Defeat¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter “Defeat” examines the collapse of the December 1905 armed uprising in Moscow and its broader consequences for the Russian Revolution. Its core argument is that the defeat was not the result of cowardice or treachery by the St Petersburg proletariat, as later Stalinist historiography fraudulently claimed, but of objective conditions: exhaustion, poor organisation, and the uneven tempo at which different layers of the working class and peasantry moved into action. The Moscow rising was merely the most dramatic expression of a wave of insurrections that swept Kharkov, the Donbas, Yekaterinoslav, Rostov-on-Don, the Northern Caucasus, Nizhny-Novgorod, Georgia, Latvia, and Siberia. In many places, local “republics” were declared, and even Mensheviks led armed uprisings, as in Rostov, where Cossacks crushed the insurgents with artillery. Yet the fatal weakness was the absence of an uprising in St Petersburg, the capital, allowing the government to concentrate its forces against Moscow and then pick off the remaining centres one by one.
The chapter directly polemicises against the Stalinist falsification enshrined in Stalin’s Short Course, which blamed the Menshevik leadership of the St Petersburg Soviet—specifically Khrustalyov-Nosar, Trotsky, and Parvus—for turning the capital’s workers against insurrection. This slander is refuted by citing Lenin’s repeated expressions of solidarity with the Soviet’s tactical line, and by Krupskaya’s memoirs, which record that St Petersburg workers were “worn out by previous strikes” and acutely aware of how “badly organised and poorly armed they were for a decisive struggle.” Lenin himself, far from criticising the capital’s proletariat, warned against provocations designed to force them into battle under unfavourable conditions. The chapter draws on Lenin’s contemporary writings to show that he regarded the movement as having “risen to a much higher plane” even after December, and that the peasant upsurge of 1906, though belated, might yet revive the revolution.
Theoretical context is provided by the military analogy of reserves arriving after the advanced guard is spent, and by the comparison of the 1905 defeat to an unsuccessful scientific experiment: the human cost was immense, but the experience was indispensable. Lenin’s later verdict is quoted at length: without the “dress rehearsal” of 1905, the victory of October 1917 would have been impossible. The chapter also traces the international impact—the strike wave in Germany, the Persian and Chinese revolutions—and concludes that the Bolshevik Party’s theoretical, political, and organisational weapons were forged in the white heat of 1905 and tempered in the reaction that followed. The defeat was not the end, but a necessary stage in the revolutionary education of the masses.