Lenin
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Lenin never mentioned his brother in public. Nevertheless, he often invoked the Russian revolutionary tradition as a whole and pictured himself as fulfilling its long-held aims. In 1920, addressing himself to newly-minted communists from around the world, he said that the Russian revolutionary tradition had ‘suffered its way’ to Marxism.10 He meant the evolution that I have just described, in which the frustrations and martyrdom of people like Alexander Ulyanov led ultimately to the rise of Russian Social Democracy. Lenin’s emotional investment in his heroic scenario arose in large part from his hope that it would make all these sacrifices meaningful.
Marxism shows Lenin ‘Another Way’
The first stage in Lenin’s groping toward ‘another way’ was straight-forward student protest against government over-regimentation of university life. After passing his final gymnasium exams in spring 1887 with his usual high marks, Vladimir entered Kazan University in the autumn of that year to study law. There he got immediately into student politics and came to the notice of the authorities when he was involved in a disruptive student demonstration. Since the authorities had to submit reports on all participants, we have a verbal snapshot of perhaps Vladimir’s first attempt at leadership: ‘[On 4 December, V. Ulyanov] threw himself into the first assembly hall and he and Poliansky were the first to dash along the corridor of the second floor, shouting and waving their hands, as if to inspire the others. After leaving the student meeting, he handed in his student card.’11
Kicked out of university, Lenin was sent to live under police observance in the nearby village of Kokushkino. Lenin later complained to Krupskaya about the way polite society dropped his family after Alexander’s execution. This social rejection should not obscure the support and sympathy that polite ‘liberal’ society gave the students expelled from university, loading them with gifts as they left. In fact, over the years, the Ulyanovs certainly benefited from their connection with Alexander and the prestige that this connection gave them in the eyes of a public opinion that was extremely hostile to tsarism.
Lenin later recalled that the following summer in the village of Kokushkino was the most intensive bout of reading of his entire life. His reading pushed him to the next stage of his evolution as he discovered the Russian revolutionary tradition. The author who had the most influence on him was Nikolai Chernyshevsky, an outstanding radical journalist and scholar of the 1860s. Chernysh evsky had been in Siberian exile since 1864 and had one year to live when Lenin read his works in 1888. Lenin found out his address and sent him a letter, although he never got a reply. Lenin learned many things from Chernyshevsky, but perhaps the real legacy of the older writer to Lenin was a visceral hatred of philistinism. Lenin felt that Chernyshevsky had a ‘pitch-perfect’ sense of what was truly revolutionary and what was ‘philistine’ compromise and conformism.
Lenin during his student days in Samara.
In October 1888 restrictions were loosened enough to allow Vladimir and his family to move back to Kazan. Here the properly Marxist stage of Vladimir’s evolution began, as he participated in illegal Social Democratic reading circles and began to cut his teeth on Marx’s Capital. Here began the love affair with the writings of Marx and Engels that continued all his life.
In 1889 the Ulyanovs moved to the Volga city of Samara, where for the next few years Vladimir continued his Marxist self-education and began to work out his own Marxist interpretation of Russian reality. Lenin’s Marxist reading of the vast social changes going on in Russia provided him with the basis of his heroic scenario of class leadership and, in so doing, pointed to the ‘other way’ his brother had failed to find. Vladimir could now be confident that ‘the force was with him’ – the force of History, with a capital H.
The dilemma facing Alexander Ulyanov and the Russian revolutionary tradition as a whole was that political freedom was necessary in order to prepare for a socialist revolution based on the masses, but political freedom itself was impossible to achieve without a mass movement. But what if a mighty, irresistible force was even now at work, vastly increasing the potential for a mass movement despite tsarist repression? If so, even a relatively feeble and persecuted Social Democratic party could have a tremendous effect, if a way could be found to tap into this vast potential.
Looking through his Marxist spectacles, Lenin perceived such a mighty force: the capitalist transformation of Russia. In the long run, of course, capitalist transformation would lay the necessary groundwork for a successful socialist revolution. But socialist revolution was not Lenin’s most urgent problem. He was much more interested in possible mass support for the preceding democratic and anti-tsarist revolution that would install political freedom. What Lenin perceived behind the dry statistical tables of land ownership and employment was the creation of new fighters who were both willing and able to wrest political freedom from the grip of the absolutist tsarist government. These fighters consisted of the new classes created by capitalist transformation out of the old Russian narod. There were several such classes, each with its particular role to play in Lenin’s heroic scenario.
The first of these new classes was the urban factory workers. The urban workers’ assigned role in Lenin’s scenario was to be ‘the sole and natural representative of Russia’s entire labouring and exploited population and [therefore] capable of raising the banner of worker emancipation’. The factory workers were the natural leaders of the narod because they directly faced in pure form the same thing (Lenin was convinced) that confronted all Russia’s labourers, since ‘the exploitation of the working people in Russia is everywhere capitalist in nature’. But while capitalist exploitation provided a link with the narod in the countryside, the urban environment gave the factory workers special leadership qualities. Their concentration in towns and in large-scale factories made them easier to organize. Even more important, they were in a position to read and heed the Marxist message about the causes of and the remedy for capitalist exploitation. In contrast, in the countryside, ‘exploitation is still enmeshed in medieval forms, various political, legal and conventional trappings, tricks and devices, which hinder the working people and their ideologists from seeing the essence of the system which oppresses the working people, from seeing where and how a way can be found out of this system.’12
The second class created by capitalist transformation was the exploited workers who remained in the countryside. Lenin’s heroic scenario depended crucially on the argument that capitalist exploitation was ubiquitous, not only in the cities, but in villages and farms all over Russia. These rural workers may not have been able to play the role of class leaders, but they could step into the essential role of class followers. Capitalism was shaking them up, pushing them out of their villages and into a brave new world. And when such a worker ‘leaves home to tramp the whole of Russia’ and ‘hires himself out now to a landlord, tomorrow to a railway contractor’, he will see many things not previously visible. He will see that
wherever he goes he is most shamefully plundered; that other paupers like himself are plundered; that it is not necessarily the ‘lord’ who robs him, but also ‘his brother muzhik’ [fellow peasant], if the latter has the money to buy labour-power; that the government will always serve the bosses, restrict the rights of the workers and suppress every attempt to protect their most elementary rights, calling these attempts rebellious riots.13
This newly visible rightlessness gives the village poor a stake in a political revolution. The narod, Lenin insisted, was even now breaking up into two opposed classes: workers on one side and a new bourgeoisie of peasant origin on the other. Ultimately, these two new classes would be bitter enemies. Social Democracy could therefore not undertake to organize or lead peasant farmers. Nevertheless, the emerging peasant bourgeoisie was yet another mass force in support of a political revolution. As opposed to elite factory owners, who resented tsarism but could always cut a deal with the authorities, the new bourgeoisie of the narod, the peasant farmers, were willing to fight and fight h
ard to rid the country of the coercive ‘survivals of serfdom’ and, in particular, the social and economic privileges of the landed estate-owners.
Capitalist transformation was thus creating new mass fighters with a stake in a successful political revolution. Foremost among these were the workers in both town and country – even though the political revolution would strengthen bourgeois rule in the short run. Nevertheless, the exploited workers have a life-and-death interest, not only in the far-distant socialist revolution that will end capitalism, but also in the here-and-now democratic revolution for political freedom that will make capitalism less intolerable. As a good Marxist, Lenin is supposed to denounce capitalist exploitation and he duly does. But these condemnations get somewhat lost in the shuffle, because Lenin is more vitally concerned with showing that there are worse things than capitalist exploitation. The kind of pre-capitalist exploitation still prevalent in Russia was worse, because it relied on coercion, personal dependence, lack of mobility and isolation. Worst of all is capitalist exploitation that was intensified by coercive survivals of the pre-capitalist order – first and foremost by tsarism itself.
Capitalism was therefore ‘progressive’, and not only because it was creating new classes that were both willing and able to fight in a nationwide struggle against tsarism. It was also shattering ‘age-old immobility and routine, destroying the settled life of the peasants who vegetated behind their medieval partitions, and creating new social classes striving of necessity towards contact, unification, and active participation in the whole of the economic (and not only economic) life of the country and the whole world’.14 Lenin’s seemingly offhand parenthetical comment – ‘and not only economic’ – reveals the connection between his learned Marxist analysis and his passionate heroic scenario. The new classes are also called upon to participate in the political life of the country, indeed, to revolutionize it.
In the early 1890s, as Lenin was working out his lifelong political identity, he also had to fight against another view of Marx’s implications for Russian revolutionary strategy. This view was put forth by the bitterest opponents of the Russian Marxists, namely, the older generation of narodniki or populists who were appalled at the infatuation with Marxism displayed by a younger generation of socialist radicals. For veterans of revolutionary struggles, such as Nikolai Mikhailovsky, the Marxist strategy was grotesquely long-term, passive and callous about the fate of the Russian peasant. According to these hostile witnesses Russian Marxists had written off the peasantry. In fact (in Mikhailovsky’s words) they ‘directly insist on the further devastation of the village’.15 Capitalism (cheered on by the Marxists) would force the crushed and impoverished peasants to migrate to the cities, become factory workers and (after a generation or two of capitalist hell) carry out the socialist revolution.
One of Mikhailovsky’s colleagues, S. N. Krivenko, sharpened the portrait by arguing that simple consistency required Russian Marxists to actively encourage capitalist production, speculate in peasant land and rejoice as peasants were kicked off the land.16 One quip of his was especially successful. Krivenko suggested that if the Marxists thought capitalism was so great, they should open up village taverns to speed it along. One Russian Social Democrat later recalled that, as a young student in St Petersburg in the early 1890s, his fellow students would slap him on the back and say, ‘Hey, Marxist, when are you opening a tavern?’17
Lenin was still in Samara in 1891 when a massive famine hit the Volga region and elsewhere. The famine first horrified and then enraged Russian society as it observed what was widely felt to be the evasion and later the bungling and outright corruption of the official response. According to one memoir account, Vladimir Ulyanov reacted to the famine exactly as predicted by Mikhailovsky and Krivenko. Vasily Vodovozov was on good terms with the Ulyanov family in Samara in the early 1890s. In his memoir, written in the 1920s, he tells us that Vladimir Ulyanov ‘sharply and definitely spoke out against feeding the hungry’. The young Marxist insisted that the famine was ‘a progressive factor. By destroying the peasant economy and throwing the muzhik out of the village into the town, the famine would create a proletariat and aid the industrialization of the region.’ Furthermore, the famine ‘will force the muzhik to think about the foundations of the capitalist system’.18 Young Ulyanov is thus a sort of Marxist Scrooge: Are there no prisons? And the Union workhouses – are they still in operation? And if people would rather die than go there, they had better do it and decrease the surplus population.
Vodovozov’s story is neat, too neat, as a hard-boiled detective might say. The young Lenin becomes a walking, talking embodiment of the most hostile stereotypes of Russian Marxism circulating at the time. Many historians still today believe in the accuracy of this polemical caricature of Russian Marxism in general and Lenin in particular. But Lenin’s actual vision of the ‘other way’ created by capitalism was far otherwise. He saw capitalist transformation of the Russian countryside as the objective force that made the heroic scenario of inspirational class leadership possible in the here and now.
According to the hostile stereotype, the Russian Marxists called on capitalism to crush the peasants, drive them out of the countryside and into the cities, and thus prepare the way for a long-distant socialist revolution. In reality, Lenin gave capitalism the mission of transforming the peasants, making them effective fighters while still in the countryside, and thus making possible a democratic revolution based on the masses and not on the isolated and therefore terror-wielding intelligentsia.
Given his actual scenario, Lenin reacted to the caricature of the Marxist Scrooge with indignant rage. In Friends of the People, he cited the comments by Mikhailovsky and Krivenko quoted earlier and responded: suppose Mikhailovsky did meet someone in some literary salon who spouted this nonsense and passed it off as Marxism. Poseurs like this ‘besmirched the banner’ of Russian Social Democracy. To tell the reading public that this repulsive caricature was an accurate portrayal of Russian Marxism was nothing but the most blatant poshlost or philistinism.19
As the Marxist Scrooge, Lenin is supposed to have actively willed the peasants’ situation to be as bad as possible. But in 1899 he wrote that ‘Social Democrats cannot remain indifferent spectators of the starvation of the peasants and their destruction from death by starvation. Never could there be two opinions among Russian Social Democrats about the necessity of the broadest possible help to the starving peasants.’ An otherwise hostile émigré memoirist remembers Lenin himself working in one of the canteens set up to help the peasants in 1891–2.20
Lenin’s Marxist analysis of the development of Russian capitalism undergirded his heroic scenario by proving three things: the proletariat has been given the role of leader; ‘the strength of the proletariat in the process of history is immeasurably greater than its share of the total population’; the deep-rooted remnants of serfdom give rise to the profound revolutionary drive of the peasantry.21 Lenin’s Marx-based heroic scenario helps to explain why he literally fell in love with Marx’s writings. We can imagine Vladimir addressing the ghost of his martyred brother in words such as these: No, Sasha, we will not get to political freedom by throwing away our lives in futile attempts to frighten the government into concessions. There is another way: an epic national struggle in which the urban workers will lead the newly galvanized narod. This will work, Sasha! It is guaranteed by the authority of the greatest socialist of all, Karl Marx.
Lenin Becomes a Revolutionary Social Democrat
His Marxist studies did not distract Lenin from obtaining professional credentials as a lawyer. He managed to obtain permission to take external exams at Petersburg University and in April 1891 he travelled to St Petersburg for that purpose. For the rest of the year he had to answer questions on topics as diverse as Plato’s dialogue The Laws, Roman law and the degrees of ‘unfreedom’ among the peasants of feudal Russia. Despite another family tragedy – his twenty-year-old sister Olga, who was living in St Petersburg, died of typhoid fever
on 8 May 1891 – he aced the examination and duly received certification as a lawyer.
Returning to Samara, he could now earn something like a living by defending local peasants on charges typically involving petty theft. But the big city beckoned, and in August 1893 he ended the Volga chapter of his life by moving to St Petersburg. Upon arriving, he dutifully wrote a letter to his mother, telling her that he had found a room that was clear and light, in a building that had a good entrance and was ‘only some fifteen minutes walk from the library’ (a primary consideration for Lenin everywhere he lived). After asking for money to tide him over, he confessed that ‘obviously I have not been living carefully; in one month I have spent a rouble and thirty-six kopecks on the horse trams, for instance. When I get used to the place I shall probably spend less.’22 Lenin used his various contacts to establish himself immediately. He got a position with the lawyer M. F. Volkenstein. Much more important to him, he used letters of introduction in order to join a Marxist circle at the Technology Institute, through which he was able to get in touch with worker study groups. He had found the milieu in which he would spend the rest of his life.
Four-year-old Vladimir with his younger sister, Olga, Simbirsk, 1874.
Lenin had already worked out the Marxist underpinnings of his heroic scenario. He had, to his own satisfaction, demonstrated the objective potential for applying a Social Democratic strategy to Russia: an underground party inspires urban factory workers with a sense of their historical mission to lead the narod against tsarism. In St Petersburg in 1893–4 he found reason enough to decide that actual Russian activists and actual Russian workers could work together to realize this potential. Some of these reasons came from developments in international Social Democracy. Among these was the resounding triumph of German Social Democracy during its own ‘outlaw period’. The German Chancellor, Otto Bismarck, had tried to destroy Social Democracy with repressive legislation in 1878 – and lo and behold, by 1891 Bismarck was gone but the German Social Democratic party was still there. Indeed, it seemed as if Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws had made the party stronger. The anti-socialist laws were allowed to lapse, the party held a triumphant congress in the German town of Erfurt at the end of 1891, and a new party programme was adopted that became a model for Social Democrats everywhere. Perhaps Social Democracy could thrive even when subjected to energetic state repression.