Closed Frontiers¶
Core Argument¶
Digest: Closed Frontiers
This chapter details the immense practical obstacles confronting Lenin and the Bolshevik émigré leadership during the First World War, focusing on the period 1915–1916. The core narrative thrust is the grinding struggle to maintain organisational continuity, produce revolutionary literature, and sustain contact with the underground party inside Russia under conditions of wartime isolation, police surveillance, and chronic financial destitution. The chapter argues that the war’s closure of frontiers and the intensification of state repression did not merely inconvenience the exiles but threatened to sever the émigré centre from the domestic movement entirely, creating a crisis of morale and material survival.
The evidence is drawn from the memoirs of Alexander Shlyapnikov, the veteran worker-Bolshevik placed in charge of transportation via Stockholm, Murmansk, and Arkhangelsk. The chapter details the meagre scale of operations: the journal Sotsial Demokrat distributed only 300 copies in Paris, 100 in London, Stockholm, and New York, and far fewer elsewhere, with a negligible number reaching Russia. The foreign bureau of the Central Committee consisted of a tiny handful—Zinoviev, Krupskaya, Inessa Armand, Shklovsky, and Kasparov—supplemented by Lenin’s own sisters, Kollontai (a recent convert from Menshevism), and a few others. The chapter underscores the desperate search for trustworthy personnel, noting that the involvement of Lenin’s relatives was itself a symptom of the shortage of reliable cadres.
The chapter draws on the historical context of the collapse of the Second International and the pro-German stance of the Scandinavian Social Democratic leadership, which limited assistance to left-wing anti-war currents, particularly the Young Socialists, though their pacifism (“Lay down the weapons!”) is noted as a political limitation. The financial crisis is illustrated by Shlyapnikov’s report that the Petersburg Committee could not spare 300–500 roubles a month to pay seafarers to smuggle propaganda, and that he was forced to rely on loans and occasional news dispatches.
A notable polemic is directed at Bukharin’s “ultra-leftism” and “semi-anarchist ideas.” Lenin’s angry correspondence with Shlyapnikov is quoted at length, condemning Bukharin’s instability on the question of national self-determination and his drift toward “semi-anarchism” under the pressure of war. Lenin’s decision to replace the journal Kommunist with Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata is presented as a necessary organisational rupture to avoid “squabbling” and “wavering.” The chapter also implicitly argues against the demoralisation and disorientation that gripped the émigré ranks, quoting a despairing comment about Plekhanov’s “cosy chats” and the general gloom, while insisting that the paper nevertheless continued to reflect the life of the workers’ movement inside Russia.