Theorist of the mass workers' party: the argument that lost to Lenin's vanguard
Trotsky recalled: 'An atmosphere of simplicity and sincere comradely participation reigned in the Akselrod household.'
A former narodnik, he co-founded the Emancipation of Labour group (1883) with Plekhanov and Zasulich, the first Russian Marxist organisation. As an Iskra editor (1900) and, after the 1903 RSDLP split, the central theoretician of Menshevism, he argued for a mass, democratic workers' party against Lenin's vanguard model. He served on the Petrograd Soviet executive in 1917 but opposed the October Revolution and spent his final decade in exile, active in the Second International.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1872–74Narodnik in the Chaikovsky circle, Kiev; joins the 'Going to the People'
- 1876–79Land and Liberty, then Black Repartition leadership
- 1881–83Converts to Marxism in exile; works with German SPD leaders
- 1883Co-founds Emancipation of Labour in Geneva
- 1900–03Editorial board member of Iskra and Zarya
- 1903–05Key Menshevik theorist; first to warn Lenin's vanguard risks Jacobin degeneration
- 1906–14Active in Second International; defends liquidationism; elected to OK Foreign Secretariat
- 1917Returns; Petrograd Soviet executive; opposes October, re-emigrates
- 1918–28Leads Menshevik emigration; anti-Bolshevik line in Second International; dies Berlin
Related historical events
- 1905–1907The Revolution of 1905Menshevik theoristA theorist who represented the Menshevik mass-party line during 1905.
- 1907–1919The collapse of the Second InternationalMenshevik centrist internationalistHe took part in the Zimmerwald movement but opposed Lenin's Zimmerwald Left, and with Martov secured the formula of peace without annexations or indemnities.
- 1917.02–07The February RevolutionMenshevik OK chairman, Petrograd Soviet executiveReturned 9 May via sealed train, joined the Petrograd Soviet executive, and as elected chairman of the Menshevik Organising Committee (OK) shaped the party's line of conditional support for the Provisional Government. He left in early August to prepare the Stockholm/Zimmerwald conference and never returned.
- 1917.10–1918.01The October RevolutionOpponent of the October RevolutionHe opposed the October Revolution in 1917.
The First Warning Against Lenin's Jacobin Vanguard (1903–1904)
After the 1903 RSDLP split over party membership rules, Axelrod published a series of articles in the new Iskra (late 1903–early 1904) in which he became the first to systematically warn that Lenin's hyper-centralised vanguard model risked transforming Russian Social Democracy into a Jacobin, conspiratorial organisation. He saw in Lenin's scheme a 'utopia of a theocratic character' (the product of Russia's backwardness, a 'petty-bourgeois radicalism' instrumentalising the workers' struggle for its own ends). Axelrod's alternative was a broad, democratic mass workers' party built on the political self-activity (samodeyatelnost) of the proletariat, along the lines of the major European Social Democratic parties. This debate became the ideological watershed between Bolshevism and Menshevism. The question Axelrod posed (democratic mass party or vanguard) remained a fundamental tension of the twentieth-century socialist movement.
The war and Zimmerwald (1914–1917)
When the First World War broke out in 1914 and the Second International collapsed, Axelrod took a centrist internationalist position. He opposed the war as an imperialist conflict but, unlike Lenin, would not call for Russia's defeat. He held that the first task of socialists was to restore the International and campaign together for a democratic peace without annexations or indemnities. The Russian Wikipedia notes that early in the war he did not hide his sympathy for the Entente and tried to explain the European social democratic parties' support for their governments by "centuries-old traditions of patriotism". His later plan for an "international struggle for peace" had workers press their party leaderships to recall socialists from governments and stop voting war credits.
He took part in the Zimmerwald movement but opposed Lenin's Zimmerwald Left, which called for a complete break with the Second International and for turning the imperialist war into a civil war. According to the Russian Wikipedia he regarded the Zimmerwald (1915) and Kienthal (1916) conferences as "private international consultations" to help parties divided by the war draw closer again and to keep "Lenin's propaganda of schism" out of West European social democracy. Together with Martov he secured the Zimmerwald majority's key formula of "a general peace treaty without annexations or indemnities", and Lenin called him "the leader of the Russian Kautskyites".
Returning to Russia in May 1917 after the February Revolution, he urged the Menshevik-led Petrograd Soviet to lead an international peace campaign while opposing a separate peace with Germany as a betrayal of the Allied democracies that would harm the Russian Revolution. He left Russia in August 1917 to attend a socialist conference in Stockholm and never returned.