Stalin: A Biography

Yet the prospects for Bolshevism in the south Caucasus had never been bleaker. Dzhughashvili wrote dispiritedly to Lenin in May:⁵

I’m overdue with my letter, comrade. There’s been neither the time nor the will to write. For the whole period it’s been necessary to travel around the Caucasus, speak in debates, encourage comrades, etc. Everywhere the Mensheviks have been on the offensive and we’ve needed to repulse them. We’ve hardly had any personnel (and now there are very few of them, two or three times fewer than the Mensheviks have), and so I’ve needed to do the work of three individuals… Our situation is as follows. Tiflis is almost completely in the hands of the Mensheviks. Half of Baku and Batumi is also with the Mensheviks… Guria is in the hands of the Conciliators, who have decided to go over to the Mensheviks.

Evidently he thought the comrade in Geneva ought to know the bitter truth about the factional balance among Marxists in the south Caucasus. Throughout the year Menshevism under Zhordania’s aegis thrust itself forward as the leading agency of Georgia’s rebellion against the Imperial monarchy. Bolshevism was in a small minority among the Georgian revolutionaries. Thus Dzhughashvili had chosen a factional allegiance which seemed to doom him to obscurity. The peasantry across Georgia followed the Mensheviks; and although he continued to argue that their strategy diverted attention from propaganda and organisation among the working class, he was a voice crying in the wilderness. He must have blamed Bolshevism’s weakness in Georgia to some extent on its failure — despite his advice in 1904 — to present the faction as a champion of national interests. He himself, however, was not infinitely flexible. He too wished to focus revolutionary activity on the towns, the workers and Marxist orthodoxy. Bolshevism did best in the south Caucasus where industry was well developed. This was the case in Baku. But Dzhughashvili did not despair: he had taken a deliberate decision that the basic strategy of the Bolsheviks was correct and that sooner or later it would triumph. For the rest of the year he predicted the imminence of the Romanov monarchy’s overthrow. Like all Bolsheviks, he declared that violent uprising and a revolutionary dictatorship were essential for this end.

Nicholas II started to panic in October 1905. Workers had formed their own councils (or ‘soviets’) which began by organising strikes and came to supplant the official bodies of self-government. Peasants moved against the landed gentry by illegal pasturing of livestock and stealing wood from forests. In Poland and Georgia the authorities were coming close to losing control. On advice from Count Witte, Nicholas II issued his ‘October Manifesto’ promising reform. In subsequent weeks it became clear that this would involve an elected parliament to be known as the State Duma as well as a Basic Law which would establish the framework that would define and constrain the powers of the Emperor, the government and the Duma. These concessions bought time and support for the monarchy; and although the Bolsheviks proceeded to organise an insurrection in Moscow, the armed forces steadily reasserted authority across the empire.