by Lars T. Lih
Lenin
Lars T. Lih
After Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) is the man most associated with communism and its influence and reach around the world. Lenin was the leader of the communist Bolshevik party during the October 1917 revolution in Russia, and he subsequently headed the Soviet state until 1924, bringing stability to the region and establishing a socialist economic and political system.
Lars T. Lih
LENIN
Lenin, faced with new technology for spreading the word, seems somewhat nonplussed (March 1919).
Introduction
On the shelves of my study, in serried ranks of blue, stand the 55 volumes of the fifth edition of the works of V. I. Lenin. In their way, these volumes – equipped with a fantastically elaborate scholarly apparatus detailing every name, book and even every proverb mentioned by their author – are the building blocks of an intellectual mausoleum comparable to the corporeal mausoleum that still stands in Moscow. Just as impressive an accomplishment of what might be called embalming scholarship is the multivolume Vladimir Ilich Lenin: Biograficheskaia Khronika, consisting of over 8,000 pages detailing exactly what Lenin did on every day for which we have information (usually he was writing an article, issuing an intra-party protest, making a speech).
And yet the very title of this biokhronika points to a biographical puzzle, since the name ‘Vladimir Ilich Lenin’ is a posthumous creation. The living man went by many names, but ‘Vladimir Ilich Lenin’ was not among them. Posterity’s need to refer to this man with a name he did not use during his lifetime gives us a sense of the difficulty of capturing the essence of this passionately impersonal figure without mummifying him, either as saint or as bogeyman.
What should we call him? He was christened, shortly after his birth in 1870, as Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov. ‘Ilich’ is a patronymic, meaning ‘son of Ilya’. And yet, for many during his lifetime and after, ‘Ilich’ conveyed a greater sense of the individuality of the man than ‘Vladimir’. As soon as he started on his revolutionary career in the early 1890s the exigencies of the underground led our hero to distance himself from his given name. The surviving copy of his first major written production – Who are these ‘Friends of the People’ and How Do They Fight against the Social Democrats? (1893) – has no authorial name on the title-page. In works legally published in the 1890s our hero adopted more than one new name: K. Tulin or (for his magnum opus of 1899, The Development of Capitalism in Russia) Vladimir Ilin, a pseudonym that hardly hides his real name. Right up to the 1917 revolution, legally published works by Vl. Ilin continued to appear.
Even in a legally published newspaper an underground revolutionary had to exercise care so that his identity would not serve as an excuse to fine it or shut it down. One such paper was the Bolshevik Pravda, published in Petersburg from 1912 to 1914. A close colleague of Lenin, Lev Kamenev, later recalled that in order not to compromise this newspaper ‘Ilich changed the signature to his articles almost every day. In Pravda his articles were signed with the most diversified combinations of letters, having nothing in common with his usual literary signature, such as P.P., F.L.-ko., V.F., R.S., etc., etc. This necessity of constantly changing his signature was still another obstacle between the words of Ilich and his readers – the working masses.’1
Our hero acquired his ‘usual literary signature’ around 1901, while serving as one of the editors of the underground newspaper Iskra, when he began to sign his published work as ‘N. Lenin’. Why ‘Lenin’? We have already seen a certain fondness for pseudonyms ending in -in. But ‘Lenin’ seems to have been the name of an actual person whose passport helped our man leave Russia in 1900. This passport was made available to Lenin, at second or third hand, as a family favour; in the end, he did not have to use it.2
‘N. Lenin’, not ‘V. I. Lenin’. His published works, right to the end, have ‘N. Lenin’ on the title-page. What does the ‘N’ stand for? Nothing. Revolutionary pseudonyms very often included meaningless initials. But when N. Lenin became world famous, the idea got about that N stood for Nikolai – an evocative name indeed, combining Nikolai the Last (the tsar replaced by Lenin), Niccolò Machiavelli and Old Nick. In 1919 one of the first more-or-less accurate biographical sketches in English proclaimed its subject to be Nikolai Lenin. President Ronald Reagan was still talking about Nikolai Lenin in the 1980s – and perhaps this name is just as legitimate historically as ‘V. I. Lenin’.
Title-page of What Is to Be Done? (1902), one of the first publications bearing the name ‘N. Lenin’.
In any event, Lenin never used ‘Vladimir Ilich Lenin’ as a signature. Most of his letters are simply signed ‘Yours, Lenin’ or the like. Certainly Lenin did not bother to hide his real name. In a 1908 letter to Maxim Gorky signed ‘Yours, N. Lenin,’ he gives his Geneva address: ‘Mr. Wl. Oulianoff. 17. Rue des deux Ponts. 17 (chez Küpfer)’.3 Only in letters to his family and to Inessa Armand does he usually forego his usual literary signature and sign off as V. U. or V. I.
Title-page of Lenin: The Man and His Work, one of the first informed accounts of Lenin in English.
After 1917, when signing official documents in his capacity of Chair of the Council of People’s Commissars, Lenin evidently felt that his family name was necessary, and so his official signature on government decrees was ‘Vl. Ulianov (Lenin)’. Other revolutionaries whose underground klichki (pseudonyms) became famous did not retain their family name in this manner – certainly not J. V. Stalin (born Dzhugashvili).
It seems that our subject, for reasons both personal and official, fought to maintain a distinction between Vladimir Ilich the person and Lenin the political institution. Posterity’s insistence on yoking together ‘Vladimir Ilich’ and ‘Lenin’ bespeaks not only convenience but also the difficulties of comprehending the shifting demands of personal and political identity in the politics of the Russian revolution.
A Soviet government decree signed ‘V. I. Ulyanov (Lenin)’.
When we look at the overall evolution of English-language studies of Lenin since the Second World War, we observe a pendulum shift from ‘Lenin’ to ‘Ulyanov’ – that is, a shift away from seeking the essence of this historical personage in his formal doctrines and towards seeking his essence in his personality. In the first decades after the War scholars elucidated the doctrine of ‘Leninism’, consisting of a series of propositions about the role of the revolutionary party, imperialism, the state and even such topics as philosophical materialism. To this end they concentrated on texts that might be called ‘Lenin’s homework assignments’. Works such as Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1908), Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), and State and Revolution (1917) all reflect the diligent note-taking of a writer who feels compelled to make a case concerning a subject with which he is relatively unfamiliar. In fact, several volumes of Lenin’s complete works are devoted exclusively to the notes he made in preparation for these books.
Even in the case of Lenin’s seminal work of 1902, What Is to Be Done?, scholars were much more interested in drawing out what they saw as the doctrinal implications of some of his passing polemical remarks than in the real heart of the book, namely, Lenin’s attempt to inspire underground activists with a heroic vision of leadership. In this way scholars used Lenin’s homework assignments to construct an elaborate doctrine entitled ‘Leninism’ and then proceeded to contrast their creation with ‘Marxism’, concluding that Lenin was an innovative, indeed revisionist, Marxist theoretician.4
Starting in the mid-1980s the Soviet archives began to be opened and a new portrait of Lenin emerged. Paradoxically the opening of the archives, so immensely beneficial in other areas of Soviet history, led to even further decontextualizing of Lenin/Ulyanov. Research proceeded on the (possibly unconscious) assumption that newly
declassified documents would unlock the secret of the real Lenin. Yet these new documents were themselves highly selective, and for an obvious reason. What sort of Lenin documents would the Soviet authorities keep under lock and key? Obviously, those documents that created problems for the official Soviet interpretation of Lenin, and in particular for the carefully cultivated image of his impeccable virtue and humanity. Keeping back these documents was a crime against scholarship, but not quite as intellectually vulnerable as the creation of a portrait of Lenin based on these documents alone. Oliver Cromwell insisted that his portrait should include ‘warts and all’. Post-Soviet studies of Lenin often seem to be based on a methodology of ‘nothing but warts’.5
The spotlight was now on the quirks of Ulyanov rather than the doctrines of Lenin. Much interest was excited, for example, by Ulyanov’s sex life. Books with titles like Lenin’s Mistress appeared.6 His political life was reduced to a number of shocking statements, mostly from the time of the Russian civil war, in which he demanded energetic repression. Sometimes it seemed as if the whole vast drama of the Russian revolution and its tragic outcomes were caused by one man’s intolerance and cruelty. Even the major large-scale biographies by Dmitri Volkogonov and Robert Service showed little understanding or even interest in explicating and contextualizing what was, after all, one of Ulyanov’s central claims to fame: the political outlook associated with the writings of N. Lenin.7
The aim of the present biographical essay is to keep the focus on both Ulyanov the flesh-and-blood personage and his rhetorical creation, N. Lenin. This is all the more necessary because the ideas of N. Lenin cannot be understood apart from the emotions Ulyanov invested in them, and Ulyanov’s emotional life cannot be understood apart from the ideas associated with N. Lenin. (Having used the distinction between ‘Lenin’ and ‘Ulyanov’ to make this fundamental point, I will henceforth revert to the normal usage of referring to the historical personage by his most famous penname.)
In early 1917 Lenin wrote to his close friend Inessa Armand that ‘I am still completely “in love” with Marx and Engels, and I can’t stand to hear them abused. No, really – they are the genuine article.’8 We should take this statement as the literal truth. Lenin was truly in love with the ideas of Marx and Engels. In similar fashion, the most fraught, long-lived and emotional relationship of Lenin’s life was his changing attitude toward the most distinguished Marxist of his generation, Karl Kautsky – or rather, with Kautsky’s writings.
But can a formal doctrine, with generalized propositions connected by logical implication, inspire such love? Not in Lenin’s case. His emotional fervour was inspired by a lifelong scenario by means of which he interpreted the eventful world around him. The key theme of this scenario was heroic class leadership. The theme of class leadership had two levels. First, most fundamentally, leadership by the class – that is, the Russian proletariat’s leadership of the whole Russian people, made up predominantly of peasants. Narod is the Russian word for ‘the people’, and (like Volk in German and le peuple in French) it has an emotional force completely lacking in the English noun ‘the people’. For Lenin the urban proletariat was only one part of the narod, but a part to whom history had given a special mission of leadership.
The centrality of this theme to Lenin’s outlook was brought out by his widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, in her eulogy after Lenin’s death in 1924. The Russian word used here for ‘leader’ – vozhd – is a key term in Lenin’s rhetoric throughout his life:
His work [in the early 1890s] among the workers of Piter [St Petersburg], conversations with these workers, attentive listening to their speeches, gave Vladimir Ilich an understanding of the grand idea of Marx: the idea that the working class is the advanced detachment of all the labourers and that all the labouring masses, all the oppressed, will follow it: this is its strength and the pledge of its victory. Only as vozhd [leader] of all the labourers will the working class achieve victory…. And this thought, this idea illuminated all of his later activity, each and every step.9
Lenin also had a romantic view of leadership within the class. He sought to inspire the rank-and-file activist – the praktik – with an exalted idea of what their own leadership could accomplish. In What Is to Be Done? (1902), he challenged his opponents: ‘You brag about your practicality and you don’t see (a fact known to any Russian praktik) what miracles for the revolutionary cause can be brought about not only by a circle but by a lone individual.’10
The party inspires the workers with a sense of their great mission to lead the narod, and the proletariat then carries out this mission by inspiring the narod to join the workers in their crusade to overthrow tsarism, thereby opening up the road that ultimately leads to socialism – this is Lenin’s scenario. Thus the two levels of heroic class leadership are interconnected, as eloquently described by Robert Tucker, one of the few scholars to fully grasp the essential content of what Lenin himself called his dream:
To understand Lenin’s political conception in its totality, it is important to realize that he saw in his mind’s eye not merely the militant organization of professional revolutionaries of which he spoke, but the party-led popular movement ‘of the entire people’. The ‘dream’ was by no means simply a party dream although it centred in the party as the vanguard of conscious revolutionaries acting as teachers and organizers of a much larger mass following in the movement. The dream was vision of an anti-state popular Russia raised up by propaganda and agitation as a vast army of fighters against the official Russia headed by the tsar.11
Lenin’s scenario was heroic, even grandiose. For Lenin, anyone who failed to share his exalted sense of historical events was a ‘philistine’. The Russian language has a rich vocabulary for attacking philistinism – not only filisterstvo, but obyvatelshchina, meshchanstvo and poshlost. Lenin constantly deploys this vocab ulary in his polemics, mainly against other socialists.
The aim of the present biographical essay is to outline Lenin’s heroic scenario, show both its complexity and its thematic unity, reveal the source of Lenin’s emotional attachment to it and document its changing role at each stage of his career. The concise format of the Critical Lives series is ideal for this purpose: any shorter and the lifelong role of the heroic scenario would be obscured, any longer and the underlying unity of Lenin’s outlook would be similarly obscured. These goals impose a strict focus that determines what needs to be said and what (with great regret) has to be left out for the present. My ambition is to bring out a recurring pattern. Once this pattern is perceived, it will easily be recognized by anyone who picks up Lenin’s writings and reads more than a few pages.
My view of Lenin is not particularly original and chimes in closely with most observers of Lenin in his time as well as with a strong minority of post-war academic historians. Nevertheless, this view does clash on many points with what might be called the standard textbook interpretation. The central theme of the textbook interpretation is Lenin’s alleged ‘worry about workers’. According to this account Lenin was pessimistic about the workers’ lack of revolutionary inclinations and was therefore inclined to give up on a genuine mass movement. He therefore aimed instead at an elite, conspiratorial underground party staffed mainly with revolutionaries from the intelligentsia. Following from this, the textbook interpretation sees fundamental contrasts between Lenin and the rest of European Social Democracy. They were optimistic, he was pessimistic. They were fatalist, he was voluntarist. They were democratic, he was elitist. They were committed to a mass movement, he was conspiratorial.
In reality Lenin was driven by a highly optimistic, indeed romantic, scenario of inspiring class leadership that had strong roots in European Social Democracy. My scholarly self would like nothing better than to fully document this fact and provide extensive back-up for any disagreements with the mainstream. My writerly self realizes that such digressions would subvert the goals of the present book. I shall therefore restrict myself to informing the reader when I have said something tha
t many experts will find surprising. A full scholarly defence of my interpretation can be found in writings listed in the Select Bibliography.
A May Day celebration in 1919 juxtaposes the man and his official image.
Only when we have a feel for the emotional glue that bound Lenin to his ideas will we be able to appreciate his lifelong commitment to a heroic scenario of inspiring leadership. This scenario is the profound link between a passionate individual and his public persona – between Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov and N. Lenin.
The Ulyanov family in 1879. The children, from left to right, are Olga, Maria, Alexander, Dmitri, Anna, Vladimir.
1. Another Way
If a historical novelist had come up with Lenin’s genealogy, it would seem very contrived. The intention of the author would have been too obvious: to give Vladimir Ulyanov ancestors from all over the Russian Empire and from as many of its ethnic groups as possible. Among his grandparents and great-grandparents there are Russian serfs from Nizhni-Novgorod, Jews from the shtetls of Ukraine, Lutheran Germans from the Baltic and possibly Kalmyks (a people of Mongolian origin) from the lower Volga.
Looking at the life trajectories of these remarkable individuals, another theme imposes itself: the pathos of the ‘career open to talent’, individual social mobility, advancement through education and professionalism. This aspect was well brought out by Albert Rhys Williams in 1919, in the first factual biographical sketch of Lenin in English:
In some accounts he is the ‘son of a peasant’; in others he is the ‘son of a nobleman’. Both statements are correct.
In old Russia, a man who became a senior captain in the navy, a colonel in the army or a Councilor of State in the Civil Service automatically attained the rank of the nobility. Lenin’s father came from peasant stock and rose to the position of Councilor of State. So Lenin is referred to as the ‘son of a peasant’ or the ‘son of a nobleman’ according to the animus of the writer.1