Stalin: A Biography

A separate session of Bolsheviks took place. It was here that Kamenev denounced the warmth of official Menshevik support for the Provisional Government and urged the need to back the Petrograd Soviet.³² The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, after all their organisational divisions since 1903, belonged to the same party once again. They were the largest two factions in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. At the central level they maintained separate bodies, but across the country — especially outside Petrograd — they worked together. This was an unsustainable situation. The right wing of Menshevism advocated vigorous national defence whereas all Bolsheviks wanted a robust campaign for a multilateral peace. Kamenev and Stalin planned to resolve matters by calling upon the anti-defencist Mensheviks to split themselves off from their faction’s right wing.

Among Bolsheviks, Kamenev was frank about his calculations:³³

It’s wrong to run ahead of things and pre-empt disagreements. There’s no party life without disagreements. Within the party we’ll survive petty disagreements. But there is one question where it’s impossible to unify the non-unifiable. We have a single party together with those who come together on the basis of Zimmerwald and Kienthal, i.e. those who are against revolutionary defencism.

We need to announce to the Mensheviks that this wish is only the wish of the group of people gathered here and is not obligatory for all Bolsheviks. We must go to the meeting and avoid presenting particular platforms. [We should do this] within the framework of a wish to call a conference on the basis of anti-defencism.

Such a statement, made three days before Lenin’s arrival in Petrograd, indicates that Kamenev and Stalin were very far from having a gentle attitude to Menshevism. Implicitly they aimed at schism on the basis of a policy on war and peace which was bound to bring the party into direct conflict with the Provisional Government.

This was a plausible strategy, and it is only because the Bolsheviks within weeks had started to go it alone and then, months later, made their October Revolution that the audacity of the Kamenev–Stalin strategy became forgotten. Both Kamenev and Stalin after 1917 had to forswear their strategy as the more radical policy of seizing power without Menshevik assistance was turned into one of the sacred items of Bolshevik history. The episode is anyway important for the light it sheds on Stalin’s career. He and Kamenev, despite the Russian Bureau’s hostility, had barged their way into the leadership of the faction and elaborated a strategy which, if it had been continued, could have produced a party of radical opposition to the Provisional Government. Factional allegiances were extremely fluid in March and April. The clever idea of tempting left-wing Mensheviks into a Bolshevik embrace had solid political potential. Kamenev and Stalin had been both nimble and determined. They had seen much more of Russia in the twentieth century than Lenin; they had experienced the atmosphere of revolutionary politics in Petrograd since the February Revolution. Their plan for a campaign for radical policies on peace, bread, land and government had the potential for huge popularity.

Lenin violently disagreed. Based in Switzerland, he wrote his ‘Letters from Afar’ which demanded the overthrow of the Provisional Government. The original strategy of Bolshevism, enunciated since 1905, had been for the workers to overthrow the monarchy and establish a temporary revolutionary dictatorship, uniting all socialist parties, which would implement all imaginable civic freedoms and establish a capitalist economy. Leninist strategy had been made obsolete by the formation of the liberal-led Provisional Government and its promulgation of civic freedoms. Lenin never properly explained why he suddenly thought Russia to be ready for the second great projected stage in its revolutionary development — namely the ‘transition to socialism’. But he insisted that this was the only true policy for Bolshevism. He got his chance to fight for his ideas when, at the end of March, the German government allowed him and a group of anti-war Russian Marxists to travel across Germany to Scandinavia before making their way to Petrograd.