War with Japan¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter argues that the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 acted as the catalyst that transformed the Bolshevik-Menshevik split from a dispute over organisational questions into a fundamental political schism. The tsarist regime, panicked by the rising strike wave of 1902-04, cynically sought a "victorious little war" to stave off revolution, as Interior Minister Plehve admitted. Tsarist Russia, despite its backwardness, was a predatory imperialist power, carving up China alongside other empires and occupying Manchuria after the Boxer uprising. This brought it into conflict with Japan, whose surprise attack on Port Arthur in February 1904 — explicitly compared to Pearl Harbour — guaranteed Japanese naval supremacy and led to the fortress's fall eleven months later with the loss of 28,200 Russian soldiers.
Lenin broke decisively with the Menshevik-controlled Iskra over the war. Where the Mensheviks offered pacifist appeals for peace, Lenin argued that the defeat of tsarism was a revolutionary necessity: "The cause of Russian freedom and of the struggle of the Russian proletariat for socialism depends to a very large extent on the military defeats of the autocracy." He subjected the campaign to searing criticism to expose the regime's rottenness, a position rooted in the Marxist analysis of war as the continuation of politics by other means, explicitly rejecting the pacifism of Jean Jaurès.
The war's unpopularity, compounded by military humiliation, forced the regime to make concessions. Plehve was assassinated by a Social Revolutionary in July 1904, and his replacement, Sviatopolk-Mirskii, permitted a Zemstvo congress and a liberal "banqueting campaign" demanding moderate constitutional reform. The Mensheviks proposed participation in and support for this liberal campaign, arguing that the working class was too weak to act independently and must not frighten the bourgeoisie with extreme demands. Lenin's response was blistering. In The Zemstvo Campaign and Iskra's Plan, he denounced class collaborationism, insisting that the proletariat must never renounce the slogans of a democratic republic and armed uprising out of fear of bourgeois panic. The chapter quotes Zinoviev to assert that the attitude to the liberals became the fundamental question defining all trends of Social Democracy, reducing all disagreements to this axis.
The chapter contrasts Menshevik subordination with Bolshevik practice. Lenin advocated that workers attend the liberal banquets not as allies but to transform them into militant demonstrations. An incident in Yekaterinoslav is cited where workers interrupted a banquet, scattering proclamations demanding a Constituent Assembly and universal suffrage, leading to clashes with police and Cossacks. Lenin praised such tactics in Vperyod as manifestations of working-class fighting spirit. The Mensheviks, by contrast, are accused of watering down demands to avoid intimidating the liberals — a policy the chapter explicitly links to Stalin's later "Popular Front." The chapter concludes by citing both Lenin and the Menshevik leader Fyodor Dan to argue that the political character of the split, though not fully apparent at the Second Congress, emerged decisively in late 1904, with the war and the liberal question exposing the irreconcilable divide between class independence and class collaborationism, Marxism and revisionism.