9 January, 1905¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter opens with the text of the petition carried by the workers to the Tsar on Bloody Sunday, capturing the abject, supplicant tone of a class still bound by monarchist illusions. This moment, 9 January 1905, is presented as the proletariat’s first decisive entry onto the historical stage. Within eleven months, that same class would rise in armed insurrection under a Marxist party. The 1905 Revolution is characterised as a dress rehearsal for 1917, an embryonic unfolding of all the basic processes—economic strikes, political general strikes, mass demonstrations, armed uprising—that would later be repeated on a higher scale. The chapter’s central argument is that this revolution tested every idea, programme, party, and leader, and that its experience was decisive for the future evolution of all tendencies in Russian Social Democracy.
The core narrative thrust, however, is not the revolution itself but the lamentable state of the Party on its eve. The chapter documents in granular detail the weakness, confusion, and factional paralysis that afflicted both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in the months before January 1905. The internal faction fight had paralysed activity; the Bolsheviks had lost control of the Party centre abroad and lacked an organ until December 1904; the Mensheviks, though better resourced, were thin on the ground in the interior. The St. Petersburg organisation did not formally split until December 1904, when the Mensheviks broke away, but the damage was already done. The chapter cites a sharp decline in Bolshevik leaflet production—from 117 in 1903 to 11 in 1904—as evidence of the inward turn.
The evidence is drawn heavily from internal Party correspondence and memoirs. Lenin’s principal agent in St. Petersburg, Rosalia Zemlyachka, is quoted at length in a letter written two days before Bloody Sunday, cataloguing disaster: Mensheviks flooding into Russia, the Central Committee turning people against the Bolsheviks, a desperate lack of people and money, cities being lost one after another. Litvinov’s letter to Lenin is even more blunt: the periphery is hardly anywhere for the Bolsheviks; the party workers think them a bunch of disorganisers; only an immediate congress and a paper can save them from certain ruin. The chapter uses these sources to argue that the constant complaints about a ‘lack of people’ revealed an ingrained lack of confidence in the workers themselves—a failure to co-opt the best elements of the proletariat and youth onto the committees, seeking instead easy solutions from abroad.
The Mensheviks fare no better. Garvi’s memoirs describe Kiev on the eve of 1905 as marked by a strange dearth of people, remoteness from the working masses, and a meagre organisational life. The old advanced workers, the real vanguard formed in the period of Economism, stood aside, mistrustful of the organisation and its methods. The chapter’s polemical edge is directed not at the Tsar or the bourgeoisie but at the Party’s own failings—the sectarianism, the bureaucratic inertia, the inability to connect leading circles with the living forces of the working-class movement. The revolution, it implies, would sweep these inadequacies aside, but only because the class itself forced the pace.