The Bolsheviks’ Influence Grows¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter details the Bolsheviks’ accelerating influence in the period immediately preceding the First World War, arguing that Russia was rapidly approaching a new revolutionary situation. The core narrative thrust is that the Bolsheviks’ correct strategy—combining illegal underground organisation with work in every legal workers’ body—was vindicated by the explosive growth of the mass movement. The text opens with the Bolshevik Duma deputies’ defiant refusal to vote war credits in June 1913, and proceeds to catalogue the strike wave of early 1914: 260,000 demonstrators on Bloody Sunday, 156,000 on strike in St. Petersburg in March, and over half a million on May Day. Lenin is cited to establish the theoretical framework: a pre-revolutionary situation exists when the masses cannot live as before and the ruling class cannot rule as before—conditions clearly met in Russia.
The chapter draws heavily on the testimony of Bolshevik Duma deputy A.Y. Badayev to illustrate the party’s organisational methods. The St. Petersburg Committee operated through factory nuclei and workshop delegates, with an elaborate system of secret voting and co-option to evade the Okhrana. Leaflets were written by workers themselves, and the Committee’s authority was such that trade unions refused to call political strikes without its instructions. This painstaking, unglamorous work is presented as the foundation of Bolshevik success.
A central polemic is directed against the Menshevik Liquidators, who are accused of being completely detached from the workers. The Mensheviks’ loss of support is attributed to their policy of cultivating the liberal bourgeoisie and their fear that mass militancy would frighten off potential bourgeois allies. The chapter quotes Menshevik leader Chkhenkeli admitting “we have lost all our ties with the working class,” and Dan warning that strikes are not always “expedient.” The Bolsheviks, by contrast, showed no such restraint. By summer 1914, they had won 16 of 19 trade unions in St. Petersburg and all 13 in Moscow—a spectacular advance given Mensheviks’ traditional strength in the unions, which the text explains by reference to Marx’s concept of the labour aristocracy.
The chapter also covers work among women, noting the first International Women’s Day meeting in Russia in 1913 and the launch of Rabotnitsa in 1914. Pravda’s circulation of 40,000 dwarfed the Mensheviks’ 16,000. The Bolsheviks extended their influence into cooperatives, insurance societies, sports clubs, and even musical societies, and launched the slogan ‘Carry the revolutionary word to the village’. The text concludes that the Bolsheviks were putting into practice the Narodniks’ old slogan ‘Go among the People!’—but on a higher, scientific, proletarian basis. The whole policy is summed up: the proletariat must fight to lead every oppressed section, and the party must fight to lead the proletariat.