Lenin
Page 18
The dreamer himself sees in his dream a great and sacred truth; and he works, works conscientiously and with full strength, for his dream to stop being just a dream. His whole life is arranged according to one guiding idea and it is filled with the most strenuous activity. He is happy, despite deprivations and unpleasantness, despite the jeers of unbelievers and despite the difficulties of struggling with deeply rooted ways of thought.7
Pisarev’s stubborn dreamer was an admired type in the culture of Russian radicalism. In order to qualify, Lenin did not need to live the ascetic, self-denying life of such heroes of Russian socialist fiction as Chernyshevky’s Rakhmetov, who slept on a bed of nails to toughen himself up. Lenin once remarked to Gorky that listening to Beethoven made him feel too soft toward the bourgeoisie who could create such beautiful things. Based on this remark, many people have assumed that Lenin gave up music for revolution, but Lenin enjoyed music all his life. When the great Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin met Lenin in the Kremlin after the revolution, he was surprised to learn that this was not their first meeting. Lenin reminded him of a party at Gorky’s in 1905 when Chaliapin sang for the company. ‘It was a marvellous evening’, Lenin reminisced.8
Lenin’s personal lifestyle was rather the stripped-down, orderly, no-frills style of his own ideal ‘revolutionary by trade’. His attitude toward food is emblematic. The Canadian historian Carter Elwood has investigated this topic and concluded that Lenin just didn’t care about food – as long as there was some on his plate, he ate it without complaint.9
Another, much more sardonic, take on the type of the stubborn dreamer comes from Lev Tolstoy’s late novel Resurrection. This novel was published in 1900 and paints a devastating portrait of a morally bankrupt Russia. Toward the end of the novel, we meet some political prisoners on their way to Siberia. Tolstoy rather likes these political prisoners – except for their acknowledged leader, one Novodvorov:
The whole of Novodvorov’s revolutionary activity, though he could explain it very eloquently and very convincingly, appeared to be founded on nothing but ambition and the desire for supremacy. Being devoid of those moral and aesthetic qualities which call forth doubts and hesitation, he very soon acquired a position in the revolutionary world which satisfied him – that of leader of a party. Having once chosen a direction, he never doubted or hesitated, and was therefore certain that he never made a mistake… His self-assurance was so great that it either repelled people or made them submit to him. And as he carried on his activity among very young people who mistook his boundless self-assurance for depth and wisdom, the majority did submit to him and he had great success in revolutionary circles.
Novodvorov behaved well only to those who bowed before him. He couldn’t stand anyone who had his own independent analysis of Russia’s ills.10
Those who knew Lenin tended to see him either as Pisarev’s heroic dreamer or Tolstoy’s petty despot, although most of the witnesses I will cite are somewhat nuanced in their judgements. Georgy Solomon (in whose Brussels apartment Lenin gave the late-night harangue about ‘recallism’ described in chapter Three) was strongly repelled by Lenin’s ‘impenetrable self-satisfaction’. Nevertheless, he was ready to qualify his dislike by adding that when Lenin was not in attack mode, ‘then before you stood an intelligent and broadly educated man, highly erudite, and distinguished by a fair amount of quick-wittedness’.11
Alexander Bogdanov also tried to explain Lenin’s puzzling combination of breadth and narrowness. Bogdanov was a top Bolshevik leader until he was forced out of the faction in 1909. In 1914 he wrote a long, unpublished critique of Lenin’s mental style. He tells us that when Lenin ‘investigated a specific phenomenon, for example, the class composition and character of this or that party, he carries out the task, sometimes brilliantly’. But in larger questions Lenin’s way of thinking was much too rigid: he took over a framework from European experience and applied it to Russia come hell or high water. This intellectual rigidity and authoritarian manner of thinking meant that Lenin was prone to misinterpret a genuinely novel situation, for example, Russia after the 1905 revolution.12
Capri, 1908: Lenin plays chess with Alexander Bogdanov with Gorky looking on; according to Gorky’s later account, Lenin lost the match.
Nikolai Sukhanov – the author of the memoir of 1917 that occasioned Lenin’s 1923 article on the cultural deficit – tried to pin down his own impression of Lenin by making a comparison with Lev Tolstoy: both (writes Sukhanov) were true geniuses in certain very narrow areas, yet they each had ‘no understanding or grasp of the simplest and most generally accessible things’ outside of that area.13
The combination of narrowness of mind and complete assurance gave rise to the abusive polemical style that appalled so many who had to deal with Lenin. Writing to his close friend Nadezhda Kristi in early 1917 the Menshevik leader L. Martov explains why he is happy to think that there is no life after death: ‘In my opinion, one earthly existence is more than enough: do you think it would be drôle to continue polemicizing with Lenin even after death and to continue to listen to his gutter abuse?’14
The same abusive style could be described, in an admiring way, as evidence of ‘intellectual passion’. Russian émigré Moishe Olgin, writing in 1919, describes Lenin in action:
Lenin does not reply to an opponent. He vivisects him. He is as keen as the edge of a razor. His mind works with an amazing acuteness. He notices every flaw in the line of argument. He disagrees with, and he draws the most absurd conclusions from, premises unacceptable to him. At the same time he is derisive. He ridicules his opponent. He castigates him. He makes you feel that his victim is an ignoramus, a fool, a presumptuous nonentity. You are swept by the power of his logic. You are overwhelmed by his intellectual passion.15
The novelist Maxim Gorky knew Lenin quite well and also had mixed feelings that varied over time. In 1920 Gorky was even ready to talk about Lenin’s saintliness! In 1909, however, he wrote a rather harsh letter to Lenin. The letter contained compliments (‘You are someone who I find organically sympathetic’), but also a critique based on Hamlet’s metaphor of playing on someone like a recorder:
Sometimes it seems to me that for you every person is no more than a recorder on which you play this or that melody pleasing to you – that you evaluate each person’s individuality from the point of view of how useful they are to you, for the realization of your aims, opinions, tasks. This way of evaluating people (leaving to one side its profoundly individualist and elitist underlay) necessarily creates a void around you – and while this is not so important in itself, you are a strong character – but the main thing is, this way of evaluating people will surely lead you into making mistakes.16
Gorky was repelled by Lenin’s instrumental attitude to the people around him. Lenin’s close associates understood this feature of Lenin’s personality, but they interpreted it in a different way. Zinoviev, looking back in the early 1930s, wrote that Lenin had an oshchushchenie about his personal mission, that is, a strong ‘feeling’ bordering on physical sensation:
Was there ‘egocentrism’ in Ilich? No.
Were there any dictatorial leanings? No.
But was there an awareness (feeling) that he was called? Yes, this there was! Without that he would not have become Lenin. Without that (precisely a strong feeling), there would be no vozhd at all.
At one time (when V. I. was still fighting for recognition), some one’s relation to him personally (or rather, not ‘personally,’ but politically and theoretically) was for him a criterion, a measure of things. Only we can’t understand this in a vulgar fashion.17
The hero-worshipping attitude to Lenin that existed even before the Bolshevik revolution comes out in a description of Lenin written in 1917 by Nikolai Bukharin, who knew Lenin well. For followers like Bukharin, Lenin himself was the ultimate inspired and inspiring leader:
The Russian and international proletariat has found themselves a worthy vozhd in the person of Lenin. A veteran revolutionary,
Lenin was christened on the path of revolution by the blood of his own brother, hanged by the butcher Alexander III. And hatred toward the oppressors took deep root in his soul. Lenin has a highly analytical mind and yet at the same time he is a person of iron will, always travelling the path that he considers the correct one. He is equally firm when he must swim almost alone ‘against the current’ and when he needs to work in the midst of his own people. Revolution is his element. He is a genuine vozhd of the revolution, following out his own logic to the end, scourging any half-heartedness, any refusal to draw conclusions.18
The iconic Lenin in 1919.
We have summoned character witnesses both friendly and hostile to Lenin, but a certain mystery will always remain. An emblem of this mystery is Lenin’s characteristic laugh. Two visiting Englishmen, interviewing Lenin in 1919 and 1920, reacted to this laugh in different ways:
Lenin, accompanied by his sister Maria, hurries along a Moscow street to attend a meeting in 1918; on the wall is a poster for a recital by Feodor Chaliapin.
Arthur Ransome: ‘This little bald-headed, wrinkled man, who tilts his chair this way and that, laughing over one thing or another, ready any minute to give serious advice to any who interrupt him to ask for it, advice so well reasoned that it is to his followers far more compelling than any command, every one of his wrinkles is a wrinkle of laughter, not of worry.’19
Bertrand Russell: ‘He is very friendly, and apparently simple, entirely without a trace of hauteur… I have never met a personage so destitute of self-importance…. He laughs a great deal; at first his laugh seems merely friendly and jolly, but gradually I came to feel it rather grim.’20
We end by repeating the words of Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, who provided the Ariadne’s thread that has guided us through the labyrinth of Lenin’s career. She first met Lenin in St Petersburg in 1894. It was here, she tells us, that Lenin fully committed himself to what he saw as ‘Marx’s grand idea’: ‘only as vozhd of all the labourers will the working class achieve victory’. Once Lenin made this commitment, he never wavered: ‘this thought, this idea illuminated all of his later activity, each and every step.’
References
Introduction
1 L. Kamenev, ‘The Literary Legacy and Collected Works of Ilyitch’ (written in the early 1920s), text taken from Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/kamenev/19xx/x01/x01.htm (accessed 5 May 2010).
2 M. G. Shtein, Ulianovy i Leniny: Tainy rodoslovnoi i psevdonima (St Petersburg, 1997).
3 V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th edn (Moscow, 1958–65), vol. 47, p. 120; Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow, 1960–68), vol. 34, p. 372. Except where noted, I will use these two editions for Lenin quotations, so that the reader can consult either the Russian text or English translation. I will use the following style: Lenin, PSS 47:120; CW 34:172. I take responsibility for all translations.
4 An example of this approach is Alfred G. Meyer, Leninism (New York, 1962).
5 The only reliable collection of new Lenin documents is V. I Lenin, Neizvestnye dokumenty 1891–1922 (Moscow, 1999). Among the more important issues illuminated by new documents are Lenin’s relations with Inessa Armand and with Roman Malinovsky, his attitude toward the Polish war as revealed in a speech of September 1920, and the events of his final months. Unfortunately, the English-language edition of the new documents is at a very low professional level; see my review of Richard Pipes, ed., The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (New Haven, CT, 1996) in Canadian-American Slavic Studies, XXXV/2–3 (Summer/Fall 2001), pp. 301–6 (one of the only reviews of the Pipes edition written after the Russian texts of the new documents had been made available).
6 Michael Pearson, Lenin’s Mistress: The Life of Inessa Armand (London, 2001). Helen Rappaport, author of the recent Conspirator: Lenin in Exile (London, 2009), has commented in an interview: ‘There is, I am sure, a darker, sexual side to Lenin that has been totally suppressed in the Russian record. I do believe that whilst he was in Paris he went to prostitutes – there are clues in French sources about this, but it is very hard to prove.’ See www.bookdepository.com/interview/with/author/helen-rappaport (accessed 5 May 2010).
7 Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography (New York, 1994); Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (Cambridge, MA, 2000). The only recent Lenin biography I can recommend with enthusiasm is Christopher Read, Lenin (London, 2005).
8 Lenin, PSS 49:378; CW 35:281.
9 Vospominaniia o Vladimire Iliche Lenine (Moscow, 1969), vol. 1, pp. 574–5.
10 Lenin PSS 6:107; Lars T. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? in Context (London, 2008), pp. 770–71 (in the case of What Is to Be Done? the references to an English-language source come from the translation of the entire book that is included in my study Lenin Rediscovered).
11 R. Tucker, Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia: From Lenin to Gorbachev (New York, 1987), p. 39.
1 Another Way
1 Albert Rhys Williams, Lenin: The Man and his Work (New York, 1919), pp. 23–4.
2 M. G. Shtein, Ulyanovy i Leniny: Tainy rodoslovnoi i psevdonima (St Petersburg, 1997), pp. 43–7.
3 Katy Turton, Forgotten Lives: The Role of Lenin’s Sisters in the Russian Revolution, 1864–1937 (Basingstoke, 2007), p. 16.
4 Vladlen Loginov, Vladimir Lenin: Vybor puti (Moscow, 2005), p. 38.
5 My account of the ‘second first of March’ is based primarily on Norman Naimark, Terrorists and Social Democrats: The Russian Revolutionary Movement under Alexander III (Cambridge, MA, 1982). Phillip Pomper, Lenin’s Older Brother: The Origins of the October Revolution (New York, 2010) appeared too late for me to use.
6 Narodnicheskaia ekonomicheskaia literatura, ed. V. K. Karataev (Moscow, 1958), p. 634.
7 As cited in Paul Miliukov, Russia and its Crisis (London, 1962), p. 289 (originally published 1905).
8 The quoted words are from Marx’s 1864 Inaugural Address for the International Working Men’s Association.
9 John Rae, Contemporary Socialism (New York, 1884), pp. 127–9.
10 V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th edn (Moscow, 1958–65), vol. 41, p. 8; Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow, 1960–68), vol. 31, p. 25.
11 Loginov, Vladimir Lenin, p. 86.
12 Lenin, PSS 1:310, 330; CW 1:299, 318 (Friends of the People, 1894).
13 Lenin, PSS 1:333–4; CW 1:321 (Friends of the People, 1894).
14 Lenin, PSS 3:382; CW 3:382 (Development of Capitalism in Russia, 1899).
15 Cited by Lenin; see PSS 1:200; CW 1:197 (Friends of the People, 1894).
16 Cited by Lenin; see PSS 1:277–8, 282–3; CW 1:269, 273–4 (Friends of the People, 1894).
17 Boris Gorev, Iz partiinogo proshlogo: Vospominaniia, 1895–1905 (Leningrad, 1924), pp. 7–9.
18 Vasily Vodovozov in Na chuzhoi storone (Prague, 1925), vol. 12, p. 177.
19 Lenin, PSS 1:200–202; CW 1:197–8 (Friends of the People, 1894).
20 Lenin, PSS 4:233; CW 4:248; Georgy Solomon, Sredi krasnykh vozhdei (Moscow, 1995), pp. 450–51. We should also note that the two major Russian Marxists of the time, Georgy Plekhanov and N. E. Fedoseev, both authority figures for the young Ulyanov, also reacted to the famine in complete contrast to the Mikhailovsky caricature.
21 Taken from Lenin’s own summary in 1907 of the implications of his earlier book, The Development of Capitalism (published in 1899) (PSS 3:13; CW 3:31).
22 Lenin, PSS 55:1–2; CW 37:66 (letter of 5 October 1893).
23 Karl Kautsky, Das Erfurter Programm [1892] (Berlin, 1965), p. 250.
24 Ibid., p. 219.
25 Grigory Zinoviev, Istoriia Rossisskoi Kommunisticheskoi Partii (bolshevikov) (Leningrad, 1924), p. 116.
26 Lenin, PSS 1: 311–2; CW 1:300.
2 The Merger of Socialism and the Worker Movement
1 Boris Gorev, Iz partiinogo proshlogo: Vospominaniia, 1895–1905 (Leningrad, 1924), p. 24.
2 V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th edn (Moscow, 1958–
65), vol. 6, p. 152; Lars T. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: ‘What Is to Be Done?’ in Context (Haymarket, 2008), p. 811.
3 Lenin, PSS 1:354–412; CW 1:340–95 (1894).
4 Lenin, PSS 46:12; CW 34:24 (letter of 16 August 1897).
5 Karl Kautsky, Das Erfurter Programm [1892] (Berlin, 1965).
6 Lenin, PSS 4:189; CW 4:217 (1899).
7 Lenin, PSS 2:101; CW 2:112 (1896).
8 Semën Kanatchikov, A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of Semën Ivanovich Kanatchikov, ed. Reginald Zelnik (Stanford, CA, 1986), p. 70 (translation slightly modified). These memoirs were originally published in 1929. Kanatchikov puts the key phrases of his younger self and his comrades in quotes.
9 Ibid., p. 98.
10 From the so-called Credo, which evoked strong protests from Lenin and other Social Democrats; the full text can be found in Lenin PSS 4:165–9; CW 4:171–4 (1899).
11 Paul Miliukov, Russia and its Crisis [1905] (London, 1962), pp. 350–51.
12 Lenin, PSS 2:114; CW 2:125 (1896).
13 Lenin, PSS 2:300, 274; CW 2:302, 278 (1897).
14 Lenin, PSS 2:111–12; CW 2:123 (1896).
15 Lenin, PSS 2:460–61; CW 2:341–2 (1897).
16 Lenin’s own words, from an unpublished biographical sketch written in 1917 (Lenin PSS 32:21).
17 Martov, Zapiski Sotsial-demokrata [1922] (Cambridge, MA, 1975).
18 Lenin, PSS 2:467; CW 2:348 (1897).
19 As cited in Miliukov, Russia and its Crisis, pp. 237–8.
20 Letter of 31 December 1928, written to the daughter of the deceased Inessa Armand, as published in Izvestiia TSK KPSS, 1989, no. 4, p. 184 (ellipsis in original).
21 Moissaye J. Olgin, The Soul of the Russian Revolution (New York, 1917), pp. 282–91.
22 M. Liadov, Istoriia Rossiiskoi Sotsialdemokraticheskoi rabochei partii (St Petersburg, 1906), vol. 2, p. 64.
23 Lenin, PSS 2:458–65; CW 2:339–45.
24 Lenin, PSS 4:195–6; CW 4:223–4.