Who is it speaks of defeat?
I tell you a Cause like ours
Is greater than defeat can know;—F. ADAMS
THE defeat of the insurgents of Moscow did not end the 1905 Revolution. The December fighting at the barricades was the climax of an uprising which began in December 1904 and faded away in 1907. The struggle was really a prolonged civil war, a series of spontaneous outbursts against the stupid brutalities of a despot and his officials who could as little understand the times in which they lived as a cave-man could understand the calculus.
Here was a Czar, an absolute monarch, at the head of a vast sprawling empire of 160,000,000 people whose ways of life were being upturned by an economic and industrial revolution. He was a man who would have been all that is meant by the expression “a perfect country gentleman” had he lived with his superstitious, ignorant, and pretty wife on a small estate in southern England, financed by a comfortable pension. There, passionately devoted to each other as they were, the couple could have spent their petty lives in idyllic bliss and harmlessness, what we have been assured was their “real gentle nature” being given full opportunity to blossom. Unfortunately for them both, Nicholas was the son of Alexander III, Czar of all the Russias, and succeeded him in the Imperial line of inheritance. The times made his job too big for him. He could think only in terms of holding to his traditional power without being able effectively to wield it. Had he possessed even the glimmering of understanding about the changes that were taking place under his nose he would himself have proposed that he become a constitutional monarch supported by a Parliament which would amalgamate the interests of the landlords and the rising capitalists, and provide legitimate channels for the complaints of the peasants and urban workers.
But of such understanding he was entirely devoid. He made concessions under duress, only to wrest them back again when the pressure was released. The ministers appointed by him received their appointments and dismissals without warning or explanations. He never felt at ease unless he had near him the faithful police officer Trepov, a man who understood the “old way” of “keeping the riff-raff out of the universities” and the populace on its knees. A despot conscious of his own weakness must derive strength from something, and the loyal Trepov had the simplicity of mind which he could understand. It worked according to a simple formula: “Call out the Cossacks!” and had its classic expression in “Bloody Sunday.” The clever politicians such as Witte, the head of his Government at the time, were too much for Nicholas.
Witte combined cleverness with shiftiness. He would appear to bend to the storm of public opinion, only to give the form of concessions and not the substance. The Czar’s Manifesto of October 30th, 1905, was the work of Witte. It furnished the shell of constitutional government but not the content. The Czar wanted to furnish neither. He longed for the stability of yore and the safe absolutism of his fathers, with a band of Trepovs to guarantee them. The times, however, were out of joint, and while the Trepovs gathered in the form of the Black Hundreds to combat the social upheaval, the foundations of stability were no longer there. The Czar needed more than anything else, though he did not realise it, a far-sighted leader of the capitalist class in whom to place his confidence and to guide him. Such a leader was absent. So it was that concessions had to be forced out of him, and every concession he regarded as a calamity because his way forward always led backward.
Nevertheless, the Manifesto appeared to some as the herald of a new epoch of liberalism, and new parties appeared. The Constitutional Democratic Party, which became known as the Kadet Party, had recently been formed after the conference of the Zemstvos. It was a capitalist Liberal Party, anxious to make the most of the new developments. Another was the Octobrist Party, so named to commemorate the date of the Manifesto and to support its proposals. The doubters in the community, who had recently formed the Union of the Russian People, under the patronage of the Grand Duke Nicholas, to support the autocracy, visited the Czar to find out what he really intended by the document. With them he felt at ease, and made it clear that he had not abandoned autocracy, “for this was a religious principle.” He soon proved his point by issuing new fundamental laws before the Duma was opened. The Union of the Russian People went on its way, and organised the Black Hundreds for conducting pogroms, especially against the Jews. This organisation was really a forerunner of the Nazi Party, having much in common with what has become known as Nazism and Fascism.
The Union may not have been the embodiment of the Czar’s political ideals, but he had a good deal of sympathy for the organisation and its work. On the day following the publication of the manifesto, more than a hundred pogroms were conducted by this organisation and thousands of people were massacred.
The new “fundamental laws” issued before the election of the first Duma (Parliament), made it clear that the imperial prerogative remained intact, and that all the ministers would be responsible to the Czar and not to Parliament. The Government also was to be free, according to an article numbered 87, to issue any new law it deemed advisable during a vacation of the Duma, on condition that the law was presented to the Duma for ratification within two months of its next sitting. A number of subjects such as Defence, foreign policy, and currency were reserved to the Emperor. Prime Minister Witte borrowed huge sums from France in anticipation of “trouble” from the Duma when it met, and the German Emperor sent several cruisers and two squadrons of torpedo-boats to assist the Czar in the event of the revolution threatening to prove too much for him. Meanwhile Nicholas had so little confidence in Witte that henceforth before showing any document to him, he submitted it to Trepov, who had become his personal minister, for his observations.
The Duma was elected on an indirect suffrage while punitive expeditions were raging and the Black Hundreds were assisting the military and the police. It met on May 10th, 1906, in St. Petersburg. Witte was dismissed on the eve of the meeting, and the first Prime Minister to meet the new assembly was one Goremykin. He suited the Czar’s mood admirably, and at once made it clear to the delegates that “any attempt to alter the imperial view will be quite useless and only dangerous to you.” Within a few weeks the Duma was dissolved.
This short-lived assembly did produce one thing. It brought into the foreground of Russian politics a new minister Stolypin, who was to gladden the heart of the Czar by “restoring order” with Napoleonic zeal. He was an able official drawn from the ranks of the governors of the provinces, and was prepared to pursue a policy of violent repression and reform in order to smash the revolutionaries and canalise discontent. He superseded Goremykin, put most of the members of the First Duma into prison, set up field courts-martial, organised punitive expeditions on a large scale, and introduced under article 87 a reform law for the peasants.
Having disposed of the Duma which had brought him to power, he held another election on the same restricted franchise. Meanwhile he prepared a new electoral law which would restrict it even further after he had dealt with the Second Duma. His great complaint about this body was that it took too long a time to die. But he was assisted in the matter of securing its demise by an interesting police conspiracy.
The Second Duma met on March 5th, 1907. Sixty-five Social Democrats had been elected. This was too much for the police. They conveniently discovered a non-existent plot of the Social Democrats and Social Revolutionaries to assassinate the Czar. It was later revealed that the whole business was a huge fraud hatched in the police headquarters, but by that time it was too late: the trick had served its purpose. The Czar issued a new manifesto accusing the Duma of having plotted against the Sovereign, and on June 3rd, 1907, the Duma was dissolved. The sixty-five Social Democratic deputies were arrested and exiled to Siberia. The new electoral law was then promulgated. It abolished all semblance of universal suffrage and placed the elections almost entirely in the hands of the country gentry. Most of the towns lost nearly all their members, and the new arrangements were such that when Sir Bernard Pares later asked a member of the Third Duma how he could explain a certain step to his constituents, he received the reply: “My constituents could all be gathered in one room.” Such a situation corresponded to the period of the “rotten boroughs” in England before the Reform Act of 1832. This Third Duma was elected in the autumn of 1907. It had 442 members, of whom eighteen were Social Democrats. It lasted until 1912, when the Fourth Duma was elected on the same franchise and continued until swept away by the November Revolution of 1917. In this Duma there were six Bolsheviks and seven Mensheviks, who in the course of time found their way to Siberian prisons.
Thus the Czar and his advisers, including the debauched Rasputin, prevented Russian Parliamentarism from ever passing beyond its incubation period, until the Revolution smashed eggs and incubator alike. The conservative reluctance to make political changes was matched with an inability to stop the economic transformation of the country. Indeed, the same Stolypin who had used the “hangman’s necktie” to strangle the political revolution, fostered the economic revolution and thereby encouraged the development of the social forces he sought to destroy. His agrarian reforms were aimed at breaking up the feudalism remaining after the 1861 “Peasant Emancipation law,” together with the communal lands of the countryside, and creating instead a capitalist farming community, or yeomanry, as the bulwark of Czarism. But these measures again accentuated the economic differences among the peasants, strengthening the better-off—the kulaks—and sweeping no fewer than a million of the poorer off the land altogether. The effect of this was twofold. There was an increased demand for manufactured goods, and the growing industries were provided with masses of cheap labour. Thus capitalism in the towns also flourished, although it had its characteristic periods of stagnation. Nor did this industrial development carry with it a progressive expansion of the concessions to the workers, beyond those won in the early months of the revolution. On the contrary, although they had secured the Ten Hour Day, the right to organise trade unions, a degree of freedom of speech and association and press, by 1908 the working day was everywhere lengthened to twelve hours, wages were cut by ten to fifteen per cent, systems of fusing flourished, and the trade unions were repressed. By 1912, when a new wave of strife began, only a residue of the gains of 1905 remained: the press had increased liberty, there was more freedom of religion, and the political concessions to Finland, Poland and the Ukraine were not withdrawn.
The subsiding of the revolutionary effort after the climax of the December rising in Moscow, was by no means a tame process of retreat before the Stolypin reaction. The workers and peasants fought tenaciously until well beaten. In 1905 there were 14,000 strikes and 2,900,000 strikers. In 1906 there were 6,100 strikes and 2,100,000 strikers. In 1907 there were 3,600 strikes and 740,000 strikers. In that year 1,692 death sentences were pronounced and 748 executions were reported in the press. In Tiflis and Kutai provinces—the familiar regions of Stalin’s activities—3,074 persons were deported by administrative order. These figures take no account of the results of the field courts-martial or the punitive expeditions in which many thousands perished. Thus the unplanned revolutionary wave and the counter-revolutionary measures of the Czar’s officials, left much wreckage of the young Social Democratic Labour Movement on the fields of battle. There were thousands dead and wounded, and many more thousands filled the prisons of Russia or lingered in Siberian exile.
Naturally there had to be an examination of this tremendous experience, which had been thrust upon the infant party of revolution, long before it was either physically or spiritually ready to face so great an ordeal. Many questions which had hitherto been debated theoretically had now been answered in practice. The actions of the newly-formed capitalist parties, such as the Kadets, and of the Social Revolutionaries and Narodniks in general, had left the way clear for the Social Democratic Labour Party to be recognised as the only party with any appeal to the industrial working-class. But the Social Democrats were divided into two camps—the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Both had their own organisations within the Party and each was striving for a majority over the other. The Bolsheviks were more than ever intent on building the Party as Lenin had outlined it in What is to be Done? The Mensheviks had also been drawn into the struggle, and thousands of them had been counted among the casualties of the revolution, while not a few had gained considerably in prestige. The workers wanted a united party too, but were not so clear about the terms of unity. And they were tired and exhausted.
The aftermath of defeat and repression soon began to affect all sections except the leaders of the Bolsheviks. Lenin gathered his depleted forces together in no spirit of defeatism, and in this sentiment he and his young disciple Stalin were one. The whole experience for them was rich in lessons of revolutionary practice which they at once began to assimilate. They were convinced that the 1905 Revolution was but the prologue to a greater and more far-reaching revolt, and they wanted the working-class to be better equipped without delay.
They did not spend time in laments. Armed with their Marxist philosophy they faced the situation realistically, and this is what they saw. The power of Czardom had been shaken to its foundations. The capitalist class had come close to gaining power but had proved that at this stage it was incapable of seizing it. Fearful of the Jacobin masses, it had joined forces with the Czar and the landed interests against the workers and peasants, thus proving again that once the working-class of any country becomes conscious of itself and acquires its own leadership, the capitalist class is no longer a revolutionary force but reactionary. The Russian working-class had advanced greatly. It had left behind the Father Gapons and attacked Czarism under the banner of its own party. It had created the Soviets—Workers’ Councils—and demonstrated to the world the form of government through which it would ultimately wield power. It had shown how to combine the mass political strike with the armed struggle, although its efforts had been neither simultaneous nor guided by singleness of aim. Where the workers had taken up arms they had fought defensively and not planned their military efforts for attack. They had given no preliminary attention to military tactics or the organisation of street fighting. The working-class of the towns and cities was not united with the peasantry, whose revolts bore the same sporadic features as their own. There had been no preliminary work of revolutionary education in the armed forces. In an article entitled “Two Conflicts,” published in January 1906, Stalin summed up the situation thus: “What the victory of the uprising demands is a united party, an armed uprising organised by the party, and a policy of attack.”
In April 1906 the Social Democratic Labour Party held a conference in Stockholm—the first all-Russian conference of the Party that Stalin had attended. It was called a “Unity Conference.” There was little unity in it, and whatever existed was entirely formal, being merely that the Bolsheviks (who were in a minority owing to many of their local organisations having been destroyed) and Mensheviks refrained from pushing their differences to the point of setting up separate parties. The differences between the two sections were too profound to be composed, but Lenin declined to force the issue and establish an independent Bolshevik Party until the assimilation of his ideas by the Social Democrats was much further advanced, and in addition he wished to secure a majority in the local organisations, the Party central machinery, and the Party newspaper before the split should come. He therefore used the conference to drive home the lessons of recent experience, and show the Party and the workers the different policies of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in practice.
The more the Mensheviks defended their position the more clearly they revealed themselves. They felt the defeat acutely, and held the view that the Social Democrats should unite with the Liberals because capitalist democracy must precede and prepare the way for socialism. It was Stalin who on this occasion defined the cleavage. He said, “Either the hegemony of the proletariat or the hegemony of the democratic bourgeoisie—that is how the question stands in the Party, that is where we differ.” Evidently he had learned the language of the Marxists, which means in this case, “Either the capitalist class or the working-class must lead the revolution against Czarism. We Bolsheviks are for the working-class led by the Social Democratic Labour Party.” Then he should have added, “and the Social Democratic Labour Party to be a Bolshevik Party.” On this issue the Bolsheviks were defeated. The Conference then had to define the policy of the Social Democrats with regard to the Land question. Up to this time they had gone no further than supporting the peasants in securing improvements to the so-called Emancipation Law of 1861. Lenin said the time had now arrived when they must demand the nationalisation of the land. He held that this would be possible only after the overthrow of Czardom, when it would be easy for the workers, in alliance with the peasants, to pass to Socialism. The demand was therefore a call to the peasants to rise with the workers against the Czar and the landlords. The Mensheviks opposed this proposal also, and advocated a programme of municipalisation. They wanted the landed estates to beat the disposal of the Zemstvos (local councils), and each peasant to be able to rent his land from his local authority and to have as much land as he could pay rent for. The Bolsheviks refused to support the proposal because it would not rouse the peasants to revolution. On the contrary, it would prevent a movement by them, localise their activities, and isolate them more than ever from the workers in the towns. But the Mensheviks held the majority.
Then the Conference had to decide whether the Social Democrats should have anything to do with the Duma, or Parliament; and once again there was a breach. The Mensheviks regarded the concession of the Duma, for all its limitations, as the first step in the democratic revolution, and welcomed it. The Bolsheviks saw in it an appendage of Czardom, to be discarded when the Czar thought convenient. However, although they had boycotted the election to the First Duma, they agreed to participate in the next in order to use the elections and the Duma itself to rouse the workers and peasants to revolution. The Mensheviks, still led by Plekhanov and Martov, deplored the fact that the workers had taken up arms. The Bolsheviks insisted that on the contrary the weakness lay in the workers not having had enough arms, not enough military preparation, and that they had fought defensively. They required more arms and a policy of attack.
With such a fundamental cleavage in the Party there could be no real unity. The Mensheviks outvoted the Bolsheviks, and secured a majority on the Executive Committee and the editorial board of the Party’s newspaper Iskra. The “unity” conference then ended with both sections hastening back to the local organisations.
It was at this conference that Stalin first met Klim Voroshilov. He was a Bolshevik delegate from the Ukraine, young, vital, already a leader of strikes. He differed from Stalin in many respects, being round-faced and fair, merry-eyed, always ready for mischief and fun, whereas Stalin was oval-faced, black-haired, swarthy, rather sombre in disposition and possessed of a sardonic humour, but equally vital. Stalin was more erudite than Voroshilov by virtue of his longer time at school. Nevertheless they had much in common besides their passionate devotion to Lenin. Both were predominantly men of action. They both sprang from the workers. Their ways of life were the same, and neither would ask others to do what he was not prepared to do himself. They began a friendship at this conference which has endured through the years of underground warfare and civil war, until to-day they stand together at the head of the armed forces of the Soviet Union to direct Russia’s greatest war.
Soon after this conference Voroshilov joined Stalin in Baku, and there with another Georgian, Ordjonikidze, who had become a firm friend of Stalin, they worked together among the oil workers and established the Bolsheviks firmly among the workers of Baku. As soon as Stalin returned, he became the recognised leader of the Bolsheviks in Transcaucasia, and a regional Bureau was formed under his leadership to do battle with the Mensheviks. He wrote a pamphlet entitled The present situation and the Unity Conference of the Workers’ Party, explaining what had happened at Stockholm and why. This he followed with articles in the newspaper Elva which the police seized when they discovered the Alvabar press. The whole purpose of this campaign was to win over Social Democrats to the Bolshevik point of view, isolate those who stood with the Mensheviks, and secure a majority in the local organisations.
In pursuing this policy Stalin was again showing qualities which distinguished him from the rest of the Russian leaders. Before a conference he organised his forces. The debates with the Mensheviks were to him as much a part of the war against Czardom as a conflict with the police, and far more important. Such debates were not allowed by him to be simply an exchange of ideas between fellow-travellers. For Stalin they were always a battle; and when in later years he led the fight against Trotsky and many others, this difference of conception as to the nature of the struggle stood him in good stead. Following this course relentlessly now, he was paving the way for another national conference which would give the Bolsheviks control over the Social Democratic Labour Party.
This congress met in May 1907 in the Brotherhood Church, London. The Bolsheviks had done their preliminary work well. In the congress of 336 delegates they held a majority on every issue. Stalin wrote a report which immediately on his return to Baku was published as a pamphlet. He gave it the title Notes of a Delegate, and in it analysed in detail the composition of the Congress and the manner of its voting on the various issues before it, stating the respective positions taken by the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. Wherever opportunity offered he added an additional kick of his own against the Mensheviks and the Liberals. He wrote:
. . . the London Congress helped considerably to further the unification and consolidation of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.
That is the first important result of the London Congress . . . the Congress ended in a victory for “Bolshevism,” a victory of revolutionary Social-Democracy over “Menshevism,” the opportunist wing of our party. . . . From henceforward, therefore, the Party will pursue a strictly class policy of the socialist proletariat. The red banner of the proletariat will no longer be lowered before the liberal spell-binders. Intellectualist vacillation, so unbecoming to the proletariat, has received a mortal blow.
That is the second, and no less important, result of the London Congress of our Party. . . .
The language of the young agitator and writer of poems is no longer apparent. Here is the measured tread of organised forces that have defeated an enemy. He reports on the discussions and relishes the fierce hitting. One passage of arms gave him more pleasure than any other event in the Congress. He recalls when Tyszko, representing the Polish delegation, said that both factions “assure us that they firmly stand by the Marxist view. And not everybody will find it easy to determine which of them, after all, does stand by the Marxist view, the Bolsheviks or the Mensheviks . . .” He was interrupted by cries from several Mensheviks “It is we who stand by the Marxist view!” “No, comrades” Tyszko retorted, “you do not stand by, but lie down on, the Marxist view: for your helplessness in leading the class struggle of the proletariat, the fact that you are able to learn by heart the great words of the great Marx, but unable to apply them in practice, prove this beyond room for doubt.”
“That was a masterly hit,” said Stalin, and I can see his shoulders shake as the delegates roar their approval.
It was at this Congress he first saw Trotsky, who was to cross his path so many times in future struggles. They had no conversation with one another. Trotsky would no doubt at that time consider Stalin to be beneath his notice. He was too busy fighting Lenin. He was opposing the Bolsheviks and had quarrelled also with the Mensheviks. He tried to form a group of his own—to secure, he said, a united party by reconciling the differences. But these differences were not reconcilable. Hardly had the Congress ended and the delegates departed for Russia, than the Second Duma was dispersed and sixty-five Social Democratic deputies were exiled to Siberia. The Stolypin reaction was in full swing and the punitive expeditions were busy with the Stolypin “necktie” and the firing squads. The working-class organisations of the towns were shattered. The “Liberal Springtime” was no more, and a deep depression set in among the parties of the Left. The effect on the Social Democratic Labour Party was exceedingly grave. The 150,000 members with which they began 1907 dwindled to a few thousand, while the correspondingly depressing mood among the leaders gave rise to a variety of opinions concerning policy—even to decrying the revolution and pleading for the liquidation of the Party and the revision of Marxism.
Here was a test for the new philosophers who would change the world. To all superficial appearances the twelve years of effort had been of no avail, and the Philistines were scathing. In every great crisis such views recur. Nevertheless, T. Dan, a Menshevik opponent of the Bolsheviks, felt impelled in after-years to write of the Bolsheviks of this period of blackest depression:
Whilst the Bolshevik section of the Party transformed itself into a battlephalanx held together by iron discipline and cohesive guiding resolutions, the ranks of the Menshevik section became ever more seriously disorganised by dissension and apathy.
There is no evidence of Stalin becoming “disorganised” or depressed. He entered this period steeled by experience and ready for whatever the new circumstances might demand of him. Where the Organisation of the Bolsheviks had been destroyed he would renew it. For him there could be no end to this war until the goal had been achieved. And in this attitude he was not alone.
The shattering blows of the reaction certainly plunged the Party into extreme difficulty. Its means of financial support were broken. Leoni Krassin, an engineer by profession who was the Party financier, had raised much money to maintain the professional revolutionaries, the illegal presses and publications, and even the purchase of arms and munitions. Much too had been raised from middle-class “sympathisers,” while in the struggles of 1905 and 1906 some of the armed groups had “expropriated” a few banks to assist them in getting further arms. What should be done now? The funds of the Party had practically vanished. The “sympathisers” were no longer sympathetic. Unless something out of the ordinary were done the Party would be paralysed. Krassin called on Stalin to solve the problem. A great deal of nonsense has been written about what he did in these circumstances. Admittedly much depends on the critic’s point of view. If he wishes to prove that Stalin was a bandit and to build up a picture of the horrors of banditry, then here are the materials with which to do it. If he holds the view that the Bolsheviks should have allowed their organisations to perish rather than engage in such activities, then of course he will denounce Stalin. The Bolsheviks themselves, however, had one criterion for their conduct: That which helps the party of revolution to fulfil its task is good; that which hinders it is bad.
Stalin was the organiser of partisan groups in the Caucasus region. He had as his principal assistant a devoted friend of his boyhood days, one Ter-Petrossian, whom Stalin affectionately nicknamed “Kamo.” Kamo was a veritable Robin Hood of the Caucasus. He had the most amazing record of arrests and escapes. Twice brought to the gallows, once made to dig his own grave, he was imprisoned again and again and always by some stratagem got free to pursue his revolutionary work in the Georgian tradition. He organised the better elements among the outlaws of the Caucasus, drilled them, and inspired them with his own revolutionary spirit. He and they lived on no more than 50 kopeks (one shilling) each a day. Kamo was the leading spirit of the group Stalin organised for the job of holding up the Treasury carriage carrying 250,000 roubles under escort from a Tiflis Post Office to the State Bank in another part of the city.
On the morning of June 23rd, 1907, two carriages containing a cashier and a clerk, the 250,000 roubles, and two police officers, and accompanied by an escort of five Cossacks, started on their journey from the Tiflis Post Office to the Tiflis State Bank. A woman, Palsya Goldava, gave the agreed signal to the waiting conspirators. Anna Sulamlidze in turn signalled to another along the way to Erivan Square. A number of men were waiting along the route. Six were loitering in the square. Suddenly two terrific explosions rent the air. Two policemen and a Cossack fell to the ground. The horses dashed through the escort towards the other waiting men—for the carriage containing the money had not been blown up. A bomb was then thrown between the horses’ legs, following which one man seized the bag of money from the vehicle and made off. Meanwhile Kamo, dressed as an officer, was in a carriage in the square. On seeing the commotion he rose in his seat, began shouting and firing off his revolvers as if attacking the culprits, and finally rode off after them. When the soldiers surrounded the square everyone had escaped. The money had been taken to a house, and was finally hidden in the private office of the director of the Tiflis Observatory.
Some six months later, Maxim Litvinov, to-day famous throughout the world for his diplomatic genius, was arrested in Paris in the act of exchanging some of the money into foreign currency. A few other men, also now well-known, were arrested for the same offence in other countries.
There was a great outcry about this incident, and the Mensheviks of the Party together with not a few Bolsheviks denounced Stalin. It should be understood, however, that the outcry was not of the kind such an incident would call forth in England. It was political, not moral. In a country of punitive expeditions and thousands of hangings, accustomed to brutality and familiar with assassinations, the killing of two policemen, some Cossacks and a few civilians was in the ordinary course of events and hardly likely to cause a thrill of moral indignation. The criticism against the perpetrators denounced them as supporters of individual robbery. If Stalin were asked to-day what he thought of the episode he would no doubt answer: “Such incidents were not an integral part of our policy, but desperate situations call forth desperate remedies. He who sets another standard than that of unlimited service to the party of revolution should not join it.” With a twinkle in his eye he would continue, “I think we had better change the subject. I move next business.” There are in Tiflis of to-day a street, a hospital, and several nurseries bearing the name Kamo in memory of a man who was the hero of many revolutionary adventures and accomplished much for the Russian Revolution.
Other incidents of the period showed that at the foundations of the Russian Empire explosive material continued to generate. Stalin went back to Baku. Here, with Voroshilov and Ordjonikidze, he took charge of the Baku Worker and launched a struggle for the leadership of the industrial workers. They beat the Mensheviks handsomely, and Voroshilov became the leader of the Oil Workers’ Union. As this union grew in influence and power the employers proposed a conference with it. Should it agree to such a meeting? The Mensheviks were divided on the question, some saying “yes” some saying “no.” Stalin, on behalf of the Bolsheviks, said in the Baku Worker: “Yes—on conditions: recognition of the union, free election of delegates, and a free press.” These proposals won the support of an overwhelming majority of the workers and placed the Bolsheviks at the head of the Shop Stewards Council. “For two weeks,” say the records, “in the period when reaction was rampant in Russia, a workers’ parliament sat in Baku with a Bolshevik presiding. In this parliament they worked out the demands of the workers and carried on widespread propaganda for their minimum programme.” Thus began a long struggle between the oil workers and their employers, and in it Stalin played a leading part. He succeeded in making the district a strong centre of political activity, which grew continuously throughout the period of reaction when the rest of the country seemed to be overcome and demoralised.
It was during the early months of this period that Stalin married a Georgian girl named Catherine Svanidze, who was also a Bolshevik. Very little is known about her, and Stalin is not a man who talks of his domestic life. One thing, however, is certain. Whatever domestic bliss these two may have experienced it was short-lived, for both were members of an illegal party and both were leading lives that made every “home” the most temporary of stopping-places. By March 25th, 1908, the police again interrupted his work and put an end to even this slender and interrupted domestic life.
He was arrested, taken to the Bailov prison and sentenced to eight months’ imprisonment and three years exile at Solvychegodsk in Siberia. When he was in prison on the previous occasion the conditions had been comparatively mild. But under the influence of the great reaction the prison authorities were now steadily abolishing the old conditions, and the rules became ever more stringent. The political prisoners were in rebellion. On Easter Sunday of 1908 the authorities decided to “teach them a lesson,” and the Solyansk Regiment was brought in to pacify them. The political prisoners were lined up in the prison courtyard. Two files of soldiers were also lined up. The prisoners were then driven in single file between the two rows of soldiers, who belaboured them with their rifle butts. Stalin, with head erect and carrying a book under his arm, marched unflinchingly under the rain of blows.
Next: VI. Deep in the Underground of Revolution