The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  Association of Young Professional Composers"; and a new shock army was constituted in the "struggle for scientific atheism," the notorious "League of the Militant Godless." The suicide of Esenin and the collapse of Maia-kovsky's LEF movement within a few months of each other in 1925 provided testimony to the growing gulf between the new regime and some of the very intellectuals who had initially supported the Revolution.

  The destruction of a living Russian culture was made complete in 1930 with the suicide of Maiakovsky, the formal abolition of all private printing, and Stalin's sweeping demand at the Sixteenth Party Congress that the first five-year plan be expanded into a massive "socialist offensive along the entire front."11 Not a single delegate abstained, let alone dissented, as Stalin began to introduce his techniques of therapeutic purges and prescriptive uncertainty. The classical Leninist opposition to relying on "spontaneity" istikhiinost') rather than strict party guidance in preparing a political revolution was expanded into a new Stalinist opposition to tolerating "drift" (samotek) on the "cultural front" while preparing a social and economic revolution.

  Moderate planners who argued that there were unavoidable limitations on the productive possibilities of the Soviet economy were denounced as "mechanists" and "geneticists," devoid of Revolutionary spirit and "dialectical" understanding. The purge of Bukharin, the apostle of relative freedom in the agricultural sphere and of balanced development of heavy and light industry, was accompanied by the purge of advocates of relative freedom and balance in the cultural sphere. Thus, Voronsky in literary theory and Deborin in philosophy were denounced for "Menshevizing idealism" and forced to recant publicly. Marxist philosophical ideas were not to be permitted to interfere with the development of the new authoritarian state; and Deborin and his followers were swept from the direction of Under the Banner of Marxism in 1930. The dominant idea in the twenties, that state law was a "fetish" of the bourgeoisie and "the juridical world view … the last refuge of the remnants and traditions of the old world," was replaced by the new concept of "socialist legality."12 The dictatorship of the proletariat would not wither away in the foreseeable future, and the authority of the Soviet state and Soviet law would have to be strengthened, Stalin told the Party Congress in 1930. This contradiction of one of Lenin's fondest beliefs was pronounced "a living, vital contradiction" which "completely reflects Marxist dialectics."13 Freud, whose doctrines of psychic determinism had been hailed in the twenties as "the best antidote to the entire doctrine of free will,"14 was denounced at the first All-Union Congress of Human Behavior in 1930 for denying the possibility of "a socially 'open'

  man, who is easily collectivized, and quickly and profoundly transformed

  in his behaviour."15

  A collective shock treatment paralleling that being given to the reluctant peasantry was being administered to the intellectual elite. Figures like Averbach in literary theory and Pokrovsky in history were used in this first "proletarian" phase of Stalinist terror to discredit others before being rejected themselves. Stalin emerged from it all as the benign father, the voice of moderation and protector of the little man from the "dizziness from success" of his less humane lieutenants.16 This "proletarian episode" in Russian culture, which lasted roughly from the first party decree on literature in December, 1928, to the abolition of the distinctively proletarian organs of culture in April, 1932, was coterminous with the period of the first Five-Year Plan; part of the unprecedented effort to transform Russian society by forced-draft industrialization and agricultural collectivization. The cultural transformations of the age, no less than the social and economic changes, bear little relationship to anything that went before in Russian history-not even to the garrison atmosphere and fierce proletarian emphases of the Civil War period. Proletarian origins and Marxist convictions were losing all importance. Indeed, the Marxist intellectuals who had played a key part in refining Communist ideology and building the new Soviet state became increasingly prime victims in the new purges of the thirties, and fanatical proletarian advocates of Revolutionary egalitarianism were denounced as "levelers" and left deviationists. There was no serious threat to the Soviet state in the late twenties; and by 1930 the depression in the West had made the danger of "capitalist encirclement" even more remote and contrived. The purpose of this "second revolution" was-as Stalin made clear in a famous speech in 1931-to create a "new Soviet intelligentsia"17 dedicated to acquiring the technological skills needed for Soviet construction. The demand for a new intelligentsia required the destruction, or drastic remaking, of the old, including those whose emotional dedication to radical humanism might also stand in the way of building the new authoritarian state. Technological skill alone was not enough. Rigid obedience to party leaders was required. As Stalin put it bluntly in 1935: "Cadres decide everything,"18 and the ideal cadre is the tempered, "cast-iron" servant of the dictator. To understand how such a drastic conclusion was reached one must look back to the legacy left by Vladimir IFich Lenin, the founder and patron saint of Bolshevism, the man in whose name Stalin tightened his totalitarian grip on all of Russian society. One must consider as well the relationship which both Lenin and Stalin bear to the complex cultural heritage of the land they ruled.

  The Leninist Legacy

  At first glance, the powerful and arresting figure of Lenin seems to be only a particularly intense example of the alienated Russian intellectual of the nineteenth century. Born and educated in the Volga region, classic center of Russian revolutionary sentiment, brought up as a member of the petty, provincial nobility in a bookish home where he was closer to his mother than his father, Lenin was an educated and qualified lawyer, but never really had any other profession than that of an illegal publicist turned revolutionary. One is tempted to see in Lenin's sudden vault to power the vindication of the intelligentsia's long-frustrated hopes for a new order in which they would play a key part.

  Yet Lenin was different from almost all his intellectual predecessors in nineteenth-century Russia; and it was his profound alienation from the dominant intellectual trends of the late imperial period which enabled him to appear as the bearer of a genuinely new order of things.

  First of all, Lenin was uniquely single-minded in an age of diffusion. In the midst of the soaring visionaries, Lenin focused his attention, op QJ1" all-consuming objective that had not traditionally been uppermost in the thinking of the intelligentsia: the attainment of power. His dedication to this objective enabled him to establish a puritanical discipline over his own emotions and those of his associates. By never giving himself over to the enervating enthusiasms of the late imperial period, he avoided its unsettling alternations between Promethean optimism and morbid sensualism. He was able to capitalize on the sense of expectation generated by the intelligentsia without becoming involved in the ebb and flow of its inner feelings.

  Sentiment of all sorts was suppressed in Lenin, whose icy and ascetic manner sets him off strikingly from the traditional loose camaraderie of the intelligentsia and its conviction that feelings were inextricable parts of the thought process. His beloved mother was German, and most of his foreign travel was in Northern Europe: the advanced areas of industrialization and urbanization. Southern Europe with its sunlight, wine, and song played- with one exception-little role in his bleak life.19 Even before he turned to Marxism in the early nineties, Lenin seems to have acquired a hatred for the vagueness, sentimentality, and-above all-futility of the aristocratic intelligentsia. He was embittered by the execution of his elder brother, a revolutionist, in 1887, and soon acquainted himself with revolutionary circles in Kazan. He introduced himself to his future wife, the stolid revolutionary Nadezhda Krupskaia, in 1894, as the younger brother of the

  martyred revolutionary, and identified himself in this fashion in a short autobiographical sketch. There are few traces of tenderness in his childless, ideological marriage.30

  Lenin's vituperation provides a striking contrast with the accustomed form of discourse even among revolutionary intelle
ctuals. There is some precedent in Marx for his language of denunciation. But his acerbic style and constant imputation of deformity to his opponents often seems closer to the rough-hewn fanaticism of peasant insurrectionists, schismatics, and sectarians-all of whom flourished in the Simbirsk-Samara-Kazan regions of Lenin's youth. His style seems more a throwback to the powerful intermixture of prophecy and epithet in Ivan the Terrible and Avvakum than a continuation of the traditional debates of the nineteenth century.

  When earlier revolutionary leaders spoke of "them and us," they were contrasting power with truth, the ruling bureaucracy with the rulers in the world of ideas. For Lenin, however, "purity of ideas" was equated with "impotence."21 Potency requires power, which in turn, demands not truth, "but a true slogan 01 the struggle."22 Morality was not to be based Qn "idealistic" standards or inner feelings, but on the ever-changing dictates of revolutionary expediency. Thus, Lenin was not fundamentally concerned witli truth (pravda) in either of its two meanings of scientific fact (pravda-istind) or moral priaciple, (pravda-spravedlivosf). Pravda became, instead, the title of his newspaper, with its daily directives for action. "Cursed questions" were replaced by cursory commands.

  These commands were binding because of a second basic and novel feature of Lenin's teaching: his emphasis on organization. The tradition of secret, disciplined, hierarchical organization had never struck deep roots in the Russian revolutionary tradition-though there was a substantial theoretical literature of Jacobin proposals from such figures as Pestel, Ogarev, Nechaev, and Tkachev. Even the full-time revolutionaries within the People's Will were undisciplined, politically naive, and visionary-their most professional members being members not of an organization but of a "disorganization group." Lenin's new conception was partly dictated by the techniques needed for self-protection against the vastly improved methods of police espionage and enforcement; in part also it followed from the re-examination of revolutionary methods that had gone on steadily since the failure of the People's Will. Increasingly, the idea of consolidation under a more military type of organization had been mooted. The term "cadre," which became such a key concept in Bolshevik organizational thinking, was introduced in the late eighties, along with the idea of the manipulative use of "front" groups.23 The leading theoretician of refurbished revolutionary populism, Victor Chernov, head of the new Social Revolutionary Party, also

  insisted in 1901 that unity would have to be superimposed on the revolutionary movement so that "we will not have social democrats and social revolutionaries, but one indivisible party."24

  Lenin's final formula for organizational discipline was that of "democratic centralism," whereby decisions were reached on the basis of free discussion among party members, moving from the bottom to the top. Ultimate decisions were reached in the central committee of the party, of which the first secretary was the absolute center. Once made, a decision became totally binding. Such a system logically lent itself to the "substitutism" foreseen from the very beginning by Trotsky, whereby "the party organization supersedes the party as a whole; then the central committee supersedes the organization; and finally a single dictator supplants the central committee."25

  Elaborating Marx's theory of a coming dictatorship of the proletariat, Lenin insisted that such a form of rule would emerge only after the total destruction of the bourgeois state machine; that the dictatorship would then "wither away" with the imminent transformation to full communism;26 but that it would, in the interim, exert power "that is unrestricted by any laws."27

  What Lenin actually brought to Russia was the dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party: his own "party of a new type" which, once in power, was renamed "Communist" to set it off from the more familiar European label of "socialist" or "social democratic."28

  Within this party, relationships were to be animated not just by the mechanical laws of democratic centralism but by the untranslatable principle of partiinost'. This "party-mindedness" or "sacrificial party spirit" appealed to the sectarian impulse to find new life in some dedicated, secret group. Lenin sought to preserve and develop the sacrificial revolutionary tradition of Chernyshevsky and of his own elder brother to develop "complete comradely confidence among revolutionaries."29 He refused to call himself a materialist (even a dialectical one) unless it be recognized-as he wrote in 1894-that "materialism contains within itself, so to speak, partiinost'."30

  Even more appealing to intellectuals than the new spirit within Lenin's party was its promise to overcome their classic separation from "the people." Lenin insisted that "all distinctions between workers and intellectuals" be "utterly eliminated"31 within his party; but that, at the same time, it must act as a "vanguard" within, rather than a "Blanquist" clique outside, other mass movements of the age. In fleeing from "Blanquism," the party must not fall into "tail-endism": the renunciation of Revolutionarj' goals in favor of "gazing with awe upon the 'posteriors' of the Russian

  proletariat."32 Indeed, no "spontaneous" movement will produce the all-important political changes for which strategic organization and discipline are required. Lenin's party offered the intellectuals an intoxicating sense of identification with the true interests of the masses, a program for involvement in their activities, and the promise of union with them in the coming liberation.

  Lenin's manifesto and proposal of 1902, What Is To Be Done?, had given Russia a new answer to that classic question, which induced Lenin's Bolsheviks to split from the Mensheviks at the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1903. Unlike Chernyshevsky's What Is To Be Done? of 1863, Lenin's did not present the picture of a new social order; unlike Tolstoy's What Is To Be Done? of 1883, Lenin's does not call for a regeneration of individual moral responsibility. Lenin called rather for a new organization dedicated to the attainment of power by an ethic of expediency.

  In the wake of the Revolution of 1905 Lenin introduced a series of opportunistic modifications of traditional Marxist doctrine: the neo-populist idea of a fusion (smychka) of poor peasants with workers in the revolutionary party;33 the conception of a "growing over" (pererastanie) of the bourgeois into the proletarian revolution without the long interim which Marx had foreseen; and the idea that imperialism was the "highest stage" of a new cannibalistic finance capitalism, that was inevitably leading to world war and world-wide revolution.34

  Liberal democracy rather than autocracy was Lenin's principal foe as he steered his party along the road to power in the chaotic and fateful year of 1917. He was aided in exile and in his return from Switzerland in April by autocratic Germany; he overthrew not a tsarist, but a provisional democratic Russian government. Constitutional Democrats were the first political rivals he arrested after the coup d'etat of November 7; and the Constituent Assembly was forcibly dismissed in January after only one meeting. Lenin rejected not just the "parliamentary cretins" of liberalism, but also those more orthodox Marxists like the Mensheviks and Plekhanov, who believed that socialist forms of ownership could only be superimposed on an advanced industrial society that had developed democratic political institutions.

  The one indispensable pre-condition for Bolshevik success in gaining and holding power was the First World War. It put intolerable strains on the old Russian Empire and on Russia's brief experiment with democracy in 1917. Wartime divisions among the European powers and post-war lassitude enabled Lenin to consolidate power in the critical 1918-21 period. Yet Lenin's ability to capitalize on such conditions stemmed from his realization

  that crisis was part of the nature of things, and that the job of a revolutionary party was not to create revolutionary situations, but to provide organized leadership for them.

  His prophetic opposition to the war placed him in a strong position for appealing to the war-weary Russian populace. Lenin arrived at the Finland Station surrounded by the aura of a genuine alternative coming from another world to demand an end to war, and promising the beginning of a new era to all who would follow him "with icons against cannon."35 The establishment and conso
lidation of his dictatorship represents a masterful case study of the opportunism and daring of a gifted strategist clearly focused on the realities of power. Details of the Bolshevik rise to power belong properly to political and military history; but inextricably involved in this story are a number of profound, if only partly conscious, Bolshevik borrowings from the radical traditions of the Russian intelligentsia. In at least four important ways, Bolshevism benefited from these traditions in threading its way from a relatively obscure revolutionary party of twenty-five thousand on the eve of the March revolution of 1917 to the unchallenged ruling force of an empire of 150,000,000 by the end of the Civil War four years later.

  The first and most important debt to the Russian intellectual tradition was the conviction that any alternative to tsarist authority must be cemented together by an all-embracing ideology. From the time of the early Boehmists, Martinists, Schellingians, Hegelians, and Fourierists, Russian reformers had tended to gravitate toward Western thinkers who offered a new view of the world rather than mere piecemeal proposals for reform. The turn in the late nineteenth century from romantic ideologists to sweeping pseudo-scientific theorists, such as Comte and Spencer, prepared the way for the Bolsheviks' turn to Marx. Tkachev, the lonely Jacobin theorist who anticipated many of Lenin's elitist ideas, had written to Engels in 1874 that Russia, in contrast to the West, required "an intelligentsia-dominated revolutionary party."36 Lenin provided such a party far more adequately than the Mensheviks, for whom Marx provided a rational guide for practical social and economic changes rather than a prophetic invocation for the coming millennium. Lenin was truer to the tradition of ideinosf, of being "possessed with an idea," than most rival groups, who in the turbulence of 1917 still seemed immersed in the world of meshchanstvo: of philistinism and "small deeds." The ideiny, or ideological quality, of Lenin's party helped attract a much-needed increment of gifted intellectuals to its ranks in 1917: the so-called mezhraiontsy, or "interregional" group, of Trotsky, Lunacharsky, Bogdanov, and others.