Martov is twenty-two, a Russian Jew born in Constantinople. He is, in the words of one leftist sparring partner, ‘a rather charming type of bohemian … by predilection a haunter of cafés, indifferent to comfort, perpetually arguing and a bit of an eccentric’. Weak and bronchial, mercurial, talkative but a hopeless orator, not much better as an organiser, affecting, in these early days, a worker’s get-up, Martov is every inch the absent-minded intellectual. But he is a celebrated mind. And while certainly not above the sorts of sectarian machination typical of political hothouses, he is renowned, even among his adversaries, for integrity and sincerity. He is widely respected. Even loved.
As for Lenin, all who meet him are mesmerised. As often as not, it seems, they feel driven to write about him: libraries’ worth of such books exist. He is a man easily mythologised, idolised, demonised. To his enemies he is a cold, mass-murdering monster; to his worshippers, a godlike genius; to his comrades and friends, a shy, quick-laughing lover of children and cats. Capable of occasional verbal ogees and lumbering metaphors, he is a plain rather than a sparkling wordsmith. Yet he compels, even transfixes, in print and speech, by his sheer intensity and focus. Throughout his life, opponents and friends will excoriate him for the brutality of his takedowns, his flint and ruthlessness. All agree that his is a prodigious force of will. To an extent unusual even among that ilk who live and die for politics, Lenin’s blood and marrow are nothing else.
What particularly distinguishes him is his sense of the political moment, of fracture and traction. To his comrade Lunacharsky, he ‘raise[s] opportunism to the level of genius, by which I mean the kind of opportunism which can seize on the precise moment and which always knows how to exploit it for the unvarying objective of the revolution’.
Not that Lenin never makes mistakes. He has, however, an acutely developed sense of when and where to push, how, and how hard.
In 1898, a year after Lenin is banished to Siberia for his activities, the Marxists organise into the Rossiskaya Sotsial-Demokraticheskaya Rabochaya Partiya, the Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party (RSDWP). For several years, despite such periods of exile, Martov and Lenin remain close collaborators and friends. With characters so different, exasperations are inevitable, but they complement and like each other, a pair of Marxist Wunderkinder.
From Marx, whatever their divisions over other points, the RSDWP thinkers take a vision of history as necessarily proceeding through historical stages. Such ‘stageist’ conceptions can differ wildly in terms of detail, degree and rigidity – Marx himself opposed extrapolating his ‘historical sketch’ of capitalism into a theory of an inevitable path for all societies, as ‘both honouring and shaming me too much’. Still, it is uncontroversial among most Marxists at the end of the nineteenth century that socialism, the initial phase beyond capitalism and en route to communism, can only emerge from bourgeois capitalism, with its particular political freedoms and its working class positioned to take control. It follows that autocratic Russia, with its huge rural masses and small working class (substantially made up of semi-peasants), with its private estates and omnipotent tsar, is not yet ripe for socialism. There is, as Plekhanov puts it, not yet enough proletarian yeast in Russia’s peasant dough to make a socialist cake.
Serfdom is a living memory. And a few miles beyond the cities, peasants still dwell in medieval squalor. In winter, farm animals share their homes and fight for space by the stove. A stench of sweat, tobacco and lamp fumes. Whatever improvements are slowly coming, many villagers still walk barefoot through muddy, unpaved streets, and latrines are open pits. Agricultural decisions about common land are reached by no more rigorous a system than competing shouts in chaotic village meetings. Transgressors of traditional mores are subjected to what is called ‘rough music’, cacophonous intervention, public shaming, a sometimes murderous violence.
But there is worse.
According to the ecstatic rant of Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, it is the bourgeoisie which ‘historically, has played the most revolutionary part … put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations … pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties’ – and thus, through the concentration of the working class at the point of productive power, created ‘its own grave-diggers’. But in Russia, the bourgeoisie are neither pitiless nor revolutionary. They tear asunder nothing. As the RSDWP manifesto has it: ‘The further east one goes in Europe, the more base, weak and cowardly does the bourgeoisie appear, and the more gigantic are the cultural and political tasks that fall to the lot of the proletariat.’
The author of these words, Peter Struve, will soon lurch to the right. In Russia, such so-called ‘Legal’ Marxists often find in their Marxism a roundabout way to be liberals, their focus shifting from workers’ concerns to the necessity of the capitalist ‘modernisation’ that Russia’s cowardly bourgeoisie cannot bring forth. An obverse or complementary left heresy is ‘Economism’, according to which workers must focus on trade union activity, leaving politics to those struggling liberals. Pilloried by those more orthodox for downplaying socialist struggle, and indeed quite ineffectual in their quietist solutions, such ‘Legal’ and ‘Economist’ heretics nonetheless focus on key questions. They have come up against a conundrum of left catechism: how does a movement go about being socialist in an unripe country with a weak and marginal capitalism, a vast and ‘backward’ peasantry, and a monarchy that has not had the decency to undergo its bourgeois revolution?
The tail end of the nineteenth century sees a flurry of imperial machinations, allegiance and counterallegiance underlying a steady hunger for expansion. Internally, the colonial drive means upholding the language and culture of dominant Russian elites at the expense of minorities. Nationalists and the left recruit prolifically from subordinated peoples and nations: Lithuanians, Poles, Finns, Georgians, Armenians, Jews. The socialist movement in the empire is always multi-ethnic, disproportionately comprising those of minority groups and nations.
Ruling over the whole patchwork since 1894 is Nicholas Romanov. As a youth, Nicholas II submitted stoically to his father’s bullying. As tsar he is distinguished by courtesy, dedication to duty, and little else. ‘His face’, one official hesitantly reports, ‘is expressionless.’ Absence defines him: absence of expression, imagination, intelligence, insight, drive, determination, élan. Description after bemused description turns on the ‘otherworldliness’ of a man adrift in history. He is a well-educated vacuity stuffed with the prejudices of his milieu – including pro-pogromist antisemitism, aimed particularly at revolutionary zhidy, ‘yids’. Averse to change of any kind at all, he is wholeheartedly wedded to autocracy. Uttering the word ‘intelligentsia’, he makes the same disgusted face as when he says ‘syphilis’.