The Trial of Bolshevik Duma Deputies¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter examines the Bolshevik Party’s response to the arrest and trial of its Duma deputies in February 1915, situating this event within the broader collapse of the Second International and the party’s desperate struggle to maintain organisational continuity under wartime repression. The core argument is that the trial represented a missed political opportunity: Lenin had expected the deputies to use the courtroom as a platform for revolutionary defeatism, openly repudiating the war and the patriotic capitulation of the European socialist parties. Instead, the defence adopted cautious, legalistic tactics that blunted the trial’s agitational value. Kamenev’s declaration that the incriminating documents “decidedly contradict his own views on the current war” is singled out as particularly damaging — Trotsky’s account, quoted at length, characterises this as a symptom of the entire upper party layer’s hostility to defeatism. Lenin was “dismayed” and “indignant.” Petrovsky’s speech is praised, but the overall conduct is judged to have “extremely weakened the agitational effectiveness of the trial.”
The chapter draws on Trotsky’s Stalin and internal party sources to reconstruct the episode. It also records the defence attorney Pereverzev’s courtroom prophecy that the deputies’ “weaknesses — lack of preparation, dependence on their intellectual advisers” would “fall away, like an empty shell” — a formulation that implicitly contrasts the workers’ instinctive courage with the intellectuals’ timidity. Despite Lenin’s disappointment, the chapter argues that the deputies’ willingness to accept perpetual Siberian exile nonetheless raised Bolshevik authority among workers who could not parse the nuances of courtroom tactics but recognised the principle of imprisonment for one’s convictions. Lenin’s subsequent claim that the Bolsheviks commanded four-fifths of conscious workers is endorsed, with the pre-war Pravda readership of 40,000 cited as evidence of a durable tradition.
The second half of the chapter shifts to the party’s organisational condition. Membership figures are given in granular detail: Petrograd’s organisation fell to 100–120 members in November 1914, recovered to 500 by spring 1915, 1,200 by autumn, and 2,000 by early 1917. Similar trajectories are traced for Kharkov (15 to 120) and Yekaterinoslav (200 to 400). The Central Committee is described as skeletal — Lenin, Zinoviev, Shlyapnikov, and Krupskaya — with a Russian Bureau only established in autumn 1915. The chapter is notably sceptical of official Soviet historiography (Istoriya KPSS), which claims ten district committees in Petrograd and groups in 29 towns; the author warns that many were “mere shells” and that the Petrograd committee was “smashed at least 30 times.” The underground press is highlighted as a vital binding force: 26 issues of Sotsial Demokrat were produced between October 1914 and January 1917, roughly one per month. The chapter concludes that the maintenance of even tiny underground meetings — “reduced to a few people” — was the key to future revival, and that party organisation existed at some point in at least 200 towns and cities, despite the continuous disruption of agents provocateurs and arrests.