On November 19, 1914, I crossed the French frontier as a war-correspondent for the Kievskaya Mysl. I accepted the offer from the paper all the more eagerly because it would give me a chance to get closer to war. Paris was sad; in the evening the streets were lost in pitch-black darkness. Now and then the Zeppelins would pay their flying visits. After the checking of the German advance on the Marne, the war became constantly more exacting and ruthless. In the boundless chaos that was enveloping Europe, with silence from the masses of workers, deceived and betrayed by the Social Democracy, the engines of destruction were developing their automatic power. Capitalist civilization was reducing itself to an absurdity while it strove to break the thick skulls of men.
At the time when the Germans were nearing Paris and the bourgeois French patriots were deserting it, two émigré Russians set up a tiny daily paper published in Russian. Its object was to explain current events to the Russians whom fate had isolated in Paris, and to see that the spirit of international solidarity was not utterly extinguished. Before the first number appeared, the capital of the paper amounted to exactly thirty francs. No “sane” person could believe it possible to publish a daily paper on so little capital. As a matter of fact, in spite of work donated by the editors and other contributors, at least once a week the paper went through a crisis so acute that there seemed to be no way out. But somehow a way out was found. The compositors, faithful to the paper, went hungry, the editors scoured the town in search of francs, and the issue that was due appeared. In this way, withstanding the constant buffets of deficit and censorship, disappearing and reappearing again under a new name, the paper managed to exist for two years and a half, until the revolution of February, 1917. Arriving in Paris, I began to work actively for the Nashe Slovo (Our Word) which then was called the Golos (The Voice). A daily paper proved a valuable aid in orienting myself in the midst of the events that were unfolding. My experience on the Nashe Slovo was useful to me later, when I had to deal with military affairs more closely.
My family came to France in May, 1915. We settled down in Sèvres, in a little house lent to us for a few months by a young friend of ours, an Italian artist, René Parece. Our boys went to the school in Sèvres. The spring was very lovely; its greenness seemed especially caressing. But the number of women in black was growing constantly; the school-children were losing their fathers. The two armies dug themselves into the ground. One could see no way out. Clémenceau was launching attacks against Joffre in his paper. In the reactionary underground circles a coup d’état was being prepared; reports of it were passing by word of mouth. In the pages of Le Temps, the parliament for several days was referred to only by the name of “ass.” But the Temps still sternly demanded of the Socialists that they preserve the national unity.
Jaurés was no more. I visited the Café du Croissant where he was killed; I wanted to find a trace of him there. Politically, I had been far removed from him. But one could not help feeling the pull of his powerful personality. Jaurés’ mind, which was a composite of national traditions, of the metaphysics of moral principles, of love for the oppressed, and of poetic imagination, showed the mark of the aristocrat as dearly as Bebel’s revealed the great simplicity of the plebeian. They were both, however, head and shoulders above the legacy which they left.
I had heard Jaurés at popular meetings in Paris, at international congresses, and on committees, and on each occasion it was as if I heard him for the first time. He did not fall into routine; fundamentally he never repeated himself, but was always finding himself again, and mobilizing the latent resources of his spirit. With a mighty force as elemental as a waterfall, he combined great gentleness, which shone in his face like a reflection of a higher spiritual culture. He would send rocks tumbling down, he would thunder and bring the earthquake, but himself he never deafened. He stood always on guard, watched intently for every objection, quick to pick it up and parry it. Sometimes he swept all resistance before him as relentlessly as a hurricane, sometimes as generously and gently as a tutor or elder brother. Jaurés and Bebel were at opposite poles, and yet at the same time they were the twin peaks of the Second International. Both were intensely national, Jaurés with his fiery Latin rhetoric, and Bebel with his touch of Protestant dryness. I loved them both, but with a difference. Bebel exhausted himself physically, whereas Jaurés fell in his prime. But both of them died in time. Their deaths marked the line where the progressive historical mission of the Second International ended.
The French Socialist party was in a state of complete demoralization. There was no one to take the place Jaurés had left. Vaillant, the old “anti-militarist,” was putting out daily articles in a spirit of intensest chauvinism. I once met the old man in the Committee of Action, which was made up of delegates of the party and the trade-unions. Vaillant looked like a shadow of himself — a shadow of Blanquism, with the traditions of sansculotte warfare, in an epoch of Raymond Poincaré. Pre-war France, with her arrested growth in population, her conservative economic life and thought, seemed to Vaillant the only country of progress or movement, the chosen, liberating nation whose contact alone awakens others to spiritual life. His socialism was chauvinistic, just as his chauvinism was messianic. Jules Guesde, the leader of the Marxist wing, who had exhausted himself in a long and trying struggle against the fetiches of democracy, proved to be capable only of laying down his untarnished moral authority on the “altar” of national defense.
Everything was topsy-turvy. Marcel Sembat, the author of the book, Make a King, or Make Peace, seconded Guesde in the ministry of Briand. Pierre Renaudel found himself for a time the “leader” of the Socialist party — after all, somebody had to occupy the place left vacant by Jaurés. Renaudel strained himself to the utmost to imitate the gestures and thundering voice of the murdered leader. Behind him trailed Longuet, with a certain diffidence which he passed off for extreme radicalism. His ways were a constant reminder that Marx was not responsible for his grandsons. The official syndicalism, represented by the president of the Confédération Générale, Jouhaux, faded away in twenty-four hours. He “denied” the state in peace-time, only to kneel before it in time of war. That revolutionary buffoon, Hervé, the extreme anti-militarist of the day before, turned him self inside out, but remained, as an extreme chauvinist, the identical, self-satisfied buffoon. As if to make his mockery of his own ideas of yesterday doubly painful, his paper continued to call itself La Guerre Sociale.
Taken all in all, it seemed like making a masquerade of mourning, a carnival of death. One could not help saying to oneself: “No, we are made of sterner stuff; events did not catch us unawares; we foresaw something of this, and we foresee much now, and we are prepared for much of what lies ahead of us.” How often we clenched our fists when the Renaudels, the Hervés, and their like tried to fraternize, from a distance, with Karl Liebknecht! There were elements of opposition scattered about, in the party and in the syndicates, but they showed few signs of life.
The outstanding figure among the Russian émigrés in Paris without a doubt was Martov, the leader of the Mensheviks, and one of the most talented men I have ever come across. The man’s misfortune was that fate made him a politician in a time of revolution without endowing him with the necessary resources of will-power. The lack of balance in his spiritual household was tragically revealed whenever great events took place. I watched him through three historical cataclysms: 1905, 1914, and 1917. Martov’s first reaction to events was nearly always revolutionary, but before he could put his ideas on paper, his mind would be besieged by doubts from all sides. His rich, pliant, and multiform intelligence lacked the support of will. In his letters to Axelrod in 1905 he complained ruefully that he could not gather his thoughts together. And he never really did, up to the very day when the reactionaries assumed power. At the beginning of the war, he again complained to Axelrod that events had driven him to the very verge of insanity. Finally, in 1917, he made a hesitant step toward the left and then, within his own faction, yielded the leadership to Tzereteli and Dan, men not even knee-high to him in intellect — in Dan’s case, not in any respect.
On October 14, 1914, Martov wrote to Axelrod: “More readily than with Plekhanov, we could probably come to an understanding with Lenin who, it seems, is preparing to appear in the role of a fighter against opportunism in the International.” But this mood did not last long with Martov. When I arrived in Paris, I found him already fading. From the very first, our collaboration in the Nashe Slovo developed into nothing more nor less than a bitter struggle, which ended with Martov’s resigning from the editorial board and finally from the contributing staff.
Soon after I arrived in Paris, Martov and I sought out Monatte, one of the editors of the syndicalist journal, La Vie Ouvriére. A former teacher, later a proofreader, Monatte in appearance was a typical Paris worker, a man of brains as well as character, and he never for a moment inclined toward reconciliation with militarism or the bourgeois state. But how was one to find a way out? We differed. Monatte “denied” the state and political struggle, but the state ignored his denial, and made him don the red trousers after he had come out with an open protest against syndicalist chauvinism. Through Monatte, I came into close touch with the journalist Rosmer, who also belonged the anarchist-syndicalist school, but, as events proved, even then stood closer to Marxism fundamentally than to the Guesdists. Since those da............