Lenin: A Biography

by Robert John Service

  On 1 April 1901 his wife Nadya arrived from Russia. By the time they met, she was not best pleased. Although she had sent him a note about her travel plan, he was not at the Munich Hofbahnhof to greet her. After waiting around for a bit, she took a horse cab to the premises of Herr Franz Modrácêk. Unfortunately Modrácêk proved to be a Czech with a frail grasp of German. Only after lengthy conversation did she extract sufficient sense from him to discover that her husband was using the alias of a Herr Rittmeyer. She returned to the station to put her baggage in storage and then take a tram to the address, which turned out to be a beer cellar. When she asked in the cellar for Herr Rittmeyer, the owner replied: ‘That’s me!’ Nadya, by now pretty depressed, exclaimed: ‘No, that’s my husband!’ Rittmeyer’s wife heard the remark and intervened: ‘Ah, this must be Herr Meyer’s wife. He’s expecting his wife from Siberia.’

  Frau Rittmeyer took Nadya to the room of ‘Herr Meyer’ and left the couple to themselves. Nadya did not hold herself back: ‘Bah! Damn it: could you not write and tell me where you were?’ Defensively Vladimir explained that he had sent several letters and that they must have been intercepted. Marital peace was resumed. Nadya settled into a role of organising Iskra’s correspondence; no doubt her own recent experience convinced Lenin that he needed an expert in these matters. In May 1901, furthermore, Nadya’s mother followed her to Germany. This relieved Nadya of much of the burden of housework (and her mother also helped with the preparation of coded letters).21 Not that Lenin was useless in domestic tasks. He dusted his books. He sewed loose buttons back on to his clothes. He polished his shoes. He dabbed stains off his suit with petroleum. He maintained his bicycle as if it were a ‘surgical instrument’.22 But these were tasks relating to personal neatness. The women, as was normal in those days, did everything else around the house. Not even revolutionaries such as Lenin saw anything unfair about the division of functions; and Nadya, while advocating feminism, did not let it impinge on her marriage.

  Yet the two of them also had a lot of fun. They went to the theatre and to musical concerts in Munich and wherever else they were staying. They read Russian literature. They also went to concerts. Lenin was a passionate admirer of Richard Wagner (who was an Ulyanov family favourite). He went to hear renditions of his operas as an active listener; he could not bear to sit passively and let the music wash through him: sometimes the effort disturbed him emotionally to such an extent that he walked out after the first act.23 The romantic component of his cultural and intellectual personality – a component he tried to hide underneath an exterior of scientific pretension – was revealed on such occasions. But even among Bolsheviks there were few who witnessed this.

  During the working day, Ulyanov got on with writing his booklet. The title he chose for it, What Is to Be Done?, was plucked from Chernyshevski’s novel of the same name. Just as Chernyshevski had described how revolutionary activists could form a revolutionary communal group in the 1860s, Ulyanov intended to sketch the way to organise a clandestine political party in the unpropitious environment of tsarism after the turn of the century. For publishers he turned to J. H. W. Dietz of Stuttgart. The booklet would be sold for one Russian ruble or two German marks. In order to confuse any Okhrana agents the author’s name would appear not as Vladimir Ulyanov or even Vladimir Ilin but as N. Lenin. He had recently used this pseudonym in letters to Plekhanov, and it was natural that he should use it again. In Munich at the time he was living in a comfortable flat on Siegfriedstrasse in the middle-class Schwabing district under the alias of a Bulgarian lawyer Iordan K. Iordanov. What’s in a name? Much pseudo-psychological speculation has been focussed on Ulyanov’s choice of ‘Lenin’ as a pseudonym. Was he inspired by the Siberian river Lena? Or was Lena the name of an early girlfriend? Or was it that the Slavonic etymological root of Lenin implies laziness and that Vladimir Ulyanov, like a medieval monk in a hairshirt, wanted to remind himself constantly that effort was needed?

  At such speculation we can only chuckle and move on. Certainly Vladimir Ulyanov would have been amused. The point is this: Russian revolutionaries used dozens of pseudonyms. What they became known as to the historians depended on many factors. It especially mattered what pseudonym they were using when a major event in their career occurred. Vladimir Ulyanov did not enter the history books for living quietly as Iordan K. Iordanov in Schwabing, or else we should be talking about Marxism–Iordanovism and not Marxism–Leninism.

  Nor indeed did he achieve fame as V. Ilin, author of The Development of Capitalism in Russia; the few reviews were depressingly flat and negative. He did not accept this with equanimity. One critic was the populist writer M. Engelgardt.24 The probable reason why Ulyanov did not issue a retort against Engelgardt was simply that he was not a Marxist and Ulyanov did not want to waste his time on him. Less easy to ignore was the review by fellow Marxist Pavel Skvortsov, whom he had got to know in Nizhni Novgorod in 1893. Skvortsov picked apart the book’s analysis, especially its fundamental premise that the various sectors of the Imperial economy fitted harmoniously together and that economic crises would not take place.25 There was something in this criticism. Ulyanov had been so keen to demonstrate the real and potential achievements of Russian capitalist development that he paid little attention to the various obstacles. In other works, of course, he had been only too happy to point to the susceptibility of all capitalist economies, including the one that was developing in Russia, to recurrent crisis. He therefore demanded and received the right of reply,26 but neither his book nor his defence of it succeeded in catching the imagination of the reading public. Even most Marxists failed to give it much attention.

  And so it was What Is to Be Done? that thrust Vladimir Ulyanov before the attention of the Marxists of the Russian Empire. He had signed the booklet as N. Lenin and it was as Lenin that everyone mainly knew him from then on. (Not that he stopped inventing and using pseudonyms through to 1917.) What Is to Be Done? in the most direct sense made Lenin’s name. It did so not because it was a major piece of innovative political theory but rather because it caused huge controversy among its restricted sphere of readers. In Ulyanov’s opinion, it was merely a statement of ‘orthodox Marxism’ on questions of party organisation. He was not wholly straightforward about this. When writing What Is to Be Done?, he was in a febrile mood; this was always a sign that he was risking a challenge to strongly entrenched convention. Ulyanov meant to annoy, excite and instigate. But he was not wholly conscious of his purposes. He was therefore caught unawares by the scale of the controversy he stirred up, and the very fact that this controversy led eventually to a communist party and to the October 1917 Revolution means that the booklet has become a twentieth-century political classic.

  Ulyanov (or Lenin as we may now call him) offered several obvious postulates about internal party organisation. He wanted a clandestine party. But how could it be otherwise if the Okhrana was to be kept at bay? He wanted a disciplined and centralised party. But how else could any party survive in the Russia of the Romanovs? He wanted a party united on fundamental ideology and strategy. But how could it be otherwise when each party had to demarcate itself from the other parties then emerging? True, these postulates were not universal among Russian Marxists. The so-called ‘Economists’ among them did not even warm to the project to form a party and to induce the working class to lead the Revolution against the Romanovs. But most Marxists were already in favour of the postulates. If a party was thought necessary, practically everyone agreed that it ought to operate clandestinely and to recognise the need for discipline, centralism and ideological unity. Lenin sprinkled his chapters with citations from Marx, Engels and Kautsky and argued that his recommendations for the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, while taking account of political conditions in the Russian Empire, still lay within the bounds of conventional European Marxism.

  So why did the booklet stir up such a storm? One reason was the very preoccupation that Lenin had with ‘the organisational question’. For many Marxists it
was unpleasantly reminiscent of the traditions of the Russian agrarian socialists of the 1860s and 1870s, who had been obsessed with matters of internal discipline and control – and little good it had done them. Indeed, the failure of those agrarian socialists had supplied a negative example which in the 1880s and 1890s had turned a lot of revolutionary sympathisers towards the kind of Marxism advocated by Plekhanov. Marxists were suspicious of Lenin’s insistence on reopening discussion on ‘the organisational question’.

  Lenin had compounded their worries by several of his obiter dicta. For a start he had used the title of a novel by agrarian socialist Nikolai Chernyshevski. Then in the text he proceeded to commend the organisational techniques developed by the Land and Freedom Party founded in 1876. He praised the terrorist leaders of Land and Freedom: P. A. Alexeev, I. N. Myshkin, S. N. Khalturin and A. I. Zhelyabov. Lenin adduced Pëtr Tkachëv too in language of approval, declaring that ‘the attempt to seize power as prepared by Tkachëv’s sermon and realised by means of a “terrifying”, truly terrifying terror was magnificent’.27 It made matters worse for Lenin’s reputation that the remark about Tkachëv came in a section of the booklet where he was arguing against the Marxist L. Nadezhdin, who wanted to resume a campaign of assassinations of individual tsarist functionaries. Lenin contrasted Nadezhdin unfavourably with Tkachëv and glorified the ‘mass terror’ advocated by Tkachëv to inaugurate a revolutionary state. For Iskra’s opponents this was yet another indication that the malignant traditions of the mid-nineteenth century had leached back unnoticed into the body of Russian Marxism. Lenin appeared to them an agrarian-socialist terrorist in Marxist disguise.

  Nor did they like the resonance of his remarks about the desirable organisational form of the party. His emphasis on the need for konspirativnost seemed to hint not only at clandestine, ‘underground’ political activity but at outright conspiracies. Marxists conventionally supposed that revolutions happened through class struggle and mass movements, and yet Lenin apparently wished to revert to a clique of highly secretive plotters. This clique, they concluded, would be subjected to a demeaning, ultra-centralist discipline. The booklet’s first chapter was a sustained attack on ‘freedom of criticism’ in the party. Lenin made no secret of the fact that he was not an absolute democrat. The priority was for discipline and unity – and for this purpose he later explained, in his version of the Party Rules, that all who were unwilling to operate actively under the direction of one of the party’s officially recognised organisations should have membership denied them.

  To the charge that he was little different from the agrarian-socialist terrorists, Lenin had a number of answers. He argued that in Russia’s political circumstances it would be suicidal for the party to make a fetish of elections and public discussion. This was not a matter of smuggling non-Marxist contraband into the party. It was simply practical sense. His second point was that he approved of the internal democracy of the German Social-Democratic Party, and when Russia had a freer political environment it was to be expected – at least he implied this – that Russian Marxists would copy their procedures. Nor could anyone deny that Lenin in other aspects of his thought was opposed to agrarian-socialist ideas. He scoffed at notions of building a socialist society upon the model of the peasant commune. He ridiculed the possibility that capitalist economic development was avoidable. He sneered at the moralising of agrarian-socialist figures such as Nikolai Mikhailovski and praised the ‘scientific’ way of thinking about society practised by Marx and Engels. And Lenin emphasised that the working class should be the vanguard of the revolutionary offensive against the Romanov monarchy. Without the willingness of the industrial workers to take to the streets, he stated, the revolutionary movement could not be successful.

  This defence of What Is to Be Done? diminished the concerns of some of his Iskra associates, including Plekhanov, about its contents. And there have been attempts by historians to assert that Lenin was as orthodox a Marxist as it was possible to find. Such was the line taken by Soviet scholars, but it has also attracted influential support from writers abroad.28 Yet the whole case is flawed. Marxism did not have a definable orthodoxy. Marx was too elusive a writer to have left a clear-cut legacy behind him. His followers struggled for recognition as authentic interpreters of his ‘doctrines’, and among them was Lenin. He had assumed that he could openly use certain Russian agrarian-socialist ideas and practices in adapting Marxism to the specific circumstances of the Russian Empire. But when the controversy over What Is to Be Done? blew up he stopped acknowledging this debt in public. He needed to exercise caution if he was to assert his ‘orthodox’ credentials – and he particularly needed to be careful if ever he was to come forward with further controversial proposals for the party.

  In any case not all Iskra’s admirers worried about such niceties. Many of them felt that the brouhaha had unfairly detracted attention from Lenin’s practical impetus and revolutionary commitment. Some of his phrases were especially attractive. For example, he declared: ‘Give us an organisation of revolutionaries, and we’ll turn all Russia upside down!’ On and on he went. He cheered and cajoled his fellow activists. He managed to let them know that, whatever difficulties they might be experiencing, he understood them – and yet he also expected them to produce wonderful results. ‘Miracles’, he asserted, were within the range of attainment of Russia’s Marxists. Too much rationality was no great thing: ‘We’ve got to dream!’

  This was a language of exhortation that no Marxist before him in the Russian Empire had spoken. It came forth not from a great stylist and his language was never to become mellifluous. But this did not matter to him or his followers. His angular grammar and syntax made activists feel that he was akin to them. For them, his abrasive rhetoric was the manifestation of a necessary, down-to-earth belligerence. Fine words and elegant arguments were hardly the most important requirements for the overthrow of the Romanov monarchy. Lenin and his followers wanted policy to be based on sound intellectual ground; but, while intellect was important to them, action – uncompromising revolutionary action – was of equal significance. And Lenin’s crude verbal formulation rather appealed to them. If he called democratic procedures a ‘harmful toy’, so what? He had worked in clandestine political organisations in the Russian Empire and he knew what he was about. If his polemical approach involved the unfair presentation of arguments put forward by his more moderate opponents, what did this matter? Lenin could touch the parts of their ideology, propaganda and especially their hopes and fears that no other leading Marxist had yet reached.

  The magnificence of the booklet, for readers who were not hostile to him, was his hymn to leadership. What Is to Be Done? is widely misunderstood as having offered a detailed practical blueprint of techniques for running a clandestine political party. Far from it: there is scarcely any practical advice from beginning to end (and even in his follow-up work, ‘Letter to a Comrade about our Organisational Tasks’, the level of detail is surprisingly low). But he had tapped a deeper need among many of those Marxists working away in the Russian Empire with his insistence that the great duty in politics was to lead the way. The central party leaders should lead the local groups. The local groups should lead the working class. The working class should lead the other discontented and oppressed groups in Imperial society. If all this could be achieved, nothing could save the Romanov monarchy. No wonder Lenin’s booklet had so formative an influence on the contours of Leninism and outlasted the peculiar environment of its writing in 1901–2. It was a work of its time, but its fundamental assumptions and attitudes had an impact upon the decisions taken by the Russian Communist Party in that very different time after the October Revolution of 1917.

  What Is to Be Done? was written between April 1901 and February 1902 and published by Dietz in March. Lenin was usually rapid in composing his works; not often did it take him so many months to write fifty thousand words. He knew the controversial nature of his work. He kept clear of Martov, his closest friend, while he
was composing it. Lenin’s sense of urgency was readily observable. He could hardly have a conversation without tightening his fists as he gripped his waistcoat. His associates picked up the mannerism and adopted it as their own.29

  Increasingly he was attracting not so much associates as followers. He took counsel with them individually. Indeed there were the beginnings of competition for his attention among them, and Nadezhda Konstantinovna prevented him from being bothered by people he did not want to see. Lenin wished to keep his discussions confidential. When pressed to reveal whom he had been talking to and how he had gained some piece of information, he had a fixed response: ‘Who did I hear this news from? A swallow brought it to me on its tail!’30 These followers had to put up with a certain elusiveness on Lenin’s part. At any time they might turn up at his flat and be told that he was not at home even when he really was. Usually he was merely talking to someone else. Nadezhda Konstantinovna was adept at mollifying the feelings of disappointed visitors by stressing that ‘Vladimir Ilich very much wishes you well.’31 Lenin had a busy life and expected his followers to respect his need to curtail their access to them. He was friendly, but only up to a point. He was not like the rest of the émigrés. He was not the sort of fellow whom his comrades slapped on the shoulder in friendship: he always kept a distance between himself and his followers.32

  Another reason for his slowness in finishing What Is to Be Done? was his involvement in other political tasks. He was helping to edit Iskra; he was also engaged in co-writing a draft party programme in readiness for the Second Party Congress. The work was time-consuming and irksome. Once he had made peace with Plekhanov in 1900, he encouraged him to write a draft programme, but Plekhanov kept on demurring. Lenin was frustrated. He himself had drafted such a document in Shushenskoe, and every Iskra follower desired the newspaper to adopt a draft of some kind since there was bound to be a debate on the matter at the forthcoming Congress. But Plekhanov concentrated his energy on works aimed at refuting the economic and philosophical opinions of Struve, who was moving away from Marxism to liberalism. There was no clearer proof of Plekhanov’s incapacity, concluded Lenin, to lead the party. But still it had to be Plekhanov, the founder of Russian Marxism, who made the first main draft and thereby gave it his seal of legitimacy.