Vacillations Among the Bolsheviks¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter details the internal struggles Lenin faced within his own Bolshevik faction during the First World War, arguing that the Party was not monolithic but subject to the same chauvinist and pacifist pressures that fractured the broader international socialist movement. The core narrative thrust is that Lenin’s uncompromising position—turning the imperialist war into civil war and advocating for the defeat of the Tsarist state—was a minority view even among leading Bolsheviks, requiring constant polemical struggle against vacillation within his own camp.
The text provides concrete evidence of this disarray. A small number of Bolshevik émigrés in Paris, including members of the Party’s ‘Foreign Committee’, volunteered for the French army, joining Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries in a declaration of ‘Russian Republicans’ publicly endorsed by Plekhanov. Krupskaya’s memoirs are cited to show the general confusion, where comrades debated which side was the aggressor rather than the class character of the war. Lenin’s response to this demoralisation was not immediate condemnation but a call for comradely discussion, as shown in his correspondence with Karpinsky. The chapter also highlights a different deviation: pacifism. Sections of the Party in Montpellier advanced the slogans ‘Down with war!’ and ‘Long live peace!’, which Lenin subjected to withering criticism, counterposing the proletarian watchword of civil war.
The theoretical context drawn upon is Lenin’s consistent insistence that the only way to end the war was to overthrow capitalism. The text quotes Lenin’s letter to Shlyapnikov dismissing peace as a “philistine, parson’s watchword,” and his letter to Wijnkoop celebrating the slogan of a people’s militia, arguing that a class that does not master military art is a class of lackeys. Trotsky is quoted to reinforce this: Marxists counterpose the slogan of winning the army and arming the workers to the enervating slogan of disarmament.
The most notable polemic is directed at Kamenev, who is presented as the leading example of high-level vacillation. The chapter draws on McKean’s research to detail Kamenev’s conduct: at his trial in February 1915 he publicly repudiated Lenin’s defeatism and called the social chauvinist Yordansky as a defence witness; police raids revealed notes dictated by Kamenev amending Lenin’s Seven Theses to sidestep the call for Russia’s defeat. The text argues this was not a tactical device but a genuine political disagreement, one widely shared among Bolsheviks. This is reinforced by McKean’s textual analysis of 47 illegal leaflets from 1915-1917, which found not a single one mentioned the slogan of Russia’s defeat being the lesser evil, and only ten referenced turning the imperialist war into civil war. Instead, the Party’s illegal literature avoided themes likely to provoke a hostile mass response, falling back on the pre-war ‘three whales’ of democratic republic, eight-hour day, and land confiscation. The chapter thus argues that Lenin’s revolutionary intransigence was imposed on a reluctant and cautious party apparatus, a struggle won only through relentless polemical fire.