Lenin: A biography

The philosophical side of Lenin’s mind was strong on conviction, but dogmatic. He was absolutely certain that ‘Marx’s philosophy is consummate philosophical materialism’,36 and the only true theory. In one of his last works, criticizing the Menshevik Sukhanov, he wrote: ‘You say that to create socialism one must have civilized behaviour. Fine. But why couldn’t we create the prerequisites for civilized behaviour from the start, by expelling the landowners and expelling the capitalists, and then start the movement to socialism? Where have you ever read that such changes in the usual historical order are not acceptable or impossible?’37 In other words, if the Marxist books have not prohibited it, any ‘historical order’ is permissible.

The aesthetic side of Lenin’s mind was less despotic, perhaps because art was less closely associated with politics than law and philosophy, or perhaps because he did not feel as confident in this sphere. Berdyaev may have exaggerated in calling Lenin backward and primitive in art, but only slightly. His taste was extremely conservative, while his range of knowledge of literature was more extensive. He cited and used Chernyshevsky more than any other writer – more than 300 times in his collected works, indeed – but he also quoted from a range of nineteenth-century Russian writers whose interests and themes tended towards the social and political. He wrote an article on Tolstoy, but he cited Dostoevsky only twice in all of his works.38 Preferring the classics to contemporary writing, he nevertheless much admired Gorky’s novel The Mother, which dealt with social and political problems on an accessible artistic level.

His earlier friendship with Lenin did not prevent Gorky from attacking the Bolsheviks fiercely in 1917 and 1918 in his Petrograd newspaper Novaya zhizn’. Under the heading ‘Untimely Thoughts’, he managed to publish forty-eight of these articles before the paper was closed down on Lenin’s orders in July 1918. Soon after the Bolshevik coup, on 7 (20) November 1917, Gorky had written: ‘Lenin and his comrades-in-arms think they can commit any crime, like the massacre at Petrograd, the storming of Moscow, abolition of freedom of speech, the senseless arrests – all the abominations that used to be committed by Plehve and Stolypin.* This is where today’s leader is taking the proletariat, and it should be understood that Lenin is not an omnipotent magician, but a cold-blooded trickster who spares neither the honour nor the lives of the proletariat.’39

Needless to say, these and many other articles which Gorky wrote at the time were not included in the thirty-volume edition of his works. Soon, however, Gorky altered his tone, aware that the regime was enduring and that he could not manage without its help and that of Lenin. In April 1919 he called on Lenin to ask him to release the Left SR N.A. Shklovskaya, secretary of the poet Alexander Blok. She was set free six months later. In September 1920 he asked Lenin to allow the publisher Z.I. Grzhebin to emigrate. Given Lenin’s personal magnetism, these visits had an effect, and soon Gorky was virtually tamed.

While Lenin himself approached art and literature as a consumer, as Party leader he saw in them a powerful instrument of political influence. It was perhaps for this reason that he was so hostile to Futurism and the other modernist trends in art. And no doubt when he urged the closure of the opera and ballet it was because he thought they were ‘court arts remote from the people’, and he could not see how singers and dancers might inspire the detachments that were carrying out food requisitioning. For him, the chief purpose of art was in developing ‘the best models, traditions, results of existing culture from the point of view of the world outlook of Marxism and the conditions of proletarian life in the epoch of the dictatorship’.40

Many biographers and people who met Lenin attest to the enormous ‘physical force’ of his mind. Perhaps this was because he usually crushed his opponent in argument with his absolute refusal to compromise; perhaps it was the uncompromising convictions themselves, the one-dimensional, virtually fanatical conviction. In any event, many people began to stress the force of Lenin’s mind, and to relate it to the shape of his head. Lunacharsky, for instance, remarked that ‘the structure of his skull is truly striking. One has to study him for a little while to appreciate its physical power, the contours of the colossal dome of his forehead and to sense something I can only describe as a physical emanation of light from its surface.’41 No one is able to confirm whether light really did emanate from Lenin’s forehead. Instead, we must make do with the five editions of his collected works, the forty volumes of the Lenin miscellanies, thousands of unpublished documents, thousands of works of hagiography and a handful of dispassionate, honest books about him. We do, however, have his plans and blueprints, and above all his actions, to judge him by.

The Phenomenon of Bolshevism

Every Soviet schoolboy knew the story of the Second Party Congress of 1903 and the difference between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks: Lenin and his ‘rock-hard’ followers ‘saw the Party as a combat organization, every member of which had to be a selfless fighter, prepared for everyday pedestrian tasks as well as to fight with a gun in his hand’, while Martov, ‘supported by all the wavering and opportunistic elements, wanted to turn the Party into an assembly room’. ‘With such a party,’ Lenin’s official biography informed us, ‘the workers would never have been victorious and taken power into their hands.’42 If a student should add that Plekhanov, though wavering and indecisive, sided with Lenin, he would earn an extra mark. Such a student would not, however, be told that it was in fact Martov’s more loosely defined formula for membership that was passed by the Congress, nor that it was only because Lenin obtained a majority in elections to the Party central organs that he could call his group the Majorityites, or Bolsheviks, while the ‘opportunists’ naturally became the Minorityites, or Mensheviks.

This laundered version migrated from book to book and became a fixed dogma in the public mind. In the years following October 1917, the term Menshevik became synonymous with opportunist, bourgeois conciliator, White Guard ally, foreign spy, enemy of the people. Naturally, this fundamentally affected attitudes towards the Mensheviks. When the Politburo discussed ‘the Menshevik question’ on 5 January 1922, it instructed Iosif Unshlikht, deputy chairman of the Cheka, to find two or three provincial towns, ‘not excluding those on a railway’, where Mensheviks could be settled. He was further told not to obstruct Mensheviks who wanted to leave the country, and that where a subsidy for fares was needed, he should apply to the Politburo.43 The days of mass execution had yet to come.

By concentrating on the organizational factor as the wall dividing the two wings of the Party, aspects of far greater significance were pushed into the background. In fact the true line dividing Bolsheviks and Mensheviks was not the issue of organization. The only true social democrats were the Mensheviks: they recognized democracy, parliament and political pluralism as values that could avert violence as a means of achieving social development. Democracy for them was a permanent value, not a political front. The Bolsheviks, by contrast, became increasingly convinced of the value of violence. And when they came to power, they believed they had conquered not only the bourgeoisie, but also their former Party comrades, the Mensheviks. ‘October,’ Stalin declared, ‘means the ideological victory of Communism over social democracy, of Marxism over reformism.’

Why did the Bolsheviks win? What was the appeal of their programme? Why did they survive, when it became clear they represented only the interests of the ‘professional revolutionaries’? The answers to these questions will lead to an understanding of the phenomenon of Bolshevism itself.

The First World War provided the key. The news that war had broken out at first caused shock among the Russian émigrés, followed by intellectual confusion, and finally the rapid growth of a defencist mood. A volunteer movement also sprang up as soon as war was declared. Many Russian émigrés in Paris, among them about a thousand Social Democrats, including Bolsheviks,44 were seized by patriotic fervour and rushed to join the French army. Most were drafted into the Foreign Legion, or languished in difficult circumstances because the French government did not know how to deal with them.45

On the other hand, a large group of Social Democratic internationalists, from both wings of the Party, soon emerged and began agitating against the imperialist war altogether. Prominent among them was Julius Martov, then living in Paris and editing a newspaper called Nashe slovo (Our Word). He called for the unification of all progressive forces in the struggle against the militarism of the imperialist powers and for an end to the war without reparations or annexations.46

The orthodox Bolsheviks took up a different position. When Lenin heard on 5 August 1914 that the German Social Democrats in the Reichstag had voted for the war budget, he declared, ‘From this day I am no longer a Social Democrat, I am a Communist.’47 The Bolsheviks would not formally change the name of the Party until their Seventh Congress in March 1918, when they became the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik). In 1914, however, Lenin was dissociating himself from the mainstream of European socialism, which in practical terms had suspended its political programme until the war was over, and was giving notice that he was bent on revolution, now more than ever. He did not, however, decline the help of the Austrian Social Democrat leader, Victor Adler, to get out of Austrian Galicia, where he had lived since 1912, in order to be physically closer to events in Russia, and to make his way to Switzerland, where he launched into a spate of writing. His first significant response to the war was a manifesto entitled ‘The Tasks of the Revolutionary Social Democrats in the European War’. In it he penned the phrase that was to become sacrosanct in Soviet historiography: ‘From the point of view of the working class and the toiling masses of all the peoples of Russia, the lesser evil would be the defeat of the tsarist monarchy and its troops, which are oppressing Poland, the Ukraine and many other peoples of Russia.’48 He went further in November 1914 when he wrote, ‘Turning the present imperialist war into civil war is the only proper proletarian slogan.’49

He was calling for the defeat of his own country, and for making an already hideous war into something even worse: a nightmare civil war. With the seizure of power in mind, this may have been a logical position to take, but from the moral point of view it was deeply cynical. Desiring the defeat of the Russian army was one thing from the safety of Berne; it was quite another for those lying in the blood-soaked mud of the trenches on the Eastern front. What Lenin wanted was to turn the whole of Russia into a theatre of war. No one took any notice of his call, no one wanted to think about civil war, and in any case nobody then believed in the socialist revolution. True, Martov had warned at the outbreak of war that out of factional fanaticism Lenin wanted ‘to warm his hands by the fire that has been lit on the world arena’.50 But no one had taken heed.

In a letter of 17 October 1914 to one of his most trusted agents, Alexander Shlyapnikov, then in Sweden, Lenin wrote: ‘… the least evil now and at once would be the defeat of tsarism in the war. For tsarism is a hundred times worse than kaiserism … The entire essence of our work (persistent, systematic, maybe of long duration) must be in the direction of turning the national war into a civil war. When this will happen is another question, it isn’t clear yet. We have to let the moment ripen and “force it to ripen” systematically … We can neither “promise” civil war nor “decree” it, but we are duty bound to work – for as long as it takes – in this direction.’51 Articles embodying this message began appearing in the émigré press over Lenin’s signature. Despite his sideswipes at ‘imperialist Germany’, there were those in Berlin who realized that they had a new ally living in Switzerland. Seeing that there was no realistic way by which to seize power, Lenin took the side of Russia’s enemy, while clothing himself in the garb of internationalism.

When the Russian people had been driven to the limit by the war, and state power in effect lay on the streets of the capital, the Bolsheviks obtained power with remarkable ease, in exchange for the promise of peace. Lenin’s call to civil war was forgotten, but having gained power, he felt he had to go further; socialism seemed so close. If yesterday’s men could be swept away, one could go on with the great experiment unhampered. Having given the people peace (however unreal and shortlived) and land (which would soon be taken back when Russia’s peasants were turned into twentieth-century serfs), Lenin also took back the liberty, such as it was, that he had promised.

The Bolsheviks survived because of their leader and because of their commitment to unbridled force. Lenin was the ideal leader in the situation. As Potresov was to write in 1937:

Neither Plekhanov nor Martov, nor anyone else, possessed the secret of Lenin’s hypnotic power over people, or rather his dominance over them. They respected Plekhanov, they loved Martov, but unswervingly they followed only Lenin as the sole undisputed leader. Lenin represented that rare phenomenon in Russia, a man with an iron will, indomitable energy, who poured fanatical faith into the movement and the cause, and had no less faith in himself … Behind these great qualities, however, there lurked great deficiencies, negative qualities, more appropriate perhaps in a medieval or Asiatic conqueror.52

What Lenin thought of Potresov he revealed in a letter to Gorky: ‘Such a swine, that Potresov!’53 Potresov had once been a close comrade of Lenin’s, and Lenin always kept his most savage invective for those who had deserted him.

In 1921 the Socialist Revolutionaries illegally published a pamphlet, at a time when it was just still possible to do so in Moscow. Entitled ‘What Have the Bolsheviks Given the People?’, it pointed out that the new masters had not fulfilled a single promise of their programme. Instead of peace, the country had been plunged into a bloody civil war lasting three years, and had lost some thirteen million people through the fighting, disease, terror or emigration. Famine raged, and the peasants were not sowing because they knew their grain would be confiscated. Industry lay in ruins. Russia had been cut off from the rest of the world and was shunned by almost everyone. A one-party dictatorship had been installed. The Cheka was a state within a state. The Constituent Assembly had been dispersed. The regime was conducting a war with its own people.54

One reason the Bolsheviks were able to survive was that their leader was himself capable of setting an example of merciless terror. For instance, in the autumn of 1920 he wrote to Krestinsky, a secretary of the Central Committee: ‘I suggest a commission be formed at once (one can do it secretly to start with) to work out extreme measures (in the way Larin proposed. Larin is right.) What about you plus Larin plus Vladimirsky (Dzerzhinsky) plus Rykov?* The preparation of terror in secret is necessary and urgent.’55 What need had the country of a regime that sought to achieve its aims by means of terror as state policy? Force was the style of the Bolsheviks and their leader. The paradox of Bolshevism – the Majorityites – was that theirs was a dictatorship of the minority, a fact observed by Martov in 1919 when writing a book on the intellectual and psychological origins of Bolshevism, which was published before completion by Fedor Dan in Berlin in 1923.

In 1923 Martov, who was terminally ill, wrote that Lenin had promised to bring in immediately all the measures detailed by Marx and Engels, namely election and recall of the government, workers’ pay to be the norm, everyone to carry out the functions of control and supervision, so that none would become bureaucrats. ‘Reality has harshly dashed all these hopes,’ he wrote. ‘The Soviet state has revealed a tendency towards the extreme strengthening of state centralism, the maximum development of hierarchical and coercive principles in the community, and the growth and super-abundance of all the special organs of state repression.’56

The slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’ had been replaced by ‘All Power to the Bolshevik Party’, while the Politburo possessed powers beyond those of any emperor. In 1919, it ordered that hostages should be shot if there were any more incidents of bombs being thrown at the civilian population;57 that anyone failing to hand in weapons within an allotted period should be severely punished, even executed.58 In April 1920 Lenin and Stalin (as People’s Commissar for Nationalities) signed a cable to their emissary in the Caucasus, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, forbidding self-determination for Georgia.59 Lenin also ordered the arrest of the delegates at an All-Russian Zionist conference being held in Moscow, as well as the publication of compromising material on them.60 The list is endless. It is noteworthy that the Politburo, which at times had up to forty items on its agenda, rarely dealt with strictly Party affairs. The Party had become a state organ.

The system created by Lenin in turn soon created a new type of man in whom, in Berdyaev’s words, the motives of strength and power displaced those of love of truth and compassion.

This new man, perfectly suited to Lenin’s plan, became the material of the Party organization and took over the vast country. Alien to Russian culture, their fathers and grandfathers had been illiterate and devoid of all culture, living solely by faith. The people had sensed the injustice of the old order but had borne their suffering meekly and humbly … But the time came when they could take no more … Their mildness and humility became savagery and fury. Lenin could not have carried out his plan of revolution and seizure of power without this revolt in the soul of the people.61

Lenin’s political approach was the negation of traditional democratic institutions, such as parliament, the resort to purely revolutionary methods, the idolizing of force. Combined with a powerful mind, strong will and the conviction that he was right, it was an approach that exerted a powerful attraction on those who believed in the possibility of making a leap from the kingdom of want into the kingdom of liberty. In 1904, in ‘Forward or backward?’, replying to Lenin’s ‘One Step Forward, Two Steps Back’, Martov wrote:

Reading these lines, breathing as they do a petty, at times senseless personal malice, amazing narcissism, blind, deaf, unfeeling fury, endless repetition of the same old meaningless ‘fighting’ and ‘scathing’ little words, one becomes convinced that this is a man who is fatally compelled to slide further down the slope onto which he stepped ‘spontaneously’ and which will take him straight to the full political corruption and shattering of social democracy.62

The Party went on splitting itself, expelling ‘factions’, ‘deviations’ and ‘platforms’, incapable because of its fanaticism of seeing these as differences of opinion rather than obsessions, as creative endeavours rather than fossilized dogma. The splits continued until, by the beginning of the 1930s, all that was left was a Stalinist monolith that was utterly incapable of changing. The situation could only lead to disaster.

Lenin and the Mensheviks

When the Third Party Congress opened in London in April 1905, with Lenin as its chairman, he paid particular attention to questions of combat: he believed that tsarism was ‘rotten through’ and that it must be helped to crash to the ground. He made a long speech about armed uprising, tabled a motion on the issue, and tried to convince the delegates that a revolution was a real possibility.63 Throughout this time, he kept up his criticism of the Mensheviks. When they called for active exploitation of a proposed assembly, Lenin insisted on a boycott, since in his view any parliament was nothing more than a ‘bourgeois stable’. When he read Martov’s article ‘The Russian Proletariat and the Duma’, published in the Vienna paper Rabochaya gazeta, he became enraged at his former comrade’s call to the Social Democrats to take part in elections to the tsarist parliament, and gave his reply in an article entitled ‘At the Tail of the Monarchist Bourgeoisie or at the Head of the Revolutionary Proletariat and Peasantry?’64 The very notion of achieving socialist, democratic and progressive goals by means of reforms, parliament and legal social struggle was blasphemy. Lenin could not see the colossal possibilities of parliamentary activity. His speeches breathe hatred for the liberals and reformists, among whom the most dangerous in his view were of course the Mensheviks.

Lenin’s reaction to the October Manifesto, like that of Soviet historians thereafter, was that it was merely a tactical manoeuvre by the tsar and the bourgeoisie, engineered by the tsar’s brilliant prime minister, Count Witte. According to eye-witnesses, the tsar realized that in signing the document he was taking a step towards constitutional, parliamentary monarchy. The autocracy had retreated and given a chance for democratic development. Had the Social Democrats – not only Lenin – not at once labelled the Manifesto a ‘deception’, and had they instead fought to make it a reality, history might have been different. Instead, the Manifesto was interpreted as a sign of weakness, and Lenin prepared to return to Russia to help bury the autocracy. He was convinced the moment was approaching. His articles now bore such titles as ‘The Approach of the Dénouement’, ‘On the New Constitutional Manifesto of Nicholas the Last’, ‘The Dying Autocracy and the New Organs of People’s Power’.

The differences with the Mensheviks were temporarily pushed to one side. They, meanwhile, like all the liberals, were having second thoughts about changing the existing political structure by force. Even relatively conservative, intelligent politicians like Witte were saying, ‘Russia has outgrown her existing structure. She is striving for a legal structure based on civil liberty.’ Witte proposed that the tsar ‘abolish repressive measures against actions which do not threaten society and the state’.65

The government’s concessions were, however, dismissed, tension rose, and the Bolsheviks forced events by exploiting the workers’ discontent. Lenin’s espousal of widespread violence and terror, however, pushed the Mensheviks further away from the idea of Party reunification. In September 1908, Martov wrote in exasperation to his friend and Menshevik comrade Pavel Axelrod: ‘I confess that more and more I think that even nominal involvement with this bandit gang is a mistake.’66 They were both unwilling to make peace with sectarianism and conspiratorial methods. While keener on reunification than the Bolsheviks, they also wanted to retain democratic principles within the Party. As for Plekhanov, he had long decided that true reunification was impossible. In his view, Lenin regarded reunification as his faction swallowing up and subordinating all the other elements of Russian social democracy, and thus depriving the Russian revolutionaries of any democratic basis. Plekhanov pointed out that instead of underlining the common features shared by the two wings (which both had their roots in the labour movement), Lenin emphasized their differences, and was an incorrigible sectarian.67

As the culmination of the Russian drama of 1917 approached, with defeats at the war front, hunger and chaos, the Bolsheviks concentrated all their energy on preparing the armed uprising. The Mensheviks meanwhile focused on peace and liberty, the Constituent Assembly and a new constitution, a strategy Lenin regarded as treacherous, for it weakened the revolutionaries’ chances of a victorious uprising. In the final analysis, the difference between the two factions boiled down to the Bolsheviks’ wanting socialism on the basis of a dictatorship, and the Mensheviks’ wanting it on the basis of democracy. In Fedor Dan’s words: ‘Menshevism stood for turning the struggle for “bourgeois” political democracy and its preservation into its first priority; while Bolshevism put the “building of socialism” at the top of its agenda, throwing overboard and attacking the very idea of a “routine democracy”.’68