Part 8 (1/2)
Escaped from exile: Once, twenty-three; twice, five; three times, one member.
The length of time the Convention as a whole had been active in Social-Democratic work, was 942 years. It follows that the time spent in prison and exile is about one-third of the time a Social-Democrat is active. But these figures are too optimistic. ”The Convention has been active in Social-Democratic work for 942 years”--this means merely that the activities of those persons had been spread over so many years.
Their actual period of work must have been much shorter. Possibly all these persons had worked, actually and directly, only one-sixth or one-tenth of the above time. Such are conditions of underground activity. On the other hand, the time spent in prison and exile is real time: the Convention had spent over fifty thousand days and nights behind iron bars, and more than that in barbarous corners of the country.
Perhaps I may give, in addition to these figures, some facts about myself. The author of these lines was arrested for the first time in January, 1898, after working for ten months in the workmen's circles of Nikolayev. He spent two and a half years in prison, and escaped from Siberia after living there two years of his four years' exile. He was arrested the second time on December 3rd, 1905, as a member of the Petersburg Council of Workmen's Deputies. The Council had existed for fifty days. The arrested members of the Soviet each spent 400 days in prison, then they were sent to Obdorsk ”forever.” ... Each Russian Social-Democrat who has worked in his Party for ten years could give similar statistics about himself.
The political helter-skelter which exists in Russia since October 17th and which the Gotha Almanach has characterized with unconscious humor as ”_A Const.i.tutional Monarchy under an absolute Tzar_,” has changed nothing in our situation. This political order cannot reconcile itself with us, not even temporarily, as it is organically incapable of admitting any free activity of the ma.s.ses. The simpletons and hypocrites who urge us to ”keep within legal limits” remind one of Marie Antoinette who recommended the starving peasants to eat cake! One would think we suffer from an organic aversion for cake, a kind of incurable disease!
One would think our lungs infected with an irresistible desire to breathe the atmosphere of the solitary dungeons in the Fortress of Peter and Paul! One would think we have no other use for those endless hours pulled out of our lives by the jailers.
We love our underground just as little as a drowning person loves the bottom of the sea. Yet, we have as little choice, as, let us say directly, the absolutist order. Being fully aware of this we can afford to be optimists even at a time when the underground tightens its grip around our necks with unrelenting grimness. It will not choke us, we know it! We shall survive! When the bones of all the great deeds which are being performed now by the princes of the earth, their servants and the servants of their servants will have turned to dust, when n.o.body will know the graves of many present parties with all their exploits--the Cause we are serving will rule the world, and our Party, now choking underground, will dissolve itself into humanity, for the first time its own master.
History is a tremendous mechanism serving our ideals. Its work is slow, barbarously slow, implacably cruel, yet the work goes on. We believe in it. Only at moments, when this voracious monster drinks the living blood of our hearts to serve it as food, we wish to shout with all our might:
_What thou dost, do quickly!_
Paris, April 8/21, 1907.
THE LESSONS OF THE GREAT YEAR
This essay was published in a New York Russian newspaper on January 20th, 1917, less than two months before the Second Russian Revolution. Trotzky then lived in New York. The essay shows how his contempt, even hatred, for the liberal parties in Russia had grown since 1905-6.
(January 9th, 1905--January 9th, 1917)
Revolutionary anniversaries are not only days for reminiscence, they are days for summing up revolutionary experiences, especially for us Russians. Our history has not been rich. Our so-called ”national originality” consisted in being poor, ignorant, uncouth. It was the revolution of 1905 that first opened before us the great highway of political progress. On January 9th the workingman of Petersburg knocked at the gate of the Winter Palace. On January 9th the entire Russian people knocked at the gate of history.
The crowned janitor did not respond to the knock. Nine months later, however, on October 17th, he was compelled to open the heavy gate of absolutism. Notwithstanding all the efforts of bureaucracy, a little slit stayed open--forever.
The revolution was defeated. The same old forces and almost the same figures now rule Russia that ruled her twelve years ago. Yet the revolution has changed Russia beyond recognition. The kingdom of stagnation, servitude, vodka and humbleness has become a kingdom of fermentation, criticism, fight. Where once there was a shapeless dough--the impersonal, formless people, ”Holy Russia,”--now social cla.s.ses consciously oppose each other, political parties have sprung into existence, each with its program and methods of struggle.
January 9th opens _a new Russian history_. It is a line marked by the blood of the people. There is no way back from this line to Asiatic Russia, to the cursed practices of former generations. There is no way back. There will never be.
Not the liberal bourgeoisie, not the democratic groups of the lower bourgeoisie, not the radical intellectuals, not the millions of Russian peasants, but the _Russian proletariat_ has by its struggle started the new era in Russian history. This is basic. On the foundation of this fact we, Social-Democrats, have built our conceptions and our tactics.
On January 9th it was the priest Gapon who happened to be at the head of the Petersburg workers,--a fantastic figure, a combination of adventurer, hysterical enthusiast and impostor. His priest's robe was the last link that then connected the workingmen with the past, with ”Holy Russia.” Nine months later, in the course of the October strike, the greatest political strike history has ever seen, there was at the head of the Petersburg workingmen their own elective self-governing organization--the Council of Workmen's Deputies. It contained many a workingman who had been on Gapon's staff,--nine months of revolution had made those men grow, as they made grow the entire working cla.s.s which the Soviet represented.
In the first period of the revolution, the activities of the proletariat were met with sympathy, even with support from liberal society. The Milukovs hoped the proletariat would punch absolutism and make it more inclined to compromise with the bourgeoisie. Yet absolutism, for centuries the only ruler of the people, was in no haste to share its power with the liberal parties. In October, 1905, the bourgeoisie learned that it could not obtain power before the back-bone of Tzarism was broken. This blessed thing could, evidently, be accomplished only by a victorious revolution. But the revolution put the working cla.s.s in the foreground, it united it and solidified it not only in its struggle against Tzarism, but also in its struggle against capital. The result was that each new revolutionary step of the proletariat in October, November and December, the time of the Soviet, moved the liberals more and more in the direction of the monarchy. The hopes for revolutionary cooperation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat turned out a hopeless Utopia. Those who had not seen it then and had not understood it later, those who still dream of a ”national” uprising against Tzarism, do not understand the revolution. For them cla.s.s struggle is a sealed book.
At the end of 1905 the question became acute. The monarchy had learned by experience that the bourgeoisie would not support the proletariat in a decisive battle. The monarchy then decided to move against the proletariat with all its forces. The b.l.o.o.d.y days of December followed.
The Council of Workmen's Deputies was arrested by the Ismailovski regiment which remained loyal to Tzarism. The answer of the proletariat was momentous: the strike in Petersburg, the insurrection in Moscow, the storm of revolutionary movements in all industrial centers, the insurrection on the Caucasus and in the Lettish provinces.
The revolutionary movement was crushed. Many a poor ”Socialist” readily concluded from our December defeats that a revolution in Russia was impossible without the support of the bourgeoisie. If this be true, it would only mean that a revolution in Russia is impossible.
Our _upper industrial bourgeoisie_, the only cla.s.s possessing actual power, is separated from the proletariat by an insurmountable barrier of cla.s.s hatred, and it needs the monarchy as a pillar of order. The Gutchkovs, Krestovnikovs and Ryabus.h.i.+nskys cannot fail to see in the proletariat their mortal foe.
Our _middle and lower industrial and commercial bourgeoisie_ occupies a very insignificant place in the economic life of the country, and is all entangled in the net of capital. The Milukovs, the leaders of the lower middle cla.s.s, are successful only in so far as they represent the interests of the upper bourgeoisie. This is why the Cadet leader called the revolutionary banner a ”red rag”; this is why he declared, after the beginning of the war, that if a revolution were necessary to secure victory over Germany, he would prefer no victory at all.