Lenin

Beryl Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317874485
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Drawing on the flood of new material to emerge from Russian and Western sources in recent years, Beryl Williams focuses on Lenin's years in power and provides first-rate introduction to the life, ideology and impact of one of the formative figures of the 20th-century.

Within an overall chronological framework, Williams examines topics such as cultural revolution, foreign policy and expansion. As well as being an examination of Lenin's life and work, this is an up-to-date evaluation of recent historiographical debates and literature in the context of the period.

Chapter 1

THE MAKING OF A REVOLUTIONARY

A. N. Potresov, an early associate of Lenin’s on the journal Iskra and later a leading Menshevik, wrote of the Soviet leader shortly after his death,

No one could sweep people away so much by his plans, impress them by his strength of will, and then win them over by his personality as this man, who at first sight seemed so unprepossessing and crude, and, on the face of it, had none of the things that make for personal charm. Neither Plekhanov nor Martov nor any one else had the secret of that hypnotic influence on, or rather ascendancy over people, which Lenin radiated.¹

This ‘hypnotic influence’ is attested to by others. Both N. Valentinov, the author of the most revealing memoir of Lenin, and A. V. Lunacharsky, the future Commissar of the Enlightenment, talked of somehow ‘falling in love’ with Lenin, of being drawn by his magnetism, by an undoubted charisma. As early as Lenin’s twenty-fifth year, when he was involved in study circles and propaganda in the workers’ districts of St Petersburg, his hearers referred to him as ‘the old man’, the starik. The title stuck throughout his life. The term was used to denote the elder of a peasant community and signified respect and wisdom. Like the use of just his patronymic, Ilyich, instead of Vladimir Ilyich (even his wife called him by it), this title marked him off from his contemporaries. The Menshevik economist, P. O. Maslov, on reading one of Lenin’s first writings, remarked on ‘the categorical and definite formulation of his basic ideas, indicative of a man with fully formed views’.² By his early twenties the future Lenin, already beginning to go bald and with a seriousness beyond his years, was a professional revolutionary. He was never to doubt or reconsider his choice.

Even before he went to the capital, a populist writer, with whom he debated Marxist ideas in Samara, commented on the sense of certainty already obvious in the young man. ‘To him Marxism was not a conviction but a religion. In him … one sensed that degree of certainty which is incompatible with truly scientific knowledge.’ Trotsky, who quoted this comment, naturally disagreed with its conclusions, but himself says of the young Lenin, ‘To him a person was not an end in himself but a tool’, and explained this as ‘flowing from the deepest sources of his nature, which were wholly directed towards a transformation of the external world.’³ The writer, Maxim Gorky, was to say that ‘the working classes are to Lenin what minerals are to the metallurgist’.⁴ Lydia Dan, Martov’s sister, recalled that she had never met anyone as disciplined as Lenin. ‘Lenin knew, he was convinced, that he knew the truth and that this gave him the right not only to win you over but to make you act as he wished, not because he was doing it for himself but because he knew what was needed.’⁵ Lunacharsky was to speak in almost identical terms: ‘Lenin’s love of power stems from his immense certainty about the rightness of his principles and, probably, from his inability … to put himself in the position of an opponent.’⁶ This could repel as well as attract. Struve talked of Lenin’s ‘brusqueness and cruelty’ and saw in him ‘actual self-castigation, which is the essence of all real asceticism, with the castigation of other people, as expressed in abstract social hatred and cold political cruelty’.⁷

Lenin was thus seen by his contemporaries as unusual. For a member of a stratum of society, the intelligentsia, deeply committed to the people and with a high degree of sentimentality, Lenin was uncommonly hard and unsentimental, and possessed to an exceptional degree a dedication to the fulfilment of his goal: the establishment in Russia and throughout the world of a socialist society. In Lenin there was no room for doubt that the end justified the means, and there was no question in his mind that he knew what those means were.

. . .

THE BOY FROM SIMBIRSK

It is not easy to explain what made Lenin the ideal revolutionary leader. In many ways Lenin’s development and background were typical of hundreds of other young men and women of his time and milieu; and this background led others, even when they became revolutionaries, along very different paths. The explanation normally given is the trauma of the execution of his elder brother, Alexander (Sasha), for his part in an attempted assassination of Tsar Alexander III on 1 March 1887. Refusing to beg for a pardon, he was executed shortly after Lenin’s seventeenth birthday. Undoubtedly the involvement, of which the family was unaware, and its tragic conclusion, was deeply traumatic for all of them, and in particular for Alexander’s clever younger brother. As nothing from Lenin’s earlier childhood can be cited in explanation, and as there is no evidence of his having any interest in revolutionary ideas before his brother’s death, this family tragedy must explain to some extent the path he was to follow. Certainly as a result of the tragedy, following as it did the sudden death of his father the previous year, the young Vladimir grew up quickly. Always a rather unsociable and withdrawn child outside the close family circle, circumstances encouraged in him a high degree of self-reliance, determination and self-control. As he and his sister Olga had sat their final school exams at the time of their brother’s execution, and passed with top marks, so he was later to sit his exams for his law degree soon after that same favourite sister had died of typhoid, and to obtain the equivalent of a first-class degree after only a year of study.

Aside from his brother’s death what can we learn from his early years which might throw light on the character of the man who was to become Lenin? Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov had a happy, secure and relatively privileged childhood, growing up in small towns along the River Volga with holidays on his maternal grandfather’s small estate in the countryside near Kazan, Kokushkino. He was born in Simbirsk, Goncharov’s Oblomovka, where ‘life flowed like a quiet river’. Goncharov had written his famous novel only twenty years earlier, depicting the monotony of what was also his home town. Oblomov came to symbolize for Lenin everything about the old Russia that he wanted to change radically and forever. When Vladimir (Volodya) was born on 10 April (old style) 1870 his parents had only just moved to Simbirsk from the livelier and more cosmopolitan centre of Nizhni Novgorod. He was the third child (of six who lived) and second son of parents whose ideas of discipline, hard work and duty marked them off from the average Russian intellectual family, and the upbringing young Vladimir received, in stark contrast to the anti-hero of Goncharov’s novel, encouraged these traits in him.

His parents came from very different backgrounds and from widely differing parts of the far-flung Russian empire. His father was a self-made man whose remarkable rise into the tsarist civil service ended by his being made Director of Public Schools for the province of Simbirsk in 1874, with the rank of Actual State Councillor, the order of St Vladimir and the right of hereditary nobility. This was a considerable achievement and a sign of how far social mobility was possible in late tsarist Russia, for he came from humble stock. Vladimir’s paternal grandfather, of whom he seems to have known next to nothing, was a tailor from Astrakhan and the son of a serf, possibly of Tatar origin, who married a Kalmyk woman. At the age of 70 he was registered as a meshchanin (townsman) but had not prospered in the Asiatic bazaars of Astrakhan. Ilya, Lenin’s father, owed his own education and his degree in mathematics and physics from Kazan University to the hard work and self-sacrifice of his elder brother. Lenin’s father deserves a study to himself. Becoming a provincial schoolteacher he then went into the world of educational bureaucracy as an inspector of primary schools before attaining the directorship. A devout Orthodox Christian and a loyal servant of the tsar, he was typical of the generation of civil servants who welcomed the emancipation of the serfs, and he set out with dedication and hard work to attempt to transform, through education, the rural wastes of provincial Russia. The Russian bureaucrat has had a bad press, often deservedly, but in the second half of the nineteenth century corruption and connections were no longer enough. These years saw the beginnings of a new professionalism at all levels of the civil service and men like Lenin’s father, who were loyal, professional and dedicated to public service, did exist. The nobility who ran the new organs of local government, the zemstva, and the commoners who worked for them as experts, believed that the reforms of the 1860s meant that the monarchy had committed itself to Westernization and progress. An educated and professional middle class, devoted to the public good, was beginning to emerge in Russia and the Ulyanovs belonged to it.

The reign of Alexander II was marked by educational reforms. Non-noble children and those from ethnic minorities were given easier access to the universities. The university statute of 1863 granted a degree of autonomy, with governing bodies being made up of councils of professors who could elect their rectors. The rigid curriculum and censorship of the years of Nicholas I was relaxed. Western literature and ideas were no longer banned. A reorganization of elementary education the following year made the access to schools for all classes of the population official policy, to ‘strengthen religious and moral notions and to spread useful knowledge’, an aim which was interpreted in a relatively liberal sense by some ministers and educational theorists. Zemstva as well as the state and the church could run schools, as could peasant communes themselves. The statute of 1874, which set up the directorate, increased bureaucratic control, but under directors like Ulyanov this was not necessarily a bad thing. His success, and his province’s appreciation, was shown in the tributes paid to him after his death.

Ilya Nikolaevich practised what he preached to his peasant children: an Orthodox work ethic and personal discipline. These qualities, together with a firm belief in progress, he instilled in his own family. He was a kind and concerned, if a stern and necessarily often absent, father. Deeply patriotic, he was horrified at the assassination in 1881 of Alexander II, the tsar liberator, by members of Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will). Even before the assassination, the terrorist campaign, and the government’s doubts as to the results of its own liberalism, had caused the reforms of the 1860s to falter. After the assassination they were to be reversed. Ilya Ulyanov was to be one of the minor victims of the change. Although recommended as loyal as well as effective, he was informed that after over twenty-five years’ service his post was not to be renewed. This was in 1884, the year of a new university statute which reversed many of the gains of 1863. Although Ulyanov himself was eventually reinstated, the policies for which he had worked so hard were not. The stress and disappointment, coming after years of unremitting work, broke his health. He died at the age of 55 of a brain haemorrhage; his famous son was to die of a similar condition at almost the same age.

Lenin’s mother came from a very different milieu. Her father, Alexander Blank, was a doctor, whose family had converted from Judaism. He married a member of Russia’s Lutheran German community. Lenin’s mother, Maria Alexandrova, was brought up by a German aunt in a strict and spartan household and had Swedish relatives. She may have kept her Protestant beliefs, although the children were brought up as Orthodox, both elder boys losing their religious faith in their teens. Maria, who had trained as a teacher, was well educated, with a knowledge of French, German, English and music, and she passed these attainments on to her children. She was a woman of considerable character and strength. Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, later credited his mother with Lenin’s organizing abilities. She ran a spotless, well disciplined and exemplary household, in some contrast to the dirt of provincial Russian towns and the slovenliness of much intelligentsia life. Not for Lenin later the muddle and squalor of intellectual exile. From her Lenin derived his abnormal sense of order. We know he could not work without a clean desk and well ordered and well sharpened pencils. Krupskaya, after his death, recorded that Lenin was ‘a militant person … he had colossal concentration … needed absolute quiet to write … was very strict with himself’.⁸ All his life he remained spartan in his habits. He did not smoke, drank little, usually beer, and devoted time to regular exercise and fitness. It was a German rather than a Russian cast of mind and his colleagues commented on it.

His mother was the dominant influence on all her children. Doubtless bored by the dullness of life in Simbirsk, she poured her energies and talents into her children’s upbringing. They adored her, and from her imbibed ideas of utilitarianism and order. This was true of young Volodya, although physically he was the child who most resembled his father’s side of the family. Precocious and noisy and unlike the other children, he was a boisterous child given to temper tantrums. He had a large head, was ungainly on his feet as a toddler, and walked late, apparently regressing in development at the birth of a younger sister. He had a ready sense of fun and a loud laugh and could play hard as well as work hard. He might find his school work easy and sail through with top grades and apparent arrogance, but he was also meticulous and well prepared for his lessons. He grew up a keen sportsman who liked hunting, chess and walking. At school before Alexander’s death he specialized in Latin and Russian literature. The last summer Alexander spent at Kokushkino, when the young student was reading Marx, Vladimir was engrossed in Turgenev. The two brothers were not close and not alike, although Vladimir grew up wanting, as many younger brothers do, to be ‘like Sasha’.⁹

After his brother’s execution Vladimir undoubtedly changed. He gave up the idea of studying classics or literature and turned to political economy and law as more useful. Eventually he was to abandon not only literature but other ‘addictions’ which he felt were a waste of time and deflected him from concentrating on his main role; music, which he loved, even chess. All were to be subordinated to the good of the cause. His younger brother later recalled that he became ‘grimly restrained, strict, closed up in himself, highly focussed’.¹⁰

Much ink has been spilt in an analysis of Lenin’s childhood in an attempt to explain his later career. Professor Pomper has even suggested that the pseudonym, Lenin, on which he finally settled (he used several others), derives not from the River Lena, as is normally believed, but from the Russian word for laziness (len’).¹¹ Whether or not the name was meant as a constant reminder to live up to the family’s work ethic, Lenin was to cite ‘Oblomovism’ as a trait in the Russian character to be fought against. Just before he left Samara he read Chekhov’s short story, ‘Ward No. 6’, and, according to his sister, saw in it another warning of the terrible prison-like apathy of Russian provincial life. Did he deliberately suppress his own personality as well as his original choice of study? Does this suppression explain his phenomenal self-discipline as well as his equally marked rages and fits of depression and exhaustion to which Krupskaya testifies? He said later in life to Gorky that he could not listen to music too often. It affected his nerves. It made him want to say

kind, silly things and stroke people’s heads who could create such beauty. Nowa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• INTRODUCTION Rethinking Lenin
• CHAPTER 1 The Making of a Revolutionary
• CHAPTER 2 The Making of a Revolutionary Party
• CHAPTER 3 The Approach to Power
• CHAPTER 4 Power: The Commune State
• CHAPTER 5 Power: The Dictatorship of the Proletariat
• CHAPTER 6 Rethinking the Revolution
• CHAPTER 7 A Cultural Revolution
• CHAPTER 8 Exporting the Revolution
• CHAPTER 9 Conclusion: ‘Lenin lives’
• Glossary
• Chronology
• Important members of Lenin’s government
• Bibliographical Essay
• Maps
• Index