In the second place, Lenin benefited from the Russian predilection for
theories of history that promise universal redemption but attach special importance to Russian leadership. The appeal of such philosophies of history had been a constant feature of the Russian intellectual tradition, and was rooted in the subconscious hold of an historically oriented theology. The old belief in a coming millennium had been secularized by a century of preaching that "the golden age lies ahead and not behind us"; and a people steeped in Utopian thought patterns were attracted by Lenin's claim that the transition to classless communism was imminent, and that all human problems were about to be solved in the manner that friendly crowds arbitrate occasional squabbles on the street.37
The belief that Russia was destined to provide ideological regeneration for the decaying West had been propagandized by conservative as well as radical theorists. And the radical belief in a coming earthly Utopia had often fascinated even those who rejected it. Dostoevsky, as he moved from radicalism to conservatism, still felt the seductive power of this "marvellous dream, lofty error of mankind":
The Golden Age is the most implausible of all the dreams that ever have been. But for it men have given up their life and all their strength, for the sake of it prophets have died and been slain, without it the peoples will not live and cannot die. . . .3S
For this dream people proved willing to die resisting the counterattacks of the old order during the Civil War. In times of chaos and disruption the most Utopian visions may provide the most practical banner for rallying popular support.
A third area of indebtedness to the indigenous traditions of Russian radical thought lay in the Bolshevik expropriation of the populist myth of "the people" as a new source of moral sanction. Shortly after the Bolshevik coup, enemies of the new regime were denounced as "enemies of the people," and ministries of state were rebaptized as "people's commissariats."39 Summary executions soon came to be glorified as "people's justice"; and Bolshevik dictatorships dressed up for export as "people's democracies."40 The vaguely appealing populist belief that "the people" carried within themselves the innate goodness for building a new social order provided the Bolsheviks with the opportunity of camouflaging instruments of state control with the lexicon of popular liberation. Without this widespread belief in "the people" as a regenerative life force, the Bolsheviks would have had far more difficulty convincing the Russian people and themselves that their own coercive measures were morally justified.
A final borrowing from earlier tradition was the subtle Bolshevik adoption of the concept of the "circle" as a new type of dedicated com-
munity in which all distinctions of class and nationality were eliminated. Such Bolshevik concepts as sacrificial "party spirit" and internal "self-criticism" had been in many ways characteristic of Russian intellectual circles from the first secret gatherings of Novikov and Schwarz in the eighteenth century. The idea that diverse social groupings could find common unity and purpose in a circle dedicated to radical change had been present in some of the early masonic groups, and had become dominant with the entrance of non-aristocratic and national minority elements into the main stream of Russian intellectual life in the late nineteenth century. Lenin accepted in practice, if not in theory, the populists' highly un-Marxian idea that the instrument of radical social change would be an alliance of "workers, peasants, and the intelligentsia." "Poor" and "poor middle" peasants were said to be the proletariat of the countryside; and "progressive" intellectuals and "oppressed" nationalities were invited to join the revolutionary movement.41 During the brief period between the end of the Civil War and his physical deterioration and death, Lenin's attitude toward culture was more that of a nineteenth-century Russian radical fervently committed to Westernization and secularization than that of a twentieth-century totalitarian despot. He had been generally unsympathetic with Bogdanov's wartime effort to build a monolithic new "proletarian culture," and permitted a variety of new artistic schools to flourish after the initiation of the more relaxed New Economic Policy in 1921. Lenin disliked the artistic avant-garde, but viewed their work as incomprehensible rather than dangerous, irrelevant rather than subversive. His main cultural preoccupations were with the spread of basic education and the inexpensive mass publication of older literary classics. It was in essence a neo-populist program tempered with a Victorian emphasis on general utility.
Elements of populist evangelism had already appeared in Lenin's call for a new elite to raise the historical "consciousness" of the working class, and in his insistence on beginning with a new journal. Elements of Vic-torianism were already evident in his patronizing, pedagogic manner, his humorless moral puritanism, and his matter-of-fact distaste for either primitive, popular superstition or sophisticated, intellectual metaphysics. Once in power, Lenin did not forbid further flights of fancy; but he did seek to bring Russian culture back to earth. He was interested in the technical task of spreading literacy rather than the imaginative art of creating literature.42
For all the benefits which he received from the radical intellectual tradition and all of his inner links with it, Lenin paved the way for its destruction. It is not just that he severed the ties that Russia had been developing with Westward-looking political and cultural experimentation.
Periods of repression and forced isolation were not new in Russian culture, and democracy was a relatively recent and unfamiliar concept for many Russians. What was profoundly revolutionary in Lenin was his deliberate break with a belief that underlay almost all previous Russian radical thought: belief in the existence of objective moral laws for human behavior. With only a few, peripheral exceptions in the nineteenth century, Russian intellectuals had resisted all efforts to find a totally new basis for morality whether in a calculus of social utility in the manner of Bentham or in the manufacture of mythic goals for the self-realizing ego in the manner of Fichte. Russian radicals had continued to use religious terminology, juxtaposing the ethical teachings of Christ to the corrupt practices of a supposedly Christian society; or the language of idealism in relating their ethical passion to the nature of goodness, or to the absolute dictates of conscience.
With Lenin, however, morality was made relentlessly relative, dictated by party expediency. He reviled not just traditional religion and philosophical idealism but also the practical idealism implicit in traditional secular humanism. His movement was to be based on a scientific theory that would free his cause from the charge of myth and purify his ethic of expediency from any trace of caprice and sentimentality. The moralistic exhortations that populists like Lavrov and Mikhailovsky had mixed in with their pseudo-scientific theories of progress were only "bourgeois phrasemongering." Modern revolutionaries needed the resilient armor of science, not the ceremonial uniforms of tradition.
Of course, the open inductive thinking of the modern scientific spirit was totally unfamiliar to Lenin, whose relentlessly political mind tended to equate it with anarchism. His longest philosophic treatise was devoted to refuting the "empirio-criticism" of those most intimately concerned with the philosophical implications of contemporary science.43 In Lenin's activist ideology, morality was deduced from scientific Marxism, of which he, the son of a schoolmaster, was the leading teacher, and he, the student of jurisprudence, the final judge. In the last analysis, arguments were not to be resolved but cut off, because the chief justice was also chief of the Revolutionary army. And this was no ordinary army, but a messianic band scientifically certain of Utopia, ruthlessly fighting for peace.
The full-blown totalitarianism that emerged under Stalin thus had organic roots in Leninist theory. There were no external criteria by which the actions of the Leninist party could be judged and criticized; no limitations established on the types of questions it was entitled to resolve. Nothing could better illustrate the depth of his break with the critical tradition of
Russian letters than his 1905 article insisting that partiinosf in literature requires that literature for the proletar
iat not only
not be an instrument of gain for individuals or groups, but not be an individual matter at all, independent of the common proletarian cause. Down with non-party writers! Down with literary supermen! Literature must become a part of the common proletarian cause: a "wheel and screw" of the one and only great social-democratic mechanism which is driven by the entire conscious avant-garde of the entire working class. Literature must become a component part of organized, planned, unified social-democratic party-work.44
The fact that there was genuine intra-party dissent and debate in Lenin's lifetime, that he never intended the party to regulate all of human life, and that he was personally fond of simple living and sincerely convinced that a new age was about to dawn-all is of primarily biographical interest. Far more important to the historian is the fact that the totalitarianism of Soviet society under Stalin followed logically (even if it may not have followed necessarily) from the Leninist doctrine of the party.
The Revenge of Muscovy
For the historian of culture, Lenin's brief rule was still something of a chaotic interregnum; and it is the age of blood and iron under Stalin that marks the real watershed. Once his dictatorial power was securely established in the late twenties, Stalin systematically imposed on Russia a new monolithic culture that represented the antithesis of the varied, cosmopolitan, and experimental culture that had continued on into the twenties from pre-Revolutionary days. During the quarter of a century that stretched from the beginning of his first five-year plan in 1928 to his death in 1953, Stalin sought to convert all creative thinkers into "engineers of the human soul." They were to be cheerleaders along his assembly lines-deliberately kept uncertain of what cheer was required of them and denied that last refuge of human integrity in most earlier tyrannies: the freedom to be silent.
It is hard to know how Lenin would have reacted to all of this. He suffered his first stroke in 1922, just a little more than a year after the end of the Civil War, and was virtually incapacitated for nearly a year before his death in January, 1924. He never had time clearly to indicate how fully he would have applied to a society at peace the totalitarian principles advocated earlier for a revolutionary party in times of war and crisis. Cultural problems had always been peripheral to his interests. Despite his party-centered
perspective, he had many friends among non-party intellectuals, many years of exposure to Western society, and a fairly rich grounding in the nineteenth-century Russian classics. There was, to be sure, a foreshortening of intellectual vistas from Marx, who knew his Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, to a Lenin steeped largely in the civic poetry and realistic prose of his native land. But Lenin's vistas were still ranging compared with those of Stalin; and Lenin must at least be given credit for belatedly warning against the "rudeness" of his successor in his long-suppressed political testament.45
Born into an obscure cobbler's family in the mountains of the Caucasus, educated in the seminaries and tribal traditions of his native Georgia, Stalin shared none of the broader European perspectives of Lenin and most other Bolshevik leaders. This small, pock-marked figure never knew the life of the Russian intelligent, did not even write in Russian until late in his twenties, and spent only four months outside Russian-occupied territory-during brief trips to Party congresses in Sweden and England in 1906 and 1907, and to study the national question in the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1912 and 1913.
The qualities that Stalin professed to admire in Lenin-"hatred for snivelling intellectuals, confidence in one's own strength, confidence in victory"-were those which he attempted to instill in himself. To these were added the compulsive chauvinism of the provincial parvenu, the scholastic dogmatism of the half-educated seminarian, and a preoccupation with organizational intrigue already noticeable during his revolutionary apprenticeship in the world's largest oil fields in Baku.
Stalin's only god was Lenin; yet in Stalin's depiction the god acquires a bestial if not satanic form. Stalin compared Lenin's arguments to "a mighty tentacle which twines all around you and holds you as a vice"; Lenin was said to have been obsessively concerned that the enemy "has been beaten but by no means crushed" and to have rebuked his friends "bitingly through clenched teeth: 'Don't whine, comrades. . . .' "4e
Stalin's formula for authoritarian rule was experimental and eclectic. It might be described as Bolshevism with teeth or Leninism minus Lenin's broad Russian nature and ranging mind. Lenin, for all his preoccupation with power and organization, had remained, in part, a child of the Volga. He had a revolutionary mission thrust upon him and took his revolutionary name from one of the great rivers of the Russian interior: the Lena.
Stalin, by contrast, was an outsider from the hills, devoid of all personal magnetism, who properly derived his revolutionary name from stal', the Russian word for "steel." His closest comrade-and the man he picked to succeed him as formal head of state throughout the 1930's went even
further--shed his family name of Scriabin, so rich in cultural association, for Molotov, a name derived from the Russian word for "hammer." No figure better illustrates the unfeeling bluntness and technological preoccupations of the new Soviet culture than this expressionless bureaucratic hammer of the Stalin era, who was generally known as "stone bottom" (from "the stone backside of the hammer"-kamenny zad molotovd).
Yet for all the grotesqueness, gigantomania, and Caucasian intrigue of the Stalin era, it may in some way have had roots in Russian culture deeper than those of the brief age of Lenin. Lenin benefited from the St. Petersburg tradition of the radical intelligentsia, studied briefly in St. Petersburg, began his Revolution there, and was to give his name to the city. When Lenin moved the capital from St. Petersburg and entered the Moscow Kremlin for the first time on March 12, 1918, he was uncharacteristically agitated, remarking to his secretary and companion that "worker-peasant power should be completely consolidated here."47 Little did he imagine how permanent the change of capital was to prove and how extensive the consolidation of power in the Kremlin. The year of Lenin's death brought a flood to the former capital, newly rebaptized as Leningrad. It was an omen perhaps of the traditionalist flood that was about to sweep the revolutionary spirit out of the Leninist party. With Stalin in the Kremlin, Moscow at last wreaked its revenge on St. Petersburg, seeking to wipe out the restless reformism and critical cosmopolitanism which this "window to the West" had always symbolized.
Stalin had many roots in the Russian past. His addiction to mass armies overbalanced with artillery follows a long tradition leading back to Ivan the Terrible; his xenophobic and disciplinarian conception of education is reminiscent of Magnitsky, Nicholas I, and Pobedonostsev; his passion for material innovation and war-supporting technology echoes Peter the Great and a number of nineteenth-century Russian industrialists. But Stalinism in the full sense of the word seems to have its deepest roots in two earlier periods of Russian history: the nihilistic 1860's and the pre-Petrine era. First of all, Stalinism appears as a conscious throwback to the militant materialism of the i86o's. Insofar as there was a positive content to Stalinist culture, it was rooted in the ascetic dedication to progress of the materialistic sixties rather than the idealistic spirit of the populist age. Stalin and some of his close associates-Molotov, Khrushchev, and Mikoyan-were like Chernyshevsky and so many other men of the sixties largely educated by priests, and had merely changed catechisms in midstream. Stalin's belief in physiological and environmental determinism-evidenced in his canonization of Pavlov and Lysenko-reflects the polemic prejudices of Pisarev more than the complex theories of Engels, let alone the thoughts of prac-
ticing scientists. His suspicion of all artistic activity without immediate social utility reflects the crude aesthetic theory of the sixties more than that of Marx.
All of the enforced artistic styles of the Stalin era-the photographic posters, the symphonies of socialism, the propagandistic novels, and the staccato civic poetry-appear as distorted vulgarizations of the predominant styles of the 1860's: the
realism of the "wanderers," the programmatic music of the "mighty handful," the novels of social criticism, and the poems of Nekrasov. This artificial resurrection of long-absent styles brought a forced end to the innovations in form so characteristic of art in the silver age. Whole areas of expression were blighted: lyric poetry, satirical prose, experimental theater, and modern painting and music.
Art was, henceforth, to be subject not just to party censorship but to the mysterious requirements of "socialist realism." This doctrine called for two mutually exclusive qualities: revolutionary enthusiasm and objective depiction of reality. It was, in fact, a formula for keeping writers in a state of continuing uncertainty as to what was required of them: an invaluable device for humiliating the intellectuals by encouraging the debilitating phenomena of anticipatory self-censorship. It seems appropriate that the phrase was first used by a leading figure in the secret police rather than a literary personality.48 Publicly pronounced in 1934 at the first congress of the Union of Writers by Andrew Zhdanov, Stalin's aide-de-camp on the cultural front, the doctrine was given a measure of respectability by the presence of Maxim Gorky as presiding figurehead at the congress. Gorky was one of the few figures of stature who could be held up as an exemplar of the new doctrine. He had a simple background, genuine socialist convictions, and a natural realistic style developed in a series of epic novels and short stories about Russian society of the late imperial period.
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