Lenin had never taken to Paris and went around describing it as ‘a foul hole’.19 Politics were part of the reason. During his French sojourn he was annoyed with the Mensheviks. He was annoyed, too, with anti-Duma Bolsheviks such as Bogdanov. Indeed, he was equally annoyed with those Bolsheviks who, despite agreeing with Lenin about Bogdanov, did not show the degree of annoyance that Lenin required of true Bolsheviks. About the other parties Lenin cared hardly at all, and when he met up with Socialist-Revolutionaries in the Parisian cafés frequented by the Russian revolutionary émigré ‘community’, he could be quite affable. Nevertheless his jokes took a combative form, as Viktor Chernov recalled:20
I said to him: ‘Vladimir Ilich, if you come to power, you’ll start hanging the Mensheviks the very next day.’ And he glanced at me and said: ‘It will be after we’ve hanged the last Socialist-Revolutionary that the first Menshevik will get hanged by us.’ Then he frowned and gave a laugh.
Quite apart from his gallows humour, Lenin was exhibiting an unceasing obsession with factional disputes inside the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. Bolsheviks had entered the Third State Duma and Lenin did not need Martov and Dan to help him to compel the Bolshevik faction to put up candidates in the Duma elections. Thus the need to keep the Mensheviks sweet had passed. Without delay Lenin resumed polemics against Menshevism, and his jokes reflected this.
Lenin’s struggle against Bogdanov was even fiercer. The detestation of the Duma among Bogdanov and his sympathisers retained the capacity to destabilise Bolshevik factional policy. Some went so far as to advocate that Bolshevik elected deputies should immediately be withdrawn from the Third State Duma. Others, and Bogdanov was one of these, wished to deliver an ultimatum to the deputies to withdraw on pain of expulsion from the faction. The first group were called the Otzovists (‘Recallists’), the second the Ultimatumists. Both groups also argued that the party should concentrate on preparing for and organising armed insurrection. For Lenin, they were living in a mental pressure chamber that had rendered them incapable of appreciating current political realities.
Lenin also brought up disagreements of an even more fundamental nature. Whereas Bogdanov gave priority to encouraging the working class to undertake its cultural self-development, Lenin stressed the guiding role of intellectuals. Admittedly Lenin did not insist that the intelligentsia should come from a middle-class background. But Bogdanov remained appalled by the Leninist idea that socialism had to be introduced to the workers by intellectuals; indeed he stipulated that the general culture of society had to be transformed so that socialist ideas might mature. The dominant present-day culture, according to Bogdanov, was ‘bourgeois’ since it was focussed upon individualism, authoritarian commands, formality, hypocrisy. A new culture – a ‘proletarian culture’ – had to be introduced, and Bogdanov suggested that it would be beyond the capacity of intellectuals to invent it because they themselves were the product of the culture of the bourgeoisie. All this and more infuriated Lenin. Bogdanov even suggested that Lenin’s notions about absolute truth, about eternal categories of thought and about the demonstrable reality of the external world were old-fashioned poppycock. Lenin, unlike Bogdanov, refused to involve himself in the broad philosophical debates in Europe of the time. Bogdanov had read Immanuel Kant and neo-Kantians such as Richard Avenarius and Ernst Mach. He admired but refused to idolise Marx. At the Vaasa dacha he had been writing a book, Empiriomonism, which recapitulated his exploratory ideas. He simply fizzed with intellectual vitality. Lenin thought the time had come to mount a frontal attack on him and his world-view.
Lenin had nothing to lose. The anti-Leninist Bolsheviks were highly influential inside the Bolshevik faction at home and abroad; they may even have been a majority. Equally pertinent was Lenin’s recognition that there was little immediate chance of another revolutionary crisis in the Russian Empire. It therefore felt opportune to resume the old schismatic tactics. If the second period of emigration was to be made endurable, Lenin believed, he had to recruit and mobilise a reliable Bolshevik faction in the image of himself.
Thus when Maxim Gorki had invited Bogdanov and Lenin together to his villa on Capri, Lenin at first refused, even though he had asked to come and stay. Lenin eventually went in April 1908 and suppressed his feelings to the extent that he played chess with his old partner in chess and politics. A degree of joviality was obtained. The problem was that Lenin’s competitive side got the better of him; Gorki was astounded at how angry and ‘childish’ he became when he lost a game.21 This happened even when Lenin and Bogdanov were avoiding conversations about politics. Only when he went fishing did Lenin relax. The local fishermen took him and Gorki out in their boats and taught them how to use a line without a rod. The trick was to wrap the end of the line over the forefinger of one hand and wait for the vibration signalling that a fish was biting. The fishermen told him what it would sound like: ‘Così: drin, drin. Capisce?’ Their Italian charm captivated Lenin, and as soon as he got a nibble, he cried out: ‘Drin, drin!’ Afterwards the fishermen called him Signor Drin-Drin – the only one of his nicknames not chosen with the Revolution in mind. They missed him when he left the island, asking Gorki: ‘How is Drin-Drin getting on? The tsar hasn’t caught him yet?’22
Lenin had stayed just for a week. He did not understand much Italian, far less could he make sense of the thick Neapolitan dialect. He had been a busy visitor, managing to squeeze into it a walk up Mount Vesuvius on the mainland as well as a visit to the museums of Naples. But he felt restored by his trip. He had loved the villa, the azure sea, the freshly caught fish, the operatic ballads, the generous, lively inhabitants. The trip to the Italian south had raised his spirits; he was ready again for the political fray.
Taking the ferry over to Naples, Lenin made the long ride north by train through Rome back across the Alps to Switzerland. His mind was made up: once he had reached Geneva, he would break definitively with Alexander Bogdanov and his sympathisers and open a campaign to rid the Bolshevik faction of them. It was a fast-changing situation. Bogdanov was nowhere near as obsessed as Lenin with the minutiae of political organisation. He was tired out by the endless scheming that engaged the leading Bolsheviks; he dearly wanted to have more time for his writing. In short, Bogdanov had had enough of Lenin and, after their Capri meeting, he resigned from the editorial board of the Bolshevik newspaper Proletari rather than put up with personal vilification. But because Bogdanov retained his place in the Bolshevik Centre it was by no means clear that Lenin would succeed in holding Bolsheviks as a faction to the line of supporting participation in the State Duma and legal public organisations in Russia. Gorki went on trying to convince himself and his friends that Lenin would not take his disagreement with Bogdanov to the point of splitting the Bolshevik faction.23 But Gorki was wrong: Lenin was firmly resolved upon a break with Bogdanov.
What made this feasible was that Lenin’s group had recently attained a degree of financial independence from Bogdanov. It had come about in a most peculiar way. A young revolutionary sympathiser N. P. Shmidt, nephew of the wealthy Moscow industrialist Savva Morozov, had died suddenly in 1907, and his will left many hundreds of thousands of rubles to his two sisters. Lenin helped to devise a scheme to lay his hands on this legacy by contriving to get two Leninist Bolsheviks, V. K. Taratuta and A. M. Andrikanis, to woo the sisters, marry them and obtain funds for the faction. This was a morally shabby scheme. But for Lenin the criterion was whether a particular action aided the Revolution, and the emotional deception of two heiresses fell well within the zone of acceptability. It had been a theme of Lenin’s since adolescence that ‘sentimentality’ had no place in politics. Now he refined this point in a paradoxical fashion by exploiting sentiment for political gain.
Lenin confessed to friends that he would not have had the nerve to carry out the scheme himself. He had been brought up to behave well in personal relations, and everything about the scheme was distasteful to him. But he also had a weakness for rough working-class
Bolsheviks like Taratuta, whose bravado appealed to him: ‘He’s good inasmuch as he’ll stop at nothing. Here, tell me directly, could you go after a rich merchant lady for her money? No. And I wouldn’t either, I couldn’t conquer myself. But Viktor [Taratuta] could… That’s what makes him an irreplaceable person.’24 Amazingly the scheme worked. Taratuta and Andrikanis were two highly disingenuous charmers, and they managed to entice the Shmidt sisters into marriage with them. The problem for Lenin was that he depended on the Bolshevik suitors sticking to their factional obligations. After the dual weddings he waited nervously to see what would happen. In fact Andrikanis double-crossed him and apparently not even Taratuta handed over everything as agreed. But a substantial sum eventually came his way and placed him in a position of financial independence from the Bolshevik Centre. At last he did not depend on Bogdanov and his friends.
First, in February 1909, he broke off personal relations with Bogdanov. Lenin had done this once before, in 1904, when he felt traduced by V. A. Noskov; and he persuaded himself that Bogdanov had also put himself beyond the pale. By June 1909 the scene was set for a final confrontation at the Proletari editorial board meeting held in Paris’s Caput café and attended by members of the Bolshevik Centre. Lenin had prepared carefully, and a majority of the participants were willing to support him. Bogdanov’s policies were criticised; he was declared, by virtue of his ‘deviations from the path of revolutionary Marxism’, to have automatically broken away from the Bolsheviks.
Lenin challenged Bogdanov even on philosophical ground. For Lenin, like all Marxists, believed that a political and economic vision needed to be directed through a sound epistemological prism. Lenin used the opportunity of his trip to London for the duration of May 1908 to complete his researches on his book Materialism and Empiriocriticism. Based at 21 Tavistock Place in Bloomsbury, he lived close by the British Museum, which he visited daily.25 Quickly – too quickly – he read the major texts of the philosophers admired by Bogdanov. The book was produced in fast order, and Lenin intended it as a weapon in the struggle for supremacy in the Bolshevik faction. Its chapters became a philosophical bible for official Soviet intellectuals after 1917 even though much private derision was showered on it. The intrinsic ideological reasons why Lenin was angry enough to write it are clear. He was a grandson of the European Enlightenment. He believed in the kind of science advocated by philosophers in the eighteenth century. For him, there were such things as absolute truth and the independent reality of the external world. Persons who dissented from this, even if they claimed to be Marxists, belonged to the ‘camp’ of political reaction.
Bogdanov, in his eyes, was a dangerous relativist. Bogdanov believed in nothing. Bogdanov could not see that some things had been discovered and proved once and for all; indeed Bogdanov did not believe that ‘seeing’ was a reliable mode of cognition at all. Lenin had a profound faith in Marx, in the eighteenth-century ideals of the natural sciences, in the capacity of the human mind to register a wholly accurate picture of the universe around itself. He thought of the mind as a camera and of the camera as an infallible guide to cognition. By repudiating this way of understanding the world, Bogdanov was siding with priests and mystics. Lenin accused Bogdanov not only of having given up on Marxism but also of having given up on the Russian labour movement and on genuinely practicable revolutionary ideas.
Although the timing of the attack was politically motivated, Lenin truly considered Bogdanov had abandoned key precepts of Marxism. But there has to be a question about the substratum of his assumptions. Lenin was saying that epistemology begat social analysis which begat economics which begat political strategy. Thus Bogdanov, being wrong about epistemology, was bound to be wrong about politics. Lenin liked to give the impression that his own thought by contrast followed a logical pattern. But he protested too much. When we consider his several abrupt shifts in policy in the course of his career, the suspicion surely arises that he needed to entertain this image of his thought in order to gratify his part-political, part-instinctive desire to do whatever would put him and his faction into a position of power in Russia. The protestations of ideological purity were but a mask; and when he donned the mask and looked in the mirror, he was not necessarily aware that his face was occluded from view. This was a source of strength for him as a politician; too much self-awareness would have turned him into a self-questioning politician like Martov or Chernov. Lenin wanted to conquer, and he let nothing complicate his quest for victory.
From 1908 he had nothing good to say about Bogdanov. The help he had received from him in 1904, when Lenin’s fortunes were frail, receded into oblivion. The comradeship of the Lenins and Bogdanovs in Kuokkala in 1906–7 faded from his memory. Expecting the same forgetfulness to be shown by his associates, he took it amiss that his sister Anna thought that Materialism and Empiriocriticism overdid the polemical crudity.26 He would have been even angrier if he had known that his sisters Anna and Maria were reading and enjoying Bogdanov’s novel Engineer Menni.27
Lenin had concentrated his energy on attacking Bogdanov and assumed that any concession to his factional enemies would dissipate his effectiveness. This was a militancy he practised throughout his career. Every time he split his party or faction, Lenin believed he was ridding himself of unreliable elements and consolidating the core of the Bolshevik organisation under his control. He was unwise in this because each split left him with supporters who objected to aspects of his policies, and a smaller organisation did not result in a more cohesive compound. Indeed this was the case at the very same meeting at which he defeated Bogdanov. The Bolshevik Centre, while agreeing with Lenin on the need to reject Bogdanov, insisted against Lenin’s wishes on seeking to found a legal large-circulation newspaper in St Petersburg. It even contemplated closing down the émigré weekly Proletari, and although Lenin managed to avoid this, he had to agree to its being published only on a monthly basis. Worse for Lenin was the Bolshevik Centre’s desire to negotiate with Trotski in Vienna with the idea of offering Bolshevik collaboration and funds for the running of Trotski’s popular newspaper Pravda.
What Lenin had not bargained for was that, in getting rid of Bogdanov and the anti-Duma Bolsheviks, he was tipping the balance of opinion inside the Bolshevik faction in favour of those who sought to co-operate with the Mensheviks. Prominent among them was the otherwise inconsequential figure of A. I. Lyubimov. The Bolshevik Centre rubbed home its message by choosing Lyubimov as its secretary. Yet Lenin refused to listen; instead he threw himself into a hysterical, vain effort to get Lyubimov to toughen the Bolshevik Centre’s terms for collaboration with Trotski. Lenin’s family life did not lighten his mood. For once, it was he who had to look after his relatives rather than they who had to tend to him. Maria Ilinichna had fallen ill first with typhus and then with appendicitis, and Lenin had to play an active part in securing proper treatment for her. (Always his adoring and overawed sister, she appreciated his endeavours on her behalf.)28 But he had been driving himself too hard on too many fronts. After the Bolshevik Centre meeting he could take it no longer, and, together with Nadya, her mother and Maria, he moved off to the village of Bombon in Seine-et-Marne. Meekly he agreed to terms that, for him, were stiff indeed: he was to avoid talking and writing about politics.29
He did not keep his word and nobody seriously expected him to. Among his supporters there were still those who queried why one man could so easily reduce the party to a shambles. The Menshevik Fëdor Dan had often heard the question. His answer was straightforward: ‘Oh, it’s because there’s no such person who is so preoccupied twenty-four hours a day with revolution, who thinks no other thoughts except those about revolution and who even dreams in his sleep about revolution. So just you try and cope with him!’30 Dan had put it in a nutshell. Lenin was difficult because he was a factionalist and he was a factionalist because he thought only his ideas would genuinely advance the cause of the Revolution.
It was Bolsheviks and their sympathisers, however, who criticised
him most severely. They could no longer give him the benefit of the doubt. Gorki could not abide his ‘hooligan tone’. When Materialism and Empiriocriticism appeared under the imprint of St Petersburg publishers L. Krumbyugel, he read only a few pages before throwing the book across the room:31
All these people shouting to all and sundry – ‘I’m a Marxist’ and ‘I’m a proletarian’ – and then immediately sitting on the heads of their neighbours and barking in their face – are repugnant to me like all philistines; each of them is for me ‘misanthrope entertaining his own fantasy’ as [the short-story writer] Leskov called them. A person is rubbish if a vivid consciousness of his linkage with people isn’t beating inside him and if he’s willing to sacrifice comradely feeling on the altar of his vanity.
Lenin is like that in his book. His dispute about ‘truth’ is conducted not so that truth might be victorious but so as to prove: ‘I’m a Marxist! The world’s best Marxist is me!’
These were words that would have wounded Lenin if Gorki had said them openly rather than expressed them in a private letter to the Bogdanovs. Whereas the Mensheviks accused Lenin of megalomania, Gorki – a Bolshevik sympathiser – suggested that his was a personality driven by vainglory.
Lenin’s fortunes went on dipping. On their return from Seine-et-Marne, after a five-week sojourn, he and Nadya took a flat in the quiet Rue Marie-Rose. Lenin was immediately angered by the news that other Bolshevik Centre members had gone beyond their overtures to Trotski and were contacting Martov. Even his closest associate Grigori Zinoviev refrained from supporting him.
Lenin: A Biography Page 26