A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

with the permanent image of a minority party, which was to be an important disadvantage in their rivalry with the Bolsheviks.

Lenin seized this opportunity to assert his control of the Central Committee and its organ, Iskra, by ejecting the three 'Menshevik' veterans — Zasulich, Axelrod and Potresov — from its editorial board. Lenin's conspiratorial methods hardened the divide between the two factions. Their clash was at first much more to do with personalities, style and emotions than with the articulation of distinctive ideologies. The Mensheviks were outraged by Lenin's shoddy treatment of the three ousted editors — he had called them Iskra's 'least productive members' — and in solidarity with them Martov now refused to serve with Lenin and Plekhanov on the new editorial board. They accused Lenin of trying to become the dictator of the party — one talked of his needing to wield a 'baton' like the one used by army commanders to instil discipline in the ranks — and set themselves up as the defenders of democracy in the party. Lenin's own intransigence, his refusal to patch up his differences with the Mensheviks (differences which, by his own admission, were 'in substance . . . very unimportant'), and his readiness, once provoked, to admit to his belief that there had to be a dictator of the party to discipline the 'wavering elements in our midst', merely heightened the emotional tensions. The meeting broke down

in petty squabbles, with each side accusing the other of having 'started it', or of having 'betrayed' the other. People took sides on the basis of hurt feelings and outraged sensibilities and established bonds of loyalty. Lydia Dan recalls that she took Martov's side not so much because she thought that he was right but because:

I felt that I had to support him. And many others felt that way. Martov was poorly suited to be a leader. But he had an inexhaustible charm that attracted people. It was frequently difficult to account for why they followed him. He himself said, 'I have the nasty privilege of being liked by people.' And, naturally, if something like a schism occurred, Martov would be noble, Martov would be honourable, while Lenin . . . well, Lenin's influence was enormous, but still.. . For my own part, it was very tragic to have to say that all my sympathies for Lenin (which were considerable) were based upon misunderstanding.³²

For several years the incipient political differences between the Men-sheviks and the Bolsheviks continued to be masked by personal factors. No doubt it was in part because the two factions all lived together — sometimes literally — in small exile communities, so that their arguments over party dogma often became entangled in squabbles over money and lovers. But Lenin's personality was the crucial issue. Bolshevism was defined by a personal pledge of loyalty to him; and Menshevism, though to a lesser extent, by opposition to him. Valentinov, on his arrival in Geneva in 1904, was shocked by the 'atmosphere of worship [of Lenin] which people calling themselves Bolsheviks had created' there. Lenin reinforced this divide by his violent attack on the Mensheviks in his pamphlet One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1904). He now called them 'traitors' to the Marxist cause. None of his Bolshevik lieutenants was even allowed to talk to any of the Menshevik leaders without gaining his prior approval.³³

Only very slowly, during and after 1905, were the differences between the two factions spelled out in political terms. In fact for a long time (right up until 1918) the rank and file Social Democrats, particularly on the Menshevik side, sought to stitch the party together again. This was especially so in the provinces, where the party's forces were simply too small to afford such factional disputes. Here they continued to work together in united SD organizations. But gradually, as the party was forced to confront the dilemmas of real politics, during the 1905 Revolution and then in the Duma period, so its two factions demarcated themselves both in terms of their different ideologies, their strategies and tactics, and in terms of their ever more diverse political styles and cultures.

Menshevism remained a loose movement — high on morals, low on discipline. There was no real Menshevik leader, in the sense that the Bolsheviks

had one, and indeed it was a part of Menshevik ideology to deny the need for one. Only slowly and reluctantly were the Mensheviks dragged towards the type of formal party structure which their rivals had from the start. Their spirit remained that of the friendly and informal circles (kruzhkt) of the 1890s, what Lenin mocked as 'the loose Oblomov gowns and slippers' of the movement's salad days. But the Mensheviks were genuinely more democratic, both in their policies and in their composition, than the Bolsheviks. They tended to attract a broader range of people — more non- Russians, especially Jews and Georgians, more diverse types of workers, petty merchants and members of the intelligentsia — whereas the followers of the Bolsheviks tended to come from a narrower range (the vast majority were Great Russian workers and uprooted peasants). This broader social base may partly explain the Mensheviks' inclination towards compromise and conciliation with the liberal bourgeoisie. This was certainly the main distinction between them and the Bolsheviks, who, under Lenin's guidance, became increasingly intransigent in their opposition to democracy. Yet this demarcation — much as it may have been linked with social differences — was essentially an ethical one. The Mensheviks were democrats by instinct, and their actions as revolutionaries were always held back by the moral scruples which this entailed. This was not true of the Bolsheviks. They were simpler and younger men, militant peasant-workers like Kanatchikov; doers rather than thinkers. They were attracted by Lenin's discipline and firm leadership of the party, by his simple slogans, and by his belief in immediate action to bring down the tsarist regime rather than waiting, as the Mensheviks advised, for it to be eroded by the development of capitalism. This, above all, was what Lenin offered them: the idea that something could be done.

Part Two

THE CRISIS OF AUTHORITY (1891-1917)

5 First Blood

i Patriots and Liberators

After a year of meteorological disasters the peasants of the Volga region found themselves facing starvation in the summer of 1891. As they surveyed their ruined crops, they might have been forgiven for believing that God had singled them out for particular punishment. The seeds they had planted the previous autumn barely had time to germinate before the frosts arrived. There had been precious little snow to protect the young plants in the winter, when the temperature averaged 30 degrees below zero. Spring brought with it dusty winds that blew away the topsoil and then, as early as April, the long dry summer began. In Tsaritsyn there had been no rain for 96 consecutive days, in Saratov none for 88, and in Orenburg none for more than 100. Wells and ponds dried up, the scorched earth cracked, forests went prematurely brown, and cattle died by the roadsides. The peasants pinned their last hopes on the harvest. But the crops that survived turned out to be small and burned by the sun. In Voronezh the harvest of rye was less than 0.1 pud (1.6 kg) per inhabitant, compared with a normal yield of 15 pud. 'Here we are getting ready to go hungry,' wrote Count Vorontsov-Dashkov to the Tsar from Tambov province on 3 July. 'The peasants' winter crops have failed completely and the situation demands immediate aid.'

By the autumn the area threatened by famine had spread to seventeen provinces, from the Ural mountains to the Black Sea, an area double the size of France with a population of thirty-six million people. Travellers in the region painted a picture of growing despair, as the peasants weakened and took to their huts. Those who had the strength packed up their meagre belongings and fled wherever they could, jamming the roads with their carts. Those who remained lived on 'famine bread' made from rye husks mixed with the weed goosefoot, moss and tree bark, which made the loaves turn yellow and bitter. The peasants stripped the thatch from the roofs of their huts and used it to feed their horses: people may go hungry for a long time but unfed horses simply die, and if this happened there would be no harvest the next year. And then, almost inevitably, cholera and typhus struck, killing half a million people by the end of 1892.

The government struggled to deal with the crisis as best as it could.

But its bureaucracy was far too slow and clumsy, and the transport system proved unable to cope. Politically, its handling of the crisis was disastrous, giving rise to the general impression of official carelessness and callousness. There were widespread rumours, for example, of the obstinate bureaucracy holding back food deliveries until it had