Shattered Illusions

...The revolution, they now felt, would come about in Russia as an inevitable consequence of the concurrent development of capitalism and proletarianization of the working classes...

...On the few occasions when he does convey the sentiments of the workers, one becomes strikingly aware of the suspicion and hostility they felt toward the intellectuals, which contrast startlingly with the faith of the intellectuals in the "people...

...The attitude of the workers themselves is rarely allowed to intrude on the narrative...

...Russian military defeats in the war with Japan encouraged social unrest in the country and led in the beginning of 1905 to the outbreak of a revolution...

...Lenin may have been an extreme but not entirely uncharacteristic representative of the generation of radical intelligentsia that emerged in the 1890s when in 1892-94 he dismissed the bulk of the Russian peasantry as "petty bourgeois...

...Petersburg Soviet...

...In 1905, Schwartz was a member of the Bolshevik faction...

...Each St...

...But as Schwartz shows, the Mensheviks overcame their scruples earlier and for this reason later acquired a dominant position in the St...

...But personal contact with the peasants during the "Going to the People" movement of that decade disillusioned all except the most romantic of the social revolutionaries...

...Solomon Schwartz's new book is not a history of the Revolution of 1905, as its title indicates, but a study of the policies of the Menshe-vik and Bolshevik factions toward the labor movement during the revolutionary year...

...Among its opponents were the leading lights of the movement, including Plekhanov, Martov and Lenin...

...As Struve asserted in the Manifesto of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1898, the further east one moved the more cowardly the bourgeoisie became...

...This experience compelled many Russian Social Democrats in the closing years of the century to conclude that the advocacy of political and revolutionary action among industrial labor had been a mistake...

...For Lenin, disillusionment with the trade unionist tendency evidenced by labor was a tremendous shock that caused him in 1900-01 to abandon orthodox Social Democratic views and develop his own Bolshevik theory...

...Reviewed by richard pipes Professor of History, Member of the Russian Research Center, Harvard University The Russian revolutionary movement was an idea in search of embodiment...

...This strategy, of course, meant postponing social revolution to the indefinite future...

...Lenin was not merely a kind of hawkish Menshevik...

...It is one of the tragedies of the Russian revolutionary movement that its hopes for the industrial worker were also disappointed...

...From the same evidence that generated the Economist tendency, Lenin drew the opposite conclusion: If the laboring class was apolitical, non-revolutionary and trade unionist in its outlook, then Social Democrats should abandon democratic action and concentrate instead on building up a centralized, professional elite of full-time revolutionaries who would advance the course of the revolution in the teeth of an opportunistic majority...

...Contact with the proletariat, whether through propagandistic circles where intellectuals taught sociology and Socialism, or through agitational groups dedicated to promoting industrial strikes, revealed the worker as dubious revolutionary material...

...Schwartz convincingly shows how unprepared the Social Democrats were for the emergence of the Zubatov organizations and how long it took them to make up their mind about Father Gapon and his activities...

...In 1909, when a group of disenchanted radicals led by Peter Struve and M. Gershenzon brought out a volume called Vekhi (Landmarks), in which they questioned the whole revolutionary premise, they were shouted down with abuse and ridicule...

...He is no doubt correct in saying that to contemporaries Lenin appeared only a tougher, more resolute, "hard-line" Social Democrat, and not a different species of Socialist...

...But this is not how he appears to the historian...

...The peasant, it was found, held the government in awe, had strong acquisitive instincts and expected to obtain additional land from the Tsar...

...The Russian peasants, with their inborn anarchism and growing land hunger, seemed much more promising, and in the 1870s the majority of radical intellectuals based their revolutionary strategy on the rural masses...

...These events gave Russian Social Democrats their first opportunity of putting their plans to test...

...It is generally known that the occasion of the 1905 outbreak was a demonstration led by Father Gapon, a rather shady figure connected with a police-sponsored trade union movement...

...What is needed are detailed case studies of the revolution as it affected various parties, groups and regions...

...The picture which he paints reveals utter confusion among the Social Democrats at the rapidity of unfolding developments and their hesitating, pragmatic adjustment to them...

...A social class had to be discovered which could be depended upon to participate in the grand assault on the existing political and social regime...

...Gradually many radicals turned away from the peasantry...

...The controversy among Russian Social Democrats over such strategic issues acquired sudden urgency in 1904...

...The problem confronting the radicals was not whether to make a revolution, since that was taken for granted, but how, or, more precisely, with whom to make it...

...Lenin entertained so deep a suspicion of the spontaneous worker movement that he was extremely loath to encourage any signs of labor activity, even industrial strikes...

...Industrial wage earners, especially those in the better paid trades {e.g., metallurgical), proved to be primarily concerned with economic and cultural self-improvement...

...Both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks were at a loss whether or not to endorse worker participation in this commission...

...Indeed, it was the events of 1905 that fixed the theoretical and temperamental differences between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks????and drove the two factions permanently apart...

...Schwartz's book, the first in "The History of Russian Men-shevism" series under the direction of Leopold Haimson, admirably fills one of these gaps...

...The unexpected intensity of social unrest finally compelled both factions to engage in mass politics and to rethink their strategy...

...After the events of "Bloody Sunday," when troops fired on a procession led by Father Gapon, the imperial government appointed a commission chaired by N. V. Shid-lovskii of the State Council to investigate the workers' grievances...

...The dependence on protective tariffs and various financial benefits proffered by the imperial government had developed strong conservative instincts in the Russian business class, so it was unlikely to duplicate the historic performance of its English or French counterparts...

...These organizations, originally formed on the initiative of a police officer, Zubatov, were in fact the first legal trade unions in Russia...

...He had developed in the preceding years a thor oughly undemocratic, elitist theory of social revolution to which he adhered, even when under the pressure of events that forced him to make tactical concessions to mass action...

...They had little interest in political action and none in revolution...

...They decided that the intellectuals should place themselves at the disposal of the incipient and still illegal trade union movement...

...The next candidate for the role of the revolutionary battering ram was the industrial proletariat, which grew very rapidly from the 1880s onward along with Russia's industrialization...

...I think Schwartz underestimates the difference between Lenin and the Mensheviks...

...A participant in these events, the author speaks with the authority of an eyewitness and yet with the detachment of a historian...

...As the industrial proletariat expanded, many radical youths converted to Social Democracy...

...Nonetheless, this excellently translated book throws illuminating light on a critical period of the Russian Social Democratic movement????a period when it first engaged in politics and acquired practical experience for 1917...

...The worker delegation to the Shidlovskii Commission became the nucleus of what in time became the St...

...It must be noted, however, that Schwartz's is an intellectual's point of view...

...No one had much faith in the Russian bourgeoisie...

...The broad outlines of the events of 1905 are sufficiently well known to make additional surveys redundant...

...The notion that a revolution was both necessary and beneficial was accepted by thousands of young Russians with the same unquestioned belief that most of us have in making money or educating our children...

...Petersburg factory was authorized to appoint delegates to this commission...

...Petersburg Soviet...

...Though clearly a Menshevik partisan, he makes no attempt to gloss over the mistakes of his party, nor does he misrepresent the motives and actions of its Bolshevik opponent...

...Its narrowness constitutes its great virtue...

...By the turn of the century this new current, which later became known as "Economism," was dominant in the Russian Social Democratic movement...

...later on, as a result of his disillusionment with Lenin's undemocratic attitudes, he switched to the Mensheviks with whom he has remained ever since...