The Question of Guerrilla War¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter examines the Bolsheviks’ approach to guerrilla warfare during the 1905–6 revolutionary period, arguing that armed partisan detachments were only revolutionary when subordinated to the mass movement. The fighting squads emerged organically from workers’ organisations, as shown by the Moscow military committee’s composition of RSDLP members, SRs, trade unionists, and students. Their primary functions were defensive: protecting meetings from police raids, defending against pogromists and Black Hundred gangs, and occasionally attacking strikebreakers and fascists. The chapter cites the raid on Riga’s police department to free Latvian revolutionaries and the temporary capture of Latvian towns in December 1905 as examples of guerrilla action at its highest intensity. Other tasks included arms capture, assassination of spies, and bank raids for funds.
The central theoretical claim is that guerrilla units were only progressive as auxiliaries to the revolutionary upswing. Lenin recognised serious dangers: adventurist and déclassé elements could infiltrate, groups isolated from the masses degenerated into criminal bands indistinguishable from bandits, and such organisations were far more vulnerable to provocateurs than ideologically-cohered revolutionary parties. Strict discipline and party control offered partial safeguards, but the only genuine control was the revolutionary mass movement itself. Once the revolution entered irreversible decline, Lenin insisted on immediate dissolution of all guerrilla groups.
The chapter situates this tactical question within the post-December 1905 defeat and the drying up of party funds. Before October 1905, the liberal bourgeoisie and intelligentsia had donated generously, viewing Social Democracy as a radical expression of bourgeois-democratic agitation and a bargaining chip against the autocracy. The Moscow uprising shattered this indulgence; the liberals, like Pontius Pilate, washed their hands of the revolution. This polemic targets the cowardice and class interests of the liberal bourgeoisie, who retreated once the Tsar’s October Manifesto satisfied their demands and the workers’ movement threatened their property.
The chapter uses the Bolshevik partisan Kamo as its central illustration. His Tiflis bank raid netted 250,000 roubles for the party, yet he lived on 50 kopeks a day, embodying total dedication. His subsequent capture, four-year feigning of madness under torture by German doctors (needles under fingernails, red-hot irons, force-feeding), and eventual escape are recounted in detail. Krupskaya’s memoir of Kamo’s visit to Lenin in Paris reveals the pathos of a revolutionary hero rendered a “fish out of water” in the period of reaction, his fantastic schemes gently redirected by Lenin toward practical underground work. Kamo’s eventual release by the February Revolution, his role in the Civil War, and his absurd death in a 1922 motorcycle accident underscore the chapter’s tragic irony: the revolutionary partisan, forged in heroic struggle, could not survive the peace.