Lenin: A Biography
Page 65
Although neither Lenin nor his fellow party leaders saw in advance exactly what kind of state they would build, furthermore, there was more than random chance about their activity in the early years of the October Revolution. The Leninists carried a set of operational assumptions into power with them. Their understanding of politics gave priority to dictatorship, class struggle, leadership and revolutionary amoralism. The ‘vanguard’, they believed, knew what was best for the working class and should use its irrefutable knowledge of the world – past, present and future – to hasten the advent of the perfect society on earth. Lenin was not the originator of these assumptions. On the contrary, they were widespread and could be found in some form or other in Marxism, in mid-nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary terrorism and in Europe’s other authoritarian revolutionary doctrines. There were traces of them in tradition of even greater longevity. Not for nothing was Leninism compared to the millenarianism of pre-Petrine Orthodox Christianity as well as to sixteenth-century Calvinism. But the point is that there was no inevitability about the recrudescence of such traditions after 1900. It took a Russian Marxist party. More particularly, it took a Lenin.
And the state created by Lenin survived intact for more than seven decades. The edifice was thrown up with extraordinary rapidity even though the architectural planning had been minimal. In 1917–19, under Lenin’s guidance, the main work was already done. The foundations had been dug, the load-bearing walls erected and the roof sealed. Politics had been monopolised and centralised. The agencies of coercion were firmly under the party’s control. The economy was penetrated by state ownership and state regulation. Religion was systematically persecuted. National aspirations were handled with grave suspicion. High artistic and intellectual culture was rigorously patrolled. Schooling was steadily communised. Law was introduced and suspended at the communist leadership’s whim, and the legislative, executive and judicial functions of the state were deliberately commingled. The rulers treated society as a resource to be indoctrinated and mobilised. The assault was begun on all intermediate organisations that had any independence from the Kremlin.
Yet Lenin was complex as a leader and theorist. Inevitably sections of the edifice had to be added long after the building work had started; much improvisation took place and, of course, Lenin was not the sole architect: there were others in his party who had an impact on the progress of construction. The Bolshevik supreme leaders were constantly modifying their schemes. They did not drive the last surviving parties underground until 1921, and factions continued to exist in the Communist Party until Stalin’s despotism after the death of Lenin. The formal panoply of censorship bodies came into existence only in mid-1922. And the policies on nationhood, which Lenin thought would allow the state eventually to fuse the various nations of the USSR into a Soviet supranational consciousness, were initially quite favourable to the national and ethnic self-expression of the non-Russians. Furthermore, the period of Civil War and the New Economic Policy was characterised by a huge amount of chaos. Communications, administration, surveillance and coercion were carried out much more haphazardly than in subsequent years. Doctrine and policy were one thing; implementation was often entirely another.
Nevertheless the basic edifice was in situ years before Lenin’s demise. It was altered drastically by Stalin, who turned it into a personal despotism and reduced the authority of the party within the Soviet state. Stalin also practised butchery not only against the military foes and class, political and religious enemies of communism but even against the functionaries of his own government and party. Yet in truth the core of the building was left intact – and Stalin, despite being a manic rebuilder, undertook alterations that gave greater stability until his death in 1953. But Nikita Khrushchëv altered the alterations when inaugurating de-Stalinisation and another flurry of rebuilding took place. The experimentation was gathering pace by the time of Khrushchëv’s removal from office in 1964. His successor Leonid Brezhnev had a soft spot for Stalin’s record, but he contented himself with undoing the more extravagant of Khrushchëv’s alterations.
Yet, despite such vicissitudes, Soviet leaders were justified in claiming that they were ruling within the Leninist tradition and over a Leninist state. From 1917–19 to the late 1980s the edifice was recognisably Lenin’s creation. The October Revolution, Marxism–Leninism and the USSR owed their existence to him more than to anyone else. What Lenin had built in the peculiar circumstances of wartime, revolutionary Russia was an invention that could be reproduced. Lenin wanted to export his building plans and laid down that the member parties of the Communist International should conform to principles of ideology and organisation developed in Moscow. Given the chance, he would have applied his template to revolutionary communist states. This task, however, fell to his successor Stalin. Furthermore, the Leninist template proved serviceable for Marxist revolutionaries in China, North Vietnam and Cuba. It did not much matter what kind of country was being communised. Both industrial, literate, Catholic Czechoslovakia and agrarian, illiterate, Buddhist North Vietnam succumbed. The methods of introduction varied from invasion to local communist political agitation. But the result in its essentials was the same. Lenin, by the same token, had a lot to answer for.
Already in the 1920s there was a strong reaction outside Soviet Russia against Lenin’s edifice. The invention of fascism did not post-date communism; for Mussolini was already moving towards his far-right political doctrines on assuming power in Italy in 1922. But undoubtedly Hitler’s Nazism fed off a visceral hostility to the Communist International, Marxism–Leninism and the USSR. To a considerable extent the history of inter-war Europe was a struggle over the consequences of 25 October 1917. The situation did not disappear after the Second World War. Rivalry between the superpowers, the USA and the USSR, was a struggle of two contrasting systems of politics, economics, ideology and military capacity – and the Soviet system was largely the one bequeathed by Lenin to Stalin and by Stalin to his successors.
It is consequently a huge paradox that the man who did most to bring the Leninist edifice tumbling down was himself a sincere follower of Lenin. Mikhail Gorbachëv came to the office of Party General Secretary with the intention of restoring the USSR more nearly to the doctrines and practices of his idol. No less than Lenin, he improvised without reference to a detailed blueprint. He expanded his perspective on reform as he proceeded. What he and his fellow communist reformers failed to understand was that the edifice of communism was a tautly interconnected piece of architecture. Administration, politics, economics, law, ideology, welfare and even the treatment of the natural environment were heavily conditioned by the original Leninist conception. The removal of any wall, ceiling or doorway in the edifice carried with it the danger of structural collapse. Gorbachëv overlooked – indeed he was ignorant of – the risks. He abolished the Communist Party’s political monopoly. He decentralised administration. He relaxed censorship and liberated religious and national self-expression. He weakened the state’s mastery of the economy. He denounced the arbitrariness of Communist Party rule, and all this he did in the belief that he was restoring the spirit of Lenin to the USSR. Any single one of his reforms would have endangered the state’s stability. The fact that he introduced all the reforms in a few years doomed the October Revolution, Marxism–Leninism and the USSR to extinction.
Since the end of 1991, when the Soviet Union expired its last breath and Gorbachëv resigned his presidency, there have been few attempts to show Lenin his old reverence. The communist states had already passed away in 1989, and although outward fealty to Leninism continued to be shown in the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese economic reforms simultaneously reshaped the state and society in the direction of a capitalist economy. Even in Russia, where a communist party asserted itself under Gennadi Zyuganov, there was no special effort to go on defending and eulogising the historical record of Vladimir Lenin.
But is Lenin really done for? When surveys of Russian public opinio
n are undertaken he remains among the most popular rulers of history. His lingering popularity is such that Russia’s President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s has not dared to remove him from the Mausoleum from Red Square and bury him in conventional fashion. Respect for Lenin persists widely. While Lenin was alive, there was much admiration for him even among people who had suffered from his policies. And so peasant petitioners trusted him despite his ambition to get rid of the peasantry. After his death, he was often adduced in conversations and in folk songs as a wise tsar who would not have tolerated the abuses of power that were customary under his successors. No doubt the continuing official paeans to his greatness reinforced these popular inclinations. Nor can it be discounted that the image of Lenin will retain some considerable force in the Russian mind for many further decades. It is not even impossible that his memory might again be invoked, not necessarily by card-carrying communists, in those many parts of the world where capitalism causes grievous social distress. Lenin is not quite dead, at least not yet.
In trying to kill him off, Yeltsin the politician and indeed many anti-Leninist historians in Russia have opted for the weapons traditional among many Western writers. Nearly always this is attempted by representing him in a mono-dimensional way. Lenin the state terrorist. Lenin the ideologue. Lenin the party boss or the writer or even the lover. Not all the dimensions are given equal treatment – and this is not always the fault of the writers. Until the last few years, we could not know very much about Lenin’s family and their internal tensions and mutual support. And his education and material circumstances – not to mention his physical health, his liaisons, his style of work and his day-to-day operational assumptions – were largely out of reach.
Some of these aspects were kept secret because they might reflect badly on him in terms of conventional morality. He cheated on his wife, he exploited his mother and sisters, he was maudlin about his health, he had no great opinion of Russians or even of most Bolsheviks. He relished terror and had no plausible notion about how to ensure that the Soviet Union would be able to give it up. He was still cruder in his letters and telegrams than in his books. Much of his correspondence was so cynical that Stalin prohibited its publication even in the course of the Great Terror in 1937–8. What is more, Lenin was a bit of an oddball. He was punctilious in his daily regime, being downright obsessive about silence in his office, about sharp pencils, about ridding himself of distraction to the point of denying himself chess, Beethoven and the lovely Inessa. He was an intruder on the privacy of his comrades. No other world statesman has felt as uninhibited about ordering the medical treatment of his fellow rulers. Yet Lenin kept a grip on himself less often than the rest of the world ever knew. Without his entourage of women, he might not have risen to his historical eminence. There was, right to the last, something of the spoilt child about Lenin. He was also a spoilt child who had seldom had difficulty in getting the attention he needed.
His rise to power and fame was possible because he had the luck of his family, his education, his ideology, his country’s circumstances and – not the least – the personality with which he was born. But he had to make his luck work for him. He understood this; while insisting that the general political and economic circumstances had to be propitious, he never ceased to declare that revolutions did not simply happen: they had to be made. And this required leadership. Lenin might have failed, and so often – as in London in 1902 or Geneva in 1915 or even in Helsinki in 1917 – his reverses came close to being definitive. And if he had been balked over Brest-Litovsk in 1918 or the New Economic Policy in 1921, he might not be remembered now as one of the major figures of influence in the past century. And yet this short, intolerant, bookish, neat, valetudinarian, intelligent and confident politician did not stay a scribbler in the British Museum or the Geneva Public Library. His jerky gestures and lisping rhetoric did not hold him back. His lapses of prognosis did not undermine him. The brilliant student who became a gawky Marxist activist and factional leader made the most of what History pushed his way.
He led the October Revolution, founded the USSR and laid out the rudiments of Marxism–Leninism. He helped to turn a world upside down. Perhaps a few years hence he will be seen to have thrust his country and, under Stalin’s leadership, a third of the world down a cul-de-sac. The future does not lie with Leninist communism. But, if the future lies elsewhere, we do not know where exactly. Lenin was unexpected. At the very least, his extraordinary life and career prove the need for everyone to be vigilant. Not many historical personages have achieved this effect. Let thanks be given.
NOTES
Introduction
1. P. N. Pospelov, Vladimir Il’ich Lenin; I. Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879–1921.
2. N. Harding, Lenin’s Political Thought, vols. 1–2.
3. R. H. W. Theen, Lenin: Genesis and Development of a Revolutionary.
4. M. Liebman, Leninism Under Lenin; A. Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power.
5. M. Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle; S. F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution.
6. E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, vols. 1–3. On Lenin as a governmental co-ordinator, see also T. H. Rigby, Lenin’s Government and M. P. Iroshnikov, Predsedatel’ Soveta Narodnykh Komissarov.
7. A. Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence; O. Figes, A People’s Tragedy.
8. R. Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime; but see also his Social-Democracy and the St Petersburg Labor Movement, which includes an examination of the importance of ideology. My point, however, relates to Lenin’s period in government.
9. A. Solzhenitsyn, Lenin in Zurich; D. A. Volkogonov, Lenin: politicheskii portret.
10. V. Soloukhin, Pri svete dnya.
11. R. C. Elwood, Russian Social-Democracy in the Underground; D. Geyer, Lenin in der Russischen Sozialdemokratie; L. Haimson, The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism; J. H. L. Keep, The Rise of Social Democracy in Russia; L. Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
12. S. Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revlution; R. G. Suny. The Revenge of the Past.
13. R. Service, The Bolshevik Party in Revolution; see also Lenin: A Political Life, vols. 1–3.
14. A. Meyer, Leninism; M. Malia, The Soviet Tragedy.
1. The Ulyanovs and the Blanks
1. A. Ivanskii (ed.), Il’ya Nikolaevich Ul’yanov, p. 178.
2. Zh. Trofimov, Ul’yanovy, p. 66.
3. D. I. Ul’yanov, ‘Detskie gody Vladimira Il’icha’, VoVIL, vol. 1, p. 121.
4. M. Shtein, Ul’yanovy i Leniny, pp. 13–14 and 42.
5. V. V. Tsaplin, ‘O zhizni sem’i Blank v gorodakh Starokonstantinove i Zhitomire’, pp. 39–44.
6. Letter from Moshko (Dmitri) Blank as quoted in M. Shtein, Ul’yanovy i Leniny, p. 44.
7. M. Shtein, ‘Rod vozhdya. Bilet po istorii’, p. 19.
8. V. Soloukhin, Pri svete dnya.
9. I am grateful to John Klier for his thoughts on the converted Jews of the Russian Empire in the mid-nineteenth century.
10. O. Abramova, G. Borodulina and T. Koloskova, Mezhdu pravdoi i istinoi, pp. 53 and 55.
11. D. I. Ul’yanov, VoVIL, vol. 1, pp. 322–3; M. I. Ul’yanova, OVILiSU, p. 230.
12. M. Shtein, Ul’yanovy i Leniny, pp. 110–11.
13. A. I. Ul’yanova-Yelizarova, OVILiSU, p. 34. I am grateful to Faith Wigzell for her thoughts on the changing significance of German culture for Russian families.
14. O. Abramova, G. Borodulina and T. Koloskova, Mezhdu pravdoi i istinoi, pp. 64–6.
15. ibid., p. 106.
16. M. Shtein, Ul’yanovy i Leniny, p. 78.
17. D. I. Ul’yanov, VoVIL, vol. 1, pp. 322–3; M. I. Ul’yanova, OVILiSU, p. 230.
18. A. I. Ul’yanova-Yelizarova, OVILiSU, p. 111.
19. ibid.
20. M. I. Ul’yanova, OVILiSU, p. 231.
21. O. Abramova, G. Borodulina and T. Koloskova, Mezhdu pravdoi i istinoi, p. 67
22. A. Ivanskii (ed.), Il’ya Nikolaevich Ul
’yanov, pp. 10–12
23. M. Shtein, Ul’yanovy i Leniny, pp. 147–8.
24. The Russian hypothesis is examined with a degree of support in O. Abramova, G. Borodulina and T. Koloskova, Mezhdu pravdoi i istinoi, pp. 80–5.
25. A. Ivanskii (ed.), Il’ya Nikolaevich Ul’yanov, p. 8.
26. M. I. Ul’yanov, OVILiSU, p. 232.
27. Memoir by a teacher called Kabanova in V. Alekseev and A. Shver, Sem’ya Ulyanovykh, p. 16.
28. A. I. Ul’yanova-Yelizarova, OVILiSU, p. 130.
29. V. Alekseev and A. Shver, Sem’ya Ulyanovykh, p. 59.
30. ibid.
31. This was the recollection of Lyubov Veretennikova: Zh. Trofimov, Ul’yanovy, p. 75.
32. V. Alekseev and A. Shver, Sem’ya Ulyanovykh, p. 23.
33. ibid., p. 17.
34. A. I. Ul’yanova-Yelizarova, ‘Vospominaniya ob Aleksandre Il’iche Ul’yanove’, in OVILiSU, p. 29.
35. V. Alekseev and A. Shver, Sem’ya Ulyanovykh, p. 58.
36. A. I. Ul’yanova-Yelizarova, ‘Stranichki iz zhizhni Vladimira Il’icha’ [draft], RTsKhIDNI, fond 13, op. 1, d. 81, p. 20.
37. Zh. Trofimov, Ulyanovy, pp. 98–9.