It ploughed me over again completely … It is useless to read it when your mother’s milk has not yet dried on your lips. Chernyshevsky’s novel is too complex, too full of thoughts and ideas, in order to be understood and valued at a young age. I myself tried to read it when I was fourteen years old … It was a worthless and superficial reading that did not lead to anything. But then, after the execution of my brother, knowing that Chernyshevsky’s novel was one of his favourite works, I began what was a real reading and pored over the book not several days, but several weeks. Only then did I understand its full depth. It is a work which gives one a charge for a whole life … It is his great merit that he not only showed that any correctly thinking and truly honest person must be a revolutionary, but also something more important: what a revolutionary should be like, what rules he should follow, how he should approach his goal and what means and methods he should use to achieve it … Before I came to know Marx, Engels, Plekhanov, only Chernyshevsky wielded a dominant influence over me, and it all began with What Is to Be Done?2
It was a slow path that took him from People’s Will to Social Democracy. Even when he had definitively moved on, he always retained a soft spot for the old terrorists, knew their places of residence in different parts of the country and would make time to go and see them whenever possible. More importantly, his ideas of how a revolutionary party should function in conditions of clan-destinity owed something to the pre-Marxist revolutionary traditions of tsarist Russia.
Had the People’s Will recovered and regrouped, Lenin might have been confronted with a serious dilemma. But it was already clear that the party was irretrievable. This had been evident in the complete failure of the 1887 plot carried out by Sasha and his comrades. The year that followed cemented the collapse. Lev Tikhimirov, the principal theoretician and strategist of the People’s Will who had a few years previously argued for a seizure of power and an immediate socialist revolution, had dramatically changed his line. In March 1888 he declared his solidarity with the autocracy and published a widely distributed pamphlet entitled Why I Have Ceased to Be a Revolutionary. Several thousand People’s Will activists followed his lead and changed sides. The anarchist poet Nadson’s last lines included one addressed to his own generation: ‘No, I no longer believe in your ideals.’
The suicide rate amongst young people was frighteningly high. Chekhov explained the causes thus:
On the one hand a passionate thirst for life and truth, a dream of activity, broad as the steppes … On the other, an endless plain, a harsh climate, a grey austere people with its heavy chilling history, savagery, bureaucracy, poverty and ignorance … Russian life weighs upon a Russian like a thousand-ton stone.
And yet, this same decade of defeat produced the first organised Social Democratic (virtually synonymous with Marxist in those early years) current in Russia: Emancipation of Labour, whose founders – Georgy Plekhanov, Vera Zasulich and Deutsch – had all once been radical Populists. Zasulich had tried and failed to assassinate General Tepper, the chief of police, in St Petersburg. As far back as 1880, the Executive Committee of the People’s Will (itself a recent offshoot of the Land and Freedom Group) had written to Marx: ‘Citizen! The intellectual and progressive class in Russia has reacted with enthusiasm to the publication of your scholarly works. They scientifically recognise the best principles of Russian life.’ They had obviously been impressed by the strong moral condemnation of exploitation, without fully grasping the central thesis of Capital.
A ramshackle bridge from the Populist shore to Social Democracy had been constructed. In 1893 Lenin, newly arrived in the capital, joined one of the Emancipation of Labour groups in St Petersburg, in which Peter Struve, Tugan-Baransky and Potresov were already active. Henceforth his own life was fused with this party that had recognised as their own the cause of the industrial workers, who laboured in appalling conditions in the factories mushrooming on the fringes of the city.
A different and equally tiny study circle, led by a local Marxist operating under the nom de guerre of Julius Martov and composed exclusively of students, was already meeting in the city. Martov was convinced that the stagnation of the intelligentsia was temporary and that the struggle of labour against capital would soon dominate the big cities, render Populism redundant and win over both workers and intellectuals to the cause. His main worry was whether they would be able to organise a workers’ party in time:
Whether one succeeds in realising that task before the occurrence of that revolution toward which Russia’s present condition is moving, or not, is all the same. If not, then we shall take part in the revolution side by side with the other progressive parties; if so, then the organised social-democratic party will prove capable of retaining the fruits of victory in the hands of the working class.
To do what? The debates regarding the character of the revolution that adherents of all these groups sought had not yet begun. One interpretation of Marxist orthodoxy suggested a bourgeois democratic upheaval to get rid of the autocracy and start a new phase in Russian history, creating the space needed for the transition to socialism. The model, envisaged in its broadest sense, was that of the French Revolution.
Martov, slightly fed-up with café talk, decided to move temporarily to Vilna to test his theories on the Jewish workers of the city. Heartened by the results of the experiment, Martov returned to St Petersburg with something to report and a pamphlet he had written with Arkadi Kremer, a Vilna activist: On Agitation. This text, suggesting a way out of the intellectuals/workers dichotomy by stressing the unity of theory and practice, made an extremely strong impression on Lenin. He understood that practice was an essential component of revolutionary consciousness. The mass of workers would be radicalised through their own collective experiences, but what about the theory?
In 1895 the two circles of Social Democrats combined to form the St Petersburg Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class. Similar developments were taking place in Moscow and Kiev. The increased frequency of workers’ struggles throughout the country led some participants to argue that they should be joining these fights; workers would discover through experience that the authorities always sided with the employers, which would push them towards a Marxist understanding of the system as a whole. Some Social Democrats disagreed, arguing that the workers did not need anyone else to guide them. Their industrial strength was sufficient to take them forward. The idea itself was not new. Populist groups had set up workers’ circles in the factories to help them organise and fight for everyday improvements. Now it was being proposed by Kuskova (an early Social Democrat in Moscow) that a separate political party was unnecessary and that the efforts of Russian Marxists should be limited to helping the workers in the factories while participating in the liberal constitutionalist movement backed by the Russian bourgeoisie.
Both Lenin and Martov, the two dominant figures of the fledgling Social Democrats, strongly opposed these ideas. Lenin’s theoretical abilities and skill in deconstructing and demolishing arguments which he considered mistaken had established his authority. In a group almost completely populated with intellectuals, it could hardly be otherwise. In What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are and How They Fight the Social Democrats (1894), he spelt out the processes at work in Russia and insisted strongly on its capitalist evolution. He did not argue that Russian capitalism had completed its work and that all that lay ahead was socialist revolution.3 The main line of his argument, as he explained to a colleague, was that ‘the disintegration of our small producers (the peasants and handicraftsmen) appears to be the basic and principal fact explaining our urban and large-scale capitalism, dispelling the myth that the peasant economy represents some special structure.’
Soon afterwards he decided to go abroad and consult various figures in exile as well as activists in European Social Democracy. He may also have wanted to get out of the country to reflect, and recover from family tragedies. His younger sister, Olga, to whom he was very attached, had died of typhoid at the age of nineteen, after which Lenin had put all else to the side and spent the summer of 1891 with his mother in Samara. In Europe in 1895, he met the elders of Russian Marxism: Plekhanov and Axelrod in
