Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (43 page)

This in turn opens up a number of further points for reinterpretation. For example, if Lenin was an intellectual, living essentially the life of a café revolutionary, what was his relationship to actual workers? As we have seen, in London he was an observer of working-class life who made occasional forays into working-class districts but who, apart from a few lectures here and there, did not have much direct contact with them. He lived a typically middle-class life rarely participating in proletarian activities and cultures. Even in Russia, in 1905–6, when he increasingly admired the outburst of working-class activity, he did so from a distance, observing demonstrations and offering guidance and analysis but without participating. He did not follow Trotsky’s example and become a Soviet activist (nor did he in 1917). He encouraged the Moscow uprising but, unlike Bakunin, who, one might surmise, would have thrown himself into the thick of the action, Lenin watched it unfold to its tragic conclusion from St Petersburg. Thus, the relationship in Lenin’s ideas between workers, consciousness and intellectuals can no longer be reduced to simple formulae.

Seeing Lenin in this light also puts a spotlight on what has often been seen as the crucial difference between the Revolution of 1905 and that of 1917 – the presence in the latter of the leadership provided by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. For the present writer the key difference lies elsewhere, notably in the fact that the 1917 Revolution was set off by the virtual collapse of the state in February prompted by divisions within the elite and a collapse of its support for Nicholas II. These fissures opened the way for social revolution to develop with relatively little hindrance in the following months. In contrast, in 1905, the state remained strong and, after the publication of the October Manifesto, the propertied elite remained united behind the tsar. Be that as it may, the question of how Lenin could have ‘led’ the Revolution needs to be examined, not least because he was away in hiding for the crucial months and had difficulty leading his party let alone the Revolution. Insofar as the Bolsheviks came to exert ‘leadership’ it arose from them concealing their own long-term aims and picking up the immediate aims of the popular movement – peace, bread, land and all power to the Soviets – and treating them as though they were their own. While this might be considered great tactics, in practice it was closer to what Lenin scoffed at as ‘tailism’ in 1905 – that is hanging on to the tail of the mass movement – rather than leadership. The Party, in the short term, adapted to the masses. It did not, at this point, lead the masses to Bolshevik conceptions of socialism and revolution. That task only began seriously after 25 October.
¹¹

Finally, Lenin’s intelligentsia style also affects our understanding of how he governed. While he was undoubtedly involved in a wide range of decision making, some of it at a surprisingly low level, he was not himself a nuts-and-bolts activist but relied on close supporters, especially Sverdlov and later Stalin, who were the ones who got things done. Lenin himself, with his continuing cycle of stress-related illnesses, remained the analyst, the strategist and the tactician of the Soviet government, attempting to treat the business of government to some extent like the running of a seminar. It followed from his understanding of the role of consciousness, that genuine reflection would lead to harmonious action to sustain the Revolution. Honest discussion would lead to conclusions with which only the benighted would disagree.

Taking the last two points together, that is Lenin’s distance from day-to-day government and the Bolshevik tactic of following not leading the masses, opens up the issue of exactly when, if at all, Lenin really began to get a grip on events instead of following them. Arguably, during the Civil War the torrent of events was too rapid for anyone to master and it was only in 1921, around the time of the Tenth Party Congress, that Lenin began to impose himself and his party on the population after their ‘defeat’ at the hands of the masses had forced a last, massive concession, the abandonment of war communism and grain requisitioning and the adoption of the New Economic Policy. Without doubt, 1921 was a moment of decision and a moment of truth in that, for the first time since October 1917, Lenin had clear choices before him. His selection of a combination of political and cultural repression, which increased as the years went by, alongside a measure of restoration of market relations in place of doomed efforts to centrally plan the economy and coerce the peasantry, defines Lenin more than any other of his policy options. He expected the compromise embodied in NEP to be a dynamic system leading Russia ineluctably to socialism. After his death, the Party right, led by Bukharin and Rykov, struggled to preserve NEP because they perceived it as Lenin’s last testament. A more impatient and vociferous Party left turned back to the policies of 1918 and 1919. The victory of the latter group, with Stalin at its head, shaped the Revolution for the rest of its life.

How much the outcome had to do with Lenin is still hotly debated. What one can say is that two ‘Leninist’ models were in conflict. On one hand, there was the disbanded system of war communism, on the other the NEP system for which Lenin had such high hopes in his last years. While Stalin’s leftist policies of 1928–32 clearly violated Lenin’s injunction to preserve the alliance between workers and peasants at all costs, it has to be said that Lenin took this position only because he believed the Party and state apparatus was too weak to enforce its policies and the Revolution would face defeat once more. However, would he, like Stalin and his supporters, be tempted by coercion if he thought it would be successful? One could make out a plausible case on both sides of this argument. A crucial consideration here is that NEP embodied a cultural element and Lenin was well aware that changing the cultural environment of traditional Russia would be a long job. Quick fixes were not possible in this scenario. Opposed to that, however, is the view that, by 1928, NEP had, in any case, become unworkable. The scissors crisis was so acute that the system could not survive without endless concessions to the market and property orientation of the peasantry. Bukharin believed Lenin would have stuck to NEP. The Stalinists believed it had to be abandoned.

Complex though it is, the argument does not even stop there. One could also surmise that, even if Lenin had been around to choose a Stalinist path, he might well have conducted it in a less crude and less needlessly violent manner. There is no way that any definitive conclusion can be drawn. Leonard Schapiro’s formulation of the relationship of Lenin to Stalin remains as relevant as ever. In his words ‘It was Lenin who provided Stalin with the weapons and set him on his path.’ That is not the same as saying there was no difference between them or that Stalinism was the one and only potential outcome of Leninism. There was nothing inevitable about the emergence of Stalin or of the policies associated with him.
¹²
One thing that is inevitable, however, is that the debate about Lenin will go on for a long time yet. The influence of and interest in one of the most important figures of the twentieth century is far from exhausted. Lenin’s future may hold as many surprises as his past.

N
OTES

1
Susan Sontag, ‘Cases of the Comrades: Why Victor Serge Should be as Famous as Koestler and Orwell’, Times Literary Supplement, 9 April 2004, p. 13. The essay has also appeared as the Introduction to

V. Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulyaev (New York, 2004).

1
CHOOSING REVOLUTION

1
Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What is to be Done? (ed. Michael R. Katz,

trans. William G. Wagner) (Ithaca, NY and London, 1989). 2 N. Valentinov, The Early Years of Lenin (Ann Arbor, 1969), p. 135. 3 See
e.g.
Vladimir C. Nahirny, The Russian Intelligentsia: From Torment to Silence (New Brunswick, N.J. and London, 1983).
4 See James White, Lenin (London, 2001), pp. 44–5.
5 I.N. Wolper, Pseudonyme Lenins (Berlin, 1970), p. 38.

2
LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS OF LENINISM (1896–1902)

1
M. Gorky, ‘Vladimir Lenin’, Russkii sovremennik, no. 1, 1924, pp. 229–44. Quoted in B. Wolfe, The Bridge and the Abyss: The Troubled Friendship of Maxim Gorky and V.I. Lenin (London, 1967),

p. 157. 2 Quoted in R. Pipes, Struve: Liberal on the Left (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), p. 195.

3 For a discussion of theories arising from this, see the Introduction to Christopher Read, The Stalin Years: A Reader (London, 2003) and Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York and Oxford, 1995). The founding texts arguing that Lenin’s conception of the Party was at the root of Soviet totalitarianism are: H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1951); J.L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London, 1952); idem, Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase (London, 1960); idem, The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution (London, 1980); Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies (Princeton, 1950); F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London, 1944); C. Friedrich (ed.), Totalitarianism (Cambridge, Mass., 1954); Carl Friedrich and Zbygniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (New York, 1956); and Zbygniew Brzezinski, The Permanent Purge: Politics in Soviet Totalitarianism (Cambridge, Mass., 1956).

4 For a cogent and convincing statement of the argument that What is to be Done? was ‘a restatement of the principles of Russian Marxist orthodoxy’, see Neil Harding, Lenin’s Political Thought, 2 vols (London, 1977 and 1981), vol. 1, ch. 7 (‘The Reaffirmation of Orthodoxy’). The quotation is from p. 189.

3 CONSTRUCTING LENINISM

1
R. Luxemburg, ‘The Organisational Question of Russian Social Democracy’. There is an English translation in Mary-Alice Waters (ed.), Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (New York, 1970), pp. 114–30. The quotation is on p. 122.

2 Quoted in L. Kochan, Russia in Revolution (London, 1970), p. 47.

3 There are many works on aspects of the revolution of 1905 but only one relatively recent general history, Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, 2 vols (Stanford, 1988). For a discussion of the historiography of autocratic ‘liberalization’ after 1905, see Christopher Read, ‘In Search of Liberal Tsarism: The Historiography of Autocratic Decline’, The Historical Journal, 45, 1 (2002), pp. 195–210.

4 Quoted in R. Pipes, Struve: Liberal on the Left (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), p. 195.

5 K. Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction (1844) in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3 (London, 1975), p. 175.

6 For a fuller account of Lenin’s role in party meetings and congresses at this time, see Christopher Read, ‘Lenin in 1905’, in A. Heywood and J. Smele (eds), The Russian Revolution of 1905: Centenary Perspectives (London, 2005).

7 See Weber 52 for 26–27 January but also elsewhere.

8 Miliukov claimed he could not recall using the phrase but agreed it represented his opinion. P. Miliukov, Political Memoirs: 1905–17 (Ann Arbor, 1967), p. 66.

9 This has been suggested in James White, Lenin (London, 2001),

p. 70.

10 Bogdanov evolved into one of the most interesting and original thinkers to emerge from the Bolshevik movement. After he was sidelined in the party by Lenin he spent more time on refining his ideas about proletarian culture, coupled with concepts of a proletarian encyclopedia to encapsulate it and a proletarian university to promote it. Later on he developed ideas on organization theory and was an accomplished writer of science fiction. He was also a doctor and conducted medical experiments on himself including a fatal blood transfusion in 1928. Among his disciples was the prominent Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci. There is a growing literature on him; see Christopher Read, Religion, Revolution and the Russian Intelligentsia: The Vekhi Debate and its Intellectual Background (London, 1979); Christopher Read, Culture and Power in Revolutionary Russia (London, 1990); Lynn Mally, Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia (Berkeley, 1992); John Biggart (ed.), Bogdanov and His Work: A Guide to the Published and Unpublished Works of Alexander A. Bogdanov (Malinovsky), 1873– 1928 (Aldershot, 1998); and John Biggart (ed.), Alexander Bogdanov and the Origins of Systems Thinking in Russia (Aldershot, 1998).

4 IMPERIALISM, WAR AND REVOLUTION

1
James Joll, Europe Since 1870: An International History (London,
1976), pp. 186–7. 2 Ibid., p. 186. 3 Ibid., p. 187. 4 For an excellent account, see Jonathan Schneer, London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis (New Haven and London, 1999) and, with a focus on the financial centres, David Kynaston, The City of London, vol. 2: Golden Years, 1890–1914 (London, 1995).

5 All quotes are from extracts in D.K. Fieldhouse, The Theory of Capitalist Imperialism (London, 1967), pp. 84 and 85. 6 It was finished in 1915 at which time Lenin read it and wrote a supportive preface. However, the book was not actually published until 1917. 7 See Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (London, 2000), p. 158.

5 FROM THE FINLAND STATION TO THE WINTER PALACE

1
For a survey of such activities, see Christopher Read, From Tsar to Soviets: The Russian People and Their Revolution, 1917–21 (London, 1996), pp. 61–142.

2 N.N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution: An Eyewitness Account
(trans. and ed. J. Carmichael), 2 vols (New York, 1962), vol. 2, p. 441.
3 The fullest study of the July Days is still A. Rabinowitch, Prelude to
Revolution (Bloomington, N.Y., 1968).

4 The myths have been most successfully rebutted in S. Lyandres, ‘The
Bolsheviks’ “German Gold” Revisited: An Inquiry into the 1917
Accusations’, in The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European
Studies, no. 1106 (Centre for Russian and East European Studies,
Pittsburgh, Penn., 1995).

5 See J. White, ‘Lenin, Trotskii and the Arts of Insurrection: The
Congress of Soviets of the Northern Region, 11–13 October 1917’,
Slavonic and East European Review, 77(1), 1999, pp. 117–39.