Mass Work Under Conditions of Reaction¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter examines how the Bolsheviks adapted to the harsh realities of the post-1905 reactionary period by systematically exploiting every available legal avenue for revolutionary work, while simultaneously maintaining their illegal apparatus. The core argument is that revolutionary Marxists must never abstain from legal mass organisations, no matter how backward or bureaucratised, but must instead wage a patient, persistent struggle for influence within them.
The chapter takes direct aim at the Menshevik position on trade union "neutrality," tracing this line back to the Economists and condemning it as a betrayal of Marxist principle. Lenin's formulation is invoked: non-political trade unionism is yellow, bourgeois trade unionism. The Stuttgart Congress of the Second International itself had affirmed that Social Democrats should strive for leadership of the unions, yet Martov opposed this for Russian conditions. The Bolsheviks' contrary approach is documented through the CC resolution published in Proletary no. 21 (February 1908), which instructed Party members to form groups within trade unions and, where police repression made legal organisation impossible, to build illegal trade union nuclei.
The chapter provides concrete evidence of Bolshevik penetration into legal bodies: by 1909, Petersburg had 19 clubs and trade union societies, up from 12 in 1907, operating under camouflage names like "The Source of Enlightenment and Knowledge." Police reports from the Okhrana archives confirm the authorities' alarm, describing trade unions as "completely Social Democratic organisations" and "nests of revolutionary conspiracy." The Bolsheviks intervened systematically in every available forum—the All-Russian Conference of Popular Universities (January 1908), the First All-Russian Congress of Cooperative Societies (April 1908), the First All-Russian Women's Congress (December 1908), and even the Anti-Alcoholic Conference of the Temperance Society (December 1909). In each case, the pattern was similar: Bolshevik delegates moved class-based resolutions, were suppressed by the presiding bodies or police, and walked out in protest.
The chapter situates this work within the broader trajectory of the Russian revolutionary movement. Strike statistics from 1907–1910 show a steady decline from 740,000 workers on strike in 1907 to just 46,000 in 1910. The turning point came with economic revival: cast iron production rose from 175m to 283m poods between 1909 and 1913, coal from 1.591 billion to 2.214 billion tonnes. By mid-1910, strikes resumed, and by 1912 an astonishing 75.8 per cent of strikes were political. The chapter notes the significance of Russia's combined and uneven development—extreme economic backwardness alongside enormous concentration of capital, with factories of over 500 workers representing 56.5 per cent of the total by 1914, and 150–200 monopolies dominating key industries. This concentration, it argues, gave the strike movement its revolutionary character. The Lena massacre of 1911 is identified as the moment the tide began to turn, with the recovery linked, as Trotsky had predicted, to economic revival.