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Dave Harker

Building the Old Bolsheviks
1881–1903

(2019)

First published here with the kind permission of the author.
© 2019 Dave Harker.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).

Maps

Abbreviations

Preface

The Stalinist Hall of Mirrors

1. Never have I witnessed such hideous butchery

2. The Emancipation of Labour Group

3. The prepared and the unprepared

4. We are uneducated and unorganised

5. On Agitation

6. Unions

7. Strikes

8. Cadre

9. The All-Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party

10. The Development of Capitalism in Russia

11. Iskra

12. The first breath of revolution

13. Propaganda of the higher sort

14. The intelligenty fall apart

15. Is our Party doomed to perpetual splits over trifles?

A working conclusion

Name Index

Sources

* * *

Dedication

For Ian

* * *

The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves

Karl Marx, 1867

* * *

Plekhanov once said to me about a critic of Marxism (I’ve forgotten his name): ‘First, let’s stick the convict’s badge on him, and then after that we’ll examine his case’. And I think that we must ‘stick the convict’s badge’ on anyone who tries to undermine Marxism, even if we do not go on to examine his case. That’s how every sound revolutionary should react. When you see a stinking heap of the road you don’t have to poke around in it to see what it is. Your nose tells you it’s shit, and you give it a wide berth.

Vladimir Ulyanov, 1900

* * *

It is possible for a prominent Party worker, the pride of the Party, a comrade who selflessly devoted his whole life to the cause of the working class, to disappear without trace ... We intend to publish a pamphlet with the biographies of these workers. Such a pamphlet will be the best answer to all the doubters and deprecators of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. Such a pamphlet will be the best guide to our young workers, who will learn from it how every thinking worker should live and conduct himself.

Vladimir Ulyanov, 1910

* * *

The generation of worker-Bolsheviks dating from the Iskra period has not only departed from the industrial field of combat, it has, with some minor exceptions, actually died out.

Semën Kanatchikov, 1934

* * *

Questions from A Worker Who Reads

Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will find the name of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished.
Who raised it up so many times? In what houses
Of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live?
Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished
Did the masons go? Great Rome
Is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph?
Had Byzantium, much praised in song,
Only palaces for its inhabitants? Even in fabled Atlantis
The night the ocean engulfed it
The drowning still bawled for their slaves.

The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Did he not have even a cook with him?
Philip of Spain wept when his armada
Went down. Was he the only one to weep?
Frederick the Second won the Seven Years’ War. Who
Else won it?

Every page a victory.
Who cooked the feast for the victors?
Every ten years a great man.
Who paid the bill?

So many reports.
So many questions.

Bertholt Brecht, 1935

It is often said that ‘the germ of all Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its beginning’. Well, I have no objection. Only, Bolshevism also contained many other germs, a mass of other germs, and those who lived through the enthusiasm of the first years of the first victorious socialist revolution ought not to forget it. To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy reveals in the corpse – and which he may have carried in him since his birth – is that very sensible?

Victor Serge, 1937

 
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Last updated: 5 December 2019