The Bolsheviks Split¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter documents the factional crisis within Bolshevism during the depths of the Stolypin reaction, centring on Lenin's struggle against the otzovist and conciliationist currents that threatened to destroy the Bolshevik faction from within. The Paris Conference of June 1909 saw Lenin's positions on otzovism and ultimatism carried by a majority, with Bogdanov isolated, yet the abstentions of figures like Tomsky and Goldenberg revealed a widespread impatience with theoretical disputes among practical Party workers. The chapter uses this moment to launch a sustained polemic against the anti-theoretical mentality that would later find its ultimate expression in Stalinism.
The text draws on Krupskaya's memoirs and Lenin's correspondence to evoke the desperate material conditions of exile—Geneva's bleak streets, the starvation-driven madness of a Moscow uprising veteran, Lenin's own remark that he felt "as if I've come here to be buried." The statistical evidence is devastating: the Petersburg Bolshevik organisation fell from 6,778 members in early 1907 to 506 by spring 1910; only five or six Bolshevik committees still functioned in Russia by summer 1909. Trotsky's retrospective estimate that Lenin could reach "30 or 40 at most" people by correspondence is corroborated by Zinoviev's admission that "the Party as such did not exist."
The chapter's most pointed polemic targets Stalin directly, quoting his letter to Tskhakaya urging Bolsheviks to "master the good sides of Machism" while developing Marxism "in the spirit of J. Dietzgen." This "winged phrase," the author notes, was later expunged from Stalin's Collected Works but survived in the Party archives. Stalin is presented as the archetypal "Party practico," indifferent to theory, whose "clumsy attempt to achieve unity" by ignoring principled questions prefigured the Stalinist cult of unanimity. But the polemic extends beyond Stalin to encompass Kamenev's conciliationism—his willingness to withdraw from the philosophical struggle rather than force a break—and Tomsky's declaration that "those who are going into philosophy want to escape the realities." Lenin's letter to Vorovsky, envisaging his own departure from the faction if the boycottists gained ascendancy, demonstrates his readiness to sacrifice organisational unity for theoretical clarity.
The chapter concludes by examining the infiltration of police agents into the depleted underground, noting that by 1910 the provocateur Kukushkin had become head of the Moscow district organisation. The Okhrana's ideal—secret agents at the head of every organisation—was being realised.