Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

  Lenin had been told a lot about Trotsky, whose real name was Lev Davidovich Bronstein, born into a well-to-do Jewish farming family from Ukraine. An autodidact with a phenomenal memory and vast reserves of energy, at just twenty-two he had already gained a reputation as a dazzling journalist and polemicist (hence his pseudonym) who could write fast and fluently on literature and art, as well as about politics and Marxist philosophy. His ego and self-belief were as great – many people said greater – than his talents. So was his lifelong interest in attractive women. Trotsky’s rebellion against his conservative parents was as passionate as his revulsion at the Tsar, and he had been in trouble with the police since his teens for socialist agitation against the autocracy. He had been jailed once,*7 had been placed in ‘administrative exile’ and, just a few weeks earlier, he had dramatically escaped from Siberia. He had joined the RSDLP, wrote regularly for Iskra, and one of his priorities after gaining his freedom was to meet Lenin.

  Nadya arranged for Trotsky to stay temporarily at the nearby ‘commune’ occupied by Martov and Vera Zasulich. Lenin and Trotsky talked all that first day – about writing, about the future of Iskra, about the revolutionary struggle and the state of the Party in Russia (‘lamentable and disorganised’, according to the younger man).

  The next day Lenin gave Trotsky a guided tour of London, with his own twist. ‘I went on a long walk with Lenin…He showed me Westminster Abbey (from the outside) and other architectural landmarks. “That’s their Houses of Parliament,” he told me at one point. Their did not of course mean the one belonging to the English, but to the enemy.’

  One Sunday Lenin took him to a socialist church – ‘a social democratic gathering accompanied by the singing of pious hymns. The main speaker was a compositor who had just returned from Australia…his speech sounded quite revolutionary, but then the congregation stood up and began singing a hymn which began “Almighty God, put an end to all kings and all rich men”. As we were leaving Lenin said to me, “The English proletariat has in itself many revolutionary and socialist elements but they are all mixed up with conservatism, with religion and prejudices; and there seems to be no way for these elements [to] come to the top.” ’7

  Just when Lenin had found a new comrade whom he praised to anyone who would listen – ‘How we need more such revolutionaries of such high ability, energy and promise’, he told Martov – he was embroiled in another conflict with an old one. Plekhanov, behind Lenin’s back, had manoeuvred the Iskra board into moving the newspaper’s production to Geneva. Lenin had not seen the ambush coming and vehemently opposed the plan, but he lost the vote. He had no wish to live anywhere near Plekhanov. As so often when he faced political obstacles, the stress would damage his health. The headaches and insomnia which often plagued him grew worse and Nadya said he was so ‘overwrought at the move from London to Switzerland that he developed a nervous illness called “holy fire” which consists of inflammation of the nerve terminals of the back and chest’.*8

  The illness was made worse by a misdiagnosis when they reached their Geneva hotel. A doctor thought Lenin had sciatica and recommended that he should use iodine over the inflamed areas, which caused agony and made him worse. He spent the first two weeks bedridden in his new Swiss home ‘in terrifying pain’, according to Nadya, unable to work – and utterly miserable.8

  *1 Not so Nadya, who never really liked ‘abroad’, though she lived in exile for fifteen years, and barely managed to make any non-Russian friends. She enjoyed being among other émigrés, was nowhere near as good a linguist as Lenin and often fell victim to toska, a peculiarly Russian strain of wistful and nostalgic longing for home.

  *2 After Lenin left London he sent her a book of scenic Geneva views with an inscription ‘dedicated to the good, kind Mrs Emma Yeo’. She kept it for the rest of her life and always said that Lenin ‘as a lodger had been better to deal with than many an Englishman’.

  *3 Nadya boasted once that she might be hopeless in the kitchen, but she did know how to prepare eggs in twelve ways. However, when she was challenged it turned out they were all the same – a sort of runny scrambled – apart from the addition of something else like tomatoes, bread, an onion and so on. ‘Vladimir Ilyich limited himself to the occasional wry comment about her culinary abilities,’ a comrade in exile recalled. ‘He would say things like he had “roasts” rather often – meaning he had overcooked boiled meat.’ He invariably allowed the women in his life to monitor what he ate and for a domineering, bossy and dictatorial man he could be remarkably submissive. Often when eating out he would look at his plate and ask Nadya or, quite frequently, her mother, ‘Am I allowed to eat this?’

  *4 I had always thought this was an apocryphal story, yet it turns out to be true. In the 1920s the actor Miles Malleson, a left-wing Labour Party supporter, occasionally worked at the Reading Room. He became friendly with a librarian who had been at the British Museum for thirty years. The actor asked if he had known Lenin, who had read there at this time and also on several other visits to London. ‘Lenin? Sorry, sir, I recall nobody by that name here.’ Malleson tried a different tack, and knew that after his first visit to London Lenin returned using his real name. ‘I wonder if you remember a Mr Ulyanov coming in?’ The librarian remembered at once. ‘Oh yes, a very charming gentleman, short with a pointed beard. A very nicely spoken man…do you know what became of him?’

  *5 Rayment professed himself a socialist and told Lenin that he had spoken at a few leftist meetings but was summoned by his boss and told that he had to choose between the job and the speeches. He had a wife and children so he made the obvious choice. He had travelled in Europe and lived for a while in Australia, but Lenin was surprised that he had never been to Whitechapel, in the East End of London, where large numbers of mainly Jewish émigrés from the Russian empire congregated; ‘I’m puzzled that you don’t know your own city,’ Lenin told him. He took him around the poor neighbourhood, where Russian Jews wore long kaftans and fur hats and lived in almost closed communities – pretty much as they did in the Tsar’s domains.

  *6 Lenin’s command of English became reasonably good, though, as many recalled, he had a hint of an Irish brogue through his Russian accent. He said that he always found the English spoken by the Irish easier to understand.

  *7 His revolutionary name, Trotsky, had been taken from one of the prison guards he got to know in jail near Odessa.

  *8 The medical term for the infection was erysipelas, which in the days before antibiotics was potentially a serious disease; he was lucky to have recovered from it comparatively quickly. Even nowadays, with modern pharmacology, it can be a very unpleasant, debilitating infection from which it can take a sufferer many weeks to recover.

  14

  What Is to Be Done?

  ‘Neither in the present nor the future can the people, left to their own resources, bring into existence the social revolution. Only we revolutionaries can accomplish this…Social ideas are alien to the people; they belong to the social philosophy of the revolutionary minority.’

  Pyotr Tkachev (1844–1886)

  ‘A Communist who doesn’t dream…is a bad Communist.’

  Lenin to Valentinov, Geneva, 1904

  The principal appeal Lenin held for his followers was not due to the strength of his indomitable will, his manifest brainpower or his brilliance as a political tactician, though all three were crucially important in his claim to be a leader. His greatest skill in his early years was his ability to inspire optimism and hope. He told his followers that they could change the world in the here and now, if they followed a set of essentially simple-to-comprehend steps and believed in a few fairly straightforward propositions. He didn’t offer salvation in the afterlife but a glimpse of heaven in the immediate future – or at least the achievement of some of their goals. Marxism is supposed to be a ‘scientific’ philosophy which can be ‘proven’ empirically. But any true Communist zealot, deny it though they may, felt it emotionally, religiously, spiritually, e
ven if those words would have stuck in the gullet of a true believer. Lenin would most definitely have denied it. But as one of his oldest comrades, Potresov, who knew him in St Petersburg in the early 1890s during his earliest revolutionary days, said, ‘for Vladimir Ilyich Marxism was not a conviction, but a religion’. Many others made the same point, at least until the 1917 Revolution.

  Knowing the history of the Communist experiment in the twentieth century, it is easy to forget the fervent idealism of some of the early Russian Marxists, along with the ruthlessly ambitious and power-hungry careerists the movement attracted at the same time. Perhaps the cynics fed off the idealists in a symbiotic relationship. Or perhaps, as many historians have argued, Marxist ideology as interpreted by Lenin was itself the root cause of the disaster of Communism in practice. That suggests there was something ‘inevitable’ about the piles of bodies, the prison camps and the food queues left by dozens of Communist regimes over the decades after Lenin, which seems somewhat simplistic. Nothing in history is ‘inevitable’.

  In the 1900s nobody knew there would be a Mao or a Pol Pot or a Nicolae Ceaus¸escu. Lenin’s appeal to mostly young people was optimistic and uplifting. With the right organisation and the right tactics, even a few revolutionaries could bring down an empire the size of Russia’s and an autocratic regime as powerful as the Tsar’s. ‘Some few thousand nobles have ruled Russia for centuries. Why not us?’ he asked.

  The essence of Leninism is contained in his best-known work, What Is to Be Done?, inspired, as the title suggested, by Chernyshevsky. Published in 1902, just before Lenin moved to London, it had a vast impact on the radical movement and made his name as the leader-in-waiting of revolutionary socialism in Russia. It got him noticed throughout Europe as a figure on the Left. While he was in London, and later in Geneva, socialist luminaries from far and wide made their way to meet the ‘coming man’ among the Russian revolutionaries of the new millennium. It is a short pamphlet of 45,000 pithily written words. It is still worth reading for anybody interested in political tactics; many conservative politicians over the last hundred years have clearly read and learned things from it.

  What Is to Be Done? was the bible of Lenin’s Bolsheviks, the blueprint for how he would seize power and hold on to it. ‘Give us an organisation of revolutionaries and we will turn Russia upside down,’ he declared.

  Much of it was specific to the conditions inside Russia and building a Party to defeat the Romanovs. But much had more general application. ‘The essence is idealistic yet conspiratorial, optimistic yet practically based, fanatic, yet as it turned out realistic,’ as one future revolutionary explained.

  Lenin had no great respect for the working classes for whom he was proposing to make the revolution. ‘The working class exclusively by its own efforts is able to develop only trade union consciousness,’ he said. They would fall victim to ‘false consciousness’ and be led by the bourgeoisie, who would betray their interests. ‘Modern socialist consciousness can only be brought to the working class from without and cannot be genuinely political consciousness unless the workers are trained to see all cases of tyranny, oppression and violence as abuse, no matter what class is affected…To bring political knowledge to the workers, the Social Democrats must go among all classes of the population, must despatch units of their army in all directions. The Social Democrat’s ideal should not be a trade union secretary but a tribune of the people…This requires an organisation of people who first and foremost make revolutionary activity their profession. In a country with a despotic government, the more we restrict the membership of this organisation to those who are engaged in revolution as a profession, the more difficult it will be to catch us. It is harder to catch a dozen clever people than a hundred fools.’

  There had to be a ‘revolutionary vanguard’ of people who could protect themselves from the police, studied Marxist ideology and mastered the arts of revolutionary conspiracy. ‘Such a party could not fail’ if led correctly. ‘We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies and we have to advance almost constantly under their fire. We have combined, by a freely adopted decision, for the purpose of fighting the enemy, and not of retreating into the neighbouring marsh, the inhabitants of which, from the very outset, have reproached us with having separated ourselves into an exclusive group and with having chosen the path of struggle instead of the path of conciliation.’

  He knew how idealistic he was being. ‘My dream may run ahead of the natural march of events or may fly off at a tangent in a direction where no natural march of events will ever follow it. In the first case my dream will not have done any harm. If a man were completely deprived of the ability to dream in this way, if he could never run ahead and mentally conceive in an entire and completed picture the results of the work which his hands are only just beginning to shape, then I cannot imagine what stimulus there would be to induce men to undertake extensive and exhausting work in the sphere of art, sciences and practical endeavour…the rift between dreams and reality causes no harm if the dreamer believes seriously in his dream, if he attentively observes life, if he compares his observations with his castles in the air and if, in general, he works conscientiously towards achieving his fantasies. If there is some connection between his dreams and life then all is well.’1

  The organisation, of course, needed a leader and it was clear whom Lenin believed that should be. He told Valentinov: ‘the right to wield the conductor’s baton is given only to someone who has special leadership qualities – above all the ability to organise…it was clear to me that he thought this right could belong only to him…his right was asserted with such simplicity and such certainty that he might have been saying that two plus two make four. For Lenin this was a matter which required no proof. I was at first shocked by his unshakeable faith in himself…but when I found myself in Lenin’s entourage…no one for a moment doubted his right to hold the conductor’s baton and to issue orders. Adherence to [his group] seemed to imply a kind of oath of loyalty to Lenin, a vow to follow him unquestioningly.’2

  —

  Nadya was a constant presence and a sounding board for nearly all the important works Lenin wrote. Often she would tell him when something wasn’t clear or was inelegantly phrased. Biographers who simply see her as a quiet secretary who never spoke up have misunderstood her role. ‘When Lenin wrote a routine article he did it very quickly, dashing it off regardless of circumstances,’ a comrade who lived close to him in Geneva in the early 1900s recalled. ‘He needed only paper, ink and pen. When a more important work was in question…he would walk up and down his room for a long time, composing the sentences which expressed his main ideas. He began to write only after whispering his ideas many times over to himself and working out the best way of putting them across. However, this solitary whispering was insufficient during the writing of certain works. He had to explain to someone…aloud, what he was writing.’

  Nadya, after Lenin’s death, said: ‘The bulk of Lenin’s writing has been done in my presence. In Siberia, before he began to write The Tasks of the Russian Social Democrats, he told me everything that was to be in it. The chapters of The Development of Capitalism in Russia, which he regarded as particularly important, were not written down until he had expounded them to me orally. He worked out the contents of What Is to Be Done? by talking to himself all the time as he walked about the room. After this preliminary work…he recited his ideas aloud in order to polish them. Before writing it…[he] rehearsed to me every chapter of the pamphlet…He liked to do this during our walks. We used to go out of town so that no one would disturb us. He used this same method – preparation first by whispering, then by talking – to write his other works.’3

  * * *

  One of the great thought crimes in the Soviet era was to be a ‘deviationist’ from the truths laid down by Marx and Engels. Millions lost their lives in purges against ‘deviation’ during the
struggles in the 1920s onwards under Stalin to maintain ideological purity and orthodoxy. The first major ‘deviationist’ was Lenin, who frequently turned Marxism on its head when it didn’t suit his tactical purposes. The high priest and learned teacher in him was a true believer – what was the point of professing the Marxist faith if everyone among the congregation was free to interpret it as they wished? The Renaissance pope and practical politician in him could tack and weave when it was necessary, even perform a complete somersault. ‘For me theory is only a hypothesis, not the Holy Scripture. It is a tool in our daily work,’ he said once, mystifying his audience. ‘Lenin could veer, prevaricate, intrigue and sow confusion, seeking support from the devil if it was offered,’ Plekhanov noted, accurately.4

  Marx’s Capital came out in Russia just five years after it was first published in Hamburg, and twenty-four years before it appeared in English. It was an instant success. Whether anyone read the whole of the huge book or not, let alone grasped its implications, its print run of 3,000 sold out in less than a year, while the German edition of 1,000 took five years. Marx’s ideas spread rapidly among the Russian intelligentsia. His emphasis that socialist revolution could be led only by the industrial working class seemed to explain why the Populist movement of the 1870s had failed. To the Russian intelligentsia it offered hope that backward Russia would one day join the ‘advanced’ Western capitalist societies. It would develop along the lines Marx claimed that Western Europe had from feudalism, through a bourgeois revolution to capitalism, the stages Marx predicted would ‘inevitably’ lead to socialism and then Communism.