Lenin and the Group for the Emancipation of Labour¶
Core Argument¶
In the winter of 1894–95, a decisive bridge was built between the émigré Marxist veterans of Plekhanov’s Group for the Emancipation of Labour and the rising generation of Social Democrats inside Russia. Lenin and E.I. Sponti were dispatched to Switzerland to negotiate the publication of popular Marxist literature. Their arrival, as recorded in the correspondence of Plekhanov and Axelrod, was a landmark event: for the first time, the exiled Group received emissaries from active Russian circles seeking serious, business-like collaboration. This broke the isolation of the émigrés, who had been reduced to spectators of the struggles inside Russia, wary after past failures with unreliable contacts. The newcomers convinced them that a real basis for spreading Marxism now existed. The Group agreed to launch a journal, Rabotnik, published abroad, while a more popular paper, Rabocheye Dyelo, would be produced inside Russia. The future of Russian Marxism seemed assured.
Disaster struck immediately after Lenin’s return. On 19 December 1895, a police raid captured most of the League of Struggle’s leaders, including Lenin. He coolly denied being a Social Democrat and feigned ignorance of the illegal literature in his possession. Martov, still at large, issued a defiant mimeographed proclamation insisting the League would continue its work, but the ruse failed; he and others were arrested on 5 January 1896. From prison, Lenin maintained contact with the organisation using clandestine methods: messages written in milk between the lines of books, revealed by candlelight, and an inkwell made of bread, which he ate when guards approached. He wrote a proclamation, To the Tsar’s Government, which was hectographed and distributed in hundreds of copies while the police searched frantically for its author. He preserved his humour, writing to his mother that he was safer than most Russian citizens, as they could never find him. Others fared worse: Vaneyev contracted tuberculosis in jail and never recovered; another went insane.
The arrests had a severe political effect. By removing the most experienced cadres—whose average age was just 24 or 25, with Lenin called “Starik” (the Old Man) at 26—leadership fell to younger, raw recruits aged 20 or less. Enthusiastic but politically untutored, they were seduced by the striking success of economic agitation. The battle against the old propaganda-circle mentality had been won, but in their eagerness to extend mass influence, a section of impressionable students began to argue that Social Democrats should not lead the workers but merely serve them by helping with strikes. This tendency, led by the medical student K.M. Takhtarev at the Technological Institute, gained ascendancy over the “old timers,” who were pushed aside. The practical successes of agitation tempted these “activists” to seek an easy path, adapting to the prejudices of the most backward layers of the working class and arguing that political ideas were too difficult for the masses. The chapter thus charts the first major crisis of Russian Marxism: the contradiction between the theoretical clarity of the émigré veterans and the economistic drift of a youthful leadership untempered by struggle.