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Soviet Union [USSR] The Development of Radical Political Parties, 1892-1904
During the 1890s, Russia's industrial development led to a
significant increase in the size of the urban bourgeoisie and the
working class, setting the stage for a more dynamic political
atmosphere and the development of radical parties. Because much of
Russia's industry was owned by the state or by foreigners, the
working class was comparatively stronger and the bourgeoisie
comparatively weaker than in the West. Because the nobility and the
wealthy bourgeoisie were politically timid, the establishment of
working-class and peasant parties preceded that of bourgeois
parties. Thus, in the 1890s and early 1900s strikes and agrarian
disorders prompted by abysmal living and working conditions, high
taxes, and land hunger became more frequent. The bourgeoisie of
various nationalities developed a host of different parties, both
liberal and conservative.
Socialist parties were formed on the basis of the nationalities
of their members. Russian Poles, who had suffered significant
administrative and educational Russification, founded the
nationalistic Polish Socialist Party in Paris in 1892. Its founders
hoped that it would help reunite a divided Poland from territories
held by Austria and Germany and by Russia. In 1897 the Bund was
founded by Jewish workers in Russia, and it became popular in
western Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, and Russian Poland. In 1898
the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party was formed. The Finnish
Social Democrats remained separate, but the Latvians and Georgians
associated themselves with the Russian Social Democrats. Armenians
were inspired by both Russian and Balkan revolutionary traditions,
and they operated in both Russia and the Ottoman Empire.
Politically minded Muslims living in Russia tended to be attracted
to the pan-Islamic and pan-Turkic movements that developed in Egypt
and the Ottoman Empire. Russians who fused the ideas of the old
Populists and urban socialists formed Russia's largest radical
movement, the United Socialist Revolutionary Party, which combined
the standard Populist mix of propaganda and terrorist activities.
Vladimir I. Ulianov was the most politically talented of the
revolutionary socialists. In the 1890s, he labored to wean young
radicals away from populism to Marxism. Exiled from 1895 to 1899 in
Siberia, where he took the name Lenin, he was the master tactician
among the organizers of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.
In December 1900, he founded the newspaper Iskra (Spark). In
his book What Is to Be Done? (1902), Lenin developed the
theory that a newspaper published abroad could aid in organizing a
centralized revolutionary party to direct the overthrow of an
autocratic government. He then worked to establish a tightly
organized, highly disciplined party to do so in Russia. At the
Second Party Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party
in 1903, he forced the Bund to walk out, and he induced a split
between his majority Bolshevik faction and the minority Menshevik
faction, which believed more in worker spontaneity than in strict
organizational tactics. Lenin's concept of a revolutionary party
and a worker-peasant alliance owed more to Tkachev and to the
People's Will than to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the
developers of Marxism. Young Bolsheviks, such as Joseph V. Stalin
and Nikolai I. Bukharin, looked to Lenin as their leader.
Data as of May 1989
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