His wife, Alexandra Fedorovna, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, is deeply unpopular. In part this is jingoism – she is German, after all, at a time of mounting tensions – but it is also due to her frantic intrigues and patent contempt for the masses. The French ambassador Maurice Paléologue sketches her concisely: ‘Moral disquiet, constant sadness, vague longing, alternation between excitement and exhaustion, constant thought given to the invisible and supernatural, credulousness, superstition.’
The Romanovs have four daughters, and a son, Alexis, who is stricken with haemophilia. They are a close, loving family, and, given the tsar and tsarina’s obdurate myopia, they are utterly doomed.
From 1890 to 1914, the working-class movement grows in size and confidence. The state pursues ham-fisted strategies against it; in the cities, it attempts to contain burgeoning popular discontent with ‘police unions’, workers’ societies organised and overseen by the authorities themselves. But to have any traction at all, these must channel real concerns, and their organisers must be what the Marxist historian Michael Pokrovsky calls ‘clumsy imitations of the revolutionary agitators’. The demands they issue are mere echoes of workers’ calls – but in echoes, words can still be made out, with unintended consequences.
In 1902, a police-union strike takes over the whole city of Odessa. Similar mass protests spread throughout south Russia the following year, and not all under the aegis of the authorities’ puppet bodies. A strike spreads from the Baku oilfields through the Caucasus. Sparks of revolt flare in Kiev, Odessa again, and elsewhere. By now the strikers’ demands are political as well as economic.
During this slow acceleration, in 1903, fifty-one of the great and good of Russian Marxism relocate a crucial meeting from a vermin-flecked Brussels flour warehouse to London. There, in backrooms and cafés or overlooked by the fishing trophies of an angling club, over three disputatious weeks, the RSDWP holds its Second Congress.
It is in the twenty-second session of that gathering that a chasm opens between the delegates, a split remarkable not only for its depth, but also for the seeming triviality of its catalyst. The question is whether a party member should be one who ‘recognises the party’s programme and supports it by material means and by regular personal association under the direction of one of the party organisations’, or ‘by personal participation in one of the party organisations’. Martov demands the former. Lenin stakes all on the latter.
Relations between the two have been cooling for some time. Now after an intense, vigorous debate, Martov wins, twenty-eight to twenty-three. But various fits of huff and dudgeon ensue on other issues, and by the time the party leadership is to be decided, walkouts by the Jewish socialist group the Bund and by the Economist Marxists mean Martov has lost eight of his original supporters. Lenin manages to push through his choices for the Central Committee. Minority in Russian is menshinstvo, majority bolshinstvo. From these words the two great wings of Russian Marxism take their names: Martov’s Mensheviks and Lenin’s Bolsheviks.
At bottom this schism is about far more than membership conditions. Already during the conference Lenin was referring to his supporters as ‘hard’ and his opponents as ‘soft’, and the distinction will generally remain glossed in such terms: the Bolsheviks considered hard leftists, the Mensheviks more moderate – though this is not to deny the substantial range and evolution of opinions on each side. What fundamentally underlies the membership dispute – in winding, mediated fashion, and far from clearly, even to Lenin – are divergent approaches to political consciousness, to campaigning, to working-class composition and agency, ultimately to history and to Russian capitalism itself. This will emerge more plainly fourteen years later, when issues of the centrality of the organised working class will come to the fore.
For now, a Martovian counterattack comes quickly: the London decisions are rescinded, and Lenin resigns from the board of the party journal Iskra in late 1903. On the ground, however, in so far as they even know about it, many RSDWP activists consider the split absurd. Some simply ignore it. ‘I don’t know,’ one factory worker writes to Lenin, ‘is this issue really so important?’ Years pass while Mensheviks and Bolsheviks veer towards and away from semi-unity. The bulk of party members consider themselves simply ‘Social Democrats’, right up to 1917. Even then, Lenin will take some time to convince himself that there is no going back.
Russia eyes the east, pushing into Asia, grasping at Turkestan and Pamir, as far as Korea: continuing work on the Trans-Siberian Railway, with China’s collaboration, puts it on a collision course with a similarly expansionist Japan. ‘We need’, says Prime Minister von Plehve, ‘a little victorious war to stem the tide of revolution.’ What better foil in a jingoist epic than a ‘lesser race’ such as the Japanese, whom Tsar Nicholas calls ‘monkeys’?
The 1904 Russo-Japanese War begins.
The regime, in the depths of self-delusion, expects an easy victory. Its forces, however, are incompetently led and inadequately equipped and trained, and they are catastrophically routed at Liaoyang in August 1904, Port Arthur in January 1905, Mukden in February 1905, Tsushima in May 1905. By the autumn of 1904, even the timorous liberal opposition is raising its voice. After the Liaoyang defeat the journal Osvobozhdenie, which six months before trumpeted ‘Long live the army!’, denounces the expansionism behind the war. Through regional self-government assemblies known as zemstvos, liberals organise a ‘banquet campaign’, large lavish suppers that culminate in pointed toasts to reform. Political activism through passive–aggressive dinner parties. The following year, opposition to the regime’s trajectory reaches such a pitch that even Nicholas feels forced to make grudging concessions. But the wave of revolt stretches way beyond the liberals, into the peasantry and the restive working class.
In St Petersburg, one ‘police socialist’ union, the Assembly of Russian Factory and Workshop Workers, is led by an unusual former prison chaplain named Georgy Gapon. This fierce-faced man is, in the words of Nadezhda Krupskaya, the Bolshevik militant to whom Lenin is married, ‘by nature not a revolutionary, but a sly priest … ready to accept any compromises’. Father Gapon nevertheless heads a social ministry, inflected by Tolstoy’s quasi-mystical concern for the poor. His theology – devout, ethical, quietist and reformist all at once – is confused but sincere.
In late 1904, four workers at the city’s colossal Putilov metallurgy and machine-building plant – which employs more than 12,000 people – get the sack. At sympathy meetings organised by their workmates, an appalled Gapon finds leaflets calling for the tsar’s overthrow. He rips them to pieces: that is well beyond his mission. But to the workers’ petition calling for the men’s reinstatement he adds demands for a wage increase, improved sanitation, an eight-hour day. Radicals to his left add further calls, resonating far beyond sectional interests: for the freedom of assembly and of the press, the separation of church and state, an end to the Russo-Japanese War, a Constituent Assembly.