The Party Decimated¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter opens with Trotsky’s stark depiction of the revolutionary movement’s collapse at the outbreak of the First World War. The most active layers of the working class were mobilised for the front, revolutionary elements were purged from the factories, strikes were met with severe penalties, and the workers’ press was liquidated. Trade unions were strangled. The influx of women, boys, and peasants into the workshops, combined with the wreck of the Second International, disoriented the workers politically. Factory administrations, emboldened, spoke patriotically in the name of the factories, carrying a considerable section of the workers with them. To call oneself a Bolshevik in those days invited not only arrest but a beating from backward workers.
The chapter’s core narrative thrust is the near-total destruction of the Bolshevik Party in the opening months of the war. The regime clamped down immediately. Thousands of Bolsheviks were rounded up and dispatched to prison or exile. Party structures disappeared; links with leading centres were severed. In St. Petersburg alone, over a thousand party and trade union members had just been arrested for participation in the July general strike. The first wave of mobilisations eliminated many activists, especially the youth. The closure of Pravda signalled a general witch-hunt against the left and progressive press. Most central committee members were sent to Siberia; many leaders were already in foreign exile. Lenin, caught in Austrian Poland at the outbreak of war, moved to Berne, Switzerland, to avoid internment. There he began the painful task of regrouping the Party’s shattered forces in emigration, concentrating on the ideological rearmament of the cadres on the basic positions of war, revolution, and internationalism.
The blow was made far worse by the unexpected collapse of the International. The sell-out by the leaders of international Social Democracy badly affected morale. The isolation of the exiled leaders was more terrible than anything hitherto experienced. Wartime border closures meant that for months on end no word was received from Russia. The party centre abroad was completely cut off from the interior until September, and even then communication was all but impossible. Censorship and other wartime measures deprived the tiny forces still functioning inside Russia of any information. Badayev records that conditions were far worse than in the worst period of reaction. The chapter argues that at the outset of war, a wave of patriotic intoxication sweeps through the population, dragging behind it not just the petty bourgeoisie but also backward sections of the working class. The advanced guard finds itself temporarily isolated.
After moving to Berne, joined by Zinoviev, Lenin and Krupskaya began reorganising the work. The main problem, besides the eternal lack of funds, was isolation. Lenin’s manifesto War and the Russian Social Democracy appeared in Sotsial Demokrat no. 33, with a total print run of 1,500. Only a handful of journals ever reached Russia. Contacts with the interior had been reduced virtually to nil. After July 1914, all communications between Russia and the West had to be conducted across the difficult far northern Swedish-Finnish frontier. In September, the Bolshevik Duma deputy F.N. Samoilov, recuperating in a Swiss sanatorium at the start of the war, brought to Russia a copy of Lenin’s Seven Theses. The hope of renewed contact with Lenin gave a welcome boost to the morale of party activists, who were only gradually recovering from the body blows inflicted on them since July.