Lenin’s Attitude to Guerrillaism¶
Core Argument¶
Lenin’s approach to guerrilla warfare was never a matter of abstract principle but a tactical question subordinated to the strategic perspective of proletarian revolution. The chapter situates this issue within the concrete conditions of 1905-1907, when the defeat of the urban workers’ movement in Petersburg and Moscow coincided with an upsurge of peasant rebellion in the countryside. Lenin saw in this uneven development a possibility: the peasant movement, still gathering force, might give a fresh impulse to the working class and, through the medium of the peasant-soldier, shake the tsarist army. The mutinies at Sveaborg and Kronstadt in July 1906 seemed to confirm this perspective. Yet the chapter makes clear that these uprisings bore all the hallmarks of peasant jacqueries — formlessness, lack of discipline, absence of strategic direction — and were crushed with savage reprisals. The working class, stunned and disoriented, could not revive its fighting spirit in conditions of mass unemployment and political defeat. Trotsky’s contemporary analysis is cited: no revival could be expected until an economic upturn restored the workers’ confidence.
The chapter’s core argument is that Marxism has always conceived the peasantry as an auxiliary force, never as the leading class in a socialist revolution. This position is traced back to Marx’s analysis of the 1848 German revolution, where he called for a “second edition of the Peasants’ War” — meaning the workers in the towns must draw the peasant masses behind them. The heterogeneity of the peasantry, divided into landless labourers, middle peasants, and rich peasants who exploit wage labour, precludes it from playing an independent revolutionary role. Guerrilla warfare, by its nature, is the classical weapon of the peasantry, suited to inaccessible rural terrain where the support of the rural masses provides cover and logistics. Lenin’s 1906 article on guerrilla war is quoted at length to show his insistence that armed struggle must be subordinate to the mass movement, permissible only “at a time when the mass movement has actually reached the point of an uprising”. He distinguished between expropriations for party funds and the degeneration of guerrilla groups into banditry, warning against “anarchism, Blanquism, the old terrorism” that isolates revolutionaries from the masses.
The chapter’s polemical edge is directed against two targets. First, the Social Revolutionary tradition of individual terrorism and the Narodnaya Volya, which Lenin always opposed. Second, and more pointedly, against Koba-Stalin, who persisted in guerrilla tactics and expropriations long after the conditions for them had ceased to exist. The Tiflis raid is examined in detail: the 500-rouble notes proved impossible to exchange, the provocateur Zhitomirsky betrayed the operation, and Litvinov and Olga Ravich were arrested abroad. The Mensheviks exploited the scandal for years, and the party control commission finally condemned expropriations in 1910. Olminsky is quoted to show the damage done: fine youth perished on the gibbet, others degenerated, and the labour movement revived slowest in cities like Baku and Saratov where expropriations had been most numerous. The chapter thus presents Lenin’s position as a model of revolutionary sobriety, sharply distinguished from both petty-bourgeois adventurism and the sectarian degeneration that follows when guerrilla tactics are detached from the mass movement.