. Proceeds were divided equally between the political parties and the publisher. In this manner the Moscow literary circle had access to a well-funded legal publishing operation. Along with N. P. Schmidt, Miagkov became a major contributor to the Bolshevik cause.11
While Lenin languished in Geneva, the Moscow RSDRP committee and its literary group printed numerous pamphlets and journals, presided over a network of 123 committees, cells, and circles operating in the Moscow region, and involved thousands of party members in the organizational work of revolution. In early July 1905 the committee delegated Shantser to visit Geneva and bring Lenin up to date on party affairs inside Russia, and to give him samples of RSDRP literature. The Moscow Bolsheviks were an increasingly active group in 1905 and by no means subservient to Lenin’s edicts from afar. Until the dissolution of the Moscow literary group in early 1908, it remained an important source of Bolshevik ideas and political literature, drawn more to collectivist theory than to Leninist authority.12
Bogdanov against Lenin
By the summer of 1905 it had become apparent that more Bolsheviks were contributing to Bogdanov’s publishing operations inside Russia than to Lenin’s émigré Proletarii. An official Soviet view of 1959 was that Bogdanov “tried to counterpose the popular journal of the RSDRP central committee, Rabochii, edited in Russia, to the central organ of the party, Proletarii.” Bonch-Bruevich had a different interpretation: Bogdanov was “the editor of the first Bolshevik newspaper, Vpered,” the author of the majority of the pamphlets (listovki) printed illegally inside Russia in 1905 by the Bolsheviks, and the major Bolshevik leader in Russia that year. Lenin himself was alarmed by this development.13
In June 1905 Bogdanov wrote Lenin that he had set up a number of legal publishing operations in Russia, including Gorky’s Znanie and Miagkov’s Kolokol, to provide a safe and unofficial voice for party propaganda. Legal editors would run these operations, and income would go to the party. Bogdanov added that the financial affairs of the RSDRP central committee were rapidly improving because of wealthy donors, and that he had been able to establish a new organ of the committee inside Russia, Rabochii (Worker), which would appear in August. This organ would be manned by the Moscow literary group. Gorky was still generous, reported Bogdanov, but the Social Revolutionaries were also wooing him.14
In addition to Gorky’s legal Znanie publishing house and the journal Rabochii, Gorky and Bogdanov were also planning a new legal journal for St. Petersburg, Novaya zhizn’ (New Life). This greatly disturbed Lenin. When Rabochii appeared in August, it called for unity among social democrats, a coalition of peasants and the “revolutionary intelligentsia” against the tsar, and a boycott of the experimental parliament, or Bulygin Duma. Most alarming was news from Bogdanov that plans were under way for a Bolshevik-Menshevik unity congress to heal RSDRP wounds. In a letter of August 14 Lenin was furious about negotiations for such a congress, and especially galled because he was now dependent on funds sent to him from Russia by Bogdanov.15
Lenin’s frequent demands for money irritated Bogdanov and Krasin. In early September they wrote Lenin that they would send him another thousand rubles, but only at the expense of their work in Russia; “if it is unconditionally impossible to edit Proletarii with foreign sources of income and we have to support you on a regular basis,” they complained, “then we will soon be bankrupt.” In addition, what Lenin considered a right, Bogdanov considered a loan. Bogdanov wrote Lenin “we have less and less money, and the thousands of rubles which we have sent you are a loan that we plan to recover.” Bogdanov also refused to send Lenin a record of Bolshevik conversations with the Mensheviks on possible unification, or to heed Lenin’s strident calls for an “armed insurrection” from the comfortable distance of Geneva.16
By October it was apparent that Bogdanov and his central committee journal Rabochii had greater funding and political standing among Bolsheviks than Lenin’s Proletarii, nominally the central organ of the RSDRP. Bogdanov threatened to reestablish Proletarii and not to send money to Lenin, but to use it for “other goals.” Lenin had been discussing Bolshevik-Menshevik reunification with the International Socialist Bureau in Brussels, proposing a conference in Berlin with the participation of George Plekhanov to settle matters; Bogdanov was sharply opposed. Finally, in late October 1905, Bogdanov wrote Lenin that he should come to Russia to attend a general meeting of the RSDRP soon, recommending Stockholm and Helsinki as the safest route. Unaccustomed as he was to taking orders, Lenin complied.17
Krasin and the John Grafton
Illegal Bolshevik operations in 1905, such as gunrunning and bomb construction, were directed by Leonid Krasin from a safe house at Kuokkala on the Finnish border, not far from St. Petersburg. Like Bogdanov, Krasin was the beneficiary of numerous fund-raising efforts, and operated under the cover of his own legal printing company, Delo. In the late summer of 1905 Krasin resigned his position with the Morozov Company and went to work as an engineer for the St. Petersburg Electrical Society, then busy laying cables for electric streetcars in the city. He also managed to get himself elected as the society’s representative to the St. Petersburg soviet, or workers’ council, in October and assisted Gorky in editing Novaya zhizn’. But the most remarkable of Krasin’s many activities in the shadowy world of the 1905 revolution was the episode of the John Grafton.18
During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904—1905 a Finnish socialist named Konni Zilliacus contrived to organize various Russian revolutionary factions with Japanese monetary support. A one-time resident of Japan, Zilliacus met with Japanese agents in Paris and Geneva in the winter of 1904—1905 and arranged to ship a boatload of weapons into Russia by way of the Gulf of Finland. In the wake of Bloody Sunday, it seemed appropriate to enlist the services of Father Gapon as well, mainly as a figurehead for the project. With the aid of Colonel Motojiro Akashi, Zilliacus settled in London and purchased Browning rifles in America, Mausers in Hamburg, and Wetterli rifles in Switzerland, amounting to some 15,500 weapons, 2.5 million cartridges, and three tons of explosives for good measure. To haul this cargo Akashi purchased a small steamship, the John Grajton, and loaded it at sea in August 1905.19
Krasin decided that the John Grajton could be put to best use by the Bolsheviks, rather than Gapon’s disorganized followers. He instructed Gorky to persuade Gapon to aid in this diversion on the grounds that Gapon’s followers were already sufficiently armed. Gorky and a friend, the pianist Nikolai Burenin, met with Gapon in Finland to this end, and Burenin contacted Lenin. The plan was to sail the ship to Maxim Litvinov’s designated location along the Estonian coast, where storage pits had been excavated to hide the weapons. They would then be moved to an appropriate underground hideaway in St. Petersburg—a cemetery.20
In the end, the project was a grand failure of comic opera proportions. On September 7, 1905, the John Grajton ran aground on a reef off the Finnish coast and blew up in spectacular fashion. A team of German divers managed to recover some nine thousand rifles from the ocean bottom, and Zilliacus got five hundred more into Russia by way of Stockholm, some of which apparently reached Burenin and the Bolsheviks. But when the Peace of Portsmouth ended the Russo-Japanese conflict, Japanese funds disappeared. Litvinov did engage in similar smuggling operations for a time along the Black Sea coast in 1906. But, in general, the Bolsheviks turned to bank robberies and extortion, rather than smuggling, as a means to obtain money and weapons.21
For Krasin the John Grafton episode was a fortuitous Bolshevik attempt to cut in on an existing revolutionary smuggling operation. By October he had turned to more pressing matters, including the St. Petersburg soviet, the printing of Novaya zhizn’, and the planning of an armed insurrection in Moscow. Once again, Bolshevik schemes were overtaken by revolutionary events, this time a national general strike that attracted the attention of the entire world.
October and New Life
The culminating experience of the Russian Revolution of 1905 was a national general strike. During the year, syndicalist theory had become Russian reality. The majority of workers in the industrial towns participated in some form of collective action that year, notably workers in the printing, metallurgical, and textile industries. They handed out leaflets, dropped tools and left their factories, gathered in mass demonstrations, and braved police violence. Very few had distinct loyalties to any political party, and their actions were largely spontaneous.22
Initial strikes in the wake of Bloody Sunday early in the year were followed by a lull and then a series of major strikes in the early autumn. On October 20 a railroad strike spread across the country to become the first truly national general strike in history, paralyzing the nation’s transport and commerce. On October 26 a citywide representative body of workers from all factories, the soviet, met in St. Petersburg. On October 30 Sergei Witte, prime minister and architect of Russia’s industrialization, announced in a manifesto the granting of civil rights and the creation of a new parliament, the Duma.
The social democrats were excited by the strike movement but ambivalent about the Duma. Should they participate in elections to a “bourgeois” parliament or not? Was a revolutionary situation still in existence or not? On October 10 the Moscow city RSDRP conference met to consider Shantser’s call for a boycott of any Duma elections; other Bolsheviks, such as Stanislav Volsky and G. A. Alexinsky, plunged into the strike movement, side by side with their Menshevik comrades. Still others marched in protest to free political prisoners. During one of these marches, on October 18, a Moscow Bolshevik leader, N. E. Bauman, was bludgeoned to death with a metal pipe by a member of the right-wing Black Hundreds. His funeral demonstration became yet another example of mass revulsion with the regime of Nicholas II.23
The Bolsheviks were beneficiaries of the October events in a number of ways. RSDRP expenditures had multiplied tenfold since the start of the year, thanks to wealthy sympathizers, enabling the party to put out a significant number of brochures and journals. Shortly after arriving in St. Petersburg in late October, Lenin and Krupskaya sent off a letter with Shantser, praising the Moscow committee’s work. Together with Krasin, Gorky, and Burenin, Lenin busied himself planning an armed uprising in Moscow, getting Bolsheviks out of jail, and establishing legal and illegal journals. While Andreeva played Liza in Gorky’s “Children of the Sun” each night at the Moscow Art Theater, she and Gorky converted their apartment into a secret Bolshevik hideout, meeting place, and distribution point for weapons, including bombs and grenades. They also helped produce two new Bolshevik journals, Bor’ba (Struggle) in Moscow and Novaya zhizn’ in St. Petersburg, financed by N. P. Schmidt and the ever-available Morozov largesse.24
Moscow, not St. Petersburg, was the center of Bolshevik activity. The Bolsheviks controlled the journal of the Moscow committee of the RSDRP, Bor’ba, and the short-lived Vpered as well. In addition, Shantser became editor of the Izvestiia (News) of the Moscow soviet. The party leaders, Lenin, Krasin, and Bogdanov, were still in St. Petersburg in December. But with the breakup of the St. Petersburg soviet by the police, Bogdanov was arrested and jailed. He whiled away his time writing the third volume of his Empiriomonism, remaining isolated from the major Bolshevik attempt at armed insurrection, the takeover of the Schmidt furniture factory in Moscow.
The “Devil’s Nest” and the December Uprising
Moscow reactionaries had called the furniture factory of N. P. Schmidt the “Devil’s Nest” for some time. The young Morozov heir had put his workers on the eight-hour day; his 260 employees were said to be the best paid in the furniture business in all of Moscow. Schmidt’s plant was also a center of activity for several thousand Moscow woodworkers, who gathered there on a strike September 28 and only returned to work October 4 after significant concessions had been made. The Bolsheviks had organized a joiners’ union, established among Moscow carpenters, at the plant. At the age of twenty-three, young Schmidt was widely known as both a Morozov and a friend of the revolution.25
In November, production at the Schmidt factory virtually ground to a halt, while political activity greatly increased. The factory had become a Bolshevik headquarters, complete with orators and target practice with Mauser rifles. M. N. Liadov, I. F. Dubrovinsky, and Shantser were all in residence plotting an armed uprising. Lenin, who had bombarded the Bolsheviks with calls for such an uprising from Geneva, was now intrigued. “This is remarkable, simply remarkable,” he told Ekaterina Schmidt; “Tell me immediately about this unusual factory.”26
Shantser and Volsky utilized Schmidt’s money and factory to procure a significant number of weapons, collected from a net of secret addresses throughout Moscow. The art nouveau furniture intended to decorate the ornate homes of wealthy Muscovites held racks of rifles and grenades. Schmidt himself, a lover of art, music, and theater, a student of natural history and agronomy, dashed off to St. Petersburg to meet Lenin, and returned to pace back and forth in his apartment muttering “a brilliant man” while crossing himself Old Believer fashion.27
On December 5 the RSDRP Moscow committee convened to discuss the matter of a general strike and an armed uprising. Shantser went off to the Schmidt apartment and remained until midnight plotting the course of events. A few days later Shantser was arrested and exiled. The Moscow uprising proceeded without him.28
Events reached their denouement on December 16 and 17, 1905, when police and soldiers closed in on the Krasnaia Presnia district of Moscow. Barricades had been thrown up throughout the district, including Nizhnaia Prudovaia Street where the Schmidt factory stood. They did little to stop the crack Semenovsky Guards regiment from St. Petersburg, which moved in with artillery to take the district. Within two days the Schmidt factory and apartment had been largely destroyed, workers’ homes burned to the ground, and the rebellion crushed at the cost of one thousand dead or wounded. Schmidt himself was arrested. Police found his basement full of additional rifles and revolvers for the armed uprising. The “Devil’s Nest” collapsed, the Bolsheviks experienced their first revolutionary failure, and the young Schmidt passed through prison gates never to return.
But the Moscow uprising was not over for Lenin and the other Bolsheviks. The Schmidt family inheritance became a central factor in Bolshevik émigré politics for the next decade. Schmidt’s self-sacrifice would enhance Bolshevik finances.
The Stockholm Congress
The December uprising in Moscow marked the tragic climax of Bolshevik plans for 1905. The dominant experience of that year had been syndicalist, not Jacobin, a general strike, and not a successful armed uprising. Within weeks Lenin retreated to the safety of Kuokkala and a dacha owned by another Bolshevik named Leitesen. Here he set up housekeeping with Krupskaya, her mother, Lenin’s sister Maria, all on the ground floor, and the Bogdanovs on the second floor. A Bolshevik headquarters was established, with daily commuting to St. Petersburg, the coming and going of armed messengers, and hopes for increasing revolutionary activity. The urbane bandit Kamo arrived from the Caucasus with revolvers strapped under his topcoat by his mother; Krasin’s entire printing plant was moved to St. Petersburg from Baku, and then on to Vyborg when the police closed in. The immediate question was what to do about the new legal organizations established by the October Manifesto, notably the Duma and the trade unions.29
In April 1906 a “unification congress” of the RSDRP met in Stockholm to assess the experience of 1905 for the party. Here the division between Lenin and the other Bolsheviks became clearer. Sixteen Bolsheviks voted with Lenin and a Menshevik majority to participate in the upcoming Duma elections; Stalin and fifteen other Bolsheviks abstained, while eleven voted against. When the RSDRP overwhelmingly passed a resolution condemning partisan activities such as seizing money in the name of the party, Lenin was conveniently out of the room. The congress specifically rejected the “expropriation of money from private banks,” a favorite activity of both the Social Revolutionaries and, later, the Bolsheviks. As to the newly legalized trade unions, the RSDRP resolved to “give every assistance to the formation of non-party trade unions” and to urge individual party members to join them.30
The results of the Stockholm congress were mixed. The RSDRP majority, including Lenin and the Mensheviks, clearly wished to participate in the new legal opportunities made possible by the Duma and the trade unions. On the other hand, the Bolsheviks were not going to let public resolutions limit secret underground activity as long as it seemed efficacious. Krasin felt that Duma activity was insufficient and that “a new revolutionary wave is inevitable”; in private, Lenin agreed. So did Bogdanov after his release from jail in May. But the pursuit of direct action, rather than parliamentary activity, was a syndicalist strategy, and Lenin would soon have to counter the appeal of that strategy within his own fraction.31
Lenin and Bogdanov soon found themselves at odds. In August 1906, they cooperated in bringing out the first issue of the new Bolshevik illegal journal, Proletarii. But when Lenin read through the third volume of Bogdanov’s latest tome, Empiriomonism, he became “angry and uncommonly furious.” He promptly sat down and penned a long, rambling, and vindictive “declaration of love,” a philosophical polemic in three notebooks insulting Bogdanov and attacking his philosophy root and branch. Bogdanov’s response was to return it to Lenin with a note saying that he, Bogdanov, would break off personal relations with Lenin unless the document was considered “unwritten, undispatched, and unread.”32
Then there was the matter of the police. By late 1906 Lenin’s inflammatory pamphlets made him a marked man. A Moscow court called one of them “extremely revolutionary” because it “openly calls for an armed uprising.” The Moscow police searched E. D. Miagkov’s publishing house, a center of Bolshevik operations, and discovered thousands of Lenin’s pamphlets, which they confiscated. Finally, the Committee on Press Affairs in St. Petersburg requested the prosecuting attorney to bring Lenin to court for another brochure on the grounds that it “calls for an armed uprising and a dictatorship of the proletariat.”33
1906 was a year of disarray for the RSDRP and the Bolsheviks. The fissure between Lenin and Bogdanov was widening. In addition to the ongoing disagreement over philosophy and politics, there was the usual question of money. The Russian Revolution of 1905 provided martyrs and victims whose memory could help enrich the Bolshevik treasury. With this in mind, Maxim Gorky was sent to America.
Gorky in America
For a generation of Russians, America had been the promised land. Since the 1880s, Russian Jews in particular had engaged in a massive exodus from tsarist oppression to American liberty. Some thirty-eight thousand Russian Jews entered the United States in the year 1902 alone; in 1905 the figure jumped up to more than ninety thousand. These immigrants often retained their ties to their homeland; many retained political connections. Since the 1880s the Liberation of Labor circle, headed by George Plekhanov, and the Jewish Bund had received donations from immigrant sympathizers in the United States. So did the RSDRP. In 1901 Paul Axelrod complained to Lenin that the Bund was getting more financial aid from America than were the social democrats. In late 1905 the Bolsheviks decided to remedy that situation.34
In January 1906 Gorky and Andreeva met with Lenin in Helsinki and agreed to help raise funds for the Bolsheviks on their forthcoming trip to America. In February Gorky left for Berlin, where his public readings raised substantial sums of money for the Russian revolutionary cause. Andreeva was a willing accomplice in these matters, as was Nikolai Burenin. The latter, a concert pianist and son of a wealthy Moscow cotton dealer, helped Krasin set up Bolshevik fighting squads in St. Petersburg in 1905. Burenin would invite notable guests to his mother’s estate on the Russo-Finnish border, indulge them in an evening of wine, poetry, music, and magic lantern shows, and send them back to St. Petersburg with illegal literature and weapons hidden in their clothing and carriages. In early 1906 he accompanied Gorky and Andreeva to America.35
Sending Gorky abroad to raise money for the Bolsheviks was apparently not Lenin’s but Krasin’s idea. Andreeva later remembered that Krasin was a shrewd and sympathetic friend who used her as a financial agent; “he told me he needed so much money for this or that, and I tried to carry out his instructions as accurately as possible.” Lenin, she recalled, had approved Krasin’s idea of sending Gorky to America “to raise funds for the revolution, to agitate on its behalf, and mainly to hinder the grant of credits to the Tsarist government.” With this in mind, Gorky, Andreeva, and Burenin set sail on the Friedrich Wilhelm der Grosse on April 4, 1906.36
For Gorky, America was a vital new nation of smoke, skyscrapers, noise, energy, and capitalist gold—the yellow devil, he called it. Workers toiled for the likes of J. P. Morgan, while eking out a living in East Side slums. New York City was a gigantic machine, human beings its moveable parts. Here Gorky and Andreeva were a scandalous success, the famous writer living in sin with the famous actress, hobnobbing with the rich, the powerful, and socialist intellectuals.37
In May 1906 Krasin reminded Gorky in a letter that the revolution was still going on, and that the legal parliamentary struggle advocated by the Mensheviks (and Lenin) was a mistake. What did Gorky think? Money collected in America, warned Krasin, should not go to the Menshevik-controlled RSDRP central committee, but should receive some “special designation.” “Otherwise not a kopek will go for weapons and the like.” As a solution, Krasin would willingly accept the money and hold it for distribution to ensure that the Mensheviks did not get it.38
A further complication was the one hundred thousand rubles left by Savva Morozov for Andreeva. Morozov’s mother was suing in court to get the funds, and Andreeva’s lawyer, P. N. Maliantovich, was defending her interest. On July 5, 1906, Andreeva wrote Maliantovich that she wished to have the money from the life insurance policy go to Krasin; after some legal complications he received sixty thousand rubles, far more than Gorky could collect in America.39
During the summer of 1906, Gorky and Andreeva lived at the Adirondack Mountains summer home of John and Prestonia Martin while Gorky wrote his proletarian novel Mother. By then Gorky was disenchanted with this energetic new country, its omnipresent newspaper reporters, wealthy socialists, and bustling cities. The Russian embassy was campaigning to expel him. Meanwhile Krasin wrote that the first Duma had been prorogued by the tsar, and that a “new revolutionary wave” was inundating Russia, leading to a “simultaneous uprising of city, village, and revolutionary elements in the army,” an “all-Russian conflagration.” Krasin’s apocalyptic prognostications and American complications soon convinced Gorky and Andreeva that it was time to embark. On October 26, 1906, they arrived in Naples from New York on the Princess Irene, accompanied by the faithful Burenin.40
The Morozov inheritance remained a problem. In September 1906, Andreeva wrote her sister, E. F. Krit, that she should take the 89,000 rubles now available from the Morozov life insurance, give 60,000 to Krasin, 15,000 to the Bolshevik K. P. Piatnitsky, 1,000 to Maliantovich for his fee, and keep the remaining 13,000 for herself. (An additional 11,000 rubles went to various Morozov family beneficiaries stipulated in the policy.) The upshot was that Savva Morozov’s suicide, his friendship with Andreeva, and Krasin’s friendly persuasion had landed Krasin—and not Lenin—a windfall of sixty thousand rubles in the autumn of 1906.41
Bolshevik interest in cultivating Gorky therefore did not diminish when he and Andreeva moved to a house on the resort island of Capri off the Italian coast in November 1906. Among their first visitors was Alexander Bogdanov, “an extremely powerful figure from whom we can expect resounding works in philosophy,” wrote Gorky. “He will complete in philosophy the same revolution that Marx has produced in political economy. . . . When he succeeds we will see the complete downfall of all remnants of bourgeois metaphysics, the decline of the bourgeois ‘soul’, and the birth of a socialist soul. Monism has never had such a clear and deep thinking representative as Bogdanov.” More prosaically, Bogdanov left Capri with additional funds for the Bolsheviks, participated in a party conference in Berlin, and returned to Moscow—all under the watchful eye of the Okhrana.42
In December 1906 Gorky campaigned for the release of Nikolai Schmidt from jail. Schmidt, on trial for his role in the December 1905 uprising, had been charged as a leader in the revolutionary movement and brutally interrogated by the police. By the end of 1906 he was in ill health, desperately unhappy, and mentally disoriented. In an article on the “Schmidt Affair” published in the London Times, Gorky argued that Schmidt’s fate revealed the “bestial cruelty” of the police state of “Romanov, Stolypin, and Company.” Gorky urged Schmidt’s prompt release from jail. But this was not to be. In February 1907, Nikolai Schmidt was found dead in his prison cell, either a suicide or a victim of police brutality. Gorky’s article—written on the advice of Bogdanov— had been too little and too late.43
Morozov money remained an issue for the Bolsheviks. Funds collected by Gorky and Burenin in America were trickling in to the party treasury via the Ladyzhnikov publishing house in Berlin, a convenient cover. They then flowed to Krasin. More important, Savva Morozov’s insurance policy had produced tens of thousands of rubles for the Bolsheviks. The Okhrana reported that Krasin ended up with thirty-eight thousand rubles himself. Another twenty-one thousand went to local RSDRP committees; more money was used to pay off old bills for Vpered and various smuggling operations. By the spring of 1907 substantial funds had found their way from Gorky and Andreeva to the Bolsheviks via Krasin and Bogdanov, but not necessarily to Lenin.44
Maxim Gorky represented both the philosophy and the financial support for Bogdanov’s collectivism. Gorky had been a major contributor to the Bolshevik cause, largely because of his admiration for Krasin and Bogdanov. For Gorky, Bolshevism represented a Russian variant of Marxism well attuned to the deepest needs of Russia’s dark people, the peasantry, and a socialist philosophy of self-sacrifice.
In February 1906 an anonymous pamphlet on “proletarian ethics” appeared in Moscow under Rozhkov’s editorship, probably written by Krasin or Bogdanov, that epitomized the collectivist experience of 1905. The author argued that Marxism had destroyed bourgeois gods but had not replaced them with proletarian gods suitable for the masses. All men and women share an “unconscious longing for immortality” expressed in the will to live and to survive. In a future socialist society the proper instinct would be not egoistic but altruistic. A proletarian ethic would “develop one’s ‘I’ beyond the limits of its individuality, and toward commonality (obshchnost’).” In the future socialist society, man would become immortal by his triumph over nature, over death. True immortality would consist only of heroic deeds of self-sacrifice in the interest of the collective, remembered and memorialized by the collective. “The individual,” concluded the essay, “is only a bourgeois fetish.”45
Collectivism represented a survival mechanism after the experience of 1905. Heroes like N. E. Bauman had perished in the bloody streets of Russian cities. Revolutionary parties were in disarray. Only myth, the conscious articulation of revolutionary experience, would keep alive a unity of purpose and a mood of direct action. Lenin and the Mensheviks had chosen the legal tactic of parliamentary participation. Krasin, Bogdanov, and Gorky wished to keep alive the revolutionary experience of collectivism and self-sacrifice. In so doing, they soon found that collectivism in politics and philosophy had a European name: syndicalism. It is to the relationship of Bolshevism and syndicalism that we now turn.
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