Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (42 page)

Second, though the additional note on Stalin was more damning, the testament itself was not very flattering about any of the other leadership candidates. Trotsky, although he was ‘personally perhaps the most capable man in the present Central Committee’, was said to exhibit ‘excessive self-assurance’ and to be ‘too preoccupied with the administrative side of affairs’. Bukharin was an outstanding figure among the younger members and was ‘rightly considered the favourite of the whole Party’ but he was also ‘scholastic’ and had not properly understood dialectics. [SW 3 738–9] In the end, Lenin made no decisive choice between them. It was a dangerous document to all and it is hardly surprising that, when Volodicheva, the secretary who had taken Lenin’s dictation, showed it to Stalin he ordered her to burn it. The following day Lenin, not knowing what had happened, asked her to keep the document secret. Volodicheva retyped a copy to replace the one she had burned.

When Stalin saw Lenin’s demand for an apology in March 1923 his immediate reaction was that it was not Lenin that was speaking but his illness.
¹³
The same criticism has been made of the whole issue. Lenin’s sister, Maria, played down its significance in later years for this reason. Others, too, have said Lenin’s judgement was impaired by his illness. Post-Soviet revelations, not to mention photos of Lenin in his last months and years, have underlined the severity of his condition. Indeed, from late 1922 onwards the Central Committee had been at pains to control Lenin politically. They were afraid that he still retained sufficient prestige to embarrass them and that he was a potential loose cannon capable of going off in any direction. That is why Stalin was appointed to liaise with him. Stalin was chosen precisely because Lenin trusted him most to do his will, including asking him to keep a cyanide capsule available in case Lenin thought it was time to make his exit. In this case, Stalin was forbidden by the Central Committee to do what Lenin asked. The Central Committee, in consultation with doctors, had ordered Lenin to restrict his political reading and activity to protect him against overexertion. It was for violating this provision that Stalin had sworn at Krupskaya on 22 December. Despite the attempts to protect him Lenin suffered a series of turns for the worse in December which were disabling him to the extent that he could only dictate for five or ten minutes a day. It is only too likely that his judgement was also not at its best. In fact, the testament in the broad sense, including the last articles, was un-Leninlike. The wide perspective on problems which it revealed was not matched by incisive solutions. Lenin was uncharacteristically tentative. Perhaps his own awareness of the impact of his illness meant that he too only half-believed in what he was doing in these troubled months. Lenin had succeeded only in complicating the resolution of these final problems.

THE FINAL MONTHS

On 9/10 March 1923 Lenin suffered a major medical crisis, a third and hopelessly disabling stroke. He was paralysed down one side and barely able to speak. The frustrations of anyone in this condition, let alone a strong-minded and determined revolutionary, are insupportable. Lenin presented a pathetic figure. It was several weeks before he was even well enough to be removed from the Kremlin and on 15 May he was taken to Gorky. As ever, the support of Krupskaya and his sisters Maria and Anna was essential. They made the household as comfortable as possible. Lenin’s abilities came and went. At times he was able to speak a little better. He even managed to walk with a stick at one point. He discovered another convalescent at Gorky was an old friend from Alakaevka and they had discussions that lasted for two days. The old pleasures, walks (in his wheelchair now) in the forest, mushroom hunting, sleigh rides in the snow, provided his last moments of joy. The presence of children delighted him as did visits from Party leaders including Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and Preobrazhensky. In October he even felt well enough to demand an emotional trip to his office in the Kremlin in his Rolls Royce. As his sisters had predicted, the guard would not even allow him in at first because he did not have an up-to-date pass, but he eventually succeeded, spending the night there because he was too exhausted to return home. It was his last trip out of Gorky. On several occasions he demanded poison capsules but no one would agree to his request. He was kept in the dark about the bitter feud that had arisen, as he predicted, in the Party between the Trotsky left and the Stalin centre. In November and December he had a further series of crises. Even so, the end came suddenly. In the late afternoon of 21 January 1924 he suffered his final attack out of the blue. Krupskaya and Maria were with him. Bukharin, who was visiting, rushed over. Lenin died in their presence just over an hour after the attack had struck, at 6.50 p.m.

LENIN AS ICON

The death of Vladimir Ulyanov was by no means the end of Lenin. In many ways it was only the beginning. From being the increasingly revered, sometimes hated but by no means personally well-known or physically recognized leader of Soviet Russia, Lenin became one of the most widespread, universally recognizable icons of the twentieth cen
tury. Leninism, or to be more precise, Marxism-Leninism, became the basic ingredient of the twentieth century’s most potent revolutionary cocktail. With certain, often locally added mixers – Stalinism, Maoism, the
juche
idea in North Korea, Castroism, Ho Chi Minh thought – it was adapted to many of the most prominent revolutionary movements of the century. Despite endemic sectarian differences in the communist movement, the idealized figure of Lenin was revered by everyone who adhered to it and his revolution was acknowledged as the model for all those that followed, even though most of them, in China, Vietnam, North Korea, Eastern Europe, Cuba and so on, actually occurred under very different conditions. Portraits of him were carried at the head of the largest political processions ever organized. His works were reprinted
ad nauseam
and he became the most widely published author in human history. Copies of his writings outnumbered copies of holy books like the Bible or the Q’uran. Indeed, the canonical core of his work – eventually established as his pamphlets
What is to be Done?
;

Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism
; and
State and Revolution –
became the texts of the new revolutionary faith. At the same time, those who were sceptical about communist revolutions – ranging from democratic socialists and anarchists on the left to conservatives and fascists on the right – tended to demonize Lenin as much as the communists idolized him. In this way Lenin became a touchstone of the twentieth century. Tell me what you think about Lenin and I will tell you who you are!

Lenin himself abhorred the idea of a cult of his personality. As we have seen he was dismissive about republishing his works and about the value of digging up early polemics which only showed ‘how stupid we were then’. [Weber 168] In his active lifetime the cult barely existed. It was his successor, Stalin, who was primarily responsible for building it up. He could be said to have invented, or at least established, ‘Leninism’ as a mode of thought. In 1924, shortly after Lenin’s death, he gave a series of lectures, later published as a pamphlet, entitled
Problems of Leninism
. One of the most potent weapons bringing him to power was his assertion of himself as the chief priest of the burgeoning Lenin cult. He gave an oration at Lenin’s funeral. It was his opinion that was decisive in preserving Lenin’s body and setting up the mausoleum on Red Square which remained a place of pilgrimage long after the Soviet system itself had collapsed. Indeed, though it is not our direct concern here, it is likely that Stalin saw himself as Lenin’s most faithful disciple. Be that as it may, the cult spread rapidly in the communist movement. It very quickly took on quasi-religious overtones, not only in Stalin’s solemn intonation at Lenin’s funeral of vows to fight for Lenin’s principles, but also in, for example, Mayakovsky’s adaptation of Christian liturgy ‘Lenin lived! Lenin lives! Lenin will live forever!’.
¹

Not everyone was drawn into it. In the non-communist world the figure of Lenin was eventually demonized as thoroughly as he was deified among his disciples. While, in many ways, the cold war dated from the Revolution itself and cast a long shadow over the peace negotiations at Versailles in 1919, it was only in its latter stages and in the wake of the Soviet system’s collapse that Lenin’s reputation in the outside world reached its lowest point. Many of his critics as well as his followers met Lenin in his years as Soviet leader and, although there was a tendency on the visitor’s part to encounter the Lenin they were predisposed to expect, so that actually meeting him often confirmed pre-existing notions rather than providing real insights into his character, the reports nonetheless portrayed a person rather than a god or demon. A recent study of British left-wing connections with Lenin’s Russia provides examples. George Lansbury ‘praised Lenin’s “far-reaching ability, downright straightforwardness and the wholehearted enthusiasm and devotion to the cause of humanity.”’ Lansbury ‘believed that he was “absolutely indifferent both to love and hatred – I do not mean that he has no feeling, because I am confident that he loved little children.”’ As if that wasn’t enough ‘Lansbury also refused to believe stories of violence that were reported in the British press could be attributed to Lenin. “While talking with him it is impossible to imagine that such a man would love or care for violence or butchery, torture or any of the other horrors which are laid to his charge. He is too big in his outlook and much too wide in his sympathies to want to kill anyone.”’ Ethel Snowden came to a different conclusion. In her view Lenin possessed ‘a firm belief in the necessity of violence for the establishment throughout the world of his ideals [which] makes one doubt miserably.’ Interestingly, Snowden also remarked that Lenin was a ‘keen-brained, dogmatic professor in politics’.
²
The professorial comparison also occurred to Bertrand Russell when he met Lenin. He wrote that ‘The materialist conception of history, one feels, is his life-blood. He resembles a professor in his desire to have the theory understood and in his fury with those who misunderstand or disagree.’ For Russell it was ‘obvious that he has no love of luxury or even comfort. He is very friendly, and apparently simple, entirely without a trace of
hauteur
. … I have never met a personage so destitute of self-importance.’
³

As the cold war deepened after 1945 the figure of Lenin and the debate around him was a central battleground of the ideological struggle. The Soviet cult of Lenin became as increasingly mechanical and formalistic as the Soviet system itself. With increasing speed after 1956, the leadership of the USSR began to distance itself from its founding ideas. Surprisingly, in the non-communist world, views of Lenin still showed a certain respect for his ideas and personality. Revisionists from the late 1960s to the 1980s, often associated with the New Left, tried to present a ‘good’ Lenin, a democrat blown off course by Russian backwardness and the exigencies of the Civil War, as opposed to a ‘bad’ Stalin.

It was not only the left that showed a certain respect for Lenin. While they had no time for his ideas, some of Lenin’s most powerful critics had a more human and nuanced view of their adversary than was often the case later. In his formidable history
The Russian Empire 1801–1917
, Hugh Seton-Watson pointed out that ‘Lenin was, of course, no more exclusively inspired by personal ambition or arrogance than were his rivals.’ He described
Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution
as ‘one of his most brilliant works’ concluding that its ‘preference for partnership between highly sophisticated professional revolutionaries and primitive masses … was characteristic of Lenin’s later career and greatness.’
⁴
Leonard Schapiro surmised that ‘it was perhaps because he was a revolutionary of genius that Lenin was a failure as a statesman.’ Lenin was a ‘strange and troubled genius, whose personal impact on events may well have been greater than that of any other individual in this century’. The historian, Schapiro concluded, ‘is left with the choice between two alternatives’. One sees ‘Lenin as a giant labouring under the unavoidable difficulties not of his own making, which were inherent in the gigantic task which he undertook.’ Alternatively his ‘stature must be measured in terms of his determination, his strength of will, his certainty of purpose and his qualities of leadership. But his obsessional character must then also be seen as one of the elements which led to the chaos of 1917 out of which bolshevik victory emerged … And yet, Lenin’s actions and their consequences will always, for some at any rate, be redeemed by his integrity, his lack of vanity, and his single-minded devotion to a cause in which he believed.’ Schapiro ended by quoting a nineteenth-century Russian thinker: ‘Great actors in history … bear responsibility only for the purity of their intentions, and for their zeal in carrying them into effect, and not for the remote consequences of the labour which they perform.’
⁵

By the 1980s and 1990s the tone had changed radically. Schapiro’s subtlety was lost on Norman Stone. Writing in a popular British newspaper, in an article entitled ‘The monster who sired the greatest evils of our century’, Stone seemed determined to pile responsibility for exceedingly remote consequences onto Lenin. He claimed that ‘Lenin and his twisted ideology gave rise to the evil that was Nazism. … When Mussolini triumphed in Italy, or Hitler in Germany, it was because of two things, both to do with Lenin. The first was that fascism was a reaction to him, and the second was that it learned from him everything that it did.’
⁶
One of the first post-Soviet biographies, written by Dmitrii Volkogonov, a former believer in the system, was equally unsubtle. ‘Bolshevism destroyed everything in Russia.’
⁷
Characteristics of Pipes’
Unknown Lenin
included ‘utter disregard for human life except where his own family and closest associates were concerned’; ‘nothing but scorn’ for ‘humankind at large’; ‘thoroughgoing misanthrop[y]’; a ‘policeman’s mentality’ and a tendency to ‘treat his vast realm like a private estate’.
⁸

RETRIEVING THE HISTORICAL LENIN

After such an assault it is no wonder that in 2003 Lars Lih pointed out the need to embark on ‘the quest for the historical Lenin’.
⁹
In Lih’s view the central position of
What is to be Done?
developed relatively late in the Leninist canon and did not fully support the widespread assumptions that Lenin founded a ‘party of a new type’ in 1903, nor did he preach permanent intelligentsia hegemony over workers. Some of these nuances are shared by the present work but there are also a variety of other recent works helping in the quest to retrieve the historical Lenin. Biographies by Service, White and Williams plus articles by Anna Krylova and Leopold Haimson, not to mention two new books by Haimson, have laid down parameters for a new interpretation of Lenin which is less in thrall to cold war ideological influences.
¹⁰

The new approach to Lenin has a long way to go but as far as the present study is concerned, a number of issues have already become prominent. First, the myth that the Party ‘split’ in 1903, in the sense that there was a clean break into two competing factions with clearly opposed, well-defined and unchanging views, has to be abandoned. For many years, the fluid groups manoeuvred around each other both in the Russian arena and, very important to all concerned, also in the Second International. The dispute was acknowledged to be within one and the same family and it was in no one’s interest to completely break up what was in any case a small party. Rather, the groups worked to control the Party and unite it around their particular principles. Associated with this, it is also necessary to define more clearly where and when ‘Leninism’ or Bolshevism stepped outside the broad framework of European social democracy. While many would say it was only for tactical reasons, it is none the less the case that Lenin did not push the break to the limit or consciously accept he had stepped outside the accepted tenets of social-democratic tradition until much later than 1903. It is hard to identify a precise moment of fracture. While it could be argued that in 1910 to 1912 Lenin was establishing his own separate camp it is still the case that, until the debacle of summer 1914, Lenin worked within the framework of the Second International. Had the Party already split, in the way which has long been assumed, 1914 would not have been so dramatic and painful. In any case, it should be noted that even at this juncture, in his own eyes, Lenin was following the true path of social democracy – that of class rather than nation, of internationalism rather than defensism – which he believed the majority leaders had betrayed. The division could be said to have become an unbridgeable gulf as late as July 1914. It was only during the war, and as one of the controversial
April Theses
, that Lenin proposed renaming his party and adopting a new programme completely separate from that of earlier Russian social democracy and the Mensheviks. This was done in 1918. Incidentally, even after the disaster of July 1914 the new division in the socialist movement, into internationalists and defensists, cut across factional ties. In 1917, Left Mensheviks like Martov and Sukhanov shared key points of view with Lenin and Left SRs joined the Bolsheviks in government for the first six months of Soviet power.

A number of other features also point the way to a more realistic, balanced, rounded, human portrayal of Lenin. Some of the most important arise from the fact that, although he was himself reluctant to face up to its implications, Lenin was, first and foremost, an intellectual and an integral member of a particular, long-established branch of the Russian intelligentsia. While attempts have long been made to associate him with extreme ‘Jacobinism’, once again it is not so simple. Lenin is and remained much more mainstream. He worked in the open – to the extent his major works and thoughts were all in the public domain via his vast writings and speeches – and he was not conspiratorial in the Nechaev sense, portrayed by Dostoevsky in
The Devils
, even though such characteristics were sometimes attributed to him. While his ideas were, as we have seen, sometimes Bakuninist, his personal activity never was. In fact, the picture that emerges from studying the historical Lenin leads to the emphasis being put on the ‘professorial’ Lenin rather than the on the street activist.