Mark Phillips: The American Question

There's a lot of confusion re what the term "professional revolutionaries" meant to the Bolsheviks. It meant, activists who were skilled in the technical practices necessitated by life underground. I think that meant -- quite literally! -- stuff like invisible ink, false mustaches, forged passports, cyphers, and things like that.

It didn't necessarily mean that a "professional revolutionary" would be paid, or even work at revolution full-time. This particular confusion -- I think! -- was introduced later by party leaderships who mixed it up, deliberately or not, with the concept of paid party functionaries. In Russia the latter were "apparatchiks", and that's not the same thing as a "professional revolutionary". Rather the contrary, really, since the terms arose from completely different historical circumstances.

A lot of blackmail got applied via this confusion. I'm thinking of Farrell Dobbs back in the old SWP, for example, who was pulled against his wishes out of the union movement, into the party central office, in the name of becoming a "professional revolutionary". I think that's how I remember the story.

This is one of many examples of the Bolsheviks' private language engendering later political confusion. It would have been better if they'd said more literally, "skilled underground operatives".