How the Party Financed Itself¶
Core Argument¶
Here the chapter examines the material underpinnings of the Bolshevik organisation in the wake of the Third Congress, arguing that the revolutionary upsurge of 1905 fundamentally transformed both the scale and the character of the Party’s financial needs. The core narrative traces a shift from the meagre, hand-to-mouth existence of the underground committeemen—living on 25–35 roubles a month, perpetually on the move—to a situation where the demand for socialist literature, arms, and organisation outstripped all available resources. The chapter insists that this was not merely a logistical problem but a political one: the old forms of propaganda were dead, and the movement required a popular press, peasant literature, and material for non-Russian nationalities.
Key claims are supported by a dense array of financial data drawn from Martov, David Lane, and Krupskaya. The St. Petersburg Bolshevik Committee raised roughly 4,680 roubles in February 1905, but by July expenditure on arms alone had reached 800 roubles in a fortnight. The Mensheviks, with a looser structure, were far more dependent on large donors—almost half their February income came from a single contributor—whereas the Bolsheviks strove to build an organisation on the kopecks of the workers. The Ivanovo-Voznesensk stronghold achieved 53 per cent of income from worker subscriptions, a figure the chapter presents as the only real foundation for a workers’ party. The Jewish Bund, despite its opportunist policy, is cited enviously for its well-centralised organisation meeting 50 per cent of needs from worker donations.
The chapter draws heavily on the testimony of Alexei Buzinov, a worker at the Nevsky Ship and Machine Works, to illustrate the dramatic transformation in consciousness: socialists who had been shunned were now recognised as leaders, looked after with “crude but touching good-heartedness.” This social shift is the historical context for the financial crisis. Wealthy sympathisers—Savva Morozov, Maxim Gorky, the young factory-owner Nikolai Schmidt—provided crucial funds, but the chapter is careful to distinguish this from mere patronage. Schmidt paid a terrible price for his commitment. The chapter also addresses the controversial question of ‘appropriations’—bank robberies by Bolshevik armed units—but mounts a sharp polemic against any conflation of this with modern terrorism or guerrillaism. Lenin’s insistence that such activities were permissible only as part of a broad mass movement and a united front against the autocracy is contrasted with the “primitive methods of struggle” that have re-emerged in the absence of authoritative Marxist leadership. The polemic is thus directed both at liberal caricatures of Bolshevik ‘conspiracy’ and at later distortions of revolutionary method.