The Period of Small Circles¶
Core Argument¶
Here the narrative traces the shift from the heroic but isolated conspiratorial circles of the 1880s to a period of intense, patient underground propaganda work among the urban proletariat. The core argument is that the Marxist method, unlike the bankrupt Narodnik fantasy of ‘going to the people’, succeeded precisely because it rooted itself in the actual conditions of the factory workers. The chapter’s narrative thrust is the construction of a bridgehead: the patient, dangerous work of the kruzhovshchina (study circle period) created the cadre that would become the backbone of the future Bolshevik Party. The key claim is that this apparently mundane work—teaching literacy and the rudiments of Marxism to exhausted workers after their shifts—was the indispensable foundation. The evidence is drawn from Krupskaya’s Reminiscences, which provides a vivid account of the Smolensk Sunday School in Schlisselburg, where the “silent conspiracy” of teaching the three Rs alongside socialist ideas operated under the noses of spies, constrained even from teaching the ten times table. The chapter insists that the tsarist censor’s dismissal of Marx’s Capital as too dry to be dangerous was a catastrophic miscalculation; workers tore the book apart to distribute it chapter by chapter.
The historical context is the aftermath of the 1891-1892 famine, which the chapter presents as a thunderbolt that exposed the “bankruptcy of the autocracy” and shattered the liberal Narodnik policy of “small deeds” (soup kitchens). This social convulsion is the pivot that forces a change in method. The chapter draws on Plekhanov’s pamphlet All-Russian Ruin, which argued that the famine was not natural but social, and advanced the demand for a Zemsky Sobor (a representative assembly) not as a reformist sop but as a “militant, fighting slogan” to mobilise the masses. This is the first concrete grappling with the problem of relating the workers’ movement to other oppressed classes under tsarism.
The polemic is sharp and double-edged. Against the Narodniks, the argument is that their false theories made a genuine link with the people impossible. Against the liberals and the emerging Menshevik-Stalinist tradition, the chapter polemicises against the idea of a “People’s Front” that subordinates the working class to the “progressive bourgeoisie”. The chapter cites Plekhanov’s rebuke to those who accused him of frightening the liberals: “the most harmful kind of ‘frightening’ is the frightening of socialists with the spectre of frightening the liberals.” The correct policy is “march separately and strike together”—episodic, tactical blocs for practical tasks, combined with merciless criticism of bourgeois vacillations. The chapter ends by noting the first seeds planted in Kazan, where a young Vladimir Ulyanov was a member of Nikolai Fedoseyev’s circle, and the emergence of Leagues of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, setting the stage for the transformation wrought by the famine.