I first met Lenin in the summer of 1906. I would rather not recall that encounter. Lenin, admired by all Left Social-Democrats, had seemed to me a legendary hero.… Not having seen him up close, because he had lived abroad until the Revolution of 1905, we had imagined him as a revolutionary without fear or blemish.… How keen, therefore, was my disappointment on seeing him [in 1906] at a meeting in the suburbs of Petersburg. It was not only his appearance that made a disagreeable impression on me: he was bald, with a reddish beard, Mongol cheekbones, and an unpleasant expression. It was his behavior during the demonstration that followed. When someone, spotting the cavalry charging the crowd, shouted “Cossacks!” Lenin was the first to flee. He jumped over a barrier. His bowler hat fell off, revealing his bare skull, perspiring and glistening under the sunlight. He fell, got up, and continued to run.… I had a peculiar sensation. I realized there was nothing to do but save oneself. And still …30
These unattractive personal traits were well known to his associates, who consciously ignored them because of Lenin’s unique assets: an extraordinary capacity for disciplined work and total commitment to the revolutionary cause. In the words of Bertram Wolfe, Lenin “was the only man of high theoretical capacity which the Russian Marxist movement produced who possessed at the same time the ability and the will to concern himself with detailed organization work.”31 Plekhanov, who on meeting him in 1895 dismissed Lenin as a second-rate intellect, nevertheless valued him and overlooked his shortcomings because, in the words of Potresov, “he saw the importance of this new man not at all in his ideas but in his initiative and talents as party organizer.”32 Struve, who was repelled by Lenin’s “coldness, contempt, and cruelty,” admits to having “driven away” such negative feelings for the sake of relations which he regarded as “both morally obligatory for myself and politically indispensable for our cause.”33
Lenin was first and foremost an internationalist, a world revolutionary, for whom state boundaries were relics of another era and nationalism a distraction from the class struggle. He would have been prepared to lead the revolution in any country where the opportunity presented itself, and certainly in Germany rather than in his native Russia. He spent nearly one-half of his adult life abroad (from 1900 to 1917, except for two years in 1905–7) and never had a chance to learn much about his homeland: “I know Russia poorly, Simbirsk, Kazan, Petersburg, the exile—that’s all.”34 He held Russians in low esteem, considering them lazy, soft, and not terribly bright. “An intelligent Russian,” he told Gorky, “is almost always a Jew or someone with Jewish blood in his veins.”35 Although he was no stranger to the sentiment of nostalgia for his homeland, Russia was to him an accidental center of the first revolutionary upheaval, a springboard for the real revolution, whose vortex had to be Western Europe. In May 1918, defending the territorial concession he had made to the Germans at Brest-Litovsk, he asserted: “We insist that it is not national interests [but] the interests of socialism, of world socialism that are superior to national interests, to interests of the state.”36
Lenin’s cultural equipment was exceedingly modest for a Russian intellectual of his generation. His writings show only a superficial familiarity with Russia’s literary classics (Turgenev excepted), most of it apparently acquired in secondary school. Tatiana Aleksinskii, who worked closely with Lenin and his wife, noted that they never went to concerts or the theater.37 Lenin’s knowledge of history, other than that of revolutions, was also perfunctory. He had a love for music, but he preferred to suppress it in accord with that asceticism that so impressed and alarmed contemporaries. He told Gorky:
I cannot listen much to music, it excites my nerves. I feel like talking nonsense and caressing people who, living in such a filthy hell, can create such beauty. Because today one must not caress anyone: they will bite off your hand. One must break heads, pitilessly break heads, even if, ideally, we are opposed to all violence.38
Potresov found that with the twenty-five-year-old Lenin one could discuss only one subject: the “movement.” He was interested in nothing else and had nothing interesting to say about anything else.* In sum, not what used to be called a man of many parts.
