Lenin’s Electoral Strategy from 1907 to the October Revolution of 1917: The Ballot, the Streets—or Both

292 Pages·2014·2.377 MB·English

by  August H. Nimtz (auth.)

Lenin’s Electoral Strategy
from 1907 to the October
Revolution of 1917
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Lenin’s Electoral Strategy
from 1907 to the October
Revolution of 1917
The Ballot, the Streets— or Both
August H. Nimtz
lenin’s electoral strategy from 1907 to the october revolution of 1917
Copyright © August H. Nimtz, 2014.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-39378-4
All rights reserved.
First published in 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—
a division of St. Martin’s 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.
ISBN 978-1-349-48371-6 ISBN 978-1-137-38995-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137389954
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Nimtz, August H.
Lenin’s electoral strategy from 1907 to the October Revolution of 1917 : the ballot,
the streets—or both / August H. Nimtz.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 1870- 1924. 2. Russia— Politics and
government— 1894–1917. 3. Soviet Union— History— Revolution, 1917–1921.
4. Political parties— Russia— History— 20th century. 5. Politics, Practical— Russia—
History. I. Title.
DK254.L46N563 2014
324.47'07509041— dc23 2013039399
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Scribe Inc.
First edition: March 2014
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xiii
1 “Legal and Illegal Work”: The Third Duma 1
2 “To Prepare for a New Russian Revolution”: The Fourth Duma 49
3 The “Great War,” 1917, and Beyond 97
Conclusion 145
Appendix A: The Fifth (All- Russian) Conference of the RSDLP 193
Appendix B: Conference of the Extended Editorial
Board of Proletary 195
Appendix C: Explanatory Note of the Draft of the Main
Grounds of the Bill on the Eight- Hour Working Day 199
Appendix D: The Sixth (Prague) All- Russia Conference of the RSDLP 205
Appendix E: The Election Platform of the RSDLP 209
Appendix F: The National Equality Bill 215
Appendix G: The Petrograd City Conference
of the RSDLP (Bolsheviks) 217
Appendix H: Excerpt from “The Constituent Assembly
Elections and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” 219
Appendix I: Second Congress of the Communist International, 1920 223
A Critical Review of the Relevant Literature 233
Notes 247
Bibliography 269
Index 273
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Preface
This volume completes the narrative that began in Lenin’s Electoral
Strategy from Marx and Engels through the Revolution of 1905: The Bal-
lot, the Streets—o r Both (hereafter, LES1905)—a narrative informed by
four arguments:1 The first is that no one did more to utilize the elec-
toral and parliamentary arenas for revolutionary ends than Vladimir Ilych
Ulyanov—L enin. The second argument is that Lenin’s position on the
“streets” versus the “ballot box”— no, it wasn’t either/or— was 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 arenas—w ith
Lenin on one side and what would become twentieth- century social
democracy on the other side. The last claim is that the head-s tart pro-
gram 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 Russia’s 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, Europe’s
last absolute monarch, did what his predecessors had never done—
institute tentative steps toward representative democracy. But Russia’s
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 par-
liament, Lenin’s party, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party
(RSDLP), was ambivalent. The divide that surfaced soon after its birth
in 1903 between the Bolshevik wing—t o which Lenin belonged—a nd
the Menshevik wing— to which Georgi Plekhanov, the titular founder
of Russian social democracy and Lenin’s one- time mentor, belonged—
manifested itself on this question. The latter agreed to participate in the
elections to the Duma but not to take their seats if elected. The Bol-
sheviks, in contrast, called for a complete boycott, a stance that Lenin
viii Preface
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 Russia’s First State Duma.
Russia’s 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 accom-
modate 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
Nicholas’s implacable resistance to any kinds of reforms—i ntransigence
that the Cadets bent to.
Lenin did all he could to encourage the RSDLP’s 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. Lenin’s intent,
utilizing the rostrum of the Duma, was to convince the peasants, repre-
sented 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 social-
ist 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 Russia’s 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 so— a differ-
ence that Lenin, through his efforts to influence the RSDLP deputies, did
all he could to deepen. Nicholas aided and abetted this effort because he
wasn’t willing to grant the few crumbs that the Cadets had called for. He’d
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.
Preface ix
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 major-
ity, the task then was to conduct an election campaign that upheld the
principle of independent working-c lass 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 reac-
tionary 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 dis-
pute 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-o riented socialist party, the Socialist Revolutionaries. The
election results, Lenin felt, vindicated his intransigence.
The Second Duma, as Lenin foresaw, was more to the left than the
First—s etting the stage for another confrontation between the crown
and Russia’s democratic opening. He immediately sought to provide
leadership for the 65 RSDLP deputies. He constantly resisted the Men-
shevik wing of the party and the Duma fraction—m ost of whom were
Mensheviks—t hat wanted to collaborate with the liberal Cadet party.
His goal, largely fulfilled in the end, was to win the peasant Duma
deputies away from the Cadets toward the Bolshevik perspective. The
agrarian and budget questions figured significantly in Lenin’s strategy,
which involved hands-o n assistance to the Bolshevik Duma deputies.
His success was a factor in the dissolution of the Second Duma by the
Czar and his prime minister, Pyotr Stolypin, on June 3, 1907, register-
ing the end of the “Russian Spring.” The accompanying arrest of the 55
RSDLP Duma deputies underscored that fact. Last, a by-p roduct of the
fight with the Mensheviks over electoral blocs and the comportment of
the RSDLP’s Duma fraction was the beginning of the codification of
the norms of democratic centralism.
Chapter 1 of this volume, “‘Legal and Illegal Work’: The Third
Duma,” begins with Lenin’s response to the regime’s decree for conven-
ing a Third Duma, which lasted from 1907 to 1912. The ukase, which
authorized even more undemocratic elections, provoked a major debate
within the Bolsheviks that lasted for four years—t o boycott or not to boy-
cott the elections and the Duma. Another long-l asting debate had to do
with how to make the Duma party group more accountable to the party.
Lenin, who led the argument against boycotters, also had to debate those
who effectively wanted to withdraw the Duma party group because of its