by Lars T. Lih
Lenin’s heroic scenario originated as a response to the dead end faced by the Russian revolutionary tradition in the 1880s. An informed British observer, writing in 1905, describes the 1880s as the Russian socialists themselves remembered it:
We thus arrive at the beginning of the eighties. Consider the situation – the People’s Will Party [Narodnaya volya] lying on the ground broken and exhausted, reaction rampant, all that was but a short time ago hopeful, disheartened and embittered. Where shall we turn for light and guidance? To the people? It is mute. To the working-class? There is none. To the educated classes? They are all full of pessimism in the consciousness of their weakness. What, then, next? Is all hope to be given up? Is there no salvation for Russia? At this moment of darkness and despair a new and strange voice resounds through the space – a voice full of harshness and sarcasm, yet vibrating with hope. That is the voice of Russian Social-Democracy.2
The dilemmas of the 1880s had a meaning for Lenin that was not only political but deeply personal, since they destroyed his older brother Alexander, who lost his life in a futile attempt to move the democratic revolution forward. Alexander’s fate led to Lenin’s deep emotional commitment to a heroic scenario that showed him ‘another way’ to achieve Alexander’s aims. Lenin never mentioned his brother in public. But at every stage of his career Lenin adamantly insisted that events were realizing the dream of the martyrs of the Russian revolutionary tradition.
Lenin became a passionate Social Democrat because he thought that this Western European movement showed the way forward for the Russian revolutionaries. Marxist analysis of Russia’s capitalist transformation proved to him that this irresistible force was uprooting old ways of life and turning the masses of the narod into potential fighters for democratic rights. The Social Democratic strategy of party-led class leadership, as embodied in the German SPD, gave him a method for realizing this potential. So vast was the power generated by this combination of objective change and energetic class leadership that it could even operate under tsarist repression – in fact, it could destroy tsarism and establish the political freedom enjoyed by Western Social Democracy. What for Alexander Ulyanov had been a duel between the government and a handful of daring revolutionaries now became an epic national struggle.
Lenin’s dedication to the konspiratsiia underground only makes sense in the context of his vision of a nationwide struggle. In contrast to the conspiratorial underground of the Russian populists the central task of the Social Democratic konspiratsiia underground was to get out the message. For Lenin the underground was a lever of Archimedes that greatly magnified the impact of a relatively feeble and persecuted organization. The underground could turn Russia around, because the seed it sowed fell on the fertile ground of Russia’s militant workers and awakening narod. The party’s role as inspiring class leader remained the same for Lenin even after it left the underground, even after it took power.
As shown by his rhetoric throughout his career, the emotions that Lenin invested in his scenario can only be described by such words as enthusiastic, exalted, romantic. The flip side of emotions such as these is his hatred of ‘philistinism’, that is, everyone and anyone who could not lift themselves up to the grand vistas of his scenario. As he wrote to Inessa Armand in 1916: ‘There it is, my fate. One fighting campaign after another – against political stupidities, philistinism, opportunism and so forth. It has been going on since 1893. And so has the hatred of the philistines on account of it. But still, I would not exchange this fate for “peace” with the philistines.’3
His emotional commitment to his scenario also made Lenin want to base it on the most solid authority possible. This explains Lenin’s love affair (the term is not too strong) with the writings of Marx and Engels. It also explains his lifelong love–hate relationship with Karl Kautsky, who gave an authoritative stamp of approval to the key ideas of Old Bolshevism, but who later (as Lenin thought) failed to live up to his own preaching – thus becoming, in Lenin’s mind, the ultimate philistine and renegade.
Lenin wholly focused on the effective presentation of his vision at the third congress of the Third International, summer 1921.
So far we have looked at some constant themes in Lenin’s outlook. We need also to consider the diversity of Lenin’s concerns throughout his career and the heroic scenario will help us out here as well. The scenario had an internal structure of three distinct episodes, as set forth already in the ‘banner sentence’ of 1894. These episodes grow out of the basic logic of class leadership. In the first episode the Social Democratic party is founded and becomes accepted as leader of the proletariat. This episode is summarized by Kautsky’s foundational formula about ‘the merger of socialism and the worker movement’. In the central episode the proletariat leads the narod in a crusade to overthrow the tsar, ‘the shame and curse of Russia’. In the final episode party and proletariat move toward the climax of the drama, socialist revolution itself.
Each of the three decades of Lenin’s political career matches up neatly with one of the three episodes. The full breakdown is given in the table overleaf. The heroic scenario thus gives us a handy device for recalling the overall contours of Lenin’s career. Since the scenario was an interpretive framework for events, not a prediction of concrete outcomes, it could be mapped onto events in a variety of ways. For example, Lenin’s scenario posits a rapid spread of Social Democratic influence among the workers. At any particular time a judgement call still has to be made about the actual extent of party influence. Although Lenin strove to be accurate and hard-headed in the empirical application of the Social Democratic scenario, he tended as a general rule to push for the most optimistic possible reading, up to and often past the point of plausibility.
A changed reading of the empirical situation could lead to crucial shifts of outlook. Although the goal adopted in 1917 – ‘steps toward socialism’ in Russia, prior to and independent of European revolution – was a far-reaching innovation in Lenin’s political platform, it remained within the logic of the original scenario. Lenin had always argued that socialist revolution was only possible when class conflict within the peasantry had reached an advanced stage, but the timing of this process was explicitly left open. In 1905–7, Lenin argued that the petty bourgeois peasant was still a fervent fighter for the democratic revolution. In 1917–18, Lenin was so eager to take ‘steps toward socialism’ that he grossly overestimated the extent of class polarization within the village.
Only at the end of his career did Lenin make serious adjustments to his scenario. In the period following the first anniversary of the revolution – late 1918 and early 1919 – Lenin was still completely convinced that things were ‘turning out just as we said they would’. The course of events soon forced him to take tentative steps beyond ‘the textbook à la Kautsky’, yet the basic logic of the scenario remained. Because Lenin still accepted the basic Marxist axioms that guaranteed his scenario, his adjustments caused him a great deal of anxiety and gave rise to a sense of encirclement by hostile forces such as international capitalism, petty-bourgeois peasantry and soviet bureaucrats. This anxiety was the result precisely of his earlier over-optimism, leading Lenin to make risky wagers that events did not justify.
The dramatic structure of Lenin’s career.
Even faced with these disappointments Lenin remained loyal to the spirit of his heroic scenario and called on the power of class leadership to accomplish one more round of miracles. His final advice to the party was: hold out against international capitalism while providing an inspiring model for Eastern countries, capture the loyalty of the middle peasant by revealing the advantages of socialism, and attack the cultural deficit both indirectly and head-on. The political testament contained in his last writings is the final, somewhat chastened but still recognizable version of his heroic scenario.
Historical Impact of Lenin’s Scenario
At some point after the Second World War mainstream academic scholarship took a wrong turning and beca
me convinced that Lenin’s essential trait throughout his career was ‘worry about workers’, coupled with a dour, if pragmatic, pessimism. Historians came close to turning Lenin into the philistine he always abominated. This basic misapprehension of Lenin’s outlook made it impossible to give a coherent account of his development and his decisions at key points. The historical impact of the actual Lenin, for good or for ill, cannot be understood apart from his lifelong heroic scenario.
The following brief speculative remarks should be prefaced with a disclaimer. Lenin is only a part of Bolshevism, which in turn is only a part of the Russian revolution, which in turn is only a part of the whole period of social upheaval from 1914 to 1921–2 that many Russians term a ‘time of troubles’. Furthermore, much of Lenin’s heroic scenario was not unique to him, but reflected much more widely held viewpoints. As a first approximation, we can say that the general theme of inspired and inspiring class leadership was a general feature of ‘revolutionary Social Democracy’, the theme of proletarian leadership of the narod (‘hegemony of the proletariat’) was a general feature of Bolshevism, while many of the details about class differentiation within the peasantry were peculiar to Lenin and perhaps his closest followers.
The immense cultural impact of Lenin’s heroic scenario on the Soviet Union stems from the fact, first, that it was heroic and, second, that it was a scenario. The culture of the Soviet Union always put a tremendous emphasis on the heroic, although this theme was expressed in different ways over the years. The theme of heroism was embedded in an explicit dramatic scenario about the world-historical mission of the Soviet Union that was propagated at all levels. Terry Pratchett’s novel Witches Abroad describes a somewhat similar society: a tyrannical queen forces everyone in her kingdom to act just as if they were characters in the canonical fairy tales. In the case of the Soviet Union and other communist countries a similar tyranny of narrative expectations met with a particular kind of resistance: the anekdot, the Soviet joke, whose specific flavour comes from subverting a heroic scenario. Socialist realism and the anekdot: these two poles of Soviet culture both stem from the heroic scenario.4
One feature of Lenin’s heroic scenario that had an immense if underappreciated impact is what I have called the kukharka strategy: mass education for both men and women. I have explained the personal origin of this theme by pointing to Lenin’s popular nickname Ilich, son of Ilya, the educational reformer. But since the insistence on equal educational opportunity from both sexes goes back to both of Lenin’s parents, I should also speak of Lenin the son of Maria Aleksandrovna, as well as Lenin the brother of Anna and Maria, the husband of Nadezhda and the friend of Inessa. The economic consequences of the kukharka strategy are illuminated in a recent analysis by the economist Robert C. Allen. Before the Russian revolution Russia had the same non-European demographic pattern as, say, India: high death rate, high birth rate. Yet the Soviet Union did not have the same population explosion as India, with immense consequences for economic growth. The demographic disasters of the Soviet era – the civil war, the famines, the repressions and the Second World War – played an appreciable but not major impact in preventing this explosion. The main reason was a dramatically fast drop in the birth rate, and comparative analysis shows that the education of women was the key factor in this achievement. Allen concludes that ‘if industrialization and urbanization had proceeded less rapidly and if schooling had been expanded slowly and provided to men in preference to women, then population growth would have been explosive’.5
When we turn to the political impact of Lenin’s heroic scenario, we are immediately confronted with a paradox. The central episode of the heroic scenario was the battle to bring political freedom to Russia, yet Lenin founded a regime in which political freedoms – rights of speech, assembly, association, etc. – were conspicuously absent. The paradox is a real one, since the logic of the heroic scenario worked to expand Russia’s political freedom at one stage and to contract it at another. Strange as it may appear, Lenin was as influential as any other single individual in bringing about the political freedom that Russia enjoyed between 1905 and 1917. There would have been no far-reaching revolution in 1905 if sections of the working class had not been prepared to take to the streets demanding political freedom, and there would have been no mass action of this kind if a small band of socialists had not spent over a decade propagating the connection between worker interests, socialist ideals and political freedom. From the very beginning of his political career, Lenin was a prominent and passionate member of this small band.
There are many objective reasons to explain the later failure of political freedom in a country that suffered military defeat, economic breakdown and bloody civil war. Yet although the disappearance of political freedom in Russia was over-determined, the logic of Lenin’s heroic scenario also made its contribution. The purpose of political freedom in this scenario was to allow the Social Democrats to spread the word, particularly in the form of the party-led agitation campaigns that the German Social Democrats had developed to a fine art. How much more effective would these campaigns be if the party could use the state to eliminate all rivals and to monopolize channels of communication? The Bolsheviks consciously adopted this strategy of state monopoly campaignism.
Turning from Lenin’s strangely divided role in the history of political freedom in Russia, we confront another paradoxical outcome. Lenin’s heroic scenario stressed proletarian leadership of a narod that was made up mainly of peasants. The peasants thus play a highly positive role in his scenario. Indeed, pre-war Old Bolshevism was defined by its wager on the revolutionary qualities of the peasantry. Yet less than a decade after his death the regime founded by Lenin ended up by waging war on the peasants and imposing a revolution from above during the collectivization campaign, contributing to a devastating famine. How did this happen?
This is the question of questions, and I can only glance at it here. Perhaps the most important point to stress is that it is a question – that is, Stalin’s peasant strategy was not the foreordained outcome of a hostility to peasants innate to Marxism or to Bolshevism. In fact, we can say that Lenin took a dangerous step when he moved beyond Old Bolshevism’s strategy of democratic revolution alongside the whole peasantry. He first overestimated the extent of class differentiation in order to be able to take ‘steps toward socialism’ in Russia itself. He then had to recalibrate and he came up with a strategy of moving toward socialism alongside a majority of the peasantry. The cost of this adjustment was an abiding anxiety, even paranoia, about the subversive influence of the vast ‘petty bourgeois’ sea that surrounded the lonely socialist island.
Nevertheless, there is an essential discontinuity between Lenin and Stalin on the peasant question that needs to be stressed, since it is often completely overlooked, even denied. Stalin obviously took over a vision of a socialist countryside from Lenin and indeed from Marxist socialism in general. We may agree or disagree with this vision. But from the point of view both of crimes against humanity and impact on Soviet history, the thing to be explained is not this vision, but the massive use of violence in 1930–34 to impose upon the peasantry a radical change of production methods, and thus of way of life, in a very short space of time.
And on the issue of violence used to impose a fundamental change in production relations, the record could not be clearer: Lenin was against it. In word and deed he emphasized that any such use of violence was a bezobrazie, a ridiculous outrage. And he did this most insistently in 1919, at the height of the civil war. Disappointed as he was with the progress of socialist experiments in the countryside, the use of violence in pursuit of this goal was simply not considered. The radical discontinuity between Lenin and Stalin on this cardinal point was perfectly evident to anti-Stalin Bolsheviks in 1932. In an underground document circulated at this time, these Bolsheviks contrast Stalin’s assault on the peasantry to Lenin’s method of persuading the peasants by ‘genuine examples of the genuine advantages of collective fa
rms organized in genuinely voluntary fashion’. They sardonically observe that the two methods resembled each other as much as Japan’s invasion of Manchuria resembled national self-determination.6
All in all, Lenin’s heroic scenario was far from realistic. Yet perhaps his utter confidence in it was the necessary illusion that enabled him to confront a situation of stormy political and economic collapse. In 1917 Lenin stood tall among the leaders of other Russian parties because they had enough sense to be frightened out of their wits by the oncoming disaster – the social and economic breakdown that was just around the corner – whereas he saw it as an opportunity. Lenin can be viewed as a Noah figure, confidently building his ark as the flood waters rose. As it turned out, the ark was leaky because it was built on unsound assumptions, the voyage involved more suffering than anyone bargained for, and the ark ended up far from where its builder planned. But nevertheless the ark did ride out the storm.
Lenin talking with a Moscow party official in 1920.
Character Witnesses
I have described the heroic scenario as the link between the flesh-and-blood individual Vladimir Ulyanov and his public persona N. Lenin. This division is of course highly artificial. To give a sense of the human reality of Ulyanov/Lenin, I call on a series of character witnesses – people with some personal knowledge of the man and of the social background that moulded him.
Lenin had strong roots in the Russian literary classics of the nineteenth century, and we can appropriately turn to them for more insight into what might be called ‘the Lenin type’. Lenin always kept with him the photographs of five individuals: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Alexander Herzen, Nikolai Chernyshevky and Dmitri Pisarev. Pisarev was a radical democratic literary critic of the 1860s, and Lenin cited a passage from him about the necessity of dreaming in his 1902 book What Is to Be Done? The following passage was not quoted by Lenin – perhaps because it was too close to his self-image?