Least known is Lenin’s formative period. The entire corpus of writings for the first twenty-three years of his life consists of a mere twenty items, nearly all of them petitions, certificates, and other official documents.1 There are no letters, diaries, or essays such as one would expect from a young intellectual. Either such materials do not exist or, as is more likely, they are secreted in Soviet archives because their release would reveal a young Lenin very different from the one portrayed in the official literature.* In either event, the biographer has very little to go on in attempting to reconstruct Lenin’s intellectual and psychic development during the period (roughly 1887–93) when he evolved from an ordinary youth without political commitments or even interests into a fanatical revolutionary. Such evidence as we possess is largely circumstantial; much of it rests on negative knowledge—that is, what Lenin failed to do given his opportunities. Reconstructing the young Lenin requires a conscientious effort to peel off layers of distorting varnish deposited on his image by years of institutionalized cult.†
Lenin was born Vladimir Ilich Ulianov in April 1870 in Simbirsk into a conventional, comfortably well-off bureaucratic family. His father, a school inspector, had attained by the time of his death in 1886 the rank of a state councillor, which gave him status equal to a general and hereditary nobility. He was a man of conservative-liberal views who sympathized with the reforms of Alexander II and believed that education held the key to Russia’s progress. He worked extremely hard and is said in his sixteen years as inspector to have founded several hundred schools. Lenin’s mother, born Blank, was the daughter of a physician of German ancestry: in her photographs she looks as if she had stepped out of Whistler’s portrait. It was a happy, close-knit family which faithfully observed the rituals and holidays of the Orthodox Church.
Tragedy struck the Ulianovs in 1887 when Lenin’s elder brother, Alexander, was arrested in St. Petersburg carrying a bomb with which, in a plot with friends, he intended to assassinate the Tsar. A passionate scientist, Alexander had shown no interest in politics until after he had been three years at St. Petersburg University. There he familiarized himself with the writings of Plekhanov and Marx and adopted an eclectic political ideology calling for the grafting on the program of the People’s Will (Narodnaia Volia) certain elements of Social-Democracy. According industrial labor a predominant role in the revolution, he accepted political terror as the means and the immediate transition to socialism as the objective. This peculiar amalgam of Marxism and Narodnaia Volia anticipated the program which Lenin would develop independently a few years later. Arrested on March 1, 1887, the sixth anniversary of the assassination of Alexander II, Alexander Ulianov was given a public trial and executed along with his co-conspirators. He conducted himself throughout with exemplary dignity.
Alexander’s execution, which occurred soon after the death of the elder Ulianov, had a profound effect on the family, which had known nothing of his revolutionary activity. But there is no evidence that it altered Vladimir’s behavior in any way. Many years later Lenin’s younger sister Maria claimed that on learning of his brother’s fate, Lenin exclaimed: “No, we will not go this way. We must not go this way.”2 Apart from the fact that Maria Ulianova was a mere nine years old when this alleged remark was made, it cannot be true, because when his brother was executed Lenin was entirely innocent of politics. The purpose of this invention is to suggest that already as a seventeen-year-old gymnasium student Lenin inclined to Marxism, which is at odds with the available evidence. Moreover, from family recollections it can be determined that the two brothers had not been close and that Alexander took strong objection to Vladimir’s rude manners and habitual sneer.
The striking fact about Lenin’s youth is that, unlike most of his contemporaries, he showed no interest in public affairs.3 The portrait which emerges from the pen of one of his sisters, published before the iron grip of censorship dehumanized Lenin, is that of an exceedingly diligent boy, tidy and punctilious—a type that modern psychology would classify as compulsive.4 He was a model student, earning excellent grades in nearly all subjects, behavior included, for which he was awarded gold medals year after year. He graduated at the top of his class. The scanty evidence at our disposal shows no trace of rebelliousness toward either his family or the regime. Fedor Kerensky, the father of Lenin’s future rival, Alexander, who happened to have been principal of the school which Lenin attended in Simbirsk, recommended him to the University of Kazan as a “reticent” and “unsociable” youth who “neither in school nor out of it gave his superiors or teachers by a single word or deed any cause to form of him an unfavorable opinion.”5 By the time he graduated from gymnasium in 1887, he held no “definite” political opinions.6 Nothing in his early biography hinted at a future revolutionary; rather, the indications were that Lenin would follow in his father’s footsteps and make a distinguished bureaucratic career. It is because of these traits that he was admitted to study law at Kazan University, from which his family’s police record would otherwise have barred him.
On entering the university, Lenin was recognized by fellow students as the brother of a celebrated terrorist and drawn into a clandestine People’s Will group. This organization, headed by Lazar Bogoraz, had made contact with like-minded students in other cities, including St. Petersburg, apparently with the intention of carrying out the deed for which Alexander Ulianov and his associates had been executed. How far its plans progressed and how much Lenin was involved is not possible to ascertain. The group was arrested in December 1887 following a demonstration to protest university regulations. Lenin, who was observed running, shouting, and waving his arms, was briefly detained. On returning home, he wrote a letter to the university announcing his withdrawal, but the attempt to forestall expulsion failed. He was arrested and expelled along with thirty-nine other students. Such savage punishment, typical of the methods which the regime of Alexander III used to stifle signs of independence or “insubordination,” kept the revolutionary movement supplied with ever fresh recruits.
Lenin might perhaps have been forgiven in time and allowed to reenroll were it not that in the course of the investigation which followed the police uncovered his connections with the Bogoraz circle and learned of his brother’s involvement in terrorism. Once these facts became known, he was placed on the list of “unreliables” and put under police surveillance. His and his mother’s petitions for readmission were routinely rejected. Lenin saw before him no future. He spent the next four years in forced idleness, living off his mother’s pension. His mood was desperate and, according to one of his mother’s petitions, verging on the suicidal. Such accounts as we have of Lenin during this period depict him as an insolent, sarcastic, and friendless young man. In the Ulianov family, however, which idolized him, he was regarded as a budding genius and his opinions were gospel.7
During this period Lenin did a great deal of reading. He plowed through the “progressive” journals and books of the 1860s and 1870s, especially the writings of Nicholas Chernyshevskii, which, according to his own testimony, had on him a decisive influence.8* During this trying time, the Ulianovs were ostracized by Simbirsk society: people shunned association with relatives of an executed terrorist from fear of attracting the attention of the police. This was a bitter experience which seems to have played no small part in Lenin’s radicalization. By the fall of 1888, when he moved with his mother to Kazan, Lenin was a full-fledged radical, filled with boundless hatred for those who had cut short his promising career and rejected his family—the tsarist establishment and the “bourgeoisie.” In contrast to typical Russian revolutionaries, such as his late brother, who were driven by idealism, Lenin’s dominant political impulse was and remained hatred. Rooted in this emotional soil, his socialism was from the outset primarily a doctrine of destruction. He gave little thought to the world of the future, so preoccupied was he, emotionally as well as intellectually, with smashing the world of the present. It was this obsessive destructiveness that both fascinate
d and repelled, inspired and terrified Russian intellectuals, themselves prone to alternate between Hamletic indecision and Quixotic folly. Struve, who had frequent dealings with Lenin in the 1890s, says that his
principal
Einstellung
—to use the new popular German psychological term—was
hatred
. Lenin took to Marx’s doctrine primarily because it found response in that principal
Einstellung
of his mind. The doctrine of the class war, relentless and thoroughgoing, aiming at the final destruction and extermination of the enemy, proved congenial to Lenin’s emotional attitude to surrounding reality. He hated not only the existing autocracy (the Tsar) and the bureaucracy, not only lawlessness and arbitrary rule of the police, but also their antipodes—the “liberals” and the “bourgeoisie.” That hatred had something repulsive and terrible in it; for being rooted in the concrete, I should say even animal, emotions and repulsions, it was at the same time abstract and cold like Lenin’s whole being.
9
Lenin’s official vita, as formalized in the 1920s, is in its essential features modeled on the life of Christ. Like Christology it depicts the protagonist as unaltered and unalterable, his destiny being predetermined on the day of birth. Lenin’s official biographers refuse to allow that he had ever changed his ideas. He is said to have been a committed orthodox Marxist from the moment he became politically involved. This claim can easily be shown to be wrong.
To begin with, the term “Marxist” had in Lenin’s youth not one but at least two distinct meanings. Classical Marxist doctrine applied to countries with mature capitalist economies. For these Marx purported to provide a scientific theory of development, the inevitable outcome of which was collapse and revolution. This doctrine had an immense appeal to Russian radical intellectuals both because of its claim to scientific objectivity and because of the inevitability of its prediction. Marx was popular in Russia before there was a Russian Social-Democratic movement: in 1880, he boasted that Das Kapital had more readers and admirers there than in any other country.10 But since Russia at the time had hardly any capitalism, however liberally the term is defined, early Russian followers of Marx reinterpreted his theories to suit local conditions. In the 1870s they formulated the doctrine of “separate path,” according to which Russia, developing her own form of socialism based on the rural commune, would make a direct leap to socialism, bypassing the capitalist phase.11 Lenin’s brother adopted this kind of ideology in the program for his People’s Will organization and it was common in Russian radical circles in the 1880s.
Knowledge of the intellectual environment in which Lenin grew up sheds light on the evolution of his ideology. In 1887–91, Lenin was not and could not have been a Marxist in the Social-Democratic sense, because this variant of Marxism was still unknown in Russia. The evidence suggests that from 1887 until approximately 1891 he was a typical follower of the People’s Will. He maintained close association with members of this organization, first in Kazan and then in Samara. He actively sought out its veterans, many of whom settled in the Volga region after being released from prison and exile, to learn the history of that movement and especially its organizational practices. This knowledge he deeply assimilated: even after becoming a leading figure in the Russian Social-Democratic Party, Lenin stood apart from his colleagues by virtue of his belief in a tightly disciplined, conspiratorial, and professional revolutionary party and his impatience with programs calling for a lengthy interlude of capitalism. Like the Narodnaia Volia he scorned capitalism and the “bourgeoisie,” in which he saw not allies of socialism but its sworn enemies. It is noteworthy that in the late 1880s he failed to join the circles active in his region which were beginning to approach Marx and Engels in a “German”—that is, Social-Democratic—spirit.12
In June 1890, the authorities at long last relented and allowed Lenin to take the examinations for the bar as an external student. He passed them in November 1891, following which he devoted himself, not to the practice of law, but to the study of economic literature, especially statistical surveys of agriculture issued by the zemstva. His purpose, in the words of his sister Anna, was to determine the “feasibility of Social-Democracy in Russia.”13
The time was propitious. In Germany, the Social-Democratic Party, legalized in 1890, won stunning successes at the polls. Its superb organization and ability to combine appeals to workers with a broad liberal program won it more parliamentary seats in each successive election. It suddenly appeared conceivable that socialism could triumph in the most industrialized country in Europe through democratic procedures rather than violence. Engels was so impressed by these developments that in 1895, shortly before his death, he conceded that the revolutionary upheavals which he and Marx had predicted in 1848 might never occur and that socialism could well triumph at the ballot box rather than the barricade.14 The example of the German Social-Democratic Party exerted a strong influence on Russian socialists, discrediting the older theories of “separate path” and the revolutionary coup d’état.
Concurrently with the spread of these ideas, Russia experienced a dramatic spurt of industrial development which in the decade 1890–1900 doubled the number of industrial workers and gave Russia a rate of economic growth unmatched by any other country. The indications, therefore, were that Russia had missed the opportunity to bypass capitalism, which even Marx had conceded to be possible, and was destined to repeat the Western experience.
In this changed atmosphere, the theories of Social-Democracy gained a following in Russia. As formulated in Geneva by George Plekhanov and Paul Akselrod and in St. Petersburg by Peter Struve, Russia was to reach socialism in two stages. First she had to go through full-blown capitalism, which would vastly expand the ranks of the proletariat and, at the same time, bring the benefits of “bourgeois” freedoms, including a parliamentary system under which Russian socialists, like the Germans, could gain political influence. Once the “bourgeoisie” had swept autocracy and its “feudal” economic foundations out the way, the stage would be set for the next phase of historic development, the advance to socialism. In the mid-189os these ideas captured the imagination of much of the intelligentsia and all but submerged the older ideology of “separate path,” for which Struve now coined the derogatory term “Populism.”15
Lenin was slow to make this transition, in part because, living in the provinces, he had no access to Social-Democratic literature and in part because its pro-capitalist, pro-bourgeois philosophy clashed with what Struve called “the principal Einstellung” or attitude of his mind. In 1892–93, having read Plekhanov, he seems to have arrived at a halfway position between the ideology of the People’s Will and that of Social-Democracy, not unlike that which his brother had reached five years earlier. He abandoned the notion of a “separate path” and acknowledged the reality which stared everyone in the eye: Russia was destined to tread the path charted in Das Kapital, which he had read in 1889. But he was unwilling to concede that before being ready for revolution Russia had to undergo, for an indeterminate period, a stage of capitalist development during which the “bourgeoisie” lorded it over the country.
His solution to the problem was to declare that Russia already was capitalist. This eccentric view, which no other student of the Russian economy is known to have shared, rested on an idiosyncratic interpretation of statistical data on agriculture. Lenin convinced himself that the Russian village was in the throes of “class differentiation” which transformed a minority of peasants into a “petty bourgeoisie” and the majority into a landless rural proletariat. Such calculations, derived from those which Engels had made in regard to the German peasantry, had little to do with the facts of the case: but to Lenin they served as a guarantee that Russia did not have to postpone the revolution ad infinitum, until her capitalism was fully matured. Arguing that fully 20 percent of Russia’s rural population in some provinces qualified as “bourgeois,” and given the industrial boom then underw
ay, Lenin felt emboldened to declare in 1893–94 that “at the present time capitalism already constitutes the basic background of Russia’s economic life” and “essentially our order does not differ from the Western European.”16
By declaring “capitalist” a country four-fifths of whose population consisted of peasants, most of them self-sufficient, small-scale communal farmers, Lenin could proclaim it ripe for revolution. Furthermore, since the “bourgeoisie” was already in power, it represented not an ally but a class enemy. In the summer of 1894, Lenin wrote a sentence that summarized the political philosophy to which, except for a brief interlude (1895–1900), he would remain faithful for the rest of his life:
The Russian
worker
, leading all the democratic elements, will bring down absolutism and lead the
Russian proletariat
(along with the proletariat of
all the countries
)
by the direct road of open political struggle to the triumphant Communist Revolution
.
17
Although the vocabulary was Marxist, the underlying sentiment of this passage was People’s Will: indeed, as Lenin would many years later confide to Karl Radek, he had sought to reconcile Marx with the Narodnaia Volia.18 The Russian worker, to whom the People’s Will had also attributed the role of a revolutionary vanguard, was to launch a “direct” assault on the autocracy, topple it, and on its ruins erect a Communist society. Nothing is said about the mission of capitalism and the bourgeoisie in destroying the economic and political foundations of the old regime. It was an anachronistic ideology, for at the time when Lenin formulated it, Russia had a burgeoning Social-Democratic movement which rejected such an old-fashioned adaptation of Marx’s theories.
The Russian Revolution Page 54