‘Zubatovism’¶
Core Argument¶
Zubatovism
The chapter examines the phenomenon of "police socialism" in early 1900s Russia, where Okhrana chief Zubatov established legal, police-controlled trade unions to channel worker militancy into non-political economic activity and recruit revolutionaries as informants. Zubatov's sophistication—offering Marxist literature, conducting interrogations in his home study—proved dangerously effective: workers joined these unions en masse, and over-zealous police officials even organised strikes to maintain credibility. The unions swelled to thousands, dwarfing the Social Democratic committees.
The core argument concerns the correct Marxist response to such reactionary mass organisations. Lenin's position, drawn from "Left-Wing" Communism: an Infantile Disorder, is presented as the decisive theoretical intervention: revolutionaries must work within even the most reactionary unions where workers are found, not boycott them on grounds of purity. Lenin insisted that refusing such work meant abandoning backward masses to bourgeois agents and labour aristocrats. The chapter contrasts this with the sectarian approach of Social Democrats who rejected Gapon's Assembly of Russian Factory and Workshop Workers as a police creation, dismissing it as "Zubatovism."
The evidence is concrete. Somov's account of the St. Petersburg organisation in early 1905 reveals a handful of youthful propaganda circles—six or seven groups of five to six workers—utterly disconnected from the mass Gapon movement. Buiko's testimony shows skilled older workers dismissing young propagandists as lacking craft competence. The Zubatov unions, under shop-floor pressure, partially transformed into genuine organs of struggle; Zubatov himself was sacked after the 1903 strike wave.
The polemic targets two positions simultaneously: the tsarist police strategy of controlled unionism, and the sectarian refusal of revolutionaries to engage with imperfect mass organisations. Lenin's method—"absolute implacability on questions of theory and principle combined with extreme flexibility on tactical and organisational issues"—is held up as the alternative to both. The chapter argues that abstract correctness ("the workers need a revolutionary party") becomes sterile when it refuses to engage with the concrete, messy forms workers' organisation actually takes. The road to the masses requires penetrating even police-run unions, not standing outside denouncing them.