I was the hall sweeper of the Revolution.—J. STALIN
WHEN in later years Stalin used this expression to indicate the lowliness of his position in the revolutionary movement of his youthful days, he was exaggerating his insignificance. Actually neither in his youth nor at any time was he the “hall sweeper.” It is much nearer the truth to say that on the day he joined the Marxist group in Tiflis he became an apprentice to the profession of revolutionary leadership.
That apprenticeship was a long one, lasting eleven years, from 1894 to its completion in the 1905 rising. It was also most unusual, for it amounted to a dedication of the apprentice to the task of revolution as another man might dedicate himself to a religious order—although it was an order which rejected religion as a fetter on the mind of man.
In the practical field, three things were essential. The apprentice had to study the history of society and learn the laws of its development; to grasp its present trends in order to see clearly the forces at work and appraise their significance; and to practise leadership of the working-class in all kinds of situations, of whatever importance, in order to direct them towards the revolutionary goal.
Having made his decision, Stalin could not, had he searched the world, have chanced upon more favourable circumstances in which to learn his new trade, than those existing in the Caucasus at the turn of that century. Russia’s industrial revolution was in its stride. Cosmopolitan capitalism was forging ahead under the protection of the despotic Czarist regime. Railways and factories were being built on a large scale. Oil wells were being sunk with great rapidity. Workers by the thousand, of all nationalities, were pouring into the new enterprises. They were being massed together by the processes of production. Their conditions of life were an abomination almost without parallel, and they were forbidden to combat them by organising trade unions—except those fostered by the police. Life was brutalised, and anyone who tried to bring light into this darkness, organisation and purpose into the ranks of this oppressed and terribly exploited mass would either be broken spiritually and physically in a few years, or in order to succeed would have to display outstanding qualities which sooner or later would stand forth as greatness.
Stalin acquired the essential principles of scientific Socialism by years of study with the secretly organised Marxist group called the Messaneh Dassy (Social Democrats). Then came the day when he was permitted to take charge of a group of workers from the Tiflis railway workshops, picked workers who were keen to learn the new teaching. He did not find it difficult to talk with these men. After all, his parents belonged to the same social stratum and his schooldays had by no means lifted him out of it. He was as poverty-stricken as they. His clothes were much like theirs. The only difference between him and them was in education. He had learned how to think coherently, and had already become pretty expert in explaining things simply.
This teaching of working-men was fascinating work. He enjoyed it. It gave him tremendous satisfaction when he saw the light of pleasure in the eyes of his pupils as they grasped some new idea.
But his apprenticeship called for much more than academic learning or even instruction to others, and it was a great day when the Social Democrats gave him the job of organising the distribution of leaflets to the factory workers. This may appear of little moment to us in Britain where millions of leaflets are freely distributed at factory gates without much interference; but in the Russia of those days political agitation was illegal, the printing had to be done on a secret press, and the money to meet it had to be raised by subscription from members of the group and sympathisers. The production and distribution of leaflets under such conditions is an art calling for much ingenuity and care lest producers, distributors, and printing-press are swept up by the police.
The next stage of apprenticeship was more difficult still, since it meant political agitation and the organisation of strikes and public demonstrations. This development was the result of an important division in the ranks of the social democrats, similar to that which had taken place when Lenin arrived in St. Petersburg and founded the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working-Class. At first sight this division might appear to affect little the cardinal question of whether the working-class would ever fight for power, especially at the existing stage of development of the Russian Social Democratic Movement. The question, however, was soon to be revealed as one of the main issues dividing the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, as the two factions were subsequently called (see below). Lenin held the Bolshevik view that strikes should be given a revolutionary political direction, and that that direction must be given by the Social Democratic Party. Those who became known as Mensheviks held the view that the social democratic groups should not lead strikes but remain as study groups and propaganda associations. The logical development of the latter point of view is seen in its most classic form in the evolution of the British Labour Party, which leaves strike leadership entirely to the Trade Unions and directs all political questions into Parliament. Of course in Russia at the dawn of the Twentieth Century there was no Parliament, but the Menshevik view led all the same toward the situation in which the strikes are denuded of their political significance and the strike weapon is looked upon as a means of struggle for economic issues only.
In this first sharp division among the social democrats young Stalin followed the course laid down by Lenin. How far-reaching was this decision! From the day he participated in a strike of the Tiflis railway workers until the Revolution of March 1917 he had to abandon all the normal modes of life. He became one of the hunted, compelled to dwell in secret places, to adopt aliases and to walk with senses ever on the alert.
It was, on May 1st, 1900, that he addressed a meeting of 500 Tiflis workers. “Not much” he would say, “but a beginning.” It was his first mass meeting. On April 22nd, 1901, he headed a demonstration of 2,000. Again “Not much,” but more important than the figure implies. The demonstration was savagely attacked by the Russian police. Stalin survived. The affair was of a new kind in the experience of the Tiflis workers, for the assembly had been an illegal demonstration, illegally organised and illegally held. It was therefore a major event, and afterwards Stalin and his friends, V. Kurnatovsky who had come from Lenin’s group in St. Petersburg, Zoda Ketskhoveti who had been a fellow student in the Theological Seminary, and Tsulukidze, forming as they did the minority among the social democrats, felt they had good reason to be satisfied.
To repeat the experience more effectively they agreed that they needed a revolutionary newspaper; so together they tackled the problem. Sylvestia Todria, who was a member of one of Stalin’s study circles, tells a story of this period which illustrates Stalin’s rather sardonic humour. Joseph asked him what was taught in the legally-sanctioned Sunday schools of the moderate social democrats, which Todria attended. The young fellow explained that he learned how the sun moves and other astronomical facts. Joseph said to him, “Listen, friend, don’t you worry about the sun; it will not stray from its orbit. What you had better learn is how the revolutionary cause should move, and help me to arrange a little illegal printing plant.”
By September 1901 he and his group organised such a plant in Baku and published the first Georgian Social Democratic newspaper, called Brdzola (“The Struggle”). The leading articles were written by Stalin and Ketskhoveli. The apprentice was making headway. In November of the same year the Tiflis Social Democratic organisation held its first conference of twenty-five delegates and elected the first leading committee of the Russian Social Democrats in the Caucasus region. Stalin was elected to this committee and was promptly sent to Batum to create a similar movement there. His capacity as an organiser was quickly recognised. He got things done. The Batum police soon knew him for a dangerous fellow. Their records said:
. . . The development of the Social Democratic Movement has made great progress since the autumn of 1901, when the Tiflis Committee of the R.S.D.L.P. sent one of its members, Joseph Djugashvili, a former sixth-class student of the Tiflis Theological Seminary, to Batum to carry on propaganda among the factory workers. Thanks to Djugashvili’s activities, Social Democratic organisations have begun to spring up in all the Batum plants, at first directed by the Tiflis Committee.
Batum was a big working-class centre where the Rothschilds, Nobels, Mantashevs and others had established large oil refineries. Here were opportunities which the youthful Stalin seized with both hands. He first organised workers’ study circles in all the factories, then quickly followed this work with leaflets and the newspaper. There was no doubt about his enthusiasm. Listen to his peroration at a conference of workers’ circles disguised as a New Year’s party: “See, the day is already dawning! Soon the sun will rise. That sun will shine for us. Believe my words, comrades.”
With the preparatory work well done the Social Democratic groups passed to the organisation of strike committees and led strikes; and on March 7th, 1902, the authorities passed from observation to mass arrests. The following day Stalin organised a demonstration to demand the release of the strikers from the Rothschild and Mantashev plants. The police arrested 300 of the demonstrators. Stalin avoided arrest and countered the police action by organising a greater demonstration the next day, when he persuaded dockers and railwaymen to join in. Carrying red banners, the demonstrators with Stalin at their head marched to the deportation barracks to demand the release of the arrested men. The police answered with rifle shots: fifteen workers were killed and fifty-four wounded. How Stalin was missed by the fire neither he nor anyone else could tell. The demonstration was broken up, but not before it had secured the release of the arrested men. Stalin helped the wounded to get clear of the crowd.
Three days later he arranged the public funeral of those killed in the struggle. In these days he had to dodge the police at every turn, but he wrote a leaflet, had it printed on a secret press and distributed it in Batum and district. The language of the leaflet is interesting, revealing his revolutionary fervour but at the same time not a little of the religious associations of his earlier days:
All honour to you who have laid down your lives for the truth! All honour to the breasts that suckled you! All honour to you whose brows are adorned with the crown of the martyrs, and who with pale and faltering lips breathed the words of struggle in your hour of death! All honour to your shades that hover over us and whisper in our ears “Avenge our blood!”
Of course it was inevitable that sooner or later the police would seize him. He had changed his address many times and found place after place in which to hide his printing plant and papers. But on April 5th, 1902, during a meeting of the leading Party group, he was arrested and convicted of being the chief leader and teacher in the revolutionary movement of Batum. He was taken first to the Batum prison and then to a prison at Kutai. So another stage of his apprenticeship was reached.
The Russian prison system was by no means as efficient as the British. It was more brutal in some respects and less in others. Like most Continental systems, and unlike the British, it separated political prisoners from those guilty of other crimes. Whether this is a reflection on the political backwardness of Britain or is due to the fact that our rulers have been more astute than their Continental counterparts is open to question. In Britain a convicted person is a criminal whatever his offence, and once sentenced, though his crime be political opposition to the régime or conscientious objection to war, he is thrust among thieves and rogues, sexual perverts and all the lowest types. The Russians separated their political prisoners from the rest and sometimes, indeed frequently, treated them more savagely. But as a rule they were not individually isolated. They were frequently herded in large cells and could discuss anything they wished. Nor were books forbidden.
Into this environment Joseph Stalin brought something new. Naturally he did what others had done in similar circumstances, and learned how to maintain contact with the outside world; but his distinctive contribution emphasises an outstanding characteristic which has marked his career—he held the view that what has to be done should be done in an organised manner. So when he arrived in prison he would have none of the gossipy individual discussions which so commonly mark the gatherings of political enthusiasts and Russian political enthusiasts in particular. These discussions are endless, and break off only to resume without achieving anything beyond helping to pass away the time and occasionally fraying the tempers of the participants. To Stalin this was a futile waste of time. “Discussion? Yes, certainly,” he would answer, “but it must be an organised discussion. The subject must be agreed upon. The spokesmen must be appointed. It must be an organised debate with a view to arriving at decisions.”
Especially did he insist on this method when, after a year in the Kutai prison, he was exiled to the village of Novaya Uda in the Balajanst district, in the Province of Irkutsk in Siberia. Novaya Uda is some 3,000 miles from the Caucasus and the climate is far more severe, though fortunately the journey was made in the summer months. Exiles were sent in batches. It was a long, long trail, partly by boat, partly by rail and many weary miles on foot. It was the first time Stalin, now twenty-four years of age, had been out of his native Georgia.
The village of Uda was one of many prison camps far away from the centres of civilisation. The authorities relied on distance to secure their prisoners, although there was considerable police serveillance. There was also, however, some social life in these villages, and certainly plenty of scope for political discussions. The places were full of exiled political offenders from among the Narodniks, Social-Revolutionaries, and Social Democrats of various trends. These centres of exile often proved to be “schools of Communism” in which many revolutionaries became followers of Lenin. It was here Stalin received his first letter from Lenin. He tells of the thrill he got from it and regrets that from conspiratorial habit he destroyed it.
It began the personal acquaintance of our apprentice with the master craftsman of revolution. At this time Lenin was far away in London, fighting amid a conference of delegates drawn from Russia, for those ideas which were soon to determine the course of Russian history. At this time also a district conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was held in the Caucasus. It elected Joseph Stalin in his absence to its leading committee.
Stalin was not the kind to sit long in a prison camp if he saw the possibility of getting away from it. On January 4th, 1904, he escaped and made his way through Siberia’s snows, across the Urals and the Volga, and back to Georgia. Six weeks after his break-away there came a knock at the door of Natalia Kistadze’s house in Batum where once Stalin had lived. It was midnight. “Who’s there?” she called. “It’s me, let me in,” Stalin answered. There was excitement in the house at that. He was certainly unexpected. His friends wanted to know all about his journey. He wanted to know all about what had happened in his absence. Since receiving Lenin’s letter his mind had been full of nothing but schemes of activity. He had felt different since the letter’s arrival. The figure which had appeared so distant and gigantic now seemed very close. He was convinced his new-found leader would stick at nothing to achieve the aims they had set before them, and he was impatient for more action; for he fully shared Lenin’s overwhelming consciousness of their tremendous race against time.
In the very month that Stalin escaped from Siberia the Japanese had started a war against Russia with what we have recently learned to call their “Pearl Harbour” strategy. Without giving any notice of their intentions or declaring war they blockaded Port Arthur, invested the port, defeated the Russian fleet stationed there, and marched into Manchuria. Of course there had been “developments” before these events. Indeed, the Russian Home Minister Plehve had told General Kropotkin that Russia was on the brink of revolution and that the one thing to stop it was “a small victorious war.” The Japanese gave them the war but not the victory. Russia had for long been advancing in the Far East. She had taken control of Manchuria, and the Japanese had been manœvring for years to secure for themselves a free hand in Korea. They would have been content to leave Manchuria in Russian hands, at least for a period, had the Russians agreed to their having Korea. But Czar Nicholas regarded the proposition as an impertinence. The Japanese then sent their plenipotentiary Ito to Russia to secure an agreement. He was treated discourteously, and the Japanese countered by scouring a treaty with England whereby England would support Japan if France and Germany intervened to support Russia in a war against Japan.
Having secured this insurance, the Japanese without more ado struck at Russia and caught her unawares. Russian policy was in chaos. There was a switching of leaders and forces while Nicholas struggled with his conscience whether or not to “share the dangers and privations of his army.” He didn’t. The Russian forces moved from defeat to defeat and slaughter to slaughter. Having lost the Far Eastern fleet at Port Arthur at the outbreak of war the Czar ordered the Baltic fleet to sail round the world to do battle with the fleet of Admiral Togo. Whether the Russian admiral and commanders were drunk and thought when they had reached the North Sea that the Japanese fleet had come to meet them is not certain. It was called “a misadventure” when the Russian ships fired on the British fishing fleet at Dogger Bank. On reaching thee Sea of Japan on May 27th, 1903, they met their doom at Tsushima. In three-quarters of an hour Admiral Togo’s fleet sank or destroyed thirteen of the Russian ships and captured four.
In the meantime the main forces of the Russian army had never been sent eastward and Kropotkin’s forces were retreating all along the line. In the battle of Mukden alone the Czarist army of 300,000 men lost 120,000 killed, wounded, or taken prisoner.
When Joseph Stalin returned to the Caucasus in the midst of all this he found the country astir with indignation. Such a war could hardly rouse a nation to enthusiasm. On the contrary, it revealed in all its nakedness the rottenness of the ruling forces, the incompetence, peculation, gigantic profiteering, and total indifference to the welfare of the people. Instead of “a little victorious war” for the diversion of revolutionary feeling, a disastrous unwanted war fanned the flames of revolution. Plehve, who had used the choice expression, was blown to bits by a bomb from a Social Revolutionary named Sazonov. In place of Plehve the Czar appointed a liberal, Prince Svyatopolk-Mirsky. His appointment was followed by a national conference of representatives of the Zemstvo (local councils). This conference pleaded for civil liberties—of person from arbitrary arrest, of conscience, of speech, of press, of meeting and the formation of associations. It also asked for a representative national assembly. It was told to mind its own business and not interfere in politics. Lenin and Stalin therefore saw clearly enough that unless they hastened with their work a revolutionary uprising would come without the working-class being ready for it and without leadership to direct it victoriously.
Stalin’s impatience to get into action can therefore be well understood. He hastened to Tiflis to meet his colleagues and take the measure of the changes that had occurred during his nearly two years of imprisonment. The Social Democratic movement had grown almost beyond recognition, but it was far from being the kind of organisation which Lenin had advocated in his book What is to be Done?
There are two ways of describing the internal situation of the Russian Social Democratic Party in this period. We may say it was torn with dissensions, doctrinaire squabbles, and jealousies. On the other hand we may say it was in a condition of immaturity, suffering from all kinds of growing pains and reflecting all the moods of a rising movement groping for a way forward. Stalin’s appraisement was certainly based upon the latter view. To him the disputes were not doctrinaire controversies of academic students; every point at issue had for him a direct bearing upon the development of the revolution.
A few months before his return, while he was still in Siberia, the Social Democrats had held their second conference in London, and the clear division of the Party into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks had been made. Stalin had already placed himself under the banner of Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks, long before the conference. Much has been made of a remark he is alleged to have uttered to his friend Tsulukidze that the disputations at the London Conference were nothing more than “a storm in a tea-cup.” Maybe he did say this. It matters little. Of much more importance is the fact that both before and after this conference, he persistently upheld the views expounded by Lenin, and combatted the Mensheviks with a vigour which brought upon him more hatred than has been displayed towards any other man in the Caucasus.
Let us here be clear about what is meant by these terms “Bolshevik” and “Menshevik,” for immediately after this conference they came into general use to define the principal trends of policy in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. They begin as two currents in one movement, separate later into two rival movements, and finally one destroys the other. The word “Bolshevik” is derived from the word “Bolshinstvo” meaning majority. The word “Menshevik” is derived from the word “Menshinstvo” meaning minority. At this particular London conference of 1903 the supporters of Lenin’s conception of how the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party should be organised were in the majority. Those who supported the views of Plekhanov, Axelrod, Martov and Trotsky were in the minority. The point at issue which led to the division might at first sight appear incidental and the storm which it raised indeed little more than “a storm in a tea-cup.” The conference was discussing the proposed conditions of membership of the party organisation. Lenin formulated a rule that “one could be a member of the Party who accepted its programme, supported it financially and belonged to one of its constituent organisations.” Martov formulated an alternative: “one can be a member of the Party who accepts its programme and supports it financially but not necessarily belongs to a constituent organisation.”
Why then the storm? Lenin argued that unless it was an obligation on every member to belong to a Party organisation and therefore be subject to its discipline, any Tom Dick and Harry could join without the Party having any control over him whatever. Martov and his supporters argued for the enrolment of large masses without too great a regard for their credentials. In this disregard for quality Lenin saw a threat to the future of the Party and the revolution, although it is doubtful whether this was realised by his supporters at the time. The rift broadened. It was quickly revealed that those who accepted Martov’s point of view differed from Lenin and the Bolsheviks in their views on almost everything else too, though all of them had come together and agreed upon a Marxist programme for the Party.
Whatever Stalin’s initial impressions of the 1903 conference may have been, there was no doubt about his subsequent ones when he got back to Tiflis. He found the Social Democrats debating the London Conference decisions and grouping themselves round the leading Party personalities. At once, without hesitation, he came down on the side of Lenin and during succeeding months toured the cities and towns of Caucasia expounding Lenin’s views with all his energy. He was a fearless debater, and preferred organised debates to any other form of public speaking. His friends of the time tell of the quietness and orderliness of his speeches in these conflicts. While his opponents became excited he was always cool and measured in his replies. I can well believe these accounts, for the same characteristics have marked his manner of speech whenever I myself have heard him in later years. They were not acquired: they were native to his development.
But polemics by speech and pen did not fill his time, although he was leading the authorities a pretty dance by the variety of his aliases as he moved from place to place. Probably the most important piece of work he undertook in these days was the building up of the illegal press. What became known as the Alvabar press was possibly the biggest piece of careful planning for the issue of illegal publications in the history of the Russian Revolution. For two years the Russian police searched for the plant without being able to find it. Meanwhile there poured from it leaflets, proclamations, pamphlets, books, periodicals in Russian, Georgian, Armenian and Azerbaijanian. Many of these were written by Stalin. A long list of publications issued from this press could here be given, but let the newspaper Kavkas (“Caucasus”) of April 16th, 1906, report on what the police at last discovered.
Secret Printing Plant. On Saturday, April 15th, in the courtyard of an uninhabited detached house belonging to D. Rostomashvili in Alvabar, some 150 or 200 paces from the City Hospital for Contagious Diseases, a well was discovered some seventy feet deep, which could be descended by means of a rope and pulley. At a depth of about fifty feet there was a gallery leading to another well, in which there was a ladder about thirty-five feet high giving access to a vault situated beneath the cellar of the house. In this vault a fully-equipped printing plant has been discovered with twenty cases of Russian, Georgian and Armenian type, a hand press costing between 1,500 and 2,000 roubles, various acids, blasting gelatine and other paraphernalia for the manufacture of bombs, a large quantity of illegal literature, the seals of various regiments and government institutions, as well as an infernal machine containing 15 lbs. of dynamite. The establishment was illuminated by acetylene lamps and was fitted up with an electric signalling system. In a shed in the courtyard of the house, three live bombs, bomb casings and similar materials have been found. Twenty-four persons have been arrested at a meeting in the editorial offices of the newspaper Elva (“Lightning”) and charged with being implicated in the affair. A search of the Elva offices revealed a large quantity of illegal literature and leaflets as well as about twenty blank passport forms. The editorial offices have been sealed up. Since electric wires have been discovered issuing from the secret printing plant in various directions, excavations are being made in the hope of discovering other underground premises. The equipment discovered in this printing plant was removed in five carts. The same evening three other persons were arrested in connection with this affair. All the way to the prison the arrested men kept singing the Marseillaise.
The revolutionaries had obviously been preparing something more than the use of the printed word. But this account was written after the great events that shook Russia from end to end before the discovery of the press. Had the police made their haul in 1905 instead of 1906 they would most probably have found more weapons than type.
In the autumn of 1904 the press was in full swing. November found Joseph presiding at a conference of Bolsheviks in Tiflis and pleading for exceptional unanimity and unity of action among all sections of the Social Democrats for a “decisive onslaught against the Czarist autocracy.” A month later a great, well-organised strike of workers took place in Baku. Its leading committee was composed of Bolsheviks and Stalin was working with them. It ended in a resounding victory for the workers, who secured a collective agreement with the owners, the first of its kind in the history of the Russian working-class. This event reverberated throughout Russia. Hardly had its echoes died away than the workers of the Putilov works in St. Petersburg went on strike over the dismissal of four men and the strike spread to the mills and factories of the great city.
There was much more spontaneity about this strike than about that of Baku. Nor were the Social Democrats in charge of it. The St. Petersburg workers had fallen under the spell of one Father Gapon, who turned out to be a police agent forming a union controlled by the police. It was called the “Assembly of Russian Factory Workers” and had branches in all the districts of St. Petersburg. When the strike broke out Gapon stepped into the leadership of it and proposed a procession to the Czar with a petition for the rectification of the workers’ wrongs. The most the Social Democrats were able to do was to persuade the meetings of workers to accept amendments to their petition and to supplement their demands with others such as the granting of a Constituent Assembly. On January 9th, 1905, Gapon headed the demonstration with cross and church banners and the petition. Some 140,000 workers marched to the Winter Palace.
The spirit of this demonstration can best be appraised from the appeal to the Czar. Could anything be more naïve and pathetic!
We workers, inhabitants of St. Petersburg, have come to Thee. We are unfortunate, reviled slaves. We are crushed by despotism and tyranny. At last, when our patience was exhausted, we ceased work and begged our masters to give us only that without which life is a torture. But this was refused. Everything seemed unlawful to the employers. We here, many thousands of us, like the whole of the Russian people, have no human rights whatever. Owing to the deeds of Thine officials we have become slaves. . . .
. . . Sire, do not refuse aid to Thy people! Throw down the wall that separates Thee from Thy people. Order and swear that our requests will be granted, and Thou wilt make Russia happy; if not, we are ready to die on this very spot. We have only two roads: freedom and happiness, or the grave.
They were not met by a beneficent “Little Father.” They were greeted by machine-guns, rifle-fire, and a charge of the Cossacks. Blood flowed freely. According to police reports 1,000 were killed and 2,000 wounded. The day has ever since been called “Bloody Sunday.”
If the Baku strike was the first clap of thunder heralding the storm that now burst on Russia, “Bloody Sunday” opened the flood dykes. Gone for ever was the “Little Father” illusion of the working-class. “Down with the autocracy!” became the leading slogan of every workers’ demonstration and of every strike. What Lenin and the Bolsheviks had for years been striving to do by agitation and propaganda the Czar’s “Bloody Sunday” did in one day. Strike followed strike and demonstration followed demonstration throughout the vast country. In February 1905, the Grand Duke Sergius, uncle and brother-in-law of the Czar, was assassinated in Moscow. The strikes widened, in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Warsaw, Riga, Baku, Lodz, Odessa. In the spring the revolt spread to the peasants, and one-seventh of the counties were affected. In June barricades appeared in Lodz and the workers battled with the troops for three days. In Ivanovo-Voznesensk 70,000 struck work and held out for two and a half months. The spirit of revolt spread to the fleet, where the Potentkin led the way. The sailors were defeated, but no incident of the year so raised the “spectre of revolution” before the rulers of Russia.
All classes were roused. And from afar one man watching with eagle eye wrote the warning message “The proletariat is fighting; the bourgeoisie is stealing towards power.” It was. Alarmed by the trend of events, they pressed upon the Czar to make concessions. In August the Government had proclaimed that it intended to establish what became known as the Bulygin constitution—a consultative Assembly with a preponderance of landlord representation. Instead of appeasing the people the announcement incited them to further protest. Before the year was out the peasants had wrecked 2,000 estates. Over one-third of the counties were now affected.
On all sides there was justification for alarm. In September a printers’ strike began in Moscow and spread into an extensive political strike. In October a strike of railway workers began on the Moscow-Kazan railway and within a few days spread to the telegraph services, into factories, mills and mines. It was joined by students, lawyers, engineers, until it became an all Russian general strike with the country at a standstill and the Government in a state of paralysis.
On October 30th, 1905, the panic-stricken Czar issued a manifesto promising “the unshakable foundations of civil liberty; real inviolability of person, and freedom of conscience, speech, assembly and association” and a legislative Duma (Parliament). But there was a catch. Indeed there were many catches. The manifesto did not promise that the Parliament would be able to introduce legislation on its own initiative, or would have power over the actions of the State officials. In fact it permitted the preparations for the operation of the Bulygin Constitution to proceed and proposed to leave to this assembly of landlords’ representatives “the further development of the principle of general suffrage.”
What was really in the Czar’s mind has been vividly revealed in his letters to his mother, quoted by Sir Bernard Pares in his invaluable book The fall of the Russian Monarchy. I will quote only one, written two days after the issue of the Manifesto.
You remember, no doubt, those January days when we were together at Tsarskoe—they were miserable, weren’t they? But they are nothing in comparison with what has happened now. . . . All sorts of conferences took place in Moscow, which Durnovo permitted, I do not know why . . . God knows what happened in the universities. Every kind of riff-raff walked in from the streets, riot was loudly proclaimed—nobody seemed to mind. . . . It makes me sick to read the news! . . . But the Ministers, instead of acting with quick decision, only assemble in council like a lot of frightened hens and cackle about providing united ministerial action. . . . Trepov made it quite plain to the populace by his proclamations that any disorder would be ruthlessly put down. . . . One had the same feeling as before a thunderstorm in summer! . . . Through all those horrible days, I constantly met Witte. We very often met in the early morning to part only in the evening when night fell. . . . There were only two ways open; to find an energetic soldier and crush the rebellion by sheer force. . . . That would mean rivers of blood, and in the end we should be where we had started. . . . The other way out would be to give to the people their civil rights, freedom of speech and press, also to have all laws confirmed by a State Duma—that of course, would be a constitution. Witte defends this very energetically. . . . Almost everybody I had an opportunity of consulting is of the same opinion. Witte put it quite clearly to me that he would accept the Presidency of the Council of Ministers only on condition that his programme was agreed to, and his actions not interfered with. . . . We discussed it for two days and in the end, invoking God’s help, I signed. . . . In my telegram I could not explain all the circumstances which brought me to this terrible decision which nevertheless I took quite consciously. . . . I had nobody to rely on except honest Trepov. There was no other way out than to cross oneself and give what everybody was asking for. . . . All the Ministers are resigning and we have to find new ones, but Witte must see to that. . . . We are in the midst of a revolution with an administrative apparatus entirely disorganised, and in this lies the main danger.
On October 26th the first meeting of the St. Petersburg Soviet (or Council) of Workers’ Deputies assembled. This was a new phenomenon, illegal, spontaneous, a direct product of the repression of, constitutional trades unionism. The repression had thrust all agitation into the factories and places of work. From these came the delegates of the workers, one for every thousand, a proportion they had learned from the Gapon union. It was not led by the Bolsheviks nor formed on their initiative. At its head were a lawyer named Choustalev-Noser, as chairman, and Leon Trotsky as vice-chairman, who arrived in St. Petersburg on the day of the meeting. There were 226 representatives from 100 works. The gathering was of immense significance, foreshadowing the form of the next revolution which lay twelve years ahead. It was led by the Social Democrats, most of whom were of the Menshevik variety. It demanded the Eight Hour Day, a Constituent Assembly, and the arming of the people. The Soviet took no steps to get arms or seize power. The arming of the people which it called for was to take the form of a people’s militia under the control of the local authorities. At this stage the Soviet was nothing more than the means for waging a political general strike.
The publication of the Czar’s manifesto weakened the strike in St. Petersburg. In a few days it was called off, only to be renewed on November 13th on receipt of news of a mutiny among the Kronstadt sailors and the proclamation of martial law in Poland. A hundred thousand workers again ceased work. When the strike extended to the telegraphic services the Government acted, arrested the chairman of the Soviet, and on December 18th arrested almost all its members.
Then Moscow came into action. On December 20th the Moscow Soviet called for a political general strike. Here the Soviet was in the hands of the Bolshevik section of the Social Democratic Labour Party, and they began to prepare for an armed uprising. Two days later barricades were in the streets, and for nine days 8,000 armed workers resisted the Czar’s forces. The Government locked the Moscow garrison in for fear the soldiers would join the insurgents. The rising was quelled by the Government bringing the Semenovsky Regiment from St. Petersburg.
Moscow’s battle represents the high-water-mark of the revolution of 1905. It had spread through a hundred cities and towns and a great section of the peasantry, into the Army and Navy and among the oppressed nationalities. It is estimated that in these struggles 4,000 were killed and 10,000 wounded.
And where was Joseph Stalin, the apprentice to revolutionary leadership, in these stormy days? Much has been written by his enemies and critics of later times to show that he was not in the limelight of events. It is true that when Lenin and Trotsky and others wrote of “1905” they concentrated their attention on St. Petersburg and Moscow and the happenings in the Army and Navy. Practically all other centres are referred to only in an incidental manner as part of the general statistical information. This is even the case in the official history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, published in 1938. Unquestionably St. Petersburg and Moscow, as the principal cities of Russia, dominated the situation, and those interested mainly in the Revolution as such and not in the activities of a particular participant, would naturally concentrate on them and tend to pay most attention to the leaders in these key centres. But the spotlight of publicity is not always a reliable guide: it is often out of focus and too artificial to reveal the real leaders.
Stalin was not in the capital city. Nor was he an orator stirring the crowd with great speeches. Throughout 1904 and 1905 he was mainly in the Caucasus, far from the limelight of St. Petersburg. But it was in the Caucasus that in December, 1904, the struggle began, and it was in the Caucasus that it lasted longest and registered the greatest successes. From the moment of his return from exile, Joseph had to work under conditions of illegality. Long before the October strike in St. Petersburg he was issuing leaflets from the Alvabar press calling for preparations for an armed uprising. The Proletariatis Brdzola of July 15th, 1905 contained an article of his entitled “Armed insurrection and our tactics.” In this paper he waged a continuous campaign against the Mensheviks, who were in a majority in the Caucasus region. The reminiscences of one present at a meeting in Nadzaladevi, Tiflis, in October 1905, show him to be no longer an apprentice, but a “journeyman” of the revolution.
At this moment [says the narrator] Comrade Koba (Stalin) mounted the platform and addressed the audience: “You have one bad habit,” he said, “of which I must plainly warn you. No matter who comes forward, and no matter what he says, you invariably greet him with hearty applause. If he says ‘Long Live Freedom!’—you applaud; if he says, ‘Long live the Revolution!’—you applaud. And that is quite right. But when somebody comes along and says, ‘Down with arms!’—you applaud that too. What chance is there of a revolution succeeding without arms? And what sort of revolutionary is he who cries ‘Down with Arms!’? The speaker who said that is probably a Tolstoyan, not a revolutionary. But, whoever he is, he is an enemy of the revolution, an enemy of the liberty of the people. . . . What do we really need in order to win? We need three things, understand that and bear it well in mind—the first is arms, the second is arms, and the third is arms and arms again.”
This may not have been great oratory, but it was plain speaking which it would be difficult for even the most dense of his audience not to comprehend. In November 1905, he was leading the Bolshevik conference of the Caucasian Federation of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. There were present delegates from the Baku, Imeretino-Mingrelian, Tiflis, and Batum Committees and from Guria. The Guria Soviet was one of the best and one of the last to be suppressed. For a number of weeks it had complete control of the local life of the people.
In December, Stalin attended the all-Russian conference of Bolsheviks in Tammerfors (Finland). It was here that he first met Lenin and worked with him on the leading political committee of the conference. It ended its work quickly in order that the delegates should return to the scenes of conflict. Lenin went to St. Petersburg and Stalin returned to the Caucasus. Although this conference was composed only of the Bolsheviks of the Party, it marks the advance of Stalin into the central councils. His contact with Lenin from this time onward was firmly established, although several years had yet to elapse and the two sections had definitely to separate into independent parties, before he became officially a member of the Central Committee with Lenin at its head. Though he did not leave the Causasus or go into exile, henceforth he was to be the loyal henchman of the master revolutionary, in constant communication with him and carrying out his orders with all the thoroughness of which he was so capable. He had become a leader; the fierce apprenticeship had not broken him. On the contrary, it had hardened him and developed his powers of clear exposition and capacity to conquer difficulties. He would need all these qualities for the fiercer strife ahead.
Next: V. The End of the Prologue