Читать книгу The Dilemmas of Lenin - Tariq Ali - Страница 12

For a decade after the tragedy, Lenin was referred to in radical circles as Alexander Ulyanov’s younger brother. As far as officialdom was concerned, the family was now beyond the pale, in total disgrace. Lenin was in his last year at the gymnasium and needed official permission to sit the exam. Kerensky defended his right to do so, pointing out to the authorities that the boy was a brilliant student, and that there was no sign whatsoever that he shared his brother’s views. The headmaster’s age and experience and his loyalty to the state ensured that his opinion could not be easily ignored. The younger brother sat the exam and, unsurprisingly, did extremely well. As a child he would answer parental questions with two words: ‘Like Sasha’. Admiration and competition both played a part. He closely followed his elder brother’s activities, learning from and comparing himself to him. His brother’s death shook him to the very core. Everything changed. He was radicalised politically by the event and its aftermath. Isaac Deutscher concludes:

The name of Alexander does not occur in any of Lenin’s books, articles, speeches, or even in his letters to his mother and sisters. In all the fifty-five volumes … of the Russian edition Alexander is mentioned almost incidentally and only twice … So extraordinary a reticence could not be ascribed to frigidity of feeling: on the contrary, it covered an emotion too deep to be uttered and too painful ever to be recollected in tranquillity.

Sometimes, in a very relaxed mood and with friends, he mentioned Sasha’s influence, as recounted in Valentinov’s Memories of Lenin. Winston Churchill, a lifelong enemy of socialism and communism, was capable, on occasion, of rising above the fray and in his essay on Lenin five years after his death wrote perceptively:

He was at the age to feel. His mind was a remarkable instrument. When its light shone it revealed the whole world, its history, its sorrows, its stupidities, its shams, and above all its wrongs. It revealed all facts in focus – the most unwelcome, the most inspiring – with an equal ray. The intellect was capacious and in some phases superb. It was capable of universal comprehension in a degree rarely reached among men. The execution of the elder brother deflected this broad white light through a prism: and the prism was red.¹

After the revolution the poet Mayakovsky wrote something similar, if from a completely different point of view:

He is earthly –

But not of those

Whose nose

delves only into

their own little sty.

He grasped the earth

whole,

all at one go.

Life for the family became difficult in Simbirsk. Socially they were boycotted by their peers; people they had known for a long time crossed the street when they saw the boys’ mother. This angered Lenin much more than the temporary suspension of the state pension due to his father’s widow because the family had produced a would-be regicide. It created in him a deep and pure hatred for liberals and their hypocrisies. How easily they were swayed by the changing moods of the establishment. How easy it was for them to hop from one opinion to another and express surprise when reminded of what they had said only a few months ago. This contempt for political chameleons stayed with him all his life, spreading effortlessly to include right-wing social democrats when they behaved in similar fashion.

Lenin in 1887, the year his brother was hanged.

After numerous petitions from his remarkable mother, the pension was restored. The family decided to leave Simbirsk for Kazan, where Lenin studied law at the university. His father had studied there too when the distinguished mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky (immortalised by the Tom Lehrer song) had been rector of the university and intellectual life had flourished. It was different now. A deadening apathy enveloped the city and the university. Police spies roamed campuses throughout the country. The Ulyanov name was known to all, which meant that Lenin was watched closely from the minute he arrived at the university. His low-key participation in an orderly protest against oppressive conditions led to his first arrest. The gendarme escorting him to prison asked, ‘Why are you causing trouble, young man? You’re breaking your head against a wall.’

Lenin’s response was spirited and prescient: ‘The wall is rotten. One good shove and it will collapse.’ After four months (including three days in prison), he was expelled from the university.

What would he do? Avenge Sasha? The thought must have occurred to him, but he rejected it. Not because he had become a Marxist – he was still very far from all that. The book that changed him was not Capital, as official hagiographers would later maintain, but Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done? In discussions of the book with fellow students and others, he was gradually coming to the conclusion that the sacrifice of his brother and the other five students hanged with him had been in vain. It was the last gasp of a party that was now dead. Not simply because of the repression, but also because the strategy had proved to be ineffective. No act of terror – not even the successful targeting of the tsar – had triggered any mass uprisings. A period of quiet had set in, a gloomy and melancholy time for the young and for the liberal intelligentsia. Nothing remotely progressive seeped through the long twilight of the 1880s. All the radical magazines had been suppressed. The newspapers of Moscow and St Petersburg were dull beyond belief. No critical voices could be published or heard. Time to read books. He devoured them.

Lenin had been banished to his hometown after the Kazan fracas, but since there was nobody left in Simbirsk, the authorities agreed that he could reside at his maternal grandparents’ farm in Kokushino, some thirty miles from Kazan. His sister, Anna, was sent there after her release from prison in St Petersburg and the rest of the family moved in as well. Memories of Sasha must have been strong. They had spent most of their summers here and Sasha, disgust written on his face, had once pointed out to his younger brother the enslaved Jewish boys being taken through the streets to unknown places, where they would be forcibly converted to the Orthodox faith. They all thought of Sasha, but did not talk about him much.

The aunts whispered to his mother that whatever else, young Vladimir should be actively discouraged from following in his brother’s footsteps. Some hope. It is not known exactly when he first came across a copy of Capital. The first Russian translation appeared in 1872. Sasha was reading it while on vacation in the summer of 1886, but Lenin at that time was absorbed in Turgenev and probably did not even notice the title. A dozen or so copies had been circulating in Kazan during his brief stint at the university. During the First World War, Karl Radek later claimed, Lenin told him that he had joined a circle of the People’s Will in Kazan, where he first heard of Marx from another student. Infected with Marxist measles at the time, this student, Mandelshtam, later became a liberal-conservative and joined the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets). This rings true. When asked about this period, his sister Anna, the most reliable source on his early life, would reply: ‘There wasn’t much to say anyway. He read, he studied, he argued.’

The family had received permission to move back to Kazan and Lenin renewed contact with some friends. Fearful of involving his family in any way, he invited none of these friends home. One can presume that none of them wished to visit him either, given the regular police surveillance of the Ulyanovs. Chetvergova, a veteran member of the People’s Will, lived in Kazan at the time. Lenin met her on a number of occasions and questioned her in detail about the organisation and its past. Reading Marx played a huge part in his own intellectual formation, but it did not become an immediate substitute for his People’s Will affinities. He never spoke about Sasha and was reticent when Sasha’s admirers attempted to engage him. Nor did he ever write about him. The only people with whom he talked about Sasha later and in some detail were his sisters, his wife Nadya Krupskaya and his close comrade and lover Inessa Armand. The tragedy left a deep scar inside him, which never disappeared. In silent homage he avidly read most of the books on Sasha’s shelves. Having ignored Chernyshevsky while Sasha was alive, he now read What Is to Be Done? and became extremely heated when it was criticised (which was often, because it did not work as literature). Valentinov, once a young Bolshevik, who became well acquainted with Lenin during his Swiss exile, recalled Lenin’s explosive response when he criticised the book:

Chernyshevsky’s novel fascinated and captivated my brother. It also captivated me. It ploughed me over again completely … It is useless to read it when your mother’s milk has not yet dried on your lips. Chernyshevsky’s novel is too complex, too full of thoughts and ideas, in order to be understood and valued at a young age. I myself tried to read it when I was fourteen years old … It was a worthless and superficial reading that did not lead to anything. But then, after the execution of my brother, knowing that Chernyshevsky’s novel was one of his favourite works, I began what was a real reading and pored over the book not several days, but several weeks. Only then did I understand its full depth. It is a work which gives one a charge for a whole life … It is his great merit that he not only showed that any correctly thinking and truly honest person must be a revolutionary, but also something more important: what a revolutionary should be like, what rules he should follow, how he should approach his goal and what means and methods he should use to achieve it … Before I came to know Marx, Engels, Plekhanov, only Chernyshevsky wielded a dominant influence over me, and it all began with What Is to Be Done?²

It was a slow path that took him from People’s Will to Social Democracy. Even when he had definitively moved on, he always retained a soft spot for the old terrorists, knew their places of residence in different parts of the country and would make time to go and see them whenever possible. More importantly, his ideas of how a revolutionary party should function in conditions of clan-destinity owed something to the pre-Marxist revolutionary traditions of tsarist Russia.

Had the People’s Will recovered and regrouped, Lenin might have been confronted with a serious dilemma. But it was already clear that the party was irretrievable. This had been evident in the complete failure of the 1887 plot carried out by Sasha and his comrades. The year that followed cemented the collapse. Lev Tikhimirov, the principal theoretician and strategist of the People’s Will who had a few years previously argued for a seizure of power and an immediate socialist revolution, had dramatically changed his line. In March 1888 he declared his solidarity with the autocracy and published a widely distributed pamphlet entitled Why I Have Ceased to Be a Revolutionary. Several thousand People’s Will activists followed his lead and changed sides. The anarchist poet Nadson’s last lines included one addressed to his own generation: ‘No, I no longer believe in your ideals.’

The suicide rate amongst young people was frighteningly high. Chekhov explained the causes thus:

On the one hand a passionate thirst for life and truth, a dream of activity, broad as the steppes … On the other, an endless plain, a harsh climate, a grey austere people with its heavy chilling history, savagery, bureaucracy, poverty and ignorance … Russian life weighs upon a Russian like a thousand-ton stone.

And yet, this same decade of defeat produced the first organised Social Democratic (virtually synonymous with Marxist in those early years) current in Russia: Emancipation of Labour, whose founders – Georgy Plekhanov, Vera Zasulich and Deutsch – had all once been radical Populists. Zasulich had tried and failed to assassinate General Tepper, the chief of police, in St Petersburg. As far back as 1880, the Executive Committee of the People’s Will (itself a recent offshoot of the Land and Freedom Group) had written to Marx: ‘Citizen! The intellectual and progressive class in Russia has reacted with enthusiasm to the publication of your scholarly works. They scientifically recognise the best principles of Russian life.’ They had obviously been impressed by the strong moral condemnation of exploitation, without fully grasping the central thesis of Capital.

A ramshackle bridge from the Populist shore to Social Democracy had been constructed. In 1893 Lenin, newly arrived in the capital, joined one of the Emancipation of Labour groups in St Petersburg, in which Peter Struve, Tugan-Baransky and Potresov were already active. Henceforth his own life was fused with this party that had recognised as their own the cause of the industrial workers, who laboured in appalling conditions in the factories mushrooming on the fringes of the city.

A different and equally tiny study circle, led by a local Marxist operating under the nom de guerre of Julius Martov and composed exclusively of students, was already meeting in the city. Martov was convinced that the stagnation of the intelligentsia was temporary and that the struggle of labour against capital would soon dominate the big cities, render Populism redundant and win over both workers and intellectuals to the cause. His main worry was whether they would be able to organise a workers’ party in time:

Whether one succeeds in realising that task before the occurrence of that revolution toward which Russia’s present condition is moving, or not, is all the same. If not, then we shall take part in the revolution side by side with the other progressive parties; if so, then the organised social-democratic party will prove capable of retaining the fruits of victory in the hands of the working class.

To do what? The debates regarding the character of the revolution that adherents of all these groups sought had not yet begun. One interpretation of Marxist orthodoxy suggested a bourgeois democratic upheaval to get rid of the autocracy and start a new phase in Russian history, creating the space needed for the transition to socialism. The model, envisaged in its broadest sense, was that of the French Revolution.

Martov, slightly fed-up with café talk, decided to move temporarily to Vilna to test his theories on the Jewish workers of the city. Heartened by the results of the experiment, Martov returned to St Petersburg with something to report and a pamphlet he had written with Arkadi Kremer, a Vilna activist: On Agitation. This text, suggesting a way out of the intellectuals/workers dichotomy by stressing the unity of theory and practice, made an extremely strong impression on Lenin. He understood that practice was an essential component of revolutionary consciousness. The mass of workers would be radicalised through their own collective experiences, but what about the theory?

In 1895 the two circles of Social Democrats combined to form the St Petersburg Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class. Similar developments were taking place in Moscow and Kiev. The increased frequency of workers’ struggles throughout the country led some participants to argue that they should be joining these fights; workers would discover through experience that the authorities always sided with the employers, which would push them towards a Marxist understanding of the system as a whole. Some Social Democrats disagreed, arguing that the workers did not need anyone else to guide them. Their industrial strength was sufficient to take them forward. The idea itself was not new. Populist groups had set up workers’ circles in the factories to help them organise and fight for everyday improvements. Now it was being proposed by Kuskova (an early Social Democrat in Moscow) that a separate political party was unnecessary and that the efforts of Russian Marxists should be limited to helping the workers in the factories while participating in the liberal constitutionalist movement backed by the Russian bourgeoisie.

Both Lenin and Martov, the two dominant figures of the fledgling Social Democrats, strongly opposed these ideas. Lenin’s theoretical abilities and skill in deconstructing and demolishing arguments which he considered mistaken had established his authority. In a group almost completely populated with intellectuals, it could hardly be otherwise. In What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are and How They Fight the Social Democrats (1894), he spelt out the processes at work in Russia and insisted strongly on its capitalist evolution. He did not argue that Russian capitalism had completed its work and that all that lay ahead was socialist revolution.³ The main line of his argument, as he explained to a colleague, was that ‘the disintegration of our small producers (the peasants and handicraftsmen) appears to be the basic and principal fact explaining our urban and large-scale capitalism, dispelling the myth that the peasant economy represents some special structure.’

Soon afterwards he decided to go abroad and consult various figures in exile as well as activists in European Social Democracy. He may also have wanted to get out of the country to reflect, and recover from family tragedies. His younger sister, Olga, to whom he was very attached, had died of typhoid at the age of nineteen, after which Lenin had put all else to the side and spent the summer of 1891 with his mother in Samara. In Europe in 1895, he met the elders of Russian Marxism: Plekhanov and Axelrod in Switzerland, Paul Lafargue (Marx’s son-in-law) in Paris and Wilhelm Liebknecht in Berlin. The meetings with the Russians were amicable. Lenin was a diligent student and listened happily on this occasion to Plekhanov, who was equally happy to be admired by this young man and impressed by his intensity.

The strike waves of 1896–97 reinforced Lenin’s view that the creation of a unified all-Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) could not be left to the future. In order to prepare for this task, Social Democrats had to agree and present a coherent set of ideas and organisational plans. The tsarist police had other ideas. Martov and Lenin were arrested in 1897 and sentenced to three years of exile in Siberia. The First Congress of the RSDLP took place in Minsk in 1898. Lenin had added a brief appendix to his pamphlet The Tasks of the Russian Social Democrats. Haunted by the fate of his brother, who had been betrayed by two weak-minded recruits, Lenin insisted that in Russia, the Social Democrats would need to work underground, create false identities and rely on other forms of deception in order to defend the organisation:

Without a strengthening and development of revolutionary discipline, organisation and underground activity, struggle against the government is impossible. And underground activity demands above all that groups and individuals specialise in different aspects of work and that the job of co-ordination be assigned to the central group of the League of Struggle, with as few members as possible.

Theoretically, the coming revolution would be based on the growing strength of the proletariat, aided by the quickening pace of capitalist development and therefore bourgeois democratic in character. Its main task would be the complete abolition of the landed estates on which the autocracy rested. This would clear the space for untrammelled capitalist development which would increase the size and weight of the proletariat, thus bringing it face to face with its enemy. And this enemy was not particular individuals, however repugnant their behaviour, but the entire capitalist class. A democratic revolution was crucial in order to create legal and other structures that permitted freedom of association and a press that allowed the workers and their organisations the political space to perceive their own strength.

In 1900, soon after they had served their term in Siberia, it was agreed by their colleagues that Lenin and A. N. Potresov should go abroad for a summit with Plekhanov, Axelrod and Zasulich to discuss the future plans of the movement and the launching of a Marxist newspaper – Iskra (Spark) – in exile to promote their views. Martov would stay on in Russia, for the time being, in order to organise Social Democratic groups. The discussions in Switzerland with the Old Guard initially went well: Lenin supported them politically against some of their younger opponents in exile, whose views on the party’s programme were at loggerheads with those of Plekhanov and Axelrod. As Lenin would soon discover, Plekhanov brooked no opposition on theoretical and organisational questions and was becoming more and more cranky as time went by.

Soon after his meeting with the ‘Father of Russian Marxism’, Lenin wrote an unusual text: How the ‘Spark’ Was Nearly Extinguished. Unusual in the sense that it reads like a diary, a form that he usually disliked. That he was excited and slightly nervous at the thought of winning over the grandees of Russian Marxism to support Iskra is not a surprise, but as he listened to them in turn, his nervousness evaporated. First stop was Zurich, where he found a charming Paul Axelrod: ‘The conversation was as between friends who had not seen each other for a long time; we spoke about anything and everything, in no particular order.’ In Geneva he was warned by another exile to be cautious – since a split in the union of exiles abroad, Plekhanov was in a particularly paranoid state of mind. Lenin described the meeting as a disaster:

My conversation with him did indeed show that he really was suspicious, distrustful, and … I tried to observe caution and avoided all ‘sore’ points, but the constant restraint that I had to place on myself could not but greatly affect my mood. From time to time little ‘frictions’ arose in the form of sharp retorts on the part of Plekhanov to any remark that might even in the least degree cool down or soothe the passions that had been aroused (by the split). There was also ‘friction’ over questions concerning the tactics of the magazine, Plekhanov throughout displaying complete intolerance, an inability or an unwillingness to understand other people’s arguments, and, to employ the correct term, insincerity.

The meeting between the ‘older’ and ‘younger’ generations reached a crisis point when Plekhanov accused Lenin and his comrades in St Petersburg of being too conciliatory to their opponents. When Lenin suggested that the new paper should be open to debate and discussion, the older man could not control his rage and

refused to listen to our arguments. He displayed a hatred towards ‘the Union-Abroad people’ that bordered on the indecent (suspecting them of espionage, accusing them of being swindlers and rogues, and asserting that he would not hesitate to ‘shoot’ such ‘traitors’, etc.) … It became evident that he and we were becoming increasingly disgruntled on the character of a manifesto.

The first meeting of the Emancipation of Labour Group, 1879.

After a few days of cooling down and an agreement of sorts on the first editorial, the entire Emancipation of Labour Group except for Martov – the three elders, Lenin and Potresov (Arsenyev) – met as a conference. An early item on the agenda was the attitude that should be taken to the Jewish Bund, a Social Democratic organisation for Jewish workers that was far more familiar with the everyday concerns and needs of Jewish workers and their families than any other organisation in the tsarist lands. Plekhanov now threw an anti-Semitic tantrum that deeply shocked Lenin:

Plekhanov displayed extreme intolerance (towards the Bund) and openly declared it to be an organisation of exploiters who exploit the Russians and not a Social-Democratic organisation. He said that our aim was to eject this Bund from the Party, that the Jews are all chauvinists and nationalists, that a Russian party should be Russian and should not render itself into ‘captivity’ to the ‘brood of vipers’, etc. None of our objections to these indecent speeches had any result and Plekhanov stuck to his ideas to the full, saying that we simply did not know enough about the Jews, that we had no real experience in dealing with Jews.

Georgy Plekhanov: From early anti-

Semitism to national chauvinism

during the First World War.

It was agreed to delay a discussion on this subject till the next conference; but on other matters too, Plekhanov’s attitude struck Lenin ‘as being particularly repellent’ and showing ‘clearly enough that normal relations did not exist between him and us’. The idea for starting a new paper had originated with Lenin and Martov in St Petersburg at one of the meetings of their new organisation.

Since it would have to be published abroad, it was suggested that they try and get the veterans on board. Plekhanov refused to accept that a handful of young whippersnappers freshly arrived from Russia were going to edit the paper. His ego, always heading in a stratospheric direction, was hurt. He refused to write the ‘declaration’ or to collaborate in its production, but carried on sniping and ‘casually threw in a venomous, malicious, remark’, describing Lenin as a ‘careerist’ and so on. Plekhanov won the battle to maintain control, leaving behind a residue of bitterness and resentment. Lenin summarised the situation thus:

As soon as we found ourselves alone, after leaving the steamer, we broke out into a flood of angry expressions. Our pent-up feelings got the better of us; the charged atmosphere burst into a storm. Up and down our little village we paced far into the night; it was quite dark, there was a rumbling of thunder, and constant flashes of lightning rent the air. We walked along, bursting with indignation. I remember that Arsenyev began by declaring that as far as he was concerned his personal relations with Plekhanov were broken off once and for all, never to be restored. He would maintain business relations with him, but as for personal relations – finished. Plekhanov’s behaviour had been insulting to such a degree that one could not help suspecting him of harbouring ‘unclean’ thoughts about us (i.e., that he regarded us as careerists). He trampled us underfoot, etc. I fully supported these charges. My ‘infatuation’ with Plekhanov disappeared as if by magic, and I felt offended and embittered to an unbelievable degree. Never, never in my life, had I regarded any other man with such sincere respect and veneration, never had I stood before any man so ‘humbly’ and never before had I been so brutally ‘kicked’. That’s what it was, we had actually been kicked. We had been scared like little children, scared by the grown-ups threatening to leave us to ourselves, and when we funked (the shame of it!) we were brushed aside with an incredible unceremoniousness. We now realised very clearly that Plekhanov had simply laid a trap for us that morning when he declined to act as a co-editor; it had been a deliberate chess move, a snare for guileless ‘pigeons’ … And since a man with whom we desired to co-operate closely and establish most intimate relations, resorted to chess moves in dealing with comrades, there could be no doubt that this man was bad, yes, bad, inspired by petty motives of personal vanity and conceit – an insincere man. This discovery – and it was indeed a discovery – struck us like a thunderbolt; for up to that moment both of us had stood in admiration of Plekhanov, and, as we do with a loved one, we had forgiven him everything; we had closed our eyes to all his shortcomings; we had tried hard to persuade ourselves that those shortcomings were really non-existent, that they were petty things that bothered only people who had no proper regard for principles. Yet we ourselves had been taught practically that those ‘petty’ shortcomings were capable of repelling the most devoted friends, that no appreciation of his theoretical correctness could make us forget his repelling traits. Our indignation knew no bounds. Our ideal had been destroyed; gloatingly we trampled it underfoot like a dethroned god. There was no end to the charges we hurled against him. It cannot go on like this, we decided. We do not wish, we will not, we cannot work together with him under such conditions. Good-bye, magazine!

Young comrades ‘court’ an elder comrade out of the great love they bear for him – and suddenly he injects into this love an atmosphere of intrigue, compelling them to feel, not as younger brothers, but as fools to be led by the nose, as pawns to be moved about at will, and, still worse, as clumsy Streber who must be thoroughly frightened and quashed! An enamoured youth receives from the object of his love a bitter lesson – to regard all persons ‘without sentiment’, to keep a stone in one’s sling. Many more words of an equally bitter nature did we utter that night. The suddenness of the disaster naturally caused us to magnify it, but, in the main, the bitter words we uttered were true. Blinded by our love, we had actually behaved like slaves, and it is humiliating to be a slave. Our sense of having been wronged was magnified a hundredfold by the fact that ‘he’ himself had opened our eyes to our humiliation.

Even as all this was going on in the tiny confines of Switzerland, back at home some of the opponents of Plekhanov were putting forward ideas that were leading to an effective rapprochement with the autocracy. These included syndicalism, a blind worship of existing class consciousness and an inability to think ahead. The economistic currents of these ‘legal Marxists’ were all mired in presentism, arguing, ‘What exists may not be permanent but we have to accompany it till there is a change. Then we will accompany that change.’

The lodestar for most Social Democrats was the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). It was seen by European socialists, including Lenin, as a model party. But he insisted that it could afford luxuries, such as an embedded and well-defined revisionist minority in its ranks, because conditions in Germany were the opposite of those in Russia. Since 1890 the group had been able to operate legally. It had a clear-cut Marxist programme, a highly developed press, well-established methods for resolving disputes and leaders with real authority. The contrast was obvious. The German model, almost perfect for democratic countries, could not be reproduced in tsarist Russia.

This was the context in which Lenin’s first major political work was written and published in 1902. He titled it What Is to Be Done? as a homage to the old radical Populist. Reading the text can be disconcerting, since it is a series of polemics aimed at groups long extinct. But it is equally disconcerting to those who open its pages hoping to find prescriptions for building a conspiratorial underground party. It is not a Marxist version of Nechaev’s Catechism. And a reader might even be shocked to find a defence of ‘dreaming’ in the middle of the text where Lenin is sharply critical of those who can’t think beyond the concrete conditions of factory life. Suddenly the familiar figure of Pisarev makes an appearance, and Lenin quotes from his essay ‘Blunders of Immature Thought’:

‘There are rifts and rifts,’ wrote Pisarev of the rift between dreams and reality. ‘My dream may run ahead of the natural march of events or may fly off at a tangent in a direction in which no natural march of events will ever proceed. In the first case my dream will not cause any harm; it may even support and augment the energy of the working men … There is nothing in such dreams that would distort or paralyse labour-power. On the contrary, if man were completely deprived of the ability to dream in this way, if he could not from time to time run ahead and mentally conceive, in an entire and completed picture, the product to which his hands are only just beginning to lend shape, then I cannot at all imagine what stimulus there would be to induce man to undertake and complete extensive and strenuous work in the spheres of art, science, and practical endeavour … The rift between dreams and reality causes no harm if only the person dreaming believes seriously in his dream, if he attentively observes life, compares his observations with his castles in the air, and if, generally speaking, he works conscientiously for the achievement of his fantasies. If there is some connection between dreams and life then all is well.’ Of this kind of dreaming there is unfortunately too little in our movement.

As early as 1907, Lenin made it clear that the prescriptions outlined were neither universally applicable nor would they be needed forever in Russia:

Concerning the essential content of the pamphlet it is necessary to draw the attention of the modern reader to the following. The basic mistake made by those who now criticise What Is to Be Done? is to treat the pamphlet apart from its connection with the concrete historical situation of a definite, and now long past, period in the development of our Party.

This was true. Neither Marx nor Lenin ever generalised from specifically local experiences. What they did understand, better than most of their peers, was that the foundations of bourgeois society were not immovable and, for Lenin, this understanding was crucial in declaring the twentieth century to be an epoch of wars and revolutions.

The universal importance of What Is to Be Done? did not lie in its detailed rebuttals of other political currents, but in its stress on the primacy of politics and the necessity of a revolutionary party with a vigorous set of publications, as well as its careful delineation of the relationship between theory and practice that the young Lukács would later (1924) describe as encompassing the ‘actuality of the revolution’.

Where would the theory come from? Here there were no doubts whatsoever. Marxist and socialist theories did not emerge spontaneously but from the intellectual labour of many, and ‘out of the philosophical, historical and economic theories that were worked out by the educated representatives of the propertied classes – the intelligentsia. The founders of modern socialism, Marx and Engels, belong by social status to the bourgeois intelligentsia.’ And, as mentioned earlier, the same applied to the anarcho-Populist currents that dominated the nineteenth century: Kropotkin, Bakunin, Tolstoy.

Trade union activity was the spontaneous consciousness of the newly industrialised workers but, on its own, was insufficient and often ended up being dominated by its capitalist opponent. It would not come to socialism spontaneously. Politics and parties were essential:

Those who refrain from concerning themselves in this way … in reality leave the liberals in command, place in their hands the political education of the workers, and concede the hegemony in the political struggle to elements which, in the final analysis, are leaders of bourgeois democracy.

It soon became obvious to Lenin that the Russian bourgeoisie was not about to play a heroic role, even indirectly like the merchants in London or the French bourgeois intelligentsia had done. The latter had rapidly lost their vision and become the principal defenders of Order, lambasted by Marx for their sins in 1848 and after. Lenin described their Russian descendants as ‘toadying, vile, foul and brutal’ and the ‘liberal pig which deems itself educated, but in fact is dirty, repulsive, overfat and smug’.

The polemical style of debate in Russia, often attributed to the left, has a much longer pedigree. Seventeenth-century debates within the Church were often harsh. In his classic History of Russian Literature, D. S. Mirsky informs us that Ivan the Terrible ‘was a pamphleteer of genius’. His quill, dripping with ‘satirical invective’, was regularly in action against the boyars and the church:

The best is the letter to the Abbot of St Cyril’s Monastery where he pours out all the poison of his grim irony on the unascetic life of the boyars, shorn monks, and those exiled by his order. His picture of their luxurious life in the citadel of ascetism is a masterpiece of trenchant sarcasm.⁴

Lenin was more considered when analysing shifts in bourgeois politics, which he always followed closely both at home and abroad. He analysed in great detail, for example, Stolypin’s reforms of 1906 (much favoured by the Russian academy these days as the alternative to the revolution), pointing out that they were doomed to failure not because they were unintelligent from the point of view of the liberal conservatives, but because the cooperation they were proposing with the wealthier sections of the peasantry was, in fact, impossible due to the extreme degree of political polarisation in Russia. This point in particular eluded Hayek in his admiring references to the proposals in The Road to Serfdom, which even he admitted were a response to the 1905 revolution whose aim was ‘to undercut the voices from below and ease the concerns of the landed nobility over confiscation’.

Lenin’s ideas on practical questions of strategy and tactics changed in the years that lay ahead and, while he agreed with the notion of a mass political-economic strike, he strongly disputed the notion, as Plekhanov and Axelrod had done before him, that this could transmogrify of its own accord into a social and political revolution. The coming war helped clarify his ideas further. One thing, however, was clear. Terrorism as a political tactic could not be resuscitated. It simply did not work. It was an inefficient substitute for mass action. It concentrated on individuals while leaving the system intact, which was why it had long ceased to interest or attract the bulk of the intelligentsia. A different path had been opened by revolutionary Social Democracy.