Feliks Dzierzynski and the SDKPiL: A Study of the Origins of Polish Communism 0880330465, 9780880330466

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FELIKS DZIERŻYŃSKI AND THE SDKPiL: A STUDY OF THE ORIGINS OF POLISH COMMUNISM

Robert Blobaum

EAST EUROPEAN MONOGRAPHS, BOULDER DISTRIBUTED BY COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, NEW YORK 1984

EAST EUROPEAN MONOGRAPHS, NO. CLIV

Copyright © 1984 by Robert Blobaum ISBN 0-88033-046-5 Library of Congress Card Catalog Number 83-82283 Printed in the United States of America

TABLE OF CONTENTS

A Note on Names, Dates and Sources Acknowledgments Preface Introduction: Russian Poland after the January Insurrection of 1863 Chapter I. Childhood and Adolescence, 1877-1893 II. The Making of a Revolutionary, 1894-1899 III. Founder of the SDKPiL, 1899-1900 IV. Dzierżyński and the “New Course” of the SDKPiL, 1901-1903 V. Building the Conspiratorial Organization, 1904 VI. Fanatic of the Revolution, 1905 VII. Between Revolution and Reaction, 1906-1907 VIII. Dzierżyński, Tyszka and the Dictatorship of the Main Directorate, 1908-1911 IX. Dzierżyński and the Eclipse of the SDKPiL, 1911-1917 Conclusion Notes Selected Bibliography Index

v vii 1 7

19 31 55 72 106 122 147 172 195 224 232 286 302

A NOTE ON NAMES, DATES AND SOURCES

In the transliteration of Russian names and titles, I have utilized the system employed by the Library of Congress, except in cases where other spellings have become customary—hence, Trotsky rather than Trotskii. Polish names and titles appear in their original spelling. I have also used the transliterated Russian spelling for the names of places located within the present borders of the Soviet Union (hence Vilna rather than the Polish Wilno or the Lithuanian Vilnius). Otherwise, I have used Polish spellings for places within the present borders of the Polish state (hence Białystok rather than Belostok). More complex is the problem of the Russian use of the Julian or “Old Style” calender until its liquidation by the Bolsheviks in 1918. The Julian calender was thirteen days behind the Gregorian or “New Style” calendar in the twentieth century and twelve days behind in the nineteenth century. To avoid confusion, dates are given in “New Style” unless otherwise noted. Most references to archival materials in this text are from two principal collections in the Central Archive of the United Polish Worker’s Party (hereafter abbreviated CA PZPR) in Warsaw. The first is a collection of manuscripts owned and catalogued by the Central Archive; it includes unpublished memoirs, police documents, personal and family records of leading party figures in addition to official party records. These materials have been designated by a call number corresponding to a particular unit of documents; for example, CA PZPR 61/III-1 contains one unit of police documents relating to the activity of Feliks Dzierżyński. The second col­ lection, the Microfilmed Archive of the SDKPiL in the Institute of Marx­ ism-Leninism, is more vast than the first, comprising hundreds of reels of v

VI

FEU K S DZIERŻYŃSKI

» . microfilm, including seven reels of Dzierzynski’s correspondence and notes. References to materials from this coUectionhąye been made according to the system of classification employed by the Central Archive rather than that of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, but have been designated by the abbreviated prefix AM to indicate their location. Finally, all illustra­ tions which appear in this text are the property of the Central Archive and have been reproduced with its consent.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The most difficult task of the author of any historical monograph is to acknowledge adequately the individuals and institutions instrumental in its preparation. This work began as a doctoral dissertation at the Uni­ versity of Nebraska and in its various drafts benefited from the welcome criticism and advice of Albin Anderson, Edward Homze, Ann Kleimola and James McClelland. Also at an early stage, the constant flow of ques­ tions and suggestions from Mark O’Connor and Tom Dyman was extreme­ ly helpful. Special thanks are due to Józef Buszko, Director of the Insti­ tute of History at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, whom I was most fortunate to have as an academic advisor during my stay in Poland. For their assistance in revising the manuscript for publication, I owe an unrepayable debt of gratitude to Norman Nainiark, Anna Cienciala and Eric Johnson. Several institutions have also aided me greatly in this study. The Fulbright-Hays Graduate Student Exchange Program supported my research in Poland for which I am sincerely grateful. Generous grants from the International Research and Exchanges Board, the University of Nebraska and Central Michigan University have at one time or another aided in this work. Archivists and librarians at the Jagiellonian University Library, the Kraków and Warsaw branches of the Polish State Archive, the Institute of History of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, the Lenin Museum in Kraków and the Sterling Memorial library at Yale University provided needed assistance in locating and using materials that went into this study. In this regard, I owe a special debt to Director Janusz Durko and his Vll

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FELIKS DZIERŻYŃSKI

efficient staff at the Central Archive of the United Polish Workers’ Party in Warsaw. Finally, I wish to thank the HuLkMemorial Fund at Cornell University for a generous subvention without which the publication of this monograph could not have been possible.

PREFACE

This book is about Feliks Dzierżyński and a political party that was molded in his image—the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. To be sure, Dzierżyński has been accorded his place in history primarily by virtue of the role he played as director of the secret police in the first decade of Soviet rule in Russia. This is understandable. Apart from Lenin, none of the Soviet leaders, including Trotsky and Stalin, consistently commanded as much power as Dzierżyński in this initial period of Soviet history. In addition to his control of the internal security forces, he also supervised the work of the Commissariat of Trans­ portation and the Supreme Economic Council, the principal Soviet agencies responsible for economic reconstruction in the years of the New Economic Policy. However, long before his emergence on the Russian scene during the 1917 revolution, Dzierżyński had already attained a reputation. Among agents of the Okhrana, he was known as the leader of the Social Demo­ cracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL), a revolutionary Marxist party that operated in the Russian zone of partitioned Poland. As a result of his tireless activity and fanatical devotion to the SDKPiL from 1899 to 1912, Dzierżyński, more than any other figure, shaped its organi­ zational structure and determined its political strategies. Indeed, Rosa Luxemburg may have been known by her contemporaries as the theoreti­ cal “brains” behind the SDKPiL, but Feliks Dzierżyński was its acknow­ ledged organizational “soul.” 1

2

FEU K S DZIERŻYŃSKI

Given the important role Dzierżyński played in the historical develop­ ment of both Polish and Russian com m unis^,it is surprising that next to nothing has been written about him in the West. Thus, while there are numerous biographies of the “Three Who Made a Revolution” (Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin), as well as an excellent treatment of the career of Bukharin (by Stephen Cohen), no work of Western scholarship has ap­ peared on Dzierżyński. L. D. Gerson’s recent study, The Secret Police in Lenin’s Russia, begins to unravel some of the mystery surrounding Dzier­ żyński, but only in the limited context of an examination of the VCheka. With respect to Dzierżyński^ early career in “Russian” Poland, the limited Western scholarship devoted to the SDKPiL also pays him scant regard, leaving the false impression that effective control of the SDKPiL as a political organization rested in the hands of a few social democratic emigres in Berlin (principally Rosa Luxemburg and her lifelong compan­ ion, Leon Jogiches-Tyszka). The recent appearance of Georg W. Strobel’s Die Partei Rosa Luxemburgs, Lenin und die SPD, while providing greater coverage of Dzierżyński^ activities, has done little to redress this imbal­ ance as is indicated in the title of Strobel’s work. The necessity of relying on sources available in the West, which shed a great deal of light on the Polish social democratic intelligentsia in emigration but very little on the party organization in its actual territory of activity, is the major reason why Dzierżyńskfs role has never been adequately assessed by Western scholars. Historians in the Soviet Union and in postwar Poland, on the other hand, have found for Dzierżyński a place second only to Lenin in com­ munist historiography. This honor can be attributed to Dzierżyński^ timely death in 1926 before the purges, the rewriting of history during the Stalin era which eliminated many possible candidates for Soviet sainthood, and the revisions of the revisions since Stalin's death which together have tended to downplay the dictator’s own role in the first decade of Soviet power. As a result, among the so-called “Old Bolsheviks” —a title for which Dzierżyński scarcely qualifies, having joined the Bol­ sheviks in August 1917—he now stands virtually alone next to Lenin. To justify his elevated position, communist historians have consciously created a legendary figure through the publication of numerous but redundant biographies, highly favorable and distorted memoir accounts, and extremely selective editions of his works.

Preface

3

As a by-product of this trend in Soviet historical writings, Dzierżyński’s biographers in both Poland and the Soviet Union have also found it necessary “to prove” that the man who supposedly stood closest to Lenin in the Soviet Union was also the principal proponent of Lenin’s ideas in Poland. Thus Dzierżyński has become, in addition of Lenin’s chief lieutenant after 1917, the ideal personal embodiment of Russo-Polish revolutionary collaboration before the Bolshevik revolution. This work attempts to bridge the gap between the lack of attention in Western scholarship to Dzierżyńskim career and the legend-building efforts on his behalf by generations of communist historians. I have con­ fined my discussion to Dzierżyńskim activies in “Russian Poland” before 1917 primarily in order to determine his role in the historical develop­ ment of Polish communism. But in the process I have also sought to define the ideological, political and personal “baggage” he later took with him as he embarked upon a new career in the first socialist state. Let the reader be forewarned: this is not a psycho-history of the young Dzierżyński. Although Dzierżyński is a tempting subject for such an en­ deavor, there is too little information about his troubled life to draw a composite psychological protrait. Dzierżyńskim conscious tendency to subordinate personal affairs to his political career does not make the task easier. The fragmentary evidence that is available has been used to deter­ mine, where possible, the interaction of Dzierżyńskim personal life with his political life. But the emphasis of this book will be on the political rather than personal issues that confronted Dzierżyński. This work will also concede at the outset that Dzierżyńskim career before 1917 in many ways did conform to the portrait of the model revolutionary activist set forth by Lenin in his famous What is to be Done? In his fanatical devotion to the “cause” of revolution and willing­ ness to make the most demanding personal sacrifices for it, Dzierżyńksi did provide more than sufficient material for the purposes of legend­ building. And, indeed, the organizational methods he imposed on the SDKPiL did serve to transform it into a conspiratorial, professionalized and centrally-controlled party of the Leninist variety. Despite these similarities with Lenin and Lenin’s party, however, Dzier­ żyński marched to his own drummer. In fact, Dzierżyński never referred to himself as a “Leninist” prior to 1917 and often applied pejorative con­ notations to the label. This work will attempt to show that even the

4

FELIKS DZIERŻYŃSKI

organizational changes Dzierżyński initiated in the SDKPiL were inspired not out of devotion to the teachings of Lenjqvbut from a practical exam­ ination of the experiences and needs of his own party. Moreover, on the key political issues of the era that divided Lenin and the SDKPiL, Dzier­ żyński shared the “errors” and theoretical “deviations” of what commun­ ist historians in the past have termed “Luxemburgism.” In short, a close and impartial examination of the evidence will show that Dzierżyński, like the vast majority of his colleagues in the SDKPiL, did not adhere to so-called “Leninist” principals in his political activity. If in his early career Dzierżyński was not the Marxist-Leninist of com­ munist mythology, neither was he merely a member of a supporting cast in the drama of the SDKPiL—a role to which Western historians have con­ signed him. Admittedly, Rosa Luxemburg had no equal among Polish Social Democrats in terms of theoretical erudition and polemical finesse. These attributes, however, qualified her for a position among the elite of the international socialist movement, not for political leadership of the SDKPiL. With the exception of brief interludes at the beginning of her career and again in 1905-1906, Luxemburg was more deeply involved in the politics of the German Social Democratic Party, a fact that Polish Social Democrats (and Dzierżyński in particular) often lamented. JogichesTyszka, on the other hand, spend most of his career behind an editor’s desk in Berlin, absorbed in the intrigues of emigre politics. It is difficult to imagine how such a figure could lead an organization that operated in the Kingdom of Poland. And yet, Western historians have argued that Tyszka held the reins of power in the SDKPiL in a kind of trusteeship imparted to him by Luxemburg. While Tyszka’s claims to political hege­ mony in the SDKPiL are both undeniable and well-documented, one must be able to distinguish between pretense and fact. The truth of the matter is that Tyszka lacked the political base among the party rank and file necessary to the realization of his ambitions. Feliks Dzierżyński on the other hand enjoyed such a base, derived from years of grass-roots organizational activity in the Polish revolutionary underground. As the inspiration behind a constantly evolving organiza­ tional apparatus and as the dominant figure in the executive insitutions of the SDKPiL, Dzierżyński translated the ideas of Luxemburg—edited as they were by Tyszka-into more easily digestible forms of political action. In the process he left his own stamp on those ideas and on the history of

Preface

5

the SDKPiL, which in the end proved more enduring than the contribu­ tions of either Luxemburg or Tyszka. In short, this book will argue on the basis of new evidence that Dzierżyński was the mainspring of the political organization of the SDKPiL, the key figure in its collective leadership, and, therefore, the founder of what would become the Polish communist party.

Feliks Dzierżyński in 1905

6

INTRODUCTION: RUSSIAN POLAND AFTER THE JANUARY INSURRECTION OF 1863

The Social and Economic Impact o f the January Insurrection Feliks Dzierżyński was born and grew up during a period of funda­ mental social, economic and cultural change in Russian Poland in the last third of the nineteenth century. Although it is not the purpose of this book to examine the history of that period in detail (for this the reader would be well served to consult the studies listed below),1 a brief outline is necessary in order to place Dzierżyński within the context of his times. “ Russian” Poland is a confusing term with multiple applications. In a strict sense, the designation applies to the territory of the Kingdom of Poland whose borders and dynastic links to the imperial Russian auto­ cracy were determined at the Congress of Vienna following the Napo­ leonic wars, an entity which is, therefore, sometimes referred to as the “Congress Kingdom.” From the perspective of many Poles, Polish lands under Russian rule also included Lithuania, Belorussia and much of the Ukraine west of the Dnieper River. These lands had comprised the east­ ern borderlands, or kresy, of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth before the partitions of Poland in the last quarter of the eighteenth cen­ tury. Referred to by contemporary Polish patriots as the annexed terri­ tories {ziemie zabrane), the former Polish borderlands had been directly incorporated into the Russian empire and were administered separately from the administration of the Kingdom. Since the territorial range of Dzierzyński’s later political activities in “Russian” Poland was limited 7

8

FELIKS DZIERŻYŃSKI

to the Kingdom and to Vilna and Kovno “provinces,” the latter adminis­ trative units of the Russian empire which themselves incorporated only a fraction of the lands of historic Lithuania, our discussion will confine it­ self to these areas. The January Insurrection of 1863, with its' main bases in the Kingdom and Vilna province, was a major watershed in the history of Poland lands under Russian rule. Sparked by dissatisfaction with the limited measures of autonomy granted by the tsar, Alexander II, and efforts to draft Polish students into the Russian army, the insurrection had as its main goal the recovery of complete national independence. However, the results of the rebellion were primarily social. Most important, the insurrection played a crucial role in the emancipation of the peasantry on Poland lands, largely determining the form such emancipation would take when later instituted by the victorious Russians. In the first days of the insurrection, the provisional Polish National Government issued a manifesto which declared peasants full owners of the land they cultivated and promised plots from crown lands to landless peasants who joined the revolt. The lords were to be indemnified eventu­ ally from funds of the state treasury.2 The insurrection was, of course, crushed by the imperial Russian army, but before the fighting had ended in the spring of 1864 the Russian autocracy came to the logical conclusion that it could ill-afford to promise the peasants anything less than what the National Government had offered them. At the same time, the tsarist government was determined to punish those Polish landowners who had participated in the insurrection and had provided it leadership. These two considerations shaped the unique character of the emancipation reform in the Kingdom of Poland and much of Lithuania. According to the imperial decree of Alexander II on February 19, 1864 (Old Style), all peasant obligations to the manor were liquidated in the Kingdom (an earlier but similar decree was already in effect in Lithuania). Unlike their Russian counterparts who did not receive full title to their land and who were burdened with redemption payments over a forty-nine period—both of which tied them to the mir (village commune)—the peasants in the Kingdom and Lithuania were given as freeholds the lands they used.3 At the same time, roughly two-thirds of the landless peasants were allotted plots primarily from confiscated gen­ try land. The emancipation decrees failed to resolve the problem of

Introduction

9

“servitudes” or easement rights, perhaps because the regime wished to retain at least one bone of contention between the peasant freeholders and their former lords. Thus while many peasant farmers were granted the right (after costly litigation on their part) to graze cattle in manorial pastures and to gather wood and cut timber in manorial forests, direct ownership of the prime woodlands and pastures remained in the hands of the former lords. While the great latifundia of the magnates remained largely unaffected by the reforms and thereby continued to dominate the economic life of the countryside, the Polish gentry class, or szlachta, fared far worse. Many gentry were driven from the land—by outright confiscation if they had participated in the insurrection or by high taxes even if they had not been involved in the rebellion. Thus the January Insurrection also marked the most important stage in the decline of the szlachta as the leading political and cultural factor in the nation, although this far from homogeneous class would continue to play an extremely active role in all aspects of Polish life. More important than the emancipation reform itself were its long-term effects. Before the insurrection, demographic and economic change was already in progress, although serfdom continued to act as a brake on many aspects of social development. Recent research on the pre-1863 period has pointed to evidence of an increase in land under cultivation and in the ef­ ficiency of farming methods, urban population growth, the expansion and professionalization of crafts and cottage industries, and most important, a dramatic increase in the number of landless peasants that provided an ever-growing reservoir of cheap labor.4 These processes were intensified by the emancipation reform, particularly the creation of a vast reservoir of labor in the countryside. The plots allotted to the landless peasants eventu­ ally proved too small and poor in quality to long sustain their new proprie­ tors. Hence the initial increase in the number of small landowners was quickly followed by a fourfold expansion in the number of landless pea­ sants between the years 1870 and 1891.5 The abolition of serfdom and the absence of restrictions in the freedom of movement of the emancipated peasants were fundamental in propelling Russian Poland into the modern era. Unlike Russia itself where the short­ comings of the emancipation reforms continued to retard the development of industry and the growth of urban centers, the Kingdom of Poland and,

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FELIKS DZIERŻYŃSKI

to a lessef extent, Vilna province experienced the initial phases of an in­ dustrial revolution. Although light industry and the crafts continued to dominate the industrial economy of RussiàhNPoland at the end of the nineteenth century, the rise of the great factories had begun in earnest. By 1900 two percent of the industrial enterprises in the Kingdom already accounted for fifty-five percent of the urban labor force.6 Moreover, by the turn of the century the total value of industrial production ex­ ceeded that of agriculture. The three great industrial regions of the Kingdom emerged at this time. Warsaw and environs (metallurgy, machine-building), Piotrków pro­ vince with the city of Łódź (textiles), and the Dąbrowa Basin (mining and metallurgy). The textile industry of the Kingdom, particularly in Łódź, employed over one-third of all industrial workers at the turn of the century. Demand for the products of heavy industry on the other hand was spurred by railroad construction which also served to integrate the economy. By 1887, 2084 kilometers of track had been laid in the Kingdom compared to 635 kilometers of track in 1862.7 The industrialization of Russian Poland coincided with fundamental demographic and social change. While the entire population of the King­ dom increased by 77.2 percent from 1865 to 1897, the urban population increased by 131.3 percent over the same period. In 1865 there were eighteen cities in the Kingdom with over ten thousand inhabitants; by 1897 the number had reached thirty-two.8 The three principal industrial regions naturally provided the major centers for urban growth. The popu­ lation of Warsaw doubled from 383,000 inhabitants in 1882 to approxi­ mately 750,000 by 1900.9 The growth of Łódź was even more pheno­ menal, from 33,000 in 1865 to 314,000 in 1897. In the Dąbrowa Basin the population of the three main cities of Częstochowa, Będzin and Sosnowiec increased by over 250 percent from 1865 to 1897.10 In Lithu­ ania the city of Vilna grew from 60,000 in 1870 to 150,000 in 1897; the city of Kovno from 41,000 to 73,500 over the same period.11 There were basically two sources of urban growth in Russian Poland in the last part of the nineteenth century-the natural increase of the urban population itself and the migration of surplus population from the coun­ tryside. Generally speaking, two principal elements of rural society came to the cities: the impoverished gentry whose small estates in the absence of cheap serf labor and sufficient capital did not adjust to the post-emanci-

Introduction

11

pation era, and the landless peasants who were constantly growing in number and whom a more slowly advancing rural economy could not absorb. The 1870s and 1880s were the peak decades of gentry migra­ tion to the cities where they made, up the majority of recruits into the urban Polish intelligentsia, infusing it with their own cultural outlook.12 According to the imperial census of 1897, approximately two-thirds of those with proof of szlachta lineage lived in urban areas.13 At the same time, many former serfs also moved to the city, at first on a seasonal basis and then permanently. Here they joined descendants of the old urban manufacturing class, displaced small producers and even some socially declassed szlachta in forming a new industrial proletariat. Working conditions for this proletariat in the infant Polish industries were characterized by the long hours and low wages typical of early industriali­ zation. Spontaneous and isolated strikes began to occur already in the 1870s culminating in a general strike in the Łódź textile industry in 1892. Despite these economic, social and demographic changes, dramatic when viewed in isolation, the Kingdom and Vilna province could be con­ sidered industrialized only in the context of the tremendous backwardness of the entire Russian empire. The industrial progress of Russian Poland continued to lag far behind that of Western Europe. In 1887 two-thirds of the total population of the Kingdom still relied upon agriculture as its major source of income and, as late as 1910, seventy-six percent continued to live in the coun try side (compared to eighty-four percent in 1872).14 In addition, a significant proportion of the urban population consisted of ethnically non-Polish groups, particularly the-Jews, but also Germans and a growing number of Russian bureaucrats. In 1897, Jews accounted for 38.3 percent of the total urban population in the Kingdom and an even higher percentage in Vilna province.15 Cultural, Intellectual and Political Currents The economic and social progress of Russian Poland coincided with new retributive policies of russification. Russification of Polish lands was not a new concept. Long before 1863 tsarist educational policies in the “western provinces” were aimed at eradicating Polish cultural influences. There Russian had become the language of instruction in most schools and Polish was eliminated entirely from the curriculum. However, before

12

FELIKS DZIERŻYŃSKI

the Januâry Insurrection the Kingdom of Poland had managed to pre­ serve for itself a limited degree of autonomy in local administration and education. It had retained its own treasury and budget, its judiciary was primarily Polish and it had won the approval of the tsarist govern­ ment in 1859 to open the Warsaw Main Schbol (Szkoła Główna), a Po­ lish university in everything but in name. All such remnants of the Kingdom's semi-autonomous status were liquidated in the aftermath of the abortive insurrection. The name of the country itself was changed to the “Vistula Land” (Privislinskii Krai) and the office of viceroy was replaced by that of the governor-general. The Kingdom was then divided into ten provinces administered directly by the Russians with Russian as the official language of administration. Russification in the Kingdom made itself felt most keenly in education. In 1869 the Main School became the Imperial University of Warsaw with a faculty dominated by “properly thinking” Russians. With an extremely high tuition compared to that of the eight other universities in the empire, the Warsaw school quickly lost its significance as a center of Polish scholar­ ship. According to one account, there were more Polish students enrolled at St. Petersburg University at the turn of the century than at Warsaw University.16 In addition, by 1885 the faculty and curricula of all state primary and secondary schools had become completely russified. We have seen how the emancipation reforms in the Kingdom were, to a large extent, conceived as a political act of retribution against the rebel­ lious Polish gentry. Russification, on the other hand, made the intelli­ gentsia—in its first generations composed as it was largely of the sons of Polish gentry—the social group most persecuted and discriminated against in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. As many displaced szlachta came to Warsaw and other cities in Russian Poland, they were able to find employment only in the lower levels of the state administration, particu­ larly in the postal and rail bureaucracies where their earnings were barely above those of skilled workers. Some were able to turn to private busi­ nesses and schools or to the free professions where they managed to eke out a meager existence. Many Polish intellectuals also engaged in literary work and journalism, if only on a part-time basis, in order to supplement their income. However, for the more ambitious gentleman-intellectual, there was really no place in contemporary society. Therefore many of them fought for a new and better system in alliance with the emerging

Introduction

13

proletariat. Under the circumstances, it is not at all surprising to find in the leadership of the Polish labor movement at the end of the nineteenth century a number of descendants from the szlachta—in addition to Feliks Dzierżyński, other notable examples are Ludwik Waryński, Józef Piłsudski and Julian Marchlewski. Noting the confusion caused by the dramatic changes of the transitional period, Ludwik Krzywicki, the famous Pplish sociologist, once character­ ized the intellectual climate of the post-insurerection era as an “ideological fog.” 17 However, it is possible to distinguish with some clarity major cur­ rents of Polish political thought at this time. Among the landed magnates and the great bourgeoisie, many of the latter not ethnically Polish to begin with, there was a tendency towards disavowal of national goals. These ele­ ments rejected as suicidal the heritage of conspiracy and armed rebellion and argued instead that only accomodation with the status quo could save the national existence. Since this philosophy preached the necessity of loyalty to all three partitioning states (Austria, Prussia and Russia), it be­ came, known as “tri-loyalism,” Represented in the Kingdom by the figure of Zygmunt Wielopolski, “tri-loyalists,” never did acquire a mass follow­ ing primarily because the loyalty of the conservative upper classes never yielded any political dividends, particularly in Russian Poland where russi­ fication rather than compromise was the order of the day. A much more attractive philosophy, particularly to the liberal intelli­ gentsia, was the positivism of August Comte as it applied to Polish condi­ tions. Unlike “tri-loyalism.” Polish positivism was forward-looking, basing itself on a belief in reason, progress and sciencè to cure social ills. Employ­ ing the older “organic work” concept of the 1840s and 1850s, Polish posi­ tivism emphasized activity in the economic and cultural rather than poli­ tical spheres. In particular, the positivists propagated the benefits of in­ dustrialization and modernization. At the same time, the positivists, like the “tri-loyalism,” rejected political activity aimed at regaining national independence, a goal which they considered an unrealistic dream, at least for the time being. In the first fifteen years after the January Insurrection, positivism was undoubtedly the dominant intellectual trend among the Warsaw intelligentsia and in the Polish literary and artistic community. However, by the 1880s the positivists’ doctrine of political absention was increasingly assailed by a more impatient and radicalized generation of intellectuals.

FEU K S DZIERŻYŃSKI

14 %

In fact a number of challenges appeared to the positivist creed. In War­ saw, the weekly publication Głos (The Korce) eloquently expressed the radical and democratic aspirations of the younger generation, calling for political action on a mass basis to preserve the national tradition from russification. In 1887 the Polish League was created in Geneva which aligned itself with Głos and a clandestine association of Polish students known as “Zet” in the so-called “camp of action.” The Polish League strove to unite all elements of society in the aim of recovering Poland’s independence from all three partitioning powers. The national, demo­ cratic and populist program of the Polish League would eventually pro­ vide the basis for the doctrines of modern Polish nationalism whose ban­ ner, however, would be carried by future organizations and parties. Postivism also came under attack from the first Polish socialists led by Ludwik Waryński and Bolesław Limanowski, who, already at this early stage, represented respectively the “internationalist” and “nationalist” varieties of Polish socialism. In 1879 Równość {Equality), the first Polish socialist newspaper, began publication from Geneva, a long-time center for Polish political emigres. The program of Równość was inspired by Marxian socialism and the Russian revolutionary populism of the narodniki with whom many Polish socialists had been in contact previously at the imperial Russian universities. Two years later, Limanowski broke with Rónwość whose internationalist position, he argued, made independence a mechanical by-product of a distant social revolution. In setting up an organization called the Lud Polski {Polish People), Liamowski put the resolution of the Polish question at the top of the “national-socialist” agenda. Meanwhile, Warynski’s return to Warsaw in 1881 led to the establish­ ment of the first socialist organization on native soil, since called the “Great Proletariat” to distinguish it from its successors. With a profound belief in the necessity of common action with Russian revolutionary groups to overthrow the tsarist government, the Proletariat in 1884 enter­ ed into alliance with the Narodnaia Volia {The People’s Will), a terrorist offshoot of the narodniki. Cooperation between the two groups ended not in a victorious revolution, but in mass arrests by police in 1886 which sub­ sequently led to the collapse of the Proletariat.18 The first socialist organi­ zation in the Kingdom had thus been liquidated, but its work would be resumed before the decade was out.

Introduction

15

The Formation o f Modem Political Parties The tempo of oppositional political activity in Russian Poland acceler­ ated in the early 1890s, reflected in the rise of the future mass political parties. In 1893 the headquarters of the Polish League was transferred from Geneva to Warsaw and the organization renamed the National League. Emancipated from emigre tutelage, the League acquired new leaders and a more conservative character. Headed by Roman Dmowski, the League selectively incorporated certain elements of the positivist philosophy, which gradually led it away from the radical tradition of the insurrections. Still, the League’s primary goal, as pronounced in its program of 1897, remained the unification of Polish society in all three partitioned zones as the basis for the resurrection of the Polish state. Relations between the National League and the Polish youth organiza­ tion Zet were strained initially because of the changes. The damage, how­ ever, was not irreparable and Zet formally joined the League in 1897. A National Democratic Party was not yet a reality, but the establishment and expansion of organizational connections in all zones of partitioned Poland would soon make it so.19 The socialist movement in Russian Poland also began to show signs of organizational vitality and expansion. After the collapse of the Great Pro­ letariat in 1886, a variety of groups, the most important of which were the Second Proletariat and the Union of Polish Workers, emerged to compete for its legacy. The Second Proletariat was created in 1888 and led by Ludwik Kulczycki and Stanisław Mendelson, .the latter the chief editor of the Geneva-based Przedświt (The Dawn). The Second Proletariat tried to maintain the traditions of its namesake and Kulczycki in particular con­ tinued to rely on terrorist tactics as the principal means of political strug­ gle against Russian autocracy.20 On the other hand, the Second Proletariat rejected Warynski’s emphasis on the necessity of cooperation with the Russian revolutionary movement. Whereas Waryński had opposed national­ ist agitation as an obstacle to such cooperation, the Second Proletariat and particularly the editorial board of Przedświt discounted the revolutionary possibilities of the Russian labor movement altogether. In this matter they were much closer to the views of Limanowski and the Lud Polski than to the traditions of the Great Proletariat.21 The Union of Polish Workers was also organized in 1888 under the lead­ ership of Julian Marchlewski (Karski), Bronislaw Wesołowski (Smutny)

16

FE U K S DZIERŻYŃSKI

and Adolf Warszawski (Warski). Rejecting the terrorist tactics of Kulczy­ cki and the “national socialism” of Przedświt, the Union of Polish Workers initially concentrated on economic agitation^nd organization. Towards the end of its existence, however, the Union’s emphasis shifted more towards political forms of struggle.22 By the early 1890s there was increasing sentiment, both in the King­ dom and among Polish socialists in emigration, for the merger of all Polish socialist groups into one organization. This sentiment was manifested organizationally by the establishment of joint strike committees and by the creation of a so-called “Central Circle” in Warsaw that consisted of representatives of all socialist groups. The main stimulus for unification, however, was the Łódź general strike of 1892 which was repressed brut­ ally by the Russian authorities. Seizing the opportunity to unite Polish socialists under the banner of common struggle against Russian autocracy, Limanowksi together with the editors of Przedświt initiated the calling of a conference of Polish socialist groups which met in Paris from November 17 to 21,1892. The Union of Polish Workers declined the invitation, although it did not reject the idea of unification in principle. Rather the Union feared the influence of Przedświt on the conference, preferring that unification take place in the Kingdom where its support exceeded that of the Second Proletariat. Indeed, the representatives of Przedświt did dominate the Paris conference as well as the new Union of Polish Socialists Abroad, which was established by the conference and entrusted with the task of drawing up a program for the new party. Reacting negatively to the resolutions of the Paris conference, the Union of Polish Workers took the lead in organi­ zing a rival conference in Warsaw at the end of February 1893, which called into being the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia SocjalistycznaPPS). This organization, sometimes called the “Old PPS,” was soon deci­ mated by arrests. With the flight of Marchlewski and Warski abroad, the initiative for formulating the principles of the new party program fell com­ pletely into the hands of Przedświt and the Union of Polish Socialists Abroad. However, the controversy did not end here—far from it. As early as 1890, the Union of Polish Workers established contact with two likeminded Polish-Jewish intellectuals, Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Jogiches (Tyszka), then studying at Zurich Univeristy. In 1893 Marchlewski and

Introduction

17

Warski joined this “Zurich group” and published the first number of Sprawa robotnicza in July 1893. Despite the efforts of Luxemburg and Marchlewski, the Union of Polish Socialists Abroad won the right to represent the PPS at the Zurich Congress of the Second Socialist Inter­ national which met in August of the same year. As a result, the remnants of the “Old PPS” still active in the Kingdom changed the name of their organization to the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP) and adopted Sprawa robotnicza as their organ. Thus, the long sought unity of the “nationalist” and “internationalist” wings of Polish socialism was never achieved. Instead, the history of the Polish labor movement became forever affected by the bitter, polemical fight between Social Democrats and “social patriots.”23 Of the three future Polish mass parties—the National Democratic Party, the PPS and the SDKP—only the first two sought to develop organizational activity in Lithuania. The SDKP operated according to a territorial prin­ ciple that limited its activities to the Kingdom. Through Zet, the National League was active in the organization of circles among Polish student youth in Vilna, particularly in the male gymnasium. The PPS chapter in Vilna, led originally by Józef Piłsudski and then by Alexander Sulkiewicz, concentrated on the older students at the Vilna School of Science and Technology. However, the recruting efforts of both organizations in Vilna were then in their infancy and neither had yet established strong contacts among the workers and craftsmen of the city. Far more significant organizational work in Vilna at this time was car­ ried out by Jewish social democrats, the predecessors of the General Jew­ ish Workers’ Union, better known as the Bund. In fact, the appearance of socialist ideas in Lithuania was directly connected with the large scale Jewish migration to Lithuanian towns in the second half of the nineteenth century and it was among the members of Vilna’s Jewish community (al­ most forty percent of the city’s population in 1897) that socialism found its first supporters. By 1892 the Jewish social democratic movement in Lithuania had acquired a sophisticated organization centered in Vilna under the leadership of Arkady Kremer. It had also established contacts with other Jewish social democratic groups operating throughout the socalled “Pale of Settlement.” By 1897, still before the creation of the Bund, the Jewish social democrats had organized 1500 workers in Vilna, no small accomplishment at that time.24 The organizational strength and experience

18

FELIKS DZIERŻYŃSKI

of the Jewish social democrats in Lithuania would also allow them to influ­ ence, directly or indirectly, the nascent organizations among the Christian workers as they emerged. V.N Thus when Feliks Dzierżyński entered the Vilna gumnasium in 1887, the reaction against positivism was already in full swing. The doctrines of democratic nationalism and socialism (both in its “national” and “inter­ national” forms) would become the ideologies of the future mass move­ ments. Within a very few years indeed, the formation of political parties in Russian Poland-the very antithesis of positivism—would directly influence an entire generation of Polish youth studying in the Russian gymnasia. In short, the cultural-political backlash against positivism, combined with the changing social and economic conditions of Russian Poland, would have a profound impact on the formation of Dzierżyński’s future political con­ sciousness.

CHAPTER I CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE, 1877-1893

The Family Nest at Dzierżynowo Edmund Dzierżyński, Feliks’ father, was in many ways a product of the transitional era of partial modernization in the western part of the Russian empire. Indeed, his career marked the first stage in the trans­ formation of his family’s status. Edmund descended from a gentry family of middle rank whose Lithuanian estate was one of many “nests” belong­ ing to the Polish szlachta throughout this area. Of the ten sons of the landowner Józef Dzierżyński, only he and his brother Felicjan were graduated from institutions of higher learning and thereafter recruited into the emerging intelligentsia. Edmund received his degree from the mathematics and physics faculty of St. Petersburg University in 1863.1 Neither Edmund, nor apparently any of the members of the Dzierżyń­ ski family, participated in the January Insurrection. Yet he was affected to a certain extent by the repression that followed. Denied employment upon graduation in his native Vilna province, Edmund was forced to ac­ cept the position of instructor of physics and mathematics at the male gymnasium in Taganrog. He served the school administration in Taganrog loyally and with distinction until illness forced him to resign in 1875, after which he received a handsome state pension. A life-long victim of tuberculosis, Edmund returned to his old family estate, known as Dzier­ żynowo, which he had recently purchased from his surviving brothers. 19

20

FEU K S DZIERŻYŃSKI

To Edmund, who had remained emotionally and intellectually attached to the countryside, it was an ideal place to raise his own large family. Nestled in the thick pine forests of the Puszcza Nalibocka in the Oszmiana district of Vilna province (today ^tlie Minsk district of Soviet Belorussia), Dzierżynowo had become the ancestral home of the Dzier­ żyński family in the second half of the seventeenth century.2 After the emancipation decrees, Dzierżynowo comprised approximately one hund­ red hectares (250 acres) of marginal agricultural land bordering the Usa River. Atop a hill overlooking the river and surrounded by thick groves on the edge of the forest stood a small wooden manor, a modest twostory dwelling that Edmund had constructed in 1880 to house his wife Helena and their eight children. The estate was secluded from the outside world, four kilometers away from the nearest farm and fifty kilometers from the nearest railroad. In the Soviet and Polish biographies of Dzierżyński,3 it is claimed that the family’s circumstances were typical for the impoverished gentry of the kresy whose economic status compared to that of the peasantry. This was not the case; Edmund had hardly been reduced to the level of a yeo­ man. In the absence of cheap serf labor and himself physically incapble of work in the fields, he was content to lease his property to neighboring Belo­ russian peasants. Although the income derived from the leaseholds was in­ sufficient to meet the needs of his family, a steady cash flow from Ed­ mund’s pension, ensured that they would enjoy at least a comfortable, if not affluent existence. Edmund apparently took some interest in the management of the estate and in a sense conformed to the role of the “village intellectual” idealized in positivist literature: an educated landowner who uses his expertise to advise the neighboring peasantry in the use of more efficient agricultural methods. However, this was the extent of Edmund’s social and political consciousness; he was hardly a proponent of social integration in the countryside nor of egalitarian principles of land ownership. Actually, Edmund viewed estate management as a hobby and spent more time, given his pedagogical background and training, in estab­ lishing a sort of classroom regime in the home for his children. His wife, Helena Januszewska, had a different cast of mind. Helena came from a wealthy gentry family with much deeper roots in the intelli­ gentsia than those just established by the Dzierżyńskis. According to

Childhood and Adolescence

The manor house at Dzierżynowo

Helena and Edmund in 1880

21

FELIKS DZIERŻYŃSKI

22

Aldona Aldona, Feliks’ older sister, the Januszewski family was related to the legendary Tadeusz Kościuszko, hero of the 1794 insurrection, and had entertained such notables as Juliusz Słowacki, the famous poet and dramatist, at the family estate in Joda.4 Helena’s father was a respected professor at the Institute of Engineering and Communications in St. Petersburg and a close friend o f the engineer Stanisław Kierbedź, whose name is associated with the construction o f an impressive railway bridge in Warsaw (the Most Kierbedzia). Helena herself was well educated, and, under the direction o f private tutors, had developed a deep appreciation for music and literature. Although hardly possessed by a rebellious spirit herself, Helena was to a far greater extent than her husband a traditional Polish patriot. She ex­ tolled the virtues o f the romantic Promethean strain in the Polish national tradition; the vision o f Kościuszko fighting to preserve the Polish state against all odds or of Mickiewicz dying while attempting to raise Polish

23

Childhood and Adolescence

Feliks at age seven legions to fight on the side o f Russia’s enemies during the Crimean War. To Helena, the January Insurrection was nothing to be ashamed of. While Edmund lived, Helena’s influence on the intellectual atmosphere at Dzierżynowo was balanced by his own realist philosophy. However, upon his death in 1882, the home became “ patriotic to the core” s in Aldona’s words. Yet despite her patriotism, Helena, too, had to accommodate herself to the harsh realities o f Russian rule. For example, after Edmund’s death, she gave to Aldona the responsibility o f teaching her brothers Russian, which was necessary for passing the entrance examinations at the gym­ nasium. Nor was Helena an advocate o f a new insurrection or revolution against the existing order. Instead, she placed her faith in the Catholic Church to save Poland, the “ Christ among nations,” from the evils of

24

FELIKS DZIERŻYŃSKI

russification. For this reason, she became most indignant when discussing the forced conversion of scores of Belorusąąi^peasants of the Uniate faith to Russian Orthodoxy. In examining the influence of various family members on the formation of the character of the young Feliks Dzierżyński, the dominant role of women, particularly his mother and sister Aldona, is most striking.6 Prior to his birth on September 11, 1877, Helena had suffered the loss of two children in infancy. Therefore, the parents bestowed the Latin forename of Feliks (happiness) on the seventh and surviving child and the first born at Dzierżynowo. Little “Felis,” as he was called, had barely reached five years when his father died in 1882. For this reason, Edmund had little in­ fluence on the upbringing of his son; Dzierżyński^ only recollection of his father was connected with the family’s walks to the small cemetery at nearby Derewno where Edmund was buried.7 With Edmund’s death, Helena took the boy, who had already become her favorite, completely under her wing. Everywhere in the boy’s development, the hand of Helena can be clearly perceived. Dzierżyński admitted in 1922 to Mickiewicz-Kapsukas, the Lithuanian revolutionary and communist leader, that the atmosphere at Dzierżynowo during his childhood had been so patriotic that “as a young boy, I dreamt of the cap of invisibility and of killing all Muscovites.”8 The same woman who inspired dreams of Fortunato’s cap also made this son the object of her intense religious devotion. Helena was determined that upon graduation from the gymnasium Feliks whould dedicate his life to the church. “I was very religious,” he told Mickiewicz-Kapsukas, “and even intended to enter a Roman Catholic seminary.”9 Years later, after Dzierżyński became involved in the work of revolutionary student circles in Vilna and had proclaimed himself an atheist, he chose to keep his “con­ version” a secret from his mother.10 Under Helena’s supervision, Feliks was raised not on the positivist works or Prus and Sienkiewicz, but on the classics of Polish romanticism. This produced in him a permanent intellectual and cultural bias. While the reading of Pan Tadeusz of Mickiewicz would always touch in him a sensi­ tive spot,11 he would later write of the apostle of Polish positivism, Alek­ sander Świętochowski: “It is impermissible to honor among the prophets of culture those who do not know how, and moreover, do not want to struggle for culture, who in the place of this struggle propagate submission

Childhood and Adolescence

25

in the industrial field and political abstention.” 12 For this reason, Dzier­ żyński later welcomed the neoromanticism of the ‘‘Young Poland” (Młoda Polska) movement that eventually replaced positivism as the dominant school of Polish art and literature. Crushed by the death of his mother in 1896, Dzierżyński remained deeply attached to her memory, expressed in his frequent longing for “the voice of Mama, calling us from the forest, or river to the dinner table.” 13 From Helena he inherited a certain sensitivity for the victims of Russian persecution and a romantic interpretation of the Polish historical tradi­ tion. Yet in his mother’s eyes his mission in life was to safeguard that tradition through the aegis of the church and not through political and social rebellion. Until he reached his late teens, Dzierżyński was more than willing to follow the course set out for him by his mother. The impact of Felik’s older brothers on his emerging consciousness was minimal. Stanisław was eight years older than Feliks and already in the gymnasium, while Kazimierz and Ignacy resided much of the time with their grandmother at Joda. Thus Feliks did not experience the pressures and influences normally found in large families with numerous brothers. Nor did he remain close to his brothers after childhood. Later correspond­ ence between them was infrequent and usually concerned family finances. Personal meetings were few and far between. He shared with them a natural aptitude in mathematics inherited in common from their father, but very little else. Later when Dzierżyński was engaged in revolutionary activity, he would often wonder “why I was the only one of us to take this road. How well it would have been if it were all of us . . . . But life has divided us, one stream carries me, another the rest.” 14 In contrast, Feliks’ relationship with his old sister Aldona was and re­ mained very close. At Dzierzynowo, Aldona served as Feliks’ tutor and surrogate mother when Helena was not immediately available. “In my heart,” he wrote her in 1911, “I will always carry that love for you, who cared for me so many years ago, in the years of my childhood.” 15 After both of them had left Dzierżynowo, Aldona became Feliks’ confidant and he shared with her his moments of despair as well as his deepest secrets. Although Aldona later made repeated efforts to divert him from the path of illegal revolutionary activity and even reproached him for fail­ ing to consider the interests of the rest of the family, her disapproval—or at best reluctant acceptance—of her brothers’ life in the underground never

26

FELIKS DZIERŻYŃSKI

threatened to dissolve the close relationship between them. More than once Aldona provided asylum for her brother^after he had escaped from exile; Feliks, in turn, contributed part of his inheritance to the needs of Aldona and her six children.16 Under the care of a doting mother and sister, Dzierżyński^ childhood years were relatively carefree. Edmund’s death did not put the family under a severe financial strain; if anything their circumstances improved. Helena began to receive generous subsidies from Joda and was able to set aside all of the remaining payments from Edmund’s pension for the edu­ cation of his sons.17 Feliks’ daily routine appears to have been equally divided into periods of play and study. “Walking on stilts was Feliks’ favorite diversion,” Aldona informs us. “This required a certain courage and balance, particularly when passing over larger objects like a cow.” 18 The mythology surrounding Dzierżyński includes vague references to a habit of playing with the children of neighboring Belorussian peasant families, particularly in connection with such activities as hunting, fishing and swimming in the nearby river Usa.19 But the available evidence—the isolation of Dzierżynowo, the total absence of references in Dzierżyński^ correspondence and Aldona’s memoirs to playmates outside of the family —suggests that Feliks had little contact with the world beyond the family estate in the first ten years of his life. When not at play, Feliks was engag­ ed under Aldona’s tutelage in the study of Polish history and literature, mathematics, French, and, of course, Russian in preparation for the dif­ ficult entrance examinations at the gymnasium. Years later, far removed from the Lithuanian countryside, Dzierżyński developed a deep nostalgia for his childhood home. In part, this reflected a trait common to the hybrid class of the gentry-intelligentsia which faced a kind of social identity crisis in this transitional period. Even as the leader of an urban based revolutionary party, Dzierżyński often felt “like a fish out of water” in the city.20 His longing for Dzierżynowo grew most in­ tense during moments of personal anguish, when he tended to idealize his childhood. These memories of a childhood filled with innocence and free from turmoil were expressed in letter after letter to his sister, most of them written, not surprisingly from prison and exile. This isolated corner of tsarist Lithuania also endowed Dzierżyński with an abiding appreciation for nature, in the solitude of which he often sought both physical and psychological escape. Whether in the forests of the

Childhood and Adolescence

27

Feliks (in front) with mother and brothers at Joda, 1889 Podhale region o f southern Poland, on the exotic isle o f Capri, or even in the wilds of Siberia, Dzierżyński felt at complete harmony with himself and his surroundings. “The forest speaks to me,” he once wrote to his friend Zygmunt Żuławski, “and I am unable to think of anything else when 1 listen to its melody.” 21

FELIKS DZIERŻYŃSKI

28

At the Vilna gymnasium

The Vilna Gymnasium In 1887, Helena Dzierzyńska decided that the ten-year-old Feliks was sufficiently prepared to join brothers Stanisław and Kazimierz in Vilna in order to begin his studies at the gymnasium. Helena accompanied her son to Vilna for the difficult entrance examinations. Shortly thereafter she returned to Dzierżynowo, having settled Feliks in the boarding house o f a certain Mme. Bujko where he resided until 1895.22 Helena’s two sis­ ters, Janina Zawadzka and Zofia Pillar von Pilchau, also resided in Vilna at that time, no doubt provinding a certain amount o f adult supervision in Helena’s absence.23

Childhood and Adolescence

29

The city of Vilna was perhaps the most important target of Russian attempts to eliminate Polish influences in the kresy. Once the proud capital of the medieval Lithuanian state and later a center of Polish cul­ tural and intellectual life, Vilna in the course of the nineteenth century had been systematically reduced to the level of a provincial town, ruth­ lessly deprived of even regional administrative significance. Vilna’s once renowned university—the oldest in the Russian empire—suffered a similar fate. In retaliation for the involvement of its students and faculty in the abortive November Insurrection of 1830, Vilna Univesity was forced to close its doors by the imperial Russian authorities. Within the confines of the old university, the First Male Gymnasium was established to carry out the russification of Polish youth. In this stultifying, oppressive atmosphere, the sons of the Polish gentry and intelligentsia, from the moment of their first visit to the gymnasium, found themselves the objects of purposeful and merciless humiliation. The first obstacle was an entrance examination in the Russian language, the failure of which often meant the end of all educational opportunity. Before taking the examination the aspiring studnet sat for hours in a wait­ ing room, confronted by signs strictly forbidding the use of Polish. Some, like Ignacy Dzierżyński, became so intimidated that when their turn was called, they immediately forgot everything they had learned about the Russian language. Ignacy, whose case had a happier ending than most, was placed in a private lodging house for one year in order to study the language and pass the examination.34 His younger brother Feliks fared somewhat better and was immediately admitted to the first-year courses which, however, he was forced to repeat after receiving poor marks in Russian.25 Dzierżyński^ weakness in Russian was a continual problem during his gymnasium studies and, given the years of training he had received from his sister at Dzierżynowo, may have constituted a form of passive resist­ ance to russification. Otherwise, Dzierżyński proved to be an able, if not outstanding student, as reflected in his final academic record, the eighthclass transcript signed by the gymnasium’s inspector. In this his last year, Dzierżyński received an excellent grade in canon law and above average marks in logic, Latin, algebra, geometry, geography, physics, history and French.26 Very little is known about Dzierżyński^ first four years at the Vilna gymnasium beyond the fact that he avoided unpleasant encounters with

FELIKS DZIERŻYŃSKI

30

the school’s « authorities. He did, however, make an immediate impression on Józef Piłsudski, an older student at the gymnasium who later became the archenemy of Dzierżyński and Polish^ççmmunism. Years later, as Marshal of the interwar Polish state, Piłsudski generously recalled in a conversation with the French republican leader Herriot that Dzierżyński “distinguished himself as a student with delicacy and modesty. He was rather tall, thin and demure, making the impression of an ascetic with the face of an icon. . . . Tormented or not, this is an issue history will clarify; in any case this person did not know how to lie.”27 ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

“Whoever cherishes his memories, his youth and his years of childhoold will be carefree, thoughtless about what tomorrow will bring,” Dzierżyń­ ski wrote in reference to his formative years.28 The available evidence indicates that Feliks Dzierżyński experienced a very happy and rewarding childhood in a nearly idyllic environment. The dominant role of women in his early life appears to have left marks on the boy’s character, but cer­ tainly no scars. The ten-year-old who entered the First Male Gymnasium in Vilna in 1887 was perhaps overly sensitive and deeply religious, but at the same time humble, intelligent, and, by all accounts, extremely kind. Anyone looking for the “Soldier of the Revolution” or the “Marat of Bol­ shevism,” if such a figure ever did exist, will not find him at Dzierzynowo. If anything, Feliks’ years at the “family nest” were too sheltered and did not prepare him for the realities of the world beyond the horizon of the Lithuanian countryside. These realities, extremely harsh for the Poles of the kresy where the policy of russification was applied most vigorously, were first encountered at the Vilna gymnasium. It was here rather than at Dzierżynowo that a revolutionary was born. In the end, it may well have been that contradiction between indulgence and later oppression—a cod­ dled child’s unwillingness to fit himself to new pressures—that made a rebel of Feliks Dzierżyński.

CHAPTER.II

THE MAKING OF A REVOLUTIONARY, 1894-1899

Feliks Dzierżyński became gradually disillusioned during his late teen­ age years in the oppressive environment of the Vilna gymnasium, causing him to turn to nationalist and later socialist revolutionary views. Follow­ ing his participation in a variety of illegal student circles, activity that led to his expulsion from the gymnasium, he became engaged in practical organizational activity among the workers of Vilna and Kovno which ef­ fectively trained him as a professional agitator. At the same time, the multinational composition of the urban working classes in Lithuania directly influenced his formulation of a position on the national ques­ tion, the fundamental issue for non-Russian socialists in the empire of the tsars. By the time he had reached twenty-two, Dzierżyński had also sur­ vived his first encounter with arrest, imprisonment and exile. This test of his beliefs ignited an intensive bout of self-questioning and resulted in his final conversion to Marxism. During this period, Dzierżyński also experi­ enced his first personal crisis. The painful loss of his mother caused him severe emotional trauma that greatly influenced his activity, both inside and outside the gymnasium. In short, these were transitional years for Dzierżyński, and years of political and emotional maturation. The Vilna Student Grcles The evolution of Feliks Dzierżyński from a passive and pious school­ boy to a revolutionary socialist-internationalist occurred gradually and 31

32

FE U K S DZIERŻYŃSKI

in stages, not in the automatic fashion as claimed in many Soviet and Polish accounts of his life. This evolutionajy^process, marked by Dzier­ żyński^ participation in a series of student circles, was influenced by three principal factors: a reaction to the system of russification which threatened his (and not only his) identity, the emotional effect of the death of his beloved mother, and his development of a close relation­ ship with young Jewish social democrats, some of whom later became influential leaders in the Bund. By his fifth year in the gymnasium, Dzierżyńskim reaction to the stifl­ ing policies of russification began to go beyond passive resistance to the Russian language. The crude, brutal behavior of the instructors toward the students coupled with attempts to extend the prohibition of the Polish language outside the classroom drove many of the students into clandestine self-education circles. “Oh, how the Vilna gymnasium was a hard school of life for the students!” wrote Ignacy Dzierżyński. “Here the youth came to know the enemy well, here they dedicated themselves to fighting it, here was the forge of strong characters.”1 In 1893 Feliks Dzierżyński joined the first student circle, one of a particularly Catholic and patriotic bent whose main objective, in Ignacy’s words, was to “train future Polish citizens.”2 This circle was either organized or at least influ­ enced by Zet; the main topics of discussion within the circle were Polish history and literature, the study of which was forbidden in the gymnasium. This allowed Dzierżyński the opportunity to share his passion for Mickie­ wicz and Słowacki with others and did not really constitute a break from the intellectual atmosphere at Dzierżynowo—the circle had no particular social program nor a plan of political action. Yet it marked Dzierżyńskim first act of defiance to the school authorities. At about the same time, “socialist” student circles loosely tied to the PPS began to make their appearance in Vilna, although their history is somewhat obscure. According to Edward Sokołowski, a student at the Vilna Technical School from 1891 to 1894, the “socialist” circles, dom­ inant from the beginning among the older students at the Technical School, began to penetrate the walls of the Vilna gymnasium in the summer of 1893.3 Shortly thereafter, at the beginning of 1894, Dzierżyński toget­ her with a group of his gymnasium colleagues, impatient with the passive character of the “patriotic” circle, joined their first “socialist” circle and took an oath to fight Russian autocracy to the bitter end.4

The Making o f a Revolutionary

33

Led by fellow students Romuald Małecki and Józef Baranowicz, this circle also concentrated on the study of Polish literature and history, but attempted to unite the cause of Polish national liberation with that of social justice.s For Dzierżyński, the principal difference between this circle and the earlier one was in its secular, even anti-clerical point of refer­ ence. For this reason, Dzierżyński considered 1894 as a turning point in that he renounced his belief in a supreme being.6 This was indeed a dramtic break from Dzierżynowo. On the other hand, the nationalistic tendencies of this circle, indicative of PPS influence, suggest that Dzier­ żyński was still far from adopting the political and ideological perspectives that would later characterize his world view. At the same time, a much more radical socialist group had also made its appearance in Vilna. Led by a Belorussian, E. Sponti, this group con­ centrated on conspiratorial training and committed itself to social change through revolutionary action.7 Supported in its activities by the Jewish social democrats, the group’s influence among the Vilna student com­ munity began to expand in the course of 1894 largely owing to the efforts of Alfons Morawski and Andrzej Domaszewicz, both descendants of the polonized Lithuanian nobility. Soon they were joined by the Polish intel­ lectual Stanisław Trusiewicz (Zalewski), who through his connections with the Union of Polish Workers carried the traditions of the internationalistic wing of the socialist movement in the Kingdom of Poland to Lithu­ anian soil. According to Edward Sokołowski, the winter of 1894-1895 witnessed a series of discussions among the various socialist student circles in which both he and Dzierżyński participated. The result was a merger of the circles and the creation of the nucleus of the future Lithuanian Social Democratic Party (LSDP). Shortly thereafter. Morawski took over direc­ tion of the circles and their curricula, placing the main emphasis on the study of political economy. “Only when Morawski thought that we had completely mastered the theory of value,” Sokołowski recalled, “were we allowed to discuss the Erfurt Program of German Social Democracy.”8 With the arrival in Vilna of the Serbian revolutionary Vladimir Perazić, the instruction of the young social democrats took on a more distinctly Marxist character. By the winter of 1895-1896, they began to study care­ fully George Plekhanov’s ‘The Monistic View of History.”9 Shortly after Dzierżyńskfs entrance into the emerging social demo­ cratic camp, he was taken under the wing of the leaders of the fledgling

34

FELIKS DZIERŻYŃSKI

movement, Morawski and Domaszewicz. Andrzej Gulbinowicz, one of the leading activists in the LSDP in these years, recalled his first encounter with Dzierżyński at à meeting where Domàszèwicz brought with him “a young boy, of average height. . .and introduced him as the intellectual Jakób.” 10 Aldona, who provided lodging for'her brother for a brief per­ iod in 1896, also mentioned that Domaszewicz paid several visits to her home in order to discuss certain matters with the young Dzierżyński.11 It seems, however, that Morawski, rather than Domaszewicz, exerted the most influence in the shaping of Dzierżyńskim views at this stage. In fact Dzierżyński often deferred to Morawski’s judgment when crucial issues, such as the defection of Stanisław Trusiewicz at the party’s first congress, faced the young organization.12 After a brief apprenticeship, Dzierżyński was entrusted by his elder associates with the direction of his own student circle in the spring of 1895. From this point dates his close association with the younger mem­ bers of the Goldman family and other Jewish social democratic youth. Leon and Michael Goldman (Mark Uber), who were destined to become major figures in the Bund, participated in Dzierżyńskim circle as did their sister Julia—subsequently Dzierżyńskim lover and fiancee.13 The participa­ tion of Jewish youth in a so-called Lithuanian social democratic circle can be explained in view of the troubled relations between the PPS and Jewish social democratic groups throughout Russian Poland and Lithuania. Jewish social democratic leaders rejected the claim of the PPS to hegemony over the entire socialist movement on former Polish lands and refused to take the position on the national question demanded of them by the PPS.14 They were also irritated by efforts to recruit Jewish workers into the PPS organization. Therefore, the Jewish social democratic leadership attempted to counter the PPS-inspired “nationalist” influence among the Christian students and workers by helping social democratic organi­ zations—which they considered more akin to their own—establish them­ selves. They also retaliated against PPS recruitment of Jews by frequently sending their own activists and youth to non-Jewish social democratic circles, particularly in Poland, but also in Lithuania. This may have been the case with the participation of the Goldmans in Dzierżyńskim circle. Dzierżyńskim connections with the Goldmans would grow and he eventually embraced their internationalist views. Yet in the spring of 1895 his ideological leanings were still undefined and he certainly did

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not direct his circle as “an agitator and propagandist of the idea of scienti­ fic socialism.” 15 Instead, a participant in the circle recalled Dzierżyńskfs “reading with us works in the natural sciences [as well as] the poetry of Nekrasov, Konopnicka, The Ode to Youth [of Mickiewicz] and many others.” 16 Dzierzynski’s circle therefore preserved an educational and cultural character rather than a political and economic one, no doubt because Dzierżyński himself had yet to be instructed sufficiently in Marx­ ist doctrine. In December of 1895, Morawski selected Dzierżyński, who already had planned a trip to Warsaw in order to visit his hospitalized mother, to repre­ sent the Vilna social democratic student circles at a secret congress of Po­ lish student organizations. This particular congress was organized by a Warsaw-based central committee of student circles in which both the rival organizations of the PPS and SDKP were active.17 The student congress thus provided Dzierżyński^ first opportunity to acquaint himself with the issues and internal divisions facing the socialist movement in the Kingdom of Poland. On the cardinal issue of rebuilding an independent Polish state, it appears that Dzierżyński opposed the “patriotic” tendency of the PPS and joined the Polish Social Democrats in forming a “left-wing.” 18 How he came to this position is another matter. Although it is possible that Dzierżyński had already fallen under the influence of his growing circle of Jewish friends, it is more likely, particularly in the light of later events, that he had been given prior instructions by Morawski to oppose the PPS at the congress. Despite their own assimilation by Polish culture, Morawski and Domaszewicz were determined to steer the fledgling social democratic movement in Vilna on to a native Lithuanian national track. Therefore, PPS pretensions to hegemony among the organized workers in both Poland and Lithuania were as much a threat to the aspirations of the LSDP leader­ ship as to those of the Jewish socialists. In any case, Dzierżyński left an impression on more than one partici­ pant at the congress. Józef Dąbrowski, a PPS activist, recalled that the congress marked his first encounter with this “extremely pleasant, al­ though after a long association—also aggravating young man. . . . Excessive and implacable in debate—he amused us all with some of his expressions [drawn from the dialect of Polish spoken in Lithuania] —but he won every­ one over with his kindness and honesty.” 19 The Polish Social Democrat Bronisław Koszutski, on the other hand, remembered a figure of more

36

FELIKS DZIERŻYŃSKI

heroic proportions: “Already these first public appearances by Feliks, then an eighteen year old youth, carried traits which characterized him in all of his later activity, namely: a profound beliefjj^the correctness of a stated idea and, simultaneously, a decisive will in his desire to realize professed principles.”20 The Turning Point The student congress coincided with the rapid deterioration of the health of Dzierżyński^ mother who, after the discovery of a brain tumor earlier in the year, had been transferred to the Warsaw clinic of Dr. Rafał Radziwiłłowicz.21 Dzierżyński had already paid her a visit in the fall of 1895 from which he returned to Vilna with unfounded optimism. In December, however, he became aware of the hopelessness of his mother’s condition and, according to Koszutski, was very despondent and frequent­ ly buried in his thoughts during the proceedings of the student congress.22 Shortly after Dzierzyhski’s departure from Warsaw, on January 15,1896, Helena passed away. The death of Dzierżyński^ mother had a profound impact on his be­ havior, both in the gymnasium and in his political activity. Dzierżyńskim involvement in the social democratic circles was bound to have an effect on his studies, but actual conflicts with the gymnasium authorities, minor up to this point, now began to intensify. In the end, perhaps by mutual agreement, Dzierżyński withdrew from the gymnasium two months before graduation. His aunt and guardian after his mother’s death, the Baroness Zofia Pillar von Pilchau, requested that the gymnasium administration issue Dzierżyński his grades for the eighth class and not formally expel him, which would, in effect, deprive him of the right to take examinations for graduation at another gymnasium.23 There are two different versions of the circumstances under which Dzierżyński withdrew from the Vilna gymnasium. The first, based on statements by Dzierżyński himself, maintains that he left the gymnasium voluntarily in order to devote his life to political activity among the working class. For example, he told Mickiewicz-Kapsukas in 1922: “When it came time for examinations for graduation, I quit the gymnasium, moti­ vated by the fact that it was also possible to develop myself among the workers and that the university only hindered intellectual work, that it

The Making o f a Revolutionary

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trained careerists.”24 Dzierżyński^ account, however, is contradicted by a letter of the gymnasium administration to the Vilna gendarmerie, which was in the process of compiling evidence against Dzierżyński after his first arrest in 1897. Here we read: Dzierżyński, while still in the gymnasium, attracted to himself the attention of the administration because of his repeated expres­ sions of dissatisfaction with the current situation. However, this was done in a way which did not provide any basis for expelling him from the school. Regardless, the gymnasium administration, having perceived in him such traits, could no longer take responsibility for issuing him a degree of graduation therefore, he was forced to leave the gymnasium.25 Thus it appears that Dzierżyński^ departure from the Vilna gymnasium was the result of a decision of the school’s director. The only decision made by Dzierżyński was not to take advantage of his aunt’s successful plea that he be allowed to pursue his studies elsewhere.26 If his mother’s death was the prelude to problems at the gymnasium, it also led to Dzierżyńskfs complete absorption in underground political activity. Andrzej Gulbinowicz recalled later that Dzierżyński, who earlier had not been oted for making long speeches or giving reports at meetings, now “was prepared to take on everything, anywhere and at any time.” On one occasion, Dzierżyński reportedly volunteered to hectograph and dis­ tribute several hundred proclamations in the middle of the night.27 Short­ ly after Dzierzyński’s return to Vilna from the Warsaw student congress. Morawski entrusted the eager young man with the organization of a similar congress for all of Lithuania.28 Meanwhile, Lithuanian Social Democracy, up to this point not yet a formally organized political party and still a battleground for competing ideologies, began to make plans for its inaugural congress. The first con­ gress of the LSDP was eventually held in the flat of Dr. Andrzej Domaszewicz at the end of April 1896. Dzierżyński, as a delegate of the social democratic youth circles, was one of the fifteen participants in its de­ bates.29 Almost immediately the delegates reached an impasse in respect to the main theses of the program drafted by Morawski and Domaszewicz. The most divisive issue proved to be the national question. Morawski and Domaszewicz intended to liberate Lithuanian Social Democracy from the

38

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influence of the PPS and build upon Lithuanian nationalism by demand­ ing “an Independent, democratic republic.” At the same time, however, they made a concession to pro-PPS elements led by Małecki by agreeing that such a republic would be “based on a ^ölbntary federation of Poland, Lithuania and other countries (referring to Belorussia and the Ukraine in particular).”30 Dzierżyński’s Soviet and Polish biographers claim that Dzierżyński joined the opposition to such “separatist” tendencies and argued instead for an “autonomous Lithuania” in a constitutional Russian state.31 Such arguments, however, can not be substantiated either by the evidence or by Dzierzynski’s subsequent conduct. When Stanisław Trusiewicz defect­ ed from the LSDP shortly thereafter in opposition to the party’s position on the national question and created a rival organization, the Union of Workers of Lithuania, Dzierżyński naively accepted Morawski’s version of the controversy. “Morawski explaned that ‘Okularnik’ [Trusiewicz] left for petty personal reasons,” Dzierżyński admitted later, “and this satis­ fied me.”32 Moreover, before the dust had settled from the Trusiewicz defection, Dzierżyński enthusiastically supported Domaszewicz in demand­ ing on oath of loyalty and full-time dedication from party members.33 After the party congress, Dzierżyński left Vilna for almost three months Although his exact whereabouts during this time can not be sufficiently documented, it is known that Dzierżyński, no longer drawing from his father’s pension for the purposes of his education, had simply exhausted his funds. The available evidence indicates that he made his way to the Lida district of the province in order to earn some money by tutoring the young daughters of a wealthy nobleman. Conceivably, the summer tutorials could have been arranged by his influential aunt and guardian, the Baroness von Pilchau. In any case, upon his return to Vilna, he moved out of his aunt’s home, where he had resided since his mother’s death, and into the home of his sister Aldona and her husband.34 There he spent barely three weeks before renting a room from Helena Miller because of concern that his political activities could compromise Aldona and her family.35 At approximately the time of Dzierżyński’s return to Vilna, the LSDP began to concentrate directly on activity among the Christian working class population. Vilna’s soil was fertile for labor agitation. From 1888 to 1898, the number of industrial enterprises in Vilna province had more

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than doubled, while the number of industrial workers had increased from 3500 to 9900. The working day in the factories averaged thirteen to fifteen hours, wages a bare seven to nine rubles per month or less than half of the average industrial wage in the Kingdom of Poland. Most factory inspection legislation did not apply to Vilna province until 1896; up to that time exploitation of female and child labor was also largely unre­ stricted.36 On the other hand, there were formidable obstacles to success­ ful mass agitation in Vilna. The labor force was not highly concentrated, reflecting the continued dominance of small, handicraft enterprises in the city’s industrial structure. More significant, the multnational composition of the city—in which the Jewish inhabitants stood as the numerically largest group (40%), followed by the Poles (31%), Russians (20%), Belo­ russians (4.2%) and the Lithuanians (2.1%)37—was also characteristic of the labor force. This mixture of nationalities in Vilna not only prevented organizational unity among the various clandestine political organizations, but also hindered solidarity in a particular factory or industrial branch during strikes. Dzierżyńskim first direct contacts with the Polish workers in Vilna re­ sulted from excursions with Andrzej Gulbinowicz to various cafes and bars. “During this time, agitation among the workers had to emphasize economic themes,” Dzierżyński recalled. “About politics and the tsar there could be no talk. Once in a pub in the neighborhood of Stefanowski market, one of the older workers mentioned the uprising [of 1863] and the other workers struck him with their bottles.”38 Agitation in the Polish working class districts of Vilna also carried risks beyond arrest and imprisonment. On one occasion, Dzierżyński and Gulbinowicz were assaulted by a group of workers from the Goldstein factory who did not appreciate the meddling of outsiders.39 In any case, such excursions proved valuable to the young and inexperienced agitator; since the form of agitation was exclusively oral, Dzierżyński learned the art of persuasion and the means of obtaining sympathizers for the cause he was advancing. In 1897 the LSDP began to focus its attention more exclusively on the factory workers whom they hoped to agitate on a mass basis through the use of printed proclamations. This constituted an entirely new field of activity for the social democratic intelligentsia, including Dzierżyński. Dzierżyński became fascinated with the power of the printed word, and he eagerly helped in the setting up of illegal presses. In time, the LSDP’s

40

FELIKS DZIERŻYŃSKI

intensified agitation began to bear fruit. Responding partly to an earlier successful strike of Petersburg rail workers, partly to the appeals issued by Jewish social democrats and the LSDP, the Vilna rail workers quit work in late January 1897. The following^pring witnessed relatively large strikes by the city’s wage-earning shoemakers and construction workers. These strikes were organized primarily byvthe Jewish social democrats, but they were supported by the LSDP, which sought to spread the strike movement to the Christian workers. In all, there occurred forty strikes in Vilna in 1897 involving 3542 factory and crafts workers. Although the intensity of the strike movement was still relatively insignificant, it did represent a marked increase from the previous year, when only 294 workers went on strike.40 Dzierżyński’s direct contact with the workers began to have an impact on the formation of his views. Whereas he had remained aloof from the controversy that had led to the defection of the Trusiewicz group, he now became increasingly occupied with the main issue of that controversy— the national question. Undoubtedly his interest arose in response to the multinational composition of the Vilna working class and the feelings of frustration he had experienced in trying to involve Polish workers in a strike action led by Jewish social democrats. Indicative of his growing sensitivity to ethnic issues, Dzierżyński made an effort to leam Yiddish during this period, hoping in this way to build his own bridge to Jewish workers in the city.41 Dzierżyński now developed an increasingly close association with Michael and Leon Goldman. Through them he came to know other Jew­ ish social democrats, whose impressive organization stood at the head of the strike movement in Vilna. At this time, these future Bundists were thoroughgoing internationalists who advocated the creation of a general social democratic organization for the entire empire. At the Second Con­ gress (February 1897) of the LSDP, Dzierżyński joined the Goldman brothers in forming a “left-wing.” This group supported the idea of the eventual unification of the ethnic social democratic organizations through­ out the Russian state and the coordination of their diverse activities through the establishment of an all-Russian social democratic party. In so doing Dzierżyński placed himself for the first time in opposition to the views of Morawski and Domaszewicz. It would be a mistake, however, to argue that the emergence of a leftwing opposition group on the eve of the party congress had thrust the

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LSDP into a new crisis. Dzierżyński and his colleagues did not threaten the party with a split, nor apparently did they try to establish contacts with Trusiewicz. Moreover, Dzierżyński and the Goldmans shared with Morawski and Domaszewicz a certain degree of hostility towards the PPS as well as their desire to emancipate the LSDP completely from its tutelage.42 Therefore, when it was pfoposed at the Second Congress to drop the idea of federation with Poland from the LSDP program, the motion passed easily. Yet fearing the isolation of the LSDP from other social democratic organizations in the empire, the opposition sought a redefinition of the party’s program in relation to the national questionone that would enable the party to accommodate itself particularly to the emergence of a viable social democratic movement in Russia. In this they were partly successful. The demand for an independent Lithuanian state was deleted and replaced by a demand for “the voluntary federa­ tion of countries with a self-governing legislature and administration in the state, province, district and community.’’43 At the same time, as part of the compromise solution, the principle that each member of the party was entitled to his own private opinions, not only in respect to concrete political questions but to program postulates as well, was accepted as part of the LSDP program.44 This provided proponents of Lithuanian state­ hood more than enough room for maneuvering and suggests that the op­ position had been somewhat less than categorical in its demands. Never­ theless, Dzierżyński and the Goldman brothers had good reason to con­ sider that they had steered the LSDP on to an “internationalist” course. Organizational Activity in Kovno Soon after the Second Congress, Dzierżyński was dispatched to Kovno where he arrived on March 18, 1897.45 The reasons given by historians and biographers for Dzierżyński^ transfer from Vilna are varied and contradictory. Undoubtedly, an important factor in the decision to send Dzierżyński to Kovno was a recent police action against and elimination of the small PPS organization in the city. The PPS’s loss was the LSDP’s opportunity to make inroads among the workers of Kovno. To do this required the establishment of a section of the LSDP in Kovno; the task was entrusted to Dzierżyński, a young but eager agitator. Dzierżyński did not protest his assignment to Kovno, but responded enthusiastically to

42

FELIKS DZIERŻYŃSKI

the chance to prove his merit, as is apparent from his four months of fever­ ish activity in the city. The decision to send Dzierżyński alone to Kovno was proBably taken for conspiratorial reasons—to avoid the casting of police suspicion on the party that a larger number of activists would attract.46 As far as the establishment of his Initial contacts in Kovno was concerned, Dzierżyński turned, as he would so many times in the future, to his Jewish friends for help.47 The obstacles to effective labor agitation in Kovno were similar to those prevalent in Vilna. Kovno, like Vilna, had experienced rapid population growth in recent years—from 41,000 inhabitants in 1870 to an estimated 73,500 in 1897.48 Kovno also shared Vilna’s multinational character: 35.3% of the population was Jewish, followed by Russians (25.8%) and Poles (22.7%). The Lithuanian element in Kovno was somewhat larger than that in Vilno, comprising 6.6% of the population.49 The labor force was more concentrated than that in Vilna, with three large metallurgical enterprises (Rekosz, Schmidt, and Tilmans) employing 1500 workers, but the city was still characterized mainly by a number of small shopkeepers and craftsmen. The most immediate problem facing Dzierżyński was to surmount the fears and suspicions of the workers themselves, who were terrorized by the recent arrests and the suppression of the PPS in the city. Partly to overcome the stigma of being an “outside” agitator from the intelligentsia, Dzierżyński found employment as an unskilled worker in a bookbinding plant. But this was not merely a ruse—Dzierżyński needed money to sus­ tain himself since the party lacked funds for this purpose. “The condi­ tions of my existence in Kovno were very difficult,” he told MickiewiczKapsukas. “Sometimes workers would invite me to sit at their dinner tables, and I would refuse, saying that I had already eaten, although in reality my stomach was empty.”50 After finding work and a room in the home of a certain Krystyna Kielczewska,51 Dzierżyński began to set up an illegal printing press and to collect statistical information about the working and living conditions of the Kovno workers.52 Naturally, he concentrated his focus on the Rekosz, Schmidt and Tilmans factories. The result was that within two weeks of his arrival, he had written, hectographed, and distributed the first and only issue of an illegal publication that he entitled Kowieński robotnik ( The Kovno Worker). In Kowieński robotnik Dzierżyński sought

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to familiarize his readers with working conditions in the Kovno factories by choosing the example of Rekosz where such conditions were the most deplorable. After emphasizing the length of the working day (thirteen hours), the extremely low level of wages (fifty kopecks per hour) and the control by entrepreneurs over a sickness fund that consisted solely of workers’ contributions, Dzierżyński formulated a series of modest eco­ nomic demands.53 In a separate article entitled “How We Fight,” Dzier­ żyński sought to dissuade workers from resorting to wanton economic terrorism and argued instead for “positive” organized action, primarily by the use of the strike. In both this and another article, “To All Workers of Kovno,” Dzierżyński appealed for unity as the main condition of successful economic struggle.54 Dzierżyński also sought to encourage class solidarity across ethnic boundaries by providing information about the recent achievements of the labor movement elsewhere in the Russian empire and how they applied to the workers in tsarist Lithuania.55 Apart from his publishing activity, Dzierżyński established personal contact with the workers in the large factories, discussed with them themes of a general nature, learned about conditions of work and industrial rela­ tions, and expressed concern for their personal problems. The objective, according to the police, was to gain the confidence of the workers and gradually urge them towards action.56 This was followed by informing the workers of existing factory legislation, distributing social democratic literature and, if necessary, reading aloud to those who were illiterate.57 Only after this field work was completed did Dzierżyński agitate directly for the establishment of a strike “kasa” or fund-raising committee—inci­ dentally the basic unit of the Jewish social democratic organization in Vilna. Through such committees Dzierżyński intended to launch a cam­ paign for better wages and a shorter working day.58 In the middle of April, Dzierżyński returned to Vilna to report to the party leadership. At a session of the party’s executive commitee, Dzier­ żyński proudly displayed a copy of his Kowieński robotnik. “In looking at the issue,” Gulbinowicz recalled, “we considered that the first pages were legibly written, but that the rest was unclear because the letters were too small, which we drew to Jacek’s attention. Jacek explained that he didn’t have enough time, that he alone wrote, printed and distributed, that he alone went to the factories and agitated.”59 Satisfied that Dzier­ żyński had laid the necessary foundations for expanding the party’s

44

FELIKS DZIERŻYŃSKI

organizational efforts, the Vilna leadership sent him back to Kovno, this time accompanied by Józef Olechnowicz, one of the most experienced of the LSDP’s agitators and a shoemaker by^prpfession.60 The most immediate task facing Dzierżyński and Olechnowicz upon their return was the writing, printing, and distribution of a May Day ap­ peal. Issued in the form of a pamphlet entitled “The Universal Workers’ Holiday of May 1,” the appeal sought to inform the Kovno workers of the meaning and tradition of the May 1 holiday and, at the same time, to encourage their participation in it. The pamphlet, couched in the phraseology of “proletarian internationalism,” is correctly attributed to Dzierżyński^ pen, while Olechnowicz probably offered suggestions and helped with the technical aspects of its publication and distribution.61 This division of labor made possible a much larger circulation than the single issue of Kowieński robotnik had achieved. Dzierżyński also began to send correspondence to Vilna for the LSDP’s main organ, Robotnik litewski (The Lithuanian Worker), which was published in both Polish and Lithuanian.62 Dzierżyński chose as his topics the largest of the Kovno steel plants, the Schmidt factory, which employed eight hundred workers, and the state-owned mechanical engineering workshops in the nearby district of Upper Freida. Modeled on his article “The Rekosz Factory” in Kowieński robotnik, these accounts were basically statistical compila­ tions and analyses followed by an indictment of prevailing conditions and an appeal for action.63 Shortly thereafter, Dzierżyński and Olech­ nowicz expanded their contacts among the workers, stepped up their agitational efforts and, by using Olechnowicz’s professional ties, success­ fully organized a strike of the city’s Polish shoemakers.64 In expanding their agitation among growing circles of workers, Dzier­ żyński and Olechnowicz, especially after the shoemakers’ strike, were bound sooner or later to attract the attention of the police. On July 17 Dzierżyński was arrested and imprisoned, “betrayed,” in his words, “by a teen-age apprentice who had been promised ten rubles by the gend­ armes.” 65 Contemporary police records indicate that there wre several worker informers, three of them from the Tilmans factory, who volun­ teered to identify “the bookbinder” for the authorities.66 In the hope of deflecting the investigation from his flat where there was much incrim­ inating evidence, the young agitator gave his name as Edmund Żebrowski. He denied that he had any contact with the workers, maintaining that his

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Zofia Pillar von Pilchau only purpose in Kovno was to give tutorials.67 Such wishful thinking was in vain. In short order the police succeeded in establishing his address, conducted a search of his flat, and discovered socialist pamphlets in Polish and Russian. They also found a list o f contacts from which his ties to Olechnowicz were eventually traced. Confronted by the new evidence, Dzierżyński revealed his identity.68 The ensuing preliminary investigation lasted five weeks. Silence was Dzierzynski’s only means o f defense. During the course o f the investiga­ tion he refused to admit either to his agitation in the factories or to member­ ship in any clandestine political organization. But the police had no dif­ ficulty in finding ample proof o f both from witnesses in the Rekosz and Tilmans factories who testified that he had distributed forbidden literature and urged the workers to set up a strike com m ittee.69 Once the police dis­ covered his ties to Olechnowicz, who was likewise arrested, his affiliation with the LSDP was exposed. The police also tried to link Dzierżyński to

FELIKS DZIERŻYŃSKI

46

Kowno prison photograph, 1897 the recent murder of a certain informer Moiseev in Vilna.70 But since no corroborating evidence could be established, the police concentrated on compiling enough proof of Dzierzynski’s “ criminal agitation among the Kovno workers” to send to the Ministry of Justice in order to obtain a conviction and a harsh sentence. In a secret memorandum from the com­ mander of the Kovno provincial gendarmes to the Vilna prosecutor, we read that “ Feliks Dzierżyński, considering his views, convictions and per­ sonal character, will be very dangerous in the future, capable of any crime.” 71

Imprisonment and Exile Dzierżyński, awaiting sentence, sat in the Kovno prison for another ten months after the investigation. This was the first real test o f the young man’s commitment to his chosen cause. “ Prison is good for those who have

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time to look critically at themselves,” he revealed to his sister Aldona, indicating that he himself was engaged in such an exercise.72 However, Dzierżyński quickly decided that he would not resign from his activities that had landed him in prison, and the treatment he received at the hands of his captors no doubt strengthened his resolve. In December the prison authorities cut him off from any contact with the outside world by con­ fiscating his stamps, envelopes and writing paper for correspondence.73 While this particular grievance was eventually redressed, Dzierżyński re­ portedly informed comrades that his guards periodically beat him.74 Finally, on May 27, 1898, the Ministry of Justice handed down an ad­ ministrative decree with its decision “to exile Feliks Dzierżyński under police supervision to Viatka province for three years,” an order that was communicated to Dzierżyński on the same day.75 Dzierżyński spent yet another month in the Kovno prison before finally embarking for exile.76 The road to exile in Viatka province in western Siberia was not a plea­ sant one for political prisoners and it provided a second test of Dzier­ żyński^ will. Taking leave of Kovno on June 26,1898, he journeyed six long weeks. “I spent more time sitting in prisons than I did on the road,” he later wrote to Aldona.77 At one point along the way, at the transit prison in Nizhni Novgorod (now Gorky), Dzierżyński was placed in the same cell with one hundred and twenty common criminals, prompting a written protest and demand to be transferred to another cell.78 Upon reaching Viatka, Dzierżyński waited another three weeks in the provin­ cial prison for a steamer to take him up river to his final destination of Nolinsk. Finally, growing impatient, he agreed to pay for the costs of travel himself. Even then, he was hardly treated as a “first class” pas­ senger. “They packed us in like sardines; there was no light or ventila­ tion which produced a terrible stench,” he informed Aldona.79 Dzier­ żyński was no doubt relieved when he finally reached Nolinsk in midSeptember. In Nolinsk, a village of five thousand inhabitants, Dzierżyński rented a room for four rubles a month and arranged meals at a fellow exile’s for another five rubles. Since the small allowance allotted to him by the pro­ vincial authorities could not cover these costs, Dzierżyński found employ­ ment at a local tobacco-manufacturing plant. Once settled, Dzierżyński enjoyed the company of several fellow exiles from St. Petersburg and Mos­ cow and found both the time and materials to study the activities of

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Russian liberal reformers in the zemstvo movement. However, he soon be­ gan to suffer from trachoma in connection with his work at the tobacco plant and was forced to seek other employment, which he eventually found with a Polish engineer, “a reaKextortionist” in Dzierżyński^ words.80 Meanwhile Dzierzynski’s “objectionable conversations” with the local inhabitants began to arouse the anger of the police who reported to the provincial authorities: “This is an impetuous and provocative ideal­ ist who is sowing enmity toward the monarchy.”81 The Viatka governor Klinberger, fearing Dzierzynski’s harmful influence in Nolinsk, particu­ larly among other political exiles, sought and received permission from the Ministry of the Interior to transfer Dzierżyński to Kaigorodsk, an isolated hamlet on the Kama River, five hundred versts (approximately 550 kilo­ meters) further north.82 Dzierżyński did not accept his fate passively and waged a futile paper war against Klinberger, demanding an explanation of the reasons for his transfer. Dissatisfied with the response of the gov­ ernor, he then sent a formal complaint to the governing Senate in St. Petersburg, also an ineffective action.83 By the end of December, Dzier­ żyński was in Kaigorodsk. One of Dzierżyński^ closer acquaintances while still in Nolinsk was Margarita Nikoleva, then serving a three-year term for illegal political activities; she later became a gymnasium instructor of Russian language and literature. From Kaigorodsk, Dzierżyński sent Nikoleva twenty-two letters from which it is possible to reconstruct in some detail his existence in his now remote Siberian outpost.84 The exact nature of Dzierżyński’s relationship with Nikoleva is something of a mystery. Although a roman­ tic liaison between the two cannot be rule out altogether,85 analysis of the correspondence indicates that Dzierżyński and Nikoleva merely shared common intellectual interests and that Dzierżyński was mainly interested in her opinions and criticism of his self-educational endeavors in Kaigor­ odsk. When the issue of romance was raised in Dzierżyński’s correspond­ ence to her, it was dealt with in a cold, philosophical and almost banal fashion, bearing no resemblance at all to Dzierżyński^ “love letters” of a later period.86 In any event, Dzierżyński^ letters to Nikoleva demonstrate that he tried to make optimum use of his time in Kaigorodsk. “The development of the mind and one’s knowledge is very important in exile,” he wrote Nikoleva. “It gives us strength, time is spent productively, you don’t

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exhaust yourself, you are able to surmount all difficulties.”87 Dzierżyński 3 roommate, A. I. Iakshin, a Russian exile who volunteered to accompany the young Polish revolutionary from Nolinsk to Kaigorodsk, would not allow him to share in the household duties. This enabled Dzierżyński to occupy himself with a more thorough reading of John Stuart Mill, Marx, Engels and Plekhanov than had been possible in the student circles.88 Although Dzierżyński professed a desire at this time to follow Marxist teachings “without becoming a dogmatist,”89 he now came completely under the spell of historical determinism as'is apparent from his following discussion of morality: Morality interests me, but only from one aspect, namely: the composition of moral concepts and the reasons for this composition and not why man possesses moral capabilities in general, which is al­ ready an area of philosophy and psychology. I am interested in mor­ ality as a social phenomenon. From this point of view morals are a product of social development, the development of human social relationships which result from corresponding economic relation­ ships, which in turn depend on the development of productive forces and their technical forms.90 Dzierżyński also took the time to observe his surroundings by strolling through the fields and spending evenings alone in the forest that embrased Kaigorodsk on two sides.91 The life of the local inhabitants came as a shock to him, proving in effect how little interaction he had actually had with the neighboring peasantry during his boyho.od years at Dzierżynowo. “The countryside for me here is something completely novel,” he admit­ ted to Nikoleva. “Long ago, as a boy, I lived in it, but not like here, as an exile.”92 Although he certainly sympathized with the plight of the vil­ lagers—their poverty, isolation and exploitation—he refused to offer radical solutions. “To propagate collective farming on a basis which does not allow any exploitation or differentiation is not a realistic probability,” he wrote on one occasion.93 Instead, Dzierżyński tried to alleviate the lot of the local peasants by helping them write petitions and protests to various judicial institutions. This irritated the authorities, but they could not take action against him because, according to a police memorandum, “Dzier­ żyński did not accept payment from these petitioners and he did not go to their homes; rather they came to him.”94

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Physically and emotionally, however, life in exile was bound to take its toll. In. addition to trachoma, Dzierżyński soon began to suffer from chronic bronchitis, emphysema and anemia. This prompted a visit to the central village in the district, Slobodsk, from where he returned with a physician’s diagnosis that his life would be a short one.95 That his illnesses exempted him from service in the imperial army was perhaps small con­ solation at the time.96 Shortly after his trip to Slobodsk, Dzierżyński began to experience periodic fits of depression and may have been on the verge of a nervous breakdown. “I feel a discrepency between the real and the apparent,” he wrote of his inner struggle. “This absorbs much of my strength and I feel that I am not gaining, but losing in character. . . . I sleep six to seven hours, but very restlessly.”97 For these reasons, Dzierżyński began to plot his escape from what he called “this unintelligible, inactive and monotonous exile.”98 When warmer weather permitted, Dzierżyński obtained the permission of the police for fishing expeditions that would last for several days. Because he always returned punctually, he avoided arousing their suspicion. Thus on August 28, 1899 (O.S.), Dzierżyński embarked on such an expedition packing only enough supplies for five days. When he failed to appear in Kaigorodsk well after the appointed time, the police began their search, but it was al­ ready too late.99 Dzierżyński^ escape was aided by the ineptitude of the police, who assumed they would catch up with him in Nolinsk where he would try to contact Nikoleva.100 Instead he made his way straight to Vilna, appearing at his surprised sister’s home on a chilly autumn evening “ unshaven, dirty, tired, with a fur cap on his head.” 101 The Education o f a Revolutionary: A Few Remarks The political education of Feliks Dzierżyński during the so-called “Lithuanian period” of his activity (1894-1899) took several twists and turns. By the time he escaped from Siberian exile in 1899, he was indeed a committed revolutionary. He was not, however, a sophisticated MarxistLeninist—a claim made by his Soviet and Polish biographers.102 In fact, there is no evidence to indicate that Dzierżyński was influenced directly or indirectly by Lenin during this period. For example, he obviously had no knowledge of Lenin’s visit to Vilna in September 1895 to confer with Jewish social democratic leaders—an event frequently cited as the turning

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point in his career (and even more incredibly, in the activity of all socialist groups in Lithuania). Had he been aware of Lenin’s presence in Vilna in the fall of 1895 or of its importance to his own intellectual development, he certainly would have credited the “Great Leader” in his autobiography and memoirs. In charting Dzierżyński’s path to revolutionary socialism, I have tried to focus on the local “Lithuanian” environment of Dzierżyńskim activities and on developments affecting his personal life. To bring Lenin into the discus­ sion at this point obscures the issue of actual influences on Dzierzynski’s political behavior. Take, for example, Dzierżyńskim emphasis on economic over political agitation in his practical activities, first in Vilna and later in Ko vno—hardly indicative of a mature Marxist-Leninist. Reflecting on these first years of his activity, Dzierżyński told Mickiewicz-Kapsukas, “I be­ came aware of the necessity of merging the economic with the political struggle only while in exile.” 103 This, of course, came well after Lenin’s visit to Vilna. Given the general intellectual climate of the times, particularly in Vilna, Dzierżyńskim emphasis on improving the material conditions of the workers was hardly out of place. “Economism,” the pragmatic argument that economic gains could be more easily achieved in an autocratic state than political gains and should therefore take precedence, was extremely popular in socialist circles throughout the Russian empire in the last years of the nineteenth century.104 In Vilna, a peculiar brand of “economism” was advanced by the leader of the Jewish social democrats, Arkady Kremer, in a brochure entitled “On Agitation.” Published in 1894, Kremer’s bro­ chure not only provided guidelines for the activities of his own organi­ zation, but also had a tremendous impact on thé non-Je wish social demo­ crats in Vilna. In the brochure Kremer argued that the political conscious­ ness of the workers could be raised only through economic struggle and, therefore, the advancing of political demands at this stage of the labor movement’s development would be premature.105 That an impressionable youth like Dzierżyński, given his close ties to Jewish social democrats, could remain unaffected by the “economist” argument, particularly its Vilna strain, is most unlikely. Both in his agita­ tion and in his articles of the period, Dzierżyński conformed to the spirit of the principles outlined in Kremer’s brochure. Although following Kre­ mer, Dzierżyński considered “political freedom” a distant, but attainable

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goal, he never did spell out its meaning nor how it was to be achieved. Nor did Dzierżyński come to the conclusion that economic advances could not be sustained or consolidated without the corresponding attainment and defense of political rights—the main argument later used by Lenin and others against “economism.” Similarly, the crystallization of Dzierżyńskim views on the national question and the closely related issue of unity among the ethnic social­ ist parties was of local inspiration. Here again the influence of the Jewish social democrats—particularly the Goldman brothers—was fundamental. Although Dzierżyński had come to reject the idea of either Polish or Lithuanian statehood, both he and the Goldman brothers favored a federa­ tion of self-governing units at all administrative levels in a future Russian state. From here the Goldmans would go one step further; as members of the Bund they embraced the idea of extraterritorial national-cultural autonomy. Dzierżyński, on the other hand, would gradually retreat from the idea of far-reaching autonomy that he had come to support in 1897; later, in the fundamentally different environment of Warsaw, he would move closer to the “orthodox” views of Rosa Luxemburg. Nevertheless, Dzierżyńskim embrace of federalist notions, albeit only temporary, was indeed typical of many political activists—Polish and Jewish—who came from the kresy.106 Furthermore, Dzierżyńskim own experience in Vilna and Kovno along with his close association with young Jewish social democrats led him to side with the opponents of the organizational separation of the socialist movement in the Russian empire along ethnic lines.107 While still in prison awaiting his sentence, Dzierżyński learned of the LSDP’s rejection of an invitation to participate in the first congress of the Russian Social Demo­ cratic Labor Party (RSDRP). This was an action that he considered a violation of the spirit of the resolutions of the Second Congress of the LSDP, and he immediately fired off a letter of protest to Domaszewicz in Vilna.108 Although it was not Dzierżyńskim intention to break with the LSDP, his action in indicative of the position he now occupied in this, one of the most controversial questions facing the socialist movement in all lands of the Russian empire. In addition to the maturation of his political views, Dzierżyńskim de­ votion to oppositional political activity increasingly bordered on fanaticism during these years. The death of his mother was of paramount importance

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in this process. Prior to her death, Dzierżyński appeared able to cope with the oppression he encountered at the Vilna gymnasium. To be sure, Dzierżyński found an escape from that oppression through his partici­ pation in student circles, but this wâs a more or less standard response among Polish youth. His difficulties at the gymnasium leading to his ultimate expulsion, however, were atypical and come immediately after his mother’s death. From that point on, Dzierżyński became increasingly involved in the clandestine activities of the LSDP and began to take on assignments that carried considerable risk of arrest. His agreement to move to Kovno and his single-handed efforts to establish an organiza­ tion of the LSDP there were taken, it seems, without a careful consideratio of the possible consequences. Those consequences, of course, were arrest, imprisonment and exile. Dzierżyńskim long term in the Kovno prison was an embittering experi­ ence that hardened his resolve to continue the struggle against his per­ ceived oppressors. “The time will come when I will again be at liberty,” he wrote to Aldona in reference to the treatment he received at the prison, “and then they will pay for everything.” 109 By this time, as he told his sister, it was already too late for him to turn back. Instead of passi­ vely accepting his fate of temporary exile in western Siberia, Dzierżyński immediately angered the authorities by his agitation of the inhabitants of Nolinsk. As a result, he was transferred to the even more remote village of Kaigorodsk. While in Kaigorodsk, Dzierżyński had only one thought: “to prepare myself for the cause” as he wrote to Nikoleva.110 Indeed, he came to see his own misery in bondage as part of that preparation. “Now I will be able to feel more strongly the suffering and unhappiness of the people,” he wrote. “Now I will be able not only to understand their strug­ gle, but also to feel it.”111 Finally, Dzierzyński’s deteriorating health while in exile, followed by a physician’s diagnosis and prediction of premature death, also had a pro­ found influence on his subsequent activity. “From now on I will try to structure my short life in such a way,” he informed Nikoleva, “in order to use it most intensively.”112 With this in mind, Dzierżyński made the decision to attempt an escape from exile—not to rest and recover from his multiple illnesses, but to return to the heat of battle against the auto­ cratic Russian state. Indeed, he had made an irreversible commitment to sacrifice himself on the alter of revolution; his health, his personal

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life, his material existence now became insignificant. Only “the cause” mattered to this Polish Tkachev as he ma4Sshis way across the Siberian steppe to Vilna and then to Warsaw, where, after a few months of fever­ ish activity, he would revitalize the social democratic movement in Rus­ sian Poland.

CHAPTER III

FOUNDER OF THE SDKPiL, 1899-1900

From Vilna to Warsaw While still in Siberia, Feliks Dzierżyński received news from Vilna that the cause was not going well.1 Only upon his return, however, did he comprehend the devastation dealt to Lithuanian Social Democracy by a series of mass arrests during the period of his exile. The crackdown in Vilna, which was by no means limited to the LSDP, resulted in a largescale political trial and the dispersal of the party and its leadership. Alfons Morawski had already fled abroad shortly before Dzierżyński^ own arrest while the less fortunate Domaszewicz was banished to Siberia.2 Michael and Leon Goldman, Dzierżyński^ former partners in the “left opposi­ tion,” had abandoned the LSDP in the aftermath of the party’s refusal to participate in the founding congress of the RSDRP. The Goldmans sub­ sequently turned all their efforts to the consolidation of the Jewish Bund, which had held its first congress in the autumn of 1897. In short, the LSDP ceased to exist as an organization from early 1899 until its slow reemergence beginning in the winter of 1901-1902.3 Meanwhile, the party’s remnants adopted policies in the name of the LSDP that would have been unacceptable to both the former leadership and the former opposition. One can imagine Dzierżyński^ shock when he learned that the rump membership of the LSDP intended to merge with 55

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the PPS!4 Indeed, the leadership of the phantom party had passed from the independent and experienced hands of Domaszewicz to a small group • \ v \ . of “students,” as Dzierżyński termed them, who in the wake of the party’s demise had fallen under the influence of pro-PPS elements led by Józef Baranowicz, Dzierżyńskfs old classmate at the gymnasium. Dzierżyński later asserted that upon his return to Vilna the new leader­ ship denied him access to the workers and instead was determined to send him out of the country as soon as possible.6 Yet given the feeble state of the organization, it is uncertain that the leadership itself had such access to deny; in any case, Dzierżyński could have easily ignored the wishes of the “students” had he so desired. Rather, the evidence in­ dicates that Dzierżyński, a fugitive from exile, was well aware of the dangers of active agitation in a city where the police, sooner or later, were bound to look for him. Edward Sokołowski recalled meeting Dzier­ żyński on the streets of Vilna at this time: “His behavior was extremely conspiratorial. He greeted me only when he become convinced that no one else was in the vicinity.” 7 Thus it appears that the plan to leave Vilna at the first opportunity was readily approved, if not inspired, by Dzierżyński himself. He did not, however, intend to resign from agitational activity elsewhere; he also con­ sidered his impending departure from Vilna to be only temporary. He eventually decided to settle in Warsaw for a number of reasons. In Warsaw he would be much less suspect and the contacts that he had established with Polish Social Democrats in 1895 at the socialist student congress, he reasoned, would provide a basis for renewing his own activity. Moreover, shortly after the founding congress of the Bund, his old friend Leon Goldman had been dispatched to Warsaw to organize a committee of the Jewish workers’ party in the city. Perhaps even more important from a personal point of view was the fact that Leon had been accompanied by his sister Julia, with whom Dzierżyński had fallen in love while still in the gymnasium. In any event, Leon Goldman would prove to be Dzierżyński^ most valuable contact once he arrived in Warsaw.8 Besides getting Gold­ man’s address, Dzierżyński also turned to the Vilna Bundists for help in obtaining a fraudulent passport and other personal documents. In midSeptember, the Bund introduced him to a gang of professional smugglers who escorted him across the “border” separating the Lithuanian from the Polish provinces.9

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Warsaw and Polish Political Parties at the Turn o f the Century At the turn of the century Warsaw was a rapidly growing urban and administrative center whose population had doubled in less than twenty years. In contrast to Vilna, the majority of the city’s inhabitants were Poles (56.5%), followed by Jews (35.8%), Russians (4.9%) and other nationalities (less than 3%).10 Indicative of the recent mass influx of villagers seeking work in Warsaw, first generation arrivals comprised an estimated seventy percent of the Catholic segment of the population.11 Warsaw was also a city characterized by its youth. Forty-one percent of its inhabitants were under the age of nineteen and a signficant propor­ tion of them were employed in Warsaw’s factories, a demographic factor of key importance to later soical democratic activity.12 Warsaw had just completed the first stage of its industrialization. From 1882 to 1900, the number of factories within the confines of the city had doubled and the number of industrial workers had increased by 350% over the same period.13 Here industry and labor were much more con­ centrated than in Vilna or Kovno. At the beginning of the century 44,500 persons were employed in Warsaw’s factories, almost half of them in metal­ lurgical enterprises; another 14,000 workers were employed in the crafts and in small enterprises.14 In Warsaw, a substantial majority (71%) of the wage-earning population was Polish, the Jews accounting for 25%15—an­ other major contrast with the cities of Lithuania where Jewish labor was proportionally dominant. Compared with his counterpart in other regions of the Russian empire, the industrial worker of Warsaw and, indeed, of the Kingdom of Poland found himself in relatively better but still extremely difficult circum­ stances. Although real wages in industry were on the whole higher than in Russia, long working hours, bad housing, unsanitary and unsafe condi­ tions in the factories all bred resentment and discontent.14 But the prin­ cipal fear among industrial workers was the constant specter of unem­ ployment resulting from a genuine economic crisis. Until the 1890s, Russian tariff policy had worked to the benefit of the Kingdom, pro­ tecting the infant Polish industries from foreign competition. However, Russian protectionism in the 1890s, particularly under the direction of Finance Minister Sergei Witte, placed the commerce of the Kingdom at a number of disadvantages. On the one hand, the Kingdom now found

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itself forced to import coke from the Donets Basin rather than from neighboring Silesia, and oil from Baku instead of Galicja. This of course, hurt the Polish producer because of thexgrfeat distances and expensive freight rates. On the other hand, the reimposition of duties on Polish industrial products, particularly those of the textile industry, in order to protect Russia’s own emerging industrial complex was bound to create economic difficulties in the Kingdom. As producers in the Kingdom sought to cut their costs in order to compete, more and more workers were thrust into the ranks of the unemployed or partially employed. A European-wide depression in the first years of the twentieth century added severely to these difficulties. Such changing circumstances had a direct impact on political life in the Kingdom, particularly in Warsaw. Entrepreneurs who had hitherto favored a close economic relationship with the rest of the Russian em­ pire now increasingly felt discriminated against in that relationship and began to consider political forms of opposition to the tsarist government. This kind of discontent was cultivated for the most part by the National League, which under Dmowski’s leadership began to organize more openly. In the 1890s the League sponsored a number of patriotic demonstrations, the most important of which occurred in April 1894 on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the Kościuszko insurrection. Although many activists of the League were arrested and exiled as a result of such activity, the repressive action of the authorities did not stop the creation of the National Democratic Party (Stronnictwo Demo kraty czno-Narodo we) in 1897. Reflecting the change in the composition of the movement, the National Democrats with greater frequency advanced as an immediate political demand autonomy for the Kingdom, especially in the area of economic and tariff policy, to defend Polish industry from discrimina­ tion and protect it from outside competition. However, in theory at least, the final goal of the League remained the reestablishment of an independent Polish state on the basis of a unifed front of all elements of Polish society. The PPS, too, had gained in strength in the last years of the nineteenth century, largely owing to the efforts of Józef Piłsudski. Prior to the emergence of Piłsudski as head of the Central Workers’ Committee of the PPS at the second congress of that party in February 1894, the organi­ zational activity of the PPS had been weak and lacking in coordination.

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Piłsudski’s greatest achievement in these years was the publication of the clandestine Robotnik (The Worker) which he edited for six years before his arrest in 1900. By that time the PPS had organized over a thousand workers in the Kingdom. Although it was still far from being a mass party, the PPS had gained the support of Polish socialists in Pozn­ ania and Galicja who placed their resources, particularly financial and technical, at the disposal of their sister organization in the Kingdom. Thus, the PPS under Pilsudski’s dynamic leadèrship developed an impressive network of conspiratorial cells in the Kingdom that no other Polish party could equal at that time. Ideologically, Piłsudski was little attracted to Marxist economic theories or to the idea of class struggle. Moreover, he was instinctively distrustful of Russian revolutionaries. He considered the socialist movement on Polish lands a means by which national independence could be recovered and equated a socialist revolution with a national insurrection against auto­ cratic Russia. Pi łsud ski’s views were shared for the most part by the editors of Przedświt and other London-based emigre activists (principal­ ly Leon Wasilewski, Witold Jodko-Narkiewicz and Bolesław Jędrzejow­ ski), but these ideas became the source of considerable controversy in the Kingdom, especially after Piłsudski’s arrest. The opposition to Piłsud­ ski and Przedświt, centered in the Warsaw organization and led by Jan Strożecki and Ludwik Kulczycki, increasingly condemned the priority given to national over social concerns. But this “nativist” group was still too weak to mount an effective challenge to the “right-wing” leader­ ship.17 The remaining Polish political party, the Social Democracy of the King­ dom of Poland, had been more or less eliminated from the field after a promising start. In the years following its creation in 1893 to its demise in 1895, the SDKP had approximately four hundred members and initi­ ally the range of its activity and influence was wider than that of the PPS.18 However, the arrest of the Warsaw leadership in the autumn of 1894, followed by further repression in the spring and summer of 1895, brought an end to the party as an active organization. In January 1896, many of the Polish Social Democrats who had escaped joined the PPS19 and, from that point until Dzierzynski’s arrival in Warsaw in the autumn of 1899, the PPS could and did rightfully claim that it was the only social­ ist organization active among the Polish proletariat.

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The Renewal o f Social Democratic Activity in Warsaw Upon his arrival in Warsaw, Dzierżyński'quickly discovered that the contacts he had made at the socialist student congress in 1895 with Po­ lish Social Democrats, many of whom were how in exile and emigration or had quit the organization altogether, were of little use to him. Instead, Dzierżyński turned to Leon Goldman and the Warsaw Committee of the Bund for help in establishing contact with the Polish workers. Relations between the Bund and the PPS, it is recalled, were strained from the beginning. In the Kingdom of Poland, the Bund particularly resented the efforts of the PPS to organize Jewish workers under its banner through a Jewish section specially established for this purpose.20 By 1899 the Bund had already begun to counterattack, dispatching its activists—men like Jakub Fürstenberg (Hanecki)—to participate in a small circle of intel­ lectuals who called themselves Polish Social Democrats. According to a member of the Warsaw Committee of the Bund: “Because the PPS blur­ red class distinctions, sowed distrust for Russia and particularly the Rus­ sian workers’ movement (of which the Bund considered itself a part) and deceived the mind with petty-bourgeois, romantic national socialism, it was felt that in Poland there was a great need for renewing social demo­ cratic work and for the rebuilding of a social democratic organization, which had died several years before.”21 For these reasons the Warsaw Bundists listened sympathetically to Dzierżyński^ plans to agitate directly among the Polish workers and they immediately put him in touch with Fiirstenberg’s circle.22 Dzierżyński quickly determined, however, that the circle had no ties with the workers and was occupied only with criticism of the PPS rather than with the rebuilding of a social democratic organi­ zation in the city.23 In Dzierżyńskfs opinion, Fiirstenberg’s group was itself far too weak and demoralized to take advantage of the growing dis­ satisfaction within the Warsaw organization of the PPS.24 Shortly thereafter, still in late September, Dzierżyński managed to establish contact, againt through the Bund, with members of the Rosół family who recently had become engaged in the organization of social democratic circles among artisans and craftsmen.25 The head of the family, Jan Rosół, was something of a legend in his own right. A former member of both the Great Proletariat and the Union of Polish Workers (and a sur­ vivor of tsarist prisons and Siberian exile), Rosół had dedicated his entire

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Jan Rosół adult life to the workers’ movement in the Kingdom o f Poland. Known affectionately as “ Ojciec” (Father), Rosół commanded enormous author­ ity and respect among his small band o f less than fifty followers.26 DzierzyńskFs attention, however, was immedately drawn to R osół’s energetic eighteen-year-old son, Antoni, than a student at the Warsaw Politechnika. Perhaps this was because Dzierżyński perceived in the younger R osół a reflection of himself: a tireless and extremely dedicated agitator who, in Dzierzynski’s words, “ understood that the only successful way to achieve a better future for the broad masses o f people is in the international class struggle o f the proletariat against the exploiting and oppressing classes.” 27 Together with the Rosółs, Dzierżyński conceived a plan o f action to re­ build a Polish social democratic organization in the city. Sharing A ntoni’s conviction “ that to criticize the PPS was not enough,” 28 Dzierżyński felt

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Antoni Rosół that many members o f the PPS could be brought into the ranks o f the Social Democrats but that this would require the infiltration o f the PPS.29 Hence, Dzierżyński joined the PPS and, particularly in its circle among the shoemakers, criticized the PPS from within. “ In this way,” he recalled, “after intensive work I managed to detach part o f the workers from the PPS and, together with R osół, to rebuild the SDKP.” 30 The PPS, as mentioned, was vulnerable to such agitation, especially in Warsaw. Many PPS workers in the city, although by no means a majority, were confused and disoriented by the new emphasis on “ insurrectionism” in both Robotnik and Przedświt, sensing that the delicate balance between the party’s social and national concerns was being undermined. Marian Płochocki, who belonged at this time to a PPS circle among the Warsaw bakers, recalled that lectures given to the circle were poorly organized and

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Stanisław Trusiewicz merely repeated the views presented in party publications. Issues such as wages and working hours, o f more immediate and vital concern to the members o f Płochocki’s circle, were not addressed.31 Still, Dzierżyńskim task was not easy. While the Bund or the Rosółs could provide him the initial contacts—for example, among the shoe­ makers—the absence o f trained agitators in the Rosół group mean that the burden o f appearing at several meetings o f PPS workers during the course o f a single day often fell on Dzierżyński alone.32 The plan o f under­ mining the PPS from within also required that Dzierżyński, who operated under the pseudonyms o f “ Franek” and “Astronom,” know the enemy well, and his removal from political life by imprisonment and exile forced him to reacquaint himself with the position o f the PPS on key issues. With

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Edward Sokołowski this in mind, Dzierżyński began to collect and examine recent publications o f the PPS. In his marginal notes to these materials, a plan o f action gradu­ ally evolved.33 Dzierzynski’s strategy eventually focused on the imbalance in the tactics of the PPS, its desire to “monopolize patriotism ” at the ex­ pense o f defending the class interests o f its members, and its “deceit” in claiming that Russian socialists were prepared to accept the continued existence o f tsarism in exchange for a constitution.34 In a separate set of notes that he used at meetings o f PPS workers, he wrote: Nationalist propaganda plays into the hands o f the government, not only because it divides our party, but also the Polish proletariat from the Russian and Jew ish. . . .We therefore consider that the

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PPS is on the wrong road with its slogan of struggle for the inde­ pendence of Poland. They accuse us of treachery, that we want to destroy the workers’ movement, intending to chop off its head. We want only that the proletariat understand its real interests.35 Dzierzynski’s efforts were given a welcome boost by the spontaneous outbreak of a series of strikes among the Warsaw shoemakers beginning in October 1899 in the relatively large firms of Brochis and Baumflek. Moving quickly to direct the strike through the formulation of demands and the timely publication of appeals to the strikers (using the press of the Warsaw Committee of the Bund), Dzierżyński and the Rosół group hoped to prove that they—and not the PPS—had the true interests of the workers at heart. One of the leaders of the strike at the Eizenhom firm later recalled Dzierżyński^ appearance at a meeting of two hundred shoe­ makers: “After the meeting, it was said among the shoemakers that this Lithuanian was well acquainted with our cause and they demanded that we bring him to other meetings.”36 Dzierżyński, moreover, did not rest with the successful conclusion of the original strike. He continued to speak at meetings, reporting the results of the strike in individual firms37 and calling upon other shoemakers in the city to join the strike action on the basis of demands already accpeted by several entrepreneurs.38 In this way, Dzierżyński and the Rosółs succeeded in bring the PPS circle of shoe­ makers into the social democratic camp. The shoemakers’ strike and the social democratic participation in it contrasted with the inactivity of the PPS and, therefore, had an impact on other PPS circles, particularly among the craftsmen. As the Social Democrats stepped up their agitation among the bakers, leatherdressers, carpenters and metal workers, the defections from the PPS began to in­ crease. In the case of the bakers, who had already formed an illegal trade union following their own successful strike in the summer of 1897, the entire organization broke with the PPS and went over to the social demo­ cratic side.39 By the end of November 1899, there were five social demo­ cratic circles active in Warsaw with a combined membership of approxi­ mately two hundred workers. Then shortly before Christmas, Dzierżyński took the final step by which Polish Social Democracy in Warsaw was re­ born—the merger of the circles into an umbrella organization called the Workers’ Union of Social Democracy.40

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Owing to his allegedly “immoral” tactics against the PPS in Warsaw, Dzierżyński quickly became despised by mąpy. PPS loyalists, but he also won their grudging respect. For example, Józef Dąbrowski conceded that Dzierżyński “was an excellent speaker, fully dedicated to the cause, a man of iron energy—which, moreover, he later proved in Russia—and, above all, he exerted a spell-binding influence on the workers.”41 Another, more impartial observer, the famous sociologist Ludwik Krzywicki, re­ called a cunning and extremely confident young man. This view of Dzier­ żyński emerges in his account of a discussion in his Warsaw flat between Dzierżyński and Edward Abramowski, founder of the Association of Polish Workers, a short-lived socialist splinter group: Abramowski had never heard of Dzierżyński; Dzierżyński, on the other hand, probably had a very clear idea about the various views of Abramowski. He selected a topic apparently in the aim of irritating Abramowski. Abramowski accepted the challenge. The exchange of opinions begam: Dzierżyński, in accordinace with his entire philoso­ phy of life, argued from a position of narrow determinism, bordering on fatalism—to be more exact, a determinism based upon the philoso­ phy of so-called historical materialism: I am like an atom in water, the current is taking me somewhere, neither the direction nor the speed depends on me and if, as an atom, I had the traits of human spiritu­ ality and could therefore think, feel and desire, then I could also philosophize like you, sir. I would conclude that I, an atom, am proceeding in the direction of the current, th a t. . . I a m going where my convictions lead me, they are thrust upon me by my entire intel­ lectual make-up, by my experiences in life. I am led to socialism be­ cause every honest, intelligent individual, inasmuch as he is familiar with today’s social theories and perceives human injustice, must be a socialist. If you like, sir, I am like an obsessed person, my obsession is the emancipation of the working class.’ Moreover, I add that Dzierżyński repeated this profession of his beliefs several times in conversations with me and emphasized that he believed in the pos­ sibility of social revolution within his lifetime.42

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The Formation o f the SDKPiL Despite Dzierzynski’s intensive activity in Warsaw, he never abandoned his desire to return to Vilna and renew social democratic work in his native Lithuania. Before his departure for Warsaw in September, he had managed to establish contact with Mieczysław Kozłowski of the Union of Workers of Lithuania and Edward Sokołowski of the LSDP, no doubt for future reference.43 Immediately after the reestablishment of a social democratic organization in Warsaw, Dzierżyński returned to Vilna armed with a pro­ posal to merge the social democratic groups in both Poland and Lithuania into a single party. On New Year’s Eve, a private conference involving Dzierżyński, Kozłowski, Sokołowski and Piotr Suknalewicz (also from the LSDP), referred to in party literature as the “Vilna Council,’’ was held in the flat of the Bundist Julian Leszczyński (Leński).44 In calling for a merger with Polish Social Democracy, Dzierżyński hoped to provide an alternative, at least for individual social democrats in Vilna, to a PPS pro­ ject for incorporating the rump LSDP organization.45 He also argued that in order to renew social democratic activity in Vilna it was necessary to concentrate all forces.46 The Council agreed in principle to a merger on the basis of the program adopted at the First Congress of the SKDP in 1894. The Council also noted that the program of the new party should clearly reject the idea of either Polish or Lithuanian independence and emphasize participation in the struggle for an all-Russian constitution as its most important political task.47 Dzierżyński was commissioned by the Council to draft a program for the new party which would be presented to a prospective congress for ratification.48 Dzierżyński was also named to lead a four-member pro­ visional central committee which was expanded to include Stanisław Trusiewicz a few days later.49 Trusiewicz, having by this time escaped from exile, immediately called a congress of the Union of Workers of Lithuania which passed a resolution approving the decisions of the Vilna Council and the projected merger. Although Dzierżyński, as the repre­ sentative of the Vilna Council to this congress, arrived after the resolu­ tion had already been adopted, he was elected to the Central Committee of the Union along with Trusiewicz and Kozłowski.50 With the merger only awaiting ratification by the first congress of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (eventually

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held in August 1900), Dzierżyński returned to Warsaw to work on the draft program and to consolidate the young organization. To compensate for \ s \ • the lack of social democratic literature, Dzierżyński collected and dis­ tributed at meetings old issues of Sprawa robotnicza, which had ceased publication after the collapse of the SDKP in 1896.S1 He also began to involve the Warsaw organization in such limited political activity as funeral demonstrations.52 Finally, Dzierżyński prepared a porfolio of materials outlining the party’s position on the sensitive and crucial issue of an inde­ pendent Polish state, apparently with the intention of copying and spread­ ing it among soical democratic activists for use in their agitation among PPS workers. Entitled Niepodległość Polski (The Independence o f Poland) the portfolio was seized by the police at the time of DzierżynńskPs arrest in February 1900.s3 These manuscripts, largely ignored by historians and biographers, are nevertheless important in that they indicate the sources of Dzierżyński^ own views on the Polish question at this stage of his career. According to Soviet and Polish accounts, the leaders of Polish Social Democracy oc­ cupied a “mistaken” position in relation to the Polish question in parti­ cular and the national question in general because of their long standing opposition to the vague formula of national self-determination to which Lenin, among others, subscribed. In Dzierżyński^ case, however, because communist historiography considers him to be the “most Leninist” of the Polish social democratic leadership, pains are taken to show that he was somehow “less mistaken” than his colleagues. For example, it has been noted that in the discussions of the Vilna Council, Dzierżyński called for “the widest possible autonomy” for Poland.54 Another com­ mentator, in assessing Dzierżyński^ role in the Polish labor movement, has argued that Dzierżyński^ approach to the Polish question was significantly different from that of Rosa Luxemburg. Dzierżyński, he asserts, was guided by the practical necessity of the common struggle of Russian and Polish workers to overthrow tsarism rather than by Luxemburg’s concept of the “organic incorporation” of Polish lands into the socio-economic structures of the partitioning states.55 Such statements imply that Dzierżyński rejected Luxemburg’s theoreti­ cal treatment of the Polish question. Nothing can be further from the truth. In composing his portfolio Niepodległość Polski, Dzierżyński drew his inspiration directly from Luxemburg’s writings—particularly her article

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“W kwestii niepodległości Polski” (The Question of the Independence of Poland) published in Sprawa robotnicza, as well as her doctoral disserta­ tion, Die Industrielle Entwicklung Polens (The Industrial Development o f Poland), in which she originally developed the concept of “organic in­ corporation.”56 Dzierżyński copied large sections of her works by hand and, in his marginal notes, called Die Industrielle Entwicklung Polens “an excellent examination” of the economic bonds linking Russia and the Kingdom of Poland. He therefore urged social democrats to use the argu­ ment of “organic incorporation” to counter the claim of the PPS that Russia was laying economic waste to the Kingdom through the applica­ tion of discriminatory tariffs and rates.57 As far as Dzierżyńskfs concept of national autonomy is concerned, it is true that at this time he argued for regional and national self-govern­ ment, that “each people should have its own legislature with most exten­ sive rights.”58 He had brought such ideas with him to Warsaw from Vilna, where he had been under the influence of Jewish social democrats. This influence did not simply evaporate overnight; in fact, Dzierżyński fre­ quently participated in Bundist meetings while in Warsaw during this period. On the other hand, Dzierżyński^ vision of autonomy was now more distant than before, which indicates the growing influence of Lux­ emburg on his thinking. Rather than advance the demand for national autonomy as an immediate political goal, Dzierżyński now argued that it was secondary to the attainment of political rights by the entire proletariat in a constitutional Russian state.59 Moreover, in DzierżyńskPs voluminous notes on the Polish question, there is no longer any mention of the feder­ alist notions that he had supported in his Vilna days, another indication of his gravitation toward the views of Rosa Luxemburg. On the specific issue of an independent Polish state, Dzierżyński was, therefore, as negative as the old SDKP had ever been. He aruged that the PPS demand for Polish statehood was “utopian” and that it could “only weaken the workers’ movement in Poland and Lithuania, where the population is mixed, because it would bring about a definite antagonism toward workers of other nationalities. . . . ’,6° In short, Dzierżyński^ position on the Polish question represented no appreciable change from the previous pronouncements of the founders and publicists of the SKDP. To the contrary, archival materials indicate that Dzierżyński sought to establish a theoretical basis for his position precisely from those pro­ nouncements. On this particular issue, as well as on others of a theoretical

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nature that would later confront him and the party he led, Dzierżyński found ideological guidance, not from Lenin (of whose existence he was still unaware), but from Rosa Luxemburg. v Dzierżyński’s Achievements Shortly after Dzierżyński^ return to Warsaw from Vilna the police be­ gan to pick up his trail. According to the Warsaw Prosecutor’s Office, the police were informed of Dzierżyński^ presence at two meetings of PPS workers on January 15 and January 19, 1900. At the first, Dzierżyński reportedly “gave a speech about the necessity of uniting the Polish work­ ers’ party with the Russian Social Democrats for overthrowing tsarism and promised to supply those present with illegal literature.”61 The police then received information that Dzierżyński was expected at another such meeting to be held on February 4. When the police raided the meeting, Dzierżyński first gave his name as Edmund Iwanowski, and then Jan Żebrowski, but eventually revealed his identity during a subsequent inter­ rogation.62 While Dzierżyński refused to discuss his contacts, residence, or the source of the literature that was seized during the arrest, he readily told the police that he was a Social Democrat in his convictions and that his views were represented in the confiscated literature.63 Later that night, Antoni Rosół was arrested in the home of his parents in a crack­ down that netted twenty-five persons.64 Before his arrest, however, Dzierżyński had given the SKDPiL the organizational push it needed. For this reason, Dzierżyński must be con­ sidered the founder of the new party. Far too often, particularly in West­ ern scholarship, historians have relegated the establishment of the SDKPiL to the status of a footnote in the history of the Polish communism treating the additon of and Lithuania to the party’s title as a matter of only passing significance. In this regard, it is important to remember that the SDKP had been altogether extinguished as an organization by 1896 and that for three years social democratic activity in the Kingdom of Poland was non-existent. Dzierżyński^ resurrection of Polish Social Demo­ cracy in 1899-1900 was, therefore, truly a remarkable feat. Significantly, it had been accomplished without the knowledge or participation of the founders of the old SDKP-particularly the Sprawa robotnicza group— although Dzierżyński definitely intended to enlist their support at some

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point. In truth, Dzierżyński did consciously tie the new party to the tradi­ tions of the SDKP by successfully urging the adoption of its program, especially in the Polish question. But the SDKPiL was more than just a continuation of the defunct SDKP. It was a new organization with new leadership, one to which the emigre Polish Social Democrats would have to accommodate themselves if they wished to pay a role in its development. Like Piłsudski before him, Dzierżyński had come to Warsaw from Vilna in order to renew systematic agitation among the Polish working classes, albeit according to fundamentally different ideological principles. Unlike Piłsudski, Dzierżyński was not accorded sufficient time by the authorities to witness the fruits of his labors. Yet in a sense the merger recently en­ gineered by Dzierżyński acted as an insurance policy. For soon after his arrest, Trusiewicz and Sokołowski hastened to Warsaw from Vilna to assume direction of the young organization. Hence, a continuity of leader­ ship was assured and a repetition of the disaster in 1895-1896 avoided. Dzierżyński also had left behind him a strong nucleus of dedicated acti­ vists in Warsaw, many of them recent converts from the PPS. “I was astonished,” wrote Sokołowski, describing his own arrival in Warsaw, “where Dzierżyński had found these people, the leading cadres of the Warsaw proletariat.”65 Even while in prison, Dzierżyński was confident that his recent efforts had not been in vain and that the organization would survive in his absence. “I have not lived long,” he wrote to his sister in reference to his brief time in Warsaw, “but at least I have lived.”66

CHAPTER IV

DZIERŻYŃSKI AND THE “NEW COURSE” OF THE SDKPiL, 1901-1903

Once again imprisonment and exile removed Feliks Dzierżyński from the field of political activity, this time for a period of over two years. After he finally managed to escape from Siberia in mid-1902, he found that the party he had labored to resurrect in 1899-1900 was in complete disarray. The organization in the Kingdom had been seriously weakened as a result of police action against it. In the process, political authority in the party had fallen to a small group of emigre intellectuals led by Cesaryna Wojnarowska. Wojnarowska and her supporters were bent on bringing an end to the “negative” and “counter-productive” polemics with the PPS, the archrival of the SDKPiL, by modifying what the con­ sidered to be the inflexible approach of the SDKPiL to the question of an independent Polish state. These changes were fought, to no avail, by Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Jogiches-Tyszka, who continued to advoate the traditional policy of uncompromising opposition to both the PPS and to the “utopian” concept of a revived Polish state. Upon his return, Dzierżyński moved rapidly to regain control of the party; this he eventually accomplished by a variety of methods which taken together amounted to an internal coup. In the process, he tipped the scales in favor of Luxemburg and Tyszka and in alliance with them formed a new locus of power within the SDKPiL. The so-called “New 72

The “New Course ”

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Course” in the SDKPiL, therefore, was not really new at all but marked the reemergence of old faces and old policies. This was reflected above all in the positions adopted by the Dzierzyriski-Luxemburg-Tyszka “trium­ virate” in relation to the Second Congress of the RSDRP in the summer of 1903 and in the failure at that congress to accomplish the long-awaited goal of merging the Polish and Russian social democratic parties. Imprisonment and Exile After his arrest in early February 1900, Dzierżyński was taken immedi­ ately to the infamous Tenth Pavilion of the Warsaw Citadel. The Citadel had been constructed after the November 1830 insurrection as a fortress with barracks housing the Warsaw garrison of the Russian imperial army. After the insurrection of 1863-1864, one of its wings, the Tenth Pavilion, was transformed into an “investigatory prison” on th e model of the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg and the Schlusselburg Fortress on Lake Loadoga. It was here that opponents of Russian imperial rule in Poland awaited sentencing. In the minds of most citizens of Warsaw, the Tenth Pavilion had become a sort of tsarist Bastille, legendary for its grotesque tortures. In reality, however, the Tenth Pavilion proved an ex­ ception to the rule of beating, torture and malnutrition that reigned in other prisons of this time. The cells of the Tenth Pavilion were cleaned daily and in some cases the prisoners were better fed inside than outside in “freedom.” According to an activist of the Polish Socialist Party who was well acquainted with the regime of the Tenth Pavilion at this time, breakfast consisted of tea and fresh bread, dinner of vegetable soup and quite frequently a meat dish, the evening meal of soup, bread and tea.1 Strolls in the prison courtyard lasted fifteen to twenty minutes. The chief aim of the authorities at the Tenth Pavilion was to isolate the individual prisoner ; therefore, the Tenth Pavilion was hardest on those who could not cope with solitude. Prisoners were usually placed in solitary confinement and the prison itself was never allowed to become over­ crowded. The soldiers responsible for maintenance and limited guard duty were not allowed to converse with the prisoners. Conservation among the prisoners themselves was also strictly forbidden and the gendarmes took careful pains to prevent the prisoners from seeing each other from a distance.2 The prisoners, however, did manage to develop a primitive

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system of communication by knocking on the cell walls. Letters could be written once a week and fifteen-minute visits from relatives were allowed, but only in the presence of the gendarme».^ The Tenth Pavilion had a library for the prisoners that helped to break the monotomy of prison life. Today the Tenth Pavilion is a museum dedicated to the heroes and martyrs of the Polish labor movement, from Ludwik Waryński to com­ munists imprisoned by the interwar Polish regime. A highlight of the prison tour is a cell adorned with red banners, a virtual shrine and memoral to Feliks Dzierżyński. This is not entirely unjustified; few prisoners ac­ cumulated more time in the Tenth Pavilion than Dzierżyński, although others certainly suffered more. Just how Dzierżyński fared in this, his first of four periods of confinement in the Tenth Pavilion, is not known. This time, at least, his stay was not extended as he was transferred to a prison in the town of Siedlce after only a month. Official documents cite “overcrowding” as the reason for the move.4 The conditions at the prison in Sielce, ninety kilometers directly east of Warsaw, were much worse in terms of hygiene and nourishment, but prisoners were allowed far greater contact with each other. For example, the prison yard provided a forum for political debates between Dzierżyński and members of the PPS. Fellow prisoner Józef Retke recalled that in the course of these “endless disputes,” he received illicit letters from Dzier­ żyński in the form of “lectures on socialism.”5 This was completely in character for Dzierżyński, whose distaste for most PPS positions led him easily into acrimonious debates. But another side of his character can be seen at Siedlce in his relationship with Antoni Rosół, with whom he shared a cell after the latter was transferred there in March 1901 with an advanced case of tuberculosis. Rosół’s legs, which had become severely infected by the spreading bacteria, were amputated at Siedlce in an effort to save his life. “Rosół was completely immobile,” according to Retke. “Dzierżyński carried Antoni in his arms twice daily—in the morning and afternoon-for long periods in the fresh air. Under a tree in the yard, Dzierżyński nursed him like a small child with bread and milk and at his own expense, for Rosół had no money.” 6 Dzierżyński^ romance with Julia Goldman also blossomed during his twenty-one months at Siedlce. After learning of his arrest in early Febru­ ary 1900, apparently from her brother Leon, Julia wrote several letters to Dzierżyński while he was still confined in the Tenth Pavilion.7 When

The “New Course

fW * * -

From the Dzierżyński “ Shrine” at the Tenth Pavilion Museum

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Siedlce Prison photograph, 1901 Dzierżyński was transferred to Siedlce, Julia hurried from Warsaw to visit him and then spent several weeks in Siedlce in the autumn o f 1901.8 Re­ ferring to his visits with the woman whom he now began calling his Fiancee, Dzierżyński wrote, “ Believe me, to sit in prison w ith a mountain of gold but without people who love you is one hundred times worse than to sit in prison without a penny but knowing that someone is thinking o f you.” 9 Julia’s visits lifted his spirits; however, their final encounter before his de­ parture for Siberian exile left Dzierżyński with the depressing thought that they would be forever divided.10 Julia, however, was more optimistic and loyally sent him letters during the period o f his exile.11 Despite the prospect of a long separation from his fiancee, Dzierżyński was almost enthusiastic about his five-year sentence to the Iakutsk region o f eastern Siberia. As before, the sentence was handed down administra­ tively through the Ministry o f Justice and was approved by the tsar on

11

The “New Course”

Julia Goldman October 20, 1901 (O.S.).12 Although Dzierżyński was to be placed under close police supervision, exile offered greater possibilities for escape as well as “ freedom” from the m onotony o f life in tsarist prisons. Before his departure from Siedlce on January 18, 1902, Dzierżyński wrote to his sister Aldona on his optimistic vision o f the future, poetically couched in the Marxian dialectic : It is possible to recognize the future in the present, but so much has to be collected in these souls o f ours. The future unites us, while the course o f life constantly divides us. Is this because o f our own will or because of harsh irrefutable fate and cold necessity? And everything thus proceeds: through sorrow, suffering, the struggle o f the conscience, the struggle o f the old with the new, through death, through the decay o f individual existence—grows a beautiful flower, a flower o f happiness, o f joy, o f light, o f warm th, o f a wonderful

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existence. I see the magnificent colors of this flower, I sense its joyous aroma, tieing together all of my thoughts, I already feel its warmth and I.see its brilliant radiaiKS>cAnd if I looked long enough at this flower, I would understand that this variegation of colors, this reviving aroma, this warmth and light and this radiance-are the offspring of misery, suffering, sorrow and loss.13 Once again the road to exile for Dzierżyński was indirect, leading through the detention or transit prisons of the Moscow Butyrka and the Aleksandrovsk Central near Irkutsk. In Moscow, Dzierżyński had a chance to see his brothers Władysław and Ignacy, who supplied him with a few permitted provisions for the long journey ahead.14 At Aleksandrovsk, on the other hand, an incident occurred which, as much as any other, con­ tributed to the making of the Dzierżyński legend. In early May 1902, in response to an unexpected tightening of prison regulations and the auth­ orities’ refusal to inform the prisoners of their final destination in exile, the political prisoners staged a three-day revolt; they demanded in effect, a return to the status quo ante. According to his biographers, Dzierżyński was responsible for the leadership and organization of the revolt .1S There is, however, little evidence to support such a version of the Alek­ sandrovsk events.16 Dzierżyński himself did not mention the Aleksandrovsk revolt or his participation in it; neither his correspondence of the time, nor his autobiographical sketch composed twenty years later, nor his con­ versation with Mickiewicz-Kapsukas about his political career refers to the incident. Evidently, Dzierżyński did not consider the uprising at Aleksandrovsk or his role in it to be a significant event in his life and revolutionary career. Moreover, the police did not find Dzierżyński^ role at Aleksandrovsk particuarly noteworthy, merely recording in a memo­ randum destined for his dossier that “Dzierżyński, Feliks participated in the demonstration at the Aleksandrovsk Transit Prison in May 1901 .” 17 Had the police considered Dzierżyński the instigator of the revolt, they certainly would have recorded it in their files.18 And despite the pro­ claimed amnesty for all of the participants in the uprising, they would have redoubled their surveillance of any suspected leader. Instead, as soon as Dzierżyński embarked for the village of Viliusk, his place of exile, the police became unwitting accomplices in his second escape. Another element in the situation, the state of Dzierżyński^ health, may have been the major reason for his limited role in the events at

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Aleksandrovsk. In November 1901, while he was still in Siedlce, Dzier­ żyński had already informed his sister that he was suffering from pneu­ monia.19 The long journey to Siberia undoubtedly contributed to a deter­ ioration in Dzierżyńskim condition, particularly his lungs, which marked the beginning of a mild but persistent phase of tuberculosis. When in the middle of May he was transferred from Aleksandro vsk to Viliiusk, some four thousand versts (4400 kilometers) to the north of Irkutsk, his trip was interrupted at the town of Verkholepsk on the Lena River where the condition of his health prompted the authorities to retain him for medical treatment.20 Nothing could have been more fortuitous for Dzierżyńskim long-stand­ ing plans for escape. Maksymilian Horwitz (Henryk Wałecki), at that time a leader of the Warsaw organization of the PPS, has recorded that Dzier­ żyński asked him for help and advice in planning his escape when they first met on the way to Viliiusk.21 The unexpected stop in Verkholensk, coupl­ ed with a slackening of police supervision over the supposedly seriously ill political exile, offered Dzierżyński his long-awaited opportunity. It was not the first, nor would it be the last mistake committed by the police in dealing with him. On the evening of June 25,1902, Dzierżyński, along with the Russian Social Revolutionary Sladkopevtsev, swam across the Lena to a small boat they hoped would take them to freedom.22 Dzierżyński would later publish an account of his second escape from Siberian exile in the first issue of Czerwony sztandar (The Red Banner), the popular organ of the SDKPiL established after Dzierżyńskim return to political activity. Although the tale of his escape combines elements of dramatic adventure, cunning duplicity, and comic relief, Dzierżyński intended it as a purely political document, evidence of the exiles’ defiance of tsarist autocracy and their disdain to “stay voluntarily in the place of exile only because the tsar had ordered them to.”23 By the time the Min­ istry of Interior had circulated a warrant for his arrest, Dzierżyński had resurfaced in Warsaw and was preparing to cross the Russo-German border. The SDKPiL in Dzierzynski’s Absence As noted in the previous chapter, Stanisław Trusiewicz, now operating under the pseudonym of Kazimierz Zalewski, picked up the mantle of leadership of the SDKPiL soon after the arrest of Dzierżyński in February 1900. Within a year of Dzierżyńskim arrest, the territorial range of the

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party had expanded from its original base in Warsaw to Łódź, Białystok and the Dąbrowa Basin. At the same timę,4he SDKPiL’s total member­ ship of over one thousand soon equaled that of a PPS wracked by seces­ sion, defections and arrests.24 The public image of the party was further enhanced by the skillful organization of funeral demonstrations. In August 1900, the funeral of Edward Węgrzynowicz, a member of the Great Pro­ letariat and the Union of Polish Workers, drew an estimated Five hundred marchers.2S The May Day demonstration of 1901 in Warsaw drew over three thousand participants under the social democratic banner and is perhaps the most visible evidence of the growing strength of the party under Zalewski.26 However, the arrest of Zalewski and his closest colla­ borators at a conference of the Warsaw organization in the late autumn of 1901 left the party organizationally fragmented and politically divided. During the so-called Zalewski period the public position of the party on key issues, such as the Polish question, was reexamined and revised. How­ ever, it was not Zalewski who was responsible for the alterations. Before his capture, Zalewski clashed repeatedly with groups representing Polish Social Democrats in emigration over the issue of who would control the destiny of the young party and determine its policies. Well before the SDKPiL held its founding congress and approved the merger engineered by Dzierżyński, a small number of Polish social demo­ cratic activists abroad convened a conference in Leipzig on February 25, 1900. The sponsors of the conference were members of two obscure bodies, the Group of Polish Social Democrats and the Association of Social Democrats of the Kingdom of Poland Abroad. Quite independent of each other until Leipzig, together they were instrumental in forcing a review of the party’s position on the Polish question. The former, repre­ sented at Leipzig by Józef Kochanowski and A. S. Ettinger-Dalski, con­ sidered the restoration of Polish independence a long-range goal of the working class to be accomplished after the overthrow of Russian tsarist autocracy.27 Kochanowski and Ettinger-Dalski were supported by Włady­ sław Olszewski, a leading member of the second group of emigre intellec­ tuals. Olszewski and other key figures in the Association, notably Cezaryna Wojnarowska and Stanisław Gutt, had wide contacts with Polish youth studying abroad.28 Wojnarowska quickly became the leading figure in the unified emigre organization after the Leipzig conference. She also began to represent the party at congresses of the Second International and in the International Socialist Bureau.

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The ostensible aim of the Leipzig conference was to consolidate Polish social democratic groups abroad into a single organization, eventually the Stowarzyszenie Robotników Socjaldemokratów Królestwa Polskiego i Litw y Zagranica (The Association of SDKPiL Workers Abroad), in order to help the new party with literature and finances. Yet, of the partici­ pants at the Leipzig conference, only Zalewski represented the organiza­ tion in the country. Therefore,he was unable to thwart attempts to modify the program of the party in relation to the Polish question. At Leipzig, the first point of the “Vilna Sketch” drafted by Dzierżyński and later approved by Zalewski, was jettisoned. It was replaced by a statement that in the maximum program of the party “we do not reject the independence of Poland.”29 The rejection at Leipzig of the first point of the “Vilna Sketch” was evidence of considerable opposition to Rosa Luxemburg’s postulate of the irreversible “organic incorporation” of Poland lands into those of the three partitioning states, which had been the theoretical basis of the views of the party on the Polish question up to that point. It is note­ worthy that Luxemburg, who had greeted news of the rebirth of the party under Dzierżyński^ leadership as “ein sozialdemokratischer Frühl­ ing,”30 began—gradually, but never completely—to dissociate herself from the reborn party after the Leipzig conference. Luxemburg took her former collaborators on Sprawa robotnicza, Leon Jogiches-Tyszka and Adolf Warski, with her into passive opposition.31 Julian Marchlewski, the re­ maining member of the old editorial board of Sprawa robotnicza, was somewhat at odds with his former colleagues -and continued to play an active role in the party after the Leipzig conference. In fact, the confer­ ence named him, along with Zalewski, co-editor of a new political organ, Przegląd robotniczy (Workers’Review).32 The Second Congress of the SDKPiL (more accurately the first con­ gress of the merged party) held at Otwock near Warsaw on August 19-21, 1900, witnessed further modifications in the position of the party on the Polish question, particularly in the minimum program of immediate poli­ tical demands. The vague and imprecise nature of the final document of the congress, which called for the “complete autonomy” of Poland and Lithuania as well as for a “federation of free political groups” in a demo­ cratic and constitutional Russia, is evidence of wide-ranging differences of opinion in the party on this key issue.33 While Zalewski and his

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supporters were able to resist efforts to introduce the demand for an independent Poland into the program of party, their acceptance of the federalist principle as part of a compromise solution at Otwock did represent another significant departure from the party’s previous pro­ nouncements on the national question. The congress also elected a Main Directorate, or Zarząd Główny (ZG), and two subordinate central com­ mittees, one for the Kingdom of Poland, the other for Lithuania. The in­ clusion of Ettinger-Dalski on the ZG along with Zalewski and his col­ laborators, Mieczysław Kozłowski, Czesław Domański and Edward Sokołowski,34 was a further indication of the willingness of Zalewski to make concessions to his political opponents. The compromise reached at Otwock, however, could not survive in the face of intensified struggle between the factions in emigration and in the country. Ettinger-Dalski resigned in protest from the ZG already in early 1901, accusing Zalewski of arbitrariness, unbridled ambition and dictatorial tendencies.35 Relations between Zalewski and other leading emigre activists, notably Wojnarowska, Gutt, Olszewski, and Marchlewski, also grew increasingly contentious. The source of the friction was Zalewski’s insistence that the party organization abroad submit to the auth­ ority of the Main Directorate. Marchlewski, the co-editor with Zalewski of Przegląd robotniczy, had tried to assume a middle ground in the inter­ nal party squabbles but soon found himself increasingly at odds with Zalewski over editorial policy and the issue of calling the third congress of the SDKPiL abroad rather than in the Kingdom.36 In this atmosphere charged with political acrimony, the Zalewskidominated ZG called a conference of the party organization in the King­ dom that eventually convened in Białystok in late February 1901. The avowed purpose of the conference was to consider the prospect of a mer­ ger with Russian Social Democracy, which was in the process of revitali­ zation and reorganization largely under the leadership of the editorial board of Iskra}1 But since the Association of SDKPiL Workers Abroad was authorized by statute to represent the party in its conduct of “for­ eign affairs,” the conference at Białystok represented an attempt by Zalewski to seize the initiative from the Association in determining the relations of the SDKPiL with other political parties, particularly the RSDRP. Not surprisingly, the conference deleted the demand for a federal structure of the future Russian state embodied in the program approved

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at the Second Congress of the SDKPiL. However, it also commissioned Zalewski to draft an open letter to the Russians on behalf of the ZG pre­ senting the conference’s proposal for “the organization of the Social Democratic Party of Russia on federalist principles and the election of a Central Council of all social democratic parties in Russia.”38 In this way, Zalewski, who had never been enthusiastic about the concept of a federali­ zed Russian state, suddenly emerged as the champion of a federalist basis for interparty relations. By the time of the Third Congress of the SDKPiL, held in Warsaw dur» ing the last days of September 1901, the party, which now counted over one thousand members, was firmly in the hands of Zalewski and his fol­ lowers. The choice of Warsaw as the site of the congress represented a defeat for Wojnarowska, Marchlewski and other emigre activists who had hoped to influence the decisions of the congress by convening it abroad. No longer bound by the need for compromise and concessions, the Zalewski leadership retreated from the previous pronouncements on the Polish question made at Leipzig in February 1900 and at the party’s second congress. Although the Third Congress maintained some flexi­ bility on the issue by stating that Polish independence was a distant pos­ sibility that might be brought about by unforeseen events, it declared that the Polish working class had no interest in the restitution of a Polish state; therefore, all reference to it was dropped from the party program. The delegates also abandoned the principle of a federal state structure which had been demanded by the previous congress. However, regarding the future structure of the Russian Social Democratic Party, the Third Congress of the SDKPiL repeated the federalist program outlined in the open letter of Zalewski.39 Ten days after the Third Congress, Zalewski and a number of his sup­ porters in the Warsaw organization were arrested. Another wave of arrests in mid-December removed the remainder of the Zalewski faction in the Kingdom with the important exception of Wincenty Matuszewski. For the first months of 1902, Matuszewski directed the work of the entire organization in the Kingdom, managing to salvage the main city organi­ zations in Warsaw, Łódź and the Dąbrowa Basin. But on June 15, 1902, he too was arrested, leaving the party leaderless in the Kingdom.40 Meanwhile, Zalewski’s opponents in emigration wasted little time in seizing control of the party. On the initiative of Julian Marchlewski, a

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conference was convened in Munich in late December 1901 to deal with the problem of rebuilding the party in the wake of the recent arrests. Other participants were Olszewski, Ettingèfï)alski and Adolf Warski. It was decided to dispatch Dalski, the long-time nemesis of Zalewski, to the Kingdom in order to reestablish links betw'een the emigre activists and what remained of the organization inside the country. The conferees in Munich also agreed to the publication of a new theoretical organ, Prze­ gląd socjaldemokratyczny (Social Democratic Review). The editorial board of the new organ was granted wide authority, subordinate only to the decisions of the party congress. Of equal importance, the Associa­ tion of SDKPiL Workers Abroad was granted its long-standing demand for full independence from the ZG.41 In effect, the Munich conference resulted in the transfer of initiative within the SDKPiL from the organi­ zation in the Kingdom to the leaders of the Association and the party editorial board in emigration. The Return o f Dzierżyński and the Establishment o f the Foreign Committee Such was the situation facing the party when Dzierżyński reappeared in Warsaw in mid-July 1902. Alarmed by the party’s weakness and dis­ organization and fearful of arrest, Dzierżyński went to Sosnowiec in the Dąbrowa Basin, where he organized his flight across the border. Before his departure, the Bund provided him with the address of Rosa Luxemburg in Berlin.42 Even before Dzierżyński^ arrival in Berlin, a subtle reemergence of the influence of the Luxemburg faction in the party was perceptible, begin­ ning with the appearance of Przegląd socjaldemokratyczny in March 1902. Probably at the urging of Marchlewski, who refused to side openly with Wojnarowska, both Luxemburg and Tyszka took an active role in the journal, the latter eventually becaming a de facto editor of the publication. As such, Przegląd socjaldemokratyczny began to reflect the views of the “Luxemburg group” on the Polish question and soon became character­ ized by its strong polemical attacks on the PPS. According to one of his biographers, the purpose of Dzierżyński^ journey to Berlin was “to take up arms against the inactivity of the party in Poland.”43 Any implication, however, that Dzierżyński held Luxem­ burg and Tyszka somehow responsible for the weakness of the party is

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completely erroneous. On the contrary, Dzierżyński was greatly impres­ sed by his first meeting with Luxemburg and with Tyszka, whom “Rosa presented to me as the founder of the SDKP.”44 Clearly, Dzierżyński intended to act in concert with them in an alliance that would remain more or less intact for the rest of his career in the SDKPiL. Dzierżyński came to Berlin with plans to tighten organizational pro­ cedure in order to give the party a direction and purpose which, he felt, it had lacked during the period of his absence. He did not, however, pro­ pose the establishment of a Bolshevik-type organization—at least not at this time.45 Rather, Dzierżyński^ focus was centered on problems pecu­ liar to the SDKPiL: the organizational choas engendered by bitter fac­ tional rivalries, the failure of social democratic publications to reach the broad masses in the Kingdom, the lack of coordination between the party organizations aborad and in the country, and most significantly, an incon­ sistent and inconsequential position on the Polish question. In his view all were the result of organizational slackness and lack of discipline. On the initiative of Dzierżyński and Tyszka, and with Luxemburg’s blessing, a conference was called in Berlin for August 14-17,1902, to deal with these and other issues associated with rebuilding the party and defining the role of the emigre organization in the process. Dzierżyński perceived clearly that the source of the partys’ difficulties lay in the independence of the Association of SDKPiL Workers Abroad. It was therefore no accident that key figures in the Association—namely, Wojnarowska, Marchlewski, Olszewski and Gutt—did not participate in the proceedings of the Berlin conference.44 Dzierżyński, who was respon­ sible for the preparation of the conference, more or less assured Wojnarowska’s absence by sending her a late invitation.47 With Wojnarowska and her associates out of the way, Dzierżyński initiated a gradual transfer of real power in the emigre organization into his own hands. In this respect, the most important decision of the Berlin conference was the creation of a Foreign Committee {Komitet Zagraniczny—KZ) independent of the Associa­ tion. As members of the KZ, the conference elected Jakub FürstenbergHanecki, Jakub Goldenberg-Turski, as well as Wojnarowska and EttingerDalski, with Dzierżyński in the instrumental position of its secretary.48 Within the KZ, Dzierżyński could count on the support of Hanecki and Turski; the inclusion of Wojnarowska was designed to appease her fury over Dzierżyński^ duplicity in stacking the conference with his sup­ porters.49

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Fundamental to Dzierżyński^ plans was the creation of a popular organ to supplement Przegląd socjaldemokratyczny, which he felt had a limited audience because of its emphasis on theoretical questions. In the words of Władysław Feinstein (Zdzisław Leder), later a key figure in the party leadership, “Dzierżyński [at the Berlin conference] placed before the literary group abroad with all force the matter of publishing popular social democratic literature intended for the masses of workers, and, above all, a mass political organ.”50 Dzierżyński himself proposed the name of the new organ, Czerwony sztandar (The Red Banner), which he borrowed from the title of a popular revolutionary song.51 The Berlin conference named Dzierżyński the first editor of Czerwony sztandar and Kraków as the site of its editorial board.52 Through the publication of Czerwony sztandar with its headquarters in Kraków, Dzierżyński hoped to establish close ties between the organization in the Kingdom and the new emigre leadership embodied in the KZ. Leniently governed by the Austrians, Kraków was just five hours by train from Warsaw and a mere hour from the Dąbrowa Basin. This offered all sorts of opportunities for smuggling men and literature into the Kingdom—as the PPS had learned several years earlier. Before assuming his new responsibilities in Kraków, Dzierżyński took the advice of his physicians and friends and went to Switzerland for treat­ ment of his lungs. He was placed initially in a Zurich sanatorium under the auspices of the multi-party Society of Aid to Political Prisoners and Exiles.53 Dzierżyński also had personal reasons for an extended Swiss stay; his fiancee, Julia Goldman, was also in Zurich, where she too was undergoing treatment, but for a much more severe case of tuberculosis. Together, they left Zurich shortly after Dzierżyński^ arrival for a grand tour that included Leysin-sur-Aigle, Sonzier-sur-Montreux, Clärens and Geneva.54 He then followed Julia to Lausanne, where she was transferred after her condition deteriorated. It is probable that Dzierżyński now be­ came aware that his fiancee was slowly dying; his mood turned sour and he tried to relieve his depression by studying photographs of his sister’s children.55 Because of his concern for Julia and the many sleepless nights which he spent in Lausanne, his own health failed to improve. Instead of con­ valescing, Dzierżyński went to Geneva where he buried himself in work.56 Again, he consciously allowed and encouraged the “cause” to take prece­ dence over his miserable personal life. Against his better judgment, he then

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decided to proceed to Kraków, where he immediately worked himself into a frenzy. Not surprisingly, a few days after his arrival, anemia and general exhaustion forced him to postpone further his plans to establish Kraków as the organizational and publications headquarters of the Foreign Com­ mittee of the SDKPiL.57 Fortunately for Dzierżyński, soon after his arrival in Kraków he ac­ cidentally met Bronisław Koszutski, whose acquaintance he originally made at the congress of illegal student organizations at the end of 1895 in Warsaw. Koszutski, after beginning his studies at Jagiellonian Univer­ sity in 1896, became active in radical student organizations at the uni­ versity, particularly in the organization Ruch, serving as its first president and later as its secretary.58 A social democrat from the Kingdom of Po­ land, Koszutski also became involved in the emigre organization of the SDKPiL and was a participant in the Leipzig conference of February 1900. To support himself, Koszutski worked as an orderly for the philanthropic Dom Zdrowia Bratniej Pomocy (Health Center of Brotherly Help), which operated a sanatorium in the resort town of Zakopane in the Tatra Moun­ tains. Koszutski used his position to place Dzierżyński in the Zakopane sanatorium, registering him for conspiratorial reasons as a dental student under the name of Józef Domański.59 During his two-and-a-half-month stay in Zakopane, from mid-October to the end of December 1902, Dzierżyński found in Koszutski not only a concerned friend but a political collaborator as well. He immediately en­ listed Koszutski’s aid in the preparation of the first issue of Czerwony sztandar. In Zakopane, Dzierżyński received articles which he and Kos­ zutski edited and then sent to Zurich for publication.60 The first issue finally appeared in late November and its warm recep­ tion from activists in the Kingdom was a testament to Dzierżyński^ skill­ ful organization of the journal.61 Although Dzierżyński employed the pens of those he called the “party literati” (that is, Luxemburg, Warski and Marchlewski) who also wrote for Przegląd socjaldemokratyczny, the focus of Czerwony sztandar was entirely different from that of its theore­ tical counterpart. The main thrust of Czerwony sztandar was toward the workers in the Kingdom rather than the Polish emigre intelligentsia. For this purpose, Dzierżyński included in his format a permanent section, “From the Country,” which featured correspondence from local organi­ zations in the Kingdom of Poland about their activities. Another permanent

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section, “ From Abroad,” sought to familiarize the readers in the Kingdom with news of the internatinal socialist movement and, more specifically, with the progress of that movement in tfiftv'Russian empire. Dzierżyński also made an obvious attempt to popularize the first issue of the organ by publishing the revolutionary lyrics to Czerwony sztandar as well as his own article describing his recent dramatic escape.62 Besides his work on Czerwony sztandar in Zakopane, Dzierżyński also continued his efforts, initiated at the Berlin conference, to bring the emigre organization of the SDKPiL into line behind the newly created Foreign Committee. The result was the draft of statutes for a completely new organization, the Union of Social Democrats of the Kingdom of Po­ land and Lithuania Abroad, which he planned to submit to the next party congress for approval.63 Dzierżyński^ organizational design for the pro­ posed Union gave the KZ wide competency as its executive body. Under his plan, the various sections of the Union—whether in Paris, Munich, Zur­ ich or Berlin—would be required to submit to the KZ monthly reports of their activities and to maintain regular correspondence with the secre­ tary of the KZ. Moreover, the expulsion of a member from one of the sections of the Union would be possible only with the agreement or by the order of the KZ. Similarly, a change in the statutes of the Union re­ quired not only the support of three quarters of the membership, but also the agreement of the KZ. At the same time, Dzierżyński also drew up a detailed questionnaire containing sixteen points the sections would be ex­ pected to answer in their reports to the KZ.64 Such a report would inform the KZ and its secretary not only about the membership of a section and its collection of funds, but about the political views of its members, how active it was in the holding of sessions, its participation in “academic organizations,” and how much literature it had distributed in the Polish colony of a given city. A key ingredient in Dzierżyński^ plans, the establishment of a strong section of the future Union in Kraków-one that could rival the influence of Wojnarowska’s section in Paris or Gutt’s section in Zurich—had to wait for the restoration of Dzierżyński^ health and his departure from Zako­ pane. Now under the name of Józef Podolski, he left together with Kos­ zutski on the last day of December 1902 for Kraków, where they rented a couple of adjacent rooms on Zgoda street (presently ulica Czapskich).65 From the beginning Dzierżyński sought to utilize Koszutski’s contacts among youth and student organizations in Kraków and he even considered

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enrolling at Jagiellonian University.66 With Koszutski’s assistance, Dzier­ żyński participated in several meetings of Ruch, an organization of social­ ist youth consisting mainly of university students from the Kingdom of Poland.67 Through his involvement in radical student organizations, Dzier­ żyński hoped to draw young activists into the work of the Kraków section of the SDKPiL, which he created on January 18, 1903.68 Dzierżyński^ efforts began to bear fruit immediately. For example, Bernard Sobelsohn (Karl Radek), a leading activist in Ruch, joined the Kraków section soon after its creation and became the permanent correspondent from Galicja for Czerwony sztandar. Rudolf Moszoro, another activist from Ruch, was employed by Dzierżyński in transporting party publications between Kraków and Zurich.69 As Dzierżyński labored to gain what he called “the right of citizenship” for the SDKPiL on Krakowian soil,70 he gained for the Kraków section a leading place in the emigre organization of the SDKPiL. While he chided Wojnarowska for the inactivity of Polish Social Democrats in Paris,71 Dzierżyński led the Kraków section in frequent discussion sessions, one of which resulted in an article, “On Demonstrations,” published by Dzier­ żyński in Czerwony sztandar.12 In April 1903, Dzierżyński negotiated an agreement with emigre activists from the splinter party, the PPS “Prolet­ ariat,” to form a conspiratorial filial in Kraków of the Kasa Pomocy Więź­ niom i Zesłańcom Politycznym (The Fund for the Aid of Political Pri­ soners and Exiles) into whose work he drew the PPSD leftists Zygmunt Żuławski and Antoni Zambaty.73 In short, Dzierżyński^ activity in Kraków, particularly his efforts to restructure the emigre organization of the SDKPiL, was to prove of crucial importance in deciding the outcome of the factional struggle within the party. By outmaneuvering Wojnarowska, Dzierżyński insured the success of his allies from the Luxemburg group in that struggle. The “New Course” had thus been launched, not from Berlin, but from Kraków.74 The Second Congress o f the RSDRP and The Victory o f the “New Course” in the SDKPiL A confrontation between the Luxemburg and Wojnarowska factions of the Polish social democratic emigre community was inevitable and the issue of merger with the RSDRP provided the spark for the clash. Perhaps no issue is more controversial in the history of the SKDPiL than the failure

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of the party to realize its avowed goal of formal unification with the RSDRP in 1903. From the beginning of its history, Polish Social Demo­ cracy stood for the. principle of cooperation.'with the Russian workers’ movement and its political representatives. This position was eventually expressed in the party’s support for a merger of all social democratic groups within the Russian state to consolidate forces for the struggle against tsarist autocracy and the attainment of a democratic constitu­ tion. Unfortunately, little thought had been given to the means by which unification was to be achieved before preparations for the Second Con­ gress of the RSDRP were initiated at the end of 1902. Nevertheless, such a grand design, symbolic of the party’s “interna­ tionalism,” had inspired nearly ever Polish Social Democrat, including Feliks Dzierżyński. In mid-April 1903, Dzierżyński thus recorded his position on the issue of merger with the RSDRP: “In one state, there should be one social democratic workers’ party and national differences cannot and should not divide the workers.” 7S However, the widespread notion, advanced by both communist and Western historians, that Dzier­ żyński was the “driving force” behind the movement for unification with the RSDRP,76 is completely inaccurate as is evident upon even a cursory examination of Dzierżyński’s role in the merger controversy. The initiative for the second congress of the RSDRP and the idea of sending an invitation to the SDKPiL came from the editorial board of Iskra, with which the SDKPiL enjoyed relatively cordial relations. The theoretical organ of the SDKPiL, Przegląd socjaldemokratyczny, main­ tained a direction connection with Iskra and the party as a whole aided in the transporation of Iskra through the Kingdom to various cities in European Russia.77 Moreover, in the December 1902 issue of Przegląd socjaldemokratyczny, Tyszka registered the general approval of the SDKPiL for the draft program of the RSDRP published by Lenin in Iskra, though he did take exception to Point Seven of the draft that refer­ red to the right of all nations to self-determination.78 However, from the beginning of negotiations on February 7,1903, be­ tween the KZ of the SDKPiL and the Organizational Committee of the RSDRP, several obstacles arose that threatened to block the participation of the SDKPiL in the upcoming “all-Russian” congress. Chief among them was the intent of the SDKPiL to merge with the RSDRP as an autonomous, virtually independent party with its own leadership. This, of course,

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conflicted with Lenin’s concept of a tightly centralized state party as ori­ ginally stated in What is to Be Done? and later repeated in the pages of Iskra. In accordance with Lenin’s organizational design for the all-Russian party, both Iskra and the Organizational Committee advanced a concept of the congress as a successive, second congress of an already existing party. In this way, only representatives of those organizations that agreed to consider themselves already constituent parts of the all-Russian party would be invited to participate in the congress with full voting rights. Lenin’s strategy was aimed originally at the Jewish Bund, which, at its own congress in June 1903, demanded a federal all-Russian party structure that would recognize the special status of the Bund as an autonomous organization active among the Jewish workers of the empire.79 Such farreaching federalism as proposed by the Bund, the Russians argued, con­ flicted with the statutes of the RSDRP accepted in 1898 at its first con­ gress. Hence, by calling this a successive rather than a founding congress, Iskra hoped that discussion on the subject of federation would be auto­ matically excluded. Among the newly emerging leadership of the SDKPiL—namely, the tri­ umvirate of Luxemburg, Tyszka and Dzierżyński—the Bund’s demand for a federalized state party was roundly criticized, resulting in a cooling of relations between the SDKPiL and the Bund. Ironically, it was Dzierżyński, the former pupil of the Bund, who was most vocal in his opposition to the Bund’s recent “deviation” from the internationalist path through “its everlasting and ubiquitous stress on its Jewishness.”80 What compli­ cated the position of the SDKPiL was that during the Zalewski period, it too had upheld the postulate of a federalized state party. In addition, despite its attacks on the Bund, the Polish leadership, like the Bund, found it necessary to defend the independence of their party in the face of the centralist arguments aggressively advanced by Lenin. Therefore, in its negotiations with the Organizational Committee, the KZ continually insisted that the congress be convened as a founding congress; this would allow the SDKPiL to negotiate from an independent position and guar­ antee for the SDKPiL a role as co-founder of a new all-Russian party.81 By July a stalemate had resulted in the negotiations between the KZ and Russian Organizational Committee. The SDKPiL had still not received an invitation to participate in the all-Russian congress and the entire issue was referred to the congress itself as the highest party authority. To this

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end, the Organization Committee asked the SDKPiL to be prepared to send delegates. In an attempt to break the impasse and to make use of a last possibility to participate in the Russian cpngress by working out con­ crete conditions for a merger, Dzierżyński and Warski took the initiative in calling the Fourth Congress of the SDKPiL. It convened in Berlin on July 25, a mere five days before the scheduled opening of the congress of the RSDRP.82 The SDKPiL entered its own congress disunited on the two fundamental issues of the national question and the organizational structure of a uni­ fied all-Russian party. Thus the congress marked the beginning of what might be called an open struggle for the party’s “soul” between the Luxem­ burg and Wojnarowska forces, a struggle that Dzierżyński had ensured would be uneven. Already in the spring of 1903, Dzierżyński used the arrests of activists in the country to constitute a new Main Directorate consisting of himself, Tyszka, Hanecki, Edward Sokołowski and Wincenty Matuszewski.83 Having gained effective control of the leading institution of the party organization in the Kingdom, Dzierżyński set about consoli­ dating his hold on the emigre organization by expanding the membership of the Foreign Committee in order to reduce proportionately the potential opposition to the “New Course.” In addition, Dzierżyński succeeded in gaining the formal approval of the congress for his draft statutes of the re­ structured emigre organization. This, in effect, completed the transfer of ultimate authority within that organization into the hands of a KZ which he dominated.84 Dzierżyński was also reelected at the congress to the powerful position of secretary of the KZ, making him the only member of the SDKPiL on both the KZ and the ZG. The main point on the agenda of the congress of the SDKPiL was the issue of merging with the RSDRP; this the congress formally treated as “the principle task of the present movement.”85 In order to put some dis­ tance between the positions of the SDKPiL and the Bund, and hence make a prospective merger more attractive to the Russians, Dzierżyński and his allies intended to revise the resolutions of the Third Congress of the SDKPiL, which had called for the organization of an all-Russian party along federalist lines. However, instead of denouncing the federalist prin­ ciples of the Zalewski period, the party’s position was only slightly modi­ fied with the adoption of a resolution by the congress leaving the organiza­ tional form of the all-Russian party a question open to future negotiation.86

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Moreover, this resolution was further diluted by far-reaching demands de­ signed to preserve the independence of the SDKPiL, embodied in seven conditions proposed by Tyszka and fully backed by Dzierżyński and Warski: 1. the SDKPiL would preserve complete autonomy in matters of organi­ zation and agitation; 2. the SDKPiL would retain its name in the common party; 3. other Polish labor organizations would have to enter the SDKPiL before entering the common party; 4. the SDKPiL would have its own representative on the editorial board of the common party ; 5. the SDKPiL would demand the revision of Point Seven of the pro­ gram of the common party which recognized the principle of the self-determination of nations; 6. the common party would have to recognize the demand of the SDKPiL for autonomy of Poland and Lithuania in a future Russian state; 7. the common party would have to formulate a resolution in relation to “Polish social-patriotism” (meaning, of course, the PPS) in the spirit of the SDKPiL.87 Whereas Tyszka, Dzierżyński and Warski wished to treat all seven points as sine qua non conditions of merger, Wojnarowska and Marchlewski were opposed to raising them at all.88 In the end, a compromise was reached at the congress, making the first three of the aforementioned conditions indispensible for merger.89 Dzierżyński, Hanecki, Turski and Warski, all closely connected to the Luxemburg group, were chosen as delegates to the Second Congress of the RSDRP in the event the SDKPiL did receive an invitation to participate in its proceedings. As the SDKPiL concluded its own congress in Berlin, the RSDRP con­ vened its congress in Brussels. At one of its first sessions, Lenin proposed that the Polish Social Democrats be invited as guests in order to present to the congress a resolution about their relations with the RSDRP. The congress agreed, informing the KZ of the SDKPiL of its decision on July 31 with the provision that the Polish delegation consist of two, rather than four members.90 The KZ named Warski and Hanecki, who arrived in Brus­ sels on August 4, at the tenth plenary session of the congress.

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Immediately after the arrival of the Polish delegates, the congress established a special commission to consider unification with the SDKPiL. From the beginning^ however, there were significant differences between the propositions of this commission and those of the Polish delegates regarding the form and range of autonomy of the SDKPiL within the Russian party. On the one hand, Warski abruptly informed the commis­ sion that if the sine qua non conditions were not met, the SDKPiL would not consider itself bound by any resolution of the Russian congress.91 On the other hand, the commission, under instructions from Lenin, demanded the establishment of direct organizational connections between the Rus­ sian Central Committee and the Main Directorate of the SDKPiL through the presence of a Russian representative on the executive body of the Po­ lish party. The commission also demanded the merger, where appropriate (as in Vilna), of local committees of all organizations that formed part of the RSDRP. Finally, the commission sought to determine the method by which the SDKPiL selected delegates to future congresses of the RSDRP.92 Such specific organizational demands had not been foreseen by the SDKPiL leadership at its recent congress and the alarmed delegates turned to Berlin for additional instructions.93 The decision either to continue or break off negotiations with the Russians belonged to Dzierżyński and Tyszka, secretaries of the KZ and ZG respectively, but in the end both of them turned to Rosa Luxemburg for advice. Despite her recognized role as party theoretician, Luxemburg held no position of authority in the party; her intervention in the negotiations with the Russians therefore could be interpreted as a violation of party statutes. For this reason, she chose to work closely with Dzierżyński and Tyszka in determining the response of the SDKPiL to Lenin’s demands. From the beginning of negotiations between the KZ of the SDKPiL and the Organizational Committee of the RSDRP, Luxemburg had been skepti­ cal about the prospects of merger. In a letter of March 1903 to Dzierżyński Luxemburg predicted that thé different positions of the two parties on the national question, particularly the inclusion of the plank in the Rus­ sian program calling for the self-determination of nations, would become the basic obstacle to unification.94 In the slogan of self-determination, not only Luxemburg, but Dzierżyński and Tyszka as well, saw a Trojan horse that would threaten the unity of the revolutionary camp by focusing atten­ tion on the national question at the expense of the struggle of workers of

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all nationalities against tsarist autocracy. A merger with a party whose pro­ gram recognized the right of self-determination, and thereby the implied right of Poland to independent statehood, would also provide welcome polemical ammunition to the PPS, the chief competitor of the SDKPiL in the Polish labor movement. For these reasons, Dzierżyński and Tyszka attempted at the Fourth Congress of the SDKPiL to include revision of the self-determination plank (Point Seven) of the RSDRP program as one of the indispensible conditions of merger. They failed to gain a maj­ ority for their view, primarily because interpretations of self-determina­ tion within the RSDRP, including an article by Lenin in the thirty-third issue of Iskra,9* had been purposefully vague. This allowed Wojnarowska and others to argue that the SDKPiL’s position on the Polish question would not be undermined if Point Seven were retained in the program of the all-Russian party. Nevertheless, given the sensitivities of the SDKPiL leadership on the national question as well as the already well developed differences over general organizational issues, the publication of the forty-fourth issue of Iskra with Lenin’s article, ‘The National Question in Our Program,” could not have been more ill-timed. It appeared at the very moment when the SDKPiL leadership was considering the pros and cons of further negotia­ tions with the RSDRP. Lenin’s primary purpose in the article was to respond to accusations of the PPS that Iskra*s draft program had been purposefully “mysterious” in dealing with the national question; this in turn required him to make more precise his own interpretation of the meaning of self-determination. Although the Polish question was peri­ pheral to his main concern in the article, Lenin argued that “self-deter­ mination does not exclude in any way the advocacy by the Polish pro­ letariat of the slogan of a free and independent Polish republic.”96 This not only failed to satisfy the PPS but also led to a swift reaction from Luxemburg and her cohorts in Berlin. Referrring to Lenin’s arguments as “eclectic” and “ unconscious opportunism,” Luxemburg, after consult­ ing with Dzierżyński and Tyszka,97 composed the following declaration which was wired to the SDKPiL delegates in Brussels: Our organization is not able to agree with the present formula­ tion of the seventh point of the program with the interpretation of the 44th number of Iskra, because the all-party program would then contradict the decisions of all of our party congresses and the

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Rosa Luxemburg principal idea o f all o f our party activity. In addition, in this cardinal question for us, there would not be that basic ideological and moral unity, without which we would consider organizational unity to be aimless.98 As Warski and Hanecki placed the declaration before the special com­ mission o f the congress, they simultaneously announced that the SDKPiL could continue negotiations to enter the common party only if the ques­ tion o f adopting Point Seven o f the Party program were postponed until the next congress. This, Warski and Hanecki argued, would allow ample time for discussion o f the issue in the party press.99 The SDKPiL delegates then proposed to replace the formula for self-determination with a state­ ment hastily drafted by Luxemburg, one that ironically had a Bundist ring

The

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“New

Leon Jogiches-Tyszka to it, to wit: “The institution o f guranteed freedom o f cultural develop­ ment of all nationalities within the state.” 100 After the commission un­ animously rejected the position o f the SDKPiL, the Polish delegation, like the Bund before it, withdrew from the congress—or more accurately —did not appear when the congress reconvened in London, where it had been forced to transfer on the order o f the Belgian authorities. In Lon­ don, the congress authorized the Central Committee o f the RSDRP to continue negotiations w ith the SDKPiL, thus leaving the Poles an open door. The new leadership of the SDKPiL also did not want to consider nego­ tiations with the RSDRP at a dead end. The party press under its control continued to popularize the notion o f cooperation with the Russian

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Cezaryna Wojnarowska workers and the RSDRP. But the failure to achieve unification was bound to meet internal party criciticism, especially because the revision of Point Seven in the program o f the Russian party had not been explicitly elevated to a sinequo non condition of merger at the recent congress o f the SDKPiL. The choice o f this issue as the public reason for the suspension o f negotia­ tions was particularly unfortunate in view of the fact that there were no defenders among the members o f the SDKPiL of Lenin’s centralist con­ ception of the all-Russian party.101 The firm position o f the Polish dele­ gates at the Russian congress in relation to organizational issues and their demands for wide-ranging autonom y of the SDKPiL within the state party were never at issue. As further evidence, the public tilt of the SDKPiL leadership toward the Mensheviks in their organizational debate with the

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Adolf Warski Bolsheviks following the split of the RSDRP aroused no criticism within the Polish party.102 The issue of self-determination, on the other hand, brought into full light the divisions within the SDKPiL on the Polish ques­ tion and pushed the factional struggle between the Luxemburg and Woj­ narowska groups to a crucial, final stage. The key figures in the debate that followed, Wojnarowska and Dzierżyń­ ski, were the logical actors in the unfolding drama. If they were not the most eloquent, they were at least the most vocal advocates o f the policies and positions of the two contending factions within the SDKPiL. For Wojnarowska the “ fiasco” at the Second Congress o f the RSDRP offered a last desperate opportunity to reverse the party’s renewed embrace of the views of Rosa Luxemburg on the national question. In the process,

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Julian Marchlewski Wojnarowska also hoped to recover her once influential role in the party that had been eroded by Dzierżyński and the organizational changes he had initiated. For Dzierżyński, a decisive victory in a showdown with Wojnarowska would serve to consolidate his control over the party organi­ zation and eliminate opposition to the “New Course” once and for all. Dzierżyński held most o f the trum p cards in this confrontation. For ex­ ample, he could and did refuse to pass on to other members o f the Foreign Committee any communications from Wojnarowska that did not fit in with his rigid notion of uncritical party discipline.103 This, along with the authoritative tone utilized by Dzierżyński in answering Wojnarowska’s letters, significantly intensified the battle. “Who,” Wojnarowska demanded at one point, “appointed comrade Józef [Dzierżyński] to the position of party censor?” 104

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Simply stated, Wojnarowska and her supporters found little to object to in Lenin’s most recent article on the national question. They saw in it not an endorsement of an independent Polish state, but a position flexi­ ble enough to allow for all possibilities. Therefore, they denounced the declaration of the Polish delegates to the Russian congress as well as the leadership’s decision to withdraw the delegation. Wojnarowska, more­ over, characterized the declaration of the Polish delegates as a new sub­ ordination of the positive tasks of the party to the negatively and nar­ rowly focused campaign against the PPS. To prevent the party from be­ coming what she called a “pure negation” of the PPS, Wojnarowska pro­ posed the adoption of new political tactics aimed at criticizing the PPS from the point of view of the interests of the working class while avoding counter-productive polemical battles on the Polish question.105 The main source of the party’s negativism, she went on to argue, was Rosa Luxem­ burg’s theoretical postulate of “organic incorporation” which Dzierżyński, Tyszka and Warski had elevated to the level of dogma.106 Wojnarowska refused to capitulate to any of Dzierżyńskim appeals to rally around “the interests of the party,” which she viewed as an attempt to silence discussion.107 Instead, she demanded that Dzierżyński resign as secretary of the KZ. After failing to dislodge him from that position, she then moved that responsibility for future negotiations with the RSDRP be transferred from the KZ to an independent commission under the supervision of the Main Directorate.108 Such a change, Wojnarowska reasoned, would deprive Dzierżyński and other members of the Luxem­ burg faction of control over the relations between the SDKPiL and the RSDRP. Dzierżyński, on the other hand, completely agreed with the declaration and subsequent walkout of the Polish delegation from what he derided as “a banquet for Lenin and Plekhanov.” 109 “To agree to the terms of Iskra on the national question,” he argued at one point during the debate, “would have meant the complete negation of our very ideas, our world view, our history and all of our efforts.” 110 Dzierżyński also claimed that the SDKPiL had lost nothing by its walkout but had gained a chance “to explain to the Muscovites in the Russian press many questions unknown to them up to this point.” 111 When Wojnarowska ultimately succeeded in placing before the KZ her objections to its conduct of negotiations with the RSDRP, Dzierżyński was forced to refute her charges directly. He

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argued that the nature of the party’s criticism of the PPS could not by any means be considered negative. “In criticizing the PPS,” he inveighed, “we are fighting nationalism, the nationalistic WoHd view and the moral cor­ ruption of nationalism which are the greatest obstacles to our social demo­ cratic movement.”112 Dzierżyński therefore urged the rejection of Wojnarowska’s motion to appoint a special commission to conduct negotia­ tions with the RSDRP. To change negotiators at this point, he argued, “would be an act of capitulation to the RSDRP, to Iskra, to Plekhanov and to Lenin.” 113 Wojnarowska might not have embarked so boldly upon her challenge of the “New Course” had she not expected support from other quarters within the party. Dissent was a real possibility within the organization in the Kingdom, which was angered by the calling of the Fourth Congress without the participation of its representatives.114 However, becaue of Dzierzynski’s stature—he was described by one leader of the Warsaw Com­ mittee as “the one without whom the organization of the SDKPiL at that time would have been unthinkable”115—he was able to persuade the Warsaw organization to express its solidarity with the resolutions of the Fourth Congress of the SDKPiL “under the condition that the ZG is located in the country.” 116 Another possible source of support for Wojnarowska’s position was Julian Marchlewski, a member of both the party editorial board and the KZ. Marchlewski indeed complained that he had not been informed of the progress of the negotiations with the Russians; nor did he agree with the declaration of the Polish delegates on the na­ tional question.117 Yet unlike Wojnarowska, Marchlewski did not go so far as to accept Lenin’s position. When Wojnarowska’s objections and motions were brought before the KZ for a vote, Marchlewski expressed his complete agreement with the basic position taken by the Polish dele­ gates at the Russian congress—namely, that the conditions demanded by Lenin and Plekhanov could not be accepted.118 Marchlewski’s position, based on the defense of the organizational independence of the SDKPiL, more or less sealed Wojnarowska’s defeat within the KZ. On November 5, 1903, Dzierżyński informed her that the KZ had unanimously rejected her motion for the establishment of a new commission to negotiate with the RSDRP. Her criticism of the delegates of the SDKPiL to the Russian congress was also considered unjustified. While some members of the KZ—most notably, Marchlewski—agreed with

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her proposition that illumination of the party’s program should hold prior­ ity over polemics with the PPS, the entire KZ rejected her division of party work into positive and negative categories.119 Following this decisive victory over his chief opponent, Dzierżyński quickly and instinctively moved to eliminate the last vestige of Wojnarowska’s influence in the party, her position as the representative of the SDKPiL in the Interna­ tional Socialist Bureau (ISB), the executive arm of the Second Interna­ tional. On December 23, 1903, Dzierżyński abruptly informed Wojnarow­ ska that she would no longer be responsible for writing the party’s periodic report to the Bureau, a task that henceforth would be entrusted to Rosa Luxemburg.120 Bitter that her representation of the party in the Bureau had become a fiction, Wojnarowska tried to turn her decision to resign from the ISB into a final act of protest. Again she counted on Marchlewski for support, in this case to use his position on the party editorial board to publish her defiant statement of resignation, which she had already submitted to the ISB on February 12, 1904. However, Marchlewski had warned her well in advance: “Instead of wasting the party’s energies on polemics, it would be better to be writing articles for our publications. At least this is what I intend to do.”121 Dzierżyński took a harder line and considered Woj­ narowska’s recent actions as evidence “of a complete lack of discipline and understanding of her responsibilities.” Certain of his own support within the party, he pushed through the KZ a motion censuring Wojnarow­ ska with the statement: “Party organs are not responsible for publishing every letter of every member of the party, particularly such letters that are of no use to the party and that are intneded only for the purposes of pub­ lic sensation.”122 Stanisław Gutt, the lone supporter of Wojnarowska on the KZ, then resigned in protest from that body, claiming in a letter to Wojnarowska that “the triumvirate of Tyszka, Luxemburg and Dzier­ żyński does what it wants without coming to an agreement with the rest of the members.” 123 The Significance o f the “New Course” From this point on, the issue of the SDKPiL’s relations with the Rus­ sian Social Democrats and the differences of opinion within the SDKPiL regarding the Polish question began to fade away from the center of the

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party’s attention. The Russo-Japanese War and the growing economic and political crises in the Russian empire emerged quickly as matters of keen concern to all Polish Social Democrats. What is important for our pur­ poses is that the merger contoversy andxthe political fallout generated by it clearly and demonstrably illuminate Dzierżyński^ adherence to positions commonly associated with Rosa Luxemburg. While Dzierżyński has been portrayed frequently as the “driving force” behind the move­ ment for unification with the RSDRP in 1903, his role in the merger con­ troversy points to quite the opposite. By his advocacy of a hard line, con­ ceding little or nothing in negotiations with the Russians, by his whole­ hearted support and defense of the walkout of the Polish delegation from the Second Congress of the RSDRP, and finally, by his efforts to elimin­ ate all opposition to the decisions that had led to the walkout, Dzierżyń­ ski was as instrumental as Tyszka and Luxemburg in determining the policies which from the Polish side made a merger with the RSDRP in 1903 an impossibility. More significant, although rarely discussed in the historical literature, was the close connection between the abortive merger negotiations and the internal conflict within the SDKPiL. The performance of the SDKPiL delegation at Brussels marked the full implementation of the “New Course,” and the defeat of the opposition to it in the subsequent struggle was a monumental turning point in the history of the SDKPiL. However, the “New Course” meant much more than a return of the Luxemburg group and its ideological and political principles to a place of prominence in the party. It certainly did not signify the rise of Tyszka to the position of an “all-powerful dictator” of the party in which Dzierżyński was simply a naive accomplice.124 Rather, the “New Course” implied organizational as well as political changes. In assuring the victory of Luxemburg and Tyszka over their emigre opponents, Dzierżyński had introduced fundamental organizational innovations that were to transform the appearance of the party. By placing himself at the head of party institutions—in the Foreign Committee, in the Main Directorate, and on the editorial board of Czer­ wony sztandar-Dzieiżyńśki concentrated considerable power in his own hands which served to centralize the organization as a whole. From his Kraków base, Dzierżyński would next turn to party institutions in the Kingdom, applying similar methods of rationalization and coordination

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to transform a loose network of circles into a centralized political organi­ zation. For these reasons, Dzierżyński was also responible for the diver­ gence between the organizational theory of the party as it applied exter­ nally, specifically to the all-Russian party, and the internal practice of the SDKPiL.

\vS

CHAPTER V

BUILDING THE CONSPIRATORIAL ORGANIZATION, 1904

The year 1904 was a turning point in the history of the SDKPiL and for Dzierżyński personally. In this year he was to lose his fiancee, Julia Gold­ man. As he struggled to overcome the tragedy of her death, he would in­ creasingly devote his nervous energy to the transformation of the SDKPiL into a tightly knit, conspiratorial, and more politically effective organi­ zation. The party began the year still weakened from the arrests of the Zalewski period; it was comprised of only a few hundred dedicated follow­ ers loosely organized in propaganda circles. By the end of the year it was a full-fledged revolutionary party, a highly disciplined organization con­ trolled at the center by professional revolutionaries—not at all unlike the model conspiratorial party envisioned by Lenin. The new organizational methods imposed by Dzierżyński also gave the SDKPiL a degree of stabi­ lity that it had previously lacked. This in turn helped to promote the modest, if not spectacular growth of the SDKPiL as greater numbers of factory workers found the party’s strict revolutionary principles more ap­ pealing in an atmosphere of growing economic and political crisis. Thus the party also began to experience a social transformation, gradually shed­ ding its appearance as an organization of artisans and craftsmen. If 1904 was a year of political triumph for Dzierżyński, it was also a year of personal tragedy. On June 4, 1904, while in Switzerland, his fian­ cee, Julia Goldman, finally died in his arms. In the final stage of her illness 106

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Dzierżyński spent an entire week at her bedside, in his own words, “unable to leave her day or night.” 1 Her illness and death literally crushed him. He had been aware of the deterioration in Julia’s condition for over a year2 and had seized every available opportunity to be with her, almost of the point of neglecting his party work and his own political ambitions. Instead of returning to Kraków after the Fourth Congress of the SDKPiL and the Second Congress of the RSDRP in the summer of 1903, Dzierżyński chose to remain in Berlin, from where he made frequent excusions to Switzerland. In letters to his sister, Dzierżyński repeatedly described his existence at this time as “miserable” and “wretched.” 3 When he returned to Kraków at the beginning of 1904, he first tried to submerge his melancholy in work that frequently lasted eighteen to twenty hours a day.4 After Julia’s death, however, Dzierżyński by his own admission became for a time com­ pletely apathetic toward his work.5 His responsibilities in Kraków, which had once seemed to so important to him, now became trivial and boring, leading to the complaint that “life is passing me by.”6 It was the hope of utilizing the Russo-Japanese War as an occasion for heightened revolu­ tionary activity that enabled him at first to rise above the depression over Julia Goldman’s fatal illness and eventually to come out of the shock of her death. The SDKPiL on the Eve o f the 1905 Revolution The prospects for that revolutionary activity were enhanced greatly by the successful Japanese surprise attack on Port Arthur of February 8, 1904, and were progressively improved by what turned out to be a humil­ iating war for the Russians. From start to finish it was a war marked on the Russian side by a maximum of ineptitude and misfortune. Initially the tsar and his ministers hoped that this “splendid little war” would stem the tide of the domestic political crisis, represented in the growing asserti­ veness of liberals associated with the zemstvos. As the war progressed, however, the massive defeats suffered at the hands of the Japanese, parti­ cularly the fall of Port Arthur in January 1905, sent shock waves through­ out the Russian empire. The initial indifference of the general population to the war was shaken by conscription and economic dislocation, the latter coming at a moment when industry was just beginning to recover from the depression of 1900-1903.

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This was particuarly the case in the Kingdom of Poland, where con­ scription‘into the tsarist army aroused deep-seated national animosities and where dependence on markets in the Far East for the sale of indus­ trial goods, particularly textiles, was the 'grbat est. The war’s disruption of Far Eastern trade led to a 30 percent decline in industrial production in the Kingdom of Poland, to the unemployment of well over one hund­ red thousand workers, and to the part-time employment of 250,000 workers at substantially reduced wages.7 To make matters worse, the decline in earnings coincided with a sharp inflation of prices for basic commodities, particularly food, the principal expenditure in the working class budget. In Warsaw alone, thirty thousand people were reportedly deprived of the means to sustain themselves and their families.8 Condi­ tions in the city of Łódź, with its highly concentrated textile industry and its large number of industrial workers, were undoubtedly worse.9 Perhaps because the economic effects of the war were felt sooner and were more severe in the Kingdom of Poland than elsewhere in the Russian empire, the expression of discontent—in the form of strikes, demonstra­ tions and resistence to mobilization—was from the beginning more pro­ nounced and widespread than in Russia itself. In short, the stage was being set for a national and social explosion unprecendented in Polish history. Dzierżyński recognized and seized the opportunity created by the deep­ ening crisis to reorganize the basis of party activity in the Kingdom and to bring the SDKPiL into the political limelight. To understand more clearly Dzierżyński^ achievements of 1904, it will help to compare the organization of the SDKPiL with that of its chief rival, the Polish Social­ ist Party, at the time of the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War. At the turn of 1903/1904, the SDKPiL had 125-150 members in Warsaw com­ pared to nearly 400 for the PPS.10 Whereas the only significant organi­ zation of the SDKPiL was in Warsaw, particularly after the arrest of sixtyfive social democrats in Łódź in March 1903,11 the PPS could boast of organized activity in Radom, Łódź, the Dąbrowa Basin, Lublin and Kalisz.12 The social composition of the two parties was also remarkably differ­ ent. Whereas relatively few of the Polish intelligentsia joined the SDKPiL, the PPS was able to attract many sympathizers from the intelligentsia not only in the Kingdom, but in Galicja and other emigre centers as well. This

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was further reflected in the finances of the two parties. In 1903 the entire budget of the SDKPiL was only 1500 rubles, compared to an 18,000 ruble budget of the PPS.13 Furthermore, the SDKPiL drew its numerical support chiefly from shoemakers, bakers, weavers, carpenters and bricklayers, while the rank and file of the PPS was more firmly anchored by industrial workers, particularly workers in metallurgy and machinebuilding.14 The factory cell, therefore, had already become the basic organizational unit of the PPS in the Kingdom.15 In comparison, the SDKPiL continued to lag behind the PPS in its organizational development and in its agitation among factory workers. The organizational basis of the SDKPiL remained unchanged from 1900 when Dzierżyński refounded the party; it still con­ sisted of a handful of propaganda circles corresponding to profession whose activities were largely uncoordinated in the frequent absence of local executive institutions. The numerical, organizational and technical advantages of the PPS over the SDKPiL are most apparent when one compares the distribution and circulation of literature. PPS literature reached twenty-five greater towns in the Kingdom by early 1904, but the publications of the SDKPiL reach­ ed only ten. In 1904, appeals of the Central Workers’ Committee of the PPS were published in eight to twenty thousand copies, the appeals of the Main Directorate of the SDKPiL in two to five thousand copies. Al­ though Czerwony sztandar and its PPS counterpart Robotnik had nearly equal circulations, the latter appeared more frequently. In addition, vari­ ous local organizations of the PPS possessed their own presses, whereas all social democratic literature was published abroad until the spring of 1904.16 The SDKPiL did, however, hold one advantage over the PPS—namely, a far greater degree of ideological unity. The PPS of 1904 had what Roman Dmowski, leader of the National Democrats, called a “dual personality.” 17 There was, in fact, a tremendous gulf between the official pronouncements of the PPS leadership in emigration and the practical activity of the organi­ zation in the Kingdom. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the con­ tradictory response of the PPS to the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War. The leadership in emigration, known in party lore as the “Starzy” (the Old Ones) and dominated by Józef Piłsudski, saw in war, especially an allEuropean conflict, the best opportunity for realizing its dream of a na­ tional uprising and the resurrection of the Polish state. Therefore, the

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“Starzy” immediately came out in favor of supporting Japan after the attack on Port Arthur. During the course . ^ t h e conflict, Witold Jodko conducted negotiations with successive Japanese ambassadors to London, and Piłsudski went to Tokyo with a vain proposal for a deal involving financial and military support from the Japanese in exchange for intelli­ gence information and PPS diversionary activity in the Kingdom. The opposition to the Piłsudski leadership, known as the “Młodzi” (the Young), believed that the revolutionary movements in Poland and Russia had common rather than contradictory goals. The “Młodzi” argued that instead of diplomatic intrigues and the training of paramilitary units for a national uprising, the PPS should concentrate on mass political agita­ tion and organizational activity. Hence, while the “Starzy” were attempt­ ing through diplomatic activity to transform the Russo-Japanese conflict into a general European holy war against Russian autocracy, the “Młodzi” were organizing anti-war demonstrations in Warsaw. In comparison, the response of the SDKPiLto the Russo-Japanese War was clear and consistent. Recognizing from the beginning that the fate of Russian autocracy was at stake, Czerwony sztandar predicted that “this war will dig the grave of the tsarist government.” 18 In a simultaneous appeal of the ZG, “War to the Tsarist Government,” the party called its ranks into action and urged them to agitate against the war on behalf of political freedom. “ Inactivity now,” the ZG warned, “would be a betrayal of the interests of the working class, of the entire nation, of all of human­ ity.” 19 Moreover, in its publications, the SDKPiL to a far greater extent than the PPS articulated the connection between the economic and poli­ tical crisis in Russia itself and the impact of severe unemployment and inflation in the Kingdom of Poland. The SDKPiL also began to involve itself more directly in the organiza­ tion of strikes. By the autumn of 1904, the SDKPiL managed to direct a general strike of Warsaw construction workers, involving 3370 persons.20 Meanwhile, the tug of war between “Starzy” and “Młodzi” in the PPS served to restrict that party’s participation in strike actions. Gradually, the radical positions and basic unity of the SDKPiL began to yield divi­ dends in terms of membership. While both the PPS and the SDKPiL ex­ perienced steady growth in 1904, the SDKPiL narrowed the gap from a 5:1 membership ratio at the beginning of the year to a 3:2 ratio by the end of the year.21

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Like the PPS, the SDKPiL was also involved in “diplomatic activity” in 1904, although of a quite different nature. Part of its effort continued the traditional use of every possible opportunity to criticize and embar­ rass the PPS. Having defeated opposition in the SDKPiL emigre organi­ zation to the “New Course” of the Berlin leadership, Dzierżyński sought means by which to undermine the SDKPiL’s chief competitor. For ex­ ample, he formally proposed the sending of eleven delegates to the Amster­ dam congress of the Second International, which was scheduled to meet in August 1904, in an attempt to gain numerical superiorty over the PPS within the Polish delegation.22 Only the prudent counsel of Marchlewski convinced other members of the leadership that Dzierżyńskfs tactics were not only too costly in view of the weak state of party finances, but also lacking in political tact.23 Dzierżyński also urged the publication of articles in the party press ridiculing demonstrations organized by the PPS in the Kingdom.24 Such an attitude towards the PPS, typical not only of Dzier­ żyński but of the entire Berlin leadership, shows a complete lack of ap­ preciation for the political divisions within that party. Thus the SDKPiL automatically excluded the possibility for rapprochement with a PPS in which the “Młodzi” were beginning to gain the upper hand. Apart from its battles with the PPS, the SDKPiL did achieve some posi­ tive gains from its “diplomatic” activities. At the Amsterdam congress, essential agreement between the SDKPiL and both factions of the RSDRP on the issues of disarmament, militarism, and colonialism led to the crea­ tion of a council of most of the social democratic parties of the Russian state. Soon thereafter, the proposal of the SDKPiL to establish a social democratic informational bureau was accepted by that council.25 In its relations with the two Russian factions, the SDKPiL contined to side with the Mensheviks in their organizational controversy with Lenin. How­ ever, the leadership of the SDKPiL expressed reservations about the edi­ torial treatment of the Russo-Japanese War in the Menshevik-dominated Iskra, which seeemed to support the Russian liberal critique of the govern­ ment’s conduct of the war.26 The SDKPiL leadership refrained from direct polemics with Iskra, perhaps because it wanted to ensure wide coverage in the Russian journal of social democratic activity in the Kingdom. But at the same time, the SDKPiL became increasingly disenchanted with the Mensheviks, particularly in the face of perceived revisionist tendencies within that faction.

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The “General Secretary” o f the SDKPiL While Polish Social Democracy supporfetf'the Menshevik principle of party organization in its public pronouncements, its own organization in the Kingdom, through a series of structural innovations introduced in the course of 1904, began to resemble the conspiratorial, centralized apparatus of the Bolshevik model. The hand of Dzierżyński in that pro­ cess is clearly perceptible. We have seen that Dzierżyński, like all of his colleagues in the party leadership, rejected the theory of what he referred to as “autocratic centralization” advanced by Lenin for the organization of the all-Russian party. Hence, the organizational changes in the SDKPiL of 1904 were not initiated because Dzierżyński was a proponent of Lenin­ ist principles. Rather, the pragmatic necessity of coordination and con­ solidation, at first to ensure the party’s survival, then later to accom­ modate the possibilities for growth and expansion of the organization, was the fundamental reason for Dzierżyński’s measures.27 Dzierżyński’s personality was of crucial importance to the nature of the party’s organizational evolution. His tendency as the acknowledged political leader of the party to involve himself in every aspect and func­ tion of the organization undoubtedly contributed to the evolution of a system of central control. In this connection the effect of Julia Gold­ man’s death on Dzierżyński gains greater significance. Dzierżyński, driven by personal misery and a terrible sense of loss, found an escape from his fits of depression and lethargic moods of nostalgia only in frenzied activity. Hence, after Julia’s death deprived him of what remained of his personal life, he steadily assumed more responsibilities in the party and, as a result, the gradual accumulation of even greater power and authority.28 By the middle of 1904, Dzierżyński had emerged as the “general sec­ retary” of the SDKPiL in fact, if not in name, with control over party finances, communications, transport and distribution of literature, the assignment of activists in the Kingdom, and supervision of all party opera­ tions—in short, control over an evolving party apparatus. The use of the term “general secretary” naturally evokes the image of Stalin, but Dzier­ żyński operated under vastly different circumstances than did Stalin in the 1920s as the head of a party in power. Dzierżyński, moreover, had no con­ scious dictatorial pretensions and his belief in the principle of collegial party leadership was sincere. Yet the fact of the matter was that of the

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other members of the SDKPiL elite, only Luxemburg and Tyszka rivaled Dzierżyński in energy, but their concerns were always much broader and more theoretical in scope, particularly owing to the involvement in the issues and controversies facing the entire international socialist move­ ment. Dzierżyński’s vision, on the other hand, was more specifically focused on the Kingdom of Poland, where the field of action was left completely open to him. One of Dzierzynski’s chief concerns was the recent susceptibility of the organization to large-scale arrests which threatened the very survival of the party in the Kingdom. During the Zalewski period, the SDKPiL had managed to create relatively strong local organizations in Łódź and Białystok, which, however, became completely isolated after the arrest of Zalewski and his Warsaw followers at the end of 1901. As the Warsaw organization struggled to recover, both the Łódź and Białystok organi­ zations were decimated by police actions in 1903, essentially bringing organized activity outside of Warsaw to an abrupt halt.29 Although Dzier­ żyński realized from experience that the risk of arrest was the inevitable result of illegal political activity in an autocratic police state, he believed that the number and severity of arrests could be reduced by strict ad­ herence to discipline and by the adoption of conspiratorial techniques. In this connection, Dzierżyński was convinced that undue attention was drawn to the party by certain unruly elements who sympathized with the tactics of terrorism and assassination as acceptable means of struggle against various factory administrations. From the beginning of its history, the party had publicly condemned terrorist actions as counter-productive because they gave the government a ready-made excuse for mass reprisals. It was Dzierżyński, however, who translated the party’s anti-terrorist principles into action. Suspicious of anyone “who loves to talk about dynamite and bombs,” Dzierżyński demanded the denunciation and ex­ pulsion from the party of known terrorists.30 In addition to purging the organization, Dzierżyński orchestrated a campaign in the party press emphasizing the effectiveness of sympathy strikes and solidarity over the ineffectiveness of isolated acts of personal vengeance.31 A purge of the undisciplined elements dealt with only one aspect of the party’s alarming vulnerability to arrest and repression. The other was a complete lack of central control and coordination of the loose network of professional circles. To remedy the situation required structural innova­ tions that Dzierżyński logically applied first to the Warsaw organization.

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The initial step in the autumn of 1903 was the appointment of a new Warsaw Committee whose members, A. S. Ettinger-Dalski, Zdzisław Leder and Wincenty Matuszewski, were all expeftèftced and talented agitators.32 Under the new Warsaw Committee a firm hierarchy was established. The work of the professional circles came to be'coordinated by an inter-pro­ fessional circle, from whose membership a central circle for the training of agitators was formed. The central circle, in turn, became subordinate to the executive directives of the Warsaw Committee.33 These measures served not only to break down the autonomous, guild-like structure of the circles through the integration and coordination of their activities, but also subordinated the principle of party democratism to the neces­ sity of conspiracy. For the purposes of supervising party activity, Dzierżyński maintained a direct line of communication with the Warsaw Committee, demanding regular correspondence from its members.34 Such close ties between the Warsaw Committee and the ZG, the latter represented by Dzierżyński in Kraków, enabled him to transmit clear instructions for social demo­ cratic participation in the growing movement against the war and mobili­ zation-reflected in the mass demonstrations that seized Warsaw in the spring of 1904. To avoid mass arrests in these demonstrations, Dzier­ żyński ordered that upon meeting the police, social democratic marchers should disperse immediately, each in a different direction.35 Such a strategy was particularly successful during a anti-war demonstration of June 26, 1904, in which no arrests occurred despite the participation of over one thousand persons in the march.36 Elsewhere in the Kingdom, where experienced personnel was lacking for the formation of city committees, Dzierżyński followed the practice used by German Social Democracy during the period of Bismarck’s anti­ socialist laws and sent “men of trust” who were directly responsible to the ZG.37 These “men of trust” were either recruited from the ranks of agitators in the central circle of the Warsaw organization or from the Po­ lish social democratic emigre community. Those from the organization abroad were supplied with fraudulent personal documents, illegal literature and instructions by Dzierżyński in Kraków before entering the Kingdom. The “men of trust” frequently assumed the executive functions of city committees and were required to submit to Dzierżyński detailed reports of their activities.38 Such was the role of Stanisław Stokowski (Czarny),

who was dispatched to Łódź by the ZG in August 1904. On the model of the changes in the Warsaw organization, Stokowski centralized the network of social democratic circles in Łódź and began the training of agitators in a central circle.39 Through the “men of trust” the SDKPiL was able to renew organizational activity in Łódź, the Dąbrowa Basin, Częstochowa, Kalisz and Lublin.40 To ensure close ties between the organization in the country and the leadership in emigration, as well as to coordinate the work of the local organizations, Dzierżyński began to send into the Kingdom paid profes­ sional revolutionaries known as “functionaries.” The functionaries were characterized above all by their conspiratorial behavior. They avoided mass meetings and demonstrations; instead they supervised and coor­ dinated party work through personal contacts with the leadership of local social democratic organizations. In contrast to the “men of trust,” the functionaries toured the organizations of the Kingdom, frequently returning to Kraków for additional instructions from Dzierżyński.41 If arrests created a hiatus in a particular local organization, as occurred in Warsaw in the spring of 1904, the functionary became responsible for ensuring the continuity of party work within that organization and the preservation of its connections with the ZG. Due to the conspiratorial nature of the work of the functionaries, it is nearly impossible to identify them from partially encoded correspondence and other party documents. According to Stanisław Pestkowski, a leading activist in the Łódź organi­ zation, during 1904 there were only two or three functionaries operating at any one time.42 One of them was certainly Jakub Fürstenberg-Hanecki, who made several excursions into the Kingdom*in 1903 and 1904.43 The centralization of the organization in the Kingdom, inspired and directed by Dzierżyński, became a cause of some concern among the work­ ing class elements who had been recruited into the party at the turn of the century by Dzierżyński himself and later by Trusiewicz-Zalewski. Many of them, former members of the Rosół group, had a vision of the party as a confederation of self-governing local organizations. Therefore, they resented the growing presence in and domination of their organiza­ tions by members of the intelligentsia, symbolized above all by the new and unelected Warsaw Committee, the “men of trust” and the function­ aries. However, once cannot speak of an opposition to the principles of conspiracy and centralism imposed upon the party by Dzierżyński. The

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Dzierżyński in Kraków, 1904 discontented cadres were too confused by the changes to coalesce into an organized group. As a sign o f their naivete, they believed that o f the lead­ ers abroad, only Dzierżyński endeavored to keep a leash on the intelli­ gentsia.44 In time their protests did become louder and better articulated, but by then the structure and composition o f the party had changed drastically.

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As the popular movement against the war and conscription into the tsarist army expanded in early 1904, it became increasingly necessary for the SDKPiL to respond quickly to the new opportunities for mass agita­ tion. This required, above all, the establishment of an illegal press in the Kingdom; Dzierżyński entrusted the task to Marcin Kasprzak who was sent to Warsaw in February. By April Kasprzak was publishing appeals, written primarily by Leder, in the name of the Warsaw Committee and other local organizations of the SDKPiL. However, the accidental arrest of Leder compromised the apartment that housed the secret press and it was stormed by the gendarmes and police on April 27.4S Kasprzak, rather than surrender himself, fired several shots from a revolver into the invad­ ing party, leaving five dead and one wounded before his capture. The armed defense of the SDKPiL press, despite its liquidation, served as an electric spark for the party organization in Warsaw, which some­ how managed to distribute thousands of copies of the May Day appeal of the ZG.46 As news of Kasprzak’s action spread quickly throughout the city, the SDKPiL gained a certain amount of recognition and notoriety. Although Czerwony sztandar claimed that “we are not advocates of ter­ ror,” it sought to publicize the incident and the subsequent trial of Kasprzak by a military tribunal.47 Meanwhile, the May 1 demonstrations, one organized jointly by the SDKPiL, Bund and PPS “Proletariat,” the other separately by the PPS, were the largest up to that time.48 The arrests of Leder and Kasprzak, as well as the earlier arrest of Matu­ szewski while on assignment in Białystok,49 created a dangerous vacuum in the leadership of the Warsaw organization. From this point on, Dzier­ żyński began to consider an excursion into the Kingdom, primarily to re­ establish the Warsaw Committee.50 Dzierżyński^ correspondence, the memoirs of his contemporaries, and other related evidence, suggest that he had gone to the Kingdom for a brief period in February 1904, but had stayed clear of Warsaw.S1 It is most likely that his first trip to Warsaw in 1904 came in August, since he was in Switzerland for most of June and then spent July in Kraków. When Dzierżyński finally did appear in War­ saw, the hiatus in the leadership of the organization was quickly remedied. The Warsaw Committee was reconstituted under the leadership of Hanecki, who then ceased his activities as a functionary of the ZG. At the same time, Józef Unszlicht was summoned from abroad to join the Warsaw Committee; he was followed by the irrepressible Matuszewski, who, im­ mediately following his release from prison and brief deportation, returned

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to Warsaw to re-establish the party’s clandestine press.52 With Hanecki taking over direct leadership of the Warsaw organization, the SDKPiL found itself in need of a permanent roviąg.funct ionary, a representative of the ZG who could supervise the work of the entire organization in the Kingdom. Immediately upon his return to Kraków from Warsaw, Dzier­ żyński advanced his own candidacy for the position. Among Dzierżyński^ colleagues in the party leadership abroad, there were certain misgivings about his plan to depart permanently for the Kingdom; however, the ensuing debate did not constitute a deep divi­ sion between Dzierżyński and his allies in Berlin.53 Adolf Warski, closest to Dzierżyński on a personal basis and therefore cognizant of the effect of Julia Goldman’s death on Dzierżyński^ behavior, was the most vocal in his opposition to Dzierżyński^ presence in the country on a continu­ ous basis. “The only reason for this,” Warski told him bluntly, “is that you can no longer hold yourself back, that this upsets you, that you are dissatisfied, in a word, reasons of desperation.”54 Warski proposed instead that Dzierżyński go into the Kingdom from time to time, to different committees and organizations in order to certify and direct their work, but retain permanent residence in Kraków.55 Warski was not convinced by Dzierżyński’s arguments that his work in Kraków was merely “techni­ cal” and that he easily could be replaced. Citing Dzierżyński^ experience and familiarity with people and conditions, Warski argued that Dzier­ żyński^ presence in Kraków was the only way to guarantee the entirety and continuity of party work. “If this is technical work,” Warski reasoned, “then I no longer know what political leadership of the party is.”56 Warski’s arguments, supported by other leading members of the party abroad, successfully restrained Dzierżyński who then submitted to the same party discipline that he strictly demanded of others. Therefore, Dzierżyński made only brief excursions to the Kingdom in the autumn of 1904, with intervening periods of rest and work in Kraków. At the same time, members of the literary group became increasingly drawn into more vital participation in party work. Warski and Marchlewski trans­ ferred to Kraków where they assumed Dzierżyński^ editorial respon­ sibilities for Czerwony sztandar as well as some of his “technical” func­ tions.57 They were followed by Tyszka in March 1905.58 For her part, Rosa Luxemburg increasingly contributed her pen to party publications. Meanwhile, as the prospects of approaching revolution became bright­ er, the scope of party activity continued to expand. In September, the

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party assumed control over the organization of a general strike of Warsaw construction workers; in late October, the party participated in two suc­ cessive mass demonstrations against conscription and mobilization. The demonstration of October 30, organized exclusively by the SDKPiL, wit­ nessed the participation of several thousand workers from all districts of the city; this was, according to Czerwony sztandar, “undoubtedly the largest and most successful workers’ demonstration that Warsaw has seen in recent months.”59 In the last months of 1904, the strikes, demon­ strations and resistance to mobilization began to spread from Warsaw to other industrial centers of the Kingdom. The placing of the demands for a representative assembly and civil liberties before the tsar’s ministers by the Congress of Zemstvo repre­ sentatives in November signified that a turning point in Russia’s political crisis had been reached. The significance of the action of the Russian liberals was not lost on Rosa Luxemburg. In a lead'article for Czerwony sztandar, she called for the placing of the political agitation of the party on a new foundation by demanding the immediate convocation of a constituent assembly on the basis of general, direct, equal and secret suffrage. “Up to this point, the political program has had mainly an agita­ tional significance,” she argued. “Now it has become a program of direct action, a subject of practical realization.” 60 As the empire of the tsars stood on the brink of revolution, it became indispensible for the SDKPiL to have its most experienced and capable political leader in the Kingdom of Poland. In the middle of December, Dzierżyński departed from Kraków for good, now with the full support of his colleagues.61 In Warsaw, he awaited excitedly the spark that was to ignite the flame of revolution. It came only a few weeks after his arrival in Warsaw, when, on January 9, 1905 (O.S.), police of the Russian capital fired shots upon a huge but peaceful demonstration of Petersburg workers led by Father George Gapon. * * * ♦ * By the time “Bloody Sunday” opened the first phase of the 1905 revo­ lution in the Russian empire, the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania had experienced a fundamental transformation in its organizational structure and mode of operation. It was now a much more disciplined organization with actual power exercised at the center by

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two executive institutions, the Foreign Committee (KZ) and the Main Directorate (ZG). Feliks Dzierżyński supervised the work of both com­ mittees and through agents who were responsible to him he was able to conspiratorialize the party organization in the Kingdom. The adoption of conspiratorial principles promoted the stability of the party by re­ ducing the risk of mass arrests; this in turn not only enabled the party to survive, but also to expand the range of its activities and, more gradu­ ally, its rank and file membership. As greater numbers of industrial workers joined the party, the SDKPiL also embarked on a social transformation which was essentially completed during the 1905 revolution. Thus the SDKPiL of necessity began to resemble Lenin’s Bolshevik organization; this despite the fact that Dzierżyński and others in the party leadership wanted no part of Lenin’s far-reaching plans for a rigid­ ly centralized, tightly controlled all-Russian party. For the SDKPiL leadership, there was no contradiction between their own evolving con­ spiratorial and increasingly centralized organization and their continued opposition to Lenin’s organizational principles. The type of statewide party envisioned by Lenin, they continued to argue, would smother the initiative of organizations like the SDKPiL, reducing them to regional branches of the RSDRP. On the other hand, the principles of conspiracy and centralization—when applied internally—were not only acceptable to the SDKPiL leadership, but indeed mandatory given the experience and circumstances of party activity in the Kingdom. Hence, as the year 1904 made clear, the SDKPiL under Dzierżyński did not oppose centralization as such; it opposed only a centrally controlled statewide organization that would deprive the SDKPiL of its independence and identity. Dzierżyński^ role in building the conspiratorial organization of the SDKPiL was, as we have seen, of crucial importance. During the course of 1904 he had a hand in the work of nearly every party institution. The effect of Julia Goldman’s death on him was the major source of his moti­ vation. Undoubtedly, he still would have advocated the adoption of con­ spiratorial principles and would have played a key role in their imple­ mentation-even had Julia lived. But he would not have involved himself so intimately in the minute details and the day-to-day operations of each and every party institution. And he probably would not have been so eager to return to Warsaw, throwing caution to the wind. After Julia’s death, Dzierżyński^ behavior increasingly assumed a fana­ tical quality. He was constantly at work, catching catnaps of a few hours

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at odd times of the day. His “nerves,” as he put it, would no longer allow him a restful night. This type of lifestyle worried many of his colleagues in the SDKPiL leadership, who feared that Dzierżyński would work him­ self, if not to death, at least back to the sanatorium. Yet, in guiding the SDKPiL through the tumult of the 1905 revolution in the Kingdom of Poland, Dzierzynski’s fanaticism for party work would once again prove indispensible.

CHAPTER VI FANATIC OF THE REVOLUTION, 1905

“Dear Auntie!,” Dzierżyński began his letter from Warsaw to his collea­ gues abroad on the night of January 28-29, 1905. “Please don’t worry, nothing will happen to me; I am sitting at home, and during these troubled days I shall stay put and not go out anywhere. Of this you can be assured.” 1 Then in iemon juice between the lines, Dzierżyński went on to describe the general strike that had seized Warsaw that morning. For the leaders of the SDKPiL who remained abroad, it was the first news of the outbreak of the revolution of 1905-1907 in the Kingdom of Poland. The Revolution o f 1905 in the Kingdom o f Poland The 1905 Revolution was not a purely Russian phenomenon; it was, like the empire itself, multinational, embracing all of the European nations that formed constituent parts of imperial Russia. The character of the revolution, moreover, varied according to the conditions and level of socio­ economic development of each nation. The Kingdom of Poland was the most industrially-developed territorial component in the entire empire, and its economy had suffered the most as a result of the Russo-Japanese War. As the abortive yet heroic insurrections of 1794, 1830 and 1863 amply demonstrated, the Kingdom of Poland was also the most restive of all the European territories in the Russian empire. Thus is should be no 122

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surprise, although it is too rarely noted, that the revolution of 1905 to 1907 in the Kingdom of Poland when measured in terms of intensity, range and staying power, proceeded to a much more advanced and dan­ gerous phase than in other parts of tlie empire, including Russia itself. For example, 93.2 percent of all industrial workers in the Kingdom went on strike at least once in 1905 compared to approximately 50 percent of the industrial labor force in the rest of European Russia.2 From the very beginning of the revolution, every one of the political parties and groups active in the Kingdom demanded a change in the status of the country, from limited autonomy within the existing political frame­ work of the empire, on the one extreme, to complete national indepen­ dence on the other. The workers’ strikes for higher wages and shorter hours coincided with the movement for the polonization of the coun­ try’s schools, the demands for universal suffrage with demands for na­ tional sovereignty. In short, the revolution of 1905-1907 in the Kingdom of Poland witnessed the fusion of two revolutions—one national, the other social—which led to an extremely explosive situation, pushing the country to the brink of a general uprising. Although the immediate stimulus for the revolution in the Kingdom came from the reaction of the Petersburg workers to “Bloody Sunday,” the course of events in Poland quickly acquired a momentum of its own. News of “Bloody Sunday” and the widespread strikes in St. Petersburg that it inspired reached Warsaw on January 24. On the morning of Janu­ ary 27, workers began to leave their jobs of their own accord, proceeding from factory to factory and calling upon others to join the walkout. By the next day, the strike had become general and delegations formed spon­ taneously with the aim of directing the strike in individual factories.3 The industrial workers were quickly joined by bakers, transportation workers, printers, post and telegraph employees; according to Dzierżyński, even the confectionary shops were forced to shut their doors.4 In Łódź, some ten thousand workers were already on strike demanding higher wages; on January 28, they were joined by over half of the city’s labor force, or an­ other 50,000 workers.5 From Warsaw and Łódź, the strike movement spread to other indus­ trial centers in early February and to the countryside by early March.6 In the spring of 1905, Lublin province became the site of a spontaneous revolt of agrarian workers;358 individual strikes were recorded in Lublin province

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alone from February to April.7 In Warsaw, the general strike of the work­ ers was accompanied by simultaneous walkouts of students from Warsaw University and the city’s secondary schools who demanded an end to the policies of russification. The student movement spread rapidly to all academic institutions in the Kingdom. “The only black mark on the map of the school strike in the Kingdom of Poland,” claimed one of the stu­ dent leaders, “was the private women’s boarding schools.” 8 In the face of this all-encompassing protest of Polish society, the gov­ ernment was at first disoriented and did not intervene with police and troops. In Łódź, where Russian military strength at this time was insuf­ ficient to break up mass demonstrations, the government actually pres­ sured the Łódź industrialists to make concessions to the workers’ de­ mands in order to defuse the political aspects of the labor unrest.9 Nor did the government seek to break up the large meetings of workers and students in Warsaw with armed force, although the police were called to Warsaw University in an unsuccessful attempt to intimidate the stu­ dents into dispersing.10 Given the scale and intensity of the movement, particularly in War­ saw, such a situation could not last long. The first skirmish between demonstrators and police in Warsaw came on January 29. On the next day the government proclaimed a state of emergency in Warsaw and Piotrków provinces which was extended to the entire Kingdom at the end of February.11 Faced with the prospect of mass bloodshed, the socialist parties (SDKPiL, PPS and Bund) issued separate and uncoordi­ nated appeals for an end to the general strike on February 2, but for the continuation of individual strikes until the economic demands of the workers were satisfied.12 Most of the striking industrial workers had returned to their jobs by the end of February after having won wage in­ creases on the average of ten to fifteen percent and work days shortened by one hour.13 Dzierżyński and the SDKPiL in the First Phase o f the Revolution The SDKPiL responded quickly to “Bloody Sunday” and to subse­ quent events. The SDKPiL was in fact the first of the Polish political parties to react to “Bloody Sunday,” proving that it was much better pre­ pared than the PPS or National Democrats for the outbreak of revolution

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in the empire and the Kingdom of Poland. After all, the entire opera­ tional and tactical strategy of the SDKPiL had long been based on such an eventuality. Thus immediately after “Bloody Sunday” on January 23, the SDKPiL printed and distributed thousands of appeals for a gen­ eral strike as a display of solidarity with the workers of St. Petersburg.14 Having anticipated the general strike, the party also worked out in ad­ vance maximum political and economic demands to guide its agitators, among them demands for the eight-hour working day and for the calling of a Constituent Assembly based on universal, equal and direct suffrage.15 By sending many of its activists to agitate among the factory delegations, the SDKPiL also proved itself much more energetic in the economic strug­ gle than the PPS, which in the first days of the revolution appeared com­ pletely disoriented.16 Finally, despite the negative attitude towards the formation of an independent Polish state, the SDKPiL promptly sup­ ported “with its entire soul” the national demands of the students for the polonization of the schools and actively participated in the organi­ zation of the student movement.17 During the first half of 1905, leadership of party work in the Kingdom fell entirely into the hands of Feliks Dzierżyński. In this opening phase of the revolution, Dzierżyński was constantly in motion, a restless whirl of human activity, in the words of Karl Radek, “the flame that ignited the entire party.” 18 Despite his initial promises to “stay put,” he an­ nounced on February 13 that he would leave Warsaw to supervise party activities in Łódź, Puławy, Żyrardów, Białystok, Vilna, Częstochowa, and the Dąbrowa Basin.19 From his journeys, Dzierżyński was able to determine the needs of local party organizations which he relayed to the party leaders who remained in emigration. Whether in Warsaw or while on tour of the provinces, Dzierżyński tried to remain in close contact with his colleagues abroad, providing the information, for example, upon which Rosa Luxemburg based her articles published in the German social democratic press about the situation in the Kingdom of Poland.20 Yet despite the multifaceted nature of his responsibilities, Dzierżyński con­ tinued to act in a very conspiratorial fashion, avoiding for the most part participation in large meetings and marches, preferring instead to restrict his contacts to a few trusted individuals. Dzierżyńskfs primary concern during this period was the disorgani­ zation of the party’s activities resulting from the spontaneous and rapid

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growth of its membership. For example, the Łódź organization of the party expanded from a membership of one hundred and twenty at the beginning of the year to over eight hundred^y October.21 Such a rate of growth was typical throughout the Kingdom of Poland; by the end of 1905, the numerical strength of the SDKPiL matched or surpassed that of the PPS in the regional centers of Częstochowa and Lublin while the SDKPiL was rapidly narrowing the gap in Warsaw.22 “I am beginning to doubt,” Dzierżyński wrote in April, “that the organization will not burst open and lose its head.” 23 According to Dzierzynski’s correspon­ dence with the Foreign Committee, the organizational strains were caused primarily by shortages of literature and trained agitators. Therefore, in letter after letter, he forcefully demanded more help from the emigre leadership in meeting the party’s growing demands. “We must know in what way we can count upon you,” he insisted at one point.24 For the most part, the emigre organization responded quickly to Dzier­ zynski’s appeals. Adolf Warski and Bronisław Wesołowski arrived in War­ saw in March and this allowed Dzierżyński to occupy himself to a greater extent with the provinces.25 The publications of the Foreign Committee (KZ) also multiplied: 54,000 copies of brochures and pamphlets were smuggled into the Kingdom between March and September.26 In prepara­ tion for the traditional May 1 holiday, the SDKPiL published twentyseven separate appeals compared to twenty-two for the PPS.27 Despite these efforts, Dzierżyński continued to bombard his colleagues on the KZ with complaints and criticisms, a sign of his own impatience and ex­ haustion.28 While securing manpower and literature for the expanding social demo­ cratic party, Dzierżyński simultaneously supervised the on-going evolu­ tion of its organizational structure. The vast majority of new party mem­ bers in 1905 came from the ranks of factory workers, particularly from the metal industry of Warsaw and the textile industry of Łódź. In order to give organizational expression to the fundamental change in the social composition of the party, the old professional circles now began to give way to factory cells, although the latter did not yet acquire specific organizational functions.29 At the same time, the city organizations were divided into district circles; these did have clearly defined goals such as the collection of dues, distribution of literature and training of new agitators. Another important organizational measure was the adoption of

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the practice of paying members of the city committees from the party treasury.30 Hence, the trend towards the development of a party led by paid professional revolutionaries continued. Under Dzierżyński’s urging the party also achieved some modest success in expanding its influence among the students and intellectuals.31 Finally, armed battle squads were introduced on the model of those already employed in the King­ dom by the PPS and Bund, designed initially to defend marchers in social democratic demonstrations in the event of a skirmish with the police or army.32 The battle squads were later disbanded in 1906 because of their easy infiltration by police agents and the inability of the party to exercise control over their activities. In the meantime, however, some of their members were assigned to act as bodyguards of the principal social demo­ cratic leaders in the Kingdom.33 Another facet of Dzierzynski’s activity in the first half of 1905 was his effort to expand systematic agitation among the approximately 300,000 soldiers of the Russian imperial army who were stationed on Polish soil. Among the SDKPiL leadership, Dzierzynski’s early interest in and em­ phasis on such agitation as well as his desire to work closely with Russian Social Democrats in this area were unique. As early as the autumn of 1904, Dzierżyński perceived the necessity of immediate organizational work among troops of the Warsaw garrison; in this regard, he aided in the establishment by Sergei Bagotskii and Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko of a filial of the Military Revolutionary Organization (MRO) of the RSDRP in Warsaw.34 The need for dramatically expanding the work of the MRO became clear after the events of January and February 1905, and the parti­ cipation of 15,000 soldiers and officers in the struggle against the revolu­ tionary movement. Feeling that many of the peasants and workers in uni­ form simply wanted to “lay down their arms and go home,” Dzierżyński repeatedly demanded from the KZ fervently written appeals in the Rus­ sian language for transmission to the troops through the MRO.35 The extension of martial law to the entire Kingdom at the end of March and the prospect of “terrible slaughter” led Dzierżyński to turn even more attention to the troops. He therefore initiated negotiations with the RSDRP with the aim of establishing the closest possible organi­ zational links between the SDKPiL and the MROs operating on Polish soil.36 What Dzierżyński had in mind was a solution that would have made the MROs de facto parts of the organization of the SDKPiL. Under such a

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scheme, the SDKPiL would have a permanent member on the MRO com­ mittees and would assume financial responsibility and control over the entire MRO organization in the Kingdoms “,Jo the Russians, therefore, would remain only the title,” he wrote, “which in any case would have tremendous moral significance for us in our agitation among the Russian soldiers.”37 At First the Menshevik-dominated Central Committee of the RSDRP resisted the efforts of the SDKPiL to bring the MROs under its control, causing further friction in the relations between the SDKPiL and the Mensheviks.38 In the end, however, an agreement was reached and signed on July 14, 1905, negotiated primarily by Dzierżyński and Julius Martov, which provided almost exactly for the type of organizational control over the MROs that Dzierżyński had sought.39 As part of the bargain, Dzierżyński became the representative of the SDKPiL on the War­ saw Committee of the MRO.40 Closely connected with Dzierżyński^ emphasis on expanding the party’s agitation among Russian soldiers was his increasing involvement in the affairs of the Southern Committee of the SDKPiL which operated in Lub­ lin province. The Southern Committee was formed already at the end of 1903 by a group of students at the Institute of Agriculture and Forestry in Puławy: Edward Próchniak, Jan Świderski, Edward Sokołowski, Marian Stachorski and Aleksander Formajster.41 Of the members of the Southern Committee only Sokołowski had any previous political and organizational experience. For this reason, Dzierżyński closely supervised its work from the beginning. The Southern Committee focused much of its attention upon the soldiers of the Russian garrison at Puławy, and connections were established through Dzierżyński between the Southern Committee and the Puławy MRO at the end of 1904 42 The work of the Southern Committee took on added significance with the rash of strikes of agrarian workers that seized Lublin province in early March 1905. Already in February, Dzierżyński demanded and received from the KZ a special “manifesto to the peasantry,” with the aim of gain­ ing some sort of organizational control over what was becoming a spon­ taneous movement of the hired agricultural workers.43 As the disturbances spread, the Russian soldiers stationed at the Puławy garrison became strongly influenced by them. On April 18, news reached the garrison that the imperial command planned to transfer five hundred soldiers from each infantry regiment and two hundred from each artillery regiment to the

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front in the Far East.44 This scheme was designed to remove uncertain elements from the rear, but instead it pushed a significant part o f the Puławy garrison to the point of open revolt. The young and inexperi­ enced Southern Committee immediately tried to assume leadership o f the expected uprising, but at the same time turned to Dzierżyński for instructions and advice.4S Alarmed that the Southern Committee might precipitate some ill-conceived action, Dzierżyński, accompanied by Warski, departed immediately for Puławy. Dzierżyński clearly perceived the danger and premature nature of such a local movement. According to an account published in the name o f the Main Directorate (ZG) on April 29, the Southern Committee “received in­ structions from us to prevent an outbreak until the time o f a revolutionary

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Zdzisław Leder action of the broad masses in the entire country, as occurred at the time of the last general strike.” 46 Upon his arrival, Dzierżyński, who did not trust the interpretation of the situation by the Southern Committee, went to the barracks and talked with the soldiers in order to examine the situation for himself. His appeals for patience and restraint in these encounters, however, fell on deaf ears, particularly in the Bielavski and Tulskii regi­ ments which threatened to strike out on their own on April 22.47 From this point on, Dzierżyński had two courses of action open to him: either to take over undisputed political and technical leadership o f what he knew would be an abortive uprising, or to salvage what he could of the party organization in the area in the face of the repression that was sure to follow. Legendary for his quick and firm decisions, Dzierżyński in this

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Edward Próchniak case vacillated, following neither course consistently. Through the South­ ern Committee, he persuaded the rebellious regiments to postpone their action until April 27. This, he hoped, would given the party time to pre­ pare appeals to the surrounding population, to other military garrisons in the Kingdom, and to the urban workers. None o f these, however, were published and distributed in tim e; the result was an embarrassing fiasco. Cossacks easily crushed the stillborn revolt on April 27, which was im ­ mediately followed by mass searches and arrests. Dzierżyński went into hiding and managed to save himself, Warski and Edward Próchniak from capture. Such was not the fate of others involved in the Puławy episode. For example, Jan Świderski, a member of the Southern Committee, was eventually sentenced to fifteen years of Siberian exile.48

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As soôn as it was safe to emerge from hiding, Dzierżyński and Warski returned to Warsaw, where preparations for the traditional May Day demonstration were in full swing. Recognising that such a mass demon­ stration would have tremendous political significance in this revolutionary year, the ZG began its planning extremely eafly. Despite large-scale arrests of party activists in March,49 the Warsaw organization quickly recovered and continued its rapid growth. Before his hasty departure for Puławy, Dzierżyński had appointed a special commission to take charge of the publication of May Day appeals and of general planning for the social democratic demonstration.50 After his return to Warsaw, Dzierżyński ordered activists to lay low and avoid contact with each other in order to minimize the chance of arrests.51 As May 1 arrived all seemed to have been well prepared. Seventy-five thousand copies of the May Day appeal of the ZG were distributed through­ out the Kingdom.52 The demonstration in Warsaw organized by the SDKPiL, for the first time independent of the May Day marches organized by its competitors, was the most imposing by far in terms of numbers and the revolutionary mood of the participants. By the time the demonstration had reached Aleje Jerozolimskie, its ranks had swelled to thirty thou­ sand.53 At that point the march was stopped by troops who, without warning, began firing into the crowd. Fifteen minutes later the massacre was over, leaving as many as fifty dead and another hundred wounded.54 Dzierżyński’s first concern in the wake of the May Day Massacre was to regroup his forces and minimize the party’s losses. For example, in his report of the “May Bloodbath” to Rosa Luxemburg, there is no indication that he contemplated further action in response to the massacre.55 On May 2, however, he called a session of the Warsaw Committee and ordered the publication of an appeal for a general strike as a sign of protest.56 In a separate and fiery appeal of the ZG composed by Warski, the party called upon the people to answer tsarist terror with mass terror.57 The tone of this appeal, which Dzierżyński no doubt approved, probably was a major factor in the negative response of the PPS and the Bund to the general strike proclaimed by the SDKPiL for May 4. The PPS, fearing a new and more disastrous bloodbath, called upon its supporters to remain at their jobs while the Bund abstained from taking any action in support of the SDKPiL.58 As a result, the general strike proclaimed by the SDKPiL turned out to be little more than an isolated protest demonstration which,

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after the disaster at Puławy, became a further source of political embar­ rassment for the party. Cracks in the Party Leadership The events of late April and early May and the role of the SDKPiL in them marked the beginning of a series of disagreements between the party leaders in emigration and those who were actively involved in the King­ dom, represented by Jogiches-Tyszka and Dzierżyński respectively. Un­ fortunately, both Western and communist historians have tended to ex­ aggerate the extent of these misunderstandings by dignifying them with expressions such as “power struggle” and “ideological differences.” 59 In reality, the problems within the ruling elite were caused for the most part by a breakdown in communication between the party organizations in the Kingdom and in emigration. Tyszka and Luxemburg complained that they had not been informed of Dzierżyński’s intentions either from Puł­ awy at the end of April or from Warsaw after the May Day massacre.60 Even if there had been time for such consultation, there was still the mat­ ter of sending conspiratorial correspondence abroad, much of which was intercepted by the Okhrana and never reached its destination.61 In the absence of detailed information from the Kingdom, Luxemburg and Ty­ szka became increasingly worried that the party had embarked upon a policy of “adventurism,” which is how they viewed the Puławy fiasco and Warski’s appeal for arming the workers.62 To reestablish vital con­ tact with the members of the leadership in emigration, Dzierżyński agreed to meet with Tyszka and Marchlewski in Kraków in the middle of May.63 Apparently this conference was successful because the issues of Puławy and May 4 were never again raised by any of its participants. However, as soon as Dzierżyński returned to Warsaw, a new disagree­ ment occurred, this time regarding the relations of the SDKPiL with the other socialist organizations active in the Kingdom—namely, the PPS and the Jewish Bund. It began when the KZ submitted to Dzierżyński for pub­ lication in the illegal party press a typically vehement polemic against the PPS. Surprisingly, Dzierżyński refused to publish such an abrasive procla­ mation because, as he declared in a letter of May 26, it “would raise a wall between our workers and the workers of the PPS. . . .We do not need slogans and appeals, but clarifications and explanations.”64 This

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dramatic .shift in Dzierżyński’s tactics toward the PPS resulted not from a keen perception of the growing strength of radical forces within that party with which the SDKPiL could ally itselfvRàther, Dzierżyński believed that the SDKPiL, by engaging in a more polite form of polemics, could draw into its ranks dissatisfied workers from a PPS that appeared dis­ oriented by the course of revolutionary events.65 In any case, it is ob­ vious that Dzierżyński had failed to communicate his changed views re­ garding the PPS before his letter of May 26. Therefore, his blunt refusal to publish the diatribe came as quite a shock to the party leaders abroad. Referring to Dzierżyńskfs letter of May 26 as “hot air,” Rosa Luxem­ burg planned a “formal response” and encouraged Tyszka to do the same.66 The matter of tactics toward the PPS, however, became quickly sub­ merged in a more serious dispute over relations with the Jewish Bund. As early as January 1905, Tyszka had sought means to isolate the PPS diplo­ matically. In this effort, he turned to the Bund with which the SDKPiL had traditionally enjoyed relatively cordial relations. At first, Tyzska was willing to make significant conccessons to the Bund. For example, he was prepared to recognize the Bund’s claim to an exclusive right to organize Jewish workers throughout the Russian empire. In exchange, the Bund would be expected to support SKDPiL’s bid to eliminate representation of the PPS in future all-Russian socialist conferences and to gain an equal­ ity of delegates with the PPS in the Polish section of the Second Inter­ national.67 The suggestion of making such far-reaching concessions to the Bund was quickly vetoed, not only by Dzierżyński,68 but also by Rosa Lux­ emburg who shared Dzierżyński^ view that the SDKPiL’s agitation among Jewish workers should be continued.69 Dzierżyński, moreover, was still furious with the Bund because of its failure to support the SDKPiL in its hour of need after the May Day massacre. Tyszka, however, continued to press ahead for a more limited agreement. Finally, in the middle of July, Tyszka arrived in Warsaw to negotiate together with Hanecki a provisional agreement with delegates of the Central Committee of the Bund. The draft agreement recorded the recognition by the Bund of the SDKPiL’s position on the Polish question. In return, the SDKPiL accepted in prin­ ciple that national organizations within a future all-Russian party be ac­ corded “autonomy and freedom inside the general party” for social

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democratic work among the proletariat of different nationalities. The agreement also prohibited both sides from entering negotiations with the PPS and provided for mutual support of each other’s mandates at inter­ national congresses.70 Despite the limited and vague nature of the concessions made to the Bund at the conference, Dzierżyński was outraged. It also appears that he may have been misled by Hanecki about Tyszka’s role in the negotia­ tions, especially since Hanecki had already developed a strong personal antagonism towards Tyszka. Under the impression that Tyszka had over­ stepped his authority and had tried to include in the agreement even greater concessions to the Bund, Dzierżyński reported to the KZ that Tyszka had “behaved so scandalously, that it is difficult to believe that he would do something like this.” 71 Disgusted and dismayed by such unjustified accusa­ tions, Tyszka resigned temporarily from his editorial work on party publi­ cations. Fortunately, the intervention of Luxemburg and Leder soon brought about a reconciliation between Tyszka and Dzierżyński. Still, Dzierżyński clearly emerged the victor from this confrontation; the ZG subsequently renounced the draft agreement, citing the failure of the Bund to come out formally on the issue of an independent Polish state.72 The Łódź Uprising As the SDKPiL leadership exhausted its energies in internal disputes and futile diplomacy, events in the city of Łódź took a dangerous turn. This textile center in the heart of the Kingdom had not existed prior to the nineteenth century; by the beginning of the twentieth century, it was second only to Warsaw in population. The rapid demographic growth of Łódź had far outstripped the city’s ability to provide adequate housing, education, medical care and law enforcement for its new inhabitants. Moreover, the industrial workers of Łódź, who made up a vast majority of the city’s population, were generally paid lower wages and worked longer hours than in other industrial centers in the Kingdom. Labor unrest in Łódź reached a boiling point already in 1892 when bread riots led to bloody confrontations between workers and police. Not surprisingly, Łódź also became one of the most volatile centers of revolution in 1905; as previously mentioned, its textile industry was severely depressed, un­ employment in the city was high, and food prices were soaring.

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The immediate origins of the Łódź uprising of 1905 can be found in the May Day strikes and demonstrations which involved slightly less than half of the city’s labor force. After May 1, tens of thousands of workers remained off the job in order to force their employers to agree to new wage demands.73 When these demands were rejected, the workers re­ sorted to various forms of terrorism and eventually to the occupation of the factories. The Łódź industrialists, most of whom were polonized Germans and Jews, were quick to appeal for the armed intervention of the authorities, which resulted in several bloody skirmishes between the workers and police.74 As the victims of these skirmishes mounted, the funeral demonstrations originally organized as signs of peaceful protest began to assume a mass, revolutionary character. On June 18, one such demonstration of five thousand workers was attacked by a patrol of Cos­ sacks and dragoons. In a preventive measure, the authorities then spirited away from the city morgue the bodies of two Jewish workers killed in the recent clash. Instead of a relatively manageable funeral demonstra­ tion, the authorities were subsequently rewarded with a march of seventy thousand outraged workers ending in a far more violent confrontation in which thirty-one persons lost their lives.75 As the violence escalated in Łódź, all of the socialist parties—including the SDKPiL—failed to gauge accurately the mood of the workers. For example, on June 23, the Łódź Committee of the SDKPiL issued an ap­ peal for a general strike, when already on the previous evening workers were constructing barricades and arming themselves with everything from rocks and bottles to small sidearms.76 The spontaneous uprising of the Łódź workers, the first of its kind in the history of the Russian empire, never had a chance of success. After three days of bitter fighting, twenty thousand additional Russian soldiers were brought in to restore order, and the primitive weapons of the workers were no match for the machine guns of the regular army.77 As far as the socialist parties were concerned, the proclamation of a state of seige in Łódź on June 26 and the repressive measures that followed resulted in the disorganization of their activities in the city; indeed, it took until October before they could fully recover. On the other hand, the Łódź uprising did force the city organizations of the PPS, Bund and SDKPiL to enter into limited agreements of coopera­ tion with each other. The PPS and the Bund agreed in principle to mutual consultation during the course of the uprising, while the SDKPiL and the

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Bund created a joint strike committee and joint self-defense units.78 Even this local cooperation, however, proved only temporary. There is no evidence to indicate that Dzierżyński had any influence on the decisions taken by the Łódź Committee in the hectic days before and during the uprising. Remaining in Warsaw during the so-called “June Days,” Dzierżyński was, however, responsible for coordinating the party’s efforts to organize solidarity strikes throughout the Kingdom in support of the Łódź insurgents. The range of these solidarity strikes was impres­ sive; beginning in Warsaw, Częstochowa, and the Dąbrowa Basin, they soon spread to Lublin, Kielce, Radom, Puławy and Białystok.79 These strikes did not alter the course of events in Łódź, but they did serve to unite the SDKPiL organizations throughout the Kingdom in a coordin­ ated action. Dzierżyński did not venture to Łódź until July 20, that is, after the city organization was already in a complete state of-disarray.80 During his brief stay in Łódź, Dzierżyński did manage to pick up many of the pieces. The Łódź Committee was reconstituted with more experienced members, which, in effect, increased the domination of this local execu­ tive body by the party intelligentsia. To ensure a greater degree of cen­ tral control, Józef Unszlicht was sent from Warsaw to join the committee and serve as a liaison with the ZG. Inasmuch as the growth of the Łódź organization in the first half of 1905 had outstripped the organizational capacities of the party, Dzierżyński initiated the establishment of party schools in each district of the city for the training of agitators among the workers.81 At the same time, he called upon the party literati abroad to make use of their close contacts with Geman Social Democracy for aid in agitation and propaganda among the approximately sixty thousand German workers in the city and the suburbs of Łódź.82 This eventually resulted in the publication by the Łódź organization of a German-langu­ age journal, Vorwärts, in addition to Do walki for the city’s Polish workers. The SDKPiL During Dzierżyński’s Imprisonment For the next few months after the Łódź uprising, the SDKPiL went through a transitional phase forced upon it by events and by the arrest of its principle political leader in the Kingdom. Perhaps because he felt circumstances demanded a visible assertion of his authority, Dzierżyński

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decided at this time to come out of his conspiratorial shell.83 Soon after his return to Warsaw from Łódź, he broke with his standard practice of avoiding large meetings and decided to preside over an interdistrict con­ ference of the Warsaw city organization which was held in a forest near the village of Dęby Wielkie outside of Warsaw. As the forty or more dele­ gates gathered, one of the participants, Bronisław Fijałek, noted that among them were several whom he had never seen before.84 Indeed, the evidence indicates that the authorities had received information from agents inside the SDKPiL that what was taking place in the forest near Dęby Wielkie that afternoon was not an innocent picnic, but a confer­ ence of a revolutionary party 8S Dzierżyński had just finished reading a report on the political situation when the delegates saw a detachment of cavalry approaching. According to all accounts-including that of the police—Dzierżyński quickly demand­ ed that everything that might compromise the individual delegates, from illegal literature to a revolver, be given to him.86 Dzierżyński was arrested under the name of Jan Krzeczkowski and several other leaders of the Warsaw organization were also taken; they included Wincenty Matuszew­ ski, Teodor Breslauer, Daniel Elbaum and Stefania Przedecka. The Social Democrats were first transported to the nearby town of Mińsk Mazowiecki for temporary detention in a three-room cottage. The next morning the soldiers guarding the cottage permitted some of the local inhabitants to bring food to the prisoners. Security was so lax that a local baker was able to offer an exchange of his professional attire so that Dzierżyński could escape. The baker’s offer was inspired by Józef Krasny who, having heard of the capture of his comrades, waited nearby with an armed social democratic battle squad from Warsaw. “Dzierżyński understood why I was there,” Krasny recalled, “but he point-blank refused to escape.” 87 According to those who were with him inside the cottage, Dzierżyński felt that under the circumstances, his flight would have been a dishonorable abandonment of his comrades.88 In the middle of the second night, the captives were taken to Warsaw and individually inter­ rogated at the Pawiak detention prison. Dzierżyński, once his identity was discovered, was transferred to the Tenth Pavilion of the Warsaw Citadel. Imprisonment provided Dzierżyński with a much needed rest and for a time he seemed almost relieved by his new predicament. “It is not so bad,” he wrote to his brother Ignacy, “as you see, I now have time to think.”89

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However, by claiming that all of the compromising literature and the revolver belonged to him in order to affect the early release of his com­ rades, Dzierżyński ensured that his own imprisonment would be long, followed by certain Siberian exile. Soon he grew restless in the Tenth Pavilion, running from corner to corner of his five by seven step cell for exercise.90 By the middle of October he was miserably bored, his case had not yet been heard, and he was kept completely isolated from his fellow prisoners. While Dzierżyński was in prison, a number of his colleagues assumed his various responsibilities. Although the party held together during his absence, Dzierżyński and his ability to coordinate the entirety of party work were sorely missed. The events of the late summer and early autumn of 1905 particularly illuminated the need for a strong guiding hand. On August 19, the tsarist government announced its plan for a consultative assembly—an imperial Duma—which had been prepared under the super­ vision of the Minister of Internal Affairs, Aleksandr Bulygin. Intended as a concession to moderate liberal opinion, the so-called Bulgyin Duma failed for a variety of reasons to achieve the desired effect of stabilizing the domestic situation.91 In the Kingdom of Poland, the SDKPiL was most vocal in its opposition to what Rosa Luxemburg called “the con­ stitution of the knout,” and it adopted the tactic of active boycott of the projected “comedy of elections.” 92 All three socialist parties in the Kingdom organized separate protest strikes against the Bulygin Duma. Despite the lack of coordination of these efforts, the government reimposed martial law in Warsaw on August 23. A few days later, it appointed George Skalon as governor-general, a man who made a public pledge to rule the “Vistula Land” with a strong hand.93 As the Kingdom faced the prospect of a repression comparable to that which occurred after the 1863 insurrection, events in Moscow and St. Petersburg led to an appreciable rise in the political temperature through­ out the empire, forcing the temporary capitulation of tsarism to the revo­ lution in October. The strike movement in Russia itself, which had subsided considerably during the summer, flared up anew in the second half of September with a nationwide strike of printing workers. On October 10, Moscow factory workers proclaimed a general strike of solidarity with the demands of the printers and this strike soon spread to St. Petersburg. On October 19, the

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railroad workers joined in, and in a few days the strike had spread to all lines in Russia. The great October strike immediately embraced the Po­ lish lands. Already by October 26, the strij^had reached the peak of its intensity in Warsaw.94 During these days of the greatest mass strike in Polish history to that point, Rosa Luxemburg lamented the inability of the party to replace Dzierżyński,95 and she began to plot her own de­ parture from Berlin to Warsaw. On October 30, 1905, in the face of the desperate situation through­ out the empire, Nicholas II issued a document subsequently known as the “October Manifesto.” The October Manifesto granted civil liberties, broadened the franchise for elections to the Duma, and gave the Duma legislative powers. As the tsar intended, the united front of opposition in Russia quickly began to disintegrate after the promulgation of the October Manifesto; on November 1, the railroads in Russia began operat­ ing again. In the Kingdom of Poland, on the other hand, the general political strike continued well into November, primarily because the socialist parties were united in their demand for constitutional guarantees of the civil rights promised on paper in the October Manifesto. At the same time they were determined to win a general amnesty. Taking advantage of the virtual abandonment of the streets of Warsaw by the police, they organized a huge demonstration on November 1 in front of the Ratusz municipal prison on Theater Square in order to intimidate the authori­ ties into freeing the political prisoners. Cossacks were called in to dis­ perse the mob in a massacre that left forty-four dead,96 but the tsar was forced by similar incidents throughout the empire to the new conces­ sion of a political amnesty on November 3. Over the next three days 1151 political prisoners were released in Warsaw alone,97 among them Feliks Dzierżyński. The “Days o f Freedom ” Dzierżyński was freed together with Maksymilian Horwitz (Henryk Wałecki), a leading figure in the Warsaw organization of the PPS. As they left the Tenth Pavilion en route to separate destinations, the two men briefly discussed the current political situation. “Dzierżyński had only one thought,” Horwitz recalled. “Not to believe in their constitution—no

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delusions—in any event, not to legalize ourselves.”98 Such was the policy the SDKPiL adopted in relation to the October Manifesto. On the day of Dzierżyński’s release, the Warsaw organization had called a conference to discuss the tactics of the party in view of the situation. “It was even­ ing,” Krasny recalled. “In view of the fact that the conference was being held on the first floor of the building next to the street, it was decided not to light the r oom. . . . Although it was dark when Dzierżyński arrived, everyone knew he was there.”99 As the room burst into applause, Dzier­ żyński took over the podium and lost no time in reasserting his author­ ity over the organization. According to Krasny, Dzierżyński then called upon the party to focus its efforts upon the arming of the workers for a final reckoning with tsarism.100 Although Dzierżyński had not been in communication with Rosa Luxemburg, she too had come to a similar con­ clusion. “Our slogan must be—Jusqu ’a l ’outrance! ” she told the Men­ shevik leaders Martov and Dan, when informed of their plans to propa­ gate the tactics of electoral agitation and the legalization of labor organi­ zations.101 Subsequent events seemed to confirm the correctness of the stance taken by the SDKPiL in relation to the October Manifesto, in essence vindicating the party’s distrust of the tsar’s intentions as well as its belief that the October Manifesto was not the end of the revolution but the signal for a broader struggle. The so-called “Days of Freedom,” the char­ acterization in Russian revolutionary literature of the period between the proclamation of the October Manifesto and the Moscow uprising of December, were particularly short-lived in the Kingdom of Poland. During the first ten days of November all of the major political parités briefly surfaced from the underground, each openly organizing a series of mass meetings and political demonstrations. Fearful of the real possibility of a general uprising, the authorities on November 6 forbade further street demonstrations and, upon the urging of the governor-general Skalon, the entire Kingdom of Poland was placed under martial law on November 10.102 Soon thereafter, the legal socialist presses were closed, followed by mass arrests on the evening of November 14-15.103 “ Freedom was promised on paper,” raged the social democratic leadership, “but on the streets the criminals of the government fire upon and murder unarmed people.” 104 The events of October and November presented the SDKPiL with both the opportunity and necessity to refine its organizational structure and

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clarify its political program. The “Days of Freedom,” brief as they were in the Kingdom, nevertheless witnessed a ąe^t and greater influx of mem­ bers into the SDKPiL, to which Dzierżyński responded with more hier­ archical control and central coordination. The factory cell, at the head of which stood a directorate, now became the basic unit of the party. The cell directorates were given definite organizational responsibilities, such as influencing factory delegations, agitation and propaganda, main­ taining ties with district committees to which they were subordinate, and the collection of dues and contributions. The district committees them­ selves were a new creation whose primary task was to supervise party work within a particular district of a given city. The city committees remained at the top of the hierarchy of the local organizations of the party, but now their authority was expanded to include entire regions.105 Thus, with these structural changes, the transition of the SDKPiL from a political sect to a mass party was basically complete. At the same time Dzierżyński sought to preserve strict discipline within the ranks and establish the unquestioned authority of the Main Directorate over the entire organization. Under his direction, the ZG was transformed into a kind of Politburo that permitted within its narrow membership internal discussion and differences of opinion, but which insisted upon an unswerving obedience from subordinate institutions and activists once its decisions had been reached. A case in point was Dzierżyński’s defense of Tyszka, his rival in the ZG, at a session of the Warsaw Committee during the “Days of Freedom.” At the session, the young Tadeusz Radwański, having expressed his impatience with Tyszka in the matter of publishing a legal newspaper, was greeted with Dzierżyński^ shaking fist. “What is this?” Dzierżyński thundered. “Do you intended to break party discip­ line?” 106 As the political struggle in the Russian empire intensified, Dzierżyński called and prepared a conference of the entire organization in the King­ dom, which met in Warsaw from November 28 to 30, 1905. In line with Dzierżyński^ concept of party organization, the conference was domin­ ated from start to finish by the ruling elite: i.e., by himself, Leder, Hanecki and Warski, all members of the ZG, and by Tyszka and Marchlewski, who represented the party editorial board.107 In the interest of clarifi­ cation and precision at this crucial moment for the revolution, the con­ ference decided to publish the program of the SDKPiL. Many of the

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points reflected traditional social democratic demands—the establishment of a democratic republic, universal suffrage and direct elections, the sepa­ ration of church and state, constitutional guarantees of civil freedoms, etc. However, in stating these demands, the SDKPiL decidely separated itself from the emerging thesis of the Mensheviks that autocracy could be overthrown by parliamentary resolution. In the resolutions of the con­ ference it is clear that the party leadership already viewed the liberal bourgeoisie not as a possible ally, but as a new enemy.108 More revealing, however, was a revised position taken by the confer­ ence on the national question. Point Three of the program demanded “equality of nationalities in the Russian Empire with the guaranteed free­ dom of cultural development: national schools and freedom to use native tongues, national autonomy for Poland.” 109 It is noteworthy that no mention was made of autonomy for Lithuania, which had been included in earlier versions of the program. This suggests that the SDKPiL leader­ ship now considered that a future all-Russian congress should decide upon a programmatic postulate for Lithuania where not only the SDKPiL, but the Bund and the RSDRP, not to mention the new Lithuanian Social Democratic Party, were also active. More significant was the formulation of the point concerning universal suffrage which would apply not only to elections to an all-Russian parliament but also “to a national Sejm and to all representative institutions.” 110 Never before had the SDKPiL been so explicit on the political form that “autonomy” would assume in the future structure of the Russian state. By advocating such a degree of national self-government, the party sought-to identify itself with the national as well as social aspirations of the Polish working class.111 Acting as the recorder for the conference, Dzierżyński noted an un­ published (for conspiratorial reasons) resolution regarding the party’s agitation in the army: “Our present work among the troops must aim at organizing the soldiers for an armed uprising.” 112 This had become a major goal of the revolutionary parties throughout the empire. Indeed, they were partially successful in their agitation among the armed forces, as demonstrated by the growing incidents of insubordination and out­ right revolt (the most famous of which was the mutiny on the battleship Potemkin in the Black Sea in May 1905). However, they failed in their ultimate goal of neutralizing the armed forces in the event of a popular uprising. As the Moscow uprising of December was to show, the continued

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loyalty of the Russian military to the tsar was the key factor in determin­ ing the outcome of the revolution of 1905. The December showdown between the'S'Ùte and the forces of revolu­ tion, from which many Russian liberals had already disassocited them­ selves after the proclamation of the October Manifesto, began on Novem­ ber 29 with a strike of post and telegraph workers. Their main demand was freedom for trade union activity. The Bolsheviks, backed by other radical socialist parties in the empire, and especially by the SDKPiL,113 called upon the workers to continue the strike in order to overthrow the tsarist government and replace it with a democratic republic. Mean­ while, the government, which had long awaited a chance to counter­ attack, arrested the members of the short-lived Petersburg Soviet on December 16. The center of the revolutionary movement then shifted to Moscow, where a general strike began on December 20 and was quickly transformed into a struggle on the barricades. In the Kingdom of Poland, the authorities took preventive measures to limit the effect of anticipated appeals from the socialist parties for a general strike in support of the Moscow insurgents. Already on the night of December 19-20, the editors and workers of the legal dailies of the PPS and SDKPiL were arrested. The next day martial law was reimposed throughout the entire Kingdom.114 These measures, along with the strike­ breaking activities of the National Democrats,115 prevented the general strike from achieving the range and intensity expected by the radicals. Although work was completely halted in the factories of Warsaw and Łódź, troops lined the streets to prevent the closing of shops.116 Mean­ while, after several days of heavy fighting, the uprising in Moscow was crushed on December 28. In the Kingdom of Poland, however, the strike continued until January 4, 1906, when the SDKPiL, PPS and the Bund called upon the industrial workers to return to their jobs.117 Once again the Polish workers were the last to retire from the struggle. Dzierżyński, the SDKPiL and the Revolution o f 1905: A Balance Sheet The 1905 Revolution was considered by the ruling elite in the SDKPiL a vindication of its uncompromising policies of thorough-going inter­ nationalism and opposition to agitation among the workers of the King­ dom for participation in the national struggle to resurrect an independent

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Polish state. The PPS under the leadership of Piłsudski and Przedświt, the SDKPiL argued with some justification, had blinded itself towards revolu­ tionary possibilities in Russia by concentrating all of its efforts on a reso­ lution of the Polish question. In contrast, Polish Social Democracy, having hitched its wagon to the Russian revolutionary star from the very begin­ ning of its activity, had accurately gauged the course of historical devel­ opment of Polish lands. It was not a national uprising that had brought about the prospect of the social and national liberation of the Polish working class, the Social Democrats maintained, but a revolution em­ bracing the entire Russian empire of which the Kingdom of Poland was an organic part. Only by seeing this revolution through to a victorious conclusion in common struggle with the Russian proletariat could the Polish workers guarantee their final emancipation from the double yoke of Russian autocracy and native capitalism. A major problem remained, however, that was not foreseen by the ruling elite of the SDKPiL. What if the revolution ended in defeat rather than in the victory anticipated by the party leadership? Although the resolution of this cardinal question was still hanging in the balance at the end of 1905, the Polish Social Democrats had not developed con­ tingency plans for the dramatic reversal in the revolutionary tide that was to come. The inability of the SDKPiL to adjust to the emerging post-revolutionary realities would soon become the source of untold misery for the party and for its political future. The revolution of 1905 was also, to a great extent, a vindication of the organizational methods imposed on the party by Feliks Dzierżyński. Only a centralized organization with the decision-making process concentrated at the top could have guided the party through the fluid and tumultuous events of 1905. Central coordination and hieararchial control also had served to keep the party together in a chaotic political climate that en­ couraged the unrestrained growth of the party and a dramatic expansion of its activities. It did not occur to Dzierżyński nor to any of the SDKPiL leadership that there might be an inherent contradiction between the con­ spiratorial principles and the reality of a mass party, which the SDKPiL had become by the end of 1905. With the anticipated victory of the revo­ lution and constitutionally guaranteed forums for legal political activity, it was assumed that the party would automatically democratize itself. Until that time, however, conspiracy, discipline, and centralism would

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remain the guiding principles of party organization. Like the political doctrines of the party elite, Dzierżyński^ system of organization became a prisoner of past success, remaining irifte'Äble in the face of changed conditions. The fortunes of Feliks Dzierżyński, whose control of the party organi­ zation in the Kingdom was undisputed already in 1904, were almost destined to rise with the outbreak of revolution Russian Poland. He was indeed a fanatic of that revolution, channelling his creative energy into tireless organizational work. On the strength of the emerging mass organi­ zation, Dzierżyński built a base of unrivaled power and influence. Even the ambitious Tyszka, Strobel’s “all-powerful dictator,” was forced to accommodate himself to the real locus of power in the party. If indeed there was a struggle for power between the two men, Dzierżyński had clearly outmaneuvered Tyszka long before 1905. Through the very nature of his activity and his assumption of a neverending list of “technical” responsibilities, Dzierżyński had placed effective control of the party into the hands of an apparatus in which his own presence was everywhere perceptible. Thus it was Dzierżyński, rather than Luxemburg or Tyszka, who was recognized by the rank and file in the Kingdom as the leader of the party during the revolution. In short, he had become, as Warski re­ called, the “soul” of the SDKPiL.118

CHAPTER VII BETWEEN REVOLUTION AND REACTION, 1906-1907

The October Manifesto offered new possibilities for political activity in the Russian empire. The suppression of the Moscow uprising, to be sure, determined that the ground rules of legal political action would be set by the tsar and his ministers and not by a constituent assembly. Yet the real if limited concessions that were in fact made served to create a political atmosphere which was fundamentally different from that exist­ ing before the revolution. Each of the political parties active in the empire, particularly those of the radical left, were therefore faced with critical choices in the immediate post-revolutionary years: whether to emerge from the underground and to what extent; whether to participate in a parliamentary experiment in which the autocracy remained as the chief technician; and whether to adapt their organizational structures to legal and semi-legal conditions. Initially, the political leadership of the SDKPiL chose to interpret the failure of the Moscow uprising as a temporary setback after which the revolution would surge forward with new force. For this reason it was decided to boycott elections to the first Duma and to oppose the “delu­ sions” of Russian liberals—and many Mensheviks and Social Revolution­ aries as well—of transforming the Duma from within into a western-style parliament. In both the interpretation of the further course of the revo­ lution and in the adoption of corresponding tactics, the SDKPiL’s position 147

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was very close to that of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, making possible a rap­ prochement followed by an informal alliance. The SDKPiL also joined Lenin in his abandonment of the boycott^after the dissolution of the first Duma and in his decision to use parliamentary activity as a forum for revolutionary agitation. In contrast to Lenin, however, the SDltPiL was not prepared to go beyond this shift in tactics towards the Duma once the revolution reached the phase of denouement. Always the realist, Lenin was to aruge that a revolutionary party had to take into consideration the existing social conditions in the empire if it wished to broaden its political base. It should therefore appeal to the non-urban masses who made up a sub­ stantial majority of the population; it should reject the sectarian ap­ proach to non-party workers, leaving a door open to them primarily through trade union activity; and it should identify itself, however vague­ ly, with the national aspirations of the non-Russian sections of the popu­ lation. On all these issues, the SDKPiL was much less flexible, opting for the continuation of strict conspiratorial tactics, rigid organizational dis­ cipline, and “proletarian internationalist” positions that had characterized its recent past. The political and tactical “hard-line” of the SDKPiL was undoubtedly influenced by the unique and tumultuous political environ­ ment of the Kingdom of Poland and by the social and national com­ position of the party itself. But it was also determined to a large extent by the character of its leadership, of which Feliks Dzierżyński remained the key figure, especially after the arrest of Luxemburg and Tyszka in early 1906. Indeed, the transitional years of 1906 and 1907 witnessed the peak of Dzierzynski’s influence and authority in Polish Social Demo­ cracy. It was no mere coincidence that these were also the peak years of the SDKPiL’s political influence in the Kingdom of Poland. It emerged from the revolution as a mass party of forty thousand strong, only slightly behind the PPS in total membership. In the process, it had become a truly multi-national working class party. With the important exception of Dzierżyński, its leadership still consisted mainly of polonized Jewish intellectuals, but its rank and file now included substantial proportions of German (25%) and Jewish workers (5%) in addition to the Polish maj­ ority (70%). Artisans and craftsmen continued to play an important role in the social composition of the party, but they were now clearly over­ shadowed by the recent mass influx of factory workers. As a matter of

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principle, the SDKPiL did not seek to extend its agitation to other seg­ ments of the population, particularly the peasantry. The party also adopt­ ed an unsympathetic attitude toward non-party workers, refusing to admit them into trade unions sponsored by the SDKPiL. Unfortunately, these positions-in addition to the party’s traditional stance on the Polish question—helped to insure that the mass base of the party, Dzierżyński’s principle achievement, would be short-lived once the regime recconsolidated its authority and ushered in a period of reaction. The Political Situation in the Kingdom o f Poland A fter the Moscow Uprising The outcome of the Moscow uprising brought an end to the equili­ brium between the old order and revolution in Russia that had existed after the proclamation of the October Manifesto. It'was the major step in reestablishing the authority of the government in the urban centers of Russia, although the turbulent countryside remained to be pacified. Still, the failure of the uprising represented a dramatic turning point in Rus­ sian domestic politics and in the fortunes of the radical parties in Russia. The consequences in the Kingdom of Poland, on the other hand, were less immediately significant. In fact, the momentum of the urban-based revolutionary movement in the Kingdom continued well into 1906. Nearly half of all the strikes in the empire in 1906 were recorded in the King­ dom of Poland, and despite the threat of lockouts and the repression of the authorities, they generally resulted in victory for the workers.1 More­ over, all of the socialist parties in the Kingdom continued their rapid growth; the SDKPiL did not reach the peak of its membership until early 1907.2 These achievements gain added significance when one con­ siders that martial law was imposed on all ten provinces of the Kingdom throughout 1906 and that a system of temporary governor-generals with almost unlimited and military-instituted powers was introduced in order to crush the revolutionary movement. Already on January 27,1906, there were 4509 political prisoners in the Kingdom, or approximately 20 per­ cent of all such prisoners in the entire empire. Simultaneously, the year 1906 witnessed the revitalization of conser­ vative forces in Poland, which found its most significant manifestation in the activities of the National Democrats. Throughout 1906 the National

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Democrats under the leadership of Roman Dmowski expanded their in­ fluence among all segments of the populatipn, including the industrial \ \S labor force. By the autumn of 1906, the National Workers’ Union (NZR), sponsored by the ND leadership, had a membership of 23,000.3 Indeed, the National Democrats could count a total membership of 70,000 compaed to 55,000 for the PPS (before the split of that party at the end of 1906) and 40,000 for the SDKPiL. Not surprisingly, Dmowski’s organization quickly came into conflict with all of the socialist parties. Its acceptance of the October Manifesto had marked the complete and final defection of National Democracy from the revolutionary camp. Moreover, the strike-breaking activities of the NZR during and after the Moscow uprising were considered a virtual declaration of war by the socialist parties. In Czerwony sztandar the National Democrats were compared to “vultures on the field of battle, who fall upon the injured.”4 The year 1906, therefore, was marked by a pronounced polarization of Polish society that in the end led to armed skirmishes between the battle squads of the National Democrats and those of the socialist parties. By the middle of 1906, the Kingdom of Poland stood on the verge of fratricidal warfare, which was prevented only by the reestablishment of Russian imperial authority. Hence, the Moscow uprising, having vir­ tually determined the ultimate result of the political and social struggle in Russia, only marked the beginning of that struggle in the Kingdom of Poland. What Next? The failure of the Moscow uprising required from the socialist parties in the Kingdom, including the SDKPiL, an analysis of the current poli­ tical situation for the adoption or readjustment of corresponding tactics and strategies. Such an analysis for the SDKPiL was naturally provided by Rosa Luxemburg, who arrived in Warsaw on December 30,1905, that is, after the outcome of the Moscow uprising had been decided but before the general strike in the Kingdom had run its course.s Dzierżyński had earlier discouraged the return of any of the party emigre literati because of his belief that the composition of appeals and articles was better done abroad.6 Now, however, he welcomed Luxemburg’s appearance in Warsaw

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and put her immediately to work writing daily articles for Czerwony sztandar.1 Shortly after her arrival in Warsaw, Luxemburg finished a brochure she had begun in Berlin under the title of Co dalej ? (What Next?), an analysis of the events of the revolution and the prospects for further action. Co dalej? is an extremely important document in that it laid the foundations for subsequent social democratic policies and tactics. Dzier­ żyński, in particular, treated Co dalej? as infallible gospel, later praising its author in the following manner: “She knows how to take the pulse of life, she is an incomparable analyst of current events—an objective sociologist; in place of speculation on roads of development, she sees the internal realities, the existing revolutionary possibilities.”8 The prin­ ciple message of Co dalej? was that the Moscow uprising had clearly de­ fined the forces of revolution and counterrevolution; the proletariat, abandoned by the liberal bourgeoisie, now stood alone in the ongoing political struggle. Under the changed circumstances, Luxemburg con­ cluded, the weapon of the general strike was no longer sufficient to bring about revolutionary change. It was now the obligation of social demo­ crats to explain to the masses “that the overthrow of absolutism and the realization of political freedom is possible only by a broad general uprising of the politically conscious working masses in the entire state.”9 Hence, Luxemburg and her disciples in the SDKPiL considered the failure of the Moscow uprising not the end of the current struggle, but a pause or temporary defeat in it; the revolution would soon surge for­ ward with even greater force. Such an analysis and its implementation into organizational fact by Dzierżyński more or less determined the posture the SDKPiL would take in relation to the upcoming elections to the imperial Duma. We have seen that after the announcement of the October Manifesto, the SDKPiL called for a continuation of the general strike until the “paper” promises of the government were guar­ anteed in a constitution. Although the ultimate political goal of the SDKPiL was the establishment of a democratic republic, it was not a foregone conclusion that the party would refuse to participate in elec­ tions to the imperial Duma. However, the suspicions of the SDKPiL and other socialist parties regarding the sincerity of the government proved well-founded when during the middle of the bloody struggle in Moscow, on December 24,1905, the government published its first electoral ordinance.

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Even'from a moderate, not to mention a radical, point of view, the electoral law was seriously flawed. It now became clear that the promise of voting rights to all classes of the population contained in the October Manifesto did not entail universal manhood suffrage. By granting voting rights only to workers from factories with crews of at least fifty, the electoral law disenfranchised millions of workers. Furthermore, the elec­ tions to the Duma would be both unequal and indirect. The electorate was divided into four curias which voted not for delegates to the Duma, but for electors. The ratio of the number of electors to the number of eligible voters varied according to curia. In the landed curia the ratio was 1:2000, in the so-called “urban” curia (of the urban propertied classes) 1:4000, in the peasants’ curia 1:30,000, and in the workers’ curia 1: 90,000.10 The electoral law was obviously designed to produce a con­ servative and docile majority in the Duma, and it was such a travesty of democratic principles that it is hardly surprising that none of the social­ ist parties in the Kingdom chose to participate, particularly under con­ ditions of martial law in which real freedom of speech, press, unions and assembly did not exist. For its part, the SDKPiL under Dzierżyński’s direction turned to the tactic of “active boycott” of the “illegal” elections to the first Duma,11 a strategy the party had employed in its agitation against the so-called Bulygin constitution the previous summer. This meant not only a refusal to participate in the elections, but a commitment to disrupt the election meetings of participating parties such as the National Democrats. Because the PPS and Bund also decided in favor of the boycott, it was immensely successful in the workers’ curia when the first round of elections was held on March 28,1906. Of the 114 Warsaw factories granted the franchise under the electoral ordinance, 103 boycotted the elections.12 In Piotrków province only workers from fifteen to twenty factories out of an eligible five hun­ dred participated in the elections.13 Nevertheless, the boycott of the elections by the socialist parties left the field open to the National Demo­ crats, who eventually dominated the Polish delegation to the first Duma. During the campaign the SDKPiL press repeatedly condemned the Na­ tional Democrats as “parasites” of the revolution and “traitors” to the nation, who, by agreeing to participate in elections while martial law was still in force, were in essence attempting “to unite our country with the Cossack Duma of the tsarist government.” 14

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Merger with the RSDRP The analysis by the SDKPiL of the significance of the Moscow uprising, the party’s stated conviction that only an armed uprising could overthrow the tsarist government, its view that the liberal bourgeoisie constituted not a potentially ally but a new enemy, and its decision to boycott the elections to the first Duma were all nearly identical to the positions adopted by Lenin and his followers. Hence, 1906 witnessed the process of a growing entente between the SDKPiL and the Bolshevik faction of the RSDRP; of course, this was also a result of a deterioration in relations between the SDKPiL and the Mensheviks. The main reason was the Men­ sheviks’ apparent willingness to cooperate with Russian liberals of the Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets), a strategy based on their theoretical evaluation of the events of 1905 as a bourgeois-democratic revolution. This frequently led the Mensheviks into positions diametri­ cally opposed to those taken by the SDKPiL. The best example was the issue of the Bulygin Duma in which the Mensheviks seriously considered participation in a future election campaign. Any kind of elections, they reasoned, offered wide possibilities for agitation. The SDKPiL, however, interpreted the Menshevik strategy as “opportunism” and a willingness to compromise social democratic principles. From this time on, the SDKPiL stayed out of the Russian factional quarrel entirely or supported proposals for mediation in an international forum. Ironically, the Menshevik leader, Julius Martov, attributed the shift in the position of the SDKPiL at this time to the arrest of Dzierżyński, whom he considered a decided “anti-Leninist.” 15 While it is true that after Dzierżyński^ arrest, relations with the Mensheviks reached a criti­ cal phase, the reasons for this were based on issues, not personalities. The SDKPiL’s subsequent negative evaluation of the October Manifesto and its belief that only an armed uprising could bring an end to Russian autocracy further separated it from the Mensheviks, who leaned towards participation in elections to the first Duma. By this time, of course, Dzier­ żyński had been released from prison and had resumed his leadership of the party organization. Despite fundamental differences in political strategy, the revolution gave rise to a strong grass-roots movement for unification that affected all social democratic organizations in the empire. As a result, a united

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central committee and an editorial board comprising both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were formed in late January 1906 with the aim of making preparations for a unification congress. By.4he winter of 1905-1906, the SDKPiL too was prepared for unification. Believing that the political unity of the proletariat in the entire Russian state was already an ac­ complished fact, the SDKPiL publicly endorsed the concept of organi­ zational unity in order to consolidate forces for the upcoming struggle.16 On the other hand, the conditions for merger advanced by the SDKPiL in 1903 remained basically unchanged. The most important of these conditions was the demand that the future “Unity” Congress of the RSDRP recognize “the independence of Polish Social Democracy in all internal matters of agitation and organization in the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania.” The SDKPiL withdrew its previous condition of revising the program of the RSDRP on the national question, but it did insist that the RSDRP recognize the right of the Kingdom of Poland to autonomy, which, by implication at least, was a repudiation of the postulate of an independent Polish state.17 According to Dzierżyński^ later report to the Fifth Congress of the SDKPiL in June 1906, the Main Directorate (ZG) had already reached an agreement regarding provisions of the merger with the united Central Committee of the RSDRP before the Unity Congress convened in Stock­ holm in mid-April.18 The outstanding issue that remained was at what point in the agenda of the congress the merger of the national parties with the RSDRP would be approved. As it turned out, the Menshevik majority at the congress successfully delayed the matter until the twentysecond session.19 The Mensheviks feared that upon entering the common party, the national parties—particuarly the SDKPiL, the Latvian Social Democrats, and even part of the Bund—would provide the Bolsheviks with a majority in the voting on certain key resolutions. Such a move naturally infuriated Dzierżyński and the leadership of the SDKPiL. As he later explained: ‘The Mensheviks were mainly concerned that we, having our delegates at the congress, would be able to influence its deci­ sions. Therefore, they opposed accepting us at the beginning of the con­ gress itself, apparently because we would oppose with all our strength the adoption of their decisions. . . . Thus they did not accept us until after their resolutions had passed.”20 The delegation of the SDKPiL to the Stockholm “Unity” Congress of the RSDRP, which met from April 10 to 25,1906, was led by Dzierżyński

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and also included Warski and Hanecki. Rosa Luxemburg had planned to attend as a non-voting representative of the German Social Demo­ cratic Party, but was arrested on March 4 and imprisoned in the Tenth Pavilion of the Warsaw Citadel. At about the same time, Tyszka was also arrested. Since the delegation of the SDKPiL was assured an advisory voice at the congress, it did participate in the heated debates at Stock­ holm. Like the Bolsheviks, the SDKPiL opposed a Menshevik resolution allowing for social democratic participation in the last round of elections to the first Duma. Speaking for his party, Dzierżyński told the congress, “In Poland the entire proletariat stands for a boycott of the Duma. The tactics of the Menshevik faction are well known to our workers. All organi­ zed workers are opposed to these tactics and not one worker has expres­ sed himself in favor of them.”21 Despite this and other criticism, the Menshevik position was approved. Dzierżyński, however, took advantage of the independence guaranteed to the SDKPiL in the merger agreement and declared that the resolution in favor of electoral participation passed by the congress was not binding on the activities of Polish Social Demo­ crats.22 When the debate on the merger of the national parties with the RSDRP began, Dzierżyński adamantly^ defended the territorial principle of Polish social democratic organization, arguing that as a condition of unification, the SDKPiL reserved the right to work among all nationalities living in the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania.23 In the end, the congress ac­ cepted Dzierżyński^ definition of the SDKPiL as “a territorial organi­ zation of the RSDRP which conducts work among all nationalities on its soil and directs the work of all party organizations in this territory.”24 In addition, while the SDKPiL would henceforth participate in all general party congresses and conferences and have its own representatives on the Russian central committee and editorial board, it would continue to hold its own congresses, have its own independent representative to the International Socialist Bureau and send its own delegation to interna­ tional congresses. Other Polish socialist organizations (meaning, of course, the PPS) could enter the ranks of the RSDRP only after entering the organization of the SDKPiL. Thus all of the conditions of merger that the SDKPiL made in 1903, with the exception of the revision of the postu­ late of self-determination in the Russian program, were met in 1906.25

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Dzierżyński and the Fifth Congress o f the SDKPiL The Fifth Congress of the SDKPiL, whfdKmet in Zakopane from June 18 to 24, 1906, was called, among other reasons, in order to ratify the merger negotiated with the RSDRP. Dzierżyński, as secretary of the ZG, was responsible for making the necessary preparations for the congress. Although ratification of the merger agreement by the congress was a fore­ gone conclusion, certain developments in relation to the divisive issue of the Duma forced Dzierżyński and the party leadership to give greater priority to the “two directions” in the all-Russian party. Immediately after the last round of elections to the Duma, the SDKPiL and the Men­ shevik-dominated Central Committee exchanged criticisms of their res­ pective tactics regarding the Duma, the Poles going so far as to imply that by participating in the Duma elections, the Mensheviks had aban­ doned their “main responsibility for the political education of the pro­ letariat.”26 Even more irritating to the leadership of the SDKPiL was a recent resolution of the Central Committee calling for support of the Duma and for “a ministry of the Duma majority.” In the view of Dzierżyń­ ski and his colleagues this was tantamount to the spreading of harmful con­ stitutional illusions. Hence, Dzierżyński revised the agenda of the Fifth Congress in order to place before it for full debate the controversy within the RSDRP. He also invited to the congress a nonvoting representative of the Bolshevik faction in order to counter the anticipated arguments of the Menshevik Otto Aussen and the Bundist Leon Goldman, who, ac­ cording to the terms of the merger agreement, had been invited to the Fifth Congress as representatives of the all-Russian Central Committee.27 It is not surprising, therefore, that the controversy within the RSDRP became the most lively subject of discussion at the congress. Zdzisław Leder, in giving a report in the name of the ZG on the “two directions” in the RSDRP, sharply criticized the Mensheviks’ analysis of the poli­ tical forces in the Duma—that is, their tendency to see “leftist ele­ ments” in the Kadets-as well as their exaggeration of the role of the Duma itself.28 Whereas the delegates gave a sympathetic hearing to the arguments and accusations of the Bolshevik representative V. V. Vorovskii, they frequently interrupted the speeches of Aussen and Goldman. The final resolutions of the Fifth Congress, drafted by Dzierżyński, clearly demonstrate that the SDKPiL now supported the Bolshevik direction in the all-Russian party as all pretense of neutrality between the factions

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disappeared. In its resolution on the freedom of criticism within the com­ mon party, the congress defended the decision of its own leadership to boycott the Duma elections. It also warned the Mensheviks on the Rus­ sian Central Committee that the Stockholm resolutions permitted the unified party to participate only in elections to the Duma and not in the formation of any kind of blocs with other parties, especially the Kadets.29 In a separate resolution on relations with the Duma, the congress was more emphatic. It declared that the real'tasks of Social Democrats in this regard should be ruthless criticism of rather than cooperation with the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties in the Duma, and the destruction rather than encouragement of popular illusions about the Duma. In short, the SDKPiL called for the adoption of a policy of active opposition to the Duma in order to convince the population that its needs would be dealt with only by the calling of a constituent assembly.30 Moreover, the SDKPiL placed little faith in the willingness of the existing Central Committee to revise its tactics. Therefore, the Polish Social Democrats joined Lenin and the Bolsheviks in calling for the convening of an extra­ ordinary all-party congress. At such a congress, the SDKPiL would have full voting rights and an opportunity to change the composition of the Central Committee. Aside from the question of the relations of the SDKPiL with the two factions of the RSDRP, the Fifth Congress of the party was highly signi­ ficant in several other respects. On the one hand, this was the first and last congress of the SDKPiL as a mass party. It was attended by fiftytwo delegates representing fifty-six organizations with a combined mem­ bership of 26,000. The Łódź and Warsaw organizations provided the majority of the delegates to the Fifth Congress, representing 9970 and 6000 members respectively. In addition, organizations of the SDKPiL in Częstochowa, Lublin provinces and the Dąbrowa Basin had member­ ships of approximately 2000 each.31 A good indication of the party’s strength immediately preceding the congress was its organization of a series of May Day strikes which were extremely successful in terms of the percentage of participants from factory labor and their wide range and intensity throughout the Kingdom of Poland.32 The Fifth Congress also marked the height of Dzierżyński^ influence in the party. Dzierżyński had channelled his self-described “obsession with the revolution”33 primarily into organizational activity in a never

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ending effort to consolidate the party’s booming membership. In so doing, Dzierżyński had established himself at the top of the organization and his authority in the party was unsurpassed by the time of the Fifth Congress. Not only did he assume responsibility for making the preparations for the most important congress in the history of the SDKPiL, but he was also the chief spokesmean for the policies of the party leadership at that congress, delivering the report of the ZG to the assembled delegates. In recognition of Dzierżyński’s unquestioned leadership, the Fifth Congress in an unpre­ cedented resolution unanimously thanked him for his “tireless efforts” on behalf of the party.34 Thus it was no accident that the peak of the party’s organizational if not numerical strength and the height of Dzierzynski’s prestige within the party coincided at the Fifth Congress. This was reflected in the adoption by the congress, after considerable debate, of new organizational statutes drafted by Dzierżyński, which, in effect, resulted in an even greater cen­ tralization of the party. Dzierżyński’s statutes established once and for all the authority of the Main Directorate over the entirety of party activity. Henceforth, representatives of the ZG were empowered to sit in on all meetings of the city committees while conferences of local organizations could not be held without the prior consent of the ZG. According to statute No. 25, the local organizations were required to turn over forty percent of their income to the ZG, which made all important financial decisions. The ZG was also given a powerful position at party congresses, each of its five full members having a voting role. To ensure against breaches of party discipline, Dzierżyński inserted into the statutes a regu­ lar procedure by which members could be expelled from the party upon the verdict of special tribunals.35 In essence, Dzierżyńskfs organizational statutes gave more power to the ZG than even the Bolshevik faction allotted its own leadership. At the Fifth Congress, Dzierżyński successfully defeated motions for the formal inclusion of democratic principles into the organizational statutes. Refer­ ring to such principles as “demagogic,” he aruged that even in semi­ legal conditions the maintenance of party discipline must hold priority over internal democracy. Furthermore, Dzierżyński defended the domin­ eering role assigned to the ZG at future party congresses, maintaining that “the masses are not yet organizationally experienced” for the party to adopt the principle of proportional representation.36 Such organizational

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rigidity led to the emergence of an opposition group at the congress led by Wincenty Matuszewski, which focused its attacks on Dzierżyński^ statutes and the work of the ZG.37 Although badly outnumbered, the protests of the opposition, with its close ties to the party rank and file, were an ominous sign for the future of the SDKPiL. To a certain extent, Dzierżyński was also responsible for the inflexible policies pursued by the party leadership in regard to the agrarian and trade union questions which were reaffirmed at the Fifth Congress. Al­ though communist historians argue that “among the activists of the SDKPiL, Feliks Dzierżyński alone occupied a correct [i.e., Leninist] posi­ tion on the peasant question,”38 the evidence overwhelmingly points to Dzierżyński^ complete lack of interest in the Polish peasants, which was typical of the entire SDKPiL leadership. The document universally cited by these historians—Dzierżyński^ letter to the Foreign Committee of February 13, 1905, demanding the immediate publication of a “mani­ festo to the peasantry”39—can hardly be equated with the formulation of an agrarian program, let alone with the adoption of Lenin’s concept of a revolutionary alliance of proletariat and peasantry. In the first place, when the SDKPiL leaders used the expression “peasantry,” they were actually referring to landless agrarian laborers and farmhands rather than to individual proprietors whose holdings were small or medium in scale.40 With this in mind, it must be noted that for ideological reasons with which Dzierżyński was in full agreement, subsequent social democratic propaganda and organizational efforts in the Polish countryside under his direction were basically restricted to the non-landowning segment of the rural population. Thus Dzierżyński^ view of 1900 that “socialism must have a purely class-proletarian basis”41 had not been altered in the least. Moreover, he completely adhered to Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis of revolutionary forces in the Kingdom and to her dictum presented in Co dalej? that “the urban worker stands alone, opposed by all, alone against the entire bourgeois society.”42 Dzierżyński’s disinterest in the landowning peasantry is reflected in his agenda for the Fifth Congress which completely omitted discussion of agrarian issues.43 When the congress debated the agenda and the lack of attention given to the agrarian question was expressly criticized, Dzier­ żyński argued that such discussion should be postponed to a future con­ gress. He even voiced the opinion that the Bolsheviks, in devising an agrarian

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program of their own, had acted “too hastily.”44 Hence, Dzierżyński, not unlike the rest of the SDKPiL leadership, considered that conditions in the Kingdom, in contrast to Russia, did not allow for the formation of a revolutionary alliance of proletariat and peasantry; the SDKPiL, therefore, had no business tyring to represent interests that were poten­ tially hostile to those of the wage-earning' population. Of course, by adopting such a policy towards the peasantry, the party automatically abandoned the opportunity of gaining influence among the largest seg­ ment of Polish society.45 A far more damaging manifestation of social democratic rigidity ap­ peared in policies relating to the trade union movement. Before 1905 the party leadership had argued that under conditions in which trade union activity was prohibited by law, illegal union organizations should maintain very close ties with the party in order to ensure their survival in the face of repression. Such a policy was insufficient, however, when the October Manifesto and the trade union laws of March 1906 offered greater latitude for union activity. Because strikes and political affilia­ tion between the unions and particular parties were still forbidden, the SDKPiL continued to emphasize the importance of clandestine union organization. This required in turn the continuation of the strict political and financial subordination of social democratic trade unions to the party.46 The social democratic policy of trade union organization, called “partyjność” by the party leadership, led to a situation in which the SDKPiL rejected for all intents and purposes the possibility of legal union activity. And because of the stranglehold of the party leadership on the unions, the SDKPiL did not take advantage of the opportunity to gain influence among the vast number of workers who had not committed themselves to any of the political parties. Of the SDKPiL leadership, Dzierżyński was the most outspoken pro­ ponent of partyjność and of exclusively illegal union activity. Several party activists involved in trade union work already at the end of 1905 expressed their opposition to the policy of partyjność, openly criticizing Dzierżyński in the process.47 Dzierżyński prevailed, nevertheless, and at the Fifth Congress a resolution was adopted which stated that it was necessary “now and in the future to establish close organizational links between the party and the trade unions.” These close links were defined as recognition by the unions of the party’s political leadership and their

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active support of the party through the contribution of ten percent of union income directly to the ZG.48 The sectarian nature of the policy of partyjność as well as its disastrous effects are all too apparent in statistics regarding union membership in the Kingdom of Poland. Of the approximately 160,000 union members at the end of 1906 (approximately 25% of the wage-earning population, five times higher than the level of union organization in the rest of the Russian empire), only 32,000 belonged to the illegal social democratic unions.49 The remainder was literally abandoned to the non-party trade unions under the influence of the PPS and the National Democrats, a fact that was not lost on the opponents of partyjność. The various inadequacies of social democratic policy and organization extended to other areas as well, particularly to relations with a changed PPS and to the national question. They all would lead to increasingly critical problems for the party after the onset of the so-called Stolypin reaction, when even greater political flexibility was required. In the mid­ dle of 1906, however, the SDKPiL under Dzierzynski’s direction had the appearance of a strong and united party, confident in the efficacy of its past and present policies. It had been vindicated in its emphasis upon the interdependence of the Russian and Polish revolutions, and hence it could claim with some justification an ideological victory over the PPS. Although it still lagged behind the PPS in total membership, it did not suffer at this time from the fatal internal divisions that plagued the PPS throughout the revolution and finally resulted in the split of that party at the end of 1906. The party’s “diplomatic” position also appeared strong and secure. It had won entrance into the RSDRP on the basis of its own conditions, and as a constituent part of the RSDRP, the SDKPiL could expect the support of Russian Social Democrats in its struggle against the PPS at international gatherings. Finally, the organizational structure of the party continued to function remarkably well, despite signs of bureaucratization and overcentralization. Within a year, however, the confidence of the SDKPiL leadership in the correctness of its analysis of the current political situation and of its organizational practice, reflected in Dzierzynski’s report to the Fifth Congress, was to be severely shaken. By then the ideological and organi­ zational rigidity displayed by the leadership at the Fifth Congress became even more ill-suited to the demands of a changing and fluid situation.

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Dzierżyński in St. Petersburgand the SDKPiL-Bolshevik “Alliance” At the Fifth Congress, Dzierżyński refused to accept full membership in the Main Directorate; instead he accented election to the executive committee as a candidate member.50 This development in no way affected his power. Dzierżyński simply wanted to reduce his responsibilities in order to assume in St. Petersburg the position of the representative of the SDKPiL on the Central Committee and central editorial board of the RSDRP to which he had been appointed by the congress. Before Dzierżyński had reached St. Petersburg in mid-August, relations between the SDKPiL and the Mensheviks on the Central Committee took yet another turn for the worse. The SDKPiL was particularly outraged when after the tsar’s dissolution of the first Duma on July 21, 1906, the Central Committee supported the appeal of the Kadets in the famous Vyborg Manifesto for a nation-wide campaign of passive resistance. Such a declaration of support for the Duma in its consitutional conflict with autocracy was severely criticized in the SDKPiL press. Czerwony sztandar accused the Central Committee of “marching in the rear of the revolu­ tion” and of violating the spirit of the resolution regarding social demo­ cratic participation in the Duma approved by the Stockholm Congress.51 Upon his arrival in Petersburg, Dzierżyński considered it his task to carry out the directives of the Fifth Congress of the SDKPiL, particu­ larly to work for the calling of an extraordinary congress of the RSDRP. Although he did not got St. Petersburg with a plan to cement an alliance between the SDKPiL and the Bolsheviks, this is in effect what happened. Again, this was largely a function of the troubled relations between the SDKPiL and the Mensheviks. For example, Dzierżyński quickly found himself in a minority of one on the editorial board of the central organ, Sotsial-Demokrat, whose other editors—Martov, Dan, Akselrod and Plekhanov—were all Mensheviks.52 After failing to persuade his co-editors to establish a permanent section for correspondence from Poland, Dzier­ żyński was forced to turn to Proletarii, a Bolshevik factional paper, with the request. The Bolsheviks immediately obliged him,53 not missing the opportunity to drive another wedge between the SDKPiL and the Men­ sheviks. In the Central Committee, composed of seven Mensheviks and three Bolsheviks apart from the representatives of the national organizations,

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Dzierżyński supported the resolution of the Bolshevik-dominated Peters­ burg Committee of the RSDRP calling for the immediate convocation of an extraordinary congress of the party to decide issues related to social democratic participation in elections to the second Duma.S4 By virtue of his close cooperation with the Bolsheviks in the matter of calling an extra­ ordinary congress, Dzierżyński was also made privy to Lenin’s decision not to boycott the elections to the second Duma. Dzierżyński clearly appreciated the advance notice given him of the change in Lenin’s posi­ tion; this would allow the SDKPiL an opportunity to reconsider its own stance in regard to the Duma and to avoid the possibility of leaving itself isolated on the question.55 Another issue that united Dzierżyński and the Bolshevik members of the Central Committee was their common opposition to Akselrod’s pro­ posal for organizing a non-party workers’ congress. As envisioned by Aksel­ rod, such a congress would be able to take better advantage of prevailing legal conditions. Dzierżyński, whose own party was even more hostile to the idea of “legalization” than the Bolsheviks, condemned the proposal in an extremely heated session of the Central Committee on August 29. At the same session, the Central Committee rejected motions for calling an extraordinary party congress as “premature.” However, it did agree to put the issue before a party plebiscite if a large number of party organi­ zations declared themselves in favor of a congress.56 From that point on, the Bolsheviks and the SDKPiL embarked upon independent but simul­ taneous campaigns in the press for a new congress and urged their sup­ porters to flood the Central Committee with petitions. Dzierżyński took credit for the limited concessions that had been wrung from the Central Committee, believing “that as a result of this struggle, the CC will give us [the SDKPiL] more consideration.”57 It has been argued that while in St. Petersburg, Dzierżyński placed him­ self “unconditionally” on the side of Lenin, moving the SDKPiL into the Bolshevik camp in opposition to the views of other Polish social demo­ cratic leaders, particularly Luxemburg and Tyszka.58 Such arguments are simply not supported by the evidence. Dzierżyńskim efforts to con­ vene an extraordinary congress, which required cooperation with the Bolsheviks, hardly represented a departure from recent party policies. Rather they were a culmination of a long process that brought the SDKPiL and the Bolsheviks closer together under the stimulation of revolution.

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Dzierżyński^ support of Lenin’s positions, moreover, was also not uncon­ ditional; indeed, before a meeting of Petersburg Bolsheviks on September 17, Dzierżyński openly argued with Lenin over Bolshevik-inspired, armedpartisan attacks on government agents and'wèàlthy civilians. Dzierżyński, in complete agreement with the Mensheviks, considered this activity de­ moralizing and inconsistent with social democratic principles.59 Finally, Dzierżyński did not determine “Russian policy” alone. During most of his stay in St. Petersburg, he remained in almost daily contact with Rosa Luxemburg, who, after her release from the Warsaw Citadel on a five-thousand ruble bond, went to St. Petersburg in order to meet with leaders of the RSDRP.60 There is no evidence to suggest that Lux­ emburg objected to DzierżyńskFs close cooperation with the Bolsheviks in the matter of calling an extraordinary party congress. On the contrary, she encouraged those efforts and advised him to remain in St. Petersburg in order to continue his work on the Russian Central Committee rather than return to Warsaw where the organization was in a state of crisis fol­ lowing a new surge of police repression.61 Hence, Dzierżyński^ activities in St. Petersburg were determined by what were generally considered to be the interests of the SDKPiL. In fact, given the party’s wide-ranging differences with the Mensheviks over key political issues, it is difficult to imagine any SDKPiL policy other than calling for an extraordinary congress to try to affect a change in the com­ position of the Russian Central Committee. That Dzierżyński cooperated with the Bolsheviks in this endeavor was only natural, since such collab­ oration provided the only vehicle by which the SDKPiL could realize its aims. Dzierżyński was, however, influenced by Lenin on one very important matter: that the tactic of boycotting the Duma had outlived its useful­ ness. When Dzierżyński returned to Warsaw in late September, he dis­ covered that his colleagues on the Main Directorate were split over the issue. The idea of participating in upcoming elections to the second Duma was opposed primarily by Aleksander Rubinstein-Małecki and Zdzisław Leder, whereas Dzierżyński, Warski, and Marchlewski favored a change in strategy. With the ZG divided, it was decided to present both points of view in the SDKPiL press.62 On November 1 and 2, 1906, the SDKPiL held a nation-wide conference in Warsaw to discuss this as well as other issues. Despite the recent arrest of Leder, Dzierżyński, who as usual

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presided over the conference, was unable to persuade the delegates to adopt a resolution in favor of participation in the elections. The best he could achieve was a decision to leave the resolution of the issue to the all-Russian party conference, which was scheduled to meet a few weeks later in Tammerfors, Finland.63 The Tammerfors Conference of the RSDRP, held from November 16 to 20, 1906, provided the SDKPiL its first opportunity of full partici­ pation in the debates of the all-Russian party. Among the thirty-four delegates to the conference, the Mensheviks had eleven compared to six for the Bolsheviks; the remaining half of the delegates came from the national parties of the Bund, SDKPiL and the Latvin Social Democracy. Dzierżyński headed the five-member Polish delegation which also in­ cluded Warski, Mieczysław Dobranicki, Kazimierz Gierdawa, and Tomasz Magrzyk.64 Dzierżyński clearly tried to maximize the role of the SDKPiL at Tammefors by insisting that the Polish delegates vote together in a bloc, which later became an established practice of SDKPiL delegations at Russian conferences and congresses. Dzierżyński also emphasized the party’s in­ dependence from both factions of the RSDRP by placing before the con­ ference a declaration that criticized the “opportunism” of the Menshevikdominated Central Committee, but at the same time rejected the Bol­ shevik thesis of “technical preparation” for an armed uprising through expropriations and other so-called “partisan activities.” However, on the most important issues—the formation of electoral blocs with bourgeois parties and the calling of an extraordinary party congress—the SDKPiL threw its weight on the side of the Bolsheviks.65 Although the Mensheviks’ election tactics were approved by a slight majority, the formation of blocs with opposition democratic parties such as the Kadets was not made binding for the entire party but left to the discretion of the individual organizations. On this basis, Dzierżyński informed the conference that the SDKPiL would publish its own electoral platform rather than that of the Central Committee.66 The conference also agreed to the long-standing demand of the Bolsheviks and the SDKPiL, now joined by the Bund and even some Mensheviks, to call a new party congress for the spring of 1907.67 Hence, on both the issue of the Duma elections and the calling of an all-Russian party congress, Dzierżyński and the SDKPiL delegation returned home from Tammerfors with significant concessions, fruits of the alliance with the Bolsheviks.

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The Łódź Lockout and Dzierżyński’s Arrest As the party began to prepare for the election campaign and for the Fifth Congress of the RSDRP, a drama wasAWfolding in Łódź that would decide the fate of the revolutionary movement in the Kingdom of Poland. The center of that movement had long since shifted from Warsaw to Łódź, where the polarization of society was most extreme and where almost all segments of the urban population apparently favored the vio­ lent solutions symbolized in the fratricidal struggles between the battle squads of the National Democrats and those of the socialist parties. In 1906, 189 persons were killed in such fighting, 66 in the months of October and November alone.68 At the same time, both the workers and the industrialists took advantage of the March 1906 laws to organize themselves into unions and associations. At the height of the trade union movement in Łódź, sixty percent of all textile workers were organized; this was the highest percentage of union membership among textile workers in the entire empire.69 The Łódź factory owners also hurried to form employers’ associations; the most important was the Union of Łódź Cotton Industrialists created by the six great firms of Poznański, Heinzel and Kumitzer, L. Grohman, H. Grohman, Scheibler and Steinert. Together they employed approximately 25,000 workers.70 The introduction of “field courts” in the Kingdom in September 1906, designed to eliminate the most radical opponents of the regime thorugh extralegal procedures, only served to exacerbate the already tense situation in Łódź. Confident of success under the conditions of martial law, the Łódź factory owners decided to proclaim a lockout; it began in the Poznański factory on December 6 and quickly spread throughout the entire textile industry. The Great Łódź Lockout, as it was called, lasted twenty weeks and was accompanied by ever-spreading violence in the streets. Initially aimed at eliminating the influence of the trade unions in the hiring and firing of workers, the Great Łódź Lock­ out proved to be the turning point in the struggle between capital and labor, not only in Łódź but in the entire Kingdom. When the lockout ended in late April 1907 with the defeat of the Łódź textile workers, industrialists throughout the Kingdom quickly and successfully resorted to similar tactics. With the proclamation of the Łódź lockout, Dzierżyński rushed to the scene to help organize the party and the social democratic trade unions

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for the struggle ahead.71 Once again, as during the June uprising of 1905, events in Łódź forced the competing socialist parties into agreements of limited cooperation. For example, representatives of the SDKPiL, Bund and the two factions of the PPS72 formed interparty and interunion lock­ out commissions to coordinate relief efforts during the lockout. The socialist parties also cooperated in the creation of a workers’ militia to defend their organizations from the attacks of National Democratic battle squads. Although 382,000 rubles were collected by the socialist parties on behalf of the locked-out workers, relief payments averaged seventeen rubles per working family or only 12 percent of the sum of lost wages.73 That the workers held out for four months is a tribute to their determination and to the organizational efforts of the socialist parties on their behalf. The Łódź organization of the SDKPiL was especi­ ally active during the lockout; it also experienced an enormous influx of new members, reaching a peak of twenty thousand by the end of the struggle.74 Towards the end of December, Dzierżyński returned to Warsaw to help formulate an appeal of the ZG to socialist organizations in Russia and Western Europe for material help on behalf of the Łódź workers.75 Of the members of the Main Directorate, only he and Hanecki had not yet been arrested. Still, Dzierżyński decided on December 26 to attend a joint meeting of Warsaw representatives of the SDKPiL and Bund that was sup­ posed to discuss strategy for the elections to the second Duma.76 The police had prepared a well-laid trap for the participants by placing the flat of Józef Krasny, where the meeting was to be held, under close sur­ veillance. Once the participants had gathered, the police raided the flat and in one stroke virtually eliminated the leadership of both organiza­ tions in Warsaw. Dzierżyński, arrested under the name of Roman Raciszewski,77 was taken along with the others to the Ratusz municipal prison. The Ratusz was the most hideous of the Warsaw prisons. The filfthy sanitary conditions at the already overcrowded prison worsened consider­ ably at the turn of 1906-1907 as a result of mass arrests. The prison was divided into three parts. On the ground floor were the common cells for the women. According to Dzierżyński^ future wife, Zofia Muszkat, who was interned in the Ratusz at this time, over one hundred female prisoners, including criminals and prostitutes, were thrown into cells originally de­ signed for thirty people.78 On the second floor, where Dzierżyński was at first confined, cells constructed for ten males were filled at this time

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with sixty or more prisoners.79 After his identity was established, Dzier­ żyński was transferred to the third floor, where prisoners considered the most dangerous to the regime (they called themselves the “aristo­ cracy”) were detained until further notice. Here men sat in pairs and in much better conditions than their fellow màiè and female prisoners. Despite the despicable sanitary conditions of the prison, the over­ crowding obviously provided for a far greater degree of contact between the prisoners than, for example, was possible at the Tenth Pavilion of the Warsaw Citadel. Although strolls were allowed only in the corridors, they did provide the prisoners with the opportunity to exchange mes­ sages. Before his identity was discovered, Dzierżyński had managed to establish contact with the female prisoners by volunteering for kitchen duty. Once he had taken his place among the “aristocracy,” however, his excursions to the kitchen were discontinued. Krasny, who shared a cell with Dzierżyński on the third floor of the Ratusz, recalled how Dzier­ żyński took upon himself the task of cleaning the cell, working with such zeal “as if this scrubbing were the most important party work.”80 With similar enthusiasm, Dzierżyński invented games and diversions to keep himself and his fellow prisoners occupied, causing one Bundist to credit Dzierżyński with preserving the prisoners’ morale.81 After three weeks in the Ratusz, Dzierżyński and Krasny were trans­ ferred to the Pawiak for an interrogation that was to last for several weeks. According to Krasny, Dzierżyński organized a “school” for forty “students” at the Pawiak and appointed himself its director.82 Dzier­ żyński^ boundless energy was only affected by the fatigued state of his health, which, along with a one-thousand ruble bond posted by the party through his brother Ignacy, helped to bring about his release.83 Immed­ iately after he emerged from prison on June 9, 1907, according to police documents, Dzierżyński went into hiding.84 Dzierżyński and the SDKPiL on the Defensive During the period of Dzierżyński^ confinement, the SDKPiLwas forced to fight a defensive battle against the onslaught of reaction. In the early spring of 1907, the party encompassed forty thousand members, but the new recruits were mainly from Łódź and had joined the party as part of the organizational spurt resulting from the Great Lockout. Elsewhere the

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party was already losing strength and once the Łódź lockout ended in victory for the employers, the decline in members became both general and steady. The party’s participation in the January 1907 elections to the second Duma was relatively successful but ultimately meaningless. In the workers’ curia, the SDKPiL elected forty out of fifty-eight electors and it received 68 percent of the workers’ votes in Łódź.85 In the “urban” curia in both Warsaw and Łódź, the SDKPiL won over 25 percent of the vote, an indication of considerable influence among certain segments of the radical intelligentsia.86 However, the electoral successes of the SDKPiL occurred in a vacuum as both factions of the PPS continued to boycott the elections. Furthermore, because of the reactionary character of the electoral ordinance, social democratic electors had virtually no chance to influence the selection of delegates to the Duma, almost all of whom were National Democrats. In such a situation all the SDKPiL could do was to support the efforts of the Russian social democratic faction in the Duma and condemn the parliamentary activities of the National Democrats.87 The government, however, was itself dissatisfied with the composi­ tion of the new Duma, which despite its efforts, was even less pliable than the first. It dissolved the Duma for a second time, arrested the social democratic deputies, and announced a new and even more discriminatory electoral ordinance. This all but assured the final defeat of the revolu­ tionary parties in the empire. With the dissolution of the second Duma, the period of the so-called Stolypin reaction began and its implementa­ tion in the Kingdom of Poland was particularly severe. In the first three quarters of 1908, military courts sentenced three hundred and sixty-four persons to death—25 percent of those sentenced in the entire empire.88 In the face of intensified repression, leaders of the revolutionary move­ ment went deeper into the underground or returned to emigre centers. Once he had escaped from prison, Tyszka initiated the transfer of the headquarters of the ZG, or what remained of the ZG, to Berlin in order to preserve the executive leadership of the party.89 This was to mark the beginning of a new era in the history of the SDKPiL. Upon his release from the Pawiak, Dzierżyński chose to remain in the Kingdom and salvage what he could of the party organization. In con­ trast to other periods of his activity, the period from June 1907 to his fifth arrest in April 1908 is extremely difficult to document.90 The scanty evidence does suggest that Dzierżyński tried to avoid Warsaw, where he

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was too well known, and, moreover, was subject to arrest for violating the conditions upon which his bond had been set.91 He also tried to change his appearance by shaving both his mustache and his beard.92 In trying to preserve the party as a functioning organization in the Kingdom, Dzierżyński promoted the frequent holding of city and regional conferences. For a time, the election campaign of the autumn of 1907 to the third Duma provided a certain organizational stimulus, although the party was far less successful than in the previous elections. Dzier­ żyński also organized two nation-wide conferences in November 1907 and April 1908. These conferences, however, only served to demonstrate the weakness and demoralization of the party in the face of intensified reaction. Only nine delegates participated in the November conference, representing just four city organizations and the ZG, a development reminiscent of the pre-revolutionary era of party activity.93 Actually there was little that Dzierżyński could do to stem the general decline of the party. His decision to move to Warsaw in early 190894 was taken in desperation after the complete disintegration of the Warsaw party organization, and it only ensured his own eventual arrest, despite the numerous conspiratorial precautions he had taken. On April 16, through a carefully laid police trap, Dzierżyński was identified and arrested at the post office on Warecki Square, the only place where he appeared more than once during the course of a week.95 He was immediately taken to the Tenth Pavilion of the Warsaw Citadel. * * * * *

The revolution of 1905 contributed to the rise of Feliks Dzierżyński at the head of an expanding, but still centralized mass organization. The onset of the Stolypin reaction, on the other hand, led to the erosion of that power base; thereafter Dzierżyński^ influence in the party was sub­ stantially reduced, although it remained highly significant. Ironically, the Main Directorate, whose power and authority continually expanded under Dzierżyński, was to fall into the hands of Tyszka during Dzierżyński^ internment and exile. Under Tyszka, the Main Directorate was trans­ formed from a strong executive committee into an instrument of dictator­ ship that operated above the rest of the party. Upon his return to political activity in 1910, it was Dzierżyński who this time had to face changed

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political realities within the power structure of the party. Dzierzynski’s impulse, however, would not be to launch a campaign to democratize and decentralize the SDKPiL; he was simply incapable of abandoning his own creation. Rather he sought and eventually achieved a partnership with Tyszka in the autocratic executive insitution. And for this reason, Dzierżyński must also share a major responsibility for the crisis that led to the split of the SDKPiL.

\'N

CHAPTER VIII DZIERŻYŃSKI, TYSZKA AND THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE MAIN DIRECTORATE, 1908-1911

During the period of Dzierżyński^ absence, the problems facing the SDKPiL, already in evidence before his arrest, mounted considerably. Dzierzyhski’s forced withdrawal from political life left a void in the party leadership that Leon Jogiches-Tyszka hastened to fill. The intensified repression in the Kingdom in 1907 that had led to the transfer of the Main Directorate’s headquarters to Berlin naturally favored Tyszka’s efforts to reconstitute the party leadership abroad. Gradually, Tyszka was able to assume control over the activities of the executive committee, which, like Tyszka himself, became increasingly arbitrary and dictatorial. Aided by Dzierzynski’s arrest, Tyszka’s rise to the top was also facilitated by the imprisonment of Warski and Leder in 1908, as well as by the pre­ occupation of Luxemburg and Marchlewski in the problems facing German Social Democracy.1 The transfer of the headquarters of the ZG to Berlin and Tyszka’s sub­ sequent ascendancy marked the beginning of a series of crises for the SDKPiL, primarily over internal organizational issues. During the revolu­ tion, the Main Directorate under Dzierzynski’s leadership functioned as the executive institution of the mass organization in the Kingdom. While Tyszka certainly had played an important role in the party leadership—as the principal editor of party publications and as a member of the ZG—he 172

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has spent relatively little time in the Kingdom and was basically out of touch with the party rank and file. For this reason, Tyszka had been forced to rely upon Dzierżyński who did have the vital organizational connections in the Kingdom necessary to provide the party with political leadership A Main Directorate minus Dzierżyński and severed from the organization in the Kingdom, on the other hand, became increasingly isolated from everyday party work; it, therefore, became a target of frequent and bitter criticism from activists who remained in the Kingdom. The participation of the SDKPiL iri the quagmire of Russian social democratic politics added fuel to the party’s internal turmoil. At first, Tyszka continued and even consolidated Dzierżyńskim policy of coop­ eration with the Bolsheviks. However, Tyszka—like Dzierżyński before him—jealously guarded the independence of the SDKPiL and refused to side openly with Bolshevik efforts to purge from the RSDRP those whom Lenin called “liquidators” and “opportunists.” As Lenin increasingly resorted to desperate methods to eliminate his Menshevik opponents from the all-Russian party, relations between the SDKPiL and Bolsheviks steadily deteriorated. Unfortunately, because Tyszka had neglected to seek a consensus for his attempts to mediate between the Russian factions, activists in the Kingdom tended to blame the ZG for the falling out with the Bolsheviks. In the end, this left Lenin an open door to interfere in the SDKPiL’s internal disputes by aiding and abetting the opponents of the ZG. Dzierżyńskim return to political life in 1910 served to exacerbate rather than resolve the multiple crises facing the SDKPiL. With a foot in both camps, Dzierżyński was indeed in an ideal position to mend the damaged relations between the ZG and activists in the Kingdom. Dzierżyńskim ultimate loyalty, however, was to the executive institution whose auth­ ority he had done so much to strengthen. He was not prepared, more­ over, to jeopardize the alliance he had forged with the so-called “Lux­ emburg group” in 1902 and which had survived intact the stormy years of the revolution. To be sure, that alliance was put to a second test in 1910 as Tyszka and Dzierżyński sought to define not only their personal relationship, but also the relationship between the leadership in emigra­ tion and what remained of the organization in the Kingdom. Not sur­ prisingly, the end result was a compromise that guaranteed Dzierżyński an equal voice in the party leadership while preserving executive prerogative,

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to wit: the dictatorship of a Main Directorate dominated by Tyszka in Berlin ańd Dzierżyński in Kraków. Unfortunately, this compromise did not address itself to the root issues of the crisis in the SDKPiL and there­ fore threatened the very party unity it was designed to preserve. The “Stolypin Reaction” in the Kingdom o f Poland The period of the so-called Stolypin reaction, beginning in June 1907 with the dissolution of the second Duma by the tsar upon the advice of his prime minister, Peter Stolypin, and ending with the assassination of Stolypin by an agent-provocateur in September 1911, was a particularly bleak era in the history of the Kingdom of Poland. Although Stolypin’s methods of pacification—among them summary courts-martial that mec­ hanically handed out death sentences-were vigorously applied through­ out the Russian empire, their impact in those areas where the social struggle had merged with movements of national liberation was even more severe. This was especially true in the Kingdom of Poland. The state of siege instituted in the Kingdom in December 1905 was not lifted until Septem­ ber 1908; in the case of Piotrków province with the city of Łódź, it remained in force until June 1909. By the time of the outbreak of the First World War, the Kingdom of Poland was still ruled by military rather than civilian governors. The application of the hangman’s noose, or the “Stolypin necktie,” was proportionally higher in the Kingdom than else­ where; approximately one-third of the death sentences administered by the special military courts occurred in this territory inhabited by only 12 percent of the total population of the empire.2 In Łódź, the military court under the supervision of General Nicholas Kaznakov compiled a record of seventy-two death sentences per every hundred verdicts.3 Non-fatal methods of dealing with the revolutionary opposition—mass arrests, exile and hard labor camps—were also fully employed. In October 1909, approximately eight hundred people were arrested in Warsaw alone.4 However, Łódź again provided the most extreme case: between January 1908 and October 1909, over ten thousand of the city’s inhabitants were exiled into the depths of Russia.5 While the Kingdom felt the full force of Stolypin’s stick, the carrot of reform—particularly Stolypin’s ambitious policy of breaking up the peasant communes in Russia and establishing

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a class of strong, independent farmers with direct title to their land-had little meaning in Polish circumstances. The peasantry in the Kingdom, it is recalled, was emancipated under much more favorable conditions than had been the case in Russia and already enjoyed many of the rights that Stolypin was now offering the Russian peasantry. Stolypin’s repressive methods, àt least in the short-term, were ex­ tremely effective in the Kingdom of Poland as they were throughout the Russian empire. Strike statistics provide one measure of Stolypin’s success. According to the records of the factory inspectors in the King­ dom, in 1906 there were 2868 strikes involving almost a half million workers; in 1907, 689 strikes involving 100,000 workers. The strike move­ ment finally reached its nadir in 1910 when only 63 strikes were recorded involving a mere 4538 workers.6 Trade union activity of all types came to a virtual halt. Between 1907 and 1910, the authorities closed down twenty-three unions in Łódź alone. At the height of the Łódź lockout, 55,000 textile workers had been organized, by 1910 only 231 textile workers in Łódź were union members.7 The repressive measures of the Stolypin period, when combined with renewed economic dislocation and severe unemployment, created a general mood of apathy and de­ moralization among the working class. Nor was tsarist repression confined to the social arena. Rather than honor the limited concessions in the national-cultural sphere made to the Poles during the revolution, the imperial government returned with a vengeance to its previous policy of russification. Most symbolic was the closing in December 1907 of the Polska Macierz Szkolna, a system of private secondary schools of a conservative and Catholic bent which had irritated the Russian authorities by its defiant use of Polish as the language of instruction. The anti-Polish policies of the tsarist government were crowned in 1913 by the introduction of legislation in the Duma for the separation of the city of Chełm and its environs from the Kingdom of Poland. The intent of the government’s legislation was unconcealed; it sought to facilitate actions of russification in this preponderantly Polish territory by directly incorporating it into Russia proper. In the face of the Stolypin reaction, it cannot be said that any of the political parties in the Kingdom truly weathered the storm. Parties such as the PPS-Proletariat and the Polish Popular Union (Polski Związek Ludowy), which had never managed to acquire a mass following, were

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easily extinguished.8 The National Democrats, who had emerged from the revolution as the numerically strongest of the political parties, were initi­ ally tolerated by the authorities to counter the influece of the socialists. However, once that mission was accomplished, the tsarist government wasted little time in attacking the National Democrats as well. The Na­ tional Workers’ Union, sponsored by the National Democrats and so re­ cently involved in strike-breaking activities during the course of the Łódź lockout, was a particular target of government repression. Nor were Ro­ man Dmowksi’s pro-governmental tactics in the Duma rewarded by the expected concessions in the area of national autonomy. When the National Democrats failed to criticize the government in the Duma after the closing of the Polska Macierz Szkolna, widespread dissatisfaction with Dmowski’s loyalist policies began to mount from within. There followed a series of defections from the National Democratic camp; the most important of these was the secession of the National Workers’ Union in 1908. The Polish Socialist Party had already split at the end of 1906 as a result of irreconcilable differences over a wide range of issues brought into bold relief by the revolution.9 The right-wing, calling itself the “ Revolutionary Fraction,” consisted of members of the PPS old guard with Józef Piłsudski at the head. Supported primarily by members of the party battle organization, the “Fraction” increasingly turned its atten­ tion during this period to the training of paramilitary units in Galicja for participation on the side of Austria in the event of a general European war. At the same time, the “Fraction” withdrew from organizational activity among the workers in the Kingdom, especially after Piłsudski found it necessary to dissolve the Fraction’s Łódź organization because it had become infiltrated by provocateurs.10 The remainder of the PPS constituted a majority of the party at the time of the split; it later took the name of the “PPS-Left.” The “Left” viewed the resurrection of the Polish state as a phenomenon dependent upon the victory of social and political revolution in Russia. Because this position resembled that of the SDKPiL, the “PPS-Left” suffered primarily from an identity crisis expres­ sed in the increasing clamor of its rank and file for merger with the Social Democrats.11

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The Decline o f the SDKPiL and the Ascendancy o f Tyszka The Social Democrats, although not immediately threatened by centri­ fugal forces, nevertheless experienced a dramatic organizational decline. From a total membership of approximately 40,000 at the beginning of 1907, the ranks of the SDKPiL were reduced to less than one thousand by 1910.12 The loss of members in Łódź, where the party had its strong­ est organization during the revolution, was the most devastating—from 20,000 members in early 1907 to 450 ihembers at the end of 1908 and even less by 1910.13 Party finances were severely strained,leading in turn to a drastic reduction in publishing activity. Czerwony sztandar, which had appeared daily in the First months of 1906 with a circulation of 18,000,14 was published in only eleven issues in 1908, nine issues in 1909 and seven issues in 1910. The territorial range of the party’s acti­ vities was also reduced as organizations in Vilna, Białystok, Lublin, Kielce and a host of other larger towns simply ceased to function. The problems of the organization in the Kingdom were compounded by the physical separation of the party’s executive institution, the Main Directorate, from the country. Tyszka’s decision in 1907 to transfer the headquarters of the ZG from Warsaw to Berlin was a practical move de­ signed to preserve the continuity of executive leadership. From 1907 until Dzierzynski’s reemergence in 1910, Tyszka dominated the sessions and activities of the Main Directorate. Indeed, it was Dzierzynski’s arrest in 1908 and his long period of confinement thereafter that allowed Tyszka to consolidate his own position within the party leadership. Tyszka, however, continued to lack Dzierzynski’s organizational base and auth­ ority; as a consequence, many of the decisions of the ZG in Berlin began to appear to activists in the country as arbitrary interference in local party affairs. The growing tendency of the ZG under Tyszka to limit discussion on issues affecting local organizations in the name of discipline also did not bode well for the future unity of the party. This eventually gave rise to an articulate and well-organized opposition with support not only in the Kingdom, but also in emigration. The ideological and political inflexibility of the party leadership pro­ vided another focal point for the criticism of opposition groups. The lead­ ership’s analysis of the practical experience of the revolutionary years, even after Dzierzynski’s return, did not result in the perception of a need

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to revise—or at least modify—principal formulations of the party’s pro­ gram and tactics. Hence, the changed circumstances of the Stolypin years did not bring any significant alterations in social democratic policies re­ garding the Polish question, the trade uniogs^ and relations with the PPS among others. These were troublesome issues for the party leadership long before Dzierżyńskim arrest and were allowed to fester during the period of his absence. Upon his return, however, Dzierżyński proved even more doctrinaire than Tyszka in adhering to the traditional policies of the lead­ ership at a time when circumstances demanded a more flexible approach. Dzierżyński: From the Tenth Pavilion to Capri The arrest of Feliks Dzierżyński in April 1908 was a heavy blow to the fortunes of the SDKPiL. For years Dzierżyński had provided the indis­ pensable connection between the party literati abroad and the rank and file in the country, and his twenty-month absence from party work was certainly an important factor in the breakdown of communication within the party. Moreover, only Dzierayński commanded the authority and popularity in the Kingdom to enforce the type of organizational discipline demanded by Tyszka and the ZG. Without that authority, many of the decisions of the ZG seemed pretentious and simply were not implemented, an ominous sign of the chaotic conditions under which the party labored. From April 1908 to September 1909, Dzierżyński was interned in the Tenth Pavilion of the Warsaw Citadel, a setting which by now should have been familiar to him. Yet in this period of intensified repression, the Tenth Pavilion acquired a new and sinister meaning for the inmates confined there, many of whom were on death row or, at the very least, faced the prospect of hard labor sentences. Dzierżyński effectively captured the demoralizing and poisoned atmosphere of prison life in a diary that he kept for the greater part of his stay in the Tenth Pavilion. Somehow, he managed to smuggle the diary out in installments for publication in the social democratic press.15 Dzierżyńskfs “Diary of a Prisoner” is certainly not a minor literary masterpiece, as claimed by one of his contemporaries.16 It is, however, a remarkable document in its treatment of the broad spectrum of personal­ ities at the Tenth Pavilion and of the psychological impulses that moti­ vated human behavior under prison conditions. The prison authorities’ use

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of agents-provocateurs not only to spy among the prisoners but also to inform on those gendarmes suspected of conversing with the inmates was typical of the regime of fear and paranoia that ruled in the Tenth Pavi­ lion during these years. According to Dzierżyński, the prisoners became even more withdrawn and isolated as a result, suspecting their cellmates and neighbors of possible collaboration with the Okhrana.17 To remove the prisoners even further from contact with the outside world, all cell windows facing the small prison courtyard were sealed at this time, and correspondence-even from family members-was confiscated. Although such isolation greatly depressed Dzierżyński,18 he was one who survived this test of endurance. In this sense, his diary is symbolic of the dedication and consistency of the party activist in the seemingly hopeless years of the Stolypin reaction. His entry for New Year’s Eve, 1908, is perhaps the best reflection of that spirit: Today is the last day of 1908. Five times I have greeted the new year in prison; the first time was eleven years ago. In prison I have matured in the torment of solitude, in the torment of stagnation in the world and in life. . . . Here in prison it is often difficult, at times even horrible. And nevertheless, if I were presented the opportunity to begin life over again, I would proceed in exactly the same way.19 As Dzierżyński languished in custody, he had every reason to expect a harsh verdict and sentence. Preliminary evidence, including his notes on a party conference that had met in Warsaw shortly before his arrest, was introduced in the Warsaw district court on July 19, 1908.20 This would have been enough to convict him of belonging to an illegal political organi­ zation involved in agitation and propaganda among the population, which usually carried with it the prospect of a long period of Siberian exile. How­ ever, in December 1908, Dzierżyński was informed that he would be re­ tried on “old and new offenses.”21 This, in effect, meant that the court would take into consideration Dzierżyński^ two previous escapes from exile in determining his sentence. On May 8, 1909, the Warsaw court handed down its decision which was then sent to the tsar for approval. Although Dzierżyński was fortunate in that he was not given a hard labor term, he was to be stripped of all his civil rights (including the privileges derived from noble birth) and exiled permanently to Siberia. Dzierżyński was undaunted by the verdict:

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In any event, I shall soon take leave of the Tenth Pavilion. I have been here for sixteen months and it now seems strange to me that thçy will take me away from here-away from this horrible and dis­ mal place. Siberia, where they will send me, seems to me now a place of freedom, a fairyland, a dream co n stru e.22 Dzierżyński had good reason to be optimistic. On August 21, he was transferred from the Tenth Pavilion to the Warsaw Arsenal while the authorities determined the exact location of his exile (they eventually decided on the village of Taseev in Yenesei province). Józef Krasny, him­ self a prisoner at the Arsenal, recalled meeting Dzierżyński on a stroll. “He was in a very good mood,” Krasny informs, “but it hurt him to see close comrades who had been sentenced to hard labor and were in chains, etc. Indeed, he knew that soon he would depart, that soon he would be free.”23 On August 31, 1909, Dzierżyński began his long journey of seven weeks to Taseev. On the way, the party of prisoners was detained at the central hard labor prison in Samara, where according to one of his com­ panions, Dzierżyński was incarcerated in a dark cell for one of his typical acts of insubordination—this time for failing to remove his cap at the order of one of the guards.24 Upon reaching Taseev, Dzierżyński found lodging with Jan Rogulski, a veteran of the 1863 uprising. Impressed with the courage and daring of “Pan Feliks,” the old man helped organize Dzierzyński’s escape a mere seven days after his arrival in Taseev.25 Dzierżyński^ escape route led through St. Petersburg, Vilna and War­ saw, finally ending in Berlin. In St. Petersburg, Dzierżyński contacted Stanisław Iwanowski with whom he shared a mutual friend, the lawyer Bolesław Szyszkowski, who had defended Dzierżyński “either in 1906 or 1907.” 26 There Dzierżyński had documents forged and clothes made to disguise himself as a forest officer; this, he hoped, would guarantee him an unmolested passage, at least to Vilna. In Vilna, according to one of his Soviet biographers, N. I. Zubov, Dzierżyński arrived at the home of his astonished sister Aldona while she was reading a letter he had recently sent from Siberia.27 Dzierżyński finally reached Berlin at the end of December 1909, after making arrangements in Warsaw for crossing the Russo-German border. By the time Dzierżyński reached Berlin, the condition of his health had deteriorated drastically. His tuberculosis once again had been aggra­ vated by prison dampness and the Siberian cold. He therefore accepted

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the proposal of Tyszka and Luxemburg to take a long rest on the isle of Capri, where Maksim Gorky had financed the establishment of a party school in August 1909 with the help of his close friend, A. A. Bogdanov (leader of the ultra-left group of the Bolshevik faction which had chosen for itself the name Vpered from the first Bolshevik newspaper).28 Once on Capri, Dzierżyński was immediately impressed by the setting as well as by Gorky, who provided Dzierżyński lodging and companionship. Sub­ sequently, Dzierżyński tried to enlist the pen of Gorky, whom he refer­ red to as “the spirit of the people, its poet, its voice and its hope,”29 for a couple of articles in Trybuna, published legally by the SDKPiL in War­ saw. Responding to Tyszka’s concern that Gorky’s political views and close association with Bogdanov and the “Vperedists” might complicate relations with Lenin, Dzierżyński assured him that “Gorky himself does not belong to either direction of Bolshevism-he is only the party poet.” 30 On Capri, Dzierżyński also had the time and leisure to tend to his fractured personal life; namely, to his romance with Sabina Feinstein, the sister of Władysław Feinstein (Zdzisław Leder). Few details are known of their relationship, despite the appearance of new evidence.31 The romance apparently blossomed in the stormy days of 1905 in Warsaw and reached its apogee after Dzierżyński^ escape from exile in 1909. Writing Sabina (whom he had just seen in Switzerland) every couple of days from Capri, Dzierżyński employed the then fashionable Młoda Pol­ ska (Young Poland) style to express his romantic fervor. Typical is his letter to her of January 14, 1910: “In vain I shall love you and long for your—always and forever—until the very end, until oblivion.”32 Apparent­ ly, Dzierżyński also asked for her hand in marriage, but was rejected: “I want you to be my wife before the entire world—I want your love. But this is madness, an impossibility. What then am I to do?”33 By the time Dzierżyński left Capri in mid-February, he and Sabina mutually agreed to end the affair, perhaps because Dzierżyńskfs conspiratorial lifestyle left little room for the domestic tranquility Sabina sought in a marriage. In any case, it is doubtful that Dzierżyński^ old fire for Sabina was ever extinguished, even in the last years of his life. Despite these amorous diversions, Dzierżyńskfs month on Capri was actually spent more as a working vacation. His absence of nearly two years from party work had left him disoriented, particularly in matters concerning the all-Russian party of whose Central Committee he remained

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a member. To bring himself up to date, he spent the bulk of his time re­ viewing the recent issues of Sotsial-Demokrat (the central organ of the RSDRP), the factional Bolshevik paper Proletarii, reports from recent sessions of the Central Committee, as wel^a^the commentary in the press of his own party. Before leaving Capri, Dzierżyński also worked on the formation“quietly and even conspiratorially”—of a special party investigatory com­ mission with himself at its head whose task would be to uncover agentsprovocateurs within the SDKPiL.34 Dzierżyński was convinced that he had been betrayed at the time of his last arrest and this impelled him to launch an investigation of long-time party members. In truth, his suspi­ cions regarding certain individuals (most notably, Marian Płochocki, a member of the party since 1900), caused him a twinge of conscience. “The sea here was entrancing me,” he wrote from Capri. “I dreamt about building a socialist society, of going to and living with the people. And now I have to think about becoming a spy and how to investigate people—com­ rades!’’35 Nevertheless, an extraordinary commission was established by Dzierżyński in Kraków in the middle of 1911. By then, however, it be­ came a partison institution that identified provocation with opposition to the ZG, a subject to which we will return later. Dzierżyński and Tyszka Dzierżyński departed from Capri in mid-February. Before reaching Kraków, where he was to take up his old work of coordinating party activity in the Kingdom as secretary and treasurer of the ZG, he stopped in Berne and Berlin for consultations with Luxemburg, Tyszka, Warski and Marchlewski. One of the most immediate tasks was defining a new working relationship with Tyszka, who had assumed control over the work of the ZG during Dzierżyński^ absence. Dzierżyński and Tyszka had displayed their differences before, especially in the spring of 1905. Now, however, Dzierżyński no longer enjoyed the upper hand—and he knew it: even before his arrest in April 1908, he protested Tyszka’s failure “to understand that we are colleagues.”36 Dzierżyński’s later separation in Kraków from the remaining members of the ZG served initially to intensify his complaints regarding Tyszka’s arbitrariness. “The work of the ZG in any event is not normal,” he warned Tyszka in June 1901. ‘The lack of collegiality is a fact. . . . ”37

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Despite Dzierżyński^ frequent reference to his own role on the ZG as a “fiction” 38 and the half-hearted threats of both men to resign from the ZG in deference to the other 39 a compromise solution was eventu­ ally reached in November 1910 that gave Dzierżyński a veto over deci­ sions of the “Berlin trojka” (Tyszka, Warski and Marchlewski) until a vote of the entire ZG could be held.40 In the end, both men considered cooperation essential, largely because of the compatibility of their poli­ tical views. In addition, Tyszka needed Dzierżyński and his authority in the Kingdom to combat the opposition to the ZG; for his part Dzier­ żyński was well aware of what Tyszka: had one for the party in the past, and what his experience would mean in the future. “You know that despite my frequent criticisms,” Dzierżyński wrote Tyszka after their reconciliation, “everything that exists we owe to your will, your tireless work and your dedication exclusively to the party.”41 As opposition to the ZG mounted, it served to bring Dzierżyński and Tyszka even closer together in mutual defense of executive prerogative and the traditional party line. The trade union question is a case in point. If anything, Dzierżyński was a more dogmatic proponent of the policies of the ZG in relation to trade union activity than Tyszka himself. For example, in an effort to divide the growing forces of opposition, the ZG under Tyszka’s direction in the first months of 1910 made limited concessions to social democratic trade union activists. The Main Directorate recognized the existing pos­ sibility of legal union and professional activity, although it continued to insist on the preservation of close organizational ties of the trade unions to the party.42 Dzierżyński, on the other hand, opposed any modification in the leadership’s former hardline approach to the trade unions; he con­ sidered the “new direction” of the ZG a reformist deviation from the un­ compromising “revolutionary” principles of trade union organization. “In my opinion,” he informed the other members of the ZG, “our first and most important task regarding the trade unions should be the creation of our own illegal party trade unions and our own trade union press which would continue our old work of propagating the idea that trade union organizations ought to be S.D.”43 By the time of the August 1910 confer­ ence of the SDKPiL in Kraków, Dzierżyński, with Tyszka’s support now that the earlier concession had failed to divide the opposition to the ZG, succeeded in reestablishing the old line. At the conference, the concept

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Dzierżyński in Kraków, 1910 or 1911 o f legalization was rejected “ under the present circumstances,” as were pro­ posals to infiltrate existing non-party unions.44 In the matter of relations with the PPS-Left and the proposals o f that party for a merger with the SDKPiL, Dzierżyński again occupied a position

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similar to that of Tyszka and, by extension, Rosa Luxemburg. We have already seen that prior to the 1905 revolution, the SDKPiL leadership had failed to perceive the internal ideological cleavages within the PPS and, therefore, it naturally had difficulty in understanding the split of the PPS at the end of 1906. Until the First World War, the dominant view of the PPS-Left among the SDKPiL leadership was that it had not really changed from the old “social-patriotic” PPS. Despite pressure from the rank and file of both organizations for.unification, the ZG treated the proposals of the PPS-Left for merger negotiations as a political maneuver. In Czerwony sztandar, the PPS-Left was characterized as “a group of bankrupt social-patriots who were forced to break with their own past but who are unable to find the road to a social democratic position.”45 Dzierżyński initially objected to the tone of the polemics against the PPS-Left in Czerwony sztandar, which, he felt, impeded necessary coop­ eration.44 However, Dzierżyński, like Luxemburg and Tyszka, predicated the possibility of unification negotiations upon the condition of the Left’s “complete emancipation from the [old] PPS” and the adoption of a “class position.”47 This meant, in effect, the unconditional acceptance by the PPS-Left of the positions of the SDKPiL on the national question, the trade unions, and relations with the Revolutionary Fraction of Piłsudski. For this reason, Dzierżyński opposed in turn proposals to merge social democratic and PPS-Left trade unions,48 the granting of proportional representation on local party institutions of the SDKPiL to defectors from the PPS-Left,49 and the idea of forming a bloc with the PPS-Left during election campaigns to the Duma.50 Hence at a time when unity was essen­ tial to the preservation of a viable socialist movement in Poland, Dzier­ żyński joined Tyszka in blocking the only possibility for its realization, the merger of the organizations of the SDKPiL and PPS-Left on a basis of full equality. The Growth o f Opposition Groups in the SDKPiL The Main Directorate’s claim to a monopoly on determining social democratic policy, as in the case of the trade unions and relations with the PPS-Left, did not go unchallenged. During the period of Dzierżyńskfs absence, many of Tyszka’s designs were in fact stymied by the equally ambitious Jakub Fürstenberg-Hanecki. Like Dzierżyński, Hanecki had

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worked closely with the organization in the Kingdom since 1903, and with Dzierżyńskfs arrest in April 1908, Hanecki moved quickly to establish himself as Dzierżyński^ successor. However, there were key differences in the way Dzierżyński and Hanecki respectively viewed their role within the total framework of the party. Dzierżyński, whether from Kraków or Warsaw, acted as the representative of the ZG and party leadership in the country, in charge of implementing decisions of an executive institution to which he belonged. Although Dzierżyński interpreted the needs of party activists in the Kingdom and relayed them to the ZG, often laced with criticism of the executive institution, he considered that his ultimate responsibility was not to the organization in the country but to the ZG. This was, moreover, entirely consistent with his vision of a centrallycontrolled organizational apparatus. Hanecki, on the other hand, considered himself after Dzierżyński^ arrest the representative of the “country” in the ZG. Hence, Hanecki felt no obligation to carry out the orders of the ZG-his position was dependent not upon the ZG, but only upon the continued sufferance of the organization in the Kingdom. Already in 1908, Hanecki began to ignore the ZG and refused to attend many of its sessions.51 Unable to accept Hanecki’s undisciplined pretensions to autonomy, Tyszka and the ZG had him replaced by Daniel Elbaum. Hanecki also ignored this decision by resigning from the ZG in May 1909 and by continuing his independent activities.52 He was soon joined by Aleksander RubinsteinMałecki, who resigned from the ZG in August 1909 in order to help Hanecki form a core of party intellectuals in opposition to Tyszka and the executive committee. The schismatic threat posed to the party by Hanecki and his supporters would not have appeared so dangerous had it not been for the simul­ taneous emergence of a workers’ opposition centered in the Warsaw organization under the leadership of Wincenty Matuszewski. Whereas Hanecki’s clash with the ZG was in part a result of his personal antag­ onism towards Tyszka,53 Matuszewski’s group more directly attacked the growing bureaucratization of the party and the centralization of leadership and initiative in the hands of the ZG. Matuszewski, whom Tyszka called the “enfant terrible” of the SDKPiL, had already criti­ cized with little result Dzierżyńskfs organizational statutes at the party’s Fifth Congress in 1906. At the Sixth Congress of the SDKPiL, which met

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abroad in Prague from December 5 to 13,1908, Matuszewski led a success­ ful effort to defeat by a narrow margin the draft agenda of the ZG, there­ by winning more time for the opposition to present its views. The ZG easily won a following vote of confidence (fifteen for, six against, six abstaining); nevertheless, Matuszewski’s condemnation of the Main Direct­ orate’s insensitive interference in the affairs of local organizations found considerable sympathy among several delegates to the congress, including Dzierzyhski’s future wife, Zofia Muszkat.54 At the Sixth Congress, the Matuszewski group began to organize itself, and, in an unprecedented step, held its meetings behind closed doors. In time, the two separate cores of opposition led by Hanecki and Matuszewski would merge, thus posing a fundamental challenge to the authority of the ZG. The SDKPiL and the Crisis in the RSDRP The policies of the ZG regarding the RSDRP also became subject to growing criticism within the party. Tyszka was at the center of this con­ troversy as well, due in part to the fact that he treated party “diplomacy” as his own personal domain. Initially, Tyszka continued Dzierzynski’s policy of opposition to the Mensheviks and of a reserved but essentially cooperative attitude towards the Bolsheviks. For example, at the Fifth Congress of the RSDRP, which met in London from May 13 to June 1, 1907, the forty-five-member delegation of the SDKPiL helped the Bol­ sheviks gain a slight majority in the voting on key resolutions. Thus Lenin’s position on such issues as relations with the Kadets, the role of the Duma, and the role of the social democratic fraction in the Duma became the official policy of the RSDRP. The SDKPiL also helped Lenin wrest control of the central organ, Sotsial-Demokrat, from the Mensheviks. On the other hand, Tyszka and the Polish delegation continued to vote against Lenin in the matter of “expropriations” and “partisan activities,” supporting a resolution that prohibited party members from participating in such actions.55 Tyszka also tried to continue the practice established by Dzierżyński of obliging the SDKPiL delegation to vote as a bloc, which had been designed to preserve maximum independence between the Russian factions. The solidarity of the Polish delegation at London was broken only by Stanisław Trusiewicz-Zalewski, who voted with the Bolsheviks on every resolution. However, several other Polish delegates, including Matuszewski, abstained from voting when they were in disagreement with Tyszka.56

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Dissension within the SDKPiL over the conduct of “Russian policy” by the ZG grew steadily thereafter, due in part to Tyszka’s failure to consult with party activists in the Kingdom, in part to a gradual shift of the SDKPiL’s position toward neutralitycin the organizational strug­ gle between the Russian factions. The changed circumstances resulting from the dissolution of the second Duma in June 1907, Lenin’s use of the “liquidator” controversy to eliminate Menshevik participation in the common party, and the growth of centrifugal forces within the Bolshevik faction itself all forced the SDKPiL leadership to reevaluate the merits of the Bolshevik alliance. This is not to say that Tyszka actually con­ templated a break with Lenin. At the Sixth Congress of the SDKPiL in December 1908, Tyszka sharply criticized the Mensheviks for “the most harmful type of opportunism,” but at the same time he considered Lenin’s ruthless struggle against them to be blatant factionalism.57 Hence, Tyszka continued to support Lenin on the key ideological and tactical issues, but he refused to support Lenin’s campaign to expel the “liquidators” from the common party. On this issue, Tyszka correctly perceived Lenin’s exag­ geration and distortion of the “liquidator” controversy for his own fac­ tional purposes. That is, Tyszka was aware of the fact that most Men­ sheviks placed great hope in the eventual creation of a legal mass party, but he also knew that very few of them were prepared to dismantle im­ mediately the existing illegal organization—the charge with which Lenin smeared the Menshevik faction as a whole. It was at this time that the concept of the SDKPiL as a “third force” in the all-Russian party assumed center stage in Tyszka’s diplomacy. Tyszka, as well as Rosa Luxemburg, had hoped for some time that the participa­ tion of the SDKPiL in the common party would serve to “europeanize” the RSDRP.s8 On the one hand, they sought to wean the Mensheviks from their “opportunistic” emphasis on legality, and, on the other, the Bolsheviks away from their splitting policies. Logically, the SDKPiL could play the role of a “third force” only within a united party, which Tyszka now was prepared to defend at all costs. The high point of Tyszka’s diplo­ macy came at the Paris plenum of the Russian Central Committee (Janu­ ary 15 to February 5,1910). Here it was resolved to liquidate the Bolshevik factional organ Proletarii and to restore the equality of representation on the editorial board of the central organ Sotsial-Demokrat, which had be­ come a factional mouthpiece of Lenin against his Menshevik opponents.59

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Unfortunately, the subtleties of Tyszka’s diplomacy and his efforts to consolidate the RSDRP made little sense to many activists in the King­ dom. To them the defense of party unity translated into defense of the Mensheviks; it also directly contradicted the avowed purposes of the ideological struggle against “opportunism” within the RSDRP. The real disaster of Tyszka’s diplomacy was not so much its ultimate ineffective­ ness in preventing a split in the Russian party, but that it was allowed to become a focal point for the coalescing forces of opposition within the SDKPiL, resulting principally from Tyszka’s conduct of a policy that had little support among party members. This not only led to the further alienation from the ZG of intellectuals such as Hanecki and Malewski, but also seemed to confirm the suspicions of activists in the Kingdom, such as Matuszewski, that the ZG had taken yet another step in setting itself up an an institution above the party. The position of neutrality adopted by Tyszka in the organizational struggle between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks within the RSDRP also be­ came an initial point of friction between him and Dzierżyński upon the latter’s return. Particularly disturbing to Dzierżyński were the results of the January (1910) plenum of the Russian Central Committee. In con­ trast to Tyszka and as a result of his own previous experiences, Dzier­ żyński was skeptical about the possibility of coming to an understanding with the Mensheviks as well as cooperating with them on the central organ. After the January plenum, when the Menshevik factional paper Golos Sotsial-Demokrata continued publication despite the elimination of Proletarii, Dzierżyński supported plans to remove the Mensheviks Martov and Fedor Dan from the editorial board of Sotsial-Demokrat. Already from Berne in early March 1910, Dzierżyński recorded his lack of belief “in the unity of the party with the participation of Dan.” 60 Whereas Tyszka feared that the removal of Martov and Dan from SotsialDemokrat would lead to a split and thereby ruin his own policy of estab­ lishing the SDKPiL as a “third force” in the RSDRP, Dzierżyński was prepared to “remove from the party all those who are dragging us through the mud-there will not be many of us—but at least we will be strong.”61 For this reason Dzierżyński greeted Lenin’s article, “Voice of the Liquida­ tors against the Party,” with complete approval, asserting that such force­ ful arguments against “reformism” had not appeared in Russia since the campaign of Iskra against the “economists.”62

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However, despite these early differences, Tyszka and Dzierżyński came to an essential agreement on the Russian question. With the continued publication of Golos Sotsial-Demokrata, the appearance in it of articles by the renegade Polish Social Democrat Trusiewicz-Zalewski, and the courting of the PPS-Left by the Mensheviks as a counterweight to the SDKPiL,63 Tyszka began to assume the firmer stance against the socalled “liquidators” advocated by Dzierżyński. By the spring of 1910, Tyszka agreed that the central organ should openly condemn the “liqui­ dators;” as a result Adolf Warski collaborated in the publication of Lenin’s article “Voice of the Liquidators against the Party.” The ZG also auth­ orized the publication of an article by Marchlewski in the German social democratic journal Die Neue Zeit sharply criticizing the Menshevik leader Martov for taking the “liquidators” under his protection.64 This apparent­ ly satisfied Dzierżyński who despite his criticism of the policy of neu­ trality in the Rusian factional struggle, nevertheless had always shared Tyszka’s aim of preserving for the SDKPiL an important and independent role within the RSDRP. “Regarding Russian matters,” Dzierżyński in­ formed Leder as early as May 1910, “I generally agree with the line taken by Leon.” 65 By the time of the June 1911 meeting of the Council of the Russian Central Committee, which represented the last “legal” attempt to resolve the internal crisis of the RSDRP, Tyszka and Dzierżyński had more or less reached a common position on Russian policy. Tyszka now accepted Dzierzyński’s view that the SDKPiL’s ideological support for the Bol­ sheviks should be translated into organizational support of Lenin’s efforts to expel the “liquidators” from the party. At the same time, Dzierżyński agreed to Tyszka’s definition of the “liquidators” -restricted to the edi­ tors of Golos Sotsial-Demokrata**—as well as to the principle that their expulsion must be accomplished by legal means, through an all-Russian congress or conference. In this way, Tyszka and Dzierżyński hoped to limit the political damage of a future purge and to preserve the rest of the party intact. With such considerations in mind, they also began to seek out the opinions of the Bolsheviks “conciliators” led by A. I. Rykov and “party Mensheviks” led by Plekhanov, both groups holding positions basically similar to that of the SDKPiL. Originally, the ZG and Lenin cooperated in initiating the ill-fated coun­ cil of the Central Committee that met in Paris from June 10 to 17,1911,67

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although, as it turned out, for quite different reasons. Whereas the SDKPiL leadership hoped to use the council for calling a party conference or con­ gress to resolve the internal policy crisis, Lenin intended to grant to the council the authority of a plenum that could immediately expel the “liquidators” from the central party institutions. Before reaching Paris, Dzierżyński and Tyszka, as the SDKPiL representatives on the Russian Central Committee, met in Berlin on June 5 to formulate strategy.68 On June 9, Tyszka, Dzierżyński and Leder (the representative of the SDKPiL on the editorial board of Sotsial-Demokrat) met with Lenin, Zinoviev and Kamenev only to discover that the Bolshevik leadership was pre­ paring a split.69 Lenin’s plot to use the council to carry out the split was strongly opposed by the SDKPiL because, in Dzierżyński^ words, “then the liquidators and opportunists will appear as defenders of the party in the eyes of everyone and will create their own C.C.”70 At the same time, Tyszka and Dzierżyński were encouraged by the absence of support for a split within the Bolshevik camp itself. “Yesterday we learned,” Dzier­ żyński reported from Paris, “that actually there are only two with Lenin (Grigorii [Zinoviev] and Kamenev). . . that the majority of Bolsheviks here are against Lenin and are prepared to come out publicly against him.”71 During a break on the second day of the council sessions, Lenin and Dzierżyński passed between them a scrap of paper that Lenin entitled “Dogovor Lenina s Iuzefem” (The Agreement of Lenin with Józef); it has been cited ever since by communist historians as proof of Dzier­ żyński^ unwavering support of Lenin in his struggle against the Men­ sheviks.72 Actually the “dogovor” was hardly an agreement, but rather an exchange of opinions. In it Lenin asked whether or not the time had come to expel “the men of Golos” from the party—to which Dzierżyński responded, “It is indeed necessary. But how?”73 Dzierżyński^ question was of no minor significance, but was in fact at the heart of the issue that kept Lenin and the SDKPiL leadership apart at Paris. The emphasis by Dzierżyński and Tyszka, as well as by the Bolshevik “conciliators,” on legal methods of removing the “liquidators” from the party was eventually reflected in the decision of the council to set up an Organization Com­ mission under Tyszka’s direction to prepare a party conference.74 The compromise solution of the Paris Council, however, did not succeed in preserving party unity (minus the “liquidators”) or the “Left Bloc” alliance of the SDKPiL with the Bolsheviks, the two goals of the SDKPiL

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at Paris. In November, Lenin denounced Tyszka’s Organization Commis­ sion after setting up one of his own in Russia which prepared the in­ famous Prague conférence of January 18,sf$12. This small gathering of Lenin’s supporters usurped the rights of the party by electing a central committee and by unilaterally announcing the expulsion of the “liqui­ dators.” By October, Dzierżyński had already become pessimistic regard­ ing the recent efforts to uphold party institutions, and, convinced of the inevitability of a split, advised Tyszka that they “give up on Russian matters.”75. Despite his pessimism, Dzierżyński was outraged by Lenin’s later actions: “We do not want to and cannot go with the Right. Lenin’s break with us means the end of party unity and the Left Bloc. Now it is possible to fear that the Leninists will want to bring their skloky [squab­ bles] to us.” 76 Dzierżyński^ concern that Lenin would attempt to interfere in the internal affairs of the SDKPiL was well justified. As one Soviet historian unwittingly writes, “In the person of V. I. Lenin, the opposition [to the ZG] from the first days of its existence found a candid and loyal friend.” 77 Oddly enough, it was Dzierżyński, rather than Tyszka, who first clearly perceived this danger, particularly in the close relationship between Lenin and Hanecki. For most of the period in question, Hanecki was the repre­ sentative of the SDKPiL on the Bureau of the Central Committee that met in Russia. Despite Lenin’s complete satisfaction with Hanecki’s work in this institution,78 Dzierżyński by February 1910 had begun to advance his own candidacy to the Bureau, insinuating that because of his opposi­ tion to the ZG, Hanecki had failed to defend the interests of the SDKPiL.79 Tyszka, however, was unmoved by Dzierzyński’s arguments. From his correspondence it is clear that Tyszka considered the work of the Russian Bureau secondary to that of the institutions of the RSDRP abroad; thus Hanecki could cause the ZG little harm from St. Petersburg. At the same time, all members of the Bureau in Russia faced the real prospect of arrest; while Hanecki’s arrest might be welcome to Tyszka, he could illafford the loss of Dzierżyński in view of the rapidly growing struggle within the SDKPiL.80 Dzierżyński repeated his demand for Hanecki’s resignation throughout the summer and autumn of 1910 and even threat­ ened to withdraw from the ZG over the issue.81 Thus it appears that much of Dzierżyński’s so-called “opposition” to Tyszka during this period was based on his perception of the “disorganizing” decision of the ZG to

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delegate to a central party institution a man “who has in his soul and in his head only his conflict with the ZG.”82 In the end Dzierzynski’s suspicions of collaboration between Lenin and Hanccki proved correct. As early as April 1911, Lenin held discus­ sions in Paris with Hanecki and other members of the opposition regard­ ing the policies of the ZG.83 It was therefore no mere coincidence that the split of the RSDRP was to be followed by the split of the SDKPiL, the latter with Lenin’s obvious encouragement. In its official commentary on the Prague conference of Bolsheviks and Lenin’s role in the final split of the RSDRP, the ZG not only condemned the “anti-Marxist and bour­ geois” organizational views of Lenin, but bitterly accused him of seeking to split the national parties, especially their own.84

* * * * * The crisis in the SDKPiL was not, of course, the result of Lenin’s intri­ gues against the ZG. Rather it was the ideological and organizational in­ flexibility, symbolized in the dictatorship of the ZG,that made the SDKPiL vulnerable to Lenin’s meddling. Neither Dzierżyński nor Tyszka would admit that the autocratic ZG was responsible for the problems facing the SDKPiL. The leadership’s perception of the internal crisis in the SDKPiL was, therefore, essentially false; this in turn influenced the choice of methods employed by the ZG in dealing with its opponents. These met­ hods, rather than resolving the crisis, served to aggravate it beyond repair. In striving to keep the “Leninist” record of Dzierżyński as unblemished as possible, communist historiography has deliberately ignored the ulti­ mate affinity of the views of Tyszka and Dzierżyński both on “Russian policy” as well as on issues affecting the party internally. Consequently, Tyszka has been assigned the major portion of the blame for the break with Lenin and for the internal crisis in the SDKPiL.85 Yet despite claims that Dzierżyński “condemned the methods of action of the Main Direct­ orate and particularly those of Leon Jogiches-Tyszka,”86 the evidence suggests that Dzierżyński not only adhered to the line associated with Tyszka and the ZG, but that he was instrumental in formulating it. The reason for Dzierżyńskfs collaboration with and loyalty to Tyszka is clear: whether in matters of internal or external policy, Dzierżyński shared with Tyszka the desire to preserve and strengthen the authority of

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the ZG as the executive institution of the party in determining the tactics and strategy of the entire organization. Unfortunately, such a view was not shared by the real opponents of the ZG—JJanecki, Małecki and Matuszewski-opponents whom Dzierżyński and Tyszka now sought to crush at the ultimate expense of the future unity of the SDKPiL. t

CHAPTER IX DZIERŻYŃSKI AND THE ECLIPSE OF THE SDKPiL, 1911-1917

At the end of 1911, the crisis in the SDKPiL had reached an acute state. The unity of the party was threatened by the separation of party executive institutions in emigration from the ravaged organization in the Kingdom, by growing internal opposition to the virtual monopoly exercised by the Main Directorate (ZG) in making decisions affecting the entire organization, and by the unfortunate and unpopular involve­ ment of the party leadership in the struggle between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in the RSDRP. To preserve the unity of the SDKPiL, the central party leadership—that is, Tyszka and Dzierżyński—sought to strengthen the authority of the ZG and enhance its power to discipline party members, especially those belonging to the opposition. However, the methods employed by the ZG to accomplish these goals-ranging from character assassination to the outright expulsion of dissidents from the party—only aggravated the crisis. By the beginning of 1912 the party had split into two mutually antagonistic camps, each led by a small group of intellectuals. For the next five years, the supporters and opponents of the ZG would fight each other for a mass following that no longer existed. Although Dzierżyński must bear his share of responsibility for the split of the SDKPiL and for its perpetuation, he was unable to witness first hand the results of his own factional politics. The Okhrana took care of that when

195

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it captured him in the late summer of 1912. While Dzierżyński languished in tsarist prisons and hard labor camps, his^^iyided party entered the war years totally unprepared for the new issues and conditions arising from the outbreak of hostilities. The ideological and political rigidity of both factions of the SDKPiL appeared in bold relief when the war put the issue of an independent Poland on the international agenda. Paralyzed by their doctrinaire programmatic postulates and lack of organizational unity, the Social Democrats stood helplessly by as Piłsudski, who had waited for such a moment, harnassed the energies of the Polish masses in rebuilding a national state. Although the SDKPiL was able to reunify its two factions at the end of 1916 and later merge with leftists from the PPS under the stimulus of the Russian revolution, the party (now officially the Com­ munist Party of Poland) ceased to be an important factor in Polish politics. Its continued opposition to the “utopia” of Polish independence, well after that independence became an accomplished fact, doomed the cause of communism in Poland for years to come. Dealing with the Crisis in the Party As Dzierżyński and Tyszka faced growing opposition to their internal and external policies in 1911, they were united in their determination to eliminate the serious threat to the executive authority of the ZG posed by that opposition. Yet they held different views on the means by which this goal was to be accomplished and this often led to heated exchanges. Much of the controversy centered on the role to be played by Dzierżyń­ ski in the struggle ahead. Tyszka, in attempting to collect forces for the struggle against the op­ position, proposed time and again to concentrate the entire ZG in Berlin, which would have necessitated Dzierzyński’s transfer from Kraków.1 For his part, Dzierżyński considered the separation of the ZG from the coun­ try to be the central problem. Tyszka’s proposed solution would only further isolate the ZG, he maintained, thereby diminishing its ability to implement executive directives and enforce discipline in the Kingdom. While he agreed with Tyszka that the forces of the ZG should be con­ centrated to provide central direction to party work,2 Dzierżyński pro­ posed that the headquarters of the ZGbe transferred from Berlin to Kraków in order to reestablish the vital link between the executive leadership

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abroad and direct organizational work in the Kingdom.3 In this regard, Dzierżyński also demanded that the ZG delegate him as its permanent representative in the country. Dzierżyński therefore repeatedly rejected Tyszka’s invitations to come to Berlin.4 While Tyszka could not force Dzierżyński to move to Berlin, he could and did seek to block his departure for the Kingdom. It has been argued that Tyszka rejected Dzierżyński^ demands to return to the Kingdom be­ cause of his fear that Dzierżyński would use his authority and popularity in the Kingdom to establish a position of independence from the ZG.S However, the principal reason behind Tyszka’s objections was his concern for the probability of Dzierżyński^ arrest, which, he argued, would be a “disastrous loss” for the party.6 Tyszka’s opionion on this particular issue was also shared by the two other members of the so-called “Berlin trojka,” Marchlewski and Warski.7 In countering Tyszka’s argument, Dzierżyński tried to win over the members of the ZG to a plan by which he would go into the Kingdom from time to time rather than permanently, dealing with a few individuals rather than organizations. This would reduce the chance of his arrest, he argued, which in any case “would be better than to leave things as they are.”8 When this scheme failed to win the support of his colleagues, Dzier­ żyński turned to more drastic measures of persuasion, including the re­ peated but empty threat of his own resignation from the ZG.9 Finally, in the middle of March 1911, Dzierżyński presented Tyszka with what he called a fait accompli: “I am informing you that I am going into the country for six or seven days. . . . I ask you not to try to convince me to stay. I will not listen. To remain abroad any longer would be death for me as well as for the party.” 10 Tyszka’s last-ditch efforts to prevent Dzierżyński^ departure, including the tendering of his own resignation and the partially justified accusation that Dzierżyński wanted to work in the Kingdom only because it gave him greater personal satisfaction,11 were unavailing. However, as a “concession” to Tyszka, Dzierżyński decided to limit his stay in the country to one day to to go only to the Dąbrowa Basin rather than to Warsaw.12 Thus, starting in April 1911, he began to make periodic trips into the Kingdom. Despite Tyszka’s con­ tinued protests, Dzierżyński kept him informed of his every move. Regardless of Dzierżyńskfs disclaimer that “the party is not for me a field for seeking personal satisfaction,” 13 there were indeed personal, in

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Zofia Dzierzyńska, 1918

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addition to political, motivations behind his insistent demands to work in the Kingdom. Soon after taking up residence in Kraków in March 1910, Dzierżyński began working closely with Zofia Muszkat, the daughter of a polonized Jewish intellectual14 and long-time member of the SDKPiL. !n Kraków, Zofia aided Dzierżyński in reorganizing the archive of party publications and in writing the formal text between the lines of his con­ spiratorial letters to activists in the Kingdom.15 Soon their involvement went beyond the affairs of the party'and, perhaps unconsciously using Zofia as an outlet for his unrequited love for Sabina Feinstein, Dzier­ żyński spent an amorous seven days with her in the Tatra Mountains in early September 1910. Soon after returning to Kraków from their “honeymoon,” Dzierżyński and Muszkat were married in St. Nicholas’ Church.16 By then Zofia was pregnant and the marriage may well have been one of honor. Nevertheless, Dzierżyński sent her to Warsaw at the end of November to expedite the transport of illegal literature into the country.17 A month later Zofia was arrested at a meeting along with other leading Warsaw party activists and then imprisoned in the Warsaw Citadel. From this moment on, Dzierżyński^ demands to go into the Kingdom acquired a greater sense of urgency. Dzierżyńskfs personal problems were compounded by the premature birth and poor health of his son Janek in the so-called “Serbia” (the women’s section of the Pawiak prison) where Zofia was later transferred.18 With the trial of his wife in November 1911 and her sentence to perman­ ent Siberian exile, Dzierżyński had to concern himself with making ar­ rangements for his son, who could not possibly have withstood such a grueling journey. In this regard, Dzierżyński explored several alternatives, from entrusting Janek to the guardianship of his sister Aldona to looking after the boy himself in Kraków.19 Finally, while in Warsaw in January 1912, Dzierżyński met with Zygmunt Muszkat, Zofia’s father, who had agreed to transmit communications between husband and wife. It was decided to place Janek temporarily in a recently opened children’s home in Warsaw, where Dzierżyński somehow managed to see his son for the first time in March 1912. “A tall boy,” he described Janek to Tyszka, “but dreadfully thin.”20 In attending to the welfare of his child, Dzierżyński repeatedly exposed himself to the danger of arrest. This did little to allay Tyszka’s concern for the fate of his political ally. On one occasion, Dzierżyński narrowly

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escaped an ambush that the police had prepared at the flat of his fatherin-law.21 ‘After Dzierżyński had seen his son, Tyszka reminded him of his responsibility to preserve a conspiratorial existence, to which Dzierżyński angrily retorted, “It seems that in belongingsto the ZG, I am deprived of rights to a personal life.”22 However, from that point on, Dzierżyński entrusted the arrangement of his family affairs in Warsaw to Ignacy Bratman23 while plotting in the meantime the escape of his wife from Siberian exile. He would see neither mother nor child again until 1918.24 Background on the Split o f the SDKPiL Despite Dzierżyńskim conviction that the crisis within the party was the result of the separation of the ZG from the organization in the King­ dom, he was mistaken in his belief that his own appearance in the country would somehow manage to bring the crisis to an end. Indeed, the divi­ sions within the SDKPiL had far deeper roots that Dzierżyński, like Tyszka, failed to recognize. Before Dzierżyńskim role in the split of the SDKPiL at the turn of 1911/1912 can be analyzed, however, it is neces­ sary to recount briefly the issues and events that led up to it. Not surprisingly, there has been a general reluctance among historians of the party, particularly in Poland, to deal with the subject of the split, certainly not one of the brighter episodes in the history of Polish com­ munism. Despite claims, most frequently made by Soviet historians, that the crisis in the SDKPiL was the result of an internal “ideological struggle” in which the question of “affinity to Leninism occupied an important place” (thus justifying Lenin’s intervention in the affairs of the SDKPiL),25 the split did not reflect profound ideological or program­ matic differences. Lenin’s role in the split of the SDKPiL has in fact served to obscure its real causes; these were fundamental differences over the twin issues of party organization and methods of leadership. The similarities with the Bolshevik-Menshevik split of 1903 are striking; what is confusing is Lenin’s support for the SDKPiL’s version of the Russian Mensheviks. Admittedly there were differences within the SDKPiL of a political and tactical nature. The opposition, known after the split as the rozła­ mowcy (the splitters), recognized the Leninist Central Committee elected by the Prague Conference of Bolsheviks in January 1912, a gathering that

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the zarzqdowcy (supporters of the ZG) considered “illegal.” The rozłamo­ wcy were also more inclined towards collaboration with the PPS-Left and favored the modification of the party’s position in relation to legal trade union activity. However, generally speaking, the rozłamowcy, like the zarzqdowcy, continued to adhere to the political and ideological tradi­ tions that had characterized Polish Social Democracy from its inception -namely the emphasis on maximalist demands, exclusiveness in relation to non-proletarian segments of the population, inflexible opposition to the goal of Polish independence under any circumstances, the terri­ torial as opposed to the national character of party work-in short the narrowly sectarian and ideologically inflexible Weltanschauung frequently characterized as “Luxemburgism.” Therefore, the rozłamowcy were not Leninists; they were simply supported by Lenin as part of his own strug­ gle with a Main Directorate that had refused to do his bidding in the allRussian party. The heated polemical debate during the war years be­ tween Lenin’s Sotsial-Demokrat and Gazeta robotnicza of the rozłamo­ wcy over the issue of national self-determination is perhaps the best evi­ dence of the latter group’s continuing loyalty to the positions of Rosa Luxemburg.26 The direct cause of the split in the SDKPiL, therefore, was the chal­ lenge posed by the opposition to the authority of the ZG over issues of party organization and the response of the ZG to that challenge. We have seen that although in principle the SDKPiL paid lip service to the role of democracy inside the party, in practice a narrow centralism identi­ fied with the five-member Main Directorate became the established rule, a divergence for which, at least prior to 1-908, Dzierżyński rather than Tyszka was mainly responsible. Hence, in demanding an organizational structure that would ensure the development of internal party demo­ cracy, local initiative and the preservation of the rights of the minority (hardly a display of affinity to Leninism), the opposition repeatedly challenged the central authority of the party represented by the ZG. In August 1910, Alexander Rubinstein-Małecki sent a letter in the name of the opposition to the party conference meeting in Kraków in which he protested the “absolutism” of the ZG.27 This opening shot was followed in October by an appeal to like-minded comrades, sug­ gesting that they openly declare war on the ZG by establishing an op­ position newspaper. They even tried to win Dzierżyński over to this plan,

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a grave miscalculation that doomed the enterprise.28 By the spring of 1911, th£ opposition intellectuals-principally Małecki, Hanecki and Radek—had taken their conflict with the ZG into the foreign sections of the party; Dzierżyński’s Kraków section^-which at the time was “our citadel of the most experienced and talented comrades” in the words of one party activist, was the primary target of this strategy.29 From this point on, the party moved steadily towards an open rupture. By March, the ZG found that it could no longer rely on Józef Unszlicht, another member of the opposition with close ties to the Warsaw organi­ zation.30 The climax came on December 11, 1911, when the Warsaw Interdistrict Conference, organized secretly for months by Hanecki, Un­ szlicht and Wincenty Matuszewski, convened without the prior know­ ledge of the ZG and elected a new “oppositional” Warsaw Committee in violation of party statutes. The election was subsequently invadidated by the ZG, a decision that was, of course, ignored by the opposition leaders in Warsaw. The split had become a fact. Dzierżyński Role: Methods o f Struggle Against the Opposition According to Polish and Soviet accounts, Dzierżyński played virtually no role in the events leading to the split or in the split itself. In the internal party controversy, Dzierżyński only “formally” took the side of the ZG because of his sense of party discipline; in his heart he supported the “Leninist” position of the rozłamowcy.31 After all, how could the most “Leninist” of the Polish Social Democrats fight a group supported by Lenin himself? “ For Dzierżyński it was a real inferno,” wrote Karl Radek in this vein following Dzierżyński’s death in 1926. “Supporting the main group of leaders, for a certain time he had to abandon the thought of uniting with the Bolshevik center, from which he did not differ in the least.”32 Tyszka, not Dzierżyński, is the villain of these accounts-as a member of the ZG, Dzierżyński was only an innocent bystander who had tried to work for unity. Did not Dzierżyński too criticize Tyszka for running roughshod over the principle of collective leadership? Thus, accord­ ing to the official line, Dzierżyński represented an “inner” opposition to Tyszka’s policies.33 Yet the large body of unpublished evidence (in contrast to the nar­ rowly selected published documents) overwhelmingly indicates that

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Jakub Fürstenberg-Hanecki Dzierżyński, like Tyszka, would not suffer any attem pts at organized opposition to the authority o f the ZG and, moreover, that he was pre­ pared to employ all means at his disposal to eliminate such opposition. That the rozłamowcy were backed by what Dzierżyński derisively called the “ C.C. of the Leninists” (the “ illegal” Central Committee elected by the Prague Conference of Bolsheviks)34 was obviously o f no significance at all to him. He certainly did not act like a man caught in the moral dilemma o f Radek’s “ inferno.” The m atter clearly requires closer scrutiny. Upon his return to active political life following his escape from exile at the end o f 1909, Dzier­ żyński advocated a hard line towards organized opposition and modera­ tion towards those who came out against the ZG “ loyally” as private

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I

Aleksander Rubinstein-Małecki individuals. Thus, in response to the challenge to the ZG posed by the renegade Stanisław Trusiewicz-Zalewski in early 1910, Dzierżyński de­ manded that his old colleague from the Vilna days be brought before a party tribunal and accused of “disorganization, demoralization, prevar­ ication, o f violating the directives and decisions of the party and its con­ spiracy, and for failure to adhere to the party program.” 3S When Tyszka suggested that in the interest of legality the tribunal should be selected by the next party conference,36 Dzierżyński displayed impatience, argu­ ing that the conference, rather than select a tribunal, should “ expel Zalew­ ski and [his supporters] as soon as possible.” 37 Regarding Hanecki, Dzierżyński initially argued against the employment of a harsh tone by the ZG in response to Hanecki’s many protests and

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Karl Radek “ insinuations” against the executive leadership.38 It did not take long, however, for Dzierżyński to abandon his advocacy o f sweet reasonable­ ness in relation to Hanecki. By the summer o f 1910, he was complaining bitterly about Hanecki: “ I am no longer able to negotiate with him and I would prefer being in a hard labor prison than to try to arrange something with him. He told me simply that he is not necessary to us, nor we to him.” 39 In October 1910, Dzierżyński first raised the possibility of bring­ ing both Hanecki and Małecki before a party tribunal for their abortive attem pt to establish an opposition newspaper, arguing that “ in my opin­ ion we cannot settle this conflict in any other way.”40 When Hanecki and Małecki abandoned their plan to come out against the ZG in print, Dzier­ żyński proposed that the leadership launch a series of private attacks

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Józef Unszlicht against them. He, in fact, had already embarked on such a course o f action. “ I have let Czesław [Hanecki] know through others that he is a rogue,” Dzierżyński informed Tyszka, “and that I am prepared to prove this be­ fore any objective audience.” 41 Where tribunals and character assassina­ tion failed to suffice in dealing with the dissident intellectuals, Dzierżyń­ ski suggested the same expedient as in the case o f Zalewski, namely their immediate suspension from party work.42

The “Radek Case” Indicative of the lengths to which Dzierżyński was prepared to go to eliminate the opposition o f the party intellectuals was his involvement in

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the so-called “Radek Case.” One of the more skilled publicists of the SDKPiL since 1904, Karl Radek was, after Trusiewicz, the foremost proponent of legal trade union activity and merger with the PPS-Left among Polish Social Democrats. When the ZG in June 1910 refused to publish in Czerwony sztandar an article in which Radek defended the idea of merging social democratic and PPS-Left trade unions, he was quickly embraced by the opposition group of Hanecki and Małecki who, in turn, accused the ZG of limiting discussion of issues crucial to the party.43 Before this incident, however, Radek had requested that the ZG set up a commission to investigate long-standing charges against him raised by Emil Haecker of the PPSD (Polish Social Democratic Party of Galicja and Silesia) of stealing books from the library of Naprzód when he worked for the Krakow-based journal in 1904. Radek obviously ex­ pected such a commission to clear his name. At first the ZG was in no hurry to establish the commission. Dzierżyński himself claimed that he had no time to participate in the investigation and asked the ZG to find someone else.44 Only when Radek joined Hanecki and Małecki in opposition to the party leadership did the ZG attach importance to the commission; now Dzierżyński agreed to preside over it. While simultaneously advocating that the ZG take some action “against Radek as an opportunist,”45 Dzier­ żyński expanded the authority of the commission to investigate, in addi­ tion to Haecker’s charges, the spurious allegation of a couple of lowranking party members that Radek, when serving as treasurer of one of the party trade unions in late 1906, had embezzled three hundred rubles from union funds. In his personal notes on the “Radek case,” it is obvious that Dzierżyński considered the evidence against Radek insufficient. The inability to account for the three hundred rubles did not necessarily mean fraud, he noted, because the many arrests and frequent changes of union treasurers at that time had left a lot of money unaccounted for.44 Never­ theless, after the split of the SDKPiL in December 1911, Dzierżyński^ commission, which had de facto been transformed into a tribunal, found Radek guilty of the charge of embezzlement and formally expelled him from the party.47 Even before the commission had reached its decision, in any case a foregone conclusion, Dzierżyński called upon the ZG to turn over the “evidence” against Radek immediately to the German Social Democratic Party (of which Radek at that time was also a member) be­ cause, as he argued, “it is my deepest conviction that such a person should

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not be a member of any socialist party.”48 Tyszka proved more than will­ ing to oblige and backed by the authority ^r^cl influence of Rosa Luxem­ burg in the SPD, eventually succeeded in getting Radek expelled from that party at is Jena Congress in September 1913.49 Dzierżyński and the Workers’ Opposition Whereas Dzierżyński was prepared to turn to politically ruthless met­ hods in the struggle against the opposition of the intellectuals, he initally called for caution and moderation in dealing with the workers’ opposition to the ZG led by Wincenty Matuszewski. In part, he believed that the dis­ sident workers were not yet lost to the party and that he could influence many of them if only the ZG would agree to his permanent residence in the Kingdom.50 At the same time, he underestimated the seriousness of the threat to the ZG posed by Matuszewski and his supporters, condes­ cendingly referring to them as “children, who don’t have the will” for engaging in political and factional activities.51 For these reasons, Dzier­ żyński argued that the ZG should allow Matuszewski’s adherents to pub­ lish their views in the press in order to avoid “pushing them into a struggle with us.”52 He also aided Matuszewski in gaining the permission of the ZG at the end of 1910 to return to the Kingdom where he immediately re­ joined the Warsaw Committee. Dzierżyńskfs misjudgment of Matuszewski and his intentions became only too apparent in December 1911 when the latter helped organize the “illegal” Warsaw interdistrict conference that resulted in the final split of the SDKPiL. Dzierżyński, according to his wife, was especially furious with Matuszewski and his role in the Warsaw conference, conveying in his letters to her an explicit sense of betrayal.53 Not only did Dzierżyński compose a resolution of the ZG informing Matuszewski that he had been placed before a party tribunal for, among other things, “fulfilling the role of an agent in Warsaw of a clique of disorganizers,” but he also person­ ally volunteered to serve the document on “comrade Marcin.” 54 Once the split of the SDKPiL became an accomplished fact, Dzierżyń­ ski demanded that the ZG declare “all-out war with this factiousness.”55 In his mind, this meant the annulment of the resolutions of the Warsaw conference, the dissolution of the “illegally” elected Warsaw Committee, the placing of the leaders of the rozłamowcy in Warsaw before a tribunal,

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and their immediate suspension from party work (Matuszewski and Unszlicht were most frequently named in this regard). And, if it became necessary, Dzierżyński was prepared to liquidate the entire Warsaw organi­ zation and reconstruct it anew from whatever supporters the ZG could muster. All of these severe measures proposed by Dzierżyński, but so closely associated with Tyszka, were eventually adopted by the ZG in its struggle with the rozłamowcy. In fact, Tyszka appeared initially reluctant to en­ gage the rozłamowcy in battle; he proposed, for example, that the ZG only suspend rather than annul the resolutions of the Warsaw conference. Dzierżyński scolded him for this, declaring that “you are only giving materiel to our ‘opposition.’ ”56 Dzierżyński also found it necessary to persuade Tyszka in the early going that the ZG come out publicly in Czerwony sztandar with its position regarding the split. “The most open and broad type of struggle is indispensably necessary,” he advised Tyszka, “only then can this tangle of intrigues and incitements be broken—on this I have not changed my opinion for even a moment.”57 Nor did Dzierżyń­ ski have any qualms about publishing a communique in connection with the placing of Matuszewski and Unszlicht under investigation for “espion­ age” with the aim of discrediting them among party activists in Warsaw. This was yet another plan that he recommended to Tyszka,58 but for which Tyszka has shouldered the responsibility in the historical literature. The Search for Provocateurs and Dzieriynski’s “Extraordinary Commission” • Dzierzyński’s search for provocateurs in the Warsaw organization event­ ually became one of the primary weapons used by the Main Directorate in its struggle against the opposition of the rozłamowcy. Dzierżyński had called for the establishment of a special commission to investigate provo­ cation in the party while still on Capri in early 1910; in mid-1911 such a commission, consisting of Dzierżyński, Edmund Giebartowski and Stefan Bratman, was set up in Kraków.59 Within a few weeks after the creation of the commission, Dzierżyński was “up to his ears” in papers from 19091911.60 In Dzierżyński^ hands, the commission quickly became a instru­ ment of factional politics. Even before the actual establishment of the commission, Dzierżyński suggested that among “the practical steps to

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oppose and eliminate provocation” would be the immediate investigation of “individuals who have claims against the party and therefore are more prone to betrayal.”61 When Zdzisław L e d e t^ h o tried to occupy a posi­ tion of neutrality in the internal party conflict, accused him of being “a bit maniacal” in his hunt for provocateurs; Dzierżyński demanded and received from the ZG a vote of confidence.62 After the split of the SDKPiL at the end of 1911, it took little time for Dzierżyński and his commission to smear the rozłamowcy with the charge of collaboration with the Okhrana. Most tainted in this respect was Józef Unszlicht, who at that time operated under the pseudonym of Jan Jurowski. Personal relations between Dzierżyński and Unzlicht had never been good; in fact, Dzierżyński believed that Unzlicht’s role in the organization of the “illegal” Warsaw conference was motivated by “personal revenge” because he had frequently accused Unzlicht in the past of “doing nothing” in Warsaw.63 In February, Dzierżyński drafted a list of his charges against Unszlicht, apparently for future reference; among these he cited failure to cooperate in weeding out provocateurs and not responding to questions sent to him by the investigating commission.64 In the summer of 1912, Dzierżyński began to make public his allegations that Unszlicht was an agent of the Okhrana.65 From here it was only one small step to, in Dzier­ żyński^ words, “the unmistakable conclusion that the Warsaw split is an act of the Okhrana,” a “fact” that, moreover, he urged the ZG to pub­ lish in the party press.66 In this respect, at the conference of supporters of the ZG that met in Kraków in August 1912, the Warsaw organization of the rozłamowcy was publicly branded “a nest of provocateurs.”67 Dzierżyński’s Activity in Warsaw in 1912 In order to give force to the decision of the ZG to dissolve the Warsaw organization of the rozłamowcy, Dzierżyński proposed that the ZG take immediate steps to establish a new organization loyal to the Main Direct­ orate. In this connection, he demanded that the ZG dispatch him immedi­ ately to Warsaw. “The dissolution of the KW (Komitet Warzawski-War­ saw Committee) without sending me there,” he labored to convince a still reluctant Tyszka, “would mean in practice the severance of the War­ saw masses from the party—from our word.”68 Tyszka eventually agreed and on April 6, 1912, Dzierżyński departed permanently from Kraków.

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Once in Warsaw, he initially tried to carry the counterattack of the ZG to “the enemy’s territory” of the Warsaw district organizations but he quickly found the going rough because of Matuszewski’s influence.69 By early June it became apparent that the districts were solidly behind the rozłamowcy. Dzierzyńskfs resolutions for placing Matuszewski and Unszlicht before a party tribunal and for dissolving the Warsaw Committee were everywhere soundly defeated. He then proposed a new course of action, the liquidation of the entire Warsaw organization and the creation of new district committees. “This actually would be the simplest and the best solution,” he advised Tyszka, “because immediately we could sepa­ rate a number of people from the dissenters, disorganizers and provoca­ teurs and most quickly bring an end to the crisis.”70 In Warsaw, Dzierżyński gathered support for his plans to create a War­ saw organization loyal to the ZG among a small group of members of the SDKPiL’s construction and flour workers’ unions. In the middle of June, a conference of the social democratic unions in Warsaw was held, attended by a mere six delegates and Dzierżyński, who nevertheless claimed to rep­ resent a thousand organized workers. The conference declared that the resolutions of the dissolved Warsaw organization were “not binding on any comrade” and it elected a provisional Warsaw Committee to take up the task of creating new district committees.71 By July 1, Dzierżyński^ Warsaw organization was in place after holding its first interdistrict con­ ference. Among its immediate tasks was to conduct an investigation of the “espionage” of Unszlicht and Matuszewski and publish its so-called “evidence” against them.72 A second aspect of Dzierżyński^ operational plan was to limit the damage caused by the rozłamowcy to Warsaw. He therefore traveled fre­ quently to Łódź, Częstochowa and the Dąbrowa Basin where he organ­ ized city conferences that passed resolutions in favor of the actions taken by the ZG against the rozłamowcy, 73 In this respect, Dzierżyński also demanded the immediate convening of a party conference to bring the rest of the organization formally into the camp of the ZG and its new War­ saw Committee.74 This conference eventually met in Kraków from August 11 to 17,1912, and was attended by all members of the ZG—Tyszka, Dzier­ żyński, Warski, Marchlewski and Bratman. Among its more important reso­ lutions were a vote of confidence in the ZG, the decision to publish an appeal warning against provocation in the organization of the rozłamowcy

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and acceptance of the position of the ZG in relation to the split of the RSDRP.75 Shortly before the conference convened, Dzierżyński reassured Tyszka “that everything is going forward, only time is necessary. . . . ”76 Unfortunately for Dzierżyński, time was definitely running out. Dzierżyński’s Arrest Dzierzyński’s support of the Main Directorate in the crisis and split of the party was not a formality, nor was it based merely on some abstract sense of party discipline. Rather it was the result of a deep conviction, in Dzierżyński^ words, that the rozłamowcy had “neither the strength nor ability to be members of a social democratic party in a period of counter­ revolution.” The ZG, on the other hand, had been “the only institution since 1908 that was and could be the spokesman of the needs and the voice of the working class.”77 For Dzierżyński there was no room for compromise on this fundamental issue. “Here there is no golden mean,” he angrily told Leder, who was trying to bring the estranged camps of the SDKPiL together. “He who is not with us is against us.”78 In the final analysis, it was Dzierżyński who, by virtue of all his prior activity, had consolidated the position of the ZG as an executive center directing all party work. He could hardly have been expected to abandon his own creation. He therefore volunteered to play the role of the ZG’s right-hand man in Warsaw, almost to the point of servility. “I am happy that you are satisfied with my work,” he wrote to Tyszka shortly before his arrest, “but I have the impression that I could do much more. In the future I must be in greater contract with you, but for now you should point out what is lacking in my work, etc.”79 If any doubts lingered among his contemporaries regarding his position in relation to the split, Dzierżyń­ ski shattered them in an open letter to party members, dated April 4, 1912, which he asked to be published in the event of his capture. The language of the document speaks for itself: I consider it my responsibility before my departure [his arrest] to indicate my deepest contempt for the scoundrels who, for their own personal ambitions, slandered the leading collegium of the party to which I have had the honor of belonging and which in the most difficult times of counterrevolution has completely fulfilled

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its responsibility of holding high the banner of Social Democracy, regardless of the costs.80 For Dzierżyński personally, the cost of holding high the banner of the Main Directorate was his inevitable arrest. Already in May, Dzierżyński considered his continued freedom “only a game of the Okhrana.”81 The Okhrana, however, was playing no game; Dzierżyński simply was a master of conspiratorial techniques and was therefore extremely diffcult to catch. To be sure, the police were aware of his feverish activity and his creation of a Warsaw Committee loyal to .the ZG. “After creating the new committee,” we read from the files of the Warsaw gendarmerie, “Dzier­ żyński continued to lead it and at the same time he directed party work here; he led strikes, he published appeals to the workers. . . and he traveled on party matters to Łódź and Kraków.”82 The police, however, were unable to locate Dzierżyński^ residence in Warsaw until September 14 when they discovered he was living under the name of Władysław Ptasiński in a flat belonging to Włodzimierz and Maria Wakar, two former members of the SDKPiL youth organization. In an unpublished memoir composed shortly before her death in 1947, Maria Wakar recalled the night of Dzierżyńskfs arrest. He had just finished drafting an appeal against the rozłamowcy when “he told me that on the basis of irrefutable facts, Józiek [Unszlicht] worked for the Okhrana; I did not believe him and he became furious and threw the appeal on the table.”83 At 2:00 am . the police raided the flat and immediately found Dzierżyński^ appeal. Rising from the bed in the other room, he declared openly, “This couple is innocent, they do. not know me, I am Dzier­ żyński.” 84 The Lean Years Dzierżyński^ arrest in Warsaw in the autumn of 1912 effectively ended his career in the SDKPiL. The next four and one-half years, as far as Dzier­ żyński was concerned, were completely wasted. The first two years were spent in isolation and contemplation at the Tenth Pavilion of the Warsaw Citadel. He had been through it all before ; the endless waiting for his case to be heard, the anticipation of Siberian exile or worse, and the hope for yet another opportunity to escape. This time, however, there would be no

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escape and Dzierżyński knew it—his offenses were too many for him to receive anything less than a sentence to hard labor, which meant years in chains. For this reason he was very withdrawn while he awaited sentenc­ ing; he discouraged his sister Aldona from visiting him in the Tenth Pavi­ lion because “in such conditions our meeting would be only painful for you as well as for me.”85 He also admitted that his dreams tortured him somewhat: “I don’t get my necessary rest and I stay awake without end, listening to that deadly silence, in the form and memories of my own soul.” 86 To add to Dzierżyński’s torment, his son Janek, although re­ united with his mother in Kraków, was afflicted with scarlet fever for most of 1913.87 The preliminary sentence of the Warsaw district court came on April 29, 1914. For his escape from exile in 1909, he was given three years of hard labor in deportation.88 The court postponed for a year its decision on a sentence for offenses connected with his recent activities in Warsaw. But before his second case could be heard, the outbreak of the war and the later advance into the Kingdom by the armies of the Central Powers altered forever the course of Dzierżyński’s life, a fate he shared with mil­ lions of others. In the massive and chaotic evacuation of the Kingdom by the tsarist authorities, they not only took with them as much of the material wealth of the country as they could—bank revenues, stocks, in­ dustrial capital, administrative personnel, war-related industry, skilled lab­ orers, even church bells—but they also evacuated the political prisoners.89 Dzierżyński was taken initially to Mtsensk, a small town near Orel, be­ fore being transferred to the Orel provincial prison in late September 1914. Although he did not expect the war to be a long, protracted conflict, Dzierżyński was deeply concerned about the fate of his wife and son, with whom the war had severed all communication.90 Although he did what he could to follow the course of the war as it affected Poland, the news he did receive only served to intensify his anxieties. “It is so difficult to be here now—useless and inactive—where there (in Poland) it is far worse,” he lamented in a letter to Aldona.91 In February 1915, he finally received word that his family had successfully found refuge in Zurich; this calmed his nerves considerably. Conditions and provisions at the prisons in Mtsensk and Orel were, ac­ cording to Dzierżyński, “very insufficient” in comparison with the Tenth Pavilion.92 Typhus claimed the lives of many political prisoners at Orel,

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and Dzierżyński himself was hospitalized with a high fever at the begin­ ning of 1915. This did not, however, prevent his transfer in April to the central hard labor prison, also in Orel province. Here he v/as more isolated than ever, allowed to write only one letter per month, and prohibited from receiving even the governmental news bulletin, PraviteVstvennyi Vestnik, which his brother Stanisław had been sending him regularly before his transfer. “Here it is clean, bedding without vermin, baths three times a month, a sunny cell,” he wrote without enthusiasm of his new environ­ ment.93 It is difficult to determine exactly how Dzierżyńskfs experiences at the hard labor prison affected him. Conditions inside the Katorzhnyi Tsentral were undoubtedly tense. According to Andrzej Radek, a mem­ ber of the PPS who shared a cell with Dzierżyński, conflicts with the prison administration were frequent and Dzierżyński was more than will­ ing to take the lead. This endeared him to his fellow prisoners, regardless of their political convictions, but it also brought upon him the full wrath of the authorities. “If a delegation was chosen to deal with the prison authorities,” Radek reported, “Dzierżyński did not hide from this respon­ sibility either, although—as a delegate, most frequently after an ‘audience’ -h e did not return immediately to the cell but ‘on the way’ was led to the dark detention room, where he would stay for three to seven days.” Moreover, Dzierżyński was frequently beaten by prison guards for acts of insubordination, which among other things led to the permanent dis­ figurement of his mouth. Yet despite such treatment, Dzierżyński re­ mained in his behavior “unbelievably polite, tactful and considerate— with his comrades he shared his last piece of sugar.” Nevertheless, Radek recalled, “Dzierżyński never laughed, I can’t even remember his smile. His face was strange and the eyes of this man-full of kindness-were covered as if by a fog of deep comtemplation.”94 Although it is uncertain to what extent a life in chains affected Dzier­ żyński emotionally, there can be no doubt that it drained him physically. The already frail state of his health was further damaged by a considerable loss of weight at the Orel hard labor prison. By the time he appeared in Moscow in May 1916 to hear the reading of his second sentence, he re­ sembled a skeleton and was so weak that he was unable to stand.95 For his illegal political activity in the Kingdom, he was given an additional three years of hard labor which were to be served at the Moscow Butyrki prison,

m

r

Dzierżyński at the Tenth Pavilion, 1914

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At the Katorzhnyi Tsentral in Orel, 1916 where he was transferred in August. Shortly after his arrival at the Butyrki, however, he was again hospitalized, this time because the chains that he was forced to wear had caused severe cramps in his legs. Despite the pros­ pects o f am putation, Dzierżyński considered his own misery the price he had pay for the right to greater happiness. “ I have never lived with closed eyes,” he explained to his brother W ładysław. “ I am not an idealist. I must go through everything. . . to the very end. It cannot be otherwise.” 96 Dzierzynski’s recovery was slow, no doubt due to the fact that the chains were not removed from his legs until'well after his release from the prison hospital, in December. By that time he was already sewing military uniforms at the Butyrki, which was at least a respite from more physically exhausting labor. At the end o f December he wrote to his wife, “ The last day o f 1916 has already arrived and although the end o f the war is not yet in sight-w e are coming closer and closer to the day o f our reunion, to the day of our happiness. I am so convinced of this.”97 Although that re­ union was still a long way off, Dzierzynski’s release from prison was im­ minent. It came with the proclamation of a political amnesty by the Rus­ sian Provisional Government, the successor to the tsarist regime over­ thrown by the February Revolution. The years immediately preceding the Russian revolution were also lean for Dzierzynski’s party. The SDKPiL entered the period o f the first world

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Dzierżyński after his release from the Moscow Butyrki, March 1917 war a divided organization. If anything, the split had deepened w ith the creation o f an executive committee, the “ Home Directorate,” by the rozłamowcy in March, 1914. Thus until the reunification o f the warring factions at the end o f 1916, there existed two rival organizations with two

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separate executive committees, foreign bureaus, editoral boards, trade unions and so on-both operating under the name of the SDKPiL. And since there was no real ideological differences between the factions, con­ fusion reigned among those workers who remained sympathetic to social democratic principles. Lack of unity was only one aspect of the SDKPiL’s continuing crisis. At the same time, agitation and organizational activity among the workers was rendered exceedingly difficult under the harsh conditions arising from the war. With the outbreak of liostilities, the tsarist regime im­ mediately reimposed martial law in the Kingdom of Poland and subse­ quently rounded up the leaders of both factions of the SDKPiL. like Dzierżyński, most of them were evacuated to Russia with the successful invasion of the Kingdom by the Central Powers. The ranks of the SDKPiL were also thinned by the mobilization and conscription of its younger members into the Russian army. Political activity under the occupation authorities of the Central Powers was no easier. The party’s cells in the factories disappeared entirely as in­ dustrial production fell to a minimum. With the closing of the majority of industrial enterprises, unemployment reached incredible proportions. By September 1915 only five thousand workers were employed in Warsaw, engaged primarily in production for the needs of armies of the Central Powers. This was followed by the voluntary and then forced migration of an eventual 275,000 Polish workers to Germany. The policies of the Central Powers, however, did provide some room for the development of legal and semi-legal forms of activity. Of these, the SDKPiL only took real advantage of elections to the Warsaw City Council, held under the auspices of the occupation authorities in May 1916. The main significance of these elections for the SDKPiL is that they provided a basis for the liquidation of the split as both factions cooperated in drawing up a com­ mon list of candidates. By the time of the reunification of the SDKPiL in December 1916, the party had organized approximately five hundred members in Warsaw but was still extremely weak outside the capital. Un­ fortunately, the party’s efforts to organize a strike of city workers at the end of 1916 were followed by arrests of its leading cadres in Warsaw. Shortly thereafter, organizational initiative transferred to party members in Russia who had been liberated from the prisons and hard labor camps by the February Revolution.98

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Towards a New Career Upon his release, Dzierzynski’s immediate impulse was to organize Po­ lish refugees in Russia, especially the evacuated workers and demobilized soldiers, “having in mind,” as he wrote to his wife, “that together with these masses we will return to Poland after the war and become one whole with the SDKPiL.”99 The frail state of Dzierzynski’s health, however, initi­ ally restricted his activity. Andrzej Radek recalled meeting Dzierżyński at a gathering of Polish refugees shortly after his release: “He looked very haggard and, moreover, he spoke weakly and without any feeling. He made a great impression, not so much by his speech as by his appearance.” 100 Although the reunification of the two factions of the SDKPiL was ac­ complished at the end of 1916 in Warsaw, the wounds did not heal quickly among SDKPiL members in Russia, many of whom had been deeply in­ volved in the split. Indeed, one of Dzierzynski’s first actions upon his release from prison was to rummage through the archives of the Okhrana in order to confirm his earlier accusations that the former rozłamowcy, and especially Józef Unszlicht, had cooperated with tsarist police agents.101 Although Dzierżyński was later forced to apologize publicly to Unszlicht when his charges were proven unfounded, the two former political enemies continued to compete with one another for the loyalties of SDKPiL mem­ bers in Russia. In this connection, Unszlicht established a “section” in Petrograd and Dzierżyński a “group” in Moscow, comprising former rozłamowcy and zarzqdowcy, respectively. In May the Petrograd and Moscow groups of the SDKPiL joined toget­ her in establishing a Provisional Executive Committee, although they dif­ fered over the extent of its competency. Unszlicht and the former rozła­ mowcy wanted to use the title of the Zarząd Główny (Main Directorate) to signify the creation of a separate party organization on Russian soil. This was successfully blocked by Dzierżyński who was opposed to en­ croachment upon the authority of already existing institutions. “The ZG is an institution connected with the party in the country,” he argued. “We have absolutely no right to this title.” 102 Other factional antagonisms created by the split also proved difficult to extinguish. Although the leadership of the SDKPiL in Russia recognized in principle the equality of both factions, there was endless bickering over the composition of party institutions. This was particularly true regarding the editorial board of

The Eclipse o f the SDKPiL

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Trybuna, the organ of the Provisional Executive Committee, which Dzier­ żyński came to consider a factional mouthpiece of the former rozła­ mowcy.103 Yet despite these disagreements, twenty-seven SDKPiL groups were formed in Russia by October 1917, and it was here, rather than in Poland, that the basis for the future Polish communist party was laid. In addition to their activity among Polish refugees, the SDKPiL groups became increasingly caught up in the drama of the Russian revolution. Most Polish Social Democrats opted for full participation in that revolu­ tion and viewed their activities as helping to spread the fire to their own country. From the beginning, both the Dzierżyński and Unszlicht factions shared a negative attitude towards the “bourgeois” Provisional Govern­ ment and they rejected the Menshevik policy of cooperation with it. Primarily for this reason, the SDKPiL groups quickly decided to ally them­ selves with the Bolsheviks and later to join the Bolshevik party organi­ zation on a provisional basis. Whereas the rozłamowiec Unszlicht did not feel he had to justify his turn to the Bolsheviks—after all, his faction had supported Lenin since 1912—the zarządowiec Dzierżyński felt obliged to write to several party members explaining his decision. “The Bolsheviks are the only SD organization of the proletariat,” he reasoned in one such letter, “and if we were to stay outside of it [the Bolshevik organization], then we would find ourselves outside of the proletarian revolutionary struggle.” 104 Nor would the SDKPiL groups in Russia engage in any ef­ forts to reconcile Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. “There is no place here for our Polish diplomacy, for our politics,” Dzierżyński wrote tô his wife, adding parenthetically, “except for the Polish question.” 105 Thus, as in 1905, the SDKPiL joined forces with the Bolsheviks under the stimulus of revolutionary upheaval; the old disputes were quickly and conveniently forgotten. Most Polish Social Democrats, including Dzier­ żyński, planned to return to Poland when the occasion was right. In the meantime, however, many of them were simply co-opted by the Russian revolution and by the Bolshevik party. Dzierżyński especially was carried away by his enthusiasm for the Russian revolution. Already in April he entered the Moscow Committee of the Bolsheviks as a representative of the SDKPiL and shortly thereafter was elected to the Executive Com­ mittee of the Moscow Soviet. With the exception of the national ques­ tion, Dzierżyński^ support at the April conference of Bolsheviks for the main tenets of Lenin’s “April Theses”—uncompromising opposition to

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the Provisional Government, the transfer of all political authority to the Soviets, and the immediate withdrawal of Russia from the war—was unswerving.106 Dzierżyński subsequently rose to the tqp