Change of Mood¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter “Change of Mood” charts the Bolshevik Party’s slow, painful recovery from near-total organisational collapse in the first two years of the war to a position of growing influence by late 1916. The core argument is that the party’s revival was not the result of a master plan or a sudden influx of resources, but a direct, lagging consequence of the radicalisation of the masses. The war’s opening phase had left the revolutionaries in the wilderness: the Duma fraction was arrested, trade unions were suppressed or placed under surveillance, workers’ cultural centres were shut down, and strike activity was met with dispatch to the front. The party’s forces were reduced to a “minimum expression,” with only a handful of illegal papers appearing at long intervals—the Petrograd Proletarsky Golos managed just four issues.
The chapter draws extensively on internal party reports and Shlyapnikov’s memoirs to illustrate the precariousness of provincial organisations. In Tver, the committee only began functioning in late 1915 and amounted to little more than a discussion circle, lacking experienced cadres. In Nizhny-Novgorod, membership stood at 150–200, but there was a “dreadful shortage of literature”; even the party’s central organ and theoretical journal Kommunist were unobtainable. The central apparatus in Petrograd was laughably small—a single flat serving as both archive and press depot, with the Bureau’s funds totalling just 1,117 roubles over two months. Shlyapnikov himself lived a nomadic existence, moving between lodgings nightly to evade police surveillance. The exception was Latvia, where the Social Democrats maintained a tight organisation and produced 26 issues of an illegal paper with a print run of 80,000.
The turning point is located in the strike wave of early 1916, particularly in the Donets Basin, where 50,000 miners struck after Bolshevik leaflets appeared. The strike was defeated—four workers killed, twenty wounded—but it transformed the mood. Cells that had been isolated grouplets now “became acquainted with each other” and united to form the social democratic organisation of the Donets Basin. The chapter argues that from this point, the party began to grow despite “ever mounting repression.” By the end of July 1916, local organisations had produced over 600 different leaflets with a total run of about two million, distributed across 80 towns. The Petersburg Committee claimed some 3,000 members, and the Workers’ Group of the Insurance Council provided a legal foothold. The polemical thrust is implicit but clear: against any suggestion that the Bolsheviks were a well-funded, centrally directed conspiracy, the chapter insists on the ragged, improvised, and financially desperate character of the underground work, and roots the party’s recovery in the objective movement of the class, not in organisational prowess.