by Lars T. Lih
The disappointing record of the soviets as instruments of democratic renewal had one implication that increasingly preoccupied Lenin. The soviets were supposed to abolish ‘bureaucratism’ and to completely remake the inherited state apparatus. But as Lenin became more and more frustrated in his dealings with the state bureaucracy he was forced to search for new ways to combat pervasive bureaucratism.
By 1922 Lenin’s anger about the deficiencies of the state bureaucracy had become an obsession. As he remarked to a colleague in February 1922, ‘departments are shit, decrees are shit. Find people, check up on work – these are everything’.50 All through the year he continued to excoriate the gosapparat (state apparatus) and to trace all its inefficiencies and failures to the original sin of tsarism. Again and again Lenin worries that the party is not controlling the state machinery, but the other way around. The state machinery was ‘like a car that was going not in the direction the driver desired, but in the direction someone else desired; as if it were being driven by some mysterious, lawless hand, God knows whose, perhaps of a profiteer, or of a private capitalist, or of both.’51
As these remarks show the bureaucracy had become a third source of anxiety, alongside the encirclements by international capitalism and by the ‘petty-bourgeois’ peasantry. The new enemy acquired a bitterly ironical label: the ‘soviet bureaucrat’. Back in 1917 this term would have appeared absurdly oxymoronic, since the soviets were viewed as the polar opposite of ‘bureaucratism’. But after 1917 ‘the soviets’ became more and more of a synonym for the state apparatus as distinct from the party. Just like the pre-revolutionary bureaucracy, the personnel of the ‘soviet apparatus’ was made up mainly of middle-class ‘bourgeois specialists’. They were automatically assumed to be hostile to the socialist cause, or perhaps even saboteurs. Lenin now referred to the soviet bureaucracy as a haven for the shattered remnants of the capitalists and landowners.
Why had the soviets failed so signally that they had almost turned into their opposite? Lenin’s diagnosis focused on the cultural deficit of the proletariat and (even more) the narod. Lenin used kultura to mean such things as literacy, elementary habits of organization and other basic skills of modern ‘civilization’ (another term frequently found in his late writings). The cultural level of the ‘soviet bureaucracy’ was also very low, according to Lenin. Yet, worryingly, these bureaucrats had more culture than the workers or even the Communists. Lenin compared the Bolsheviks to barbarians who had conquered a higher civilization. Didn’t history show the very real danger that ‘the vanquished nation imposes its culture upon the conqueror’, that is, ‘Communists stand at the head of departments, enjoying rank and title, but actually swimming with the stream together with the bourgeoisie’?52
Russia’s new elite: a provincial party committee in Perm, 1922.
The cultural deficit explained the failure of Lenin’s hopes for the soviets, but it also posed a direct challenge to the legitimacy of socialist revolution in backward Russia. Lenin was confronted by this challenge in January 1923 when he read a memoir of the 1917 revolution written by the left-wing socialist Nikolai Sukhanov. In notes dictated soon afterwards Lenin admitted that socialist critics such as Sukhanov had correctly asserted that Russia was not ready for socialism. He responded to these familiar arguments with a flood of rhetorical questions (I count nine in two pages).
Such questions are the rhetorical device of choice for those who are not quite sure of their position. Lenin’s questions boil down to two: weren’t we justified in taking power in 1917 by Russia’s otherwise hopeless situation? Who’s to say we can’t pull off the unexpected task of creating cultural prerequisites for socialism after taking power?53
Lenin’s defensive tone shows his uneasy awareness that there was something deeply unorthodox about this relation between a proletarian vlast and culture. The standard Marxist schema proposed the following sequence:
capitalism→culture→vlast→socialism
For Russia at least, Lenin now maintained that the following sequence was permissible and indeed necessary:
capitalism→vlast→culture→socialism
In Marxist terms, the idea of the proletarian vlast creating the cultural basis for its own successful existence bears a resemblance to the way Baron Munchausen pulled himself out of the mire by his own bootstraps.
Lenin needed something like a miracle, so he again evoked the spirit of What Is to Be Done?, the book in which he boasted that an ordinary underground activist, even in isolation, could achieve miracles if he embodied the spirit of inspired and inspiring leadership. We shall look at two of Lenin’s attempts to put this spirit to work for the revolution, one in 1919 at the height of the civil war, and the other in 1923, now in a considerably chastened form.
In early 1919 the Bolshevik leader Jacob Sverdlov died of typhus. Sverdlov was the organization man of the Bolshevik top staff and his death was a real blow to the efficient running of the party. Lenin’s eulogy for him was the occasion for a classic exposition of his own concept of leadership. In his eulogy Lenin insists that repressive violence, seen by many people as the essence of Bolshevism, was only an enforced necessity. The real essence of Bolshevism was inspired and inspiring class leadership or, as he expresses it here, Bolshevism’s ability to organize the proletariat and through it the narod. A party leader (vozhd) such as Sverdlov can organize the masses because his utter devotion to the cause gives him ‘moral authority’. Sverdlov was only the most outstanding of a whole corps of vozhdi ‘pushed forward’ by the proletariat from its own ranks. According to Lenin these proletarian leaders had started to replace intelligentsia leaders around the beginning of the century.
As so often when discussing heroic leadership, Lenin alluded covertly to the fate of his brother, who had been tragically deprived of the opportunity to become such a leader:
The history of the Russian revolutionary movement over the course of many decades has known a long list of people, devoted to the revolutionary cause, but who did not enjoy the possibility of finding a practical application of their revolutionary ideals. And, in this connection, the proletarian revolution was the first to give these previously isolated individuals, heroes of the revolutionary struggle, a genuine grounding, a genuine base, a genuine framework, a genuine audience and a genuine proletarian army, where these vozhdi could reveal themselves.54
The image of the proletariat as an ‘audience’ for the inspiring leader – an image also found in What Is to Be Done? – brings out the unique quality of Lenin’s heroic scenario.
In his final articles of early 1923 Lenin once again calls upon the aid of proletarian leaders who arise directly from the working class, but now in a much smaller and more prosaic context. The grand vistas of the civil war have receded and Lenin now calls on recruits from the working class to improve the working of the state administrative machinery. The institutional details of his scheme are less important to us than its reliance on class leadership in yet another guise. Just as in What Is to Be Done? Lenin’s 1923 plan was to recruit up-and-coming workers from the bench into responsible posts in the party organization, with the same expectation that this infusion will make the party unbeatable.55
At the unveiling of a statue to Marx and Engels, November 1918: Lenin next to Jacob Sverdlov (Lenin’s model of inspiring leadership).
But Lenin was now determined to keep the whole process under control. The task previously given to the masses, acting through the soviets, is now handed to the party, acting from above: ‘We still have the old machinery, and our task now is to remould it along new lines. We cannot do so at once, but we must see to it that the Communists we have are properly placed… Our party, a little group of people in comparison with the country’s total population, has tackled this job. This tiny nucleus has set itself the task of remaking everything, and it will do so.’56
Despite the contrived and mundane nature of the organizational scheme propagated in his final articles, Lenin invested it with his usual emotio
nal fervour. In 1902 he wrote about his scheme for an underground newspaper: ‘That is what we must dream about!’ In 1923 he wrote about his scheme to improve state administrative machinery: ‘These are the lofty tasks I dream of for our Rabkrin [Worker and Peasant Inspection].’57
Lenin’s Rabkrin scheme was an attempt to overcome the cultural deficit that Lenin blamed for the deficiencies of the soviet bureaucracy. It has the air of a desperate improvization, an attempt to square the circle, and as such it was never remotely practicable. But the other prong of Lenin’s attack on the cultural deficit was much more substantive: mass education for the narod. We might call this Lenin’s kukharka strategy, after his famous boast in 1917 that the Bolsheviks would teach the kukharka, the female cook, how to administer the state.
In ‘Pages from a Diary’, the most eloquent of Lenin’s final articles – and one that has not received the attention it deserves – we see for the last time Ilich, son of Ilya Ulyanov, the tsarist educational reformer. After going through some statistics showing Russia’s low literacy, Lenin insists that education of the narod must be made a top priority. The country must make a real shift in budgetary priorities toward education, particularly by improving the material position of the schoolteacher of the narod. The status of the schoolteacher should be higher in Soviet Russia than in any bourgeois society.
True to his lifelong scenario, Lenin sees the ‘gigantic, world-historical cultural task’ of mass education in terms of class leadership, as drawing the peasant ‘away from union with the bourgeoisie and toward union with the proletariat’. At the end of his career Lenin once again summoned up the ultimate guarantor of his ‘other way’: the Russian people on the move, transformed by the pressures of modernity, eager to liquidate the heritage of pre-modern backwardness, or, as Lenin put it, the ‘semi-asiatic absence of culture’:
We are speaking of the semi-asiatic absence of culture, from which we have not yet extricated ourselves, and from which we cannot extricate ourselves without strenuous effort – although certainly the possibility exists of our doing so, because nowhere are the masses of the narod so interested in real culture as they are in our country; nowhere are the problems of culture posed so profoundly and consistently as they are in our country; in no other country is the state vlast in the hands of the working class which, in its mass, is fully aware of the deficiencies, I shall not say of its culture, but of its literacy; nowhere is the working class so ready to make, and nowhere is it actually making, such sacrifices to improve its position in this respect as in our country.58
Lenin’s Final Year
Lenin’s attempts to move beyond the ‘textbook à la Kautsky’ took its toll. From 1919 his speeches lose their earlier sharpness and become progressively more unfocused, repetitive, digressive. He becomes defensive and halting as he searches for a way to match his ideological scenario with events. A new and unexpected quality appears: Lenin is unsure of himself.
Nevertheless, in his articles published in January 1923 Lenin strove to achieve at least a provisional synthesis. The result is an idiosyncratic blend of anxiety and confidence. Lenin could not really abandon the axioms of the textbook à la Kautsky even when they challenged the legitimacy of socialism in Soviet Russia. Among these axioms are the following: Only a series of revolutions in the advanced countries will crush capitalism. A successful fight for socialism in Russia requires the dissolution of the peasantry into bourgeoisie and proletariat. Small-scale production for the market engenders capitalism. The proletariat will achieve socialism on the basis of the cultural achievements of capitalism. Lenin believed in these axioms all his life, and he couldn’t stop believing them simply because they had become inconvenient. As a result Lenin saw the Bolsheviks encircled by three founts of anxiety: international capitalism, the ‘petty-bourgeois’ peasantry and the dubiously loyal ‘soviet bureaucrat’.
Lenin fades away, but the new elite remains (one of Lenin’s last public appearances, October 1922).
Even so, Lenin looked to the future with confidence, on the basis of an adjusted version of his heroic scenario. If by ‘Lenin’s testament’, we mean his final message to the party, it can be summarized as follows:
Hopes have faded for socialist revolution in Europe anytime in the foreseeable future? Then take courage from the inevitable awakening of the East, while praying that inter-capitalist squabbles will allow socialist Russia to hold out.
Hopes have faded that the peasants would move toward socialist transformation on their own initiative? Then take the Old Bolshevik scenario of class leadership that had vindicated itself during the civil war and apply it to the novel task of leading the ‘middle peasant’ to socialism.
Hopes have faded that soviet-style democracy from below will transform the state? Then use the party to remake the inherited state apparatus from above, and put the highest possible priority on campaigns for mass literacy.
Do all these faded hopes mean that our socialist critics were right and that Russia was not ready for socialism? Yes, but – who’s to say that a proletarian vlast cannot pull itself up by its own bootstraps by itself creating the cultural prerequisites for socialism?
Lenin’s final stroke on 6 March 1923 marks the real end-point of his life and work, although his physical death came almost a year later. During the rest of 1923 Lenin was barely able to communicate. A moving description of Lenin’s state during this period comes from a letter from Yevgeny Preobrazhensky to Bukharin, describing a visit to Lenin in July 1923:
I had just come downstairs with Belenkii [Lenin’s security guard], when in the room to the right of the entrance Belenkii gestured with his arm toward the window: ‘over there, they’re carrying him’. When about twenty-five feet away he noticed me, to our horror, and started to press his hand to his chest and shouting ‘over there, there’ – asking for me. I had just come and had not yet seen M. I. and N. K. [Maria Ulyanova and Krupskaya]. They came running, and M. I., quite upset, said ‘since he’s noticed you, you have to go to him’.
I went, not exactly knowing how to behave or even, really, whom I would see. I decided to keep a happy and cheerful face at all times. I approached him. He pressed my hand firmly, I instinctively embraced him. But his face! It cost me a great effort to keep my mask and not to cry like a baby. In this face there was so much suffering, but not only the sufferings of the present moment. It was as if on his face were photographed and frozen all the sufferings he had undergone during this whole period.59
The final stroke occurred on 21 January 1924. An hour after, Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, known to the world as N. Lenin, breathed his last.
Epilogue
The highly emotional link between the flesh-and-blood individual Vladimir Ulyanov and his public persona N. Lenin consisted of a heroic scenario that gave content and meaning to his statistical investigations, his incessant polemics, his political strategies and all other aspects of his career. The basic contours of this heroic scenario were set out by Lenin in St Petersburg in 1893–4 and remained unchanged for the rest of his life.
Lenin’s scenario can be compressed into a single sentence or expanded into three hundred pages on capitalist development in Russia. The one-sentence version goes something like this: The Russian proletariat carries out its world historical mission by becoming the vozhd of the narod, leading a revolution that overthrows the tsar and institutes political freedom, thus preparing the ground for an eventual proletarian vlast that will bring about socialism. What propels this drama forward is inspired and inspiring class leadership. The party activists inspire the proletariat who inspire the Russian narod who inspire the whole world with their revolutionary feats.
The key words in the preceding summary are a mixture of learned terms imported from Europe (proletariat, revolution, socialism) and a deeply Russian vocabulary (vozhd, narod, vlast). I have transliterated rather than translated the key Russian words. The normal translations – vozhd = leader, narod = people, vlast = power – are not inaccurate, but they bleach the e
motional colour out of Lenin’s rhetoric. By now the reader of this book will have seen these words in a variety of contexts and will have acquired a feel for their hard-to-translate connotations.
The combination of an assertively ‘scientific’ terminology and a romantic narrative is brought out with almost naive frankness by one of Lenin’s closest associates, Grigory Zinoviev, in a lecture on party history given in 1923:
The advocates of ‘Economism’ [around the turn of the century] did not acknowledge the hegemonic role of the proletariat. They would say: ‘So what, in your opinion, is the working class, a Messiah?’ To this we answered and answer now: Messiah and messianism are not our language and we do not like such words; but we accept the concept that is contained in them: yes, the working class is in a certain sense a Messiah and its role is a messianic one, for this is the class which will liberate the whole world.
The workers have nothing to lose but their chains; they do not have property, they sell their labour, and this is the only class which has an interest in reconstructing the world along new lines and is capable of leading the peasantry against the bourgeoisie. We avoid semi-mystical terms like Messiah and messianism and prefer the scientific one: the hegemonic proletariat.1
‘Reconstructing the world’ is the proletariat’s mission in the general Marxist narrative, while ‘leading the peasantry’ is a mission much more specific to Bolshevism. Although the role of the proletariat as leader of the narod does have very deep roots in European Marxism, its strategic and emotional centrality is a distinctive feature of Lenin and Bolshevism.