Kez
11th June 2002, 16:08
Often on the board have been discussions of guerilla warfare and the viability of such now, i have always been confused on the topic, and i found this article helped, see if it helps you.
http://www.marxist.com/bolshevism/part3-3.html
The Question of Guerrilla War
In the period 1905-06, the revolutionary movement included an element of “guerrilla warfare”, with partisan detachments, armed expropriation, and other forms of armed struggle. But the fighting squads were always closely linked to the workers’ organisations. Thus, the Moscow military committee included not just RSDLP members, but also SRs, trade unionists (printers) and students. As we have seen, partisan groups were used for the purpose of defence against pogromists and the Black Hundred gangs. They also helped to protect meetings against police raids, where the presence of armed workers’ detachments was frequently an important factor in preventing violence. Occasionally, such groups could pass over to the offensive, though the target was not the armed forces of the state (against which they could not hope to win in a straight fight), but strike-breakers and fascists. One armed workers’ group staged an attack on a Black Hundred group in the Tver inn in Petersburg in January 1906. Where conflicts with the police took place, it was usually in connection with the release of political prisoners, as in the daring raid on the Riga police department in order to secure the release of arrested Latvian revolutionaries. Precisely in Latvia the guerrilla movement reached its highest intensity when, in December 1905, a number of towns were actually captured by armed detachments of insurgent workers, agricultural labourers and peasants before the uprising in Latvia was brutally suppressed by punitive expeditions under tsarist generals.
Other tasks included the capture of arms, the assassination of spies and police agents and also bank raids for funds. The initiative for the setting up of such guerrilla groups was frequently taken by the workers themselves. The Bolsheviks strove to gain the leadership of these groups, to give them an organised and disciplined form and provide them with a clear plan of action. There were, of course, serious risks entailed here. All kinds of adventurist, declassed and shady elements could get mixed up in these groups, which, once isolated from the movement of the masses, tended to degenerate along criminal lines to the point where they would become indistinguishable from mere groups of bandits. In addition to this, they were also wide open to penetration by provocateurs. As a rule it is far easier for the agents of the state to infiltrate militaristic and terrorist organisations than genuine revolutionary parties, especially where they are composed of educated cadres bound together by strong ideological ties, although even the latter are not immune to penetration, as we shall see later. However, Lenin was well aware of the dangers of degeneration posed by the existence of the armed groups. Strict discipline and firm control by party organisations and experienced revolutionary cadres partially guarded against such tendencies. But the only real control was that of the revolutionary mass movement.
As long as the guerrilla units acted as auxiliaries to the mass movement (that is, in the course of the revolutionary upswing) they played a useful and progressive role. But, wherever the guerrilla groups were separated from the mass revolutionary movement, they inevitably tended to degenerate. For this reason, Lenin considered it completely inadmissible to prolong their existence, once it was clearly established that the revolutionary movement was in irreversible decline. Once this stage was reached, he immediately called for the dissolution of all the guerrilla groups. In the initial stages, however, they played a positive role. There were many heroic and self-sacrificing people involved, working under the strict control of the Party. Such a man was the famous Armenian revolutionary Semeno Arshakovich Ter-Petrosan (Kamo).
One of the main reasons for continuing the tactic after the defeat of the December uprising was simply that the party was short of funds. Up to that time, the party had relied to a great extent on big donations from wealthy sympathisers. In the period of constitutional agitation before 1905, and during the initial period of the revolution, a large part of the “progressive” bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia looked upon the Social Democracy with approval and even admiration. They tended to see it as merely as a more radical expression of the bourgeois-democratic movement. The activities of the revolutionary students and workers were regarded with indulgence, and even the kind of sneaking admiration which comes from the nostalgia for a lost youth. And as is natural in the outlook of hard-headed men of money, an element of calculation was involved. The bourgeoisie hoped to use the revolutionary movement as a bargaining chip in its negotiations with the autocracy for a share in government. But after October 1905, the attitude of the liberal bourgeoisie began to change. The tsar’s manifesto having satisfied their basic demands, their enthusiasm rapidly began to cool. The Moscow rising finally convinced them that the workers meant business. This was getting to be a dangerous game! The reaction bared its teeth, and like Pontius Pilate, the liberals washed their hands of the whole affair. “We told you not to go too far! Don’t provoke the reaction! Why not accept what’s on offer? After all, half a loaf is better than a prison sentence.”
The sudden drying up of funds placed the party in a difficult position. Under attack from all sides, the Party was desperately short of resources, especially as the bourgeois liberals had turned against the revolution. Many former wealthy businessmen and intellectual fellow travellers, who had earlier been prepared to give money to the revolutionaries for a variety of motives, now hastily moved away, suddenly recalling that they had careers and families to worry about. For the working class, however, there was no-where to retreat. This was now a life or death struggle. It was at this point that the question of expropriations assumed a burning importance. Kamo already had a long record of revolutionary activity, including imprisonment and escape from Baku prison, before he became famous for his part in the armed struggle. Cool-headed, brave and efficient, Kamo was the personification of the best type of Bolshevik activist. After the mutinies at Sveaborg and Kronstadt, the peasant movement grew in intensity. There seemed to be every possibility that the revolution was entering into a new stage. The question of accumulating arms acquired a fresh urgency. Kamo was in charge of obtaining weapons, but there was a severe problem of cash. At the Stockholm Congress the Mensheviks had got control of the Central Committee, and they were not keen on the idea of arming. “Letters and telegrams to the Central Committee went unanswered. Requests for money remained like a voice crying in the wilderness.”[43]
Kamo did not flinch from taking the necessary action to arm the party. In a series of spectacular bank raids which drove the police frantic, large sums of money were “expropriated”. Yet Kamo himself lived very modestly on 50 kopeks a day. Like other Bolshevik partisans, he was totally dedicated to the party and the cause of the working class. His legendary bravery and audacity were shown by the Tiflis bank raid in the summer of 1907. Travelling on a forged passport as a well-known Georgian nobleman, Kamo went to Tiflis to organise a major expropriation. On the morning of 23 June, dressed as an army officer, although he was suffering from wounds caused by an accidental explosion, Kamo led a spectacular attack which netted 250,000 roubles—a huge amount—from the State Bank. His later experiences read like an adventure novel. Having escaped to Germany, Kamo was arrested in Berlin with a suitcase full of dynamite. He had been betrayed by the agent provocateur Zhitomirsky.
Accused and indicted as a “terrorist-anarchist”, for four years he pretended to be mad. As a punishment for his conduct, he was placed naked in a basement cell at sub-zero temperatures for nine days. Sent to a prison for the criminally insane, he kept up the act. For four months he never lay down but stood with his face to a corner, standing first on one leg then another. The brutal treatment to which he was subjected included force-feeding, during which several of his teeth were broken. On two occasions he attempted suicide by hanging and opening his veins with a sharp bone. At first, the authorities believed he was feigning madness, but after six months of torture, they began to believe that his madness was the genuine article. Finally, in March 1909, the doctors decided that the state of the mentally deficient “anarcho-terrorist” Ter-Petrosan was quite satisfactory, that he was quiet and rational, and even able to perform handicraft and gardening. Being returned to prison, Kamo again feigned madness and was subjected to more torture. “Civilised” German doctors inserted needles under his fingernails, his body was burnt with red-hot irons, but to no avail. Kamo’s body was permanently scarred, but he kept up the pretence of insanity until finally the authorities decided that the upkeep of this foreign lunatic should not be paid by the German people, and ordered his extradition to Russia. Finally, he effected yet another daring escape from a mental hospital in Tiflis.
In her biography of Lenin, Krupskaya recalls how Kamo visited them in Paris: “He was very distressed to hear that a rupture had occurred between Ilyich and Bogdanov and Krassin. He was greatly attached to all three. Besides, he was unable to grasp the situation that had developed during the years he had spent in prison. Ilyich told him how things stood.
“Kamo asked me to buy him some almonds. He sat in our Paris kitchen eating almonds, as if in his native Georgia, and telling us about his arrest in Berlin, about the way he had simulated insanity, about the sparrow he had tamed in prison, etc. Listening to his stories, Ilyich felt extremely sorry for that brave, devoted, childishly naive man with the warm heart, who was so eager to perform deeds of valour, but who now did not know what to turn his hand to. His schemes were fantastic. Ilyich did not argue with him, but tried delicately to bring him back to earth with suggestions about organising the transportation of literature and so forth. In the end it was decided that Kamo was to go to Belgium, have an operation on his eyes there (he was cross-eyed, and this always gave him away to the police spies), and then make his way south to Russia and the Caucasus. Ilyich examined Kamo’s coat and said: ‘Haven’t you got a warm coat? You’ll be cold in this, walking about on deck.’ Ilyich himself always promenaded the deck incessantly when travelling by boat. Hearing that Kamo had no other coat, Ilyich got out the soft grey cloak which his mother had given him as a present in Stockholm and of which he was very fond, and gave it to Kamo. His talk with Ilyich, and the latter’s kindness, somewhat soothed Kamo.[44]
Like many others who had played an active part in the revolution, Kamo was now like a fish out of water in the period of reaction. The inactivity, the isolation, the pressures of émigré existence, all depressed and frustrated him. He soon returned to underground activity in his native Caucasus, where the revolutionary movement was on the eve of a new awakening. Re-arrested, he was given four death sentences, later commuted to 20 years’ penal servitude as a sign of the tsar’s magnanimity on the three hundredth anniversary of the Romanov dynasty. Kamo was sent to the penal prison at Kharkov where he sat out the war sewing dresses, underclothes and boots in the company of common criminals who learned to respect the man they called Big Ivan. Even in this hellish place, the spirit of revolt did not die. In order not to have to take his hat off in the presence of the warders, he went bare-headed even in the coldest weather. Kamo was only released from this place by the February revolution, after which he immediately rejoined the ranks of the Bolshevik Party and played a heroic role in the Civil War. Having survived all these trials and tribulations, ironically, he died in a motor-cycle accident in 1922.
Lenin’s Attitude to Guerrillaism
The question of guerrilla war was closely linked to the perspective for a revival of the revolution, and the possibility that the peasant movement might give an impulse to the movement of the workers in the cities. The apparently theoretical discussions at the Fourth Congress on the agrarian question were but a pale reflection of a stark reality. The peasants’ rebellion was on the upswing. Month by month the violent outbursts in the villages increased in number and intensity. But the consolidation of the Stolypin reaction forced Lenin to reconsider the position. A turning-point was the defeat of the mutinies at Sveaborg and Kronstadt. Whereas the Mensheviks had already given the movement up as lost, Lenin’s tactics were directed towards winning over the left petty bourgeois, the poor peasants to the idea of an armed uprising, a movement in the villages which in turn could link up with the movement in the towns to bring about the overthrow of the autocracy. Nor was this perspective as utopian as might appear. While the working class of Petersburg and Moscow had suffered defeat, the movement in the villages was just beginning to get seriously underway. This in turn had an effect on the mass of peasants in uniform who made up the overwhelming majority of the tsarist army. Shaken by military defeat and months of revolution, the mood of the men in grey overcoats was becoming ever more unsettled. The critical point was reached on the night of the 17 July. A mutiny of soldiers and sailors erupted in the Sveaborg fortress near Helsingfors. When the St Petersburg RSDLP committee got news of the uprising it sent representatives to the sailors in an attempt to persuade them to postpone the action. But it was already too late.
Although the RSDLP’s military organisation participated in the revolt —two Lieutenants, A.P. Yemelyanov and Y.L. Kokhansky, were Social Democrats—the rising was mainly under the influence of the Social Revolutionaries. Out of ten artillery companies, seven participated actively in the rising, which advanced revolutionary-democratic slogans: down with the autocracy, for freedom for the people, land to the peasants. The Finnish workers took action in support of the mutineers. A general strike was begun in Helsingfors on July 18, spreading to other towns. The movement lasted for three days, but, badly prepared and with no clearly thought-out plan of action, subjected to a heavy bombardment from pro-government ships, the Sveaborg rising was crushed. The mutineers were handed over to the tender mercies of the tsarist courts-martial. Forty-three men were executed and hundreds others sent to penal servitude or imprisoned. This was no isolated case. Other mutinies occurred elsewhere. The news of the Sveaborg events caused a ferment in the naval garrison in Kronstadt and an actual mutiny on the cruiser Pamyat’ Azova near Revel. It seems that in this case, the RSDLP had been planning an action, but was disrupted by the arrest of the local military and workers’ organisation on July 9. The government was aware of the plans for an uprising from its network of spies and quickly acted to smother the revolt. More than 2,500 Kronstadt mutineers were arrested. As in Sveaborg, the courts-martial were pitiless: 36 men were sentenced to death; 130 were sentenced to penal servitude; a further 316 were imprisoned, and 935 sent to corrective battalions.
The impact of the peasant movement was clearly discernible in the mutinies, which also contained the negative side of all peasant jacqueries in history—lack of perspective and formlessness—which enables a small force of determined disciplined officers used to command to subordinate to their will a far larger number of troops who lack discipline, organisation and a clear plan of action, and who have been conditioned all their lives to obey. These were indeed the last throes of the revolution. After Sveaborg, the general outcome was no longer seriously in doubt. Reaction was triumphant, and celebrated its victory in the customary fashion—with a new wave of arrests, summary court martials, shootings, lock-outs. Unemployment soared. And as Trotsky explained at the time, this onset of mass unemployment, coming in the wake of a severe political defeat, could not have the effect of reviving the fighting spirits of the workers, but precisely the opposite. The workers were stunned and disoriented. It would take time for them to recover. Trotsky predicted—and he was shown to be correct—that there would be no revival of the revolutionary movement in Russia until there was some kind of upturn in the economy.
Marxists have always conceived the peasant war as an auxiliary of the workers in the struggle for power. That position was first developed by Marx during the German revolution of 1848, when he argued that the German revolution could only triumph as a second edition of the Peasants’ War. That is to say, the movement of the workers in the towns would have to draw behind it the peasant masses. The Bolsheviks also explained that it was the workers in the cities who had to lead the peasants behind them. It is important to note that during the Russian revolution the industrial working class represented no more than 10 per cent of the population. Yet the proletariat played the leading role in the Russian revolution, drawing behind itself the multi-millioned mass of poor peasants—the natural ally of the proletariat. No reference or hint at the possibility that the peasantry can bring about a socialist revolution can be found in the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. The reason for that is the extreme heterogeneity of the peasantry as a class. It is divided into many layers, from the landless labourers (who are really rural proletarians) to the rich peasants who employ other peasants as wage labourers. They do not have a common interest and therefore cannot play an independent role in society. Historically they have supported different classes or groups in the cities. The only class able to lead a successful socialist revolution is the working class. This is not for sentimental reasons but because of the place it occupies in society and the collective character of its role in production.
By its very nature, guerrilla warfare is the classical weapon of the peasantry, and not the working class. It is suited for conditions of armed struggle in inaccessible rural areas—mountains, jungle, etc.—where the difficulty of the terrain makes it complicated to deploy regular troops and where the support of the rural masses provides the necessary logistic support and cover for the guerrillas to operate. In the course of a revolution in a backward country with a sizeable peasant population, guerrilla warfare can act as a useful auxiliary for the revolutionary struggle of the workers in the towns. But it would never have occured to Lenin to put forward the idea of guerrillaism as a substitute for the conscious movement of the working class. Guerrilla tactics, from a Marxist standpoint, are only permissible as a subordinate and auxiliary part of the socialist revolution. This was precisely Lenin’s position in 1905. It had nothing in common with the kind of individual terrorist tactics pursued by the Narodnaya Volya and their heirs, the Social Revolutionary Party, still less the insane tactics of the modern terrorists and “urban guerrilla” organisations which are the very antithesis of a genuine Leninist policy.[A]
In his article on guerrilla war, Lenin gives a graphic picture of the situation: “The phenomenon in which we are interested is the armed struggle. It is conducted by individuals and by small groups. Some belong to revolutionary organisations, while others (the majority in certain parts of Russia) do not belong to any organisation. Armed struggle pursues two different aims, which must be strictly distinguished: in the first place, this struggle aims at assassinating individuals, chiefs and subordinates in the army and police; in the second place, it aims at the confiscation of monetary funds both from the government and from private persons. The confiscated funds go partly into the treasury of the Party, partly for the special purpose of arming and preparing for an uprising, and partly for the maintenance of persons engaged in the struggle we are describing. The big expropriations (such as the Caucasian, involving over 200,000 roubles, and Moscow, involving 875,000 roubles) went in fact first and foremost to revolutionary parties—small expropriations go mostly, and sometimes entirely, to the maintenance of the ‘expropriators’. This form of struggle undoubtedly became widely developed and extensive only in 1906, i.e., after the December uprising. The intensification of the political crisis to the point of an armed struggle and, in particular, the intensification of poverty, hunger and unemployment in town and country, was one of the important causes of the struggle by the vagabond elements of the population, the lumpenproletariat and anarchist groups.”
Lenin insisted that armed struggle must be part of the revolutionary mass movement, and specified the conditions in which it was permissible: “1) the sentiments of the masses be taken into account; 2) the conditions of the working class movement in the given locality be reckoned with, and 3) care be taken that the forces of the proletariat should not be frittered away.” And he also made it clear that, far from being a panacea, guerrilla war was only one possible method of struggle permissible only “at a time when the mass movement has actually reached the point of an uprising”.
The danger of degeneration inherent in such activity becomes an absolute certainty the moment the guerrilla groups are isolated from the mass movement. In the period following 1906, when the workers’ movement was in decline and the revolutionaries were reeling from a series of body-blows, the guerrilla organisations increasingly displayed signs that they were ceasing to be useful auxiliary organs of the revolutionary party, and becoming transformed into groups of adventurers, or even worse. Even while defending the possibility of guerrilla tactics as a kind of rearguard action against reaction at a moment when he still expected the revolutionary movement to revive, Lenin warned against “anarchism, Blanquism, the old terrorism, the acts of individuals isolated from the masses, which demoralise the workers, repel wide strata of the population, disorganise the movement and injure the revolution,” and added that “examples in support of this appraisal can easily be found in the events reported every day in the newspapers”.[45]
As time passed, Lenin came to understand that the tactic of expropriation had outlived its usefulness. He was already coming round to this point of view before the Tiflis raid. But, given the acute shortage of funds, accepted the windfall by way of exception. However, the money from the raid did the party no good. The entire sum was in 500 rouble banknotes, impossible to exchange in Russia. The money was sent abroad, but to no result. The provocateur Zhitomirsky, who occupied a key position in the Bolsheviks’ foreign organisation, alerted the police to the scheme. Litvinov, the future Soviet ambassador to London, was arrested while attempting to exchange the notes in Paris. The same fate awaited Olga Ravich, who later became Zinoviev’s wife, in Stockholm. But although the booty from Tiflis proved useless to the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks seized upon it to make a scandal that dragged on for years. The question of expropriations was also the occasion for heated discussions within the Bolshevik faction, where it soured relations. Finally, at the insistence of the Mensheviks, the question of expropriations was placed on the agenda of the Party control commission in January 1910. A resolution was passed condemning expropriations as an inadmissible violation of party discipline, while recognising that the participants in these actions had not meant to damage the labour movement, but had merely been guided by “a faulty understanding of Party interests”.[46]
Not everyone who participated in the guerrilla movement was a Kamo. As the reaction dragged on and the workers’ movement remained in a depressed state, the dangers of the movement falling into the hands of declassed elements and actual criminals multiplied. Prominent among those who, in contradiction with Lenin’s position, persisted in the tactic of guerrillaism and expropriations long after the conditions for them had ceased to exist was Koba-Stalin. Such tactics seriously undermined the movement. Olminsky, who was close to Lenin at this time, wrote: “Not a few of the fine youth perished on the gibbet; others degenerated; still others were disappointed in the revolution. At the time people at large began to confound revolutionists with ordinary bandits. Later, when the revival of the labour movement began, that movement was slowest in those cities where the ‘exes’ (expropriations) had been most numerous. (As an example, I might name Baku and Saratov.)”[47]
This is where i adopted the name of Kamo
Comrade Kamo
http://www.marxist.com/bolshevism/part3-3.html
The Question of Guerrilla War
In the period 1905-06, the revolutionary movement included an element of “guerrilla warfare”, with partisan detachments, armed expropriation, and other forms of armed struggle. But the fighting squads were always closely linked to the workers’ organisations. Thus, the Moscow military committee included not just RSDLP members, but also SRs, trade unionists (printers) and students. As we have seen, partisan groups were used for the purpose of defence against pogromists and the Black Hundred gangs. They also helped to protect meetings against police raids, where the presence of armed workers’ detachments was frequently an important factor in preventing violence. Occasionally, such groups could pass over to the offensive, though the target was not the armed forces of the state (against which they could not hope to win in a straight fight), but strike-breakers and fascists. One armed workers’ group staged an attack on a Black Hundred group in the Tver inn in Petersburg in January 1906. Where conflicts with the police took place, it was usually in connection with the release of political prisoners, as in the daring raid on the Riga police department in order to secure the release of arrested Latvian revolutionaries. Precisely in Latvia the guerrilla movement reached its highest intensity when, in December 1905, a number of towns were actually captured by armed detachments of insurgent workers, agricultural labourers and peasants before the uprising in Latvia was brutally suppressed by punitive expeditions under tsarist generals.
Other tasks included the capture of arms, the assassination of spies and police agents and also bank raids for funds. The initiative for the setting up of such guerrilla groups was frequently taken by the workers themselves. The Bolsheviks strove to gain the leadership of these groups, to give them an organised and disciplined form and provide them with a clear plan of action. There were, of course, serious risks entailed here. All kinds of adventurist, declassed and shady elements could get mixed up in these groups, which, once isolated from the movement of the masses, tended to degenerate along criminal lines to the point where they would become indistinguishable from mere groups of bandits. In addition to this, they were also wide open to penetration by provocateurs. As a rule it is far easier for the agents of the state to infiltrate militaristic and terrorist organisations than genuine revolutionary parties, especially where they are composed of educated cadres bound together by strong ideological ties, although even the latter are not immune to penetration, as we shall see later. However, Lenin was well aware of the dangers of degeneration posed by the existence of the armed groups. Strict discipline and firm control by party organisations and experienced revolutionary cadres partially guarded against such tendencies. But the only real control was that of the revolutionary mass movement.
As long as the guerrilla units acted as auxiliaries to the mass movement (that is, in the course of the revolutionary upswing) they played a useful and progressive role. But, wherever the guerrilla groups were separated from the mass revolutionary movement, they inevitably tended to degenerate. For this reason, Lenin considered it completely inadmissible to prolong their existence, once it was clearly established that the revolutionary movement was in irreversible decline. Once this stage was reached, he immediately called for the dissolution of all the guerrilla groups. In the initial stages, however, they played a positive role. There were many heroic and self-sacrificing people involved, working under the strict control of the Party. Such a man was the famous Armenian revolutionary Semeno Arshakovich Ter-Petrosan (Kamo).
One of the main reasons for continuing the tactic after the defeat of the December uprising was simply that the party was short of funds. Up to that time, the party had relied to a great extent on big donations from wealthy sympathisers. In the period of constitutional agitation before 1905, and during the initial period of the revolution, a large part of the “progressive” bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia looked upon the Social Democracy with approval and even admiration. They tended to see it as merely as a more radical expression of the bourgeois-democratic movement. The activities of the revolutionary students and workers were regarded with indulgence, and even the kind of sneaking admiration which comes from the nostalgia for a lost youth. And as is natural in the outlook of hard-headed men of money, an element of calculation was involved. The bourgeoisie hoped to use the revolutionary movement as a bargaining chip in its negotiations with the autocracy for a share in government. But after October 1905, the attitude of the liberal bourgeoisie began to change. The tsar’s manifesto having satisfied their basic demands, their enthusiasm rapidly began to cool. The Moscow rising finally convinced them that the workers meant business. This was getting to be a dangerous game! The reaction bared its teeth, and like Pontius Pilate, the liberals washed their hands of the whole affair. “We told you not to go too far! Don’t provoke the reaction! Why not accept what’s on offer? After all, half a loaf is better than a prison sentence.”
The sudden drying up of funds placed the party in a difficult position. Under attack from all sides, the Party was desperately short of resources, especially as the bourgeois liberals had turned against the revolution. Many former wealthy businessmen and intellectual fellow travellers, who had earlier been prepared to give money to the revolutionaries for a variety of motives, now hastily moved away, suddenly recalling that they had careers and families to worry about. For the working class, however, there was no-where to retreat. This was now a life or death struggle. It was at this point that the question of expropriations assumed a burning importance. Kamo already had a long record of revolutionary activity, including imprisonment and escape from Baku prison, before he became famous for his part in the armed struggle. Cool-headed, brave and efficient, Kamo was the personification of the best type of Bolshevik activist. After the mutinies at Sveaborg and Kronstadt, the peasant movement grew in intensity. There seemed to be every possibility that the revolution was entering into a new stage. The question of accumulating arms acquired a fresh urgency. Kamo was in charge of obtaining weapons, but there was a severe problem of cash. At the Stockholm Congress the Mensheviks had got control of the Central Committee, and they were not keen on the idea of arming. “Letters and telegrams to the Central Committee went unanswered. Requests for money remained like a voice crying in the wilderness.”[43]
Kamo did not flinch from taking the necessary action to arm the party. In a series of spectacular bank raids which drove the police frantic, large sums of money were “expropriated”. Yet Kamo himself lived very modestly on 50 kopeks a day. Like other Bolshevik partisans, he was totally dedicated to the party and the cause of the working class. His legendary bravery and audacity were shown by the Tiflis bank raid in the summer of 1907. Travelling on a forged passport as a well-known Georgian nobleman, Kamo went to Tiflis to organise a major expropriation. On the morning of 23 June, dressed as an army officer, although he was suffering from wounds caused by an accidental explosion, Kamo led a spectacular attack which netted 250,000 roubles—a huge amount—from the State Bank. His later experiences read like an adventure novel. Having escaped to Germany, Kamo was arrested in Berlin with a suitcase full of dynamite. He had been betrayed by the agent provocateur Zhitomirsky.
Accused and indicted as a “terrorist-anarchist”, for four years he pretended to be mad. As a punishment for his conduct, he was placed naked in a basement cell at sub-zero temperatures for nine days. Sent to a prison for the criminally insane, he kept up the act. For four months he never lay down but stood with his face to a corner, standing first on one leg then another. The brutal treatment to which he was subjected included force-feeding, during which several of his teeth were broken. On two occasions he attempted suicide by hanging and opening his veins with a sharp bone. At first, the authorities believed he was feigning madness, but after six months of torture, they began to believe that his madness was the genuine article. Finally, in March 1909, the doctors decided that the state of the mentally deficient “anarcho-terrorist” Ter-Petrosan was quite satisfactory, that he was quiet and rational, and even able to perform handicraft and gardening. Being returned to prison, Kamo again feigned madness and was subjected to more torture. “Civilised” German doctors inserted needles under his fingernails, his body was burnt with red-hot irons, but to no avail. Kamo’s body was permanently scarred, but he kept up the pretence of insanity until finally the authorities decided that the upkeep of this foreign lunatic should not be paid by the German people, and ordered his extradition to Russia. Finally, he effected yet another daring escape from a mental hospital in Tiflis.
In her biography of Lenin, Krupskaya recalls how Kamo visited them in Paris: “He was very distressed to hear that a rupture had occurred between Ilyich and Bogdanov and Krassin. He was greatly attached to all three. Besides, he was unable to grasp the situation that had developed during the years he had spent in prison. Ilyich told him how things stood.
“Kamo asked me to buy him some almonds. He sat in our Paris kitchen eating almonds, as if in his native Georgia, and telling us about his arrest in Berlin, about the way he had simulated insanity, about the sparrow he had tamed in prison, etc. Listening to his stories, Ilyich felt extremely sorry for that brave, devoted, childishly naive man with the warm heart, who was so eager to perform deeds of valour, but who now did not know what to turn his hand to. His schemes were fantastic. Ilyich did not argue with him, but tried delicately to bring him back to earth with suggestions about organising the transportation of literature and so forth. In the end it was decided that Kamo was to go to Belgium, have an operation on his eyes there (he was cross-eyed, and this always gave him away to the police spies), and then make his way south to Russia and the Caucasus. Ilyich examined Kamo’s coat and said: ‘Haven’t you got a warm coat? You’ll be cold in this, walking about on deck.’ Ilyich himself always promenaded the deck incessantly when travelling by boat. Hearing that Kamo had no other coat, Ilyich got out the soft grey cloak which his mother had given him as a present in Stockholm and of which he was very fond, and gave it to Kamo. His talk with Ilyich, and the latter’s kindness, somewhat soothed Kamo.[44]
Like many others who had played an active part in the revolution, Kamo was now like a fish out of water in the period of reaction. The inactivity, the isolation, the pressures of émigré existence, all depressed and frustrated him. He soon returned to underground activity in his native Caucasus, where the revolutionary movement was on the eve of a new awakening. Re-arrested, he was given four death sentences, later commuted to 20 years’ penal servitude as a sign of the tsar’s magnanimity on the three hundredth anniversary of the Romanov dynasty. Kamo was sent to the penal prison at Kharkov where he sat out the war sewing dresses, underclothes and boots in the company of common criminals who learned to respect the man they called Big Ivan. Even in this hellish place, the spirit of revolt did not die. In order not to have to take his hat off in the presence of the warders, he went bare-headed even in the coldest weather. Kamo was only released from this place by the February revolution, after which he immediately rejoined the ranks of the Bolshevik Party and played a heroic role in the Civil War. Having survived all these trials and tribulations, ironically, he died in a motor-cycle accident in 1922.
Lenin’s Attitude to Guerrillaism
The question of guerrilla war was closely linked to the perspective for a revival of the revolution, and the possibility that the peasant movement might give an impulse to the movement of the workers in the cities. The apparently theoretical discussions at the Fourth Congress on the agrarian question were but a pale reflection of a stark reality. The peasants’ rebellion was on the upswing. Month by month the violent outbursts in the villages increased in number and intensity. But the consolidation of the Stolypin reaction forced Lenin to reconsider the position. A turning-point was the defeat of the mutinies at Sveaborg and Kronstadt. Whereas the Mensheviks had already given the movement up as lost, Lenin’s tactics were directed towards winning over the left petty bourgeois, the poor peasants to the idea of an armed uprising, a movement in the villages which in turn could link up with the movement in the towns to bring about the overthrow of the autocracy. Nor was this perspective as utopian as might appear. While the working class of Petersburg and Moscow had suffered defeat, the movement in the villages was just beginning to get seriously underway. This in turn had an effect on the mass of peasants in uniform who made up the overwhelming majority of the tsarist army. Shaken by military defeat and months of revolution, the mood of the men in grey overcoats was becoming ever more unsettled. The critical point was reached on the night of the 17 July. A mutiny of soldiers and sailors erupted in the Sveaborg fortress near Helsingfors. When the St Petersburg RSDLP committee got news of the uprising it sent representatives to the sailors in an attempt to persuade them to postpone the action. But it was already too late.
Although the RSDLP’s military organisation participated in the revolt —two Lieutenants, A.P. Yemelyanov and Y.L. Kokhansky, were Social Democrats—the rising was mainly under the influence of the Social Revolutionaries. Out of ten artillery companies, seven participated actively in the rising, which advanced revolutionary-democratic slogans: down with the autocracy, for freedom for the people, land to the peasants. The Finnish workers took action in support of the mutineers. A general strike was begun in Helsingfors on July 18, spreading to other towns. The movement lasted for three days, but, badly prepared and with no clearly thought-out plan of action, subjected to a heavy bombardment from pro-government ships, the Sveaborg rising was crushed. The mutineers were handed over to the tender mercies of the tsarist courts-martial. Forty-three men were executed and hundreds others sent to penal servitude or imprisoned. This was no isolated case. Other mutinies occurred elsewhere. The news of the Sveaborg events caused a ferment in the naval garrison in Kronstadt and an actual mutiny on the cruiser Pamyat’ Azova near Revel. It seems that in this case, the RSDLP had been planning an action, but was disrupted by the arrest of the local military and workers’ organisation on July 9. The government was aware of the plans for an uprising from its network of spies and quickly acted to smother the revolt. More than 2,500 Kronstadt mutineers were arrested. As in Sveaborg, the courts-martial were pitiless: 36 men were sentenced to death; 130 were sentenced to penal servitude; a further 316 were imprisoned, and 935 sent to corrective battalions.
The impact of the peasant movement was clearly discernible in the mutinies, which also contained the negative side of all peasant jacqueries in history—lack of perspective and formlessness—which enables a small force of determined disciplined officers used to command to subordinate to their will a far larger number of troops who lack discipline, organisation and a clear plan of action, and who have been conditioned all their lives to obey. These were indeed the last throes of the revolution. After Sveaborg, the general outcome was no longer seriously in doubt. Reaction was triumphant, and celebrated its victory in the customary fashion—with a new wave of arrests, summary court martials, shootings, lock-outs. Unemployment soared. And as Trotsky explained at the time, this onset of mass unemployment, coming in the wake of a severe political defeat, could not have the effect of reviving the fighting spirits of the workers, but precisely the opposite. The workers were stunned and disoriented. It would take time for them to recover. Trotsky predicted—and he was shown to be correct—that there would be no revival of the revolutionary movement in Russia until there was some kind of upturn in the economy.
Marxists have always conceived the peasant war as an auxiliary of the workers in the struggle for power. That position was first developed by Marx during the German revolution of 1848, when he argued that the German revolution could only triumph as a second edition of the Peasants’ War. That is to say, the movement of the workers in the towns would have to draw behind it the peasant masses. The Bolsheviks also explained that it was the workers in the cities who had to lead the peasants behind them. It is important to note that during the Russian revolution the industrial working class represented no more than 10 per cent of the population. Yet the proletariat played the leading role in the Russian revolution, drawing behind itself the multi-millioned mass of poor peasants—the natural ally of the proletariat. No reference or hint at the possibility that the peasantry can bring about a socialist revolution can be found in the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. The reason for that is the extreme heterogeneity of the peasantry as a class. It is divided into many layers, from the landless labourers (who are really rural proletarians) to the rich peasants who employ other peasants as wage labourers. They do not have a common interest and therefore cannot play an independent role in society. Historically they have supported different classes or groups in the cities. The only class able to lead a successful socialist revolution is the working class. This is not for sentimental reasons but because of the place it occupies in society and the collective character of its role in production.
By its very nature, guerrilla warfare is the classical weapon of the peasantry, and not the working class. It is suited for conditions of armed struggle in inaccessible rural areas—mountains, jungle, etc.—where the difficulty of the terrain makes it complicated to deploy regular troops and where the support of the rural masses provides the necessary logistic support and cover for the guerrillas to operate. In the course of a revolution in a backward country with a sizeable peasant population, guerrilla warfare can act as a useful auxiliary for the revolutionary struggle of the workers in the towns. But it would never have occured to Lenin to put forward the idea of guerrillaism as a substitute for the conscious movement of the working class. Guerrilla tactics, from a Marxist standpoint, are only permissible as a subordinate and auxiliary part of the socialist revolution. This was precisely Lenin’s position in 1905. It had nothing in common with the kind of individual terrorist tactics pursued by the Narodnaya Volya and their heirs, the Social Revolutionary Party, still less the insane tactics of the modern terrorists and “urban guerrilla” organisations which are the very antithesis of a genuine Leninist policy.[A]
In his article on guerrilla war, Lenin gives a graphic picture of the situation: “The phenomenon in which we are interested is the armed struggle. It is conducted by individuals and by small groups. Some belong to revolutionary organisations, while others (the majority in certain parts of Russia) do not belong to any organisation. Armed struggle pursues two different aims, which must be strictly distinguished: in the first place, this struggle aims at assassinating individuals, chiefs and subordinates in the army and police; in the second place, it aims at the confiscation of monetary funds both from the government and from private persons. The confiscated funds go partly into the treasury of the Party, partly for the special purpose of arming and preparing for an uprising, and partly for the maintenance of persons engaged in the struggle we are describing. The big expropriations (such as the Caucasian, involving over 200,000 roubles, and Moscow, involving 875,000 roubles) went in fact first and foremost to revolutionary parties—small expropriations go mostly, and sometimes entirely, to the maintenance of the ‘expropriators’. This form of struggle undoubtedly became widely developed and extensive only in 1906, i.e., after the December uprising. The intensification of the political crisis to the point of an armed struggle and, in particular, the intensification of poverty, hunger and unemployment in town and country, was one of the important causes of the struggle by the vagabond elements of the population, the lumpenproletariat and anarchist groups.”
Lenin insisted that armed struggle must be part of the revolutionary mass movement, and specified the conditions in which it was permissible: “1) the sentiments of the masses be taken into account; 2) the conditions of the working class movement in the given locality be reckoned with, and 3) care be taken that the forces of the proletariat should not be frittered away.” And he also made it clear that, far from being a panacea, guerrilla war was only one possible method of struggle permissible only “at a time when the mass movement has actually reached the point of an uprising”.
The danger of degeneration inherent in such activity becomes an absolute certainty the moment the guerrilla groups are isolated from the mass movement. In the period following 1906, when the workers’ movement was in decline and the revolutionaries were reeling from a series of body-blows, the guerrilla organisations increasingly displayed signs that they were ceasing to be useful auxiliary organs of the revolutionary party, and becoming transformed into groups of adventurers, or even worse. Even while defending the possibility of guerrilla tactics as a kind of rearguard action against reaction at a moment when he still expected the revolutionary movement to revive, Lenin warned against “anarchism, Blanquism, the old terrorism, the acts of individuals isolated from the masses, which demoralise the workers, repel wide strata of the population, disorganise the movement and injure the revolution,” and added that “examples in support of this appraisal can easily be found in the events reported every day in the newspapers”.[45]
As time passed, Lenin came to understand that the tactic of expropriation had outlived its usefulness. He was already coming round to this point of view before the Tiflis raid. But, given the acute shortage of funds, accepted the windfall by way of exception. However, the money from the raid did the party no good. The entire sum was in 500 rouble banknotes, impossible to exchange in Russia. The money was sent abroad, but to no result. The provocateur Zhitomirsky, who occupied a key position in the Bolsheviks’ foreign organisation, alerted the police to the scheme. Litvinov, the future Soviet ambassador to London, was arrested while attempting to exchange the notes in Paris. The same fate awaited Olga Ravich, who later became Zinoviev’s wife, in Stockholm. But although the booty from Tiflis proved useless to the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks seized upon it to make a scandal that dragged on for years. The question of expropriations was also the occasion for heated discussions within the Bolshevik faction, where it soured relations. Finally, at the insistence of the Mensheviks, the question of expropriations was placed on the agenda of the Party control commission in January 1910. A resolution was passed condemning expropriations as an inadmissible violation of party discipline, while recognising that the participants in these actions had not meant to damage the labour movement, but had merely been guided by “a faulty understanding of Party interests”.[46]
Not everyone who participated in the guerrilla movement was a Kamo. As the reaction dragged on and the workers’ movement remained in a depressed state, the dangers of the movement falling into the hands of declassed elements and actual criminals multiplied. Prominent among those who, in contradiction with Lenin’s position, persisted in the tactic of guerrillaism and expropriations long after the conditions for them had ceased to exist was Koba-Stalin. Such tactics seriously undermined the movement. Olminsky, who was close to Lenin at this time, wrote: “Not a few of the fine youth perished on the gibbet; others degenerated; still others were disappointed in the revolution. At the time people at large began to confound revolutionists with ordinary bandits. Later, when the revival of the labour movement began, that movement was slowest in those cities where the ‘exes’ (expropriations) had been most numerous. (As an example, I might name Baku and Saratov.)”[47]
This is where i adopted the name of Kamo
Comrade Kamo