[5] Geoffrey Swain, Russian Social Democracy and the Legal Labour Movement (London, 1983), pp. 41–43.
[6] See Loren R. Graham, "Bogdanov's Inner Message," in Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia , by Alexander Bogdanov, ed. Loren R. Graham and Richard Stites (Bloomington, 1984).
[7] Dietrich Grille, Lenins Rivale (Cologne, 1966), pp. 110–19; Kenneth M. Jensen, Beyond Marx and Mach (Dordrecht, 1978), pp. 67–86; and Zenovia A. Sochor, Revolution and Culture (Ithaca, 1988), pp. 42–45.
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The leftists attempted to put their ideas about party organization and tactics into practice by starting two exile schools for worker-cadres in Capri and Bologna between 1909–1911.[8] Because training and education were a central part of their program, the leftists attached great significance to these schools. The first opened at Gorky's villa on the island of Capri in the summer of 1909 with thirteen worker-students elected from Russian party committees sympathetic to the left Bolsheviks' political stance. The teachers were prominent intellectuals, including Gorky, Bogdanov, Lunacharskii, and the historian Mikhail Pokrovskii. They devised an ambitious curriculum that included classes on the history of the socialist movement, literature, and the visual arts. In addition, the school offered practical courses on agitational techniques, newspaper writing, and propaganda.[9]
Capri school leaders also tried to give life to their ideas about party organization. To elaborate their critique of the Bolshevik center, the instructors gave lectures on socialist party organization with titles such as "On Party Authoritarianism." They tried to put party democracy into action on a small scale. Both students and teachers were elected to a school council that oversaw day-to-day affairs. When the council concluded that the lectures were too long and did not leave students enough time for questions, the teaching sched-
[8] On the background of the Capri school see Jutta Scherrer, "Les écoles du patti de Capri et de Bologne," Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique , no. 19 (1978), pp. 259–84. On the schools in general, see S. Livshits, "Kapriiskaia partiinaia shkola, 1909 g.," Proletarskaia revoliutsiia , no. 6 (1924), pp. 33–73; idem, "Partiinaia shkola v Bolon'e, 1910–1911 gg.," Proletarskaia revoliutsiia , no. 3 (1926), pp. 109–44; N. Semashko, "O dvukh zagranichnykh partiinykh shkolakh," Proletarskaia revoliutsiia , no. 3 (1923), pp. 142–51; Heinz Fenner, Die Propaganda-Schulen der Bolschewisten: Ein Beitrag zur Vorgeschichte der Proletkultbewegung (Berlin, 1920); Williams, The Other Bolsheviks , pp. 151–59; and the memoirs of one participant, V. Kosarev, "Partiinaia shkola na ostrove Kapri," Sibirskie ogni , no. 2 (1922), pp. 63–75.
[9] On the Capri students see Livshits, "Kapriiskaia shkola," pp. 51–53; on classes see Kosarev, "Partiinaia shkola," pp. 70–73; and Scherrer, "Les écoles du parti," pp. 270–77.
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ule was restructured and questions were integrated into the teaching format.[10]
This first experiment did not fulfill the organizers' high hopes. The teachers fought among themselves, and Gorky eventually broke with Lunacharskii and Bogdanov. Five of the Capri students deserted the program to join Lenin. Only one worker-participant, Fedor Kalinin, would go on to distinguish himself as an important party leader. Nor did the school succeed in consolidating the left Bolsheviks' political position. Already in 1908, Lenin denounced their reinterpretation of Marxism in a weighty tome entitled Materialism and Empiriocriticism .[11] He ousted Bogdanov from the Bolshevik faction before the first classes in Capri began.[12] He even tried to co-opt some of the leftists' ideas by starting a party school of his own near Paris.[13]
Despite these setbacks, the Capri experiment was a formative experience for many left Bolsheviks, Bogdanov in particular. At the conclusion of the school, a group of students and teachers came together and gave themselves a new name: the Vpered (Forward) circle.[14] The Vperedists, who gained recog-
[10] Kosarev, "Partiinaia shkola," pp. 66–67.
[11] On Lenin and Bogdanov's philosophical disputes see David Joravsky, Soviet Marxism and Natural Science (New York, 1961), pp. 27–44. On the publication of this book see Nikolay Valentinov, Encounters with Lenin , trans. Paul Rosta and Brian Pearce (London, 1968), pp. 233–39.
[12] See Georges Haupt and Jutta Scherrer, "Gor'kij, Bogdanov, Lenin: Neue Quellen zur ideologischen Krise in der bolschewistischen Fraktion, 1908–1910," Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique , vol. 19 (1978), p. 329.