A Brief Interregnum¶
Core Argument¶
A Brief Interregnum
This chapter charts a pivotal moment of organisational and political consolidation for the Bolsheviks, set against the squalid backdrop of émigré life and the terminal decay of the RSDLP’s fragile unity. The narrative centres on Lenin’s relentless drive to forge a disciplined, theoretically grounded revolutionary cadre, a project exemplified by the party school he established in Longjumeau in the spring of 1911. Housed in two small rooms rented from a leatherworker, the school was a deliberate counterweight to the Bogdanov-dominated schools at Capri and Bologna. Lenin delivered forty-five lectures on political economy, the agrarian question, and socialist theory, while Zinoviev and Kamenev lectured on party history. The student body included an Okhrana agent, Andrei Malinovsky, who reported on proceedings to the Paris Bureau of the tsarist police.
The composition of the school’s lecturers and students reveals Lenin’s tactical flexibility. Though a Bolshevik affair, it included Vperyodists, Mensheviks, Bundists, and conciliators—but no Liquidators. Lenin’s aim was to isolate the Liquidators, draw in the better Menshevik elements (especially the Pro-Party Mensheviks), and salvage what could be saved of the centrists and left reformists. The chapter argues that history repeatedly demonstrates the tendency of left reformist leaders to cling to the right, while rank-and-file workers can be won over—a pattern visible in 1905–6, 1910–14, and 1917. The first condition for this struggle, however, was to organise separately as a tendency.
The chapter details the rapid disintegration of the unity painfully achieved at the January 1910 Plenum. Lenin’s closest collaborators—Rykov, Kamenev, Zinoviev—clung to the illusion of compromise, drawing Lenin’s scornful dismissal of “good intentions, sweet words, kind thoughts, and impotence to carry them into practice.” A special meeting of CC members in Paris (28 May–4 June 1911) saw Lenin’s resolution to convene a new conference accepted, but the Mensheviks walked out of the editorial board of Sotsial Demokrat in protest. The split was a fact in all but name. The chapter polemicises sharply against conciliationism, arguing that politics cannot be reduced to simple arithmetic: two men pulling a boat in opposite directions is worse than a single rower who knows his destination. The different tendencies within the RSDLP were pulling in opposite directions, with contradictory tactics flowing from incompatible perspectives and goals.
Lenin’s implacable attitude is presented as a political necessity, grounded in the clear rightward evolution of Menshevism as a Russian variant of opportunism: its stress on parliamentarism, its hankering after a bloc with the Cadets, its opposition to anything that might frighten the liberals, its demand to wind up underground activity and subordinate the party to tsarist legality. The chapter also takes aim at the vulgar empiricism of many Party activists in Russia, exemplified by Stalin’s dismissive remark about the “tempest in the teapot” abroad and his preference for practical work over theoretical struggle. Lenin’s heated 1912 letter to Ordzhonikidze, Spandaryan, and Stasova is quoted as a rebuke to those who regarded the fight against the Liquidators as merely an émigré squabble. The chapter concludes that Lenin’s “experiment” with the January Plenum had been necessary to convince his co-thinkers of the impossibility of union with the Liquidators, and that the most pressing need now was to unite the revolutionary wing on a principled basis to take advantage of the rising revolutionary wave.