A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

Tsarist Russia 719

nothing about Lenin’s appearance that would have attracted the attention
of tsarist spies or Swiss and French police. An Englishman said that “he
looked more like a provincial grocer than a leader.”
Lenin combined a powerful ability to theorize with a facility for adapting
to changing circumstances. His steely resolve would carry him to cold fury
when colleagues or rivals failed to agree with him. “He who does not
understand this does not understand anything!” was a typical Lenin rejoin­
der. A vigorous polemicist, he could be impatient and churlish in speech,
cutting and sarcastic with his potent pen.
In 1902, Lenin, who had taken his name as a pseudonym the previous
year, published What Is to Be Done? In this pamphlet (with the same title
as the work by Chernyshevsky), Lenin established what would become the
basic tenets of a new revolutionary party. Lenin believed that Marxist
analysis could be applied to a backward, authoritarian nation with a rela­
tively undeveloped working class and a small bourgeoisie. “The one serious
organizational principle for workers in our movement must be strictest
secrecy,” he wrote, and “the strictest choice of members and the training
of professional revolutionaries.” He rejected all compromise with liberals
and reform socialists, viewing as self-defeating the struggle of workers for
small economic gains, crumbs tossed from the posh table of the ruling
class. Rejecting the common Marxist view that the social experiences of
workers would lead them to revolutionary consciousness, Lenin believed
that only a minority of workers would achieve consciousness and that
these should join with intellectuals in a party that would direct the masses.
Lenin and his followers became known as the “Bolsheviks,” or “majority”
(although much of the time in the years that followed they were not), and
their rivals were known as the “Mensheviks,” the “minority.” The Menshe­
viks believed that a proletarian revolution lay in the future, but not until a
bourgeois uprising had first succeeded in overthrowing the tsarist state.
Mensheviks believed that their role was to mobilize support for their party
through propaganda, while undertaking timely alliances with liberal groups.
They objected to the high degree of party centralization upon which Lenin
insisted.

The Russo-Japanese War (1904—1905)

In the meantime, the Russian Empire lurched toward war with Japan. It

had begun to covet Chinese Manchuria and the peninsula of Korea. The

acquisition of Manchuria would permit Russia to construct a more direct

rail link to the ice-free Russian port of Vladivostok; that of Korea would

protect the new port from possible attack and provide still more ports. In

1894, Japan goaded China into a war. By the Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895),

the victorious Japanese took the island of Formosa (Taiwan) and gained Chi­

nese recognition of Korea’s independence. This placed the peninsula under

direct Japanese influence. Japan also acquired the Liaodong (Liaotung)