Lenin Vladimir Ilʹich - Lenins Electoral Strategy from 1907 to the October Revolution of 1917: The Ballot, the Streets--or Both

Lenins Electoral Strategy from 1907 to the October Revolution of 1917

Lenins Electoral Strategy from 1907 to the October Revolution of 1917

The Ballot, the Streetsor Both

August H. Nimtz

LENINS ELECTORAL STRATEGY FROM 1907 TO THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION OF 1917

Copyright August H. Nimtz, 2014.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the United States a division of St. Martins Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.

Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

e-ISBN (US): 978-1-137-38995-4

e-ISBN (UK): 978-1-137-39000-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nimtz, August H.

Lenins electoral strategy from 1907 to the October Revolution of 1917 : the ballot, the streets--or both / August H. Nimtz.

pages cm

Includes .

ISBN 978-1-137-39378-4 (hardback)

1. Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 1870-1924. 2. RussiaPolitics and government18941917. 3. Soviet UnionHistoryRevolution, 19171921. 4. Political partiesRussiaHistory20th century. 5. Politics, PracticalRussiaHistory. I. Title.

DK254.L46N563 2014

324.4707509041dc23 2013039399

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Scribe Inc.

First edition: March 2014

Contents

Preface

T HIS VOLUME COMPLETES THE NARRATIVE THAT BEGAN in Lenins Electoral Strategy from Marx and Engels through the Revolution of 1905: The Ballot, the Streetsor Both (hereafter, LES1905)a narrative informed by four arguments: The first is that no one did more to utilize the electoral and parliamentary arenas for revolutionary ends than Vladimir Ilych UlyanovLenin. The second argument is that Lenins position on the streets versus the ballot boxno, it wasnt either/orwas squarely rooted in the politics of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Third, the historic split in international Marxism between communism and social democracy was long in place before the Guns of August 1914 exploded, owing in large part to two very different conceptions of how Marxists should comport themselves in the electoral/parliamentary arenaswith Lenin on one side and what would become twentieth-century social democracy on the other side. The last claim is that the head-start program the founders of the modern communist movement gave Lenin on electoral politics goes a long way toward explaining why the Bolsheviks, rather than any other political current, were hegemonic in October 1917.

When Russias toilers took to the streets at the beginning of 1905 to challenge the three-hundred-year-old rule of the Romanov dynasty, Lenin was soon given the opportunity to apply lessons distilled by Marx and Engels on the revolutionary usage of the electoral process. Forced to make concessions to the masses in motion, Czar Nicholas II, Europes last absolute monarch, did what his predecessors had never doneinstitute tentative steps toward representative democracy. But Russias first parliamentary experiment was born with handcuffs that limited its powers. While the liberal Constitutional Democratic Party, or Cadets, was willing to take part in the democratically hobbled national parliament, Lenins party, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), was ambivalent. The divide that surfaced soon after its birth in 1903 between the Bolshevik wingto which Lenin belongedand the Menshevik wingto which Georgi Plekhanov, the titular founder of Russian social democracy and Lenins one-time mentor, belongedmanifested itself on this question. The latter agreed to participate in the elections to the Duma but not to take their seats if elected. The Bolsheviks, in contrast, called for a complete boycott, a stance that Lenin reluctantly agreed to. But when the Duma convened in April 1906, he immediately embraced the 18 Menshevik deputies who were elected in order to influence their conduct as a party group or fraction in what would be Russias First State Duma.

Russias first experiment in representative governance lasted only three months. Granted under duress, Nicholas felt less pressure to keep the Duma in place as the revolutionary mobilizations unleashed in 1905 began to subside in the spring of 1906. Though always willing to accommodate themselves to Nicholas, the Cadets, the largest bloc of the almost five hundred deputies in the Duma, increasingly constituted a thorn in the side of the monarchy. The land question was the unbridgeable divide. Any attempts by the Cadets, however feeble, to ameliorate the deplorable position that the mass of peasants faced were seen by the landlord class, at whose head stood the Czar, as a mortal threat to their interests. Hence Nicholass implacable resistance to any kinds of reformsintransigence that the Cadets bent to.

Lenin did all he could to encourage the RSDLPs Duma fraction to expose the prevarications of the Cadets on the land question as well as other issues. The pronouncements of Peter Struve, a Cadet leader and one-time Marxist, were special targets of his polemics. Lenins intent, utilizing the rostrum of the Duma, was to convince the peasants, represented by the Trudovik deputies, that only the proletariat and not the liberals were their real allies. But if the Cadets were prone to bend to Nicholas et al., the Mensheviks were prone to bend to the Cadets. They concurred with Lenin and the Bolsheviks that a bourgeois and not a socialist revolution was on the immediate agenda in Russia, but they disagreed, profoundly, on which bourgeois layer to look to for that revolutionary project. Whereas Plekhanov and the Mensheviks were prone to look to the liberal bourgeoisie that the Cadets sought to represent, Lenin insisted that it was with the peasantry that Russias proletariat should seek to forge an alliance for making the bourgeois democratic revolution. Toward that end he waged, much to the consternation of the Mensheviks, an incessant campaign to expose the democratic shortcomings of the Cadets. While the latter were willing to compromise with Nicholas on the land question, the Trudovik deputies were increasingly less inclined to do soa difference that Lenin, through his efforts to influence the RSDLP deputies, did all he could to deepen. Nicholas aided and abetted this effort because he wasnt willing to grant the few crumbs that the Cadets had called for. Hed had enough of the democratic experiment. On July 8, 1906, the monarch sent the Duma packing but called for a new one to convene in February the following year.

Unlike for the First Duma, Lenin decided that the Bolsheviks should not boycott the elections to the Second Duma and waged a campaign to get his wing of the RSDLP on board. Once they did, at least the majority, the task then was to conduct an election campaign that upheld the principle of independent working-class political action. That proved to be a challenge because of Menshevik/Cadet claims that a vote for the RSDLP would split the left/progressive vote and allow the most reactionary party, the Black Hundreds, to be elected. Only a vote for the Cadets, the lesser of the evils, as the Mensheviks argued, could prevent that outcome. Lenin crunched the numbers and spilled a lot of ink to dispute that claim. He also insisted on fidelity to the decision adopted at the RSDLP 1906 congress that only in the second round of elections could the party enter into electoral blocs, and then only with the Trudoviks and the peasant-oriented socialist party, the Socialist Revolutionaries. The election results, Lenin felt, vindicated his intransigence.