THE YEARS OF REACTION AND THE NEW REVOLUTIONARY UPSURGE
Chapter Three
THE YEARS OF REACTION AND THE NEW REVOLUTIONARY UPSURGE. PRISON AND
EXILE (1907-February 1917)
The First Russian Revolution was suppressed, and, beginning in 1907, political reaction set in.
Thousands of workers and peasants were shot or hanged on sentences passed by court martials or by punitive detachments without trial. In 1909, the prisons held 170,000 people. Repressions were particularly severe when it came to Bolshevik groups. The legal workers’ press was banned.
In the Kingdom of Poland, reaction was worse than elsewhere. Martial law was introduced throughout the country, and court martials routinely meted out harsh sentences.
The SDKP and L was doing its best to expose the ruthlessness of the autocracy and bolster confidence in a new revolutionary upsurge.
Dzerzhinsky plunged into work with renewed vigour. Above all, he took pains to liven up the activities of the Warsaw Social-Democratic organisation. He also toured many industrial centres, restoring disrupted Party contacts and establishing new secret addresses, and supervising the .printing and distribution of underground literature, newspapers and leaflets. As always, he was especially concerned with recruiting and educating propaganda workers.
In the autumn of 1907, Dzerzhinsky made several trips to Lodz. There, as in the other towns of the Kingdom of Poland, harsh repressions were in full swing. As a sign of protest, the workers went on strike. At Dzerzhinsky’s suggestion, the Main Board sent materials about the events in Lodz not only to the underground Polish press but also to foreign newspapers in hopes of “provoking meetings of protest throughout Europe”.
Later, Dzerzhinsky’s wife wrote about his vigorous activities during that time, the willpower and courage he demonstrated, and his ability to inspire faith in the ultimate victory of the revolution:
“I came to know him better in the beginning of 1908. That was a very hard period of the blackest reaction. The Party organisation was almost entirely smashed, the prisons were overcrowded. The vacillating elements turned away from the Party. In Warsaw, only about 5 or 6 Party activists were left. We met seldom, and with difficulty. The people were often late. Work was slack.
“But then ’Jozef made an appearance,... and the Party organisation was galvanised into immediate action. Everyone looked rejuvenated, filled with new energy. People were no longer late. Flats for the activists’ meetings appeared as if by miracle. Party discipline was re-established without a word from ‘Juzef. He inspired us all by his enthusiasm, his faith in an early new upsurge of the revolution.”
On April 3, 1908, Dzerzhinsky was arrested again and put into the No. 10 Block of the Warsaw citadel. This was his fifth arrest, and he spent 16 months in prison. As before, the police failed to make him utter a single word about the Party organisation or his contacts.
His moral courage and revolutionary optimism are reflected in his prison diary. “Life would not be worth living,” wrote Dzerzhinsky in his diary in May 1908, “if mankind had not been guided by the star of socialism, the star of the future.”
Twice, in January and in April 1909, the Warsaw court sentenced Dzerzhinsky to life exile in Siberia and deprivation of all civil status rights for escaping from exile and “participation in a criminal association"
(i.e., work in the underground Social-Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania).
On August 31 he was deported, and in mid-September brought to Krasnoyarsk. A few days later, he was told of the decision concerning his future domicile: the remote village of Belskoye in the taiga, 300 km from Krasnoyarsk.
On September 24, 1909, Dzerzhinsky arrived at Belskoye, but did not stay there long. The police and
the clergy “discerned in his behaviour manifestation of arrogance and the wish to make trouble”, and did their best to get rid of him. In early October 1909, he was transferred to a still more distant spot, the village of Sukhovo, and from there, a month later, to the village of Taseyevo. Dzerzhinsky took a room in the house of the local blacksmith, a former exile, Anton Krogulsky (in some documents, Rogulsky), who had participated in the Polish uprising of 1863. There he was to remain as an “eternal exile" until his death.
On November 13, 1909, Dzerzhinsky escaped from Taseyevo. The secrecy of his escape was such that a search for him began only three months later, by which time he was thousands of kilometres away from Taseyevo, on the Italian island of Capri. The Main Board of the SDKP and L had sent him there to take treatment.
Having spent nearly two years in prison and in exile, Dzerzhinsky needed time to find his bearings in the situation prevailing in the country and the Party. While on Capri, he read Social-Democratic publications for the years 1908 and 1909, and Party documents forwarded to him by friends in the Party Main Board.
On return from Capri, Dzerzhinsky travelled to Berne, Zurich and Berlin on Party business, and gradually came to realise that the best thing would be for him to move secretly to St. Petersburg in order to keep the Main Board informed of the situation in the RSDLP and maintain constant ties with the Central Committee Russian Bureau.
However, the Party leadership suggested that he return to Krakow, where he arrived in March 1910 to take up the job of secretary and treasurer of the SDKP and L Main Board. Once in Krakow, he acquainted himself with the state of affairs in the Party branches of the Kingdom of Poland. It was far from encouraging. There were not enough people and printed material, and the people sent from abroad were often apprehended. In the absence of timely information and specific instructions from the Main Board, many underground groups were “stewing in their own juice" and were not competent enough to head the mounting revolutionary movement. The immediate task was to build up the underground organisations ideologically and politically. While in Krakow, Dzerzhinsky had to
re-establish contacts, render assistance to Party groups, maintain ties with the Main Board and the Party Bureau of Foreign Groups, keep in touch with the Krakow printing press which dealt with Party publications and do the proof- reading. His job as Party treasurer consumed a great deal of time and effort, and he was also responsible for storing and transporting Party literature to the Kingdom of Poland, supplying underground activists with documents, looking for new addresses to which the Party correspondence could be sent, and keeping the Party archives in order.
In August 1910, he reported on the political situation and the tasks of the Party at the regional conference of the Social-Democratic Party held in Krakow. His report was based on Lenin’s ideas on
the need to strengthen the organisational and political work of the Party at the time of the growing revolutionary movement, and to continue to level daily just criticism against the bourgeois and petty- bourgeois parties. Dzerzhinsky called on the Party to step up its propaganda activities among the working-class members of the left wing of the Polish Socialist Party and win them over to the position of the Social- DemocraticParty.
The work of the Krakow Branch of the Party grew markedly livelier. In late May 1910, it established
a self- education club for Krakow and Galician workers. The first talk, about the history of the class struggle in France, was given by Dzerzhinsky.
Despite his enormous work load, Dzerzhinsky found time to further his own education. A systematic method of studying scientific literature that he had evolved back at the beginning of his revolutionary career was proving most helpful. In Krakow, Dzerzhinsky made a thorough study of Marx’s and Engels’s philosophical works, including The Poverty of Philosophy, Anti-Dühring, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism,
works by Kant, Mach and some other bourgeois philosophers. In addition, he went back to his study of the theory of rent and other categories of the Marxist political economy which first he had begun in Wilno and Kowno and continued in his Vyatka exile.
The Krakow police kept Dzerzhinsky under secret surveillance and sometimes summoned him for questioning.
Dzerzhinsky was very concerned about the state of affairs in the RSDLP, where the controversy between the Bolsheviks on the one hand and the Mensheviks and other opportunist groups on the other was mounting. As a member of the RSDLP Central Committee, he took a lively interest in intra-party
issues. In February 1911, he wrote to Tyszka: “As concerns the policies of the CO [Central Organ],[1] I subscribe to them to the extent of my knowledge of these matters; I even go further, for I agree with Lenin’s policy. You know what my position is.”
To bolster the work of underground Party organisations, in May 1911 Dzerzhinsky made trips to Warsaw, Lodz and other towns of the Kingdom of Poland, where he lent a hand in the distribution of
underground literature, held several Party meetings, and ascertained the situation for himself.
Between May 28 and June 4, 1911, Dzerzhinsky and Tyszka took part in the conference held by the eight members of the RSDLP Central Committee residing abroad. At Lenin’s suggestion it was convened in Paris and considered “the issue of the restoration of the Central Committee in connection with the overall position of the Party”. The report was delivered by Lenin.
The conference also discussed the question of preparing a general Party conference. A commission was set up to deal with this matter.
At the conference, Dzerzhinsky spoke out in defence of Lenin’s stand. On May 27, on the eve of the
conference, he wrote from Paris that he had had meetings with Lenin, that the Bolsheviks regarded the present Central Committee as “a stinking corpse”, and that the central Party bodies should be purged of traitors who must not remain Party members.
On May 29, the second day of the conference’s work, Lenin and Dzerzhinsky exchanged notes on the question under discussion. It is clear from Lenin’s note, which he called “a treaty between Lenin and Juzef”, that Dzerzhinsky supported expelling the Mensheviks from the Party. “This has to be done”, he stated firmly.
After the conference, he returned to Krakow, but still maintained contact with the Bolshevik Centre in Paris. In one of his letters of July 1 1911 he wrote that Krakow was a more convenient spot than Paris for directing the RSDLP practical work in Russia, and reported on the opportunity to ensure a safe crossing of the border for Party activists.
“For many reasons,” he wrote, “it is most inconvenient to conduct practical work from Paris... If here (in
Krakow.—Auth.) someone should undertake it, it would be easy to arrange a crossing.” Lenin had probably taken this letter into account when deciding to move from Paris to Krakow in the summer of
1912.
In mid-November 1911 Dzerzhinsky left for Brussels on Party business. On his return trip, he spent
a few days in Paris, and then proceeded to Berlin, where he stayed until the end of December.
In January 1912, the Sixth All-Russia Conference of the RSDLP chaired by Lenin was held in Prague.
It defined the tactics of the Party in view of a new revolutionary wave in Russia. Having analysed the political situation in the country, the conference stated that the overthrow of the autocracy and seizure of power by the proletariat in alliance with the peasantry was still the objective of a democratic overturn in Russia.
The conference elected a Central Committee comprised of seven members and headed by Lenin. Dzerzhinsky was deeply troubled by the fact that the Social-Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania had sent no representatives to the Prague Conference. He voiced his concern in a letter
to the Main Board, and in March 1912 asked for a “report on Lenin’s conference”. In that letter, Dzerzhinsky tried to persuade the Main Board to allow him to leave Krakow and settle somewhere in
the Kingdom of Poland.
Finally, permission was granted. Prior to leaving for Warsaw on March 22, 1912, Dzerzhinsky wrote
and forwarded to the Main Board “A Letter to My Comrades”, which was to be published in case of his arrest. “Out of the last 14 years of my life,” he wrote, “I have spent six in prison and one in exile. I should not be sorry to DC exiled again if this would help the Party cast off the alien elements which penetrated it during the rising of the revolutionary wave and are now sponging of it.”
Back in Warsaw, Dzerzhinsky was very busy. He held Party and workers’ meetings throughout the city, taught workers’ groups, searched for new addresses where underground literature could be kept, and had it smuggled to Polish towns.
The revolutionary movement continued to rise. The events of April 4, 1912[2] acted as a powerful impetus. Learning of the incident, Dzerzhinsky addressed a letter to the Main Board asking that an appeal be issued and then sent to him. At his suggestion, the appeal urged the Polish workers to respond to the events on the Lena by determined action. In May 1912, 25,000 people in Warsaw and 10,000 in Czestochowa staged a strike in response to the appeal of the SDKP and L.
Dzerzhinsky received valuable assistance in his work from Sofia (Zosia) Dzerzhinskaya (nee Muszkat), a professional revolutionary and member of the SDKP and L. The two met in 1905 when both were involved in underground work in Warsaw. Sofia was a propaganda worker and a member of first the district and then the city (Warsaw) Committee of the SDKP and L. She often took part in Party congresses. In 1906 she was arrested and put into the Warsaw prison, where Dzerzhinsky was also being detained at the time. Having served her sentence, Sofia continued underground work in a number of Polish towns. In 1909 she was arrested for the second time in Warsaw, and three months later was deported abroad. She settled in Krakow where she again met Dzerzhinsky, who had returned from his Siberian exile. The two worked together to put the Party work in order, establish secret correspondence with Party committees and copy manuscripts of essays and other materials for the Czerwony Sztandar that were sent in from Berlin (where the Party Main Board had its headquarters). Sofia would forward these materials to Warsaw, where the newspaper was printed at an underground press. The work was of great importance for the Party and required a great deal of patience and care. Sofia was active in the Krakow branch of the SDKP and L, where she was engaged mostly in building up the Party’s foreign contacts.
Felix Dzerzhinsky and Sofia Muszkat fell in love and were married in August 1910. But their happiness was soon disrupted. In November 1910 Sofia was sent by the Party to do underground work in Warsaw, and in late December she was arrested.
In June 1911, while still in prison, Sofia gave birth to a son and named him Jan. The baby remained with her in the prison cell for the first eight months of his life. The tsarist court sentenced her to the deprivation of all civil status rights and life exile in Eastern Siberia. The child, very weak and sickly, was placed in a private nursery. Later, Sofia’s uncle, Marian Muszkat, a medical doctor, took the child under his care, and the boy recovered.
In the autumn of 1912 Sofia escaped from exile and safely made her way to Krakow, where she hoped to join her husband. But upon reaching the Russian-Austrian border, she learned that Dzerzhinsky had been arrested for the sixth time a few days before, on September 1, 1912, while he was in the midst, of some important Party work.
The report drawn up by the police department on September 26 cited “incriminating” evidence against Dzerzhinsky. It stated that he had set up and headed a new Warsaw committee acknowledged by the Main Board, and “at the same time engaged in Party work there, staged strikes, and issued proclamations to the workers concerning current events in workers’ and political life. During six months he had resided in Warsaw, Dzerzhinsky had made trips to Lodz and also went to Krakow to make reports to the Main Board on the results of his work”. It was obvious that the police had collected extensive information about Dzerzhinsky’s activities.
Soon after his arrest, the Main Board featured his letter written on March 22, 1912, in the Party press, supplying it with the following foreword:
“Each of you knows him. Out of the 34 years of his life, he has spent six years in prison and more than one year in exile. He joined the movement at the age of 17 and worked in Warsaw for 12 years.
Everywhere he was in the front ranks, where the work was hardest, the responsibility the greatest, the dangers the worst. An organiser, agitator and Party leader, he was ready at any time to do anything to promote the cause, from the pettiest, most trivial technical matters to jobs requiring the broadest knowledge of political thought. Showing iron strength and fiery enthusiasm, he worked to restore Party organisations smashed by the enemy or disintegrating through slipshod work... He laid at the altar of the Party his youth, his health, and his private life.”
The investigation into Dzerzhinsky’s activities lasted almost two years, during which time he was kept at the No. 10 Block of the Warsaw Citadel. His court trial was held on April 29, 1914; Dzerzhinsky was sentenced to three years of hard labour for his escape from Siberian exile. His participation in the underground Party activities was still being investigated.
In July 1914, in connection with the start of the First World War, 502 prisoners, Dzerzhinsky among them, were transferred to a prison in the town of Orel in Russia. He remained there until April 21, 1915, and was then taken to Orel central prison.
Kept in the same cell with Dzerzhinsky were mostly young weavers from Lodz. Dzerzhinsky had always found it easy to mix with workers. He divided them into two groups and started teaching them Polish and Polish literature. In the evenings,’ lying on their bunks, the young men listened to Dzerzhinsky talk about political topics and recite passages from the classic writers of Polish literature—Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Slowacki, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Marja Konopnicka and Eliza Orzeszkowa.
While in Orel prison, Dzerzhinsky carried on a never- ending campaign against the Mensheviks and
the Bund. He was also exhorting the prisoners to fight for better conditions and against the arbitrary
rule of the authorities.
Dzerzhinsky did not even suspect that his fate was a matter of grave concern for Lenin, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife and also a professional revolutionary, and other members of the Union for the Assistance to Political Prisoners, which had established its headquarters first in Krakow and later in Switzerland. Correspondence between Sergiusz Bagocki, the Union chairman, and Nadezhda Krupskaya and Sofia Dzerzhinskaya for the year 1915 shows that Krupskaya was aware that Dzerzhinsky had no money and therefore requested that he be given material assistance.
In late March 1916 Dzerzhinsky was transferred to Moscow, first to the Taganka and then Butyrka prison. In May of the same year, he was sentenced to six years’ hard labour for his revolutionary activities in 1910-12, “excluding the three years served under the sentence of the Warsaw regional court passed on April 29, 1914”.
After the new sentence had been passed, the Moscow court approximately calculated the sentence to
be served beginning in May 1916 to be concluded only in May 1919.
Whether he was a prisoner or a free man, Dzerzhinsky never lost his faith in the inevitability of another Russian revolution in the near future. A worker and Social- Democrat, Mlinarski, who was Dzerzhinsky’s fellow-prisoner in Orel and was kept in the next cell in the Taganka prison, wrote that even in prison Dzerzhinsky used to say that better days would be here soon. “Tsarism will have a price to pay for the war,” he said.
“It might be that if the war lasts another year, the workers and peasants clad in soldiers’ uniforms will wipe out the autocracy; a revolution will take place, and we shall go home. Of course we shall return not to sit out the difficult times but to fight against the old world and build a new happy life for all these working people."
Dzerzhinsky was released from the Butyrka prison by Moscow workers on March 1, 1917. He was not yet
40, and had given 22 years to the revolutionary movement.
Notes
[1] The Central Organ was at that time the Sotsial-Demokrat newspaper. Lenin was on its editorial
board and in fact headed its publication.
[2] On April 4, 1912, troops shot down a peaceful march of strikers at the gold mines near the
River Lena
in Siberia.
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