Lenin
Page 19
25 Martynov, ‘Avtobiografiia’, in Deiateli SSSR i revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia Rossii: entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ Granat [1925–6] (Moscow, 1989), p. 525.
26 Lenin, PSS 2:268–9; CW 2:350 (1897).
27 K. N. Morozov, Partiia sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov v 1907–1917 gg. (Moscow, 1998), p. 40.
28 Lenin, PSS 6:132–3; Lih, Lenin Rediscovered, p. 794.
29 Pavel Axelrod, in a letter to Kautsky published in Iskra, 25 June 1904.
30 Aleksandr Nikolaevich Potresov, Izbrannoe (Moscow, 2002), pp. 67–120.
31 I. V. Stalin, Sochineniia (Moscow, 1946–52), vol. 4, pp. 308–9.
32 Perepiska V. I. Lenina i redaktsii gazety ‘Iskra’ s sotsial-demokraticheskimi organizatsiiami v Rossii, 1900–1903 gg. (Moscow, 1969–70), vol. 2, pp. 28–9 (letter of 6 June 1902).
33 O. Piatnitsky, Memoirs of a Bolshevik [1925] (New York, n.d.), pp. 56–7.
34 Vladimir Ivanshin in Rabochoe Delo, No. 8 (November 1900), p. 11.
35 Lenin, PSS 6:107; Lih, Lenin Rediscovered, pp. 770–71.
36 Lenin, PSS 6:171; Lih, Lenin Rediscovered, p. 828.
3 A People’s Revolution
1 This paraphrase of the meaning of revoliutsiia do kontsa comes from Bolshevik émigré Gregor Alexinsky in his still useful book Modern Russia (London, 1913), p. 254. In Lenin’s Collected Works, the phrase do kontsa is translated in various ways, including ‘through to victory’ and ‘to its [the revolution’s] consummation’.
2 John W. Steinberg et al., eds, The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero (Leiden, 2005), 2 vols.
3 Zinoviev, Sochineniia (Moscow, 1923–4), vol. 15, p. 21 (from a 1918 biography of Lenin).
4 ‘Bolshevism as a tendency took definite shape in the spring and summer of 1905’ (Lenin, PSS 19:364; CW 16:380) (1910). Axelrod’s letter to Kautsky was published in Iskra no. 68 (25 June 1904).
5 Lenin, PSS 9:126–36; CW 8:17–28.
6 M. Liadov, Iz zhizni partii (Moscow, 1956), p. 114 (originally published in 1926).
7 Lenin, PSS 12:336; CW 10:261 (1906).
8 Lenin, PSS 12:319; CW 10:245 (1906).
9 Lenin, PSS 17:49–50; CW 15:61 (1908).
10 Lenin, PSS 12:322; CW 10:248 (1906).
11 William English Walling, Russia’s Message: The True World Import of the Revolution (New York, 1908); Walling, Sovietism: The ABC of Russian Bolshevism – According to the Bolshevists (New York, 1920).
12 Walling, Russia’s Message, pp. 363–8.
13 Ibid., pp. 369–70.
14 L. Kamenev, ‘The Literary Legacy and Collected Works of Ilyitch’, from Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/kamenev/19xx/x01/x01.htm (accessed 6 May 2010).
15 Lenin, PSS 49:413, CW 35:305 (letter of March 1917).
16 Lenin, PSS 16:329; CW 13:349. If pronouncements such as this were better known, the extreme democratism of State and Revolution (1917) would be less surprising.
17 Lenin, PSS 16:405, CW 13:423.
18 Lenin, PSS 16:325; CW 13:346.
19 Aleksandr Spiridovich, Bol’shevizm: Ot zarozhdeniia do prikhoda k vlasti (Moscow, 2005), p. 164 (originally published in 1922).
20 Ibid., pp. 164–7.
21 Ibid., p. 186.
22 Alexinsky, Modern Russia, p. 289.
23 Lev Kamenev, Mezhdu dvumia revoliutsiiami (Moscow, 2003), p. 560.
24 Lenin, PSS 17:31–2; CW 15:44 (1908).
25 Lenin, PSS 17:48–9; CW 15:60–61 (1908).
26 Lenin, PSS 12:339; CW 10:264 (1906).
27 Lenin, PSS 17:146; CW 15:156 (1908).
28 Leopold Haimson, ‘Russian Workers’ Political and Social Identities’, in Workers and Intelligentsia in Late Imperial Russia: Realities, Representations, Reflections, ed. Reginald Zelnik (Berkeley, CA, 1999), p. 170. As Haimson points out, the Bolshevik devotion to the underground is not explainable by lack of success in legal, aboveground institutions, since by the outbreak of war in 1914 the Bolsheviks were dominant in many of these legal organizations.
29 Lenin, PSS 17:145; CW 15:154 (1908).
30 Lenin, PSS 17:145 (1908); CW 15:20–21; see also CW 15:18, 290, 323 (1908).
31 Lenin PSS 17:292; CW 15:288 (1908). Lenin refers specifically to the pamphlets issued during the revolution. ‘According to the calculations of a competent bibliographist, between 1905 and 1907 no less than twenty-six million copies of books of pamphlets of Social Democratic tendencies were issued, and twenty-four millions of Revolutionary Socialist tendencies’ (Gregor Alexinsky, Modern Russia, p. 262).
32 Georgy Solomon, Sredi krasnykh vozhdei (Moscow, 1995), p. 453.
33 Ibid., pp. 467–8. The fictional character Oblomov famously never managed to get out of bed for several hundred pages; Maria Tsebrikova (1835–1917) was a radical writer with a special interest in the woman question.
34 Substantial excerpts of this book can be found in Kamenev, Mezhdu, pp. 468–537.
35 Lenin, PSS 48:308; CW 35:147 (letter of July 1914).
36 Lenin, PSS 6:133; Lars T. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: ‘What Is to Be Done?’ in Context (Haymarket, 2008), p. 794.
37 Lenin, PSS 48:323; CW 43:423 (letter of July 1914).
38 Lenin, PSS 20:387–8; CW 17:305 (December 1911).
39 Lenin, PSS 23:296–305; CW 19:218–27.
40 V. I. Lenin: Neizvestnye dokumenty, 1891–1922 (Moscow, 1999), p. 158 (letter of 12 July 1914).
4 Three Train Rides
1 V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th edn (Moscow, 1958–65), vol. 48, p. 330, Collected Works (Moscow, 1960–68), vol. 35, p. 154 (letter of 28 July 1914).
2 Vladimir Ilich Lenin: Biograficheskaia Khronika (Moscow, 1970–82), 12 vols, 3:267–8.
3 Lenin, PSS 26:354; CW 21:342 (August 1915).
4 Lenin, PSS 26:17–19; CW 21:29–30.
5 Lenin, PSS 27:76–81; CW 21:416–20.
6 For texts and background of the various anti-war resolutions of the Second International, see John Riddell, ed., Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary International: Documents: 1907–1916, The Preparatory Years (New York, 1984).
7 Lenin, PSS 27:102; CW 21:441 (January 1916).
8 Lenin, PSS 49:43–4; Olga Hess Gankin and H. H. Fisher, The Bolsheviks and the World War: The Origin of the Third International (Stanford, CA, 1940), p. 202 (letter to Kollontai, end of December 1914).
9 Gankin and Fisher, Bolsheviks and the World War, p. 460 (speech of 3 June 1916).
10 Lenin, PSS 49:20, 24; CW 35:167, 171 (letters to Alexander Shliapnikov from October 1914).
11 ‘Dead Chauvinism and Living Socialism’ (December 1914), in Lenin, PSS 26:98–105; CW 21:94–101.
12 Karl Kautsky, Road to Power, trans. Raymond Meyer (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1996), pp. 88–91.
13 Lenin, PSS 49:82 (letter to Radek from June 1915); the pungent translation comes from R. Craig Nation, War on War: Lenin, the Zimmerwald Left, and the Origins of Communist Internationalism (Durham, NC, 1989), p. 78.
14 Lenin, PSS 49:82 (letter to Radek from June 1915).
15 Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin (New York, 1960), p. 327.
16 Zinoviev, Sochineniia (Moscow, 1923–4), vol. 15, p. 39.
17 Lenin, PSS 27:48–51; CW 21:401–4.
18 In a lecture to Swiss workers given on 22 January 1917 Lenin insisted that ‘we must not be deceived by the present grave-like stillness in Europe. Europe is pregnant with revolution’. He then went on to say ‘We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution.’ This last statement is the basis for claims about Lenin’s pessimism at this time. But Lenin is talking about socialist revolution in Europe as a whole, and his prediction is completely accurate: he did not live to see its decisive battles. Lenin, PSS 30:327–8, CW 23: 253.
19 Lenin, PSS 30:280; CW 23:211–2.
20 Lenin, PSS 49:390; CW 35:288.
21 N. Lénine and G. Zinoviev, Contre le Courant, vol. 2, trans. V. Serge and Parijanine, n.d. (facsimile edition by Franc
is Maspero [Paris, 1970]), p. 112 (dated 31 January 1917).
22 For the theses of October 1915 see Lenin, PSS 27:48–51; CW 21:401–4; for the theses of April 1917, see PSS 31:113–18, CW 24:21–6.
23 Lenin, PSS 49:421; CW 35:310 (letter to J. S. Hanecki, 30 March 1917).
24 Lenin, PSS 31:55–7. Just before introducing the new goal of ‘steps toward socialism’, Lenin had read an article by Karl Kautsky on the prospects of the 1917 Russian revolution, and this article may have played the role of a catalyst in his thinking.
25 Lenin, CW 25:366; PSS 34:200 (14 September 1917).
26 Lenin, PSS 30:278–9; CW 23:210. The hope that wartime measures represented ‘an instalment – a very large instalment – of Socialism’ was a common one, as attested by these words of William Walling from 1915 in his The Socialists and the War (New York, 1972) (reprint of the 1915 edition), p. 500.
27 For Threatening Catastrophe, see Lenin, PSS 34:151–99; CW 25:319–65. For Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power? [vlast], see PSS 34:287–339; CW 26:87–136.
28 Lenin, PSS 34:159; CW 25:327.
29 Lenin, PSS 34:315; CW 26:113.
30 Stalin, Works (Moscow, 1953), 3:275 (25 August 1917).
31 Lenin PSS 35:2; CW 26:239. (Since the Russian Orthodox church did not accept the calendar reforms of Pope Gregory, the Russian Calendar was 13 days behind the European calendar by 1917. The new Bolshevik government switched to the European calendar in early 1918.)
32 For a detailed survey of the crises of 1918, see Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd (Bloomington, IN, 2007).
33 V. I. Lenin: Neizvestnye dokumenty, 1891–1922 (Moscow, 1999), pp. 246–7, 584–6 (details about the events in Penza are taken mainly from this source).
34 The texts of the relevant telegrams can be found in Lenin, PSS, vol. 50; see particularly items 249, 254, 259, 261, 270. Despite the attention given to the telegram translated in the text, it adds very little to the picture provided by previously published material.
35 A. V. Peshekhonov, Pochemu ia ne emigriroval (Berlin, 1923), pp. 32–3 (the corpses were taken down for Christmas). For a synoptic view of non–Bolshevik terror, see G. A. Bordiugov, Chrezvychainyi vek Rossiisskoi istorii: chetyre fragmenta (St Petersburg, 2004), pp. 45–54. Terror of this sort was carried out not only by the White generals but party governments such as the SR-dominated Komuch in 1918.
36 Lenin, PSS 37:354; CW 28:340.
37 Lenin, PSS 37:305–31; CW 28:294–315.
38 Lenin, PSS 37:331; CW 28:318.
39 John Riddell, ed., Founding the Communist International: Proceedings and Documents of the First Congress: March 1919 (New York, 1987), pp. 32, 302.
40 Arthur Ransome, Russia in 1919 (New York, 1919), pp. 122–3; Krupskaya, Reminiscences, p. 488; Vospominaniia o Vladimire Iliche Lenine (Moscow, 1969), 1:533.
41 Lenin, PSS 38:215; CW 29:224–5 (March 1919).
42 Lenin, PSS 37:169–70; CW 28:165.
5 Beyond the ‘Textbook à la Kautsky’
1 Lenin, ‘Our Revolution’, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th edn (Moscow, 1958–65), vol. 45, p. 382; Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow, 1960–68), vol. 33, p. 480. A ‘textbook à la Kautsky’ is something quite different from a ‘Kautskyist textbook’. Since Lenin defined ‘Kautskyism’ as renegade behaviour, a ‘Kautskyist textbook’ could never be anything but harmful.
2 All of these phrases and more in the space of five pages (Lenin, PSS 45:378–82). Lenin’s final writings have been conveniently published together with his major statements from 1922 by Pathfinder Press in Lenin’s Final Fight: Speeches and Writings, 1922–23 (New York, 1995). When appropriate, references to the English translation of Lenin’s last writings will be made to this edition, cited as ‘Pathfinder’; for ‘Our Revolution’, see Pathfinder, pp. 219–23.
3 Arthur Ransome, Russia in 1919 (New York, 1919), p. 99 (in specific reference to trade unions).
4 Morris Hillquit, From Marx to Lenin (New York, 1921), pp. 113–14.
5 Leo Pasvolsky, The Economics of Communism (New York, 1921), p. 295.
6 William English Walling, Sovietism (New York, 1920), p. 52.
7 Muriel A. Payne, Plague, Pestilence and Famine (London, 1923), p. 48.
8 Ibid., pp. 75–6.
9 Ibid., pp. 36, 40.
10 Ibid., p. 138.
11 Ibid., pp. 142–3 (parenthetical comment inserted from earlier passage).
12 Ibid., p. XV; cf. p. 34. Payne’s one mention of Lenin: ‘The people absolutely worship Lenin – odd as this may seem in England. They don’t seem to like Trotsky so much; but even the educated Russians never say a word against Lenin. There must be something in a man so much beloved’ (p. 117).
13 My main source on the course of Lenin’s health is the account of his sister Maria Ulyanova (published in Izvestiia TSK KPSS, 1991, nos 1–6).
14 Lenin, PSS 53:109 (letter of 9 August 1921).
15 Space does not permit a full analysis of a famous outburst in March 1922 in connection with a campaign to force the Orthodox Church to contribute some of its valuables to famine relief. Three summary points can be made: Lenin’s outburst is not as bad as it is made to sound by the usual citations, often quoted without any context whatsoever; Lenin’s more extreme rhetoric did not become as the basis of actual policy; the previous mitigating points still leave us with a repellent call for violence covered by a fig-leaf of legality. For the text of this memorandum, see V. I. Lenin: Neizvestnye dokumenty, 1891–1922 (Moscow, 1999), pp. 516–19. For background on the expulsion of prominent intellectuals in 1922 see Stuart Finkel, On the Ideological Front: The Russian Intelligentsia and the Making of the Soviet Public Sphere (New Haven, CT, 2007).
16 Based on Maria Ulyanova’s later account, as published in Izvestiia TSK KPSS, 1989, no. 12, p. 198; 1991, no. 3, p. 188. There is other documentary evidence that this conversation took place.
17 ‘Political Testament’ was the title given to a recently published collection of letters by Engels (Izvestiia TSK KPSS, 1991, no. 6, p. 198).
18 Izvestiia TSK KPSS, 1991, no. 6, p. 197.
19 Ransome, Russia in 1919, pp. 118–19.
20 Ibid., p. 126. Ransome replied: yes, abortive typhoid.
21 Russell, The Theory and Practice of Bolshevism, 2nd edn (London, 1949) (first published 1920), p. 34. Lenin’s scenario for England is set forth in the pamphlet that he had just written for the Second Congress of the Third International, Left-Wing Communism, A Sign of Growing Pains.
22 For one example of such reassurances, see the speech of May 1919 (Leninskii sbornik [1970], 37:150).
23 Lenin, PSS 38:261–2; CW 29:271; see also PSS 38:316–19; CW 29:320–23.
24 Lenin, PSS 42:310–11; CW 32:113 (6 February 1921).
25 Lenin, PSS 44:293; CW 33:144–5 (23 December 1921).
26 Lenin, PSS 40:245; CW 30:450 (April 1920). Compare this claim to Lenin’s bid for support from the middle peasant, as discussed later.
27 Lenin, PSS 45:401–6; Pathfinder, p. 251.
28 Lenin, PSS 44:79; CW 32:505 (letter to Ganka Miasnikov).
29 Lenin, PSS 38:256–8; CW 29:265–7.
30 Lenin, PSS 39:372–82; CW 30:193–204.
31 Lenin, PSS 42:180 (Eighth Congress of Soviets, December 1920).
32 Lenin, PSS 43:60–61; CW 32:216–17.
33 Lenin, PSS 38:194–5; CW 29:205 (speech at Eighth Party Congress, March 1919).
34 Lenin, PSS 42:195.
35 Pasvolsky, Economics of Communism, p. 265.
36 Lenin, PSS 38:200–201; CW 29:210–11 (Eighth Party Congress, March 1919) (Lenin’s emphasis). See also PSS 38:29; CW 29:44–5 (March 1919).
37 Lenin, PSS 39:372–82; CW 30:193–204 (December 1919).
38 The metaphor of oases of collective production comes from N. Osinski in Pravda, 5 September 1920. For Lenin’s electrification slogans see PSS 42:30; CW 31:419 (21 November 1920) and 42:157–9; CW 31:516 (22 December 1920).
39 Lenin, PSS 39:154; CW 29:555.
40 Lenin, PSS 40:230; CW 30:435 (from a short recorded speech). As Trotsky put it in February 1920, ‘the grain will be returned to the village in several months, in a year or two, in the form of cloth, agricultural equipment, kerosene, and so on’ (Sochineniia [Moscow, 1925–7], vol. 15, pp. 14–23).
41 Lenin, PSS 39:278; 30:113–14 (October 1919).
42 Lenin, PSS 43:29; CW 32:188–9 (‘possibility of being his own boss’ is a paraphrase of svobodno khoziainichat’).
43 Lenin, ‘On Cooperation’, PSS 45: 369–77; Pathfinder, 209–18. During the Gorbachev era, this article was taken out of context and used to advocate a move away from state control of distribution.
44 Instances of this phrase seem to be restricted to PSS 43:371 (notes for a speech to the Tenth Party Congress in 1921), PSS 44:160–1, CW 33: 65–6 (speech of October 1921); PSS 45:6, CW 33:216 (speech of 6 March 1922). Lenin also used similar expressions when discussing his fears that the party was being controlled by the bureaucracy (PSS 45:94–5; Pathfinder, pp. 50–51). Probably the hard-line connotations of the phrase arose when Stalin claimed that coercive collectivization had successfully solved the problem of kto-kovo.
45 Lenin PSS 45:383–88; Pathfinder, 233 (‘How to Reorganize Rabkrin) (January 1923).
46 For example, PSS 38:62; CW 29:77 (March 1919).
47 Lenin PSS 41:27–8; CW 31:44–5 (summer 1920).
48 Voprosy istorii KPSS, 1990, no. 6, p. 33.
49 From Zinoviev’s speech at the 8th Congress of Soviets, December 1920 (Vosmoi vserossisskii s”ezd rabochikh, krestianskikh, krasnoarmeiskikh i kazachikh deputatov (Moscow, 1921), pp. 207–12, 224.
50 Lenin, PSS 44:368–9.
51 Lenin, PSS 45:86; Pathfinder, p. 41 (speech in March 1922); cf. PSS 45:308, 390–91; Pathfinder, pp. 125, 238–9.
52 Lenin, PSS 45:95–100; Pathfinder, pp. 50–55. For capitalists worming their way into the bureaucracy and taking on the ‘protective colouring’ of Soviet employees, see PSS 39:155; CW 29:556 (August 1919).
53 Lenin’s notes were published under the title ‘Our Revolution’ (PSS 45:378–82; Pathfinder, pp. 219–23).
54 Lenin, PSS 38:75; CW 29:95–6 (March 1919).
55 Lenin, ‘How we should reorganize Rabkrin’, PSS 45:383–8; Pathfinder, pp. 227–33.