Preface

Building the Old Bolsheviks is a long overdue attempt to trace the complex and contradictory process of how the original Bolsheviks were built, and how they were active in their own building, between 1881 and 1903. This book will challenge haters of the devils Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, and worshippers at the shrines of saints Vladimir, Joseb and Lev, and it will seek to offer provisional answers to four questions. Who were the original Bolsheviks? How did they become revolutionaries? What were their ideas? How did they organise?

Russian revolutionaries were not socially homogeneous. A male intelligent and a female intelligentka almost always had a secondary, and often a higher education, but many became émigrés. A praktik was a practical underground worker who often had a primary education, at best, but almost all praktiki, and some intelligenty, risked their lives by working under dangerous tsarist conditions.

Very few Western European academics have translated any of the surviving full-length auto biographies and biographies of praktiki, and none of them appear to have had any practical involvement in a revolutionary organisation, while the microscopic number of writers with any revolutionary experience have just as ‘top down’ a perspective. Proletarian revolutions, by definition, come from ‘below’, but hardly any writers acknowledge that the thousands of praktiki and hundreds of intelligenty in Russia were often the real leaders for most of the time.

This study is by a retired academic with 25 years’ experience in a revolutionary socialist organisation and almost twice as much as a trade union activist. I have studied the lives of as many of the original Bolsheviks as I can, and I have tried not to let the comparatively rich sources for the usual intelligenty suspects dominate my account. I have not engaged with academic or sectarian squabbles, but since none of the works I have read are 100 percent reliable, I use ‘according to’ and ‘reportedly’ to indicate my misgivings. I include some information from the internet, for want of anything better, but it comes with the usual health warning.

Hundreds of intelligenty and praktiki will appear in this narrative, sometimes momentarily, and often with the barest biographical detail, and many will disappear into emigration, prison, deportation or exile, often without trial. Many survivors will reappear, after they escaped or completed their sentences, and some became active again, as did some émigrés who returned; but some will disappear. Tsarist prisons were often rife with fatal diseases, and when the temperature in Siberia reached 30 degrees below zero it burned the lungs, but it could reach 46 degrees below in Yakutsk, where Jewish ‘state criminals’ (political suspects) were sent, often without trial. To avoid making the well-known émigré intelligenty dominate this narrative, and avoid the bewildering multiplicity of klitchki (underground pseudonyms) which can make us forget that they were human beings, this book uses transliterations of given and family names. It also gives the transliterated titles of books and periodicals, and the names (and acronyms) of organisations.

The reader does not need a detailed knowledge of Russian geography, history or culture, but this book travels across the vast empire and much of Western Europe, following the refugees and émigrés who relied on the few states that would take them in. In this period British law stipulated that ‘fugitives’ should ‘never be surrendered for extradition if their crimes were of a political character’: the Swiss government resisted deporting foreigners charged with a political crime; and the French government gave limited sanctuary to political refugees.

The reader does not need to know what Anglophones call Belarussian, Estonian, Finnish, Georgian, German, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish or any of the 170 or so other languages which were spoken in the Russian empire. This book accepts the westernised names for the subject nations, but since the tsar sought to ‘Russify’ the names of their towns and cities, it uses the names favoured by the majority of their inhabitants. The capital of Suomi (Finland) was Helsinki, not Helsingfors, that of Eesti (Estonia) was Tallinn, not Reval, that of Latvija (Latvia) was Rïga, not Riga, that of Lietuva (Lithuania) was Vilnius, not Vilna, that of Krolestwo Polskie (the Kingdom of Poland) was Warszawa, not Warsaw, that of Ukrayina (Ukraine) was Kyiv, not Kiev, that of Sakartvelo (Georgia) was Tbilisi, not Tiflis, and that of Azsrbaycan (Azerbaijan) was Bakı, not Baku.

The Old Style Russian calendar was 12 days behind the western calendar until 1 March 1900, then 13 days behind until February 1918. This book uses the Russian calendar, but gives both dates where there is potential confusion, and it gives Russian weights, measures and distances in metric quantities.

I would particularly like to thank Dave Ayre, Einde O’Callaghan, Frank Ellis, Ian Birchall, Katy Turton, Paul Baker and Sebastian Budgen. I have tried to follow Marx’s mottos: ‘ignorance never yet helped anybody’, ‘doubt everything’ and ‘go your own way, and let people talk’. These are excellent guides, particularly if they are applied to the few well-known intelligenty; but much information about the original Bolsheviks comes to us via their subsequent murderers, so we can barely see most of them at the end of the Stalinist Hall of Mirrors.

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Last updated: 5 December 2019