Lenin: A Biography

by Robert John Service

  But the solutions he proposed to Bolsheviks were expressed very abstractly. He called for centralism, order, discipline and – increasingly – punishment. The theorist of organisation had never been very good at precise organisational advice. Even in What Is to Be Done? he had been loath to get down to details; and when he did, as in his ‘Letter to a Comrade about our Organisational Tasks’, he had tended towards a rather schematic set of recommendations. At any rate in late 1918, as he convalesced, he did not give much attention to pressing organisational matters. Instead he wrote a booklet to counteract what the party’s enemies had written about him. He had one enemy especially in mind: Karl Kautsky. Out at the sanatorium he composed Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade. For the first time in his career he did not write in longhand. His recuperation took some weeks, and even Lenin had to content himself with dictating his thought to a Sovnarkom secretary, Maria Volodicheva. The inner Lenin revealed himself. Despite his personal and political woes, what did he think it most important to do? To refute Kautsky, a theorist whose existence was completely unknown to the vast majority of the citizens of the Soviet republic, and who was not even the major Marxist leader in Germany.

  His words were unexceptional by Lenin’s standards, except for their bluntness. The various verbal evasions of 1917 were put behind him. He mocked Kautsky’s rejection of the desirability of ‘dictatorship’, and declared:4

  It’s natural for a liberal to talk generally about ‘democracy’. A Marxist will never forget to pose the question: ‘for which class?’ Everyone knows – and the ‘historian’ Kautsky knows it too – that the uprisings and even the strong cases of unrest among slaves in antiquity instantly exposed the essence of the ancient state as a dictatorship of slave-owners. Did this dictatorship eliminate democracy among slave-owners, for them? Everyone knows this not to be true.

  And so Lenin reaffirmed the precept that his socialism, which he thought to be the sole genuine form thereof, could be introduced only though dictatorship. He pressed the argument directly: ‘Dictatorship is the power relying directly upon force unbound by any laws.’5

  Yet he continued to be coy about the influences upon his thought. He mentioned Marx, Engels and Plekhanov, but practically no one else. Not once did he mention his admiration for the agrarian-socialist terrorists. Nor did he advertise another influential figure for him: the fifteenth-century writer Niccolò Machiavelli. Whereas Marx had written about the need for dictatorial repression, Machiavelli spelled out how to repress effectively. But having got himself into trouble in 1902 by praising the Russian narodniki, Lenin did not wish to associate himself with a thinker who for centuries had been notorious for promoting amoral techniques of rule; and when Lenin mentioned him in confidential correspondence, as in a letter to Molotov in 1922, he did not refer to Machiavelli by name but as ‘one wise writer on matters of statecraft’.6 Machiavelli, he confided to Molotov, ‘correctly said that if it is necessary to resort to certain brutalities for the sake of realising a certain political goal, they must be carried out in the most energetic fashion and in the briefest possible time because the masses will not tolerate the prolonged application of brutality’. So much for the idea that Lenin was always trying to limit the brutal nature of his regime. In fact he wanted the brutality to be as intense as possible in the short term so that it might not need to be unduly extended in time.

  Although we do not know when Lenin read Machiavelli, it is clear that that he was an admirer. There were several other authors he studied after the October Revolution. A few of them are known to us. Among them was John Maynard Keynes, whose treatise on The Economic Consequences of the Peace denounced the Treaty of Versailles. In this case Lenin was open about the influence; for Keynes castigated the territorial and economic dispositions made by the Allies in 1919. He also read Osvald Spengler’s Decline of the West. Spengler wrote that Western capitalism was doomed because of the natural cycle of civilisation from birth to life and then death. Lenin did not like the book, preferring an economic and political explanation for the doom that he too anticipated for the principal market economies; he said that Spengler was a bourgeois whinger.7 Evidently when Lenin read for pleasure, it could frequently be the pleasure of caustic contempt.

  In general, though, his intellect was engaged by concerns nearer to home. He focussed his efforts on sustaining the Soviet dictatorship against the attacks of White armies and foreign expeditionary forces. The solution chosen by the Central Committee and supported by the local party bodies was that a single supreme organ should head the Soviet state, decide policies and regulate their implementation. This, they believed, would eliminate the chaos and indiscipline. The organ they selected was their own party.

  There is controversy as to why this happened. All Soviet and most Western historians have suggested that it resulted from a deeply laid scheme stretching back to What Is to Be Done? in 1902.8 Yet it strains credulity – now that we can get at archival sources and scholars have looked for ‘dirt’ on Lenin wherever it may be found – that if the Bolsheviks had been planning a specific institutional form of state they would not have left evidence in their letters and memoirs. But such evidence has not come to light. Certainly Lenin was the founder of the one-party, mono-ideological state, but his sketches had been vague on crucial practicalities. What he had articulated was really a set of basic assumptions. He praised leadership and professed a capacity for infallible policies; he also believed in the need for a vanguard party. This was not yet a prescription for the Bolshevik party to become the supreme organ of the Soviet state. But the pressure of events pushed Lenin and his comrades to elaborate their assumptions and move towards this institutional invention within a year or so of the October Revolution. Those assumptions about revolutionary strategy started to count seriously in 1918–19. Policies changed; assumptions were modified in details, but not fundamentally.

  Not only Lenin and the Central Committee but the local party leaders were content with the transformation of politics. In January 1919 the Central Committee, most of whose members were frequently absent from Moscow in fulfilment of military or political duties, set up two small inner subcommittees: the Political Bureau (Politburo) and Organisational Bureau (Orgburo). The Central Committee, the Politburo and the Orgburo were empowered to take charge of the highest affairs of state. Despite being party bodies, they were really the supreme agencies of state and their decisions were mandatory for Sovnarkom, the Council of Labour and Defence and the People’s Commissariats.

  Lenin belonged to the Central Committee and Politburo and retained his post as Chairman of Sovnarkom and the Council of Labour and Defence. No one else had quite so steady a presence in the Kremlin. The only possible exception was Sverdlov, who was both Central Committee Secretary and Chairman of the Soviet Central Executive Committee, and it was Sverdlov who directed state affairs when Lenin was shot on 30 August 1918. As soon as Lenin recovered, Sverdlov resumed his position as Lenin’s right-hand man in Moscow. The dominance of Lenin and Sverdlov was such that their critics – and even some of their friends – described their rule as a duumvirate. Sverdlov was an imperious little man with an improbably deep voice and a penchant for dressing from head to toe in black leather; his energy seemed boundless. But on 16 March 1919 he died suddenly after a brief attack of ‘Spanish’ influenza. Deprived of a loyal adjutant, Lenin gave an impassioned eulogy at his graveside. Lenin and Sverdlov had not been friends. They spent no time relaxing in each other’s company, and Lenin did not show much regard for Sverdlov’s intellectual capacity or political understanding. But as an organiser, Sverdlov had been outstanding. He was irreplaceable and Lenin knew how much he was going to miss him.

  In ensuing years he tried out a series of substitutes for Sverdlov in the Central Committee: Stasova in 1919, Krestinski, Serebryakov and Preobrazhenski in 1920, Molotov and others in 1921 and – most fatefully – Stalin in 1922. All except Stalin were more subordinate to Lenin than Sverdlov had been. In the frequent absences of T
rotski, Stalin and Zinoviev, there was great latitude for Lenin as an individual to grasp the main levers of the central party and governmental machines.

  His confident manipulation of the levers is remarkable against the background of a private life that had entered an unsettled phase. After recuperating from the assassination attempt, he returned to full-time political work in the Kremlin on 14 October 1918. In fact he was not in good health. He was suffering from his old problems of headaches and insomnia. He had coped by taking walks around the Kremlin’s pathways at midday and midnight. His personal guards, who had no knowledge of his medical history, found this rather maddening since he could easily have been targeted by another gunman. Worse still, he disliked being surrounded by them and sometimes deliberately broke away from them.9 Often he invited either Nadya or his sister Maria to join him. He needed to talk to people he could trust – and neither Maria nor Nadya pressed their ideas on him. His other form of exercise was his hunting trips, which he undertook with Bolshevik associates. The People’s Commissars set off to slaughter the wildlife of the Moscow countryside. Lenin had last gone hunting when he was in Siberian exile and he was delighted to have a regular opportunity to go out with his rifle over his shoulder.

  Yet the trips were dangerous from a medical viewpoint. On several occasions he felt a tightening round his chest and an acute pain in his legs. His reaction was to think up some excuse to sit down; he mentioned nothing to his shooting partners. Almost certainly he was suffering what are designated as transient ischaemic attacks (or mild heart attacks). Lenin must have been aware of their seriousness since he consulted medical textbooks whenever he had physical problems. The shadow of mortality grew longer. Lenin became ever more impatient to do what he could for the Revolution before he died.

  His health was not the sole thing disturbing him. Although Nadezhda Konstantinovna’s memoirs refer to no tension between husband and wife, the external signs suggest a different story. When Lenin moved out to the Gorki sanatorium, she did not go with him.10 This would be explicable as feminist self-assertiveness if other things had not pointed to Nadezhda Konstantinovna’s disgruntlement. It must be of some significance that among the first visitors to Lenin’s bedside after the assassination attempt in August 1918 had been Inessa Armand.11 Inessa was then working in Moscow as a state functionary for the province’s economy and lived not far from the Kremlin. Her arrival in the Kremlin can hardly have been wonderful news to Nadezhda Konstantinovna. In late 1918 only a few persons could visit him and always they had to have an invitation or his prior permission. Lenin and Inessa had seen something of each other after the October Revolution since he had specifically asked that she should be invited to attend Sovnarkom sessions. Yet there is no evidence that Lenin resumed his affair with her (although this cannot be excluded). His days had been packed with work. What is more, he and Inessa were not in accord over politics; like most leading Bolsheviks, she had been thoroughly hostile to Lenin’s campaign for the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. But their friendship transcended politics, and, when Lenin lay prostrate with bullet wounds, he wanted her by his bedside.

  Meanwhile Nadya’s Graves’s disease and her heart palpitations were bothering her, and soon after Lenin returned to the Kremlin she departed for the park in the Sokolniki district on the city’s north-eastern edge; she stayed at her own request in a school where she was allocated a small first-floor room.12 Her treatment remained in the hands of Professor Gete, the family doctor for both the Lenins and the Trotskis.13 She stayed there through December and January. It was an odd move from a medical standpoint since the doctors could have more conveniently treated her if she had not left the apartment she shared with her husband and sister-in-law. Why, then, did she go? It may be that she needed a break from the busy routines of the Kremlin and that Professor Gete did not mind travelling out to examine her. But there are other possibilities. If indeed Nadya was shaken by Lenin’s request to see Inessa after the shooting, perhaps Nadya simply decided to find some tranquillity by herself. She may have thought that by isolating herself she would provoke Lenin into some deeper appreciation of her as his wife and lifelong companion-in-arms.

  This is as far as reasonable speculation can take us. Lenin, Nadya and Inessa did not leave further clues about their feelings at that time. Or, if they did, such clues have been lost to history. Nor should it be forgotten that, whatever the nature of Lenin’s relationship with Inessa Armand in 1918–19, his preoccupation in life was still with politics. Making and consolidating the Revolution remained his supreme passion.

  In any case, he kept a sense of marital obligation to Nadya and she in turn was gratified by his visits to her in Sokolniki. Usually he would arrive in the evening after work, accompanied by his sister Maria and driven by Stepan Gil.14 On Sunday, 19 January 1919 this was very nearly the cause of his death. Lenin, who had had been asked by the children of the Sokolniki school to attend a fir-tree party, set out from the Kremlin with Maria, Gil and his current bodyguard I. V. Chebanov. When they reached the Sokolniki Chaussée, they heard a sharp whistle. It was already dark; into the snow-laden road leaped three armed men who commanded Gil to halt the car. Gil thought them to be policemen and he obeyed the order. (In mid-1918 he had ignored such an order and the police had fired at the car!) Quickly Lenin showed them his documents. But the men forced him and the other passengers out of the vehicle, put a gun to Lenin’s temples and searched his pockets. Lenin remonstrated: ‘My name is Lenin.’ But they took no notice. The passengers still did not understand that the men were not policemen, and Maria asked to see their documents. The reply came back: ‘Criminals don’t need documents!’ The thieves stole Lenin’s Browning revolver and sped off in the car. Chebanov’s only positive accomplishment was to save the can of milk they were bringing for Nadezhda Konstantinovna.

  They trudged to the offices of the Sokolniki District Soviet, where Lenin had difficulty in convincing the clerk that he really was Lenin. Eventually the Soviet’s chairman and his deputy appeared, and recognised Lenin. Thus Lenin and his group arrived late at the children’s fir-tree party. On the same evening Dzierżyński organised a police hunt. The car was found after the robbers ran it into a snowdrift. A Red Army soldier and a policeman lay dead by the side of the vehicle: this could easily have been the fate of Lenin and his partners. Dzierżyński intensified the hunt. The robbers were detected and interrogated. They argued that they had misunderstood what Lenin had said to them. Instead of ‘Lenin’, they had heard ‘Levin’. But, having made their escape, they re-examined the documents and recognised who their victim really was. Their audacity was extraordinary. One of them, Yakov Koshelnikov, wanted to return immediately and kill Lenin. He calculated that the blame would be placed on counter-revolutionaries. There might even, Koshelnikov fantasised, be a coup d’état and he argued that in such a situation there would be no manhunt for the robbers. His fellow gang members, however, rejected his advice. Lenin was luckier than he knew at the time.15

  Yet Lenin and the other central Bolshevik leaders could not help but recognise the fragility of the state’s rule over Russia. Biographies in the past have tended to overlook this. If a gang of three desperadoes in the capital could casually ponder whether to go back and assassinate the head of the government, things had come to a pretty pass. Indeed they had always been at a pretty pass and were not to undergo improvement until after the Civil War. Chaos and confusion in the meantime was the norm.

  Over the winter of 1918–19 there were several attempts to straighten out the crooked corners of the state’s institutions. By and large, Lenin had the support of officialdom of his party in this process. Soviets, party committees, trade unions and factory-workshop committees were brought to account by a central party and government apparatus that no longer felt inhibited by the need to consult with ‘the localities’. The Party Central Committee and Sovnarkom pressed for all institutions to behave in a more obedient, orderly, military-style fashion. The need for this had become acute
in November 1918. Until then the Red Army had been fighting against forces assembled by the Socialist-Revolutionary ministers of Komuch in Samara, and Trotski had been able to report several successes. Kazan was retaken on 10 September. The Komuch army, despite having been strengthened by the Czechoslovak Legion, was no match for the Reds. But in the meantime other armies had been formed to invade central Russia. These were led not by socialists but by former Imperial Army officers who detested not only Bolshevism but also socialism in general, as well as most kinds of liberalism. In southern Russia a Volunteer Army had gathered under the leadership of Generals Alexeev and Kornilov. In mid-Siberia there was another anti-Bolshevik contingent led by Admiral Kolchak. In Estonia, General Yudenich was putting together yet another. The military threat that had been posed by Komuch was about to be intensified.

  Once again, neither Lenin nor the rest of the Central Committee had any presentiment of this. Until then one anti-Bolshevik force seemed much like any other. But on 18 November 1918 Admiral Kolchak’s high command arrested the Socialist-Revolutionaries in Omsk and proclaimed Kolchak as Supreme Ruler of All Russia. The objective of this White Army was to move rapidly through to the Urals and then into central Russia. As they came to the strategically important Urals city of Perm in December, a desperate defence was expected. Instead the Bolshevik party and the local Soviet regime fell apart. In the ensuing winter months a triumphant Kolchak looked close to taking Lenin’s place in the Kremlin.

  Lenin’s reaction to the Perm disaster showed up his weaknesses in this initial period of the Civil War. He had a matchless knowledge of the mechanisms of the supreme state agencies. He saw to it, too, that he stayed in touch with popular feelings by means of his trips around Moscow and his audiences with peasant petitioners from the provinces (even though he ruthlessly trampled on such feelings whenever he felt that considerations of either Marxist ideology or Realpolitik should take precedence). But Lenin had little appreciation of the enormous chaos of the regime lower down the administrative hierarchy from the Kremlin. Sitting in his office, he could rely on the phones working. He could order books from libraries and read the day’s papers on the morning of publication. He could count on personal assistants and secretaries to do whatever he wanted of them, and he never wanted for food, clothing and shelter. He did not live sumptuously in the Kremlin; but by the standards of party, government and army officials outside Moscow he was a pretty protected, not to say pampered, leader. His isolation from provincial reality dissuaded him from blaming any setbacks on his own policies or upon the inherent difficulties of politics in the regions. Instead he chastised individuals. Always they were judged too weak, too stupid or too dissolute. In the case of the military débâcle at Perm, Lenin simply concluded that one of the main local officials, M. M. Lashevich, had been drunk on the job.16