作者：Casey Harison

本文僅為分享，不代表本人言論意見，嚴禁轉載。為了閱讀體驗，本文會按章節(jié)投稿，請使用網(wǎng)頁端閱覽。

Russian émigrés and the revolution of 1905

This shift in the revolutionary tradition from France to Russia—and the role of 1871 and 1905 in this transition—may be discerned not only from French voices but also from Russians living and writing in Paris, who joined in the “conversation” about 1905 through their writings, public talks and via participation in demonstrations like the pilgrimages to Père-Lachaise. Many of these persons also belonged to expatriate political organizations, although few of them seem to have had the interest or opportunity to speak to working-class groups. Virtually alone among them, Lenin recognized the practical instruction to be gained from the history of the Commune. While most émigrés approached the history of 1871 and any parallels it may have had with Russia in 1905 skeptically, Lenin, who was in Paris periodically after 1900 and who lived there between 1908 and 1912, was an extraordinary figure at this moment for insisting on the lessons the Commune still had to offer.(82)

Russians had lived in Paris as expatriates or émigrés for many decades. Some were aristocrats, some ordinary workers, and others members of the intelligentsia or self-proclaimed revolutionaries. Indeed by 1904–5, Paris may well have been “the grand headquarters of Russian Revolutionaries in Europe.”(83) Among them was the Social Democrat Boris Krichevsky (1866–1919), the editor of the “Economist” newspaper Rabocheye delo and author of The Proletariat and the Russian Revolution, which he wrote in late January 1905, just after Bloody Sunday. At this early stage, Krichevsky saw parallels between Russia and the summer of 1789 in France rather than with the Commune of 1871, likening Father Georgii Gapon, the Orthodox priest who organized the march on the Winter Palace that ended with Bloody Sunday, to Camille Desmoulins, the journalist who had helped galvanize the Paris crowds in July 1789.(84) Krichevsky thought the “martyring of the proletariat” in January 1905 would not necessarily lead to more violence—in other words, that a Russian revolution would not have to follow the pattern of the French Revolution—partly because the physical ground for revolution had changed. Citing the effect of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris during the Second Empire, he argued that the tactic of using barricades to make an insurrection had been “neutered” by the laying of long, broad boulevards, which made the movement of the state’s armed forces easier than ever. Since St. Petersburg had broad streets similar to those of Paris (he did not consider Moscow or other Russian cities in his analysis), barricades and street-fighting were no longer practical. Moreover, in the past the “bourgeoisie” had dispatched workers to the streets and then had themselves reaped the political rewards. But now the general strike—the only method of “combat” he considered “truly proletarian”—could be used in place of barricades.(85)

For expatriates like Maksim M. Kovalevsky (1851–1916), a periodic resident of Paris and the author of The Russian Crisis (1906), the task of Russian émigrés was essentially the same as that of French émigrés in Amsterdam before 1789: to criticize the current regime and to rally European and international support.(86) Kovalevsky had taught at the University of Moscow in the 1870s and 1880s and possessed a long résumé as a critic of capitalism. He was much influenced by the history of the French Revolution, by Marx and by the experiences of Russian Populism in the 1860s–1880s. Having come from a wealthy family, Kovalevsky was able to use his financial resources to found a short-lived Russian School of Social Sciences in Paris (where Lenin taught in 1903). Writing after the 1905 revolution in Russia had reached a crescendo, Kovalevsky mostly recognized where things had gone wrong. He believed the December rising in Moscow reflected the desire of young workers for a “better future,” with its defeat caused in part by the “twisted and tortuous” streets of central Moscow, which had also contributed to the ferocity of the struggle. Because the insurrection had not elicited much popular support, there was little doubt that this style of urban rebellion that was so much associated with nineteenth-century Paris had been “once and forever strangled.”(87) There were obvious analogies between the experiences of Paris in 1871 and Moscow in 1905, but Kovalevsky only hinted at them in The Russian Crisis.(88)

Charles Léon Rappoport (1865–1941) was one of the best-known and most influential Russian émigrés living in Paris in 1905. Born in Lithuanian Russia in 1865 , he had joined the revolutionary group People’s Will after its assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. By the end of the decade Rappoport had made his way to Western Europe, earning a doctorate from the University of Berne in 1897 and becoming a French citizen two years later. In France, Rappoport, turned from activism toward writing, which he did under the pseudonym of “Ossip.” As a “revolutionary Marxist,” he was a supporter of Guesde, and though parting ways with Jaurès around 1902, he was also a founding member of the SFIO. In future years, Rappoport was enthusiastic about the revolution of February 1917, even as he remained “wary” of Lenin, particularly after the Bolsheviks dismissed the Constituent Assembly in early 1918. Rappoport supported the adoption of the 21 Conditions for membership in the Comintern at the Tours Congress of 1920, and joined the PCF when it formed at the same time. Yet, he wrote little about the revolution of 1905 and the Commune, even in response to Lenin, whom Rappoport challenged on many occasions.(89) His virtual silence on 1905 stands in marked contrast to Lenin’s keen interest.

By and large, Russian émigrés in Paris, like the French commentators described earlier, declined to identify practical, positive lessons from the Commune evoked by the revolution of 1905. In this sense, Lenin played the prominent and proactive role in the transition of the revolutionary tradition from France to Russia. In noting that the revolution of 1905 “revived the memory of the Commune with more than a hint of mimicry,” Georges Haupt considered the writings of Lenin at this time as critical in “producing a shift both in the imagery of 1871 and its use as an example.”(90) There is an early hint of Lenin’s appreciation of the Commune’s instructive history in his March 1905 introduction to a work by the former Communard general Gustave-Paul Cluseret. Cluseret’s work on the “rules” for conducting a “war in the streets” was an uncompromising depiction of the necessities of urban warfare, which Lenin praised for its educational value.(91) However, Lenin’s grasp of the practical lessons of the Commune derived not so much from Cluseret as from his reading of Marx’s The Civil War in France. It was particularly Marx’s belief in the authenticity of 1871 as a working class revolution that Lenin seized upon. As an émigré in Western Europe, Lenin tried to make the Commune “relevant” again, taking it up as the real-life historical drama by which to rethink the “problem of revolution” and as a way of articulating a “dictatorship of the proletariat”—even though, in recognizing its failures, he also described the Commune as “a government such as ours should not be.”(92) Perhaps predictably given the politicized and disputed history of the Commune, once the Bolsheviks came to power they would readjust, yet again, the use and meaning of its legacy.

Lenin’s first substantive analysis of the Commune came in 1905 while he was living in Geneva.(93) In “Plan of a Lecture on the Commune,” he criticized those, like Kautsky, who harped upon the failures of 1871. Rather, Lenin wrote, today’s revolutionaries should imitate the Commune’s “[p]ractical, successful steps, illuminating the true way.”(94) Lenin also saw similarities between the Commune and the failed December rising in Moscow. The comparison was an obvious one, even though the events in Moscow had not achieved even the limited success of the Commune. Still, few observers had made the connection. In linking the Paris and Moscow rebellions, Lenin could symbolically tie together the two country’s revolutionary traditions, thus bolstering the emerging Bolshevik interpretation of events.95 Some Russian revolutionaries disagreed with Lenin. Georgii Plekahnov, the founder of the Russian Social Democratic movement, likened the model of the Commune to “ancient history.”(96) But others, including Trotsky who was personally active in Russia in 1905 and whose formulation of the theory of “permanent revolution” dates from this period, also saw this as a moment to make 1871 “relevant” again.(97)

But before 1917 it was especially Lenin who used the Commune as the very model by which to rethink the central “problem of revolution”: how could power be won by the proletariat, and once gained how could that power be sustained?98 Coming to grips with the parallel histories of 1871 and 1905 also gave Lenin the chance to more precisely integrate into his thinking the concept of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” In a speech of March 1908, he elaborated upon more “Lessons of the Commune.” Among the actions the Communards should have taken, Lenin reiterated two points about military tactics made earlier by Marx: the Parisian National Guard should have gone on the offensive immediately against the “Versaillais” (the regular French army arrayed against the Communards), and the Guard should have been organized in a more professional manner. Moreover, the Commune should have “l(fā)et the bourgeoisie bear the responsibility for the national humiliation” since this would have permitted it to unmask its true “proletarian” face, the better to instigate a national and social revolution. Otherwise, the Communards’ “fatal mistake” had been to emphasize the defeat in the war against Prussia as their inspiration, instead of the war’s social goals. Finally, the Communards had sometimes behaved timidly toward their “class enemies.” The Commune should have seized the Bank of France, affected more stringent economic controls and, in general, more resolutely battled its opponents.(99)

In contrast to many contemporaries, including the French writers described earlier, Lenin persistently identified a number of positive lessons from 1871: it revealed patriotism to be illusory and demonstrated that “imperialist” war had to be turned into civil war; the Commune also exposed the fragility of bourgeois “democracy” and the true working spirit of proletarian government; likewise, it taught the European proletariat “to pose concretely the tasks of the socialist revolution.” But the special significance of the Commune for Lenin lay “in the fact that it endeavored to crush, to smash to its very foundations, the bourgeois state apparatus, the bureaucratic, judicial, military and police machine, and to replace it by a self-governing, mass workers’ organization in which there was no division between legislative and executive power.”(100)

These lessons, nearly all of them derived directly from Marx, were incorporated by Lenin into The State and Revolution. Completed in August and September 1917, this text is one of the landmark documents of the twentieth century. In explaining and legitimating the revolutionary conditions in Russia through the prism of the Commune’s experience, it also offered a revised and newly relevant picture of 1871.(101) No longer were the Communards simply the brave but ultimately misguided martyrs of an unplanned and doomed enterprise. Now they were revealed by Lenin as the true revolutionary precursors described by Marx, and the Commune itself as the practical forerunner of what was to become the Soviet Union. In his own day Marx had insisted upon the importance of the events of 1871, but it would take the startling success of revolution in Russia in 1917 and the assumption of power by the Bolsheviks, via Lenin’s “take” on 1905, to implant the new historical meaning of the Commune.