Lenin and his Rivals by Donald W. Treadgold

Author:Donald W. Treadgold [Treadgold, Donald W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, Modern, 20th Century, General
ISBN: 9781351794817
Google: HqS8DgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-04-21T01:28:12+00:00

6.

Nevertheless, since the SR’s had been rebuffed in autumn 1904 by their preferred allies, the Marxists, they turned their attention without much enthusiasm to the liberals. Revolutionary Russia repeated over and over—although it might as well have saved its breath so far as the Marxists were concerned—that the Paris agreement had nothing to do with a bourgeois-socialist “bloc” but was simply an arrangement for “simultaneous attack” on Tsarism by hitherto uncoordinated groups.10 The government was trying its best, noted an SR writer, to divide and smash the liberal opposition. Though the Liberationists had not succeeded entirely in capturing the November 1904 zemstvo congress, their slogans of cooperation with revolutionaries were meeting with a surprising amount of support in moderate circles. During the “banquet campaign,” “for the first time Russian liberals dared … to stand on their feet and raise their heads like a man” and their success surpassed all expectations. But since the masses remained aloof from the protest meetings of “society,” the liberals then began to imagine themselves the nucleus of the whole movement. After all, Struve had expected this sort of situation; the masses were not ready, he thought, for real political initiative. The peasants, he had written, would only appear as a conscious political force once complete political liberation was achieved, and he had minimized the readiness of the workers for struggle. Struve forgot, retorted Revolutionary Russia, that the intelligentsia’s “liberation movement” was itself evoked by revolutionary attacks on Tsarism and gave evidence of the direct effect of the growing strike and peasant movements of the masses themselves. The liberals’ movement was only one part of the opposition activity. Still, it could fulfill an important role as a result of continuing “evolution and differentiation” among moderate elements. As the socialists faced non-socialist democracy with the aim of utilizing its most capable forces for the sake of the revolution, they would find their purpose would be best suited by the differentiation just appearing of “democrats” from “moderate constitutionalists.”

Did the limited support SR’s were willing to offer the liberals imply, as the Soviet historian Chermenskii asserts,11 that they had abandoned their antipathy to the bourgeoisie once they moved from “rambling declarations about the bourgeoisie in general to the characterization of its political liberal representatives”? Not at all. On the contrary, the Socialist Revolutionaries at once condemned Iskra’s “plan” for workers’ aid to the zemstvo campaign as having the quite non-revolutionary aim of acting through the bourgeois opposition. Iskra, the Menshevik organ, was guilty of two-faced behavior. In fact it forgot fighting tactics and concentrated on the liberals. Officially it rejected all cooperation with them, privately it conferred with them with the objective of preventing fright at the “red phantom.” The question of the moment, thundered Revolutionary Russia, was armed uprising, and joint action was possible only with those who declared solidarity with the aim of placing the fate of the nation in the hands of the armed populace and the Constituent Assembly. If liberal democrats refused to “take this new step,” they would lose whatever vital forces they possessed to the revolutionary camp.

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