‘The Masses Have Now Grown Up’¶
Core Argument¶
In the period leading up to 1913, the Russian class struggle had entered a phase of explosive acceleration, with over a million workers participating in strikes, more than half of them political. The chapter charts the Bolsheviks’ rapid ascent to dominance within the organised working class, a development that rendered the Mensheviks increasingly marginal. A Party meeting in Polish Galicia placed the perspective of a new revolution on the order of the day, and the Bolsheviks’ organisational strength, though numerically modest, was amplified by discipline and political clarity. Lenin himself, in a September 1913 extract, acknowledged the impossibility of fixing a precise membership figure, but insisted that organisation multiplies strength tenfold: the vanguard’s power far exceeds its numbers.
The Poronino conference, held near Kraków at the end of September 1913 and deliberately misdated as the “August conference” to evade police surveillance, marked a strategic turning point. Twenty-five to thirty delegates from major Party organisations attended, including Lenin, Zinoviev, Krupskaya, Kamenev, Inessa Armand, and the Bolshevik Duma deputies. The conference’s resolution on the Party press signalled a new departure: it recognised the legal press as vital for agitation and organisation, called for the strengthening of a workers’ paper in Moscow and the establishment of one in the south, and demanded closer cooperation between existing legal papers. Crucially, it emphasised that regular payments to the legal press should be treated as membership dues to the Party. At the same time, the conference insisted on extending illegal publishing work, including a central illegal Party paper, because the legal press could not provide the thorough analysis required by the developing revolutionary movement.
The chapter’s core argument is that the Bolsheviks’ influence was growing far faster than formal membership, and that this required a flexible, adaptive approach to organisational questions. Krupskaya’s letter captures the mood: “The masses have now grown up.” Self-made workers’ organisations had proliferated during the elections, unconnected to the Party but of the Party in spirit. In these new conditions, Lenin—who in 1903 had fought Martov’s attempt to blur the line between member and sympathiser—now advocated that any regular reader of Pravda should be regarded as a Party member. The chapter insists there is no contradiction: the earlier position suited a small cadre party; the later one reflected the emergence of a mass workers’ party. The polemic is implicit but clear: against those who would fetishise organisational forms, the chapter argues that Lenin’s tactical flexibility was a mark of revolutionary realism, not inconsistency. The Party is a living organism, adapting to the objective situation.