The Duma Fraction¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter details the catastrophic collapse of the Russian Social Democratic Duma fraction in the opening months of the First World War, tracing its trajectory from initial anti-war defiance to arrest and liquidation. The core narrative thrust is the immense pressure of jingoistic war fever on the Bolshevik deputies, their vacillations under that pressure, and Lenin’s mounting anxiety from abroad as his followers failed to match his intransigent revolutionary defeatism.
The chapter opens by establishing the near-unanimous patriotic fervour of the Duma in July 1914, with only the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and Trudoviks refusing war credits. However, this principled stand quickly eroded. The petty-bourgeois Trudoviks, led by Kerensky, swung to defencism, isolating the Bolshevik deputies. The chapter argues that the Bolsheviks, now reduced to five men (Badayev, Petrovsky, Muranov, Samoilov, Shagov) after the provocateur Malinovsky’s departure, wobbled. Under Kamenev’s influence, they soft-pedalled Lenin’s defeatism and drew closer to the Mensheviks, whose leader Chkheidze adopted a semi-left stance. Their joint Duma resolution, as Krupskaya noted, was “very cautiously worded”.
The chapter’s central polemic is directed at the leaders of the Socialist International, personified by the Belgian socialist Emile Vandervelde. Vandervelde, now a minister in his own government, sent a telegram to the Russian deputies urging them to suspend opposition to tsarism to defeat “Prussian militarism”. The chapter excoriates this as “sly diplomacy” and “weasel words”, given Vandervelde’s intimate knowledge of tsarist oppression from a 1914 fact-finding mission. The Mensheviks capitulated, issuing a statement that, while enumerating tsarist sufferings, concluded they were “not opposing the war”. Lenin was “especially disappointed” at the Bolsheviks’ feeble response to this telegram, and kept publicly silent about their declaration, criticising it in unpublished correspondence.
Despite these initial hesitations, the chapter notes the fraction did recover its nerve, refusing war credits, walking out of the Duma, and delivering anti-war speeches at factories. Trotsky is cited to confirm that, while the fraction had not risen to the height of its task, the percentage of patriots among Bolsheviks was insignificant. However, the police, having infiltrated the party to the highest levels, struck. A secret November 1914 conference, chaired by Kamenev and attended by the Duma deputies and a handful of local delegates, was raided on its third day. The chapter concludes with the arrest of the entire Bolshevik fraction, a blow that left the party’s fortunes at their lowest ebb, with no mass protests and the focus of work shifting abroad under ever-tightening police controls.