*Martynov,
* As described in Martynov,
*Although the daughter of the British Ambassador has gone to great lengths to depict her father as highly upset by his government’s action (Meriel Buchanan,
PART TWO
The Bolsheviks Conquer Russia
Russia has been conquered by the Bolsheviks.…
[The Bolshevik Party] set itself the task of overthrowing the world.
9
Lenin and the Origins of Bolshevism
He will go far, for he believes all he says.
One need not believe that history is made by “great men” to appreciate the immense importance of Lenin for the Russian Revolution and the regime that issued from it. It is not only that the power which he accumulated allowed Lenin to exert a decisive influence on the course of events but also that the regime which he established in October 1917 institutionalized, as it were, his personality. The Bolshevik Party was Lenin’s creation: as its founder, he conceived it in his own image and, overcoming all opposition from within and without, kept it on the course he had charted. The same party, on seizing power in October 1917, promptly eliminated all rival parties and organizations to become Russia’s exclusive source of political authority. Communist Russia, therefore, has been from the beginning to an unusual extent a reflection of the mind and psyche of one man: his biography and its history are uniquely fused.
Although few historical figures have been so much written about, authentic information on Lenin is sparse. Lenin was so unwilling to distinguish himself from his cause or even to concede that he had an existence separate from it that he left almost no autobiographical data: his life, as he conceived it, was at one with the party’s. In his own eyes and in the eyes of his associates he had only a public personality. Such individual traits as are attributed to him in the Communist literature are the standard virtues of hagiography: self-denying devotion to the cause, modesty, self-discipline, generosity.
Least known is Lenin’s formative period. The entire corpus of writings for the first twenty-three years of his life consists of a mere twenty items, nearly all of them petitions, certificates, and other official documents.1 There are no letters, diaries, or essays such as one would expect from a young intellectual. Either such materials do not exist or, as is more likely, they are secreted in Soviet archives because their release would reveal a young Lenin very different from the one portrayed in the official literature.* In either event, the biographer has very little to go on in attempting to reconstruct Lenin’s intellectual and psychic development during the period (roughly 1887–93) when he evolved from an ordinary youth without political commitments or even interests into a fanatical revolutionary. Such evidence as we possess is largely circumstantial; much of it rests on negative knowledge—that is, what Lenin failed to do given his opportunities. Reconstructing the young Lenin requires a conscientious effort to peel off layers of distorting varnish deposited on his image by years of institutionalized cult.†
Lenin was born Vladimir Ilich Ulianov in April 1870 in Simbirsk into a conventional, comfortably well-off bureaucratic family. His father, a school inspector, had attained by the time of his death in 1886 the rank of a state councillor, which gave him status equal to a general and hereditary nobility. He was a man of conservative-liberal views who sympathized with the reforms of Alexander II and believed that education held the key to Russia’s progress. He worked extremely hard and is said in his sixteen years as inspector to have founded several hundred schools. Lenin’s mother, born Blank, was the daughter of a physician of German ancestry: in her photographs she looks as if she had stepped out of Whistler’s portrait. It was a happy, close-knit family which faithfully observed the rituals and holidays of the Orthodox Church.
