Lenin: A Biography

by Robert John Service

  Aphorism: It is impossible to obtain a complete understanding of Marx’s Das Kapital and especially its first chapter without first having made a thorough study and acquired an understanding of the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently not one Marxist in the past half-century has completely understood Marx.

  Lenin was monumentally pleased with himself. He felt that he had done something that had foiled all other successors of Marx and Engels. Implicitly he set himself up as the only true expounder of the Marxist tradition. From Marx and Engels a straight genealogical line could now be drawn to Lenin.

  Lenin belonged to a community of socialist intellectuals in which it was thought very bad form to make personal boasts: he therefore did not use the aphorism in public. But he meant it seriously nonetheless. He had come to his revised understanding of Marxism by means of intensive philosophical study. He picked up particular texts by Marx and Engels, especially Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach. But he also took up an examination of Hegel, who had had an impact upon the formation of the ideology of Marx and Engels. Hegel’s vast History of Philosophy was the object of his detailed attention. Feuerbach, too, attracted his scrutiny.

  Nor did he stop at that. He went, too, to the works of Aristotle. For the first time since adolescence he took an opportunity to search out some significance in the Classical heritage he had learned in the Simbirsk gimnazia. Until then he had confined himself to proverbs and phrases he remembered from his youth. In the Great War, Lenin wanted to draw intellectual sustenance of a more substantial kind from ancient Greek philosophy. Marxist scholars had always known in principle of Hegel’s influence on Marx, and Hegel openly alluded to Aristotle as his own precursor in many fundamental aspects of epistemology and ontology. This was enough for Lenin to go back and explore Aristotle’s work. He had to do this from scratch since Aristotle had not been an author on the gimnazia curriculum. Perhaps if Lenin had known more about Marx’s other intellectual influences (which was not possible for anyone in the early years of the century), he would probably have been drawn to the works of the pre-Socratic philosophers. Marx had written a brilliant dissertation on one of them, Heraclitus, when he was a postgraduate. But Lenin anyway found plenty of things of interest in Aristotle.

  This was not an endeavour lightly undertaken. The dense German prose of Hegel’s History of Philosophy involved labour enough, but Aristotle’s Metaphysics were even more onerous as Lenin had not kept up his Greek since the gimnazia, and he made use of a parallel-text edition in German and Greek. His school training had given him an ability to understand any text very quickly. Although he could speak German and French (and English rather less satisfactorily), he read things much more fluently. He had few rivals in picking up books and filleting their contents for quick information.

  In returning to the Classics, Lenin was looking for justification as a Marxist theorist. More generally – and less consciously – he sought to examine and shore up his own intellectual foundations. He had been brought up not only as a Russian but also as a European. He was the child of parents and teachers who believed in Science, Enlightenment and Progress. Within that cultural milieu it had been customary to trace a line of human achievement back to the great writers of Athens and Rome. The Classics were at the origins of European civilisation and were a resource of invaluable intellectual refreshment. His Marxism discouraged him from using terms such as civilisation positively except in unguarded moments; for Marx had taught that all ‘civilised’ societies in history had been characterised by exploitation and oppression. But under the surface of his ideology Lenin was a typical late-nineteenth-century middle-class European. The good life was a European one. Civilisation was European. The rest of the world, like the USA in the recent past, had to be Europeanised. When he wanted to refer in shorthand to people who had yet to attain a reasonably high level of culture, he referred breezily to ‘Hottentots’. Lenin was not devoid of the prejudices of a privileged, educated member of an imperial nation.

  So what did he discover in Aristotle? The unfinished language of Lenin’s notebooks conveys his excitement. Essentially he was dropping large parts of the epistemology of his 1908 book, Materialism and Empiriocriticism. He was not frank about this. When he criticised past Marxist expositions, his targets were Kautsky and other leading Marxists, not himself. In fact his own theory of knowledge had been cruder than any offered by any leading Marxist theorist; Materialism and Empiriocriticism had suggested that the human mind was akin to a camera and that ‘external reality’ was always accurately registered and reproduced by the mind’s camera-like processes. Not so in the notebooks written in the Great War:12

  Cognition is nature’s reflection by man. But it’s not a simple and not an unmediated, complete reflection but the process of a series of abstractions, of the formation or construction of concepts, laws, etc.; and these concepts, laws, etc. (thought, science = ‘the logical idea’) also comprehend in a conditional, approximate fashion the universal pattern of an eternally moving and developing nature.

  This statement would have been unimaginable in any of Lenin’s writings before 1914.

  What had happened was that he had at last found a rationale for the risky, exploratory approach to politics for which he was well known. Earlier he had claimed that his policies were based on predetermined scientific principles. Now he asserted that ‘practice’ was the only true test of whether any policy was the right one. Flexibility was essential. Ideas had to be ‘hewn, chopped, supple, mobile, relative, reciprocally linked, united in opposites in order to embrace the world’. This, he held, was the truth available from the philosophy of Aristotle, Hegel and Marx. Nothing was permanent or absolutely definite; everything was interactive: it was in the nature of material and social relationships that factors clashed with each other and – by virtue of this ‘dialectical’ process – produced complex, changeable results. Politics required experimentation and Marxists should accept that they would involve ‘leaps’, ‘breaks’ and ‘interruptions of gradualness’. All this, for Lenin, was a philosophical antidote to Kautsky.

  The pleasure he took in this particular result gives a hint that Lenin had not been studying epistemology and ontology with anything like an open mind. His research in the Bern Public Library had not been undertaken out of simple intellectual inquisitiveness; he was devouring Hegel, Feuerbach and Aristotle with a specific end in view. If his research had corroborated Kautsky’s position, he would simply have looked to other authors for support. Lenin, as had been obvious since his economic works of the 1890s, was a reader with a political mission. Another point deserves emphasis. This is that Lenin did not manage to arrive remotely near to a coherent philosophical standpoint. His notebooks were full of contradictions. While asserting the ‘conditional, approximate’ nature of cognition, he still believed in the attainability of absolute truth and in the independent existence of the external world. The notebooks were the part-time jottings of a man who would not have passed a first-year philosophy examination. They were muddled. They were also ungenerous: Lenin did not have it within him to acknowledge that essentially he had reversed his position in regard to several basic criticisms he had made of Bogdanov in 1908. Admission of error was something he did only very rarely.

  Yet he had readied himself intellectually for the kind of revolutionary process that occurred in 1917. Even in 1905 he had altered policy at his whim. But now he had a rationale. He had justification, as he saw it, for splitting with any Marxist in Europe who irked him. This became evident when far-left socialists opposing their respective governments in the war began to co-ordinate their activity. Lenin wanted such co-ordination. But he was not the leading light of such efforts. This indeed was part of the problem: the Swiss socialist Robert Grimm and the Italian Odino Morgari had campaigned for some time to organise an international meeting of socialists who wished to end the war. Yuli Martov, too, had played a prominent role. All were appalled at the way their fellow socialists had given up campaigning against governments for the
duration of the war. The point, they argued, was to stop the fighting. They attributed the war’s outbreak to a variety of causes. Personal, dynastic, diplomatic, economic and imperial factors were adduced in their many pamphlets on the subject; and not a few of the pamphleteers were simply pacifists. Lenin, advocate of ‘European Civil War’, stuck out like a sore thumb.

  But at least they agreed that neither military coalition was blameless. Everyone contacted by Grimm believed that the Allies and the Central Powers were as bad as each other. The solution, they argued, had to be based on internationalist principles. Military victory for either the Allies or the Central Powers would involve annexations and indemnities. It would be the triumph of one imperialism over another. It would be no peace worthy of the word. Lenin could therefore accept Grimm’s invitation to join him in the Swiss village of Zimmerwald for a conference of anti-war left-wing socialists from the combatant countries in Europe.

  He worked hard to develop the arguments to strengthen his political case. This led him to conduct research on the global capitalist economy; his notebooks contained references to 148 books and 232 articles. Already Lenin had endorsed a book by Bukharin on the same topic, but he wanted to put things his own way. Privately he thought Bukharin to have exaggerated the smoothness of present economic developments. Lenin considered it wholly wrong to predict that capitalism would eventually form a ‘world economic trust’. Bukharin, he thought, had forgotten the Marxist axiom that capitalist economies were inherently unstable and incapable of harmonious co-operation with each other. The result was a book, Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism, which he asked his sister Anna to get published legally in Petrograd. Anna duly complied, and secured a contract for him. But she sensibly noted that Lenin had filled his draft with bilious remarks about Kautsky. On her own initiative she excised them in order to render the book more appealing to the publishers. Lenin had either to accept her action or forgo the contract. For once, albeit with bad grace, he backed down – and publication was scheduled for 1917: only the outbreak of the February Revolution meant that it failed to appear under tsarism.

  There was already a large Marxist literature on imperialism. Karl Radek, Rosa Luxemburg, I. I. Skvortsov-Stepanov, Nikolai Bukharin and Karl Kautsky himself had worked upon the ideas of Rudolph Hilferding. All agreed that capitalism had entered a mature period of dominance by ‘finance capital’ and that national economies were being thrust by the very nature of capitalism into economic rivalries that made them seek external markets, grab colonies and fight other imperial powers for theirs. Lenin, too, was influenced by this literature. He was also impressed, like Hilferding, by the efficiency of the German war economy. The wartime regulatory framework for production and consumption was ironically known as Kriegsozialismus (‘War Socialism’), which Hilferding thought could be turned to good account by the socialists. The high level of co-ordination within the capitalist economy, he argued, provided one of the preconditions for a total social revolution. But Lenin disagreed utterly with Hilferding beyond this point. Whereas Hilferding felt that violent revolution could and should be avoided, Lenin was unable to see any other way of making a revolution. ‘It is necessary for us ourselves’, he wrote, ‘to seize power in the first instance, and not chatter in vain about “power”.’13

  Hilferding and Kautsky had put forward the possibility that capitalist countries might eventually resolve their political disputes in such a fashion as to be able to exploit their colonies in common. Lenin was aghast. To advocate such a plan was to accept that capitalism could endlessly survive. Lenin by contrast urged that the various empires could not help but clash with each other. He described a hierarchy of imperialisms in order of economic progressiveness. The USA was at the top. Germany and Japan came next, followed by Britain and France. Portugal was last of the imperial powers, being only marginally ahead of Russia. This world of imperialisms would not settle down at the end of the Great War. According to Lenin, either there would be socialist Revolution or else there would be recurrent wars until such time as Revolution took place. Lenin was out to show that any dreams of softening the conflict of world capitalism were illusory. Only Revolution would do.

  And so to the international socialist movement organised by Morgari and Grimm and attended by Lenin. Two little Alpine conferences were held. The first took place in the holiday village of Zimmerwald, up the mountains behind Bern, in September 1915; the second occurred in Kiental in the same vicinity in April 1916. Both conferences were sparsely attended. Trotski remarked that half a century after the foundation of Marx’s First Socialist International it was still possible for all of Europe’s internationalists to be accommodated in four charabancs.14

  Whereas everyone else regretted the paucity of delegates, Lenin was delighted. He knew that the smaller the number was, the greater would be the proportion of those who advocated policies near to his own. Still, however, he was angry. He raged at the invitations sent to Karl Kautsky and Hugo Haase, who refused to break openly with the German Social-Democratic Party, and was even more annoyed when Haase promised to come. At first Lenin let Zinoviev conduct negotiations with like-minded delegates from other countries. But he did not fully trust even Zinoviev and took to discussing matters directly with Karl Radek, the Polish Jew who had once held membership of the German Social-Democratic Party. Radek was not easy to cajole. Lenin had to drop his formula that socialists should campaign for the military defeat of their national governments. He was also compelled to stop demanding a complete break with the official socialist parties that had voted war credits for their governments. Radek’s more judicious line prevailed. He knew Lenin’s history, and resolved that the Zimmerwald Conference would not be turned into an assembly of polemical doctrinairism. Nevertheless the group of delegates put together by Radek and Lenin never amounted to more than eight, including both Radek and Lenin.

  Having made his compromise with Radek, Lenin decided to be a good fellow and not rock the boat (or rather the charabanc). Only once did he cause trouble. This was when Georg Lebedour objected to Radek’s call for street demonstrations. Lenin exclaimed: ‘The German movement is faced with a decision. If we are indeed on the threshold of a revolutionary epoch in which the masses will go over to revolutionary struggle, we must also make mention of the means necessary for this struggle.’15 These were words of a believer and a logician. The Zimmerwald Conference was being asked to spell out the things that many delegates who were anxious about the reception that might await them back home aimed to obfuscate. Yet the leftist speakers got some of what they wanted. The Conference declared the Great War to have been caused and prolonged by ‘imperialist’ rivalries. It castigated the socialist parties that had voted war credits (without naming them directly). The Conference agreed that military hostilities could be ended only by engagement in ‘irreconcilable proletarian class struggle’.16

  But it was the convenors of the Conference, especially Robert Grimm, who gained most satisfaction from Zimmerwald. They had good reason. In December 1915 Hugo Haase, having returned from Switzerland, led a faction of German social-democratic deputies in the Reichstag in open criticism of war credits. Haase and Kautsky called for socialists everywhere to put all pressure on their government to compose a ‘peace without annexations’. Here was proof, argued Grimm against Lenin, that persuasion could have a positive effect. He looked forward to enhancing this atmosphere at the next Conference, to be held in Kiental from 26 April 1916.

  Grimm, however, was disappointed. The Kiental Conference, attended by forty delegates, was noisy and bad-tempered from the start. The mandates of some delegates were challenged. Delegations fell into internal altercations. Several invited delegates found reason not to come; in particular, Haase and Kautsky took exception to the fact that the Zimmerwald Conference had set up an International Socialist Commission. For them, this was an infringement of the rights of the International Socialist Bureau; and they held to this opinion even though the International Socialist Bureau had ba
rely operated in wartime. Of course, Lenin was delighted by their absence, having convinced himself that Kautsky was the incarnation of political betrayal. Kautsky, he asserted, was a Mädchen für Alle – a political prostitute who would go to bed with virtually anyone in public life if he could avoid a clash with the German government. Having come to this conclusion in August 1914, Lenin would not budge. It had become an indissoluble ingredient not only in his politics but also in his emotional life that Kautsky was a renegade. The last thing Lenin wanted was for Kautsky to have a chance to resume his doctrinal sway over European Marxism.

  At Kiental, Lenin shone no more brightly than at Zimmerwald. The difficulty was that the far-left delegates (who now called themselves the Zimmerwald Left) were few and all of them suspicious of Lenin. Nonetheless he had some grounds for cheer. The Kiental Conference condemned pacifism even though many delegates wanted an end to the war at any price; it also called for ‘vigorous action directed at the capitalist class’s overthrow’. This was close to Lenin’s idea that revolution was the way to end the war, and at the end of the proceedings he was happier than he had thought he would be.

  He was lucky that the German Marxists whom he criticised for indulging their government did not know that he had some unusual contacts of his own with the same government. At first this had taken the form of sending political literature to Bolsheviks in German POW camps. Chief among these was none other than Roman Malinovski, who had enlisted in the Russian Imperial forces and had been taken captive. Lenin, who still refused to believe that Malinovski had worked for the Okhrana, spread Bolshevik propaganda among Russian POWs through lectures given by Malinovski.17 The German high command facilitated this since Lenin advocated Russia’s defeat. Baron Gisbert von Romberg, the German minister in Bern, had been made aware of Lenin’s activities through an Estonian nationalist, Alexander Keskuela, who also sought the overthrow of the Romanovs. Another adviser to the Germans was Alexander Helphand-Parvus, who had influenced the thinking of Lev Trotski in 1905. Parvus was a harsh left-wing critic of the German Social-Democratic Party; he was also a wealthy businessman whose murky deals in Scandinavia, the Balkans and Turkey had involved errands on behalf of the German government. One of Lenin’s associates, Jakub Hanecki, was an employee of Parvus in Stockholm. Although Lenin’s direct meetings with Keskuela and Parvus were rare, there is strong circumstantial evidence that the Germans made finance available to the Bolsheviks as a result.