COMMUNISM

The greatest revolutionary

TIBOR SZAMUELY

Lenin was born one hundred years ago: on 22 April 1870. Today nobody would deny that he was a very great man. Whether or not he was the greatest man of the century is open to debate, but by one crucial criterion he would certainly qualify for the title: his influence upon the world has been more decisive than that of anybody else. Of Lenin alone among all the great figures of modern times can one say with assurance that had he not lived the whole further course of world history would have been different. Lenin changed all our lives.

Without Lenin, quite simply, there would have been no Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Towering above his irresolute and fearful followers, Lenin literally forced them to seize power—the power which, as he alone saw, was there for the taking. October 1917 was Lenin's revolution. Unlike all the other great modern revolutions this one, from beginning to end, was planned, led to victory, legiti- mised and transformed into an orderly sys- tem by one man. And, what is even more extraordinary, the regime it established sur- vives to this day, fifty-two years after its creation. For Lenin did more than just seize power: the continuity and durability of the regime he imposed upon Russia is due to what must be judged his greatest achieve- ment: the invention of a unique instrument of power which for fifteen years, patiently and methodically, he had moulded and trained and prepared for The Day. The Communist party is Lenin's most enduring memorial. Its appearance transformed our whole concept of politics and enriched the world by the one distinctive twentieth cen- tury contribution to the art of government —the totalitarian one-party state.

'When we say "the party" we mean "Lenin", when we say "Lenin" we mean "the party": wrote Mayakovsky. This simple statement of fact also explains one of the main difficulties in writing about Lenin. His life was inseparable from his party. No other politician has ever identified himself so com- pletely with his organisation or his cause. How is one to distinguish Lenin the man from Lenin the party? His private life, such as it was, contains nothing of interest: a dutiful son, an exemplary husband—no vices, no signs of human frailty, no moments of weakness or self-doubt. What few per- sonal friends he had either broke with him or gradually became mere 'comrades': per- sonal feelings or relationships were always subordinated to politics. He would give loyal support and co-operation to men whom he personally disliked (such as Trotsky) as long as they agreed with him, while no insult was too outrageous, no slander too vicious for a political opponent like Martov—possibly the one person outside his family for whom Lenin had ever felt genuine affection. (Curi- ously enough, the only letter in which Lenin ever expressed any purely private emotions was the last letter he wrote in his life, de- manding that Stalin apologist for having insulted his wife. But men—even men like Lenin—change within sight of death.)

Another difficulty in dealing with Lenin is the sheer volume of literature about him. Almost all of it is mendacious. Lenin lies securely buried under the hundreds of mil-

lions of copies of communist hagiographical works, in a sepulchre far more impregnable and forbidding than the squat mausoleum in Red Square. Inevitably—such is the power of sustained propaganda—the official Soviet picture of Lenin has come to influence west- ern non-communist assessments. Today, as the longest drawn-out birthday celebration in history approaches its climax, and with UNESCO decreeing that the memory of the 'great humanist' be honoured by all govern- ments and men of goodwill (how Lenin would have roared with laughter at this egregious instance of bourgeois cretinism!), Vladimir Ilyich has at last reached the tele- vision screens and the colour supplements.

In some respects the emerging western picture of Lenin is even more distorted than the blatant falsification of the Moscow Agitprop. Viewing him through western eyes, what do we see? A cultivated gentle- man, who spent much of his life in various European countries, who frequented the British Museum, who knew foreign lan- guages, was on friendly terms with emin- ent European socialists, and who dressed and behaved like any member of the great European middle class. Moreover, he was a marxist, i.e. an adherent of a rationalist and qu;ntessentially West European ideol- ogy. In short, a man whose psychology and politics we feel we can understand (as we cannot understand the 'Asiatic' Stalin); a man who westernised, even 'democratised' Russia, and whose occasional deplorable excesses were unavoidable in a country as backward as Russia had been in 1917.

Lenin is therefore usually discussed within our familiar western terms of reference. What made him become a revolutionary? The explanation is simple: no account of his life, however brief, omits to mention the decisive part played by the execution in 1887 of his elder brother Alexander, who had been plotting to assassinate the Tsar. Vladimir decided to avenge his brother's death and took his place in the revolution- ary ranks—only, being a highly _intelligent youth, he saw that marxism, not terrorism, provided the solution for Russia.

This popular story bears all the hall- marks of a myth. While Lenin was un- doubtedly upset by his brother's death, he never showed any sign of deep emotional involvement. Indeed, on the very day of the execution he was sitting his (extremely stiff) secondary school graduation exam and passing it with flying colours and top grades in every subject. A remarkably cool per- formance for a young man of seventeen, even for one endowed with Lenin's excep- tional powers of concentration. Immediately afterwards he entered Kazan university— something which, under his own regime, the brother of an executed criminal would never have been allowed to do: so much for Tsarist tyranny, which, we are endlessly told, justified every later revolutionary atrocity.

(An interesting sidelight on the 'great humanist': after Alexander's conviction their mother sought the intercession on his behalf of an influential family friend, Senator Tagantsev. The Senator did all he could, even placing his own position in jeopardy, but to no avail. In 1921, when Lenin was ruler of Russia, Tagantsev's son was sentenced to death by the Cheka, to- gether with sixty others, as head of an entirely fictitious conspiracy. The desperate father, now an aged man, appealed to Lenin, reminding him of the long-ago episode. Lenin never even replied, and the younger Tagantsev was executed.) Lenin would have become a revolutionary regardless of his brother's fate. For one thing, he was born to be a revolutionary, just as some people are born to be writers or composers. Also—and this is what we find so hard to understand—it was the natural tiling to do for a young member

of the Russian intelligentsia at the time. The intelligentsia was a peculiarly Russian phen- omenon: a social class specifically devoted to the task of overthrowing the existing order (the west now seems to be evolving something similar of its own). Until the late 1880s they had all adhered to what is usually called populism; after that marxism became the dominant trend. And Lenin, as a young Russian revolutionary intelligent, adopted marxism as his creed.

He adopted marxism, and he adapted it— not so much to Russian conditions as to the Russian revolutionary tradition of which he was in many ways a typical representative. Whatever European communists or their fallen 'revisionist' brethren may say, Lenin never developed marxism—he Russianised it. He grafted marxism onto traditional Russian revolutionary teachings and pro- duced a weird hybrid now known as Leninism—totally useless in the west, yet eminently serviceable in Russia and points east. But Russia was all he was ever inter- ested in. Without grasping Lenin's Rus- sianness it is imposible to understand either the man or the success of his revolution.

There may be something symbolic in the fact of Lenin having been born and spend- ing the first twenty-three years of his life on the Volga, where Europe ended and Asia began, and east and west constantly intermingled (his father was half, if not wholly, Kalmyk). Lenin embodied Russia. that gigantic land sprawling across two continents and never quite knowing to which it belongs. The easy cosmopolitanism of many of his contemporaries was alien to him; for all his professed internationalism he always remained a Russian through and through. Although fairly well-read in world literature, he hardly ever quoted any but Russian authors, whom he loved dearly; he spent fifteen of the thirty years of his pol- itical life in Europe, but never evinced the slightest interest in any of the countries where he lived, never wrote anything about them, never took part in local socialist pol- itics, never met westerners (except at inter- national gatherings), never made any at- tempt to understand the people who were his hosts.

When he formed the Communist Inter- national in 1919 this lack of comprehension of non-Russian conditions was to prove a major disaster for the western com- munist parties; they have never recovered. But for Lenin this single-minded concen- tration on Russia to the exclusion of anything else, this total immersion in s- sian affairs throughout the long yea /s of emigration, became a source of st ength. It made him a national leader, capable of putting the interests )af Russia and of Rus- sia's revolution before 'those_of -the world proletariat, and thus pulling the young Bolshevik government through the unpre- cedented hazards surrounding it.

If I were to choose any single point in Lenin's career where his supreme qualities as leader and strategist stood out most clearly it would be the signing of the Brest-Litovsk treaty with Germany. Three-quarters of his party and almost the whole of his central committee regarded the signing of a harsh and ignominious peace with the imperialists as a betrayal of the world revolution, of everything they had fought for. Lenin faced them almost alone. The peace must be signed, he insisted, whatever the conditions —otherwise Soviet Russia was finished. 'Comrade Lenin's mistake', cried one of his close colleagues, `consists in looking at the matter from the point of view of Russia and not from the international viewpoint'. It was quite true, and Lenin was absolutely correct. For two months he ground his comrades down with his relentless, rep- etitive, iron logic, until they gave in. It was the last time a majority of the party ever opposed him. The peace was signed and the revolution saved. That marked the decisive turning-point. Soviet Russia was to be, not the trigger of world revolution, but a nation-state among other nation-states.

Nor, without being Russian, could Lenin ever have created his tight-knit, conspir- atorial, highly disciplined and centralised 'party of a new type'. Its organisational structure had nothing to do with marxism- it owed everything to the Russian revolu- tionary tradition. However much he may have believed himself a marxist, Lenin was really following in the footsteps of Nechaev, with his organisation of devoted, ruthless professional revolutionaries; of Tkachev, who, arguing with Engels in 1874, had boldly declared: 'Very little is needed for this state to fall apart: two or three military defeats, a peasant rebellion simultaneously in several provinces, an open rebellion in the capital'. All that was needed to seize power in these circumstances was a disciplined elitist party. Engels contemptuously laughed the ignorant Russian scribbler out of court—but in 1917 it was Tkachev's not Engels's forecast which came true, Probably the greatest intellectual influence upon Lenin was not that of Marx but that of Chernyshevsky. Lenin revered Cherny- shevsky; a set of the master's works accom- panied him through all his travels. In his conversations with Valentinov at the turn of the century Lenin described how his whole being had been transformed after reading Chernyshevsky. And when, in 1902, Lenin wrote his most important work—the work that was to become the standard text- book of the new politics of the twentieth

century—he gave it the title of Chernyshev- sky's famous novel: What Is To Be Done? *Here, for the first time, Lenin expounded his highly original views on `spontaneity'

and `consciousness': left to themselves the working-class could spontaneously develop at most a 'trade union consciousness', con- cerned with small day-to-day gains. Revol- utionary consciousness, and revolutionary organisation, could only be brought in from the outside by the intelligentsia. This thesis

ran directly counter to the basic tenet of marxism that 'social being determines social consciousness' yet Lenin managed to con-

vince hi self that his was the only orthodox brand of marxism. What is more to the point, he convince others. Out of this combination of two essènially incompatible elements, of what Lenin called `revolutionary theory' and `revolutionary practice', the Communist party was born. The formula worked in Russia. Whether it has succeeded in build- ing the socialist society of Lenin's dream is questionable, to say the least, but there can be no doubt that every Russian develop- ment since 1917 has stemmed from Lenin's invention of 'the party of a new type' and of its basic organisational principle of 'democratic centralism.' The proletarian revolution was too important a matter to be left to the proletariat. It had to be led and rigidly controlled by a chosen party—and by the person who chose it.

Today, when the terrible truth about the Soviet Union can no longer be concealed

from the world, pathetic efforts are made. to prove that the rot only set in with Stalin. The case for divorcing Leninism from Stalin- ism does not stand up to scrutiny: the one grew inexorably out of the other. The present-day totalitarian Stalinist system of the Lissa is exactly what Lenin's earliest critics had expected, long before 1917, to develop from his schemes.

Plekhanov, the 'father of Russian marx- ism', had, indeed, forecast the Leninist-Stalin- ist state even before Lenin's appearance on the scene. Arguing against the populist plans for achieving power by means of a minority revolution, he sketched, in 1884, a prophetic picture of the kind of system they would be compelled to introduce in the (to him in- conceivable) event of their success: 'Such a revolution would result in a political mon- strosity similar to the ancient Chinese or Peruvian empires—or, in other words, in a resuscitated Tsarist despotism supplied with a communist lining'. By a crowning,irony of history, it was the Russian marxists who, under Lenin, were to effect the design their pioneers had so abhorred. Twenty years later Trotsky (yet another irony) perceptively summed up the in- evitable development of Lenin's system: `Lenin's methods lead to this: the party organisation at first substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the central commit- tee substitutes itself for the organisation; and finally a single "dictator" substitutes himself for the central committee'. After What Is To Be Done? appeared no one criticised Lenin more sharply than the famous revolutionary socialist Rosa Lux- embourg: `Nothing will more surely enslave a young labour movement to an intellectual elite hungry for power than this bureau- cratic straitjacket, which will immobolise the movement and turn it into an automaton manipulated by a central committee'. When `Red Rosa', thrown into the Kaiser's gaol, received her first news of the October revo- lution she uttered a sombre warning: 'With- out general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution . . . Only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading and an elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings, where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unani- mously . . . A dictatorship, to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat, however, but only the dictatorship of a handful of politicians'. A prescient picture.

How then is it possible today to maintain the fantasy of a 'democratic Leninism'? Is the uncanny correlation between what was predicted and what actually happened no more than a chance coincidence?

The foundations of Stalinism were laid down in the first days of the revolution, when Lenin set up a one-party minority government. This came as a surprise even to his hardened followers: a few days later, nearly half his government resigned, de- claring that other than the establishment of a broad socialist coalition `only one path remains open: the preservation of a purely Bolshevik government by means of political terror. This is the path now taken by the Council of People's Commissars'. Lenin re- mained unperturbed: he knew they would all return—as they did. He went on with building up the machinery of political terror. The one-party government gradually became a one-party state. Then the freedom of the communists themselves began to be cur- tailed.

A few brave spirits tried to protest. One old bolshevik spoke up at the ninth Congress, in 1920: `I should like to ask Comrade Lenin a question; and who is going to appoint the Central Committee? But what does it matter—there is one-man leadership there, too'. By then Lenin had had enough of arguments. At the next party congress he announced: 'No more opposition, comrades—the time for that is past! Either here—or there, either with a rifle—or with the opposition'. When one of his closest colleagues, Shliapnikov, ex- presed continued disagreement, Lenin threat- ened to train a machine-gun on him—a portent of the shape of things to come.

By 1921 Lenin was absolute dictator over a cowed country and a muted party.

Whether he had consciously wanted it that way or not is beside the point. Given his premises, things could hardly have devel- oped otherwise. The essential fact is that every distinctive feature of Stalin's, Krush- chev's and Brezhnev's Russia was already present in Lenin's Russia. The terror was instituted and developed by Lenin, who had even begun to apply it to communists. The

Cheka, forerunner of the KGB, was all- powerful. The first great show-trial—that of the leaders of the banned Socialist- Revolutionary party—was held in 1922. The concept of `Socialism in one country' was the ineluctable consequence of Brest-Litovsk.

Russian nationalism, albeit in a muffled form, was already reappearing. Lenin often

used to say disapprovingly, `Scratch a Rus- sian and you'll find a chauvinist,' and he would have been genuinely surprised to be

told that he was a Russian nationalist him- self, yet it would have been the truth, for all his abhorrence of national oppression.

(When the Red Army took Vladivostok in 1922 he sent a gleeful telegram: 'Vladi- vostok is far away, but it is our very own city'—though it had been founded on ter- ritory seized from China a mere ten years before his birth.) Soviet Russian expan- sionism had already begun: independent Georgia was occupied in 1921, after the failure of the first attempt to conquer Poland. The Comintern was no more than an instrument of Russian foreign policy. Lenin had helped Mussolini come to power by splitting the Italian left, just as Stalin was to do in Germany ten years later. Even the gross social and economic inequality of Soviet society was originated by Lenin when he introduced wage differentials for 'val- uable specialists' a few weeks after the revolution.

Lenin lives on after death in his creation. In an eerie way, today's Russia presents a horrible caricature of Lenin's personality. His reserve and desire for personal privacy have turned into pathological secretiveness; his brusque manner has become boorishness; his fussy administrative methods are trans- muted into bureaucratic red tape: his con- ventional views on art have developed into raging philistinism; his intolerance of op- position has passed into the savage suppres- sion of any kind of free thought; his cynicism has been reduced to total immorality. Yet, however grotesquely misshapen, the features of Vladimir Ilyich are unmistakably there; his parenthood cannot be in any doubt.

There was, of course, a great difference in style between Lenin and his successors. Unlike them, he was in many ways an attractive character, simple, unaffected, unselfish, basically good-natured; he was neither cruel nor vindictive nor vain. A less conventional 'great man' it would be difficult to imagine. Lenin had no charisma; he was a poor orator; in an ideological movement he laid no claims to theoretical originality.

What, then, made him great? A powerful mind, an unyielding will, a knack of timing, a deep understanding of human mature, unlimited ruthlessness, an ability to discover his opponents' weak points, boundless self- confidence. But without two other .qualities even these talents would not have assured him his unquestioned domination over the party.

First, Lenin possessed an unrivalled un- derstanding of the nature of politics and of power. He openly declared: 'Politics can- not but have precedence over economics: to argue otherwise is to forget the ABC of marxism'. Never mind that marxism was built on a diametrically opposed principle: Lenin was right, and he knew it. He was a master politician who stripped every prob- lem down to the fundamental essentials of power. There is no better description of- the essence of politics than his justly renowned maxim, 'Who—whom?'

Most important of all, Lenin was, to use Yeats's phrase, 'full of passionate intensity' (I leave the reader to decide whether this made him 'the worst'). It was Cis passionate intensity that ..set him apart from his fol- lowers, to whom he always remained-some- thing of an enigma. For him nothing existed but the cause. He was a fanatic, single- mindedly devoted to revolution. The ends of the revolution justified any means em- ployed to achieve them. If necessary, terror, sacrifice, intrigue, deception, slander, cor- ruption—anything for the revolution. And he won.

Or did he? He had sought a short-cut to socialism; he constructed an infinitely worse despotism than that of the Tsars. Incorruptible himself, he thought his fol- lowers could use any foul means without becoming corrupted. He demanded guile, deceit, dishonesty towards the enemy—and absolute loyalty and dedication to the party. 'Everything that is done in the interest of the proletarian cause is honest', he impat- iently explained to the naïve Italian com- rade Angelica Balabanoff. But events were to show that a party brought up on Lenin's principles contained the seeds of its own corruption and destruction. A party of revolutionary immorality can only achieve an immoral revolution. Lenin, of all people, should have known that history has a peculiar way of avenging itself.

Lenin was not just an infinitely talented and unscrupulous politician. That alone would not have changed the world. He was also a dreamer. His vision of the future is described in the strangest of his books, The State and Revolution, a Utopia of pro- letarian anarchism. Lenin wrote it in 1917, during his last period of hiding; before it was finished he had returned to Petrograd to establish the new state. He never even attempted to carry out a single one of his prescriptions—he even objected to the book's publication. Why? Did he know that

the vision was unattainable? Did he sense that his party was only an instrument of power, not of building Utopia? No one can tell.

For a few months in 1922-23, between his second and third strokes, the invalid Lenin could reflect at leisure upon the results of his revolution. His last writings reveal his torment. Around him he saw nothing but dishonesty, intrigue, careerism, bureaucracy, moral turpitude, incompetence. All the old warnings had come true. He tried to find remedies for the multitude of evils, but he knew it was hopeless. He also knew that he was dying. Had it all been worth it? Yes, a thousand times yes. The revolution had triumphed. True, it was not the revolution he and his comrades had expected, but— here he quotes Napoleon—'0n s'engage et puis . . . on you'. Europe was hopeless, but China and India were already stirring. The Orient has finally entered the revolutionary movement.' Salvation would come from the east. These were his last words.

Unimaginable sufferings were still in store for his people, and for others as well, but Lenin had built his state well on stout foundations of Muscovite despotism. It has survived all the storms and many now take it as their model. The forces unleashed in 1917 are still raging around us. A variety of revolutionary dictators has passed before our eyes, but Lenin remains unique: a quiet-looking, scholarly little man in civilian clothes, the incarnation of havoc and rev- olution and of a failed hope.