His solution to the problem was to declare that Russia already was capitalist. This eccentric view, which no other student of the Russian economy is known to have shared, rested on an idiosyncratic interpretation of statistical data on agriculture. Lenin convinced himself that the Russian village was in the throes of “class differentiation” which transformed a minority of peasants into a “petty bourgeoisie” and the majority into a landless rural proletariat. Such calculations, derived from those which Engels had made in regard to the German peasantry, had little to do with the facts of the case: but to Lenin they served as a guarantee that Russia did not have to postpone the revolution ad infinitum, until her capitalism was fully matured. Arguing that fully 20 percent of Russia’s rural population in some provinces qualified as “bourgeois,” and given the industrial boom then underway, Lenin felt emboldened to declare in 1893–94 that “at the present time capitalism already constitutes the basic background of Russia’s economic life” and “essentially our order does not differ from the Western European.”16
By declaring “capitalist” a country four-fifths of whose population consisted of peasants, most of them self-sufficient, small-scale communal farmers, Lenin could proclaim it ripe for revolution. Furthermore, since the “bourgeoisie” was already in power, it represented not an ally but a class enemy. In the summer of 1894, Lenin wrote a sentence that summarized the political philosophy to which, except for a brief interlude (1895–1900), he would remain faithful for the rest of his life:
The Russian
Although the vocabulary was Marxist, the underlying sentiment of this passage was People’s Will: indeed, as Lenin would many years later confide to Karl Radek, he had sought to reconcile Marx with the Narodnaia Volia.18 The Russian worker, to whom the People’s Will had also attributed the role of a revolutionary vanguard, was to launch a “direct” assault on the autocracy, topple it, and on its ruins erect a Communist society. Nothing is said about the mission of capitalism and the bourgeoisie in destroying the economic and political foundations of the old regime. It was an anachronistic ideology, for at the time when Lenin formulated it, Russia had a burgeoning Social-Democratic movement which rejected such an old-fashioned adaptation of Marx’s theories.
On his arrival in St. Petersburg—the city that one day would bear his name—the twenty-three-year-old Lenin was a fully formed personality. The first impression which he made on new acquaintances, then and later, was unfavorable. His short, stocky figure, his premature baldness (he had lost nearly all hair before he was thirty), his slanted eyes and high cheekbones, his brusque manner of speaking, often accompanied by a sarcastic laugh, repelled most people. Contemporaries are virtually at one in speaking of his unprepossessing, “provincial” appearance. On meeting him, A. N. Potresov saw a “typical middle-aged tradesman from some northern, Iaroslavl-like province.” The British diplomat Bruce Lockhart thought Lenin looked like a “provincial grocer.” For Angelica Balabanoff, an admirer, he resembled a “provincial schoolteacher.”19
But this unattractive man glowed with an inner force that made people quickly forget their first impressions. His strength of will, indomitable discipline, energy, asceticism, and unshakable faith in the cause had an effect that can only be conveyed by the overused term “charisma.” According to Potresov, this “unprepossessing and coarse” individual, devoid of charm, had a “hypnotic impact”:
Plekhanov was respected, Martov loved, but they only followed unquestioningly Lenin, the one indisputable leader. Because Lenin alone embodied the phenomenon, rare everywhere but especially in Russia, of a man of iron will, inexhaustible energy, combining a fanatical faith in the movement, in the cause, with an equal faith in himself.20
