The Russian Revolution полностью

Lenin might perhaps have been forgiven in time and allowed to reenroll were it not that in the course of the investigation which followed the police uncovered his connections with the Bogoraz circle and learned of his brother’s involvement in terrorism. Once these facts became known, he was placed on the list of “unreliables” and put under police surveillance. His and his mother’s petitions for readmission were routinely rejected. Lenin saw before him no future. He spent the next four years in forced idleness, living off his mother’s pension. His mood was desperate and, according to one of his mother’s petitions, verging on the suicidal. Such accounts as we have of Lenin during this period depict him as an insolent, sarcastic, and friendless young man. In the Ulianov family, however, which idolized him, he was regarded as a budding genius and his opinions were gospel.⁷

During this period Lenin did a great deal of reading. He plowed through the “progressive” journals and books of the 1860s and 1870s, especially the writings of Nicholas Chernyshevskii, which, according to his own testimony, had on him a decisive influence.⁸* During this trying time, the Ulianovs were ostracized by Simbirsk society: people shunned association with relatives of an executed terrorist from fear of attracting the attention of the police. This was a bitter experience which seems to have played no small part in Lenin’s radicalization. By the fall of 1888, when he moved with his mother to Kazan, Lenin was a full-fledged radical, filled with boundless hatred for those who had cut short his promising career and rejected his family—the tsarist establishment and the “bourgeoisie.” In contrast to typical Russian revolutionaries, such as his late brother, who were driven by idealism, Lenin’s dominant political impulse was and remained hatred. Rooted in this emotional soil, his socialism was from the outset primarily a doctrine of destruction. He gave little thought to the world of the future, so preoccupied was he, emotionally as well as intellectually, with smashing the world of the present. It was this obsessive destructiveness that both fascinated and repelled, inspired and terrified Russian intellectuals, themselves prone to alternate between Hamletic indecision and Quixotic folly. Struve, who had frequent dealings with Lenin in the 1890s, says that his

principal Einstellung—to use the new popular German psychological term—was hatred. Lenin took to Marx’s doctrine primarily because it found response in that principal Einstellung of his mind. The doctrine of the class war, relentless and thoroughgoing, aiming at the final destruction and extermination of the enemy, proved congenial to Lenin’s emotional attitude to surrounding reality. He hated not only the existing autocracy (the Tsar) and the bureaucracy, not only lawlessness and arbitrary rule of the police, but also their antipodes—the “liberals” and the “bourgeoisie.” That hatred had something repulsive and terrible in it; for being rooted in the concrete, I should say even animal, emotions and repulsions, it was at the same time abstract and cold like Lenin’s whole being.⁹

Lenin’s official vita, as formalized in the 1920s, is in its essential features modeled on the life of Christ. Like Christology it depicts the protagonist as unaltered and unalterable, his destiny being predetermined on the day of birth. Lenin’s official biographers refuse to allow that he had ever changed his ideas. He is said to have been a committed orthodox Marxist from the moment he became politically involved. This claim can easily be shown to be wrong.

To begin with, the term “Marxist” had in Lenin’s youth not one but at least two distinct meanings. Classical Marxist doctrine applied to countries with mature capitalist economies. For these Marx purported to provide a scientific theory of development, the inevitable outcome of which was collapse and revolution. This doctrine had an immense appeal to Russian radical intellectuals both because of its claim to scientific objectivity and because of the inevitability of its prediction. Marx was popular in Russia before there was a Russian Social-Democratic movement: in 1880, he boasted that Das Kapital had more readers and admirers there than in any other country.¹⁰ But since Russia at the time had hardly any capitalism, however liberally the term is defined, early Russian followers of Marx reinterpreted his theories to suit local conditions. In the 1870s they formulated the doctrine of “separate path,” according to which Russia, developing her own form of socialism based on the rural commune, would make a direct leap to socialism, bypassing the capitalist phase.¹¹ Lenin’s brother adopted this kind of ideology in the program for his People’s Will organization and it was common in Russian radical circles in the 1880s.