Lenin: The Black Hundreds and the Organisation of an Uprising












V. I.

Lenin



The Black Hundreds and the Organisation of an Uprising


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Published:

Proletary, No. 14, August 29 (16), 1905.

Published according to the text in Proletary.


Source:

Lenin
Collected Works,

Progress Publishers,

1972,

Moscow,

Volume 9,

pages 200-204.


Translated: The Late Abraham Fineberg and Julius Katzer


Transcription\Markup:
R. Cymbala


Public Domain:



(2004).

You may freely copy, distribute,
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• README




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The events in Nizhni-Novgorod and Balashov have attracted general attention. In
the previous issue we published a detailed account of the Nizhni-Novgorod
massacre; in this issue we are giving an account of the massacre in
Balashov. The misdeeds of the Black Hundreds are on the increase, and
Social-Democrats would do well to turn their attention to this phenomenon and
its significance in the general course of revolutionary development. As a
supplement to the correspondence from Samara, the following leaflet, issued by
the Borisoglebsk group of the R.S.D.L.P., is of interest:

"Workers and inhabitants of the town of Borisoglebsk! The Balashov and
Nizhni-Novgorod events, in which the police have proved their ability to
organise a massacre of all who hold dissenting views, have shown you the gravity
of the situation the revolution is confronting us with. The time for words and
platonic criticism has passed. By force of circumstances, the government drives
us from words to deeds. It sees that the revolutionary movement has advanced
beyond the point where it could be fought against, as has been the
case hitherto, by the police and the gendarmerie alone. It realises
that in the struggle against the ’internal foe’ the regular armed
forces of the Ministry of the Interior will not be sufficient. The
entire population of the Russian Empire has become an ’internal foe’
and ’rebellious’, and the government is obliged to enlist volunteers
for the regular army. But in this wholesale enlistment into
’government service of tramps, rowdies, hawkers, and similar
disreputable characters, who recognise no bureaucratic restrictions
whatever, our government has at the same time been forced to change
its time-honoured methods of influencing the masses and the
time-honoured secret methods of the immediate struggle against the
revolution. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the
gander. Hitherto our government confined itself to waging a struggle
against the printed word. It now itself publishes proclamations in the
Moskovskiye Vedomosti, Russkoye Dyelo, Orezhdanin, Dyen, and
other official organs. Hitherto our government only



hunted down agitators. It now itself sends out prelates, generals, Sharapovs,
Gringmuts, and other agitators of its own to conduct agitation among the
people. Hitherto our government only throttled all organisation. It now itself
organises unions of the Russian people, leagues of patriots, and unions of
monarchists. Hitherto our government trembled at the mere thought of an
uprising. It now itself organises uprisings of the Black Hundreds, and hopes to
provoke a civil war. Terrified at the prospect of the impending revolution the
government has seized on such of the latter’s weapons as organisation,
propaganda, and agitation. With the aid of these double-edged weapons and with
the help of the Black Hundreds, the government is beginning to stage scenes of
popular indignation, of counter-revolution. After a ’try-out’ in the marginal
provinces it is now beginning a tour of the heart of Russia. We have recently
witnessed such scenes in Nizhni-Novgorod and in Balashov, and it cannot be said
that the autocracy met with no success there. ’Revolutionary’ methods of
struggle proved efficacious; many enemies of the autocracy were murdered or
manhandled and the population was terrorised by this legalised terrorism on the
part of our government.

“There can be no doubt that the experiment will be further extended. The
laurels won by some of the Black Hundreds will give the others no rest until
they too will have put their strength to the test. Where there is revolution
there is counter-revolution too, and, therefore, Borisoglebsk must also be
prepared to experience the organising skill of the eminent representatives of
the Black-Hundred trend. We have reason to expect also in Borisoglebsk pogroms
against the Jews, against the workers, and against the intellectuals; therefore,
in preparation for proper resistance to the ’illegal measures’ which the
government has adopted to suppress the revolutionary movement, the Borisoglebsk
group is starting a subscription for the organisation of armed self-defence, and
invites all those whose sympathies do not lie with the government and the Black
Hundreds to help in the organisation of self-defence groups with money and
arms.”

In fact, civil war is being forced on the population by the government
itself. It is a fact that “tramps, rowdies, and hawkers” are being
taken into government service. Under these circumstances bourgeois talk by the
Osvobozhdeniye League about the crime and folly of advocating
insurrection, about the harmfulness of organising self-defence
(Osvobozhdeniye, No. 74) is now not merely inordinate
political platitudinarianism, or justification of the autocracy and
(in actual fact) servility to Moskovskiye Vedomosti. But, in
addition to this, it is impotent peevishness on the part of the
Osvobozhdeniye dodderers whom the revolutionary movement has
relentlessly consigned to the scrap heap or some old curiosity
shop— the place most suitable for them. Theoretical discussions
on



the necessity of an uprising may and should be held, and the tactical
resolutions on this question should be the outcome of careful thought and
deliberation; meanwhile it should not be forgotten that spontaneous events
take their own authoritative course regardless of all philosophising. It
should not be forgotten that all the tremendous contradictions that have
been piling up in Russian life for centuries are now developing with
irresistible force bringing the masses to the fore and relegating outworn
and dead teachings about, peaceful progress to the rubbish
heap. Opportunists of all sorts like to tell us: learn from
life. Unfortunately, what they mean by life is only the standing water of
peaceful periods, of times of stagnation, when life makes scarcely any
progress whatever. These blind people always lag behind the
lessons of revolutionary life. Their dead doctrines always fall
behind the stormy torrent of revolution, which expresses the most
far-reaching demands of life, those involving the most vital interests of
the masses.

See, for instance, how ridiculous, in face of these lessons given by life, are
the plaints being made by a certain section of Social-Democracy about the danger
of a conspiratorial view of the uprising, about a narrow “Jacobin”
approach to the question of its necessity, about exaggerating the importance and
role of material forces in the impending political events. These plaints started
on the eve of an insurrection becoming a most real and vital necessity to the
people, just when the masses, who stand farthest from all
“conspiracies”, began to be drawn into an insurrection be cause of
the misdeeds of the Black Hundreds. A bad doctrine is splendidly rectified
by a good revolution. In the new Iskra one can read feeble
witticisms (or are they sneers?) of a purely Burenin type[1]

about
the publication of a special military pamphlet discussing the military questions
of the revolution and even going into the question of day and night attacks,
about thought having to be given to the matter of headquarters for the uprising,
and of about having members of the organisation “on duty” to get
timely information of any pogrom, of any “enemy” action, and to give
proper and timely orders to our fighting forces, to the organised revolutionary
proletariat. And at the same time, as if in derision of the lifeless doctrine of
the Mensheviks abroad, we see the actions of the



Mensheviks in Russia. We read that in Ekaterinoslav (see Proletary,
No. 13) an agreement was concluded between the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks, and
the Bund,[2]

in anticipation of violence (a pogrom by the Black
Hundreds was expected! Is there a city or village in Russia today that is not
expecting something of that kind?). “Joint collection of money for the
purchase of arms, a joint plan of action, etc.” What kind of plan this was is
evidenced by the fact that at the Bryansk Works, for instance, the
Social-Democrats, at a meeting of five hundred workers, called for the
organisation of resistance. “Then in the evening the organised
workers of the Bryansk Works were quartered in various houses; patrols
were stationed, a headquarters was appointed, etc. — in short,
we were in complete fighting trim” (incidentally, they let each
other know the “location of the headquarters of each
organisation” of the three mentioned above).

It is at their own comrades, who are engaged in practical work, that the
new-Iskra journalists are sneering.

However much you may turn up your noses, gentlemen, at the question of night
attacks and similar purely tactical military questions, however much you may
pull wry faces about the “plan” of assigning secretaries of
organisations, or their members in general, to stand on duty to provide for any
military exigency—life goes its own way, revolution teaches, taking in
hand and shaking up the most inveterate pedants. During civil war military
questions must of necessity be studied down to the last detail, and
the interest the workers show in these questions is a most legitimate and
healthy phenomenon. Headquarters (or members of the organisations on duty) must
of necessity be organised. The stationing of patrols and the billeting
of squads are all purely military functions; they are all initial operations of
a revolutionary army and constitute the organisation of an
insurrection, the organisation of revolutionary rule, which matures and
becomes stronger through these small preparations, through these minor clashes,
testing its own strength, learning to fight, training itself for victory—a
victory that will come the sooner and the more probably, the more pro found the
general political crisis becomes, the stronger the discontent, disaffection, and
vacillation within the ranks of the tsarist army.



Social-Democratic comrades all over Russia must and will follow on an ever wider
scale the example set by the comrades of Ekaterinoslav and
Borisoglebsk. The appeal for aid in money and arms is most timely. There
are ever increasing numbers of people to whom all “plans”. and
even revolutionary ideas of any sort are quite alien, but who nevertheless
see and feel the necessity for an armed struggle when they
witness the atrocities perpetrated by the police, the Cossacks, and the
Black Hundreds against unarmed citizens. There is no choice, all other ways
are blocked. One cannot help being agitated by what is taking
place in Russia at the present time; one cannot help thinking of
war and of revolution,
and whoever is agitated, whoever thinks, who ever takes an interest, is
obliged to join one armed camp or the other. You may be beaten up,
maimed, or murdered no matter in what supremely peaceful and scrupulously
lawful way you behave. Revolution does not recognise neutrals. The struggle
has already flared up. It is a life-and-death struggle between the old
Russia, the Russia of slavery, serfdom, and autocracy, and the new, young,
people’s Russia, the Russia of the toiling masses, who are reaching out to
wards light and freedom, in order afterwards to start once again a struggle
for the complete emancipation of mankind from all oppression and all
exploitation.

May the day of the insurrection of the people come soon!




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Notes





[1]

Burenin, V. P., worked on the staff of the
reactionary news paper Novoye Vremya, engaged in libelling and
besmearing representatives of all progressive public and political
trends. Lenin uses his name as a synonym for dishonest methods of conducting
polemics.

[2]

The Bund (The General Jewish Workers’ Union of
Lithuania, Poland, and Russia) came into being in 1897 at the founding Congress
of Jewish Social-Democratic groups in Vilna. In the main, it comprised
semi-proletarian Jewish artisans in the west of Russia. At the First Congress of
the R.S.D.L.P. in 1898, the Bund joined the latter “as an autonomous
organisation, independent only in respect of questions affecting the Jewish
proletariat specifically”. (The C.P.S.U. in Resolutions and Decisions
of Its Congresses, Conferences and Plenary Meetings of the Central
Committee, Russ. ed., Moscow 1954, Part 1, p. 14.)

The Bund was an expression of nationalism and separatism in the Russian
working-class movement. In April 1901 the Bund’s Fourth Congress decided to
alter the organisational ties with the R.S.D.L.P., as established by the
latter’s First Congress. In its resolution, the Bund Congress declared that It
regarded the R.S.D.L.P. as a federation of national, organisations, and that the
Bund should enter the R.S.D.L.P. as a federal section. After the Second Congress
of the R.S.D.L.P. turned down the. Bund’s demand that it should be recognised
the sole representative of the Jewish proletariat, the Bund left the Party, but
rejoined it in 1906 on the basis of a decision of the Fourth (Unity) Congress.

Within the R.S.D.L.P. the Bund constantly supported the Party’s opportunist wing
(the Economists, Mensheviks, and Liquidators), and waged a struggle against
Bolshevism and the Bolsheviks. To the latter’s programmatic demand for the right
of nations to self-determination the Bund contraposed the demand for autonomy of
national culture. While the Stolypin reaction was raging, the Bund took a
liquidationist stand, and was active in the formation of the August anti-Party
bloc. During the First World War the Bundists held a social-chauvinist stand,
and in 1917 they supported the counter-revolutionary Provisional Government and
sided with the enemies of the Great October Socialist Revolution. During the
foreign military intervention and the Civil War the Bund’s leaders made common
cause with the forces of counter-revolution. Meanwhile there was a turn among
the Bund’s rank and file for collaboration with the Soviets. In March 1921 the
Bund decided to dissolve itself, part of the membership joined the Russian
Communist Party (Bolsheviks) on the basis of the general rules of admission,




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