Bolsheviks in the Duma¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter argues that the Bolsheviks’ entry into the Fourth Duma in 1912 marked a decisive test of Lenin’s tactic of combining legal and illegal work, and a sharpening of the factional struggle against Menshevism. The core narrative thrust is that while the Bolsheviks won an overwhelming mandate from the industrial working class—securing six deputies from the workers’ curiae, representing 88.2 per cent of worker electors, against the Mensheviks’ 11.8 per cent—the rigged electoral system gave the Mensheviks a formal majority of one in the Social Democratic fraction. This disparity exposed the corrupting pressures of bourgeois parliamentarism. The chapter draws on detailed electoral data from Badayev to demonstrate that the Bolshevik deputies were genuine proletarians (metal and textile workers), while the Menshevik seven were predominantly intellectuals and professionals, including Skobelev, son of an oil magnate, and Chkheidze, a journalist.
The central polemic is directed against conciliationism—the tendency of the Bolshevik deputies themselves to capitulate to Menshevik leadership within the Duma. Lenin is shown waging a relentless war against this, demanding that the deputies break from the Liquidators’ paper Luch and reject the Mensheviks’ claim to ‘autonomy’ for the parliamentary fraction. The chapter cites Lenin’s fury at the deputies’ initial failures: voting for a Cadet-Octobrist speaker, refusing to read the CC’s revolutionary statement, and merging factional newspapers. The theoretical context is the Marxist critique of parliamentary cretinism: the chapter argues that the bourgeoisie’s institutional pressures—committees, procedure, points of order—corrupt even honest workers unless they are thoroughly class-conscious. The Mensheviks’ resolution of 1 November 1907, declaring the Duma fraction an ‘autonomous group’, is presented as a direct assault on party control, a slavish imitation of bourgeois norms.
Evidence is drawn from McKean’s study of St. Petersburg and from Lenin’s Collected Works, including his denunciation of the Liquidators’ ‘unity’ campaign as a pack of lies. The chapter contrasts the Mensheviks’ obstruction of extra-parliamentary activity with the Bolshevik deputies’ factory visits, correspondence with 54 regions, and report-backs to voters. It highlights Surkov’s anti-Church speech, praised by Lenin for exploding the god-builders’ myth that religion is a personal affair, and Badayev’s account of conditions in the Baltic naval dockyards, where workers earned 12–18 kopecks an hour and were wrecked in seven or eight years. The overall argument is that the Duma work, though severely limited, enabled the party to act as ‘tribunes of the people’, exposing the autocracy and maintaining a two-way dialogue with the masses—but only when subordinated to revolutionary party discipline, not bourgeois parliamentary independence.