Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (35 page)

As far as culture and education was concerned Lenin’s thoughts on this continued to develop but as far as his attitude to workers was concerned two elements predominated. One was the need to overcome the backwardness of the majority of Russian workers through practical measures such as abolishing illiteracy. Only a better educated worker would serve the productionist cause to the full. One step beyond that was the development of political consciousness in the workers. Only a politicized worker would be able to play a full part in the project of socialist construction. However, setting aside mass expansion of the desired consciousness, Lenin was having problems with his supposedly advanced workers and others gathered in the Party. The Party as a whole was not fulfilling Lenin’s expectations and a multitude of problems were emerging. At this point we need to switch from Lenin’s ideas about what productionism and state capitalism were to examining the agencies he was using to implement those ideas.

LENIN’S REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGY 1918–20 – AGENCIES FOR IMPLEMENTING TRANSFORMATION

To a Marxist, theory was no good without practice. For some Marxists, possibly Marx himself to some degree, there was a sense that the laws of history would work themselves out regardless. For Marx this approach was summed up in his crucial assumption that the liberation of the workers would be the task of the workers themselves. Through their everyday experiences they would come to realize that the roots of the problems they faced – low wages, poor conditions, harsh discipline, unemployment – were not the result of the whims of employers but were integral to the capitalist system itself. Through everyday labourist struggles over such issues they would come to see that only revolution in the realm of property relations would enable them to be free and have a reasonable share of the wealth modern industry and technology could create. In other words, they would raise their revolutionary consciousness through everyday struggle.

As we have seen, from its origin, Bolshevism took a different line. Summarizing what we examined earlier, we can reiterate the following. Starting from the question facing all Marxists at the time, ‘Why has there not been a revolution?’, Lenin had pinpointed the need for a party, an agency, to speed up the process. In that sense, Leninism was Marxism in a hurry. The model of agency with which he was familiar was the populist movement in the service of which his brother had given his life. So Leninism, in its struggle against tsarism, combined Marxist theory with elements of populist practice, and, perhaps, some theoretical influences from the latter as well. The question now was, how would this model sustain the leap from opposition to government? Should completely new structures be set up? What problems would the chosen model encounter? There were a myriad other implications. What was Lenin’s answer?

Consciousness, culture and religion

Any analysis of Lenin’s practice has to start at the point where theory and practice meet, with the quality of consciousness. Consciousness was as vital, perhaps more so, in building a new system as it had been in bringing down the old. In any case, the positive consciousness needed for construction required more imagination and was infinitely more complex than the negative consciousness needed to oppose a tyranny. Some Bolsheviks were more interested in these issues than others but for Lenin, although he spent relatively little time on it, consciousness was crucial. Socialism could not be built unless it succeeded in winning over the minds and hearts of the population. This did not have to be very sophisticated at the lowest level. The promise of a new and better life based on science, medicine and technology was enough. However, that could only be a first step. It was necessary to reveal the whole Bolshevik mission and win support. This led to a multitude of problems. At one level, the Bolshevik mission was not coherently thought out in the long term. At the immediate practical level Russia was one of the most traditionally religious countries in the world and scientific Marxism fitted the cultural outlook of only a few educated intellectuals. Arising from these was the devastating shortage of missionaries. Things did not look promising on the cultural front. It put a number of priority tasks before Lenin and the Party. First, work out just what the mission was, produce what today would be called a mission statement. Second, develop a strategy for converting the religious-minded masses. Third, find the personnel to achieve these. Since the Party was the association which, in Lenin’s mind, brought the conscious parts of the population together in order to lead the rest of their fellow beings to Leninist enlightenment, we will look at it, and the problems of leadership and personnel, in the next section. Here, we will look at how Lenin dealt with the other two issues.

Before that, however, we should note that Bolshevik success and survival were built on both mobilization of support and on coercion. Supporters of Lenin have concentrated more on the former and have often overestimated it. Critics have concentrated on coercion, particularly by the Cheka, and have often overestimated it. The point is that there was a balance between the two. Lenin could not have survived by either of them alone. Here we will look at how he raised the crucial support he needed to survive, even though he failed to gain all the support needed to build a new world.

Lenin had always put the role of the newspaper in the first rank of Party tasks while in the underground. With the whole state mechanism at his disposal, ramshackle though it now was, he had even wider scope for creating instruments of propaganda. In an appropriate phrase the Soviet state has been called a ‘propaganda state’.
¹¹
By the time of the turn to ‘iron proletarian discipline’ in early 1918, Lenin had not only encouraged the flourishing of a vast array of official newspapers and journals, he had supervised the destruction of almost all those which were independent. Starting with the ‘counterrevolutionary’ liberal and conservative press the government had moved on to ban left-wing papers published by its opponents. In the process, Lenin had alienated one of his former key friends and associates, Maxim Gorky, whose independent paper,
Novaia zhizn’
(
New Life
), was forced into closure. It was also in the debate over press closures that Trotsky made his famous remark that the Bolshevik policy of freedom of the press was part of its minimum programme, closure of the counterrevolutionary press its maximum programme. In addition to newspapers, all print media and eventually all means of artistic expression, including film (in which Lenin was to show increasing interest), theatre and music, were under the supervision of a censorship apparatus which began to formalize itself from 1918 onwards. In the early years the control functions were exercised largely by the newly formed (December 1917) State Publishing House (
Gosizdat
) which was charged with ‘regulating and supervising’ the ‘publishing activities of all scholarly and literary societies and equally of all other publishers’.
¹²
In 1922 a specialized censorship apparatus was set up known as
Glavlit
.
¹³

Taking over the media was only one aspect of mobilization. Paper shortages and economic and distribution problems, not to mention illiteracy, meant that many key targets of propaganda were out of reach, especially in rural areas. In the early days, Lenin conducted what he called propaganda by decree and this was an especially important area. From the outset the Declaration of Soviet Power and the Decrees on Land and Peace of the Second Congress had a major propaganda role in building support for Bolshevik initiatives. The Decree on Peace, for example, was never even seriously communicated to foreign powers but was widely circulated within Soviet Russia. Similarly, the Declaration of Rights of the Exploited and Working People, produced as a Party riposte to the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, was widely circulated and, in an innovation arising in part from Krupskaya’s early experiences in workers’ circles and Lenin’s admiration of London’s newspaper reading rooms, the texts were put up in public places and their contents discussed through Party, trade union and factory committee bodies. The most important example of propaganda by decree was the Party programme of 1919 – its mission statement at last – and the associated publication by Bukharin and Preobrazhensky of an official commentary on it entitled the
ABC of Communism
. It laid out Party policy and aspirations in all areas from political power to finance, from religion to social policy. As such, it is the best guide to Bolshevik aims of the period. It was widely circulated and, although much of it and of the Party programme were written in an inaccessible intellectual style, it was used as the basic text for a wide range of reading groups especially in factories above all.

Lenin encouraged these developments, though, apart from closely supervising the production of the new Party programme (fulfilment, incidentally, of another of
The April Theses
), he was not always directly involved. He was, however, more taken up with issues of the content of the new, socialist culture. From questions of sexual behaviour to styles of painting, Lenin’s personal views were conservative. On sexual matters, for instance, he wrote in January 1915 to Inessa Armand, commenting on her pamphlet on women’s rights. Lenin chided her: ‘I advise you to throw out paragraph 3 altogether – the “demand (women’s) for freedom of love”. That is not really a proletarian but a bourgeois demand.’ [CW 35 180–1] A week later he wrote again suggesting that she should ‘contrast philistine-intellectual-peasant … vulgar and dirty marriage without love to proletarian civil marriage with love’. [CW 35 182–5] In November 1920 Clara Zetkin recalls that he dismissed ‘Freudian theory as fashionable folly’ saying he was ‘always distrustful of those who concentrate on the sexual aspect’. He continued, referring to the fashionable view among some Party members that having sex was as natural and as insignificant as drinking a glass of water, that he was ‘a Philistine to some extent, although I find philistinism repugnant. But I also hold the famous glass of water theory to be completely unmarxist and moreover unsocial. Sexual life is more than the purely physical, there is also the impact of culture.’ [Weber 175] For Lenin, civil marriage based on love was the proper context for sexual relations.
¹⁴

Sexuality was not the only sphere where he found himself in conflict with the avant-garde which sprang up so powerfully in early revolutionary Russia. In artistic and cultural matters in general Lenin preferred traditional forms of theatre, concert music and opera. Abstract artists like Chagall and El Lissitsky, the futurists and other brilliant schools which emerged were not at all to Lenin’s taste. Even artists who claimed to be supporters of the Bolsheviks were not approved of. In May 1922, for example, he opposed the voting of funds to print 5,000 copies of Mayakovsky’s avant-garde poem
150,000,000
describing it as ‘nonsense, stupidity, double-dyed stupidity and affectation’. [CW 45 138] He also wrote to the Bolshevik historian and cultural commissar M.N. Pokrovsky requesting his help to ‘fight futurism’. [CW 45 139]

Given Lenin’s own brand of ‘futurism’, namely his stress on the technological utopia, his views seem unexpected. However, the key to them lies in his constant awareness of the outlook and life of the ordinary people who, he believed, had no truck with bohemian intellectual pretentiousness. In this respect he was not wrong to identify himself as, in some ways, a philistine. It was only in the 1930s that one of the foundations of the official artistic and cultural doctrine of socialist realism was defined as
narodnost’
, meaning art that was accessible to and focused on the ordinary people. This was a bedrock of Lenin’s outlook. He preferred traditional artistic styles because they were more immediately comprehensible. In the early years, when many artists were incorporated into the propaganda apparatus at various levels, it was the less experimental ones who were retained. By 1921, the avant-garde was more or less dispersed by emigration, starvation or ‘internal exile’ (i.e. abandoning their art, or at least not showing it in public). A few were caught up in repression and executed. Many were forcibly deported. A mass expulsion of over 200 intellectuals, many of whom were not avant-garde but were certainly non-Bolshevik, took place in the summer of 1922. Most of them were university teachers. In their place, the educational and propaganda apparatus recruited people whose message was more consistent with that of the Bolsheviks and whose style was more easily accessible via posters, cartoons and so on.

One focus of poster campaigns was religion, an area in which Lenin had complex views. Personally, he developed a deep antipathy to all forms of religion as his attacks on the Godbuilders had shown before the war. He was aware, however, that direct confrontation risked deepening what he considered to be the prejudices of religious believers. Party pronouncements emphasized ‘helping the toiling masses to liberate their minds from religious prejudices’ without ‘offending the religious susceptibilities of believers, which leads only to the hardening of religious fanaticism’.
¹⁵
This reflected Lenin’s own opinion. For instance, in 1921, in a letter to Molotov, he complained of what he called tactless propaganda claiming to ‘expose the falsehood of religion’. It was, he wrote, ‘
absolutely
’ necessary to ‘
avoid any affront to religion
’. [CW 45 119–20] On another occasion, on 2 April 1919, he supported a plea from a group of artisans to be able to complete the building of a church in Cherepovets. [Weber 158] At the same time, Lenin had been uncompromising from the first with any attempt to allow believers to join the Party. Unlike Social Democrats elsewhere Lenin was firmly opposed. On occasions he contravened his more ‘liberal’ assertions about not offending religious people by approving, even encouraging, harsh measures including shooting clerical personnel, albeit ones who had actively supported the Whites.