The Russian Revolution полностью

Lenin did not lose faith in the ultimate outbreak of a European revolution, but the prospect seemed remote. The Imperial Government had sufficiently weathered the military and political crisis of 1915 to be able to launch a major offensive in 1916. From sporadic communications sent him by his Petrograd agent, Alexander Shliapnikov, he knew of the deteriorating economic situation in Russia and the popular discontent in its cities,¹³⁹ but he disregarded the information, apparently convinced of the ability of the Imperial regime to overcome such difficulties. Addressing a gathering of socialist youths in Zurich on January 9/22, 1917, he predicted that while a revolution in Europe was unavoidable, “we old-timers perhaps shall not live [to see] the decisive battles of the looming revolution.”¹⁴⁰ These words he spoke eight weeks before the collapse of tsarism.

*On the primary and secondary materials concerning the young Lenin which are kept concealed in Soviet depositories, see Richard Pipes, ed., Revolutionary Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 27, note 2.

†I have attempted to draw a picture of Lenin’s early intellectual and spiritual evolution on the basis of the available documentary evidence in Revolutionary Russia, which I edited. Most of the information on the pages which follow comes from this work as supplemented by two other of my writings: Struve: Liberal on the Left, 1870–1905 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970) and Social Democracy and the St. Petersburg Labor Movement, 1885–1897 (Cambridge, Mass., 1963). Of the secondary sources, the most valuable is Nikolai Valentinov’s The Early Years of Lenin (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1969).

*Chernyshevskii was the leading radical publicist of the 1860s, the author of What is to be done?, a novel that urged young people to abandon their families and join communities committed to new positivistic and utilitarian ways of thinking. He regarded the existing world as rotten and doomed. The hero of the novel, Rakhmetov, is portrayed as a “new man” of iron will, totally dedicated to radical change. Lenin borrowed the title of Chernyshevskii’s novel for his first political tract.

*In 1792, in a transport of exuberance, Robespierre exclaimed: “I am neither the courtier of the people, nor its moderator, nor its tribune, nor its defender—I am the people itself!” (Alfred Cobban, Aspects of the French Revolution, London, 1968, 188.)

†He eventually came to tolerate his personal cult because, as he explained to Angelica Balabanoff, it was “useful, even necessary”: “Our peasants are suspicious; they don’t read, they must see in order to believe. If they see my likeness, they are persuaded that Lenin exists.” Impressions of Lenin (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1964, 5–6).

*A. N. Potresov, Posmertnyi sbornik proizvedenii (Paris, 1937), 297. Tatiana Aleksinskii concurs: “For Lenin, politics superseded everything and left room for nothing else”: La Grande Revue, XXVII, No. 9 (September 1923), 459.

*In order for his common-law wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia, to accompany him to Siberia, Lenin had to marry her. Since the Russian government did not recognize civil marriages, the wedding (July 10, 1898) had to take place in church: Robert H. McNeal, Bride of the Revolution: Krupskaya and Lenin (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1972), 65. Neither Lenin nor his bride ever referred in their writings to this embarrassing episode.

*See above, Chapter 1.

†Lenin, PSS, IV, 375–76. A decade later, Benito Mussolini, ten years Lenin’s junior and a leading Italian socialist, arrived independently at the same conclusion. In 1912 he wrote that “a worker who is merely organized has become a petty bourgeois who obeys only the voice of interest. Every appeal to ideals finds him deaf: B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, IV (Florence, 1952), 156. On another occasion Mussolini said that workers were, by their very nature, “pacifistic”: A. Rossi, The Rise of Italian Fascism, 1918–1922 (London, 1938), 134.

* At the end of the month, to elude surveillance by the Russian and Belgian police, the congress moved to London.