The October strike did not develop according to plan. It began with the printers in Moscow, and then subsided slowly. The decisive fights had been planned by the par ties for the anniversary of the Bloody Sunday (January 22). That is why I was completing my work in my Finnish refuge without haste. But an accidental strike that was already in its last gasps suddenly spread to the railways and went off at a gallop. After October 10 of that year, the strike, now with political slogans, spread from Moscow throughout the country. No such general strike had ever been seen anywhere before. In many towns there were clashes with the troops. But, taken by and large, the October events remained on the plane of a political strike and never took on the character of an armed up rising. Absolutism lost its head, however, and retreated. On October 17 1 it announced the Constitutional Manifesto. It is true that injured Czarism retained the apparatus of power. The government policy was more than ever, to use the words of Witte, “a mixture of cowardice, blindness, treachery and stupidity.” Nevertheless, the revolution won its first victory, a victory not complete in itself, but one which promised much.
“The most important part of the Russian revolution of 1905,” the same Witte wrote later, “was, of course, in the slogan of the peasantry: ‘Give us land.’” With this one can agree. But Witte goes on to say: “I did not attribute much importance to the Soviet of Workers. Nor did it have any.” This only proves that even the most gifted of bureaucrats did not understand the significance of the events which were the last warning to the ruling classes. Witte died in time to avoid having to revise his views on the importance of the workers’ Soviets.
I arrived in St. Petersburg when the October strike was at its peak. The wave of strikes was sweeping farther and farther, but there was danger that the movement, not being controlled by a central organization, would die down without any results. I came from Finland with a plan for an elected non-party organization, with delegates who represented each a thousand workers. From a writer named Iordansky (later, the Soviet ambassador to Italy) I learned, on the day of my arrival, that the Mensheviks had already launched the slogan of an elected revolutionary organization on the basis of one delegate to five hundred men. This was the right thing to do. The part of the Bolshevik Central Committee then in St. Petersburg resolutely opposed an elected non-party organization because it was afraid of competition with the party. At the same time, the Bolshevik workers were entirely free of this fear. The sectarian attitude of the Bolshevik leaders toward the Soviet lasted until Lenin’s arrival in November.
One could write an instructive chapter on the leadership of the Leninists without Lenin. The latter towered so high above his nearest disciples that in his presence they felt that there was no need of their solving theoretical and tactical problems independently. When they happened to be separated from Lenin at a critical moment, they amazed one by their utter helplessness. This was the situation in the autumn of 1905, and again in the spring of 1917. In both instances, as in others of less importance historically, the rank-and-file of the party sensed the correct line of action much better than did their semi-leaders when the latter were thrown on their own resources. Lenin’s delay in arriving from abroad was one of the things that prevented the Bolshevik faction from gaining a leading position in the events of the first revolution.
I have already mentioned the fact that N.I. Sedova had been made prisoner during a cavalry raid on a Mayday meeting in the woods. She served about six months in prison and was then sent to live under police supervision at Tver. After the October Manifesto, she returned to St. Petersburg. Under the names of Mr. and Mrs. Vikentiyev, we rented a room in the apartment of a man who turned out to be a gambler on the stock exchange. Business in the stock-market was bad, and many a speculator had to take in roomers. Newsboys brought us all the published papers every morning. Our landlord would sometimes borrow them from my wife, read them, and gnash his teeth. His affairs were constantly getting worse. One day he burst into our room waving a newspaper wildly. “Look,” he yelled, as he pointed his finger at my newly written article Good morning, St. Petersburg janitors! “Look, they are now reaching out for the janitors! If I came across the jailbird I would shoot him with this gun!” And he pulled a gun out of his pocket and shook it in the air. He looked like a maniac. He wanted sympathy. My wife came to my office at the newspaper with this disturbing news. We felt we had to look for new quarters. But we didn’t have a free minute; so we trusted to fate. We stayed on with this despairing speculator until my arrest. Fortunately, neither he nor the police ever learned the identity of Vikentiyev. After my arrest our room was not even searched.
In the Soviet I was known by the name of Yanovsky, after the village in which I was born. In the press I wrote as Trotsky. I had to work for three newspapers. With Parvus I took over the tiny Russian Gazette and transformed it into a fighting organ for the masses. Within a few days the circulation rose from thirty thousand to one hundred thousand. A month later, it had reached the half-million mark. But our technical resources could not keep up with the growth of the paper. We were finally extricated from our difficulties by the government raid.
On November 13 (26), in alliance with the Mensheviks, we had started a big political organ, Nachalo (The Beginning). The paper’s circulation was jumping by leaps and bounds. Without Lenin, the Bolshevik Novaya Zhizn (The New Life) was rather drab. The Nachalo, on the other hand, had a tremendous success. I think this paper, more than any other publication of the past half-century, resembled its classic prototype, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which was published by Marx in 1848. Kamenev, one of the editors of the Novaya Zhizn, told me afterward how he watched the sale of newspapers at the stations when he was passing through by train. The St. Petersburg train was awaited by endless lines. The demand was only for revolutionary papers. “Nachalo, Nachalo, Nachalo,” came the cry of the waiting crowds. “Novaya Zhiin,” and then again, “Nachalo, Nachalo, Nachalo.” “Then I said to myself, with a feeling of resentment,” Kamenev confessed, “they do write better in the Nachalo than we do.”
Besides the Russian Gazette and Nachalo, I also wrote editorials for the Izvestia (The News), the official Soviet organ, as well as numerous appeals, manifestoes and resolutions. The fifty-two days of the existence of the first Soviet were filled to the brim with work the Soviet, the Executive Committee, endless meetings, and three newspapers. How we managed to live in this whirlpool is still not clear, even to me. But much of the past seems inconceivable because as we remember it we lose the element of activity; we look at ourselves from outside. Where as in those days we were sufficiently active. We not only whirled in the vortex, but we helped to create it. Everything was done in a hurry, but, after all, not so badly, and some things were even done very well. Our accountable editor, an old democrat, Dr. D.M. Hertzenstein, would drop in sometimes at the Nachalo offices, dressed in an immaculate Prince Albert coat. He would stand in the middle of the room and watch our chaos affectionately. A year later he had to answer in court the charges brought against him for the revolutionary fury of a newspaper over which he had not the least influence. The old man did not renounce us. On the contrary, with tears in his eyes, he told the court how, while editing the most popular pa per, we fed ourselves between work on stale “pirozhki” which the doorman brought, wrapped in paper, from the nearest bakery. The old man had to serve a year in prison for the revolution which did not succeed, for the émigré fraternity, and for stale “pirozhki.”
In his memoirs Witte wrote afterward that in 1905 “the vast majority of the people seemed to go mad.” Revolution appears to a conservative as collective madness only because it raises the “normal” insanity of social contradictions to the highest possible tension. Just as people dislike to recognize themselves in a bold caricature. And yet the entire modern development condenses, strains, and accentuates the contradictions and makes them unbearable, consequently preparing that state of mind when the great majority “goes mad.” But in such cases, the insane majority puts the straitjacket on the sane minority. Thanks to this, history keeps moving along.
A revolutionary chaos is not at all like an earthquake or a flood. In the confusion of a revolution, a new order begins to take shape instantly; men and ideas distribute themselves naturally in new channels. Revolution appears as utter madness only to those whom it sweeps aside and overthrows. To us it was different. We were in our own element, albeit a very stormy one. A time and place was found for everything. Some were even able to lead personal lives, to fall in love, to make new friends and actually to visit revolutionary theatres. Parvus, for instance, was so taken with a new satirical play that he bought fifty tickets for the next performance and invited his friends. (I must explain that the day before he had been paid for his books.) When he was arrested, the police found fifty theatre-tickets in his pockets, and for a long time racked their brains over this revolutionary puzzle. They did not know that Parvus did everything on a large scale.
The Soviet roused great masses of people. The workers supported it to a man. In the country, disturbances continued, as they did among the troops who were returning home from the Far East after the Peace of Portsmouth. But the guards and the Cossack regiments stood firm. All the elements that go to make a successful revolution were there, but they did not mature.
On October 18, the day after the promulgation of the manifesto, tens of thousands of people were standing in front of the University of St. Petersburg, aroused by the struggle and intoxicated with the joy of their first victory. I shouted to them from the balcony not to trust an incomplete victory, that the enemy was stubborn, that there were traps ahead; I tore the Czar’s manifesto into pieces and scattered them to the winds. But such political warnings only scratch the surface of the mass consciousness. The masses need the schooling of big events.
In this connection, I remember two scenes during the life of the St. Petersburg Soviet. One was on October 29, when the city was filled with rumors of pogroms being prepared by the Black Hundred. The delegates came straight from their workshops to the meeting, and showed samples of the weapons that were being made by the workers against the Black Hundred. They shook their knives, knuckles, daggers and wire whips in the air, but more in good humor than seriously, and with much jesting. They seemed to believe that their readiness to face the enemy was enough to solve the problem. Most of them did not seem to realize that it was a life-or-death struggle. But that they learned in the December days.
On the evening of December 3, the St. Petersburg Soviet was surrounded by troops. All the exits and entrances were closed. From the balcony where the Executive Committee was in session, I shouted down to the hundreds of delegates who were crowding the hall: “No resistance to be made, no arms to be surrendered.” The arms were revolvers. And then, in the meeting-hall, already surrounded on all sides by detachments of infantry, cavalry and artillery, the workers began to wreck their arms. They did it with practised hands, striking a Mauser with a Browning and a Browning with a Mauser. And this time it did not have the sound of a jest, as it had on October 29. In the clashing and creaking of twisting metal one heard the gnashing teeth of a proletariat who for the first time fully realized that a more formidable and more ruthless effort was necessary to overthrow and crush the enemy.
The partial victory of the October strike had for me a tremendous theoretical as well as political importance. It was not the opposition of the liberal bourgeoisie, not the elemental risings of the peasantry or the terrorist acts of the intelligentsia, but the strike of the workers that for the first time brought Czarism to its knees. The revolutionary leadership of the proletariat revealed itself as an incontrovertible fact. I fell that the theory of permanent revolution had withstood its first test successfully. Revolution was obviously opening up to the proletariat the prospect of seizing the power. The years of reaction which soon followed failed to make me move from this position. But from these premises I also drew my conclusions about the West. If the young proletariat of Russia could be so formidable, how mighty the revolutionary power of the proletariat of the more advanced countries would be!
Writing afterward in the inexact and slovenly manner which is peculiar to him, Lunacharsky described my revolutionary concept as follows: “Comrade Trotsky held in 1905 that the two revolutions (the bourgeois and socialist), although they do not coincide, are bound to each other in such a way that they make a permanent revolution. After they have entered upon the revolutionary period through a bourgeois political revolution, the Russian section of the world, along with the rest, will not be able to............