Revolutionary Upswing¶
Core Argument¶
Here, the chapter argues that the Bolsheviks’ electoral success in the Fourth Duma was not a parliamentary manoeuvre but the direct expression of a mounting revolutionary wave. The core narrative thrust is that the objective situation—mass strikes involving over a million workers annually in 1912 and 1913, new mutinies, and the pauperisation of the peasantry—proved the correctness of Lenin’s intransigent line. The chapter insists that the organisational split from the Mensheviks was not a sectarian preference but a strategic necessity dictated by the logic of the approaching crisis: the revolutionary party had to be “well shod on all fours” before the critical point.
Key evidence is drawn from the workers’ own instructions to their Duma deputies, quoted from Badayev’s memoir. These instructions frame the struggle as a continuation of 1905, identify the proletariat as the vanguard with the peasantry as its only reliable ally, and declare a fight on two fronts—against the feudal order and against the liberal bourgeoisie seeking compromise with the old powers. The chapter uses the Kraków conference (December 1912–January 1913) to demonstrate the tension between Lenin’s centralised, illegal party perspective and the conciliationist tendencies within the Bolshevik Duma fraction itself. The conference resolutions, while formally noting Bolshevik electoral dominance, were in fact a disciplinary instrument: they subordinated the Duma deputies to party control, ordered them to break with the Liquidators’ newspaper Luch, and mandated an illegal underground structure of factory nuclei.
The chapter’s most notable polemic is internal, directed against the Bolshevik deputies’ reluctance to split the parliamentary group. It exposes a sharp conflict between Lenin and Stalin, citing Krupskaya’s cautious memoir and Stalin’s own February 1913 Pravda article, which called for unity against splits “from wherever they come”—a phrase the chapter reads as a direct rebuke to Lenin. Sverdlov’s appointment as editor of Pravda is presented as a demotion for Stalin, and the chapter notes that Stalin’s subsequent arrest did not occur before he had defied the Kraków line. The polemic thus targets not only the Menshevik Liquidators but also the “conciliationism” and vacillation within the Bolshevik ranks, arguing that Lenin’s relentless pressure was necessary to forge a party capable of leading the upsurge. The theoretical context is the Leninist conception of the party as a centralised, illegal vanguard, organically linked to the mass movement through legal fronts like Pravda and the Duma tribune, but never subordinated to parliamentary or legalist illusions.