All across Europe, Marxist parties in the organisation of socialist and labour groupings known as the Second Socialist International break with previous pledges and rally to their governments’ war efforts. The moves shock and devastate the few stalwart internationalists. On hearing of the pro-war vote of the powerful German Social Democratic Party, Lenin clings desperately, for the short while that he can, to the belief that such reports are a forgery. The great Polish-German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg considers suicide.
Within the Duma, only the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks walk out against the war. For this show of principle, many deputies will find themselves exiled to Siberia. When Plekhanov visits Lausanne to argue for the military defence of Russia, a pale, raging, familiar figure comes to confront him. Lenin will not call him comrade, will not shake his hand. Lenin damns his old collaborator with remorseless cold invective.
Russia mobilises more quickly than the Germans expect, invading East Prussia in August 1914, aiding France’s early battles. But the country’s armed forces, albeit somewhat modernised since 1904, are still in a parlous state. And the Russian high command is totally unprepared for modern war. Its commitment to nineteenth-century methods in an era of rapid-firing war machines leads to appalling carnage. As supply problems, incompetent leadership, corporal punishment and the infernal nature of the fighting take their toll, the war effort is undermined by waves of surrenders, disobedience and desertions.
The German offensive comes in the spring of 1915. Under the barrage Russia loses significant amounts of territory, almost a million soldiers are captured, and more than 1,400,000 killed. The scale of the cataclysm is giddying. Ultimately the war will cost Russia between 2 and 3 million lives – perhaps more.
In September, the tiny Swiss village of Zimmerwald hosts a conference of European anti-war socialists. A pitiful thirty-eight delegates, including Bolsheviks and internationalist Mensheviks and SRs.
Even as they meet, right-wing Mensheviks and SRs in Paris collaborate on the first issue of the pro-war Prizyv. ‘A revolution is brewing in Russia’, the hard-right SR Ilya Fondaminsky writes in its pages, but it ‘will be national rather than international, democratic rather than social, and pro-war rather than pacifist’. Right SR intellectuals gravitate away from a narodnik vision of revolution for agrarian socialism, between liberalism and collectivism, towards a jingoistic version of the bourgeois revolution foreseen by their right-Menshevik collaborators.
United in their opposition to such ‘social patriotism’ of their erstwhile (and in some cases current) comrades, in Zimmerwald the delegates are divided on how sharply to break with them. Eight delegates, including Lenin and his close collaborator and aide-de-camp, the energetic, choleric Grigory Zinoviev, want to leave the corrupted Second International. The Zimmerwald majority, including Mensheviks, will not acquiesce.
Most delegates oppose Lenin’s calls for the revolutionary mobilisation of the proletariat against the war as an attempt to split the International – which it is. Moreover, some present consider that given popular patriotism, Lenin’s call will endanger anyone who makes it. Instead, the meeting reaches a compromise, and produces a statement of general anti-war sentiments. This, for the sake of unity, Lenin and his supporters sign up to, without enthusiasm or satisfaction.
In a short book of 1916, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin describes the epoch as one of monopoly capitalism entangled with the state, of capital’s parasitism on its colonies. Seeing war as systemic, he opposes any concession to anti-war moderation. Lenin is against moralist pacifism, let alone ‘defencism’, according to which while expansionism is opposed, the ‘defence’ of a home state is deemed legitimate. Instead, famously, he argues for ‘revolutionary defeatism’ – a socialist advocacy of the defeat of one’s ‘own’ side in an imperialist war.
Even the radical Trotsky is alienated by the formulation. He cannot, he says, ‘agree with your opinion … that Russia’s defeat would be a “lesser evil”’. He considers this a ‘connivance’ with patriotism, supporting the ‘enemy’.
One reason his call provokes such consternation is that Lenin is often not clear about whether it is for the defeat of one’s state at the hands of another power, or, along with all imperialist powers, at the hands of the workers. Although the second possibility – international insurrection – is clearly his preference, as well as the telos of his argument, at times he seems to insinuate that the first would suffice. There is an element of performance in the ambiguity. By hammering home this ‘defeatism’, his intention is to bolster the growing sense that the Bolsheviks, more than any other current, oppose the war utterly and without remission.
The war mobilisation drains Russia’s land and industry of workers. Ammunition, equipment, food run short. Inflation soars, with a brutal impact on workers and the urban middle class. The public mood begins to turn. As soon as the summer of 1915, strikes and food riots shake Kostroma, Ivanovo-Vosnessensk, Moscow. The liberal opposition organises into a soi-disant ‘Progressive Bloc’, calling for rights for minorities, an amnesty for political prisoners, certain trade union rights, and so forth. The bloc is furious at incompetence from above, and absolutely opposed to power from below.
The strike wave ebbs, flows and continues, and with it extremes of social desperation. Amid the chaos of the flights of internal refugees, of invaded towns and captured and killed soldiers, thousands of besprizorniki – abandoned, lost or orphaned children – make their way to the cities and gang together in makeshift new families, living in the cracks, by theft, begging, prostitution, whatever they can. Their numbers will explode in later years. An underground of profiteering stirs, of despair, decadence, drunkenness, bohemian ‘cocainomania’. Febrile symptoms of collapse. Moscow is in thrall to a new tango craze, and it undergoes dark mutations: mimes of murder, jaunty references to carnage. One professional dance duo are notorious for their ‘Tango of Death’, performed in traditional evening wear, the man’s face and head painted to become a skull.
A decade before the war, as the tsar and tsarina sought help for their desperately unwell son, they had made the acquaintance of an unkempt, ill-educated, egocentric Siberian ragamuffin, a self-styled holy man who seemed able, by whatever combination of charm, folk knowledge and luck, to alleviate young Alexis’s suffering. Thus Rasputin, the so-called mad monk who is neither mad nor a monk, established himself at the heart of the court – where he remains.