He has, of course, been written about frequently. But not until recently was it possible to get access to crucial materials about his life and career. Important documentary collections were published under Mikhail Gorbachëv. Then in 1991, as the USSR collapsed, Boris Yeltsin gave direct admittance to the central party archives themselves. During those years I was writing a trilogy on Lenin’s politics, trying to explain the connection between his practical activity and his doctrines within the framework of a revolutionary party that founded the world’s first socialist state.
The analysis I have offered – both then and now – differs in basic ways from other works on Lenin. The most obvious contrast is with successive official Soviet accounts and with various Trotskyist accounts, which have represented him as an unblemished thinker, politician and humanitarian.1 But there are also books which, despite not eulogising him, give him the benefit of too many doubts. Thus I do not share Neil Harding’s conviction that Lenin thought out his ideas thoroughly and exclusively from Marxist principles and that his actions derived entirely from ‘orthodox’ doctrine.2 It is equally difficult to agree with the notion of Rolf Theen that Lenin secretly derived all his fundamental notions from non-Marxist Russian revolutionaries.3 The following chapters dissent, too, from Marcel Liebman’s claim that Lenin strove to minimise authoritarianism in his party and the Soviet state (as well as from the claim in Alexander Rabinowitch’s generally useful works that the Bolshevik party was highly democratic in organisation in 1917).4 Nor, to my mind, does the evidence support the suggestion by Moshe Lewin and Stephen Cohen that, shortly before he died, Lenin tried to reform communism in the direction of eliminating its association with dictatorship, class war and terror.5
Lenin’s ideological commitment remains a bone of contention. E. H. Carr saw him as a politician who, as the years passed, was more interested in building up the state institutions than in pushing through with his revolution.6 As regards foreign policy, Adam Ulam asserted that export of revolution was no longer a primary goal for Lenin within a few months of the communist seizure of power, and Orlando Figes has pushed this to the extreme by suggesting that Lenin ordered the invasion of Poland in 1920 for purely defensive reasons.7 The following chapters affirm that Leninist ideology is crucial to an understanding of the origins and outcome of the October Revolution.
Much has been written, too, about Lenin’s personality. But Richard Pipes is surely wrong to portray Lenin in power as merely a psychopath to whom ideas barely mattered and whose fundamental motivation was to dominate and to kill.8 Likewise this book takes issue with Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Dmitri Volkogonov, who argue that Lenin and Leninism were wholly alien to Russian traditions;9 it also contests the anti-semitic case of Valentin Soloukhin that Lenin’s ideology was largely a product of the Jewish element in his ancestry.10 A somewhat less demonic portrait of Lenin emerges from the work of Ralph Carter Elwood, Dietrich Geyer, Leopold Haimson, John Keep and Leonard Schapiro.11 But in the past couple of decades it has been suggested, notably by Sheila Fitzpatrick and Ronald Suny, that the way to explain Lenin is anyway not to concentrate attention upon him but to look at broader phenomena in the state and society of both Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union.12 My own earlier work highlighted the political and organisational pressures which pushed Lenin into doing what he did or which, in some instances, stopped him from doing what he wanted.13 Even Alfred Meyer and Martin Malia, whose writings convincingly indicate the importance of ideology, underestimate the obstacles in the path of Lenin’s complete freedom of self-expression.14 So there is certainly a need to look at Lenin in the context of his times. But in the final judgement – as I hope to show – his personal impact upon events in his time and later was crucial.
The aim is not just to give an analysis different from the other serious ones that are available. I also wish to provide something that has hitherto been impossible to achieve: a biography. The Lenin of history was screened from us by the Soviet state. Those documents and memoirs which did not support the contemporary official image were kept hidden. The first revelations under Gorbachëv were memoirs by Lenin’s relatives and by Bolshevik party members. Some of the Politburo records from the revolutionary period were also published. The result was a large increase in our knowledge about Lenin, but always there was the problem that historians were not allowed into the archives to read things for themselves. This changed in 1991. (I was fortunate to be in Moscow on the day when the central party archives were ‘unsealed’ after the abortive coup d’état against Gorbachëv and to use the new historical freedom.) Steadily the files became declassified. The Politburo, Central Committee, Conference and Congress minutes became accessible in their original form. Even material on Lenin’s campaign to unseat Stalin in 1923 could be scrutinised. Lenin as a politician became a more comprehensible figure as a consequence.
This was already an enticement to take another look at Lenin. What has made the project irresistible is the access more recently granted to the archival correspondence and memoirs of his family. Long-held suspicions were proved correct. Even the version of Lenin’s wife’s memoirs that appeared under Gorbachëv turns out to have been subject to politically motivated cuts. Then the reports by his sisters, brother, doctors, bodyguards and nurses were cleared for inspection. At last a biography in a full sense became feasible.
This book starts from the premise that Lenin the revolutionary and Lenin the man are inexplicable without reference to each other. His mixed ethnic background was not without significance. But the idea that this was enough in itself to make him ‘anti-Russian’ or ‘cruel’ is implausible. The point about his family is that its members were marginal elements seeking incorporation into the official Imperial order – and ultimately they failed to achieve this. Like other such families, the parents pushed their offspring hard to achieve educational success. The children were subjected to heavy pressure and not all of them survived unscathed. Lenin was one of the successful ones, but his compulsion to work intensively and meet deadlines stayed with him until his last illness. The contents of his education also left their mark. What has not previously been understood is that Lenin’s schooling involved deep but narrow study. The effect was that his mind was left exposed to other influences, including revolutionary ideas in particular. Lenin’s education enabled him to read foreign languages and to respect science, but also left him open to the attractions of any ideology that seemed to make sense of the society in which he lived.
He was an able suppressor of outward emotion. He acted calmly even after the trauma he suffered when his elder brother Alexander was hanged; and later he was to find steady satisfaction in his work alongside his wife. But things were not always on an even keel. We can see in some detail how other women tempted him and that one of them, Inessa Armand, held his heart for a while. But by and large, he was a manipulator of women. In securing their help, he played them off one against the other – and this meant putting his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya at the mercy of his less than kindly sisters. These women provided him with a regular support in day-to-day organisation. Krupskaya did not always fall for his charm. But mostly she did. In particular she returned to his side when he became mortally ill in 1922. Lenin was a bit of a hypochondriac and, if he had not been able to count on the active sympathy of his family, he would probably have erupted. There was always the possibility of an explosion: Lenin was a human time-bomb. His intellectual influences thrust him towards Revolution and his inner rage made this impulse frenetic. Lenin had greater passion for destruction than love for the proletariat.
His personality is closely linked to the kind of politician he became. His angry outbursts were legendary throughout the party before 1917; shortly before he died they became so acute that serious questions arose about his mental equilibrium, even his sanity. But usually he took a grip on himself and channelled his anger into a controlled form of aggression. He was a political warrior. This has never been a secret, but the intensity of his militant style can now be see
n more clearly. Even in the moments of retreat, as when he introduced the New Economic Policy in 1921, he was wild in his declarations and proposals. It is true that he moderated his ideas after consultation with colleagues and acquaintances. But he stayed loyal to certain key understandings. His occasional restraint came from a man who wanted to fight hard but saw the advantage of temporary and partial withdrawal. He modified policies, sometimes in drastic ways when his power was under threat. But from its formulation at the beginning of the 1890s to his death in 1924 there was little change in his basic thinking. He could live for years in a locality – be it London, Zurich or Moscow – and fail to draw the conclusions about his surroundings that came easily to others without his hardened prejudices. He lived and died a Leninist. In his basic assumptions about politics Lenin was no chameleon.
The influences on him were not just Marxist. For some time we have known that he was influenced by the Russian agrarian-socialist terrorists of the late nineteenth century. Indeed there is no need to choose between Marxism and populism as if they were polarities: the two tendencies of thought massively overlapped each other. But there were other influences that are less familiar. Lenin’s childhood reading, from Uncle Tom’s Cabin onwards, had a lasting effect. So too did Russian literature – and some of his favourite authors such as Gleb Uspenski, who wrote stories about the Russian peasantry, strengthened his scepticism about the pleasanter side of contemporary peasant attitudes. In later life he picked up further ideas from writers such as Machiavelli and Darwin. He also assimilated ideas from chance acquaintances even if they happened to be hostile to Marxism. Thus the figure of Father Gapon, Orthodox priest and critic of the Romanov order, had a significant impact. Marxism was the primary ingredient of Lenin’s thought, but it gained a lot of its solidity from combination with other ingredients.
While Lenin stuck to his basic assumptions, he felt free to alter strategy even when it caused acute annoyance to his colleagues. On some questions he ignored them entirely. He relished the disputes over the October Revolution, the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and the New Economic Policy. But he was also a party boss who let his associates argue with each other to deflect criticism from himself. He was almost a one-man court of appeal. Lenin alone was respected by all sections of the Bolshevik party and his patriarchal style strengthened his dominance at least when he was in reasonable health. He also handled the party with finesse, managing to sound radical even when he was recommending moderation. Lenin could be evasive; he could also play down secondary dispute in pursuit of the supreme goal of the moment. More than most politicians, furthermore, he could speak in several registers at once. While using Marxist terminology, he could also develop popular slogans. The Party Congresses were always victories for him. He had a gift for ruthless and yet inspiring leadership. Steadily he learned how to widen the range of his political techniques. He never lost his teacherly style or his odd enunciation of words. But his force of personality and ideological commitment reinforced the message and he learned to trust his instincts.
Nevertheless he was not infinitely adaptive. Lenin’s austere personality had its counterpart in his narrow approach to politics. It took a huge effort for him to become a reasonable public speaker. He was a man of the printed word, a fanatical reader and writer. In fact the most effective exponents of twentieth-century political techniques in 1917 were the anti-Bolshevik premier Alexander Kerenski and Lenin’s fellow Bolshevik Lev Trotski.
And the common idea that Lenin was always a widely known figure is nonsense. Few knew what he looked like when he came back to Russia in 1917. His writings were familiar only to well-informed Marxists. In 1917 neither Pravda nor the other newspapers carried his visual image. Even in the Civil War he had difficulty in getting recognised by the general public. It was only after the inception of the New Economic Policy in 1921 that he became generally famous. This is of importance for a consideration of his political impact. Lenin was often absent for decisive moments in the history of his party and government. In Siberian exile and in European emigration he was frequently removed from the centre of action; in 1917 he could not return until April, and then in July he fled to Finland until the beginning of October. Furthermore, he was recurrently incapacitated by serious illness. We can now see that his health had been failing him since his early manhood. Ulcers, migraine, insomnia, St Anthony’s fire and both minor and major heart attacks laid him low. He had to leave much administration to others and, to his chagrin, his leading colleagues showed that they could run the state quite adequately without him.
Nonetheless Lenin did make history. In the April Theses of 1917 he drafted a strategy for the party to seize power. In October he insisted that power should be seized. In March 1918 he fended off a German invasion of Russia by getting a separate treaty signed at Brest-Litovsk. In 1921 he introduced the New Economic Policy and saved the Soviet state from being overwhelmed by popular rebellion. If Lenin had not campaigned for these strategical shifts, the USSR would never have been established and consolidated.
Not everything done by Lenin was carefully conceived. In particular, he had little foresight about what he was doing when he set up the centralised one-party state. One of the great malignancies of the twentieth century was created more by off-the-cuff measures than by grandiose planning. Yet the creation was far from being a complete accident. Lenin, even at his most improvisational, thought and acted in accordance with his long-held basic assumptions. He liked what he had done in his career. He was proud of his doctrines, his party and his revolution. And his influence was not confined to the events of his lifetime. His institutional legacy was immense. Lenin set up the Sovnarkom and dispersed the Constituent Assembly. Lenin created the Cheka. Lenin convoked the Communist International. More basically he had an impact upon assumptions. Lenin eliminated concern for ethics. Lenin justified dictatorship and terror. Lenin applauded the political vanguard and the need for firm leadership. Lenin convinced his party that his Marxism was pure and that it embodied the only correct policies. In strategy, institutions and assumptions Lenin had a lasting impact upon far-left socialism for his country and the world.
PART ONE
THE REBEL EMERGES
‘I’d like to arise from my grave in about a hundred years and have a look at how people will be living then.’
Lenin’s grandfather, Dr Alexander Blank
1. THE ULYANOVS AND THE BLANKS
On 10 April 1870 the river Volga – the dominant natural feature of the provincial town of Simbirsk in Russia’s south east and the largest river in Europe – was showing the first signs of spring. The temperature had risen to 5° centigrade. The huge field of ice across the channel between the banks of the river was heaving and beginning to crack. Spring was arriving, and the long-awaited change of season caused excitement in every house in Simbirsk except for one on Streletskaya Street, where a baby boy was being born. His parents Ilya and Maria Ulyanov already had two children and the whole family attended his baptism some days later in the St Nicholas Cathedral, where the priest sprinkled water over his head and christened him Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov. The godparents were Arseni Belokrysenko, an accountant in the Imperial civil administration and Ilya’s chess partner, and Natalya Aunovskaya, who was the widowed mother of one of Ilya’s colleagues.1 After the christening Ilya Ulyanov departed for St Petersburg to attend a pedagogical conference and left Maria Alexandrovna to recover from her labour with the assistance of the family’s new nanny Varvara Sarbatova. Life in the house on Streletskaya Street returned to normality.2
Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov entered the history books as Lenin, the main pseudonym he used in the Russian revolutionary movement. It was also as Lenin that he bequeathed his name for a set of doctrines, Marxism–Leninism. Yet when his native city had its name changed in his honour in 1924 it was not called Leninsk but Ulyanovsk. And Ulyanovsk it remains to this day.
In the nineteenth century there was a widely held idea that places like Simbirsk were somnolent places and that bustl
e and enterprise was confined to St Petersburg. Foreign travellers had this impression. Many Russian observers – including tsars, ministers and intellectuals – thought this too. The static nature of Russia’s provincial way of life was part of the conventional wisdom. The assumption was made that the further a city was from the capital, the sleepier the urban scene was likely to be. In fact the cities in the Russian provinces were anything but quiet. Simbirsk, a Volga port a thousand miles from the capital, bustled with the struggle of its inhabitants to make enough money to survive. At its highest point, the town stood 450 feet above the water level. But most of the town was long and low-lying and stretched eleven miles along the waterfront. The quays were the main places where goods entered or left the city. Fishing was an important source of urban employment; sturgeon was the prime catch. Simbirsk lay along the route from central Russia to the Caspian Sea. Barge-haulers, who were the burlaki immortalised in the ‘Song of the Volga Boatmen’, pulled the heavy, flat vessels up and down the river. There was hardly any large-scale manufacturing. A few clothing factories and the old Simbirsk Distillery were the extent of the province’s industrial development. Although trade with the Ottoman Empire and Persia was on the increase, Simbirsk was not an economic centre at the level of St Petersburg and Moscow. There was no metal-working factory, and no significant foreign industrial presence existed. The buildings were mainly of wood and there was little sign of the architectural panache of the Imperial capitals.
Peasant agriculture was the other mainstay of economic activity. The peasantry sold their produce to middlemen with their businesses in Simbirsk and the other towns. The main crop was rye. Potatoes, wheat, oats and barley were also grown. In 1861 there had been a great jolt to the traditional way of treating the province’s peasants, when the Emperor Alexander II had issued an Emancipation Edict freeing them from the personal control exercised by noble landowners. But the land settlement was particularly disadvantageous to the peasantry of Simbirsk. The soil in the Volga region was as fertile as any in Russia, and the noble landlords contrived to keep all but a small proportion of it in their hands. And so the peasants could seldom live by agriculture alone. Many of them eked out their existence by means of various handicrafts. Simbirsk province was covered by forests, and woodworking was a common craft and trade. Carts, wheels, sleighs, shovels and even household utensils were wooden goods produced locally. The markets were colourful and the biggest of them was the Sbornaya Market in Simbirsk, where it was possible to buy anything made in the province.
Lenin: A Biography Page 2