by Lars T. Lih
We hardly exaggerate if we say that one Lenin got on the train in Krakow and another Lenin got off in Bern. The Krakow Lenin was a Russian Social Democrat with opinions about European and global issues. The Bern Lenin was a European Social Democrat of Russian origin. Lenin had long been of the opinion that the final episode of his heroic scenario – in the words of his banner sentence of 1894, when the Russian proletariat, side by side with the proletariat of all countries, would take ‘the direct road of open political struggle to the victorious communist revolution’ – was fast approaching in the countries of Western Europe. But since, as he saw it, the leaders of European Social Democracy had now abandoned the banner of revolutionary socialism, he, Lenin, would stride forward to pick it up.
Central to the programme of this new Lenin was a vision of a world entering an era of revolutions. Western Europe was on the eve of the final, socialist revolution. In Russia the democratic anti-tsarist revolution was already ‘commencing’ (as Lenin had written to Inessa Armand in summer 1914). All over the world, national and anti-colonial revolutions were brewing. These various genres of revolutions would inevitably influence each other in an intense process of interaction. In Lenin’s vision, the world war that broke out in 1914 had tremendously accelerated the process of global interaction. The miseries caused by the imperialist war would speed up revolution everywhere. Any successful revolution – whether socialist, democratic or national – would then spark off revolution in other countries, often by means of revolutionary war. After a socialist revolution, for example, ‘the victorious proletariat of that country, after expropriating the capitalists and organizing their own socialist production, will arise against the rest of the world – the capitalist world – attracting to its cause the oppressed classes of other countries, stirring uprisings in those countries against the capitalists, and in case of need using even armed force again the exploiting classes and their states’.3 In this invocation of revolutionary war we easily see Lenin’s familiar scenario of inspiring class leadership, now applied on an international scale.
The manifest duty of socialists everywhere was therefore to ‘turn the imperialist war into a civil war’ – that is, to use the crisis caused by the war in order to accelerate the revolution on a national and international scale. But, as Lenin observed with horror, a large majority of European socialist leaders had reneged on this duty when they supported their own government’s war effort. Lenin already believed that ‘opportunism’ – the deluded hope that socialism could be achieved other than by class revolution – was an insidiously powerful force in the European Social Democratic parties. Majority socialist support for the war convinced him that the rot of opportunism had infected Social Democracy at its core. In a Bolshevik manifesto drafted by Lenin in October 1914 he announced ‘with deepest sorrow’ that ‘the most influential socialist leaders’ had ‘defamed socialism’. Their conduct inspired ‘a burning feeling of shame’, because they ‘dishonoured the banner’ of revolutionary Social Democracy.4
According to many writers on Lenin the shock of socialist betrayal in 1914 kicked off a process of rethinking that led to the rejection of what he had earlier considered to be Marxist orthodoxy. According to Lenin himself it was not he who had changed but the others. He insisted that the vision of a world in revolution that I have just outlined was part and parcel of a universal consensus among pre-war revolutionary Marxists. Thus comments such as this one are a constant feature of his wartime rhetoric: ‘there is no need here for us to prove that the objective conditions in Western Europe are ripe for a socialist revolution; this was admitted before the war by all influential socialists in all advanced countries’.5
Lenin presented himself not as a bold innovator or a fearless rethinker but as someone faithful to the old verities – as the socialist leader who kept his head while all about him were losing theirs. This is how he could walk off the train in Bern in September 1914 and start agitating that very day on the basis of a platform that remained unchanged until the outbreak of the Russian revolution in spring 1917. This is how he had the amazing self-assurance to defy the entire socialist establishment in the name of Marxist orthodoxy.
The emotional content of Lenin’s politics during this period cannot be understand without grasping his ferocious anger at the way that socialist leaders reneged on their own word. For Lenin one of the most glaring examples of this behaviour – an example he recalled again and again – was the refusal to honour the declaration issued by the Basel International Congress of 1912. There, in solemn conclave assembled, the representatives of European Social Democratic parties had resolved that in the event of war, Social Democrats would ‘use the economic and political crisis created by the war to rouse the masses and thereby hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule’.6
Lenin had a personal relation to the mandate of the Basel Congress, since he himself, along with Rosa Luxemburg and L. Martov, had been instrumental in adding a similar pledge to a resolution passed by an earlier international socialist congress in 1907. This personal connection was just one more reason why Lenin saw the Basel Manifesto of 1912 as an expression of Social Democratic consensus, as a summary of ‘millions and millions of proclamations, newspaper articles, books, speeches of the socialists of all countries’ from the entire epoch of the Second International (the international socialist organization that united the main socialist parties from the mid-1890s to 1914). ‘To brush aside the Basel Manifesto means to brush aside the whole history of socialism.’7
Lenin blamed ‘opportunism’ for this betrayal and his feelings found expression in an emotional call for purification: ‘The European war has done much good to international socialism in that it has disclosed the whole extent of the rottenness, vileness, and meanness in opportunism, and thereby has given a wonderful stimulus for purging the worker movement of the dung which had accumulated during the decades of the peaceful epoch.’8 Many European socialists were taken aback by Lenin’s purificatory zeal. A French socialist who supported his country’s war effort, Solomon Grumbach, no doubt spoke for many:
In speaking of [Lenin and Zinoviev] we deal with the Grand Inquisitors of the International, who fortunately lack the power of carrying out their ideas, for otherwise Europe would have known many more funeral pyres and quite a few of us would have been seared over a slow fire to the accompaniment of Leninist hymns on the ‘only true Leninist socialism’ and would have thrown into the hell of socialist traitors as lost filthy-bourgeois-chauvinist-nationalist-social-patriotic souls.9
The same reaction of disappointed anger accounts for Lenin’s feelings toward the person who was probably the central figure in his emotional life during this period: Karl Kautsky. Lenin read with horror Kautsky’s many articles of autumn 1914 in which Kautsky seemed to tie himself in knots, not exactly in order to defend the new opportunism, but to excuse it, to cut it as much slack as possible, to avoid burning bridges within the party. Lenin’s consequent obsession with Kautsky was so overwhelming that it puzzled some of his own sympathizers, who knew that Kautsky was rapidly becoming a marginal figure in German socialism. Kautsky became the focus of Lenin’s anger because he embodied not only the pre-war Marxist orthodoxy to which Lenin still swore loyalty but also the refusal to live up to that orthodoxy when the chips were down. In letters written in autumn 1914 Lenin vented his feelings. ‘Obtain without fail and reread (or ask to have it translated for you) Road to Power by Kautsky [and see] what he writes there about the revolution of our time! And now, how he acts the toady and disavows all that!… I hate and despise Kautsky now more than anyone, with his vile, dirty, self-satisfied hypocrisy.’10
Lenin followed his own advice: he reread Kautsky’s 1909 publication Road to Power and devoted a whole article to the contrast between what Kautsky wrote there and what he was writing now.11 Indeed, Lenin took his own vision of global revolution more from Kautsky than from any other writer. As Kautsky wrote in Road to Power, ‘today, the battles in the liberation struggle of labouri
ng and exploited humanity are being fought not only at the Spree River and the Seine, but also at the Hudson and Mississippi, at the Neva… and the Dardanelles, at the Ganges and the Hoangho.’12 In contrast the wartime Kautsky seemed to Lenin to be an embodiment of philistinism, the age-old enemy of Lenin’s heroic scenario, and Lenin’s extensive anti-philistine vocabulary peppers every page of his many anti-Kautsky diatribes. Lenin coined a term for this new and insidious form of philistinism: kautskianstvo, defined as the use of orthodox phraseology as a cover-up for de facto opportunism. Kautskianstvo is usually given the misleading translation ‘Kautskyism’, but this rendering implies that Lenin is rejecting the system of views propagated by Kautsky before the war. On the contrary the term kautskianstvo affirms Lenin’s loyalty to Kautsky’s pre-war views by violently condemning his ‘renegade’ behaviour in failing to live up to them. The intensity of Lenin’s feelings about Kautsky after 1914 reminds one of a disappointed lover – and perhaps that is the best way to look at it. Lenin hated Kautsky because he loved Kautsky’s books.
Immediately upon arriving in Switzerland in September 1914 Lenin moved to get Europe-wide support for his platform. As the anti-war currents in the socialist movement began to get their bearings after the August catastrophe of socialist support for the war, Lenin became the main spokesman for what became known as the Left Zimmerwald movement. The geographic part of this label came from the small resort town 10 kilometres south of Bern, where disaffected socialists from a number of countries came together on 5 September 1915 to discuss aims and strategy. Few in number as they were, and isolated as they seemed to be from the socialist mainstream, the delegates felt confident that their influence could only grow as the war dragged on.
Lenin’s efforts to stake out a position to the left of most Zimmer wald partisans led to the formation of the Left Zimmerwald movement. As opposed to the Zimmerwald majority Lenin wanted no talk of peace as the overriding goal. Only socialist revolution could cut off the capitalist roots of war, and socialist revolution, in the short term, might require more fighting rather than less. Lenin also felt that the Zimmerwald majority was too easy on socialists who supported the war and too sentimental about the possibility of resurrecting the Second International. In private Lenin referred to the Zimmerwald majority as ‘Kautskyite shit-heads’.13 Left Zimmerwald was a minority within a minority but Lenin was unfazed. He was confident that the workers would soon support his stand, no matter how grim things looked at present. In a letter of 1915 Lenin calculated the forces he could count on during the upcoming Zimmerwald conference: ‘The Dutch plus ourselves plus the Left Germans plus zero – but that does not matter, it will not be zero afterwards, but everybody.’14
In early 1916 Lenin and Krupskaya visited Zurich so that Lenin could use the city library to research his book Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (another work that to a large extent is a defence of Kautsky-then against the apostasy of Kautsky-now). The visit kept being prolonged until the couple decided to stay permanently in Zurich. Here they lived, as Krupskaya recalled, ‘a quiet jog-trot life’, renting rooms in a shoemaker’s flat, attending performances by Russian theatrical companies and picking mushrooms (‘Vladimir Ilich suddenly caught sight of some edible mushrooms, and although it was raining, he began to pick them eagerly, as if they were so many Left Zimmerwaldians he were enlisting to our side’).15 Nevertheless, the role of one crying in the wilderness imposed a tremendous strain. Zinoviev recalled in 1918 that many who knew Lenin were surprised how much his appearance had altered under the stress of the war and the collapse of the International.16
Despite his engagement with the Left Zimmerwald movement, Lenin did not give up hopes for ‘the commencing revolution in Russia’, only he saw it more than ever as part of a global revolutionary process. As he wrote in October 1915, ‘The task of the proletariat in Russia is to carry out the bourgeois democratic revolution in Russia to the end [do kontsa], in order to ignite the socialist revolution in Europe’ [Lenin’s emphasis]… There is no doubt that a victory of the proletariat in Russia would create extraordinary favourable conditions for the development of revolution both in Asia and in Europe. Even 1905 proved that.’17
There is a widespread impression that Lenin was growing downhearted and pessimistic about the chance of revolution just weeks before the fall of the tsar in early 1917.18 In actuality the approach of the Russian revolution during the winter of 1916–17 was visible even to Lenin and his entourage, observing events in far-off Switzerland. In December 1916 Lenin pointed to ‘the mounting mass resentment and the strikes and demonstrations that are forcing the Russian bourgeoisie frankly to admit that the revolution is on the march’.19 In a letter of 10 February 1917 to Inessa Armand Lenin related that his sources in Moscow were optimistic about the revolutionary mood of the workers: ‘there will surely be a holiday on our street’ (a Russian idiom meaning ‘our day will come’).20
At the end of January 1917 – a few weeks before the February revolution was sparked off by street demonstrations in Petrograd – Lenin’s close comrade, Grigory Zinoviev, also observed that ‘the revolution is maturing in Russia’. Zinoviev also saw the approaching revolution in Russia through the lens of Lenin’s heroic scenario of class leadership. Zinoviev accurately conveyed – though perhaps in more flowery language than Lenin – the emotional fervour behind the Bolshevik scenario:
Oh, if one word of truth – of truth about the war, of truth about the tsar, of truth about the selfish bourgeoisie – could finally reach the blocked Russian village, buried under mountains of snow! Oh, if this word of truth would then penetrate even to the depths of the Russian army that is made up, in its vast majority, of peasants! Then, the heroic working class of Russia, with the support of the poor members of the peasant class, would finally deliver our country from the shame of the monarchy and lead it with a sure hand towards an alliance with the socialist proletariat of the entire world.21
Zurich to Petrograd
On 15 March 1917 Lenin learned about the thrilling events in Petrograd (the more Russian-sounding name given to St Petersburg at the beginning of the war): the tsar had abdicated, a government based on Duma representatives had taken power, and workers and soldiers had immediately formed a soviet based on the 1905 model. All Lenin’s thoughts now turned to getting to Russia, and since the Allied governments, especially England, had not the slightest intention of helping an anti-war agitator agitate against the war, he accepted the offer of travelling to Russia by means of a sealed train through Germany (most other Russian Social Democrats in Switzerland soon followed by the same route).
The train one which Lenin, Krupskaya, Inessa Armand and about thirty other émigrés travelled was sealed from Gottmadingen station on the German–Swiss border all the way to Sassnitz on Germany’s Baltic coast, where the travellers boarded a Swedish ferry. Lenin hoped that the strict rules forbidding contact between the Russian émigrés and any German citizens would minimize the impact of his ride through enemy territory. Although Lenin’s dramatic journey in the sealed train has attracted much attention, in essence it was no different from his train ride in 1914 from Krakow to Bern (true, the 1914 train was not sealed and Lenin was able to stop off in Vienna and thank Victor Adler in person). In each case the government of a country at war with Russia was glad to give safe passage to an enemy national who was a foe of the Russian government. We can also say about the 1917 train trip what we said about the 1914 trip: one man got on the train, another got off. In Switzerland Lenin was a marginal émigré, while in Petrograd he was a respected, even feared, party leader and a factor in national politics. The earlier train-ride from Krakow to Bern in 1914, however, did not mark a boundary in the evolution of Lenin’s views – Lenin still adhered to the same view of the world, only more so. In contrast, literally the day before his train left the Zurich station in 1917, Lenin’s scenario of class leadership underwent a modification with far-reaching implications.
Lenin photographed by a journalist wh
ile in Stockholm en route to Russia, April 1917. Lenin has yet to adopt the worker’s cap he wore following his return to Russia.
The so-called ‘April Theses’ announced by Lenin as soon as he arrived in Petrograd have traditionally been regarded as the expression of a major shift in Lenin’s outlook, yet identifying exactly what is new in these theses is quite difficult. The key parts of the April Theses – militant opposition to a government of ‘revolutionary chauvinists’ intent on continuing the war, all power to the soviets, winning over the peasants by advocating immediate land seizures and diplomacy bent on changing the imperialist war into a civil war – can all be found in a set of theses published in October 1915. Indeed the April Theses might very well be called the October Theses.22
In his earlier 1915 theses, and right up to the day before he left Switzerland, Lenin had spoken of two distinct types of revolutions: the democratic revolution in Russia and the socialist revolution in Western Europe. In Lenin’s scenario the Russian revolution incites the European revolution, making the two revolutions closely linked but nevertheless separate. Accordingly Lenin never considers the possibility of socialist transformation in Russia prior to and independent of socialist revolution in Europe. The abdication of the tsar did not in itself imply any change in his outlook, since carrying the democratic revolution ‘to the end’ was still very much on the agenda. Indeed, Lenin’s first reaction to the news from Russia was to exult that the theses of October 1915 said ‘directly, clearly, exactly, how it will be with us with a revolution in Russia, and they say it one and a half years before the revolution. These theses have been remarkably confirmed, word-for-word, by the revolution.’23