Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (3 page)

Not all observers believed the assassination was a failure. Among those who believed that the point was to continue with classic terrorism was a small group of students at St Petersburg University, including Alexander Ulyanov. They vowed to attempt to assassinate Alexander III. When the plot was discovered Alexander tried to take the blame on himself and protect his fellow conspirators. His noble gesture failed to save them. He also refused to renounce his act, standing by it even though he might have escaped the death sentence which was eventually passed on him. Alexander’s heroic stoicism was especially painful in the face of his mother’s pleas and his knowledge of the grief and suffering it would bring to the rest of his loving family, which had already suffered the great blow of Ilya’s death in January 1886.

Alexander’s arrest
,
trial and execution in 1887, while an apparently routine punishment for a potential regicide, was a turning point in Russia’s history. The impact turned the Ulyanov family inside out, pushing them further into increasing hostility to the autocracy. All the members were deeply affected, but none took the execution to heart more than Volodya. While, up to that point, Volodya’s life had been normal and showed no signs of revolutionary tendencies, the arrest and execution of Alexander changed all that. In 1886, Lenin began to form in the soul of Volodya.

LENIN: THE FIRST INFLUENCES

Although hard information is sparse and what we have tends to be hagiographical, it seems that Alexander had become something of a role model for his younger brother. Through hard, academic work Alexander had succeeded in getting to university, no mean feat at a time when there were only some ten thousand university students in the whole Russian Empire. His fate raised the question: what had driven him to sacrifice his own life, so young and so full of promise? Providing an answer seems to have caused a pall of seriousness to fall over the often light-hearted life of the family. Apparently for the first time, the young Volodya began to wrestle with the complex questions of political and social justice and the responsibility of the individual to right wrongs which led him to follow Alexander down the revolutionary path.

Initially, Volodya appears to have become aware of the hidden political side of Alexander’s personality through contact with some of his books from his Petersburg lodgings. Details are especially sketchy and Soviet commentators went to great lengths to date Lenin’s first acquaintance with Marxism from this point and to present it as a road to Damascus. A much-quoted saying attributed to Lenin by his sister even implied that Lenin was already an embryonic Marxist. On hearing of his brother’s fate Lenin is said to have remarked ‘We will not go that way’. In Soviet interpretations the phrase was meant to imply that he rejected the path of revolutionary terror. But it is completely incredible that Volodya had already formed a core Leninist political consciousness as the story is meant to demonstrate. If he did say such a thing at the time, and, like so much from these crucial years of Lenin’s life we cannot be certain, it could have had a variety of meanings, most obviously that giving away one’s life so easily was wrong, that one should live on to fight and fight again. Indeed, Lenin’s later life shows his great anxiety not to be captured at crucial moments so he could do precisely that.

Far from shunning revolutionary populism it is almost certain that Volodya, before Lenin was fully formed, did fall precisely under the influence of that creed which focused on idealization of the ordinary working person and stressed the corruption of the elite and the duty of enlightened intellectuals to lead the liberation of the labouring masses. Many populists believed that the peasant commune, the
mir
, and the cooperative workshop, the
artel’
, were potential building blocks of a future socialist society. In the late 1880s there was no other radical movement of any size in Russia. Although Marxism, under the influence of George Plekhanov (1856–1918), was separating itself out from populism, its influence was still very small and largely confined to Russians living abroad. After all, it was Plekhanov himself who joked, when he and Pavel Axel’rod and other founders of Russian Marxism went for a boat trip on Lake Geneva, that if they were to drown it would be the end of Russian Marxism. That being said, it should, however, be remembered that Marx had great influence on the populists and it was in 1879 that one of them had written to him putting a question with which he wrestled for the remainder of his life. The question was: could Russia bypass capitalism and go straight to the construction of a socialist society from its semi-feudal base? After much thought and prevarication Marx replied, in the Preface to an 1882 translation of
The Communist Manifesto
, that Russia could go straight to socialism provided the revolution occurred relatively soon and that the advanced capitalist countries of western Europe also underwent socialist revolutions and assisted the weaker Russian proletariat and working peasantry. It is not, therefore, surprising that Alexander had some Marxist texts in his library.

However, it was not Marx who made the greatest impact on Volodya. The didactic novel
What is to be Done? Tales of the New People
(1864), written by the academic economist Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828–89), had a greater effect. Although much maligned by critics for its unlikely plot – including a love-triangle in which everyone tries to give way to everyone else – and its wooden, caricatural characterizations, it was the Bible of a young generation of students and became a founding text of populism. The attraction was the radical communal lifestyle of the main characters. They lived together and shared everything in the manner of ‘new people’ living out, before Nietzsche coined the phrase, the revaluation of all values. The crudely money-grubbing market and property-oriented values of contemporary Russian society were rejected in favour of science, reason and modernity. Sexual double standards and the subjection of women were totally rejected. In a peculiar coda, omitted from most English translations of the novel until it was restored in 1989,
¹
Chernyshevsky portrays a vision of a futuristic building, based on London’s Crystal Palace, a great wonder of the age, as a temple of free love and the free life. Perhaps the most influential character, and one whose influence in turning Volodya into Lenin is almost universally recognized, was Rakhmetov. He distinguished himself by trying to make himself as tough as possible to serve the revolution. To do this he spent time with the boat-haulers of the Volga, a breed of tough outcasts who pulled Volga barges upstream. The work was hard and badly paid but they had the reputation as the toughest people in Russia. Ilya Repin painted a memorable portrait of them and they were also idealized and immortalized in ‘The Song of the Volga Boatmen’. Rakhmetov is also depicted sleeping on a bed of nails to help him overcome pain. Rakhmetov became a symbol and heroic role-model for many Russians and it is often suggested that Lenin’s ‘fanaticism’, in the eyes of his critics, or ‘revolutionary determination’ for his supporters, derived from Rakhmetov.

Sergei Nechaev, a real-life Rakhmetov in some respects, is also frequently brought into the explanation at this point. Nechaev wrote a text entitled
Catechism of a Revolutionary
in which he urged the would-be revolutionary to cast off all regular social ties and devote him-or herself entirely to revolution. Nechaev was a controversial figure in 1870s Russia as was his association with one of the leading revolutionaries of the age, Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76). At one time Bakunin was thought to be the author of the
Catechism
. Nechaev’s extreme vision of a revolutionary as an outcast who was infused only with the single passion of revolution is often pointed to as a paradigm for Lenin’s later supposed fanaticism. However, there is no evidence that the
Catechism
had any major influence on Lenin; nor, as we shall see, did he live his life according to its precepts.

The influence of Bakunin himself is harder to assess. Terrorists of the late nineteenth century, including Alexander Ulyanov, were highly influenced by Bakunin’s ideas, especially his principle that ‘the urge to destroy is a creative urge’. Influenced by evolutionary theory Bakunin argued that everything should be attacked and challenged. If it survived, according to the Darwinian law of the survival of the fittest, it deserved to do so. If a person or institution or idea collapsed under the assault, something stronger and better suited would take its place. It is very likely that Bakunin and his followers were more influential than Marx in turning Volodya Ulyanov into Vladimir Il’ich Lenin. However, there is not enough evidence for us to be sure. Our information on this issue has also been polluted by generations of Soviet dissemblance. The hagiographic requirement was, as we have seen, to produce Lenin as a full-blown instinctive Marxist from day one of his revolutionary career. To allow the influence of a thinker, albeit a Russian, who was the chief opponent of Marx in the First International and in the left-wing doctrinal arguments of the 1860s and 1870s, would not fit that requirement.

However, it is most likely that the young Lenin was influenced, directly or indirectly, by Bakuninist ideas. In some respects the development of his thought, which involved Russifying Marx, showed certain key Bakuninst elements throughout his life. In particular, Bakunin prioritized political struggle especially against church and state, hence his encouragement of terrorism particularly against state officials. For Marx, the key was class struggle which involved very different dimensions and practices, Marx, like Lenin, being largely sceptical about the revolutionary value of isolated acts of terrorism. Such violence could, the Marxists argued, lead more easily to greater repression than to liberation. However, despite his later impeccable Marxist affiliation, Lenin’s thought and, above all, his practice, showed a Bakuninite framework. Lenin was a quintessential political animal and state and church were in the forefront of his targets. In his disputes of the early twentieth century with Mensheviks and the so-called Economists, Lenin took a rather Bakuninist line against the more apparently orthodox Marxism of his opponents. However, that lay in the future.

Much of what has been said in the preceding paragraphs is speculative and at best circumstantial. It does, none the less, seem likely that the first ideological impulse turning Volodya into Lenin arose from the populist tradition. First, as has already been stressed, there was no other widespread tradition to which he could turn in the late 1880s. There are also tantalizing hints in the memoirs of Lenin’s future lifelong companion, Nadezhda Krupskaya. She recalls in several places that Lenin, despite polemicizing mercilessly against their younger followers, retained a great respect, almost affection, for senior populists and the pioneers of populism. Obviously we have already encountered the influence of one leading populist inspiration, Chernyshevsky, whom he appeared to read for the first time in these formative years. According to one source, Lenin claimed it was Chernyshevsky who had ‘ploughed me over again completely’, a striking metaphor and one which exactly describes the process of turning the conventional Volodya into the radical Lenin.
²
Finally, as we shall see, Krupskaya herself hints at early populist influence.

In the end, it must be said, there is not much firm ground on which to base a sound judgement about exactly why Volodya decided to become a revolutionary and what his earliest principles were. The overwhelming effect of his brother’s arrest and execution must be in the forefront. In addition, it may help explain Lenin’s extraordinary hatred of tsarism and the old Russia which had swallowed up his beloved brother. It would be vapid to reduce Lenin’s revolutionary energy to a personal grudge against the system but at the same time it would be evasive to ignore the intensely personal element which appears to form a core source of Lenin’s immense revolutionary drive.

One other factor must be taken into account, one which illustrates the autocracy’s unfailing ability to dig its own grave, in this case by confirming its potential enemies in their convictions. As the brother of a convicted terrorist Volodya was himself an object of increased government surveillance. The first key problem was his educational career. As a top student Volodya would have been entitled to walk into the best of universities. However, it took a long struggle for his headmaster, Fyodor Kerensky, to get him admitted to the local university in Kazan. Within months, he was expelled. Once again the hagiographic tradition had Volodya as a youthful student protest leader who was thrown out for his radical activities. Once again, we do not know for sure but there is no evidence to back up claims of precocious leadership. The thought that a young, newly arrived student would take the lead in radical protests is most unlikely though he might well have taken part. In any case, once disturbances had broken out, the authorities expelled all students considered to be potential as well as actual risks, such as those with terrorist brothers, as well as actual activists. Whatever the precise details, we do know that Volodya was expelled from Kazan and a regular career was almost closed to him, like thousands of others, throwing them further into radical and revolutionary activities as ‘straight’ career paths closed off in front of them.

As it turned out, expulsion was not the final nail in the coffin of Volodya’s university career. Though he was not allowed to attend classes, he was later permitted to study law by correspondence at the University of St Petersburg.

LENIN BEGINS TO EMERGE: LIFE AND ACTIVITIES

The eight years following his expulsion from Kazan in 1887 were among the most significant of Lenin’s life. Like any young person he developed rapidly in that time, between the ages of 17 and 25. It was not only in the intellectual and political sense that he matured but also in the personal and moral sense. The chrysalis of Volodya increasingly fell away and Lenin slowly, but not yet completely, emerged. The period is of particular interest because Lenin was still an ordinary person, albeit a tremendously intellectually gifted one. He lived a more normal, everyday existence than at any time subsequently in his adult life. Though we do not have a mass of material on these years they are the last ones in which we can look at Volodya/Lenin as an ordinary person.