Bolsheviks are riddled with informers. Their numbers plummet. They are destitute. The émigré insurrectionists have to seek any work to survive. ‘One comrade’, Krupskaya will recall, ‘tried to become a French polisher.’ The ‘tried’ is poignant. Among the left diaspora, despair, mental illness and suicide are not uncommon. In Paris in 1910, Prigara, a starving, deranged veteran of the Moscow barricades, visits Lenin and Krupskaya. His eyes are glassy, his voice loud. He ‘begins talking excitedly and incoherently about chariots filled with sheaves of corn and beautiful girls standing in the chariots’. As if he can see one of those peasant Arcadias, as if he can almost touch Nutland, Darya, Opona.
But he is closer to drowned Kitezh. Prigara escapes the protection of his comrades, ties stones to his feet and neck and walks into the Seine.
The twentieth century opens on a great, sluggard, contradictory power. The Russian empire stretches from the Arctic to the Black Sea, from Poland to the Pacific. A population of 126 million Slavs, Turks, Kirghiz, Tatars, Turcomen, countless others, gathered in wildly various polities under the tsar. Cities full of cutting-edge industries imported from Europe punctuate a vastness where four-fifths of the people are peasants tied to the soil, in near-feudal abjection. In the works of visionary artists like Velimir Khlebnikov, the self-styled King of Time, Natalia Goncharova, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Olga Rozanova, a strange modernist beauty illuminates a dominion where the great majority cannot read. Jews, Muslims, animists, Buddhists and freethinkers abound as, in the empire’s heart, the Orthodox Church propagates its lugubrious and ornate moralism – against which chafe dissenting sects, minorities, sexual dissidents in the cities’ queer hinterlands, radicals.
In his books 1905 and Results and Prospects, written shortly after the failed revolution, and throughout his life thereafter, Trotsky develops a particular conception of history as ‘a drawing together of the different stages of the journey, a combining of separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms’. Capitalism is an international system, and in the interrelations of cultures and polities, history does not clean up after itself.
‘A backward country assimilates the material and intellectual conquest of the advanced countries,’ Trotsky will come to write. ‘Though compelled to follow after the advanced countries, a backward country does not take things in the same order.’ It is driven to
the adoption of whatever is ready in advance of any specified date, skipping a whole series of intermediate stages … [though it] … not infrequently debases the achievements borrowed from outside in the process of adapting them to its own more primitive culture … From the universal law of unevenness thus derives another law which … we may call the law of combined development.
This theory of ‘uneven and combined development’ suggests the possibility of a ‘leap’, a skipping of those ‘stages’ – perhaps autocratic order might be sundered without the mediation of bourgeois rule. Reconfiguring a term from Marx and Engels, Trotsky invokes ‘Permanent Revolution’. He is not the only leftist to use the term – he draws on an unorthodox Belarussian Marxist, Alexander Helphand (‘Parvus’) and others are developing similar concepts – but he will become the most celebrated one so to do, and he develops it in particular important ways.
In a ‘backward’ country like Russia, Trotsky says, where the bourgeoisie is weak, it will not execute a bourgeois revolution, which leaves the working class to do the job. But how can that working class self-stall its demands? Its triumph will be driven by its interests, eroding capitalist property and going beyond ‘bourgeois’ gains. By now, he is not the only Marxist to hold that if the working class is at the helm of this ‘permanent’ revolution it must continue beyond capitalism, but far from seeing that as a potential or likely disaster like many others, he is the most enthusiastic about the prospect. Still, for Trotsky as for most of the Russian Marxists, the international dimension is key. ‘Without the direct state support of the European proletariat’, he writes immediately after 1905, ‘the working class of Russia cannot remain in power and convert its temporary domination into a lasting socialistic dictatorship.’
In these bleak post-1905 days, some Mensheviks have shifted on the possible necessity of the party entering government, ‘against its will’ and without optimism about its prospects, if no appropriate historical agent arises. They continue to hold that the working class should ally with the liberal bourgeoisie they still see as key, and hunt for suitable bourgeois radicals who, even if ‘subjectively’ anti-revolutionary, Martynov says, contribute ‘objectively, without wishing to do so’, to the revolution. To their left, the Bolsheviks advocate instead a ‘democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants’. Both sides see that ‘progressive’ bourgeois–democratic revolution as desirable, an aspiration at the limits of the possible and sustainable. To most, Trotsky’s ‘permanent revolution’ is a scandalous eccentricity.
It is May 1912 in Irkutsk, Siberia. The workers in a vast, British-funded goldfield, housed in serf-like conditions in unsanitary barracks, have gone out on strike. They want increased pay, the dismissal of hated supervisors and – again that copula of economic and political demands – the eight-hour day. Troops are deployed. The company gives orders. The troops open fire. The death toll is 270 strikers, in what becomes known as the Lena Massacre.
Huge and angry sympathy strikes shake Moscow and St Petersburg. Industrial action picks up again. In 1914, there is a general strike in the capital, one serious enough to raise concerns about mobilisation for the war that everyone knows is coming, spawned by the predatory tussles of the great powers.
Some in the regime understand that it cannot sustain a conflict, or survive the inevitable fallout. In February 1914, in a prescient memo, the conservative statesman Pyotr Durnovo warns the tsar that if the war goes badly, there will be revolution. He is ignored. Pro- and anti-German factions vie within the elites, but Russia’s easterly interests, its alliance with and economic ties to France, necessarily range it against Germany. With some reluctance, after an exchange of urgent, polite telegrams between ‘Nicky’ and ‘Willy’ – Nicholas II and Germany’s Wilhelm II – wherein they discourage each other’s military momentum, shortly after European hostilities start, on 15 July 1914, Nicholas takes Russia into the war.
What comes then is the usual wave of patriotism and pieties, rallying the credulous, the desperate and the politically bankrupt. ‘Everyone’, reports the poet Zinaida Gippius, ‘has gone out of their minds.’ Demonstrators attack German shops. In St Petersburg, a crowd clamber onto the roof of the German embassy and throw down its pair of enormous equine sculptures. They land twisted and wrenched, with macabre bronze injuries. Russians cursed with German names rush to alter them. In August 1914, the name of St Petersburg itself is changed to the more Slavonic Petrograd: in semiotic rebellion against this idiocy, the local Bolsheviks continue to style themselves the ‘Petersburg Committee’.
To the north-east of the city centre, in Petrograd’s great domed Tauride Palace, on 26 July 1914, the Duma deputies vote in favour of war credits, the state’s borrowing to fund the carnage. Liberals now pledge themselves again to the sclerotic regime the modernisation of which is their notional raison d’être. ‘We demand nothing’, simpers Milyukov, ‘and impose no conditions.’
It is not only the right who line up for war. The peasant–populist Trudoviks, a moderate left party associated with the SRs, enjoin peasants and workers, in the words of their mouthpiece, a flamboyant lawyer named Alexander Kerensky, to ‘defend our country and then set it free’. The celebrated anarchist Prince Kropotkin himself supports the fighting. The SRs are split: though many activists, including Chernov, oppose the slaughter, a large number of the party’s leading intelligentsia support the country’s war effort – including the near-legendary SR figurehead Babushka, the ‘Grandmother of the Revolution’, Catherine Breskho-Breshkovskaya. Nor is the Marxist left immune. Grotesquely, the venerable Plekhanov tells Angelica Balabanoff of the Italian Socialist Party: ‘If I were not old and sick I would join the army.
