How Did the Party Survive?¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter directly confronts revisionist historiography, specifically the work of Robert McKean, which seeks to diminish the Bolshevik Party’s role in the Russian workers’ movement during the First World War. The author accepts McKean’s well-documented evidence that the party was in dire straits by 1914-15: membership in Petrograd barely reached 500, city and district networks were virtually non-existent, and anti-war leaflets reached only a negligible audience. The response to the 1915 anniversary of Bloody Sunday saw merely 2,000 workers strike; the May Day call that year yielded only 600. Police raids had “completely disorganised” the Leninists. The chapter does not dispute these facts but argues that McKean’s case, while correcting Stalinist fairy tales of an unbroken triumphal march, is overstated and ultimately fails to explain the central riddle: if Bolshevism had been effectively liquidated, how did the party recover so rapidly after February 1917 and seize power within nine months?
The answer lies in what the party possessed beyond its formal committee structures. In the pre-war period, four-fifths of organised workers had supported the Bolsheviks. Many were not active in committees but were readers of Pravda and collaborators. Hundreds of thousands more had been touched by Bolshevik agitation and slogans. This constituted the party’s real capital: a layer of class-conscious workers trained up by Pravda between 1912 and 1914. Lenin’s letters to Shlyapnikov, quoted extensively, make this explicit. Even after the arrest of the Duma deputies, Lenin insisted that Pravda had trained thousands from whom a new collective of leaders would be formed. The advanced sections of Pravdist workers, that bulwark of the party, had survived despite terrible devastations. The chapter argues that the idea of the party lived on in these workers’ minds, dormant during the patriotic reaction, but re-emerging as conditions changed.
The polemic is twofold. First, against McKean’s implicit suggestion that absence of formal organisation equals absence of revolutionary potential. The author notes that the difficulty of getting precise information about unnamed worker-Bolsheviks in conditions of strict clandestinity does not mean they did not exist. Second, the chapter contrasts Bolshevik resilience with Menshevik collapse. Martov’s plaintive admission that “everything that is alive is going over to the Leninists” is cited, alongside McKean’s own acknowledgment that the Menshevik Organisational Committee and Central Initiative Group betrayed no sign of existence. The organisational and political flabbiness of Menshevism, which had made a principle of disbanding illegal party organisation in favour of purely legal activities, rendered them incapable of underground work. Trotsky is invoked to summarise: the war produced dreadful desolation, but scattered groups, circles, and solitary individuals gradually found each other, rebuilt district connections, and revived underground work. The Okhrana itself later reported that Leninists, commanding an overwhelming majority of underground social democratic organisations, were issuing revolutionary appeals in considerable numbers with palpable results in strikes and disorders. The party survived not because it was untouched, but because its cadres, trained in its ideas, methods, and traditions, were invincible.