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The 'Red Years'
EUROPEAN SOCIALISM VERSUS
BOLSHEVISM, 1919-1921
The 'Red Years'
EUROPEAN SOCIALISM VERSUS
BOLSHEVISM, 1919-1921

Albert S. Lindemann

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley, Los Angeles, London
1
974
University o£ California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
ISBN: 0-520-02511-3
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-80834
Copyright © 1974 by T h e Regents of the University of California

Printed in the United States of America

 We dreamt of taking part in a harmonious synthesis
of the broad humanism of Jaurès and the revolutionary
audacity of Lenin.
L.-O. Frossard

I cannot agree with those confused workers and in-

tellectuals who have made a fetish out of the Russian
example.
Ernst Dàumig

It is easy to destroy but difficult to rebuild.

G. M. Serrati

Either one is a menshevik or a bolshevik; there is no

third way.
Gregory Zinoviev
 Acknowledgments

I have incurred relatively few debts in preparing this

work, and rather than offer the traditional list of pro-forma acknowl-
edgements, I would like to devote a few lines to those for whose
help I feel a special gratitude. First, to Agnes Peterson, curator of
the western European collection of the Hoover Institution, whose
efficiency, helpfulness, and broad knowledge were of inestimable
help in the opening stage of my research. Second, to professors Peter
Kenez and William Rosenberg, friends who offered valuable ad-
vice when the work was in a difficult stage of composition. Finally,
and most of all, to my wife, Barbara, who took much time—more
than I had any right to ask of her—from her own historical research
to help me; nearly every page of this work has been influenced by
her clarity of mind and solid sense of literary style.
A. S. L.
Santa Barbara
 Contents

Introduction xi
I. Before the Biennio Rosso: T h e Deeper Roots
of the Socialist-Communist Conflict i
T h e SPD, SFIO, and PSI in the generation before
the war 1
Trends of the prewar socialist parties 6
Prewar socialism in Russia 9
T h e trauma of war 12
Lenin and the problem of war 17
War's end and the radicalization of western
socialist parties 21

II. The Russian "Spark" 26

Revolution in Russia 27
T h e spread of revolution to Germany 34
T h e failures of revolutionary socialists in Germany 40
T h e Bern Conference 46
T h e First Congress of the Communist International 48
Leninism and the First Congress of the Comintern 51
T h e PSI and the Comintern 53
Comintern policy in 1919 63

III. Between Socialist and Communist

Internationals 69
T h e response of the USPD and SFIO to bolshevik
doctrine in early 1919 69
Impasse at Lucerne: T h e USPD in search of a
new international 74
T h e reconstructionist movement 77
T h e Leipzig congress 80
November elections in France and Italy 88
T h e advance of the reconstructionist movement 91
T h e Strasbourg congress 96
x Contents

IV. Paths to Moscow 103

T h e USPD opens negotiations: A letter from Moscow 104
T h e SFIO approaches Moscow 109
Cracks in the Maximalist majority 115
Adjustments in Comintern policy: T h e extreme left 120
Adjustments in Comintern policy: T h e centrists 136

V. In T h e Land of Revolution 148

T h e delegates of the SFIO 149
T h e delegates of the USPD 154
T h e delegates of the PSI 159
En route to Petrograd 163
Moscow 168
Cachin and Frossard before the "most redoubtable
of tribunals" 174
Voyage down the Volga 180
T h e late arrival of the USPD delegation 182

VI. T h e Second Congress of the Communist

International 187
T h e opening days of the Second Congress 188
Cachin and Frossard opt publicly for the Comintern 191
T h e SFIO and USPD delegates before the
Committee on Conditions 194
New pressures from the bolsheviks 199
Serrati versus the bolsheviks 201
T h e compromise with Cachin and Frossard 205
T h e attack of the extreme left 2og
T h e split in the USPD delegation 211
Bordiga at the Second Congress 216

VII. T h e Campaign for Communism 220

Cachin and Frossard return to Paris 221
T h e return of the USPD delegates 225
T h e return of the Italian delegation 228
Factory occupations and municipal elections 235
T h e Twenty-one Conditions in France 238
T h e new factions of the PSI 241
Serrati and centrism 245

VIII. T h e Split in Western Socialism 249

T h e Halle congress 250
Negotiations at Halle 254
 Contents xi

T h e factions of the SFIO 257

T h e congress of Tours 260
T h e congress of Leghorn 269
Paul Levi and the Comintern 274

Epilogue and Conclusions 287

Notes 3°3
Bibliography 329
Index 341
 Introduction

As the machines of war were stilled in the late autumn of

1918, virtually all observers agreed that the old Europe was dead.
T h e fifty-two month nightmare had come to an end, but what
would now follow? T h e smoking ruins, the dizzying row upon row
of graveyard crosses, the hobbling and mutilated veterans of the
trenches constituted a searing indictment of those who had been in
positions of power during the past generation. T o many it seemed
inevitable that the socialists, the political pariahs of pre-1914 Eu-
rope, would move toward the center of the political stage in most
countries. Indeed, the first major political upheaval growing out of
the war, the revolution in Russia, saw a steady swing leftward until
even moderate socialists lost all control, and leadership of Russia
fell to the most extreme of all Russian socialist factions, the bolshe-
viks, who within a year adopted the name "communist." There-
after, the specter of communism haunted Europe far more than
when, seventy years before, Marx had made it dance before the eyes
of an anxious ruling class. By the time of the signing of the
Armistice in November 1918, socialists had assumed political lead-
ership of Germany, and by the summer of 1919 pro-bolshevik com-
munist regimes were in power in Hungary and Bavaria. In the two
decisive years following the end of the war, succinctly termed the
biennio rosso (the red two years) by the Italians, most of Europe
was shaken to its roots by strikes, uprisings, mutinies, factory occu-
pations, and other challenges to existing authority.
A climax to these developments came in the late summer of
1920. T h e Red Army, having driven back an attack by the Poles,
was triumphantly marching into central Europe, and in the halls
of the Kremlin high hopes were entertained that the proletariat of
western Europe would rise up to join hands with the advancing
Russian forces. Gathered in Moscow at the same time was perhaps
the greatest meeting of revolutionaries ever to assemble: men from

xiii
xiv Introduction

nearly every country of the world had come to the Second Congress
of the Communist International, to learn from the bolsheviks and
to speed the progress of world revolution. The most important of
these delegations, from the standpoint of the bolsheviks' hopes to
break out of their isolation, were those from Germany, France, and
Italy. It was to these three countries that the bolsheviks gave special
attention in planning revolution and in establishing communist
parties. It was in these three countries as well that revolutionaries
especially admired the success of the bolsheviks and hoped to work
together with them to assure the success of revolution throughout
Europe.
T h e biennio rosso was a period remarkable for the richness of
ideological debate between those western socialists who were favor-
ably impressed by the Bolshevik Revolution and those who were
suspicious of or even hostile to it. The prewar doyens of Marxian
orthodoxy, such men as Karl Kautsky, Filippo Turati, and Jules
Guesde, were vigorously challenged by the first successful Marxian
revolutionary, V. I. Lenin. These champions of scientific socialism
were forced to reformulate carefully what they believed to be the
fundamental theoretical verities of Marxism against what seemed
to them an eastern, anarchist corruption of Marx's thought. From
Moscow the bolsheviks in turn cited chapter and verse to support
their accusation that the prewar leaders of socialism had betrayed
the revolutionary essence of Marxism. Younger voices in the West,
such men as Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Daumig, and Ferdinand Lor-
iot, struggled with the problem of making revolution in western
Europe and sought to glean something from the Russian experience
while struggling to preserve their own particular additions to or
reinterpretations of Marxian writ. Thus to follow the polemics of
these years constitutes a wide-ranging exploration of the many pos-
sible varieties of Marxism, Leninist and non-Leninist.
T h e concrete revolutionary experiences of the biennio rosso
were equally rich. The Spartacist Uprising of January 1919, the
Hungarian and Bavarian soviet regimes of the summer of 1919, the
French general strike of the spring of 1920, the factory occupations
in Italy in the autumn of that year, the German March Uprising of
1921—these are only some of the more important revolutionary ex-
 Introduction xv

periences of this period. The spring of 1921 marked a more or less

definite exhaustion of this revolutionary thrust, except for a belated
spasm in Germany in 1923, but the general period stretching from
the end of the war to the early months of 1921 constituted undoubt-
edly the richest period of revolutionary activity in western Europe
after 1848.
The interplay between bolshevism and western socialism in the
biennio rosso falls into remarkably neat and logically divided stages,
as if a historical dramatist had set them down to be observed as acts
of a play. In the course of each act the protagonists gain new insights
that push them, often against their wills, to ineluctable strife. T h e
final act is one of tragic triumph: Lenin emerges victorious over his
western socialist opponents, but his victory is gnawed by a cancerous
paradox, since bolshevik ascendancy over western revolutionary so-
cialists was facilitated by the failure of revolution in the West, the
very revolution that was necessary if the Bolshevik Revolution was
to have a more profound Marxian significance as the first stage of
world socialist revolution.
The first act opens with the establishment of rival internation-
als, one led by western socialists who hoped to restore the much dis-
credited prewar international, and one led by the bolsheviks who
looked to a radically new international (March to August 1919).
T h e following act sees an attempt by certain western socialists to
work out a compromise or "reconstructed" international, which
ultimately fails (August to April 1920). Subsequently, the "recon-
structionist" socialists journey to revolutionary Russia, hoping to
negotiate favorable terms for their entry into the Communist Inter-
national (April to August 1920). From these negotiations emerges
the impossibility of compromise and thus an ardent campaign in
the West for and against communism, climaxing in a series of
schisms in the leading socialist parties of the West (October 1920 to
January 1921). The left factions of each of these schisms then estab-
lish communist parties, tightly bound to the Moscow international.
The most dramatic and revealing confrontation of western and
Russian varieties of Marxism was at the Second Congress of the
Communist International in the summer of 1920. (This was the
first genuinely international congress. The first official congress, in
xvi Introduction

March 1919, was a token affair, organized while Russia was still
blockaded, and thus very few westerners were present.) After a series
of confusing and inconclusive contacts with Moscow across the Al-
lied blockade in 1919 and early 1920, delegations from France, Ger-
many, and Italy, as well as from many other nations, made it into
the promised land of the revolution. This was their first chance to
have a sustained dialogue with the bolsheviks and to observe the
revolution directly. Many surprises were in store for them. T o the
outrage of some of the westerners, the Russians proved themselves
masters in the art of factional intrigue and manipulation. T h e west-
ern delegations were also surprised and disappointed to discover
that the leaders of the Communist International were less tolerant
of the peculiarities of western socialism than had been hoped. T h e
Twenty-one Conditions for admission into the new international,
worked out at the Second Congress, reflected bolshevik principles,
narrowly interpreted, with few or ambiguous concessions to the
more liberal-democratic aspects of western socialist tradition.
Yet at the same time the experiences of war and the high hopes
awakened by the Bolshevik Revolution spelled an end to the pre-
war unity of western socialist parties with a decisiveness that ex-
ceeded anything the bolsheviks could accomplish through direct
intervention in the affairs of western socialists. In fact, rather than
mindlessly seeking to shatter western socialist unity, the bolsheviks
worked for the broadest possible unity in the new communist par-
ties, at least a broader unity than was desired by many western
revolutionaries.
T h e splits that developed failed to serve the positive f u n c t i o n -
that of liberating revolutionary energies by providing revolutionary
leadership—which both the bolsheviks and leading western revolu-
tionaries hoped for. T h e disastrous communist uprising in March
1921 in Germany and the Kronstadt Revolt in Russia in the same
month marked the end of an era. T h e reins of bolshevik despotism
in Russia were tightened, and the bolsheviks began to insist on an
even more dogmatic and imitative operation of communist parties
in the West. T h e high hopes and ardent optimism of the biennio
rosso would not return.
 Introduction xvii

T h e fascinating period following World War I, when Europe's

socialist parties split and when communist parties were established,
has drawn the attention of many writers, both scholarly and popu-
lar. With a few exceptions, these writers have focused on a single
country. T h e following pages attempt to bring together the findings
of the many scholarly monographs on Russia, Germany, France,
Italy, and the Communist International, and to blend them into a
broader yet integrated picture of western socialism following the
war. It is hoped that this more comprehensive, comparative ap-
proach will merit the attention not only of the scholarly expert but
also of the intelligent layman who is interested in socialism and
communism but who does not have the time or inclination to delve
into the vast monographic literature.
At the same time this aspires to be more than a work of synthesis,
for the author has dug thoroughly into the firsthand accounts and
other primary sources of the period in Germany, France, Italy, and
Russia, and has attempted to make use of the new perspectives
opened u p by abandoning the confines of national history. This
effort has born fruit in a number of ways. For example, it was pos-
sible to discover new information pertaining to developments in
one socialist or communist party in the sources of another, as in the
case of notes taken by a German communist at an important meet-
ing between the bolsheviks and French socialists in Moscow—notes
that escaped the scrutiny of even the most thorough scholars of
French socialism and communism in this period. On a different
level, it was possible to gain insights into the forces working on men
like G. M. Serrati and Paul Levi—ostensibly very different men, but
men who responded to the bolsheviks in quite similar ways for quite
similar reasons—insights that scholars concentrating on Italy or Ger-
many alone missed or failed to explore because of their more nar-
row focus. From yet another perspective the international approach
opened u p interesting and instructive comparisons among the
thoughts of such revolutionary figures as Antonio Gramsci, Ernst
Daumig, and Alfred Rosmer (all associated with syndicalist perspec-
tives), figures almost never mentioned together in accounts dealing
with individual socialist or communist movements.
xviii Introduction

Leninism also has been exhaustively described and analyzed by

scholars and popularizers. The following account attempts to add
something to the historical understanding of Leninism by examin-
ing Lenin's thought in the context both of his polemics and of his
more friendly exchanges with western socialists in 1919 and 1920.
By following these exchanges and by exploring the ways in which
he and his lieutenants worked out tactically separate policies in
dealing with the socialists of France, Germany, and Italy, it is pos-
sible to gain a new awareness of the important transformations of
Leninism in these years, as well as—and perhaps more significantly
—of its lasting ambiguities.
None of the existing monographs has given much attention to
the colorful sequence of events surrounding the Second Congress of
the Communist International in the summer of 1920 in Russia.
This lapse may exist because the accounts of visitors from individ-
ual countries do not provide adequate information for a rounded
account. Here again the international approach has proved fruitful,
for the various reports and memoirs composed by foreign visitors to
Russia complement one another in many ways. By weaving together
the accounts of the French, German, and Italian visitors, a much
more complete picture is possible than if only Russian sources or
the sources of one other country were used. The experiences of most
delegates to Russia were decisive, either in making them decide to
abandon certain of their earlier beliefs or in making them take up
a firmly anti-bolshevik position. It is hoped that the reader will find
this account of western socialists in Russia one of the more engag-
ing, instructive, and even amusing aspects of the complex story of
the split among western socialists and the birth of communist par-
ties in the West.
 Chapter X

Before the Biennio Rosso:

The Deeper Roots of the
Socialist-Communist Conflict

The struggle between communist and socialist parties,

and the splits within the latter, was directly tied to the world crisis
of 1914 to 1918, to World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. Yet
the appeal of Lenin's theories was not exclusively dependent upon
his success as a revolutionary or upon the inadequacies of western
socialist leadership. Prior to 1917 many non-Russian socialists had
entertained ideas similar to those which would later be called Le-
ninist. On the other hand, Lenin was thoroughly schooled in the
writings of the great western socialists, and these writings consti-
tuted the basic texts from which he formulated his particular adap-
tations to Russian conditions. Thus in order better to understand
the postwar divisions between socialists and communists, it is im-
portant to gain some sense of prewar socialism in Russia and the
West, the ways in which western socialists responded to World War
I and to the Bolshevik Revolution.

The SPD, SFIO, and PSI in the generation

before the war
The generation before World War I has often been
termed the "classic age" of European socialist parties. From modest
beginnings in the 1890s they grew steadily, becoming on the eve of
the war a major political force in many countries, although nowhere
in the majority or even sharing power with other parties. In a num-

1
2 Before the Biennio Rosso

ber of countries, most notably in Germany, the socialist party was

the largest party, and where not the largest it was the most disci-
plined and determined, eliciting a sense of commitment on the part
of its membership which was unequaled in other parties. T h e So-
cialist International, an organization of the world's socialist and
labor organizations, convoked regular congresses of increasingly
impressive dimensions, where the great issues of theory and practi-
cal politics were debated and where it was confidently predicted
that the future belonged to socialism.
T h e German Social Democratic party, or SPD (Sozialdemokrat-
ische Partei Deutschlands), was the paragon of prewar international
socialism. Just as the German Reich enjoyed a degree of economic,
diplomatic, and cultural hegemony in continental Europe during
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, so the SPD stood
as the most admired and imitated by other socialist parties. Indeed,
the SPD's position in international socialism was intimately linked
with Germany's power as a nation state, and the particular charac-
ter of the SPD was in many ways a reflection of the character of the
German nation. Germany's rapid industrialization, following her
dramatic national unification in 1871, created the basic social and
economic conditions for a powerful socialist party. T h e expansion
of industry entailed a concomitant growth of the working class, and
the harsh dynamics of industrialization spawned a hostile working
population, yoked to an unfamiliar factory discipline, separated
from ownership of the means of production, overworked, and un-
derpaid. T h e SPD offered a natural channel for these resentments,
and it grew by leaps and bounds: emerging from an outlawed status
in 1890, the party by 1906 had attracted approximately 385,000
members; by 1914 this figure had shot up to over one million,
which was well over ten times the membership of the French and
Italian socialist parties. 1
But the SPD's growth was not paralleled by a growing participa-
tion in Germany's political institutions. In the Reichstag the SPD
deputies stood as a body apart, refusing to join in most of the for-
malities and rituals of parliamentary life and shunned by the repre-
sentatives of the bourgeois parties. In the world outside parliament
the situation was similar. T h e German worker, especially one of
 Before the Biennio Rosso 3

socialist fidelities, experienced a strong sense of social ostracism and

exclusion from his country's ruling circles. Even if the SPD could
have obtained a majority in the Reichstag, the constitution of the
Reich effectively precluded the possibility of a socialist exercise of
power because the chancellor was not responsible to the Reichstag
and other institutional arrangements preserved real political and
military power for a clique of Prussian Junkers and Rhenish-West-
phalian industrial magnates. Faced with such a constitutional bul-
wark, German socialists found much relevance in revolutionary
Marxism; legal reform through majority rule was not a real alterna-
tive, at least not before constitutional reforms, the likelihood of
which seemed extremely remote.
In terms of prestige and overall eminence the French Socialist
party, or SFIO (Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière),
was the second party of the International, and like the SPD it bore
unmistakable signs of the country of its birth. France experienced a
slower rate of industrial growth, which did not suddenly or seri-
ously undermine the stability of her social and economic structures.
The SFIO never grew to the impressive dimensions of the SPD, in
part because France did not possess the masses of proletarians who
might have been attracted to a socialist party. She remained a coun-
try of small enterprise and luxury production, of independent peas-
ants, shopkeepers, and artisans. And since the fruits of her smoothly
expanding productivity went to a relatively static population, real
wages rose roughly 50 percent between 1870 and 1914. 2 Life for
much of France's popular classes was less harsh than for Germany's
industrial workers. In France, one sees some of the material realities
underlying the rosy hues of the belle époque.
French socialists did not suffer quite the same sense of isolation
or ostracism as did the German socialists. This was in part because
France was a democratic republic, whose institutions many social-
ists found more compatible with a steady development toward a
socialist victory. Moreover, left-wing or revolutionary sentiments
were far more familiar and respectable to Frenchmen, who thought
of France as le pays de la révolution, the country of revolution. But
an equally important consideration in explaining the SFIO's rela-
tive integration into French political and social life is the social
4 Before the Biennio Rosso

origin of her leadership and membership. T h e S F I O , unlike the

SPD, received a considerable proportion of its support from non-
proletarian elements of society, most notably from intellectuals. O n
the other hand, it had difficulty in eliciting active participation
from France's working population, at least in comparison to the
SPD. Similarly, the S F I O , being composed in large part of highly
individual bourgeois intellectuals, was not as sternly organized or
monolithic in appearance as the SPD, with its working-class leaders
and members and their sense of strength through unity and disci-
pline. T o be sure, the pronouncements of the S F I O were often full
of revolutionary rhetoric, but the actual sense of class conflict was
inevitably diminished in a party whose leaders were themselves
overwhelmingly of bourgeois origin.
Rather than give their allegiance to a political party, France's
revolutionary workers tended to identify with the C G T (Confédéra-
tion Genérale du Travail), an anarchosyndicalist or revolutionary
trade-union organization (syndicat means, roughly, "trade u n i o n "
in French), which shunned participation in parliamentary struggles
and was in particular deeply suspicious of the bourgeois intellec-
tuals at the head of the SFIO. T h i s degree of separation and suspi-
cion was not the norm in most other countries, where socialist par-
ties and trade unions cooperated actively. Equally, the aggressive
revolutionaries at the head of the C G T were unlike the trade union
officials in other countries. T h e leaders of the German " f r e e " trade
unions ("free" of the influence of the church or of management),
for example, represented a voice of caution and moderation in rela-
tion to the SPD, and union officials were generally in favor of re-
formist rather than revolutionary socialism. Insofar as the anarcho-
syndicalists mixed elements of Marxism and anarchism in their
beliefs, they shared some characteristics with the extreme left—
sometimes called "anarcho-Marxist"—of the Socialist International.
T h e anarchosyndicalists and the left of the S F I O would come to-
gether at the end of the war as constituent parts of the French Com-
munist party.
T h e Italian Socialist party, or PSI (Partito Socialista Italiano),
grew u p in a country m u c h less developed economically than either
Germany or France, a country of severely limited natural wealth,
 Before the Biennio Rosso 5

with remarkable disparities in industrial advancement between

north and south. Italy lacked adequate supplies of iron and coal to
support heavy industry, and her arable land was limited and often
poor. Even the land that was under cultivation was m u c h less evenly
distributed than in France: nine-tenths of Italy's five million land-
holders possessed less than an hectare of land—not enough to sustain
a family. 3 Italy, unlike France, still had a land-hungry peasantry,
pressed at times to desperation and prone to violent, anarchic up-
risings.
Modern, heavy industry in Italy existed almost exclusively in
the north, where a number of very large and quite advanced indus-
trial concentrations had developed, especially in the three cities of
the so-called "industrial triangle," Milan, T u r i n , and Genoa. T h e
PSI recruited almost exclusively from the northern urban centers,
and in these limited areas the organizations of the proletariat were
in many ways comparable to those in Germany. Moreover, strong
support for the ideals of socialism existed in the north not only
among factory proletarians but also among the agricultural prole-
tariat, the braccianti or landless day laborers of the P o valley, w h o
worked the large farms of that area and whose conditions of work
and social position made them ready recruits to socialism.
T h e harshness of the social and economic experience of the Ital-
ian masses helps to explain why in the generation before the war a
n u m b e r of dramatic and bloody confrontations occurred between
the government and the working class. Inevitably the PSI became
involved in them, although the leadership of the party was by n o
means consistently revolutionary; from one year to the next party
leadership shifted between ardent revolutionaries and moderate
reformists. Significantly, however, the party experienced unprece-
dented growth and became increasingly militant between 1911 and
1914 under the leadership of Benito Mussolini, w h o at the time was
an ardent socialist revolutionary of more or less anarcho-Marxist
complexion. W h e n W o r l d W a r I broke out, the PSI stood far to
the left in the International, a circumstance that w o u l d have pro-
found implications for the relationship of the PSI to antiwar ac-
tivity and to the creation of the Communist International at the
end of the war.
6 Before the Biennio Rosso

Trends of the prewar socialist parties

The PSI's move to the left in the few years before the war
was an exception to the trend of the most important parties of the
International. The leadership of both the SPD and the SFIO tended
to fall increasingly under the sway of the parties' more conservative
wings, while the counterparts to Mussolini's wing, the radical revo-
lutionaries in the French and German parties, lost influence in the
higher party councils. This was an ironic development, since the
opening years of the century had seen a coalition of the center and
left of the SPD leading the struggle in the International against
Revisionism, that is, the revision of revolutionary Marxism in favor
of gradualism. Similarly, the divided and warring factions of French
socialism finally came together in 1905 to form the SFIO with a pro-
gram that represented a victory of the orthodox Marxists in France
over the parliamentary reformists.
The growing preeminence of more cautious figures in the SPD
was in a paradoxical way related to the party's remarkable success
since 1890. The SPD's growing numbers and the multiplication of
its functions entailed the proliferation of professional party func-
tionaries, since the complexities of such matters as party finance and
the organization of national electoral campaigns became more than
the old-style volunteer party workers could manage. But party bu-
reaucrats are reluctant revolutionaries because illegal actions of any
sort run the risk of governmental repression, which can in turn
mean the loss of party funds and property—and the end of jobs for
party bureaucrats. Similarly, the SPD's growing strength at the
polls tended to justify those who believed that constitutional re-
forms would eventually be attained and who thus advocated the
parliamentary road of "peaceful attrition" of capitalism. In 1912
the SPD won four and one-half million votes, nearly twice as many
as its nearest rival, the Catholic Center party.4
It was obvious that the SPD could not continue to grow as it had
since 1890 and still remain isolated from political power in Ger-
many. Of course the left wing of the party predicted a violent con-
frontation between the state and the socialist working class, but the
 Before the Biennio Rosso 7

more cautious members of the SPD and the trade unions—and they
constituted a solid majority of each—contemplated less dramatic
and less risky alternatives. They were yearly more concerned with
this dilemma: as long as the SPD refused to enter left-wing parlia-
mentary coalitions, the governing coalitions would unavoidably be
pushed further to the right because the great size of the SPD made
its presence in any coalition of the left a virtual necessity. Such con-
siderations, among others, impelled many in the SPD to reconsider
the orthodox Marxist notions of the bourgeois state and of the ir-
reconcilability of class conflict under capitalism. The yearnings of
many moderate leaders of the SPD to make their party a Volks-
partei, a democratic party of all the people rather than a class party,
were already apparent at this time, although there was no forthright
and open expression in the higher organs of the party or in its con-
gress resolutions until the Weimar years, after the left wing had
split off. The war would act as a catalyst in these matters, forcing"
German socialists to make the decision they had so long postponed:
whether to try to work within the existing social and economic sys-
tem for piecemeal and "realistic" reforms, or to wage an uncom-
promising struggle culminating in revolution.
The SFIO's drift to the right from 1905 to 1914 was less distinct,
in part because the French party was far less successful than the SPD
in recruiting members and winning votes and thus did not have to
deal with the many dilemmas facing a large party. Moreover, it was
easier for the moderate members of the SFIO to put up with fierce-
sounding revolutionary rhetoric than it was for their counterparts
in Germany, since a kind of verbal revolutionary conformism ex-
isted among the leaders of the SFIO which gave a quite false impres-
sion of genuine revolutionary commitment. But a fundamental
shift in factional alliances occurred in the SFIO in the nine years
before the war: Jean Jaurès, the former leader of the parliamentary
reformist Independent Socialists, who had bowed to Jules Guesde
and the revolutionary left in 1905, emerged in the following years
as the unquestioned leader of the SFIO. He gave the party its direc-
tion and its image and was usually supported by Guesde against the
noisy, antipatriotic extreme left of Gustave Hervé. In other words,
there was a fundamental shift to the right in the factional alliances
8 Before the Biennio Rosso

of the party, similar to the shift in the SPD against the left radicals
around Rosa Luxemburg. Thus cracks existed in the SFIO before
the war which presaged the postwar schism in the party, although
Hervé and his faction were not as isolated or as superciliously dealt
with as were Luxemburg and the German revolutionary left.
Although the question was not posed with the same immediacy
in France as in Germany, many in the SFIO looked forward to a
reform of French society based on cooperation in parliament be-
tween the French bourgeois democratic radicals and the SFIO. Had
the war not intervened, this might have been a realistic perspective,
although in the immediate prewar period the Radical party, the
socialists' nearest neighbor in the French political spectrum, moved
to the right, away from the socialists, partly in response to their
greater verbal militancy. At any rate, the war would drastically in-
tensify the factional hostilities within the SFIO and would postpone
until the mid- 1930s the question of left-wing parliamentary alli-
ances for social reform.
As remarked previously, it is more appropriate to term the left-
wing thrust of the PSI after 1 9 1 1 an episode rather than a trend, for
between 1900 to 1914 the peculiar tergiversations of Italian politics
and foreign policy encouraged first one and then another of the
wings of the PSI to assume leadership. This alternation was made
all the easier by the relatively small number of party members in
the PSI and the concomitant delicate balance between the factions.
In the SPD a rapid assumption of power by one faction was impeded
by the inherent difficulties of organizing mass support and bucking
established bureaucrats; in the PSI the contending factions did not
have to deal with the many problems of pulling hundreds of thou-
sands of members in new directions. Thus the anarcho-revolution-
ary factions that came to the forefront periodically in the PSI re-
mained permanently minority trends in the French and German
parties.
Mussolini's rise to leadership of the PSI was directly related to
Italy's blatantly imperialistic campaign in 1 9 1 1 into Tripoli and
Cyrenaica. Most socialists violently opposed this adventure, but
Lionida Bissolati, a leader of the reformist faction of the party, sup-
ported the campaign on the grounds that expansion was the proper
 Before the Biennio Rosso 9

concern of a young state and that colonies would help to alleviate

the poverty of Italy's south. Within a year Bissolati and many of his
followers were expelled from the PSI, and Mussolini's "intransigent
revolutionary" faction assumed control.
This sharp move to the left troubled not only the remaining re-
formists but many of the older members of the party, who voiced
concern about what they believed were Mussolini's Bakuninist ten-
dencies and about the drift of the PSI away from solid Marxian
principles. But Mussolini's threat to resign was enough to silence
these critics; he had become far too valuable to the party and
seemed in large part responsible for its remarkable growth after the
expulsion of Bissolati. By the time of the congress of Ancona in 1914
the PSI's membership had mushroomed to 58,000, almost double
what it had been two years before, 5 and close to the membership of
the SFIO (70,000) in 1914.
T h u s the campaign into Libya precluded a right-wing trend in
the PSI, parallel to that in the SPD and SFIO. T h e sense of malaise
and Verdrossenheit, of unease and disillusionment, which more and
more were topics of discussion in the SPD and SFIO in the immedi-
ate prewar period, could hardly bother the PSI while it waged an ar-
dent campaign, sparked by the charismatic Mussolini, against Italy's
imperialist war. Italian socialists found a sense of direction, while
the French and German socialists were plagued by uncertainty.

Prewar socialism in Russia

T h e suggestion that Russian socialists would one day as-

sume leadership over a major part of the socialist movement in west-
ern Europe would have seemed laughable to most observers of the
prewar scene, for the Russians had traditionally borrowed from and
relied upon westerners, both intellectually and materially. For ex-
ample, Russia's extremely rapid industrial expansion between 1890
and 1914 was of a peculiarly "imported" nature; Russian industry
was in large part brought from the West, both in terms of capital
investment and technological ability. Only the brawn of the labor-
ing masses was Russia's own, and most of these masses were freshly
torn from the countryside, thus lacking the more deeply rooted tra-
io Before the Biennio Rosso

ditions and institutions of the contemporary working class in the

West. In short, in nearly all areas of concern to socialists, Russia
was a backward country.
There were, however, certain surprising aspects to Russia's so-
cial and economic development. Although by 1905 most of Russia's
nonagricultural labor force was still employed in small shops, the
percentage of workers (though of course not the total number) in
factories of one thousand or more workers was three times as great
as that in Germany. 6 Of course the total production of Germany
was enormously greater than that of Russia, but backward Russia
had relatively more industrial concentration than did highly indus-
trialized Germany. Russia thus had areas of intense proletarian con-
centrations, and these proletarians were easily attracted to social-
ism. And insofar as Marx's theories focused on the implications of
industrial concentration, a socialist in Russia could find much of
relevance in them.
Lenin himself was not only attracted to Marxism as a scientific
description of the trends of industrial society but also to the organi-
zational model of the leading Marxist party, the SPD. It may seem
paradoxical that an ardent revolutionary like Lenin should admire
the party machine that became a bulwark of reformism and that
was responsible for isolating and emasculating the SPD's radicals.
But the dangers of bureaucratization in the SPD were not so patent
when Lenin began to forge his own ideas of party organization in
the first few years of the twentieth century. And, more important,
in the context of Russia's state and society the dangers of a self-
serving bureaucracy at the head of a socialist party hardly existed.
Living outside the law, usually in exile, and animated by a spirit of
self-sacrifice verging on fanaticism, the members of the Russian So-
cial Democratic Workers' party could hardly be compared to the
SPD Bonzen or bureaucrats-on-high.
Lenin welded the Russian populist or narodnik notion of pro-
fessional revolutionaries, an elite corps of "pures" and "hards" (also
seen in the theories of the French socialist Blanqui), to the German
socialist notion of a bureaucratic machine designed to lead and
manipulate the proletarian masses; and he infused into the amal-
gam his own remarkably assertive personality. His unshakeable
 Before the Biennio Rosso 11

faith in the infallibility of his own judgment made the actual opera-
tion of the Bolshevik party even less democratic than it was in the-
ory. At the same time, his realistic approach to the problems of
working-class consciousness—that workers needed firm, constant
guidance and could not develop a mature revolutionary mentality
without being taught it by the party—saved him the inconveniences
and obstacles to action with which revolutionaries like Rosa Lux-
emburg (who looked to a more spontaneous development of social-
ist consciousness among the working class) had to deal.
Before the war Lenin did not devise his theories with an eye
primarily to western socialism. Yet, while his theories were not
known in the West at this time, he did offer, without directly so
intending, some rather interesting if draconian solutions to the
problems that were of growing concern in the West: the loss of élan
through bureaucratization and parliamentarization, a growing
sense of frustration on the left because of the apparent incompati-
bilities between democracy and social revolution, and the failure
of even the most highly industrialized countries to produce a prole-
tarianized and rebellious majority according to Marx's predictions.
Lenin stipulated that party leaders, and even party members, were
to be professional revolutionaries of tested revolutionary courage
and commitment; anyone who showed weakness in the direction of
reformism, careerism, or parliamentarism was to be ruthlessly cast
aside. If necessary, the revolutionary minority of a socialist party,
unable to effect the necessary purging of the ranks of its party,
should break away and form a new party that would be faithful to
revolutionary principles. Professional revolutionaries could not
concern themselves about the "false consciousness" of the formal
majority of the population—or even the majority of the proletariat
—since only an intellectual and moral elite could be expected to
achieve a true socialist consciousness before the actual victory of
socialist revolution.
Actually, each of these notions and many others central to Le-
nin's thought can be found as individual propositions in the writ-
ings of western socialists. But gathered together and presented in
Lenin's forceful style—and of course with the authority of revolu-
tionary victory behind them—they exercised an understandable at-
x2 Before the Biennio Rosso

traction to many revolutionaries w h o were still searching for ways

out of the dilemmas mentioned above, which merely became inten-
sified in the immediate postwar period. T h e r e is a certain irony to
all of this because in the prewar international socialist community
Russians were normally shrugged off as hopeless sectarians, and any
sympathy western socialists showed tended to be condescending.
T h e Russians' odd ideas and unending quarrels were regarded as an
unhappy consequence of their economic and cultural backwardness.
T h i s condescension was most blatant on the part of the leaders of
the SPD; but even in France, where one might have expected a
more genuine comprehension of socialist sectarianism, there was
little interest in the affairs of Russian socialists. Jaurès himself or-
dered the staff of L'Humanité, the newspaper of the S F I O , to avoid
accepting articles or letters from them in order not to become in-
volved in their interminable quarrels. 7 A n d when G . M. Serrati, a
leader of the left wing of the PSI, received admiring letters from
L e n i n in late 1914 he did not even bother to answer them. 8

T h e trauma of war

T h e war marked a dramatic turning point for European

socialism. It forced the leaders of each party to make the choices
they had so often avoided: between patriotism and international-
ism, reformism and revolution, commitment to the ideals of the
International or commitment to the interests of the nation. T h e
pressures of war introduced into party life a sense of stringent neces-
sity which often threw former comrades at each others' throats.
T h u s the war meant an ultimate schism in the International and in
the individual parties that made it up.
T h e unanimous support given first by the S P D and then the
S F I O parliamentary delegates for war credits in early August 1914
dramatically demonstrated the impracticality of the earlier resolu-
tions of the International to oppose the threat of war. T h e outbreak
of W o r l d W a r I was a failure of working-class internationalism, not
only because workingmen were killing one another, but also be-
cause most of the leading parties of the International had lost the
ability, and even the desire, to communicate with one another. T h e
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