Lenin: A biography

The illegal, conspiratorial character of the Party predetermined the mutual penetration, if not fusion, of this ‘social’ organization and the state security organs. The process occurred officially and ‘legally’. One of Lenin’s most trusted agents, Yakov Ganetsky, wrote to Lenin on 10 October 1919 proposing ‘the closest possible ties between the Party organizations and the extraordinary [security] commissions … and to oblige all Party members in responsible posts to report to the … commissions any information they obtain by both private and official means and which might serve to combat counter-revolution and espionage. They should also actively help the … commissions by taking part in solving cases … being present at interrogations and so on.’6 Lenin could hardly have made the point clearer, when he stated, ‘A good Communist is a good Chekist [secret policeman] at the same time.’7

Theorist of Revolution

As had become their custom, late on the morning of 10 January 1905 Lenin and Krupskaya were making their way to the city library in Geneva, where they were then residing. On the steps they ran into Anatoly Lunacharsky and his wife, who told them the wonderful news that revolution had broken out in St Petersburg. They all ran to Lepeshinsky’s émigré restaurant, where the events were already being discussed excitedly. Lenin proposed a joint meeting with the Mensheviks, on condition that only one speaker from each side take the floor, and two days later the two irreconcilable factions met. Lunacharsky spoke for the Bolsheviks, Fedor Dan for the Mensheviks. But each side was more intent on preventing the other from scoring a success than on discussing realities. When Dan hinted darkly at ‘splitters’, Lenin gave a signal and the Bolsheviks walked out.8

Everything Lenin had written until now had been devoted to the problems of preparing for revolution: creating a party, formulating its programme, exposing tsarism. Now it was necessary to write about the revolution itself. Even if it was somewhat embarrassing that the popular workers’ leader Father Gapon, who had built up a large following in St Petersburg, was closer to events than ‘real’ revolutionaries, Lenin was fascinated by the priest, who seemed to have been pushed into the revolution only by the suffering he shared with his flock. Gapon in fact had since 1904 been working in close cooperation with the secret police, whose object had been to divert the workers from revolution by helping them in their struggle for economic gains. Lenin did not believe Gapon was a provocateur and he inscribed his 1905 Geneva pamphlet, ‘Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution’, ‘To Georgy Gapon with respect, from the author’.9 In an article in the January issue of Vpered entitled ‘The Priest Gapon’, he wrote: ‘Gapon may be a sincere Christian socialist and perhaps it was precisely Bloody Sunday that pushed him onto a fully revolutionary path.’ He concluded that a cautious attitude was called for.10 ‘Bloody Sunday’, 22 January 1905, had been the occasion of a huge procession of workers and their families, led by Gapon, towards the Winter Palace, to petition the tsar for help. Troops guarding the approaches to the city centre were ordered to fire into the crowds, after repeated warnings, and some eight hundred were killed and many more wounded. It was an event which not only shocked world opinion, but also triggered the violence and disorder of the rest of the year.

It would appear, from everything that has been written about him by Soviet historians, that there was no field of social life which Lenin did not ‘enrich’, ‘refine’, ‘formulate’ or ‘illuminate’. But let us dwell here only on his theory of socialist revolution, such as it was.

Analysing the entrails of capitalism, Marx had stressed that the coming of proletarian revolution depended wholly on the material conditions of hired labour. For him, revolution was a social fruit that must ripen. While agreeing in principle with this idea, Lenin, believing that only the conscious activity of individuals could guarantee the success of the revolution, shifted the stress onto forcing the process by energizing the masses, by organizations and parties. In principle, he regarded the improvement of the workers’ conditions and the realization of socialist goals by evolutionary, reformist means, as impossible. For him the main thing was to create the institution of control. In January 1917 he wrote that contemporary society was ripe for socialism, ripe for control ‘from a single centre’.11 Reforms, he wrote, were ‘a side effect of the revolutionary class struggle’.12 Throughout his writings, he speaks of the decisive rôle of the conscious masses, classes, parties, leaders. Circumstances were important only in order to legitimize the settling of these problems by force of will.

Even though the First World War, and Russia’s fortunes in it, dramatically altered the political situation, and led to the downfall of the tsar and the formation of a liberal Provisional Government, Lenin must have known the Mensheviks were right when they said in 1917 that Russia was not ripe for socialist revolution. Yet he was prepared to exploit the opportunity for his own party to seize power in October. The alternative was for the Bolsheviks to occupy the position of an extreme wing with little influence in the forthcoming Constituent Assembly, planned by the Provisional Government and actually convened in January 1918. Lenin therefore leapfrogged the classic Marxist scheme, ignoring ‘objective conditions’, as well as a host of homegrown and European Social Democrats who were committed to a parliamentary process. He was cleverer than they, for he recognized that the war had not only been the chief cause of the February revolution which finished off the Russian Empire, but would also dash the hopes that had been aroused then. He exploited the war by moving it in effect from the trenches of the Eastern front to the Russian plains in the shape of revolution and civil war, and in doing so, he altered the disposition of political forces. It was this strategy that led to the redrawing of the map of the world, brought into being mighty movements in all continents, and held the minds of statesmen in tension and fear as to whether the world revolution would occur.

Like all the Russian leaders, Lenin was hypnotized by the French Revolution. Peppering their articles and speeches with terms like ‘Girondistes’, ‘Jacobins’, ‘commissars’, ‘Convention’, ‘Thermidor’, ‘Vendée’, they were not merely paying homage to the French revolutionaries, but were also emulating them, as they tried to remake history for themselves. In a telegram of 30 August 1918, the day he was nearly assassinated by the Socialist Revolutionary Fanya Kaplan, Lenin told Trotsky in Sviyazhsk to use the most extreme measures against senior commanders who showed lack of strength: ‘They should be told that from now on we are applying the model of the French Revolution and will put on trial and even shoot … the army commander at Kazan and the other top commanders.’13 The French revolutionaries applied terror in the name of liberty, of course, whereas Lenin did so in the name of power.

At the height of the First World War, Lenin came to the unexpected conclusion that ‘the victory of socialism is possible first in a few or even one individual capitalist country’.14 It would have been hard to disagree, had he meant the seizure of power, rather than the victory of socialism. Shortly thereafter, he set forth one of his fundamental theses even more forcefully, namely that ‘socialism cannot conquer simultaneously in all countries’.15 This, too, would have been a rational assertion, but for the minor matter of what it was he meant by ‘socialism’, and the question of which were the lucky countries that might enter the promised land in splendid isolation. Lenin had the answer: those which were the weakest link in the imperialist system. It was here that the absurdity began. It appears that Germany, Great Britain, the USA and other developed capitalist states had less chance of social and economic advance than, say, Russia. And yet Lenin himself had written that the material base for socialism was already in place in Europe. Despite his attempt to smooth over the inconsistency by asserting that socialism would never arise in Russia without a certain level of capitalist development,16 his position remained absurd, and had nothing in common with socialism. The possibility of ‘building socialism in one country’ boiled down to the chance of seizing power. It was easier in a country where conditions were ‘ripe’, and where the appropriate ‘organization’ was present, even if the state and the level of democracy were less ready to climb the next step up the pyramid of social progress.

After his return to Russia on 16 April 1917, when he was whipping up a mood of frenzy, harnessing the masses’ impatience, promising peace and land in exchange for support for his party, Lenin bent every effort to turn that party into a combat organization, capable of seizing power. Soon after the February revolution, when all the ‘illegals’ emerged from hiding, he was still declaiming, ‘we will create our own party as before and we will definitely combine our legal and our illegal work’.17 This had nothing to do with socialism. The society which Lenin and his adherents began to build had to resort to unrestrained violence, in accordance with the leader’s views, in order to survive. As the highest principle of revolutionary development, the dictatorship trampled and subordinated everything to its own will. Having once espoused the idea of socialism in one country, Lenin pushed questions of morality well down the Bolshevik agenda. In May 1919 the Politburo gave routine authorization for a collection of valuable jewellery to be made available to Comintern. The list of this jewellery runs to many pages and is valued in many millions of roubles, with items marked ‘for England’, ‘for Holland’, ‘for France’, and so on.18 In November 1921 the Politburo unanimously rejected an appeal from a special commission for the improvement of children’s rations.19 The difficulties faced by the new regime do not justify the refusal to meet this need. While millions were dying of hunger and disease, the Politburo was lavishly disbursing tsarist gold to ignite revolution in other countries.

It is not difficult to find evidence in Lenin’s writings of the idea that the dictatorship of the proletariat is compatible with full democracy, as indeed Soviet propaganda insisted for decades. It is, however, hard to reconcile the idea with the practice, where it is difficult to understand what Lenin meant by democracy. How can the dictatorship of one class – or more accurately one party – be reconciled with the principles of people’s power, liberty and the equality of all citizens? It smacks of social racism. A letter from Lenin to the Bolsheviks in Penza, not far from Simbirsk, written in August 1918, illustrates this point:

Comrades! The kulak uprising in [your] five districts must be crushed without pity. The interests of the whole revolution demand it, for the ‘final and decisive battle’ with the kulaks everywhere is now engaged. An example must be made. 1) Hang (and I mean hang so that the people can see) not less than 100 known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers. 2) Publish their names. 3) Take all their grain away from them. 4) Identify hostages as we described in our telegram yesterday. Do this so that for hundreds of miles around the people can see, tremble, know and cry: they are killing and will go on killing the bloodsucking kulaks. Cable that you have received this and carried out [your instructions].

Yours, Lenin.

P.S. Find tougher people.20

Clearly, not all Bolsheviks were up to the task.

Even after this telegram, Lenin frequently discussed ‘democracy and the dictatorship’. It is, however, unclear what rôle democracy was to play. The document cited above is a total condemnation of Lenin’s ‘theory’ of socialist revolution. What did he mean by ‘100 known kulaks, rich men’? Who were these condemned individuals? Today we know them to have been the hardest-working, most capable of the peasantry. If the circumstances were invoked to justify the crime, then they could be invoked to justify anything at all. In what way were Lenin’s orders to ‘shoot on the spot’, ‘arrest or shoot’, ‘apply extreme revolutionary measures’, etc., preferable to the ‘Cossack whips’ and ‘bloody massacres’ of Nicholas II? Compared to the bestialities of the civil war, the tragedies of tsarist Russia pale into insignificance.

Nor was it the ‘iron logic’ of a revolution that had gone out of his control that forced Lenin to apply these monstrous methods. In an earlier time, from the peacefully ordered world of Geneva in October 1905, he wrote a series of articles for publication in St Petersburg which were in effect instructions for staging an armed uprising. One such, entitled ‘Tasks for the Ranks of a Revolutionary Army’, discusses ‘independent military actions’, as well as ‘managing crowds’. He recommended that ‘units arm themselves as best they can (with rifles, revolvers, bombs, knives, knuckledusters, sticks, paraffin-soaked rags, rope for rope-ladders, spades to dig barricades, gun-cotton, barbed wire, nails (to stop the cavalry) and so on and so forth)’. Places and people, even if unarmed, must be made ready ‘to throw stones down onto the troops and pour boiling water from top storeys, to throw acid over the police and steal government money’. It was, he wrote, of the utmost importance to encourage the ‘murder of spies, policemen, gendarmes, Black Hundredists’, while it would be ‘criminal’ to trust the ‘democrats’, who were only good at running a liberal talk-shop.21

Lenin’s ‘theory’ of revolution proposed nothing other than these inhuman terrorist methods. Even when Nicholas II published his Manifesto of October 1905, leading to the creation of the State Duma and possibly opening the way eventually to constitutional monarchy, and offering perhaps the chance of a move towards democracy, Lenin did not alter his position. To the tsar’s proposal to give ‘the population stable foundations of civic freedom on principles of true inviolability of the person, freedom of conscience, speech, assembly and union’, the Bolsheviks responded with a signal for renewed violence. Lenin called for ‘the pursuit of the retreating enemy’, an ‘increase in pressure’, while voicing his confidence that ‘the revolution will finish off the enemy and wipe the throne of the bloody tsar from the face of the earth’.22

The evolution of the Bolsheviks’ attitude to the Constituent Assembly of 1918 – the first such body to be elected on a fully democratic basis in Russia’s history – demonstrates their extreme pragmatism. As long as it appeared possible to exploit this nationwide institution in their own interests, Lenin had supported the idea of the Assembly. But as soon as the elections produced a Bolshevik minority, he abruptly changed course. An All-Russian Commission had been formed before the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 to manage the election, and when that seizure of power took place the Commission declared it ‘a sad event’ that would ‘bring anarchy and terror’.23 When the Commission declared that ‘it found it impossible to enter any sort of relations with the Council of People’s Commissars’, i.e. Lenin’s government,24 its members were arrested. On the orders of the Bolshevik leadership they were locked in an empty room in the Tauride Palace for four days without food or bedding, in the hope that they would ‘see sense’ and cancel the election. The election went ahead regardless.

Realizing that the new Assembly, in which they had won only a quarter of the seats, would not bow to them, the Bolsheviks simply dispersed it during the night of 6 January 1918, after its first and only day of existence. Since the overthrow of the tsar in February 1917, the revolutionary bodies, the workers’ strike committees, and the soldier’s and peasants’ representatives had been forming their own councils, or soviets, and through these had been applying pressure on the successor (Provisional) government to bring the war to an end and to introduce radical reforms. After seizing power in their name in October, Lenin declared that ‘the Soviets are incomparably superior to all the parliaments in the world’, and therefore ‘there is no place for the Constituent Assembly’. He added, ‘The people wanted to convene the Constituent Assembly, so we convened it. But the people at once sensed what this notorious assembly represented. So now we have carried out the will of the people.’25 ‘The people’ had been given one day in which to make up their minds. This device, of speaking in the name of the people, would become a firm tradition, whereby every activity was authorized by the mythical ‘will of the people’.

Lenin’s theory of socialist revolution made no room for any representative elected institutions or direct democracy. Instead, he said, the socialist revolution ‘cannot but be accompanied by civil war’.26 Neither he nor any of his accomplices were troubled by the fact that the people had not empowered them to decide its fate. As the Socialist Revolutionary émigré Boris Savinkov wrote in 1921, in a Warsaw publication: ‘The Russian people do not want Lenin, Trotsky and Dzerzhinsky, not merely because the Bolsheviks mobilize them, shoot them, take their grain and are ruining Russia. The Russian people do not want them for the simple reason that … nobody elected them.’27

On the eve of the Bolshevik coup d’état, in August-September 1917, Lenin wrote his famous work State and Revolution, in which he laid out his ideas on the future socialist state. According to Lenin, ‘when everyone has learned to govern and is in practice independently governing social production, independently accounting for and controlling the spongers, the layabouts, crooks and similar “preservers of capitalist traditions”, then to evade this accounting and control will become so unbelievably difficult, such a rare exception, and will be accompanied, no doubt, by such speedy and serious retribution (for the armed workers, the people who live practical lives, are not sentimental intellectuals and will not permit anyone to fool around with them), that the need to observe the simple, basic rules of any human community will soon become a habit’.28 Lenin placed special emphasis on social control, believing that when it ‘became genuinely universal, general, nationwide’, it would be impossible to refuse to serve the state, ‘there would be no place to hide’.29

Lenin apparently never asked himself why, before 1921, the Bolsheviks were incapable of giving the people anything but chaos, civil war, hunger and terror.30 The fact is, the Bolsheviks had achieved their goal: the Party had power. The revolution was for Lenin a social experiment. If it failed in 1905, it would succeed in 1917, and if not, there was always the future. In an article entitled ‘For the Workers’ Attention’, Gorky wrote in November 1917:

Life in all its complexity is unknown to Lenin, he does not know the masses, he hasn’t lived among them, but he found out in books how to raise the masses onto their hind legs, how to enrage the masses’ instincts easily. To the Lenins, the working class is like iron-ore to a metal-worker. Is it possible, given present circumstances, to cast a socialist state out of this ore? Evidently not. But why not try? What does Lenin risk if the experiment fails?31

To achieve power, the Bolsheviks became wedded forever to violence, while liberty was buried in the marriage. Lenin’s address ‘To the Citizens of Russia’, following his coup, and his decrees promising peace and land, say nothing about liberty as the main aim of the revolution. They were not the Bill of Rights of the English revolution of 1689, nor the American Declaration of Independence of 1776. The Russian revolution, which formally gave the people peace and land, cunningly replaced the idea of liberty with that of the abolition of the exploitation of man by man. In giving the people the spectre of hope, Lenin had found and trapped man’s most robust and vital element, that of faith. He thus condemned the Russians for decades to contenting themselves with hope alone.

What, if any, was the philosophical foundation of Lenin’s approach? He has, after all, been called the most powerful philosopher of the twentieth century by Soviet scholars (the present author included). Had Lenin not come to power, his Materialism and Empiriocriticism (1908) would have been known only to the narrowest circle of experts on the theory of knowledge, and even they would have found it excessively scholastic: ‘Everything in it “corresponding” to the position of dialectical materialism,’ wrote the Russian émigré philosopher Vasili Zenkovsky, ‘is accepted without qualification, while whatever does not, is discarded for that reason alone.’32 Indeed, Lenin himself wrote in this work: ‘Following the path of Marx’s theory, we shall approach closer and closer to the objective truth (while never achieving it); following any other path we shall come to nothing but confusion and lies.’33

In other words, only those who employ Marxist methodology are philosophers and scholars. The peremptory nature of his arguments, his hallmark as a politician, organizer and philosopher, puts one mentally on guard. Lenin’s philosophy was designed to separate the ‘pure’ thinkers from the ‘impure’, the materialists from the idealists. His aim was to demonstrate that a school of philosophy which accepted the existence of religion could not be scientific.

Whether or not Lenin’s reasoning is accepted as plausible or implausible, the principle of Party-mindedness, which he proclaimed as necessary for the philosophical study of scientific knowledge, places the reader beyond the pale of science and in the sphere of ideological opposition to Bolshevik values. After the failure of the 1905 revolution, an upsurge of interest in idealist philosophy occurred in Russia, as it did also in Western Europe, for different reasons. Disappointment with socialist, that is materialist, ideas was driving Russian intellectuals towards a spiritual philosophy which emphasised individual self-perfection as the path to social improvement, rather than the other way round, which was the message and purpose of socialism. In an effort to counter this trend, the Bolshevik intellectuals Alexander Bogdanov and Anatoly Lunacharsky had become interested in the works of the contemporary Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach (the creator of the measurement of the speed of sound) and his mentor, the nineteenth-century Swiss philosopher Richard Avenarius. According to Mach, the attributes of the material world – colour, shape, texture – are conferred on objects by the human mind. In other words, man makes the world as he knows it. The object of this theory was to eliminate the distinction between the spiritual and the physical world, since the world according to Mach is a physical entity given shape by consciousness. Marxist materialism posited the opposite proposition: the physical world, the environment, is what forms and conditions the human mind. Marxists are realists, or materialists, and Machists are idealists.

Bogdanov, a trained biological scientist, took Mach further by asserting that not only the physical world, but society itself, is a product of the human mind, that without the human will to form communal life, society would not have come into being. Society therefore is the expression of consciousness. The object of this line of reasoning was, as has been suggested, to counter the corrosive effect new idealist thinking was having on socialist life in Russia, by showing that Marxist philosophy was sufficiently flexible to absorb such an apparently idealistic notion.

At around this time, 1906 to 1909, Lenin was engaged in complicated relations with Bogdanov and other intellectuals associated with his Bolshevik organization. Partly in competition for intellectual leadership, partly in order to keep control of the organization and its finances, Lenin chose to make an assault on Bogdanov and his allies, by challenging their orthodoxy as Marxists. In order to do so, he read exhaustively in philosophical literature.34 Having accepted Marx’s social-political and philosophical teaching without qualification, Lenin confined himself to nothing more than commenting on it. No social-political theory can be universal, yet that is what Lenin made of Marxism. As for such new idealists as Berdyaev and his fellow thinkers, Lenin’s hostility in the end saved their lives: when in March 1922 he read a collection of articles by Berdyaev, Fedor Stepun, Frank and others, entitled Oswald Spengler and the Decline of Europe, Lenin wrote to N.P. Gorbunov, general administrator of the Council of People’s Deputies (Sovnarkom), describing the book as ‘White Guardist’ and ordering Gorbunov ‘to speak to the Deputy Head of the GPU, I.S. Unshlikht, about it …’35 Philosophers were not yet being shot for ‘White Guardist’ views, but were merely deported from the country.