Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (7 page)

Altogether, Krupskaya’s comment that ‘Generally speaking, exile did not pass so badly. Those were years of serious study’ [Krupskaya 42] was entirely appropriate. In no area was that more true than that of Lenin’s health. Throughout his life Lenin had a tendency, which we have already observed, to work himself into a nervous frenzy which would bring on illness at critical moments. Being remote meant Lenin had to face fewer crises and less excitement. As a result his health was better than ever, despite temperatures as low, on occasions, as – 40 °C. The initial detention in prison had put a strain on him, pointed out by his mother-inlaw in terms familiar to many sons-in-law. ‘My mother,’ wrote Krupskaya, ‘told me he had even got fatter in prison and was a terrible weight.’ [Krupskaya 30] However, on meeting him in Shushenskoe, Krupskaya noted that ‘Il’ich looked much fitter and fairly vibrated with health.’ [Krupskaya 33] Only when the time was approaching for Lenin to leave Shushenskoe and return to the hurly-burly of political conflict did his anxieties return. ‘Vladimir Il’ich began to spend sleepless nights. He became terribly thin.’ [Krupskaya 43]

In these later years he also had less time for ‘distractions’. At one time he had asked for a chess set to be sent out to him because there were a number of players in the area. He even played by correspondence, but, like hunting, once he returned to Russia proper he gave it up because he had no time for it. Similarly, he gave up skating as a boy because ‘it tired me so that I always wanted to go to sleep afterwards. This hindered my studies. So I gave up skating.’ He even abandoned his interest in Latin because ‘it began to hinder other work.’ [Krupskaya 39–40] The image of the single-minded Lenin, the determined revolutionary, was already being moulded. Although, as we shall see, he did not entirely cut himself off from relaxing pastimes and hobbies, he was concerned to keep them under great control. The most famous, and most frequently quoted example, comes from Gorky’s obituary of Lenin in which he referred to Lenin confessing to a love of Beethoven’s
Appassionata
sonata, which he said he could listen to every day because it was ‘marvelous superhuman music’. The problem was that

I cannot listen to music often, it works on my nerves, I want to say sweet stupidities and stroke the heads of people who, living in this dirty hell, can create such beauty. But at the present time one must not stroke people’s heads, they will bite your hand, it is necessary to hit them over the head, hit without mercy, even though in our ideal we are against using any violence against people. Hmm, hmm, our duty is devilishly hard.
¹

As in other areas of Lenin’s life his virtues – in this case revolutionary determination – were often the flipside of his vices – an obsession with politics and principles too frequently at the expense of actual individuals. A softer, more sympathetic Lenin who worked through his feelings rather than suppressed them might have been a more effective Lenin. However, he was not alone in believing strength of will implied trampling on one’s own feelings, let alone those of others. It was a common motif of an increasingly Nietzschean age.

‘YEARS OF SERIOUS STUDY’

The carousel of history did not stop just because Lenin had been forced to step off for four years from 1896 to 1900. Indeed, they were particularly eventful times as imperialism continued to carve up the globe and the world slid towards total war. Socialism, too, was in deepening crisis. Significant Marxist movements were emerging across the capitalist world but their appearance brought conflict with earlier radical movements. Not only that, disagreements about interpreting the writings of Marx became more acute. The question of questions facing Marxists was why had no Marxist revolution appeared? In many ways, early twentieth-century Marxism was a series of answers to that crucial conundrum.

From the Russian point of view three great debates were dominating the radical scene. In the minds of many the three debates have become confused with one another so it is as well to define them and separate them as clearly as possible.

We have already mentioned the first. Was the growth of capitalism in Russia inevitable? Although populists had been divided on tactics between those who urged long-term persuasion and propaganda and those who saw terror as catalyst of revolution, they were united over one fundamental principle. Russian society was already deeply saturated with socialism. Peasants, it was argued, were not petty-capitalists but proto-socialists. They held property in common; they redistributed it in accordance with ancient principles of social justice; their lives were largely self-governing through the local commune (
mir
or
obshchina
). The collective mentality was translated into industrial society through co-operative workshops (
artely
). The existence of these institutions and the mentality of equality and fairness which underpinned them could, it was thought, provide a basis for a direct transition into socialism without Russia having to pass through the super-exploitative agonies of a capitalist industrial revolution. Inventive minds embroidered the arguments in many ways. A leading populist economist, N.F. Danielson, put forward an argument which merits attention today given the tribulations of Russia’s post-Soviet version of capitalism. He argued that capitalism could never be competitive in Russia because its size and educational/cultural backwardness inhibited its infrastructural growth, and intractable factors such as distance and climate pushed the costs of production above those of more fortunate countries. Whether or not that was the case, populists believed that Russia could, possibly, leap straight from decaying feudalism to socialism.

For social democrats, as they increasingly began to call themselves, these ideas were anathema. Peasants were not the building blocks of the future, they were a transitional hangover from the past. They may not have been capitalist proprietors but, it was argued, their aspirations were precisely to become such. Rather it was workers who were the bedrock of future socialism. Populist optimism also violated one of the basic assumptions of social democrats. Marx, they argued, had laid down a theory of stages. Primitive communism gave way to property-owning societies of which the most recent were feudalism and capitalism. The one developed into the other and capitalism would develop into socialism and, at the end of history, into communism. The stages were clearly defined and, all social democrats believed, central to Marx’s theory.

Lenin, as we have seen, cut his social-democratic teeth on defending these assumptions. The seminal work, which Lenin admired deeply, was Plekhanov’s
Our Differences
which, as its title suggested, marked out the principles of social democracy as opposed to those of populism. In his earliest writings the young Lenin did little more than develop Plekhanov’s insights.

However, it was during his Siberian exile that Lenin focused on the question in greater detail. In an article, evocatively entitled ‘The Heritage We Renounce’, written in 1898, Lenin summarized his position. First and foremost he had absolutely no time for populist sentimentality about the life of the peasants. In no way was rural society to be idealized. For Lenin, peasants were the victims of unremitting repression by landowners and state. They were poor, ignorant and often lived short, brutish lives curtailed by alcohol and domestic violence. They were not ‘noble savages’ or homespun philosophers as depicted by Tolstoy. Their way of life was artificially kept in the past by oppressive legislation. Emancipation, he argued, had worsened their condition. The commune was not an emanation of their collectivist spirit, it was an alien and inefficient body imposed on them by the state. In Lenin’s words: ‘the Narodnik [populist] falls so low that he even welcomes the police rule forbidding the peasant to sell his land. … Here the Narodnik quite definitely “renounces the heritage”, becomes a reactionary. … For the “peasant” who lives chiefly from the sale of his labour-power, being tied to his allotment and commune is an enormous restriction on his economic activity.’ [SW 1 77] The peasants’ future lay in casting off the shackles of feudalism and allowing rural society to develop towards capitalism. For Lenin, the inner instincts of the peasantry were directed towards becoming small-scale individual proprietors, not socialists. Those who did not succeed in making the transition would fall into an ever-increasing class of agricultural labourers who would be the basis of a rural proletariat, the natural ally of the urban proletariat. This was the class that would provide a foundation for socialism, not the peasantry as a whole, which was doomed to disappear as capitalism worked its way through rural Russia.

Within this fundamental argument the article contained a number of additional interesting motifs. It followed that Lenin, to a degree, was defending the development of a liberal form of capitalism in Russia. Indeed, he referred without irony to Adam Smith as ‘that great ideologist of the progressive bourgeoisie’. [SW 1 65] Even further, he based his article on a forgotten book by a Russian advocate of liberal capitalism, Skaldin (whose real name was Fyodor Yelenev). Although the article was undoubtedly polemical in tone, Lenin retained certain courtesies which later disappeared from his writings. For example, he was prepared to accept Skaldin’s good faith, referring to him as ‘a bourgeois enlightener’ whose views were based on ‘the sincere belief that the abolition of serfdom would be followed by universal well-being and a sincere desire to help bring this about’. [SW 1 63 and 64] The writer whom Lenin used as his example of populist romanticism, Alexander Engelhardt, was also treated with some respect, being described as ‘much more talented than Skaldin and his letters from the country are incomparably more lively and imaginative’ and that his account was ‘replete with deft definition and imagery’. [SW 1 66] There was also an overtly ‘democratic element’ to Lenin’s thought at this time. In an article on Engels’ death written a few years before, he pointed out that Marx and Engels were democrats before they were socialists. In his 1898 article he also, as he continued to do, posited political freedom as the indispensable prerequisite for any further progress. He also reaffirmed it in an article of 1900 entitled ‘The Urgent Tasks of Our Movement’ which opens ‘Russian Social-Democracy has repeatedly declared the immediate task of a Russian working-class party to be the overthrow of autocracy, the achievement of political liberty.’ [SW 1 91] This created ambiguities over his position with respect to the second controversy of the time, that relating to so-called Economism which we will examine shortly.

Before moving on to that we need to remember that, as was mentioned in Chapter One, it has been suggested that, in the polemic over the development of capitalism, Lenin, ironically, was championing ideas of the unavoidability of the capitalist stage abandoned by Marx, whereas the populist argument was closer to that of Marx himself. While this argument is ingenious and in many ways compelling, Lenin himself developed beyond such early assumptions. His most complete work of this period,
The Development of Capitalism in Russia
, written largely in 1896–7 and corrected in 1898, was published in 1899. Here the stress is not so much on whether Russia could avoid the capitalist stage. Lenin’s essential argument was that capitalism had already developed to such an extent in Russia that the issue was no longer a live one. Russia was already in the capitalist stage. Examining rural society Lenin identified the growth of capitalist traits. For example, there was greater differentiation of production – that is areas were becoming less self-sufficient and producing what the region was best at and trading it for what other regions were best at. In other words an incipient national market rather than a series of local market economies was developing. Further signs were a growing tendency to produce cash crops, that is crops for sale rather than local consumption; a growth of individual as opposed to communal proprietorship; growing class differentiation between rich (kulak), middle and poor peasants/labourers. All these were signs of the hold which capitalism had already taken on Russian society and economy. The debate was over. Russia was firmly on the capitalist path.

Implicit in this was, of course, Lenin’s acceptance of the theory of stages. It is also clear that Lenin followed the Marxist tradition, as mentioned above, of admiring the constructive, modernizing aspects of capitalism when it came to overthrowing feudal relations. Without the development of capitalism, socialism was out of the question.

This did not mean that Lenin took a rose-tinted view of capitalism. Indeed, the second controversy of the period showed exactly the opposite side of his view of capitalism. Other thinkers had taken the view that the nature of capitalism was such that it would almost automatically turn into socialism of its own accord. No revolutionary, especially political, transition would be needed. In European terms, Eduard Bernstein became the foremost advocate of this tendency known as evolutionary socialism. This is not the place for a detailed discussion of Bernstein’s views. From our perspective we need to note that Bernstein was facing up to the key question of why Marxist revolution had not yet occurred, indeed, seemed rather remote in the late 1890s, by pointing to what he considered deficiencies in Marx’s theory as it was understood at the time. In particular, he argued that capitalism did not lead to the impoverishment of the workers, which would have led them to the situation described by Marx and Engels in
The Communist Manifesto
with the proletarians having nothing to lose but their chains. Instead, through trade unions and labour militancy, they were able to build up an increasingly comfortable and respectable way of life. Instead of polarizing into rich proprietors and impoverished proletarians, capitalist society (like Marx, Bernstein drew his example from the most advanced capitalist society of the age, Britain) was creating a solid centre. Property, ownership of land and capital, was diversifying through society. The middle classes were not disappearing but growing fast. Bernstein’s conclusion was that the struggle by trades unions and labour-oriented political parties for escalating reforms was the way forward. Revolution was unnecessary. Capitalism was socializing itself.