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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.24: The Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class

Last time we introduced Julius Martov, and a new theory of organizing for the Russian Marxists: agitation, not propaganda, which Martov would then carry with him to St. Petersburg when his two years administrative exile in Vilna finally wrapped up in the autumn of 1895. In today’s episode, he will arrive, bearing this new strategy, and then join with other Marxists in the capital to form a new group who would agitate their way towards the revolution they all dreamed of. Now, one of Martov’s key allies in this project is going to of course be Lenin, and it is in the course of today’s episode that these two future friends turned future rivals will meet for the first time.

So what has Lenin been up to? Well, while Martov was trumpeting the success of the new program of agitation to his comrades in Vilna in May of 1895, Lenin was off on his first trip abroad, on a mission he undertook on behalf of his comrades in St. Petersburg to make contact with the now legendary old guard émigré Marxists of the Emancipation of Labor Group, our old friends Georgi Plekhanov, Vera Zasulich, and Pablo Axelrod. When Lenin submitted his travel paperwork to the authorities, he claimed that this was a vacation he undertook for his health, which wasn’t totally made up. He had been very sick in April of 1895 and did actually need to recuperate, but the authorities didn’t really care whether it was a lie or not. Lenin was well-known to them, and they happily stamped his papers to get him out of the country, because maybe if they were lucky, he would just decide to never come back, which would be all right with them.

So in the last week of April, 1895, Lenin departed on what would be a four month tour through Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and France, his most important object being linking up with the Emancipation of Labor Group. Now we left this group back in episode 10.17, roundabout 1890, and I wrapped up episode 10.17 by saying, and I’m quoting myself now, it’s fair to say that by the dawn of 1890, the Emancipation of Labor Group had zero influence on socialist politics at home or abroad. But much to everyone shock the forces of history turned in their favor, Plekhanov suddenly appeared to be a mad prophet who had predicted a great flood and who everyone had laughed at until the flood suddenly came. End quote.

So having spent the 1880s publishing their interpretations and translation of Marx into the void, the Vitra system had come along and made Marxism suddenly very relevant to this younger generation like Lenin and Krupskaya and Martov. Not that the Emancipation of Labor Group yet had any formal ties to any distributors or allies inside of Russia. Their work was smuggled in and passed around, but it was all very haphazard. Like, the kids who would go on holiday with their families and come home with trunks full of illegal books. These books would then be passed around hand-to-hand inside of reading and discussion circles, but there was no permanent stable distribution link. One of the reasons Lenin was undertaking his mission to find the Emancipation of Labor Group was to forge just such a permanent stable distribution link between Switzerland and Russia.

So even as late as 1895, the Emancipation of Labor Group was still just as small as they had always been. It was still just the three of them: Plekhanov, Zasulich, and Axelrod. And this is not to say they could not have built a larger organization inside the émigré community had they wanted to; they just, did not want to. The triumvirate of Plekhanov, Zasulich, and Axelrod conceived of the Emancipation of Labor Group as a close knit intellectual brain trust that must remain compact in order to maintain a ideological, coherence and purity. Coherence, and purity as defined mostly by Plekhanov. So they were happy to meet with potential supporters or followers or people who might like to spread their work, but they were never going to offer you membership in the group. And one way to think about this is that they basically conceived of themselves as something like a modern rock band, cranking out albums. If you like a band, you support the band, you go to their concerts, you buy their albums and tell your friends. But just because you like a band doesn’t mean you get to join the band. But young radicals at the time didn’t really have any concept of this. Being invited to join parties and circles and groups was a fairly normal thing. So what often came as a disappointing shock to fans who came around to Plekhanov being like, aw, man, I dig your stuff, where can I sign up? And Plekhanov would say, hey, great, buy some books, spread the word, but no, you don’t get to join the band. And then, they would leave and he would go back to writing.

Now there were pluses and minuses to this approach, but for sure the biggest plus, at least in Plekhanov’s mind, was that he never had to share song writing duties with anyone. Is at time for me to let this metaphor go? Yes, it is time for me to let this metaphor go, you get it. While they were busy not expanding their ranks in the early 1890s, Plekhanov was hard at work on what became one of his most important books: The Development of the Monist View of History, which was meant to be the definitive articulation of historical materialism for a Russian audience. Written under a pseudonym, the title, The Development of the Monist View of History, was intentionally designed to be unwieldy and boring, to hopefully slip it past the censors.

And it worked. Just as they had done with Capital, the bureaucrats and the censor’s office decided the The Development of the Monist View of History was a snooze fest and they let it be published legally in Russia. Once it started making the rounds though, it turned out to be a real hit. The Monist View became the basic textbook explanation for historical materialism, leaving readers with a clear argument why the Marxists were so focused on this growing urban proletariat as the key to the future socialist revolution. And it turned out to be a must read for all budding socialist revolutionaries.

One of those budding socialist revolutionaries was of course Lenin, and a 25-year-old Lenin arrived in Switzerland in May of 1895, moderately intimidated by the prospect of meeting the great Plekhanov, the Moses of Marxism. Plekhanov, for his part, seems to have appreciated Lenin’s appreciation of his work, at least once it became clear that Lenin did not want to, like, join the band. Lenin was instead offering his services as a representative of supporters inside Russia who could help spread the ideas of Plekhanov and the other members of the Emancipation of labor Group. And this was the perfect moment to really flood the intellectual market with Marxism, because the Witte System was in full swing by this point, which really did seem to be proving that Marx and historical materialism were dead right. So Plekhanov and Lenin worked out an arrangement in principle, and Lenin departed with a stack of letters of introduction written by Plekhanov that would open doors for young Lenin throughout Europe. And though in the future, they were almost never in the same place at the same time, Lenin and Plekhanov would spend the next 10 years or so basically on the same side. So this meeting in May of 1895 was the beginning of an effective partnership.

But Plekhanov also recognized in Lenin something that Lenin probably recognized in himself already: a potential rival for the title leader of the Russian Marxists. This concern was deepened a little bit when Lenin moved along to Zurich to stay for a week with Pavel Axelrod, and Axelrod straight up said, I think we found our leader in Russia. So Lenin and Axelrod hung out for about a week and got to know each other, they read and discussed various articles and books and ideas, and Lenin was very pleased when Axelrod commented on a collection of articles Lenin had brought with him, saying that he liked one in particular, which just so happened to be the one written by Lenin under another pen name. They also discussed the role in relationship of those revolutionaries inside Russia to those outside Russia. And they agreed that when the revolution came that the center of leadership had to be inside Russia, that the best way for émigré outfits like the Emancipation of Labor Group to help the revolution would be as Axelrod put it, to act as a fortified redoubt overlooking a great battlefield. They would be able to take in the whole picture, give strategic advice and protect the most precious valuables. Axelrod did not really agree with many of his fellow émigré s, who in their kind of arrogant and insular myopia, believed that the people inside Russia should be the foot soldiers while the émigré s should be the generals. Axelrod, thought this was kind of crazy. If nothing else, it was a supremely inefficient way to run a revolution, which is almost by its very nature a rapid fire event that will require instantaneous decision making on the ground. Lenin agreed wholeheartedly. So, agreed on this point, Lenin departed, and it would come as a bit of a shock to Axelrod to find Lenin making the opposite case just a few years later. Of course, that was after Lenin had been driven into exile himself, which I’m sure had nothing to do with his change of heart.

After his stay in Switzerland, Lenin moved on to Paris, where he met with other émigré radicals, the most important of these audiences being with the legendary Frenchman. Paul Lafargue, the veteran of the Paris commune who had fled to London in the aftermath of the Bloody Week, and who soon thereafter married Karl Marx’s daughter Laura. Sitting there with this communard and the daughter of Marx, Lenin listened to their stories with rapt attention, and the Paris Commune in particular would be a historical event he would often return to in his own writings.

Aside from this meeting, Lenin enjoyed his time in Paris as best he could, though his health did start to deteriorate. He suffered headaches and insomnia, and eventually he had to make his declaration to the Russian authorities that he was traveling abroad for his health true. With an infusion of cash from his always supportive mother, Lenin returned to Switzerland, where he recuperated at a spa before heading back to the battlefield in Russia.

Lenin returned to St. Petersburg in early September, 1895, looking forward to implementing a program he had discussed with the Emancipation of Labor Group: linking together the 20 or so currently separate Marxist reading circles in and around St. Petersburg, and then linking that linked group to the émigré s abroad. It was going to be the beginnings of the beginnings of a social democratic party.

Maybe.

It was in the service of this project that Lenin first met Martov, who returned from his exile in October of 1895 bearing the new gospel of the Vilna program, and eager to make it work in St. Petersburg. Now up until now, Lenin himself had mostly been doing polemical work against the philistine narodists, who could not see that they were the past and Marxism was the future. He had also done some propagandizing among the workers, though he didn’t really enjoy it. He was a writer, a debater, and a leader, not a school teacher. So though he did enjoy the intellectually stimulating life of a salon radical, he saw in the Vilna program a straightforward way to advance the revolutionary character of the working classes. Because in the end, the working classes were going to be expected to do their revolutionary work as a class, as a mass movement. This was not supposed to be about an elite intellectual vanguard. Lenin agreed that focusing on specific factory grievances would help show the workers living examples of the theory of the exploitation of labor outlined by Marx. Lenin also agreed that prodding the workers toward strikes by socialist agitation would give those workers necessary experience, and a fighting spirit that would serve them well in the revolution to come.

So the leaders of the various Marxist discussion groups in St. Petersburg got together and founded this thing called the Union for the Struggle of the Emancipation of the Working Class. The union adopted Martov’s recommended strategy: talk less, listen more. Publish leaflets, not books. Focus on lived reality, not abstract theory. Your audience is the workers, not other coffee house radicals. And the actual membership of this coordinating Union of Struggle was never very big, maybe 20 members in all. Lenin and Martov both sat on the central committee where they implemented Martov’s strategy. Their first task was to go out among the workers and find out what their grievances actually were. So they printed and distributed questionnaires for people to fill out that they hoped would allow them to cobble together a list of complaints that might motivate the workers to go on strike. And this did generate some useful information and the members of the union also attempted to supplement this with direct personal interviews, but as we’ve discussed, many of the members of the Union of Struggle were white collar, middle and upper class intellectuals. They’d come around asking these potentially seditious questions of the workers and be met with understandably tight-lipped suspicion from those workers.

But Krupskaya was assigned to one of the poorest working class districts, and thanks to her years of experience and connections as a night school teacher, she was able to come back with reliably detailed information about pay conditions and hours. And one of the most interesting things to come out of this exercise in gathering information was that the managers had a habit of imposing fines on workers for any number of infractions. So their already pitifully low hourly wages were in reality even lower than that, because their pay was routinely docked. Lenin, with his training as a lawyer, would soon be writing up a 44 page booklet explaining to the workers their rights with regards to these fines.

But that was the last thing he was able to do as a free man, because as he sat down to get started on the first issue of a new newspaper, they hoped to get going, Lenin was arrested.

For as much as our young revolutionaries enjoyed playing cloak and dagger, dodging surveillance and meeting secretly and writing to each other in secret codes with invisible ink and all this stuff you find in a standard issue spy novel, the Okhrana was watching them pretty much the whole time. Lenin was well-known. He had been tracked in and out of Europe. The authorities knew about his false bottom trunk that he used to bring home illegal literature, but as long as Lenin and his comrades posed no immediate threat, it was better to just wait, monitor them, gather more information, more names and more plans. And most especially, wait until they did something you could really nail them to the wall for.

Now the reason the authorities knew so much about them is because they had spies, informants and agents provocateur liberally sprinkled around keeping tabs on everyone. Among the founders of the Union of Struggle was a certain dentist, who was just such a spy. Now the problem of police spies was one of the biggest hurdles that Lenin and his comrades struggled to overcome. It’s one of the biggest problems any revolutionary group struggles to overcome. You can’t trust nobody, because if you trust nobody, then you’re just a paranoid crank, hiding out in a studio apartment, afraid to talk to anybody. You’re not revolutionary of the people. But you also can’t trust everybody, because for sure some of your comrades are police spies. Of course they are.

Now in his novel, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which is a manual for revolution dressed up as a space adventure, Heinlein recommend making friends with a sentient and basically omniscient supercomputer who will be able to identify such police spies, group them together in their own cordoned off revolutionary cells, where you can feed them disinformation. But in the absence of a sentient and basically omniscient supercomputer, spies are going to get in. You just have to trust your instincts, trust evidence that they are spies if and when it does come in, and then go with your guts in these early days, especially Lenin tended to err on the side of being too trusting. So, because they trusted this dentist, everyone wound up arrested before they got a chance to do much of anything in 1895.

Now the authorities finally decided to go from surveillance to arrest in November, 1895, because some factory workers did start a brief strike, and the authorities became concerned that maybe this new Union of Struggle group was having an impact. So the dentists spy tipped off his handlers that the six principle editors of the new underground newspaper would all be in the same place at the same time on December the eighth. The police raided the rooms, and Lenin and five of his comrades were carried away. About a month later, a second sweep picked up Martov and a bunch of others.

Now, not all the members of the Union of Struggle were in custody. Krupskaya kept her name clear, as did some of the younger members, and they tried to carry on with their agitation work. And though it was difficult, it was not impossible to stay in contact with their imprisoned comrades.

As we saw last week, the people running the prisons and detention centers were not exactly committed to their jobs, and for the entirety of 1896, while Lenin and Martov and friends were held in the preliminary detention facility — which is where you were held without trial, until your sentence was handed down — they freely accessed their comrades on the outside without too much difficulty. They use coded language, and invisible ink, and hidden notes smuggled into the binding of books because the inspectors at the detention facility never tried too hard to stop it. And in between this regular correspondence, Lenin, for example, was able to return to more abstract, theoretical ideas, beginning work on his first contribution to Russian Marxism, The Development of Capital in Russia.

Now Lenin’s principal facilitator in all this was Krupskaya, who was still on the outside, and who had taken a job as a copyist in the railroad administration. She happened to have a coworker who was a non-movement family friend of the Ulyanovs, who could somewhat innocuously visit Lenin in prison. So people would send letters to Krupskaya at her office, she would write or encode things into books and letters, hand them off to this family friend who would then take it all into Lenin. And it was in this way that everybody inside prison was able to cheer on the strikes of 1896. These great strikes were of course blamed on the socialist agitators and the socialist agitators were happy to take credit for it, but in fact, the strikes were quite spontaneous and undirected by anyone inside the Union of Struggle.

The 1896 St. Petersburg textile workers strikes were something of a watershed in retrospect. And their importance only grew in time, as it seemed to be proving what Karl Kautsky had said, in which the Vilna program was working towards the merger of the blue collar worker and the white collar socialist into a single movement. The strikes lasted for three weeks in May and June, 1896, and were the largest industrial worker actions in Russian history to date. The strikes specifically hit the textile industries in St. Petersburg, where you found the lowest paid, least educated, and most maltreated workers. These people were doing 12 to 14 hour days in miserably hot conditions doing monotonous activity,

Now it began as a small walkout of just a few workers in one single textile plant, but quickly spread to twenty more factories, and in the end included at a minimum 18,000 workers and at a maximum 30,000, depending on what source you’re looking at. Half of these workers were men and half of these workers were women. And it was a big moment in Russian labor history, and the liberal professor turned liberal politician Pavel Milyukov, who we talked about back in episode 10.20, said that the 1896 strikes were when the Russian masses first stepped on to the revolutionary stage.

The first action started on May the 23rd, 1896 when about a hundred very low grade assistants walked off the job and demanded pay for the recent plant closure that had coincided with the coronation of Tsar Nicholas the Second, who I should mention we will be catching back up with next week. Now, in addition to this recent affront, they were also demanding back pay related to this additional twenty minutes of unpaid labor that employers had started adding to the end of the day back in 1887. This is just 20 minutes that were tacked onto the end of the day that you weren’t paid for. It was as literal and expression of the exploitation of surplus labor as you could get. The next day, these hundred assistants were joined by about a hundred spinners at the plant who further demanded a shorter work day.

Now this first plant would remain shut down until June the fifth. In the meantime, word of this strike spread to other workers as they talk to each other at canteens or in parks or at shared boarding houses, and it became very apparent very quickly that these workers understood the importance of getting as many factories as possible to catch the contagion of strike. Just as a single worker is isolated without his or her coworkers, a single factory is isolated without other factories also joining in. So over the last week of May 1896, the strike spread, to the 600 workers in this factory over here, then the 700 and that factory over there, eventually reaching something like 20 factories in all, and as I said, somewhere between 13 and 30,000 workers.

Now, these strikes were not started by the Union of Struggle, but when they got going, the remaining free members of the union did what they could. And principally, that meant helping spread the word and make sure other people knew what was happening. This turned out to be extremely helpful because previously the authorities had just been able to clamp down on all information about an isolated factory strike to stop the contagion of strike from spreading. But they were unable to do this in 1896, so for three weeks, St. Petersburg had to deal with tens of thousands of workers refusing to work, and the textile industry basically shutting down. Now in the end, no great victory was really won here. Some small concessions were extracted, and the factories restarted. Now, another follow on strike in early 1897 did eventually lead to a maximum hour law being passed by the government later in 1897, but the importance of the 1896 strikes weren’t just about what specific demands they extracted. They were peaceful and disciplined and seem to be both spontaneous and widespread, which indicated prior organization and planning. And given that On Agitation had just come out, it seemed like the merger between the workers and the socialists was in fact taking place. And even if we know in retrospect that that merger was not fully consummated in 1896, it certainly showed that things were heading in that direction, which terrified conservatives, exhilarated radicals, and made cautious liberals wring their hands and beg for reform. And working class demonstration strikes and direct actions would only pick up steam as Russia’s embrace of industrialization continued, and everyone pointed themselves towards the shockingly massive confrontations of 1905.

But 1905 is still a little ways off, though I promise we are moving towards it quicker than you might realize. Certainly quicker than anyone in Russia realized. But before the revolution could come, the members of the Union of Struggle were going to have to become… exiles and émigré s. Krupskaya was finally identified as revolutionary and arrested in August of 1896, and she too got placed in the preliminary detention facility.

Then they all sat in custody until the end of January 1897, when their sentences were handed down. And they all agreed these sentences were surprisingly light, just three years exile in Siberia. They even got three days freedom in St. Petersburg to arrange their affairs and prepare for their trip. And it was over these three days that Lenin and Martov apparently cemented their lasting friendship. In the few months they had worked together at the end of 1895, they hardly knew each other, they were still strangers, and they were kept separate in the preliminary detention facility, but here in these last 72 hours, they bonded. Even if they had been apart, they had gone through something together. Their spirit was unbroken, and both of them were as committed to the cause as ever. So they agreed to ride out their three years in exile without making any attempt to escape, and then they would meet back up and plot their next move.

Among the last minute arrangements Lenin made before he had to depart east was to write a small message in invisible ink to Krupskaya, who being arrested later than the others, was still in prison. The invisible note… was a marriage proposal.

Now Vladimir and Nadya had now known each other and worked together for nearly three years, and they liked each other and respected each other. But most importantly, if she agreed to marry him, then their union would be recognized by the state, and she would be allowed to come join Lenin in Siberia, where they could continue their work, and if nothing else keep each other company. She agreed.

Now the marriage of Lenin and Krupskaya would never be the stuff of romance novels. And down the road, it will become emotionally complicated, but they will remain loyally married until death did them part.

So next week we will ship these revolutionaries off to Siberia, but keep the story in St. Petersburg to pick back up with newlyweds whose marriage, for better or for worse, was more like something out of a romance novel. They really truly loved each other as man and wife. And I am talking here about Nicholas and Alexandra, who were opening their reign as emperor and empress of Russia by telling all those whose hopes for progress, reform, and change — hopes, which had been raised by the elevation of the young tsar — that those hopes were hopeless. No, no, no, you silly heads, there will be no progress, reform, and change. There will be only orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality, and isn’t that simply marvelous.