Stalin: A Biography

While the Brdzola group languished in the gaols of Batumi and Baku, Noe Zhordania continued to elaborate the strategy and tactics of Georgian Marxism. Both Zhordania and Lenin felt that the founding parents of Marxism in the Russian Empire — Georgi Plekhanov, Pavel Axelrod and Vera Zasulich — had failed to discern the advantages of appealing to the peasantry. Lenin was out to attract peasant sympathy by offering to restore the strips of land lost to the gentry landlords through the Emancipation Edict of 1861. Many Russian Marxists thought the proposal too indulgent to the peasantry; they preferred the orthodox emphasis on campaigning among the working class. But Zhordania criticised Lenin for insufficient audacity. Instead he urged that all agricultural lands should pass into the hands of peasants. Dynastic, ecclesiastical and noble estates should be expropriated. Most Georgian workers had ties with the countryside. Georgia was a predominantly agrarian society. Not only that: Zhordania urged Georgian Marxists to go out among the peasants and recruit them to the ranks of organised Marxism.³¹ Very quickly his comrades answered his call. The campaign paid off. Nowhere else in the Russian Empire were peasants so ready to hearken to Marxists. Marxists could boast of their hegemony over the Georgian political opposition to the Romanov monarchy.

Dzhughashvili did not approve of Zhordania’s strategy. He agreed that the peasants should be promised the transfer of all agricultural lands and that Lenin’s proposal was too timid. But he disliked the idea of diverting so much propaganda and organisation to the peasants. He insisted on the need to operate among the ‘workers’. He also made a point of the need for Marxists to report on and explain the vicissitudes of the labour movement outside the Russian Empire, especially in central and western Europe.³²

About a further point of dissent with Zhordania, however, he was always to show extraordinary reticence. Dzhughashvili was still far from abandoning all his Georgian patriotism. He wished a distinct Marxist party to be formed in Georgia. Whereas Zhordania aimed for a regional organisation covering the entire Caucasus regardless of its ancient national and ethnic boundaries, Dzhughashvili demanded a Georgian territorial demarcation in the party.³³ The difference between Zhordania and Dzhughashvili was large; it was even larger between Dzhughashvili and those other comrades such as Mikha Tskhakaya who were to become Bolsheviks. Tskhakaya agreed that the books, pamphlets and newspapers had to be written in the Georgian language — otherwise no Georgian workers would get acquainted with Marxism — but like other radical Marxists, he felt that Zhordania’s preoccupation with Georgia’s national and cultural development gave off a whiff of nationalism. Dzhughashvili’s idea for a territorially demarcated organisation in the south Caucasus seemed equally malodorous to radicals who espoused Marxism because it offered a path to modernity and away from nationalist strife.

Such an idea in fact had echoes more widely in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. The Jewish Bund — the Marxist organisation based in the western borderlands of the Russian Empire and dedicated exclusively to work among Jews — was criticized by the Iskra group for demanding territorial autonomy inside the party despite the fact that other ethnic groups lived in the same region. (Marxists in the south Caucasus avoided such requests on behalf of a single national or ethnic group.) This request was discussed at the Second Party Congress in August 1903. When Iskra’s representatives opposed any such nationalterritorial principle for organisation, the Bundists walked out. Wilful and independently minded, Dzhughashvili was risking being classified as a Marxist who could not accept the Russian Social-Democratic Party’s commitment to internationalism.