The Party Press¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter examines the explosive growth and transformation of the Bolshevik organisation during 1905, using fragmentary membership data to demonstrate a party undergoing rapid proletarianisation. The numerical evidence, though acknowledged as incomplete, shows organisations doubling and trebling within months: Nizhny Novgorod rose from 100 to 250, then to 1,500 by year’s end; St Petersburg’s Bolsheviks increased tenfold to 3,000. The chapter estimates roughly 8,400 organised Bolsheviks nationally by 1905, with Mensheviks at comparable strength, but stresses that the party’s real influence extended to hundreds of thousands through the revolutionary ferment unleashed after the October Manifesto.
The central narrative thrust concerns the qualitative transformation accompanying this quantitative growth. Fresh young workers flooded into leading bodies at local and provincial level—‘natural leaders’ thrown up by the revolution itself. Lenin’s claim that the party had become ‘the party of millions of the proletariat’ is presented as no exaggeration, given the vast periphery of workers who considered themselves Social Democrats without formal membership.
The chapter pivots to the party press as both symptom and cause of this expansion. Novaya Zhizn’, launched legally ten days after the Tsar’s Manifesto under a front editorial board, achieved circulations of 50,000–80,000 despite operating under censorship. Gorky’s role in securing financial backing from liberal publishers and ‘fellow travellers’—writers like Balmont and Andreyev—is highlighted as a pragmatic alliance that popularised Bolshevik ideas without absorbing these intellectuals into the party.
A significant polemic emerges through Lenin’s writings from this period, directed against two targets simultaneously. First, the ‘committeemen’ who feared that opening the party would dilute its revolutionary character. Lenin’s response, quoted extensively, insists that the danger of dissolution only exists if the party lacks principles—which the Bolsheviks do not. Second, and more sharply, Lenin repudiates the notion that socialist consciousness must be introduced from without, insisting workers are ‘instinctively, spontaneously Social Democratic’. The chapter frames this as a direct contradiction of the position associated with What Is To Be Done?, noting that the same Lenin who argued for restricted membership in 1903 now called for one intellectual to several hundred workers in party organisations. The chapter concludes with a barbed observation that some self-styled Bolsheviks never understood Lenin’s dialectical shift—a failure attributed to the interpreter, not the theory.