11 Intellectuals and the Working Class

The Leninist story has its roots in an attempt, at the turn of the twentieth century, to gather the scattered left-wing groups across the Russian empire and organize them into a single unified party. Alexander Potresov, a person central to this process, wrote that “at the end of our deportation, we established what Lenin called the ‘Triple Alliance’ (Lenin, Martov, and I), with the aim of creating an illegal literary centre of the movement around the paper Iskra [Spark] and the magazine Zaria [Dawn] and to make of these publications a tool to build a truly all-Russian, unified and organized party.”1

At one level, the history of this project is well known, including the launch of these two publications (Iskra in 1900, Zaria in 1901), the theorizing of their use in Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? and the unexpected split that broke the unity of the “Triple Alliance” at the end of the 1903 Congress, putting Lenin at odds with Martov and Potresov. At another level, it is virtually unknown. At best, our received wisdom is partial. First, the “publication as organizer” concept is universally credited to one person—Lenin. In fact, as Potresov tells us, Lenin had two intimate collaborators—Martov and Potresov. Second, the concept is universally associated with the newspaper Iskra as the publication around which the organization would be built. In fact, the project envisaged a newspaper for popular consumption (Iskra) along with a theoretical journal for in-depth history and theory (Zaria). The eclipse of two of the three collaborators speaks to the long habit of elevating the role of Lenin and minimizing (or erasing) the role of others—the theme of the previous chapter. The eclipse of the theoretical journal from the “publication as organizer” concept speaks to the anti-intellectualism that is the theme of this chapter. Krausz’s scholarship helps us open the door to this aspect of Lenin’s thought.

The Turn to Anti-intellectualism

Navigating the relationship between the left and the intelligentsia was a critical task in Lenin’s time as much as it is in our own. Tamás Krausz and many others highlight the centrality to Lenin, at the time of the launch of Iskra and Zaria, of a theory of political organization in which intellectuals—or intelligentsia—would play a crucial role. In the early 1900s, Lenin believed that socialist “consciousness had to be injected from the outside,” as Krausz notes.2 Therefore, he ascribed a central role to intellectuals coming into the movement from outside the working class. In 1902, Lenin articulated his views in What Is to Be Done?:

The theory of socialism … grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals. By their social status the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia. In the very same way, in Russia, the theoretical doctrine of Social-Democracy arose altogether independently of the spontaneous growth of the working-class movement; it arose as a natural and inevitable outcome of the development of thought among the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia.3

Whatever the merits of this argument, it was not one unique to Lenin. It is well-known (and documented within Lenin’s text) that his view that the socialist movement required the uniting of working-class militants with radical intellectuals outside the working class leaned heavily on the writings of Karl Kautsky.4 It is not well-known that in 1900, Iulii Martov, who was later to become Lenin’s principal critic, had published the book Red Banner in Russia: An Essay on the History of the Russian Labor Movement, which was organized around a thesis almost identical to that of Lenin’s.5 Savel’ev and Tiutiukin summarize the focus of Martov’s book: “From an initial premise that the contemporary international socialist movement resulted from the unification of two elements that had long been developing separately (the workers’ economic struggle and the ideological and theoretical activity of socialist intellectuals), Tsederbaum [Martov] studied the merger of these two currents, specifically in the Russian context.”6 Lenin spoke favourably of Martov’s book at the time of its publication.7

That said, Lenin decisively parted company with Kautsky’s and Martov’s views from 1903 until his death, making a hard turn toward anti-intellectualism. The trigger for this turn was the split in the Russian Left in 1903. Krausz suggests that Lenin saw “sociological and psychological reasons” for the split. This line of argument was developed in Lenin’s polemical work titled One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, where he “entertained a digression about the ‘significance of the mentality of the intelligentsia.’ According to him, differences in mentality were bound to hamper consolidation, at least until the time the workers took control of the party.”8 Krausz goes on to argue that “a certain degree of anti-intelligentsia bias was characteristic of Lenin’s political disposition. It stemmed from his approach to class (the interests of intellectuals being different from that of the working class).” Lenin’s “political experiences” showed him that, “due to its ‘individualist’ traits, a significant majority of the intelligentsia would not subject itself to the ‘social order and discipline’ of the Soviet system.”9 Krausz is outlining what can only be called a problematic and simplistic sociology and, at the same time, minimizing the significance of this simplistic sociology to Lenin’s thought. This “anti-intelligentsia” bias, based on an essentialist sociology, was more than a diversion: it became embedded in the core of Lenin’s writings and lasted until his death.

Lenin’s One Step Forward, Two Steps Back crystallizes this turn to anti-intellectualism. In that work, his characterizations of the intellectual can be placed into two categories: (a) the economic reductionist sociology summarized by Krausz; and (b) invective and insults. Let’s begin with the latter, which set the tone for his entire book. He counterposes “the individualism of the intellectual, with its platonic acceptance of organisational relations” to “the proletariat,” which “is trained for organisation by its whole life, far more radically than many an intellectual.”10 He declares: “Onward! That’s what I understand! That’s life! Not the endless, tedious intellectual talk, which comes to an end not because people have resolved the issue, but because they are tired of talking.”11 These outbursts are in no way isolated. Lenin denigrates “the mentality of the radical intellectual, who has much more in common with bourgeois decadence than with Social-Democracy.”12 One Step Forward, Two Steps Back contains many more similar instances of invective.

• “intellectual feebleness,” “flabby whimpering of intellectuals,” “the instability and feebleness of the intellectual”13
• “the ‘flabby whimper’ of defeated intellectuals”14
• “opportunism and intellectualist instability,” “the intellectualist instability of the minority,” “the intellectualist instability of certain comrades”15
• “unstable intellectuals”16
• “the dissolute intellectual”17

When Lenin leaves the terrain of insult and invective, the level of his analysis rises only slightly. The key to the rightward drift outside the Bolsheviks, he argues, is “the minority’s intellectualist individualism.”18 He claims that “to the individualism of the intellectual,” with “its tendency to opportunist argument and anarchistic phrase-mongering, all proletarian organisation and discipline seems to be serfdom.”19 He describes “the political complexion of this typical intellectual, who on joining the Social-Democratic movement brought with him opportunist habits of thought.”20 He contrasts “the psychology of the unstable intellectual and that of the seasoned proletarian, between intellectual individualism and proletarian cohesion.”21 He invokes the categories of the French Revolution to make his case, counterposing “the Girondist timidity of the bourgeois intellectual” to the Jacobinism of his faction. “The Jacobin inseparably connected with the organisation of the proletariat—a proletariat conscious of its class interests—this is the revolutionary Social-Democrat,” he declares. The next sentence then fully combines the two approaches—insult followed by sociological reductionism: “The Girondist yearning for professors and school boys, who is afraid of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and who sighs about the absolute value of democratic demands, this is the opportunist.”22

In a leaflet written in July 1904, but published only in 1923, the invective, insults, and reductionist sociology again blur together:

We are fighting in the interests of the working-class movement in Russia against émigré squabbling. We are fighting on behalf of the revolutionary proletarian trend in our movement against the opportunist intellectualist trend…. We are fighting for a united party organization of our working-class vanguard and against intellectualist licentiousness, disorganization, and anarchy. We are fighting for respect for party congresses and against flaccid recklessness, against divergence of word and deed, against contempt for agreements and decisions adopted by common consent.23

The anti-intellectual diatribes continued through 1905, dropped off in 1906, then reached a crescendo in 1907. Samples from the latter year follow, organized by month.

January: “a gang of intellectual phrase-mongers”;24 “the musty atmosphere of intellectualist politicking”;25 “vague, intellectualist pretension”;26 “unstable intellectual opportunists”;27 “arrogant Menshevik intellectuals”28

February: “the Russian Marxist intellectuals, who are debilitated by scepticism, dulled by pedantry”;29 “an intellectual philistine who moralises”;30 “The Russian intellectual is limp and despondent”;31 “the plaints of the miserable, frightened and faint-hearted intellectuals”;32 “The spinelessness and political short-sightedness, characteristic of the petty-bourgeois intellectuals and philistines”33

April: “the whining of petty-bourgeois intellectuals”;34 “genuine, impotent, intellectualist grumbling”;35 “The intellectualist Menshevik hens have hatched out ducklings”;36 “intellectualist-philistine weariness with the revolution”;37 “An ‘intellectual’ who cannot find himself an audience that is not indifferent to those problems as much resembles a ‘democrat’ or an intellectual in the best sense of the word, as a woman who sells herself by marrying for money resembles a loving wife. Both are variations of officially respectable and perfectly legal prostitution”;38 “whining intellectualist trash”39

May: “idle dreams of an idle intellectual”;40 “As an intellectualist party, bourgeois liberalism is impotent”41

August: “the intellectuals who have wormed themselves into the Social-Democratic movement … display such cowardice and spinelessness in the struggle, such a shameful epidemic of renegade moods, such toadyism towards the heroes of bourgeois fashion or reactionary outrages—so let our proletariat derive from our bourgeois revolution a triple contempt for petty-bourgeois flabbiness and vacillation”42

October: “the boundless servility of intellectualist philistinism”;43 “the green mould of intellectualist opportunism”44

December: “intellectualist tittle-tattle”;45 “intellectualist-bureaucratic chatter”46

What was the context for this torrent of verbal abuse? The initial anti-intellectual tirade in 1904 was directed toward his new opponents in the party, Iulii Martov and the Mensheviks, from whom he had divided in 1903. Again in 1907, Menshevik intellectuals were his major target, but the context is one sketched out earlier—what Luxemburg called the “muddy wave” of Bolshevik expropriations, actions whose most vocal critics were, again, Martov and the Mensheviks. The most notorious of these expropriations—the Tiflis bank robbery—occurred in 1907, corresponding to the crescendo of insults documented here. Hurling insult and invective is a classic method by which to deflect attention from unsavoury actions, which the “muddy wave” period certainly saw in abundance. The anti-intellectualist theme appears again and again in Lenin’s writings in the years that follow.

Rosa Luxemburg was solicited by Martov and the other editors of Iskra “to analyze the split between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks in the Russian Social-Democratic Party.”47 What resulted was a careful, systematic, and devastating rebuttal of Lenin’s views. In her article—published in the German theoretical journal Neue Zeit, edited by Karl Kautsky—Luxemburg critiqued Lenin’s denigration of the intellectual and sociological glorification of the proletariat, linking both to his extreme emphasis on military-like discipline and centralism inside the party. What Luxemburg found “surprising,” she wrote, was his “conviction that all the preconditions for the realization of a large and highly centralized workers’ party are already to hand in Russia.”

When he optimistically exclaims that it is now “not the proletariat but certain intellectuals in Russian social democracy who are lacking in self-education in the spirit of organization and discipline,” and when he praises the educational significance of the factory for the proletariat in making it completely ripe for “discipline and organization,” this once again betrays an over-mechanistic conception of social democratic organization. The “discipline” that Lenin has in mind is instilled into the proletariat not just by the factory but also by the barracks and by modern bureaucracy—in a word, by the entire mechanism of the centralized bourgeois state…. It is not through the discipline instilled in the proletariat by the capitalist state, with the straightforward transfer of the baton from the bourgeoisie to a social democratic Central Committee, but only the defying and uprooting this spirit of servile discipline that the proletarian can be educated for the new discipline, the voluntary self-discipline of social democracy.48

Lenin wrote a response in which he abandoned invective altogether and did his best to bolster the sociological side of his argument, contrasting “the intellectual-opportunist and proletarian revolutionary trends” in the Russian Left, and elsewhere altering this slightly to “a proletarian-revolutionary and an intellectual-opportunist wing of our Party.”49 But his reply fails to address the points of substance raised by Luxemburg, which may explain why it was never published in Neue Zeit and remained unpublished until 1930, when the drive to construct a Lenin cult was in full swing.

Much has been written about Lenin’s epistemology as it concerns the relationship between radical intellectuals and the working class.50 However, it is only the young Lenin’s pro-intellectual views that have been examined in detail; very little attention has been paid to the “mature” Lenin’s turn to anti-intellectualism. At the very least, in order to properly arrive at an appreciation of the merits and demerits of Lenin’s approach, we need to incorporate Luxemburg’s critique, which carefully links the two questions of the role of the intellectual and the building of a political organization, avoiding both anti-intellectualism and sociological reductionism.

One more point needs to be added. In part, the dichotomy between “intelligentsia” and “proletariat,” so evident in Lenin’s writings, reflected a class analysis that had not come to grips with the increasingly important role of mental labour within the proletariat. Theodor [Fedor] Dan, in his last book published in 1946, presented a characteristic analysis of the Russian intelligentsia of his era, an analysis in sync with what both Lenin and Martov had written at the turn of the last century (but not of course in sync with Lenin’s turn to anti-intellectualism). Dan says that “intelligentsia” is a “specifically Russian word” and it “does not mean a professional group of the population but a special group united by a certain political solidarity.” Like educated people everywhere, he says, they tend to come from the “upper classes,” but do not identify with these “upper classes.” He says that “what is common to all the educated people included in it [the intelligentsia] is their political and social radicalism,” and that this has to do with the specificities of Russian economic and social development. This means that “in other languages there is no adequate expression for the Russian word ‘intelligentsia’ because outside Russia there was and is no such social phenomenon.”51

The identification of a special role for a group of intellectuals whose origin is outside either the peasantry or the proletariat (understood narrowly as the manual working class) is important. But there are limitations to such an approach. First, if by upper classes we mean the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie (which in a strict class analysis is the only thing that “upper classes” can mean), it by definition cannot account for the presence within the Russian intelligentsia of people such as Dan himself—the son of a pharmacist and a representative of that portion of the intelligentsia that was Jewish. In an environment as antisemitic as the old Russian empire, Jews were completely excluded from both “upper classes,” whether aristocrat or bourgeois.52 A sketch of the background of Martov, another outstanding Jewish member of the Russian intelligentsia, can help us understand the intelligentsia more precisely. Martov’s biographer says that Martov’s great-grandfather was “the enlightened watchmaker of Zamosc.” His grandfather “was the founder and editor of the first Jewish journals and newspapers in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian.” One uncle was “headmaster of the famous Odessa Talmud Torah.” Another “financed his medical studies at the university of Berlin by translating Turgenev’s works into German.” His father was “secretary-general of the Russian Steamship Company” and “the Eastern correspondent of the Peterburgskie vedemosti (the Petersburg Record).”53 Perhaps “secretary-general” of a steamship line would qualify as being part of the managerial class, and in this limited sense qualify as “upper class.” But the rest of Martov’s background—comprised of watchmakers, editors, headmasters, translators, newspaper correspondents and medical doctors—clearly does not.

Too often our understanding of “the proletariat” is restricted to manual labourers, excluding the white-collar section of the proletariat, those who we might classify as “mental labourers.” Too often, these white-collar mental labourers are put into the elastic and ill-defined category of “middle class” or “petit-bourgeois,” and through this conceptual back door are shoved into the category of “upper class.” Such a conceptual move perhaps would be understandable a century ago, when much manual labour was in fact menial labour—when in other words, the “lifestyle” divide between manual and mental labourers was extreme. Today, that divide is much diminished. Many who would qualify as “manual labourers” are in fact highly skilled, deploying training and education indispensable in an increasingly complex economy. By contrast, many who would qualify as “mental labourers” are doing far more work formerly offloaded to others in the workforce. To give just one simple example—the typing pool has been absorbed into the personal computer and word processing software used daily by every contemporary professional.

If our understanding of the working class is broadened to include mental labourers, if we permit ourselves to mix together collars both blue and white, then this changes our understanding of the intelligentsia dramatically. With that perspective, the experience of Russia looks less sui generis and more anticipatory—a precursor to a phenomenon that has become increasingly widespread. The New Left student movement of the 1960s and 1970s is an excellent example. A small—a very small—number from among the New Left might have been considered “children of the bourgeoisie.” Some were “children of the proletariat” narrowly understood as the blue-collar workforce. Most were “children of the proletariat” properly understood as comprising both manual and mental labourers. This late twentieth-century New Left intelligentsia, just like the early twentieth-century Russian intelligentsia, often “stood outside” their place of origin (identifying with the peasants in Vietnam, for instance, and not with the US working class army with which they were at war) and were very much united by a sense of political and social radicalism. But saying that they came from the “upper classes” (which many conservative analysts did, in order to label, ridicule, and dismiss them) can only be maintained if the white-collar working class is designated as “upper class”—a position that is less and less tenable. To properly embrace both manual and mental labour within the working class demands a rejection of all politics based on anti-intellectualism.

The Muck of Ages II: Anti-Intellectualism and Antisemitism

A discussion on anti-intellectualism, left here, would be incomplete. Lenin was writing in the context of tsarism and the Russian empire—a society imbued with a host of prejudices. In the context of the upheaval of 1917, one of those prejudices was directed against the intelligentsia. Orlando Figes writes of the “deep anti-intellectualism that was widely shared by the rank and file who had joined the [Bolshevik] Party since 1917.” This anti-intellectualism could, in part, be seen as a component of anti-capitalism. Derived from bourgeois, “the popular term burzhoois … was used as a general form of abuse against employers, officers, landowners, priests, merchants, Jews, students, professionals, or anyone well-dressed, foreign-looking or seemingly well-to-do.” Students and other “intellectuals” were thus painted with the same brush as the “other” privileged people who oppressed the lower classes. Ominously, the one word that stands out in this list is “Jews.”54 The anti-intellectualism of the crowd had a sinister dimension.

Anti-Jewish racism—by convention, usually referred to as antisemitism—was one of the most divisive and pervasive of the prejudices that corrupted the culture from which the revolutionary movement emerged.55 Marc Ferro recounts that as Kerensky fled Petrograd after the Bolshevik seizure of power, he saw graffiti “painted in enormous letters, ‘Down with the Jew Kerensky, Long Live Trotsky.’”56 Kerensky was, of course, not Jewish, while Trotsky was. Raphael Abramovitch, a participant in and chronicler of the revolutionary process, notes something similar, remarking on the “odd combination of social demagogy, revolutionary mood and anti-Semitism” one would encounter on the streets of Petrograd in 1917. “As the days of October approached, the more openly one could hear the same groups of people on the street that shouted for peace, also talking about Kerensky, saying that he was Jewish and that his real name was Kerenson.”57 The point is not simply to highlight this irony, but rather to point out the equation in popular consciousness of “the other” with “the Jew”—the essence of anti-Jewish racism. Russian political activists were swimming in a milieu where casual antisemitism was pervasive, even among the revolutionary urban crowds that overthrew tsarism.

Early twentieth-century Russia was not the only place where anti-intellectualism became enmeshed with antisemitism. Writing in the early 1960s about the Cold War, Richard Hofstadter challenged the anti-intellectualism of the McCarthyite Cold Warriors:

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in a mordant protest written soon after the election, found the intellectual “in a situation he has not known for a generation.” After twenty years of Democratic rule, during which the intellectual had been in the main understood and respected, business had come back into power, bringing with it “the vulgarization which has been the almost invariable consequence of business supremacy.” Now the intellectual, dismissed as an “egghead,” an oddity, would be governed by a party which had little use for or understanding of him, and would be made the scapegoat for everything from the income tax to the attack on Pearl Harbor. “Anti-intellectualism,” Schlesinger remarked, “has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman.”58

The key takeaway here is Hofstadter’s observation that anti-intellectualism can be a kind of disguised antisemitism. The overlap between these two forms of prejudice, whether intentional or not, was a factor in the Lenin-era disputes.

This is a complex subject. Antisemitism became a dominant aspect of life in Stalin’s Russia. By contrast, the Bolshevik Party, while Lenin was alive, was famous for combatting antisemitism in Russia. Early in his career, Lenin emphatically made the case for what we might, in the twenty-first century, call an intersectional approach to political activism. He thought that, too often, activism was defined in narrow class-reductionist and trade-union terms, an approach that would prevent the union of the many strands of opposition developing against tsarism and capitalism. He asserted: “It cannot be too strongly maintained … that the Social-Democrat’s ideal should not be the trade-union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects.”59 These words were backed up by practice. Before 1917, tsarist oppression took its sharpest form in the periodic pogroms organized against the oppressed Jewish population of the Russian empire. Opposition to these pogroms was central to the activity of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. To cite just one example, in the run-up to a party congress in 1905, Lenin wrote: “We have been promised the report of a comrade who helped organise hundreds of workers for armed resistance in the event of an anti-Jewish pogrom in a certain large city…. It is of the highest importance that the greatest possible number of comrades undertake such and similar work at once.”60

This commitment to combatting antisemitism was systematically eroded as the Stalinist bureaucracy cemented its authority. This did not happen overnight. Mikhail Baitalsky—a survivor of Vorkuta, an activist in the anti-Stalinist opposition, and a keen opponent of antisemitism—argued that a commitment to combatting antisemitism still left traces into the 1930s:

Even in the varied camp atmosphere of the time, I still did not sense any distinct expressions of anti-Semitism. More precisely, the attitude existed in graduated intensity. In the world of the criminal scum, anti-Semitism was openly expressed. Among the higher social layers, I did not notice it. It turns out that the lower depths were better at anticipating the coming change.61

The “coming change” was the new turn to repression, which began in 1947, lasted until Stalin’s death in 1953, and included state-sanctioned antisemitism under the guise of a campaign against “cosmopolitanism.” Baitalsky’s point about the early 1930s notwithstanding, the signs of this shift could be seen much earlier. The economist Yuri Larin held a seminar on antisemitism in 1928. Vadim Rogovin, quoting Larin’s 1929 account, described the meeting:

Here the worker-propagandists who had gathered from all corners of the nation cited typical questions asked at various meetings. In a number of these questions, which reflected the traditional formulations of anti-Semitism (“Why do Jews always manage to get good positions?”, “Why don’t Jews want to do heavy labor?”, “Won’t the Jews betray if there is a war?”, and so forth), an important place too was occupied by “new” questions of the type: “Why was the party opposition made up of 76 percent Jews?”62

This presaged the manner in which Stalin would deploy antisemitism as a weapon in the years of the Great Terror. The Moscow Trials, held from 1936 to 1938, were the portion of this terror visible to outside observers. These were, of course, trials in name only; they have been clearly exposed as judicial frame-ups based on confessions extracted under torture. At these so-called trials, writes Rogovin, “a disproportionately high number of the defendants were Jewish. At the first show trial, ten (out of sixteen) of the defendants were Jews, at the second, eight (out of seventeen)…. In all this, Trotsky saw an attempt by Stalin to exploit the anti-Semitic moods that still existed in the country in the struggle against the Opposition.”63

In a 1937 article, “Thermidor and Anti-Semitism,” Trotsky analyzed in detail the antisemitism emerging under Stalin, underlining the pre-existing widespread antisemitism in tsarist Russia. While the revolutions of 1917 had removed antisemitism from law, “legislation alone does not change people,” he argued.

Their thoughts, emotions, outlook depend upon tradition, material conditions of life, cultural level, etc. The Soviet regime is not yet twenty years old. The older half of the population was educated under tsarism. The younger half has inherited a great deal from the older. These general historical conditions in themselves should make any thinking person realize that, despite the model legislation of the October Revolution, it is impossible that national and chauvinist prejudices, particularly anti-Semitism, should not have persisted strongly among the backward layers of the population.64

This latent antisemitism was increasingly deployed as a divide-and-conquer tool to inflame passions against the Opposition and deflect criticism from the regime. Trotsky saw this as a sign of the reactionary nature of the regime in the 1930s, pointing out: “History has never yet seen an example when the reaction following the revolutionary upsurge was not accompanied by the most unbridled chauvinistic passions, anti-Semitism among them.”65

Suzanne Rosenberg lived through the period of state-sponsored antisemitism, from 1947 to 1953. “Venom and abuse were hailed upon the ‘rootless cosmopolites,’” she wrote, going on to describe the campaign as “directed mostly against Jewish professionals and intellectuals.”66 In 1952, a friend of Nadezhda Joffe travelled to Moscow on vacation. As Joffe recalls: “When she returned, she described how the situation there was terrible: the anti-Semitism bordered on an atmosphere of pogroms.”67

Mensheviks and Bolsheviks

The question of antisemitism hit different “registers” depending upon the wing of the Russian Left in which one resided. Lenin’s key opponents were the Mensheviks. The trigger for his turn from being pro-intellectual to anti-intellectual was the 1903 RSDRP congress, where the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks divided. The Mensheviks continued to be a focus for Lenin’s anger in the years that followed the congress—and the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks came from distinctly different social strata. Philip Mendes points out that “15 out of the 17 Mensheviks who attended the 1903 RSDLP Congress were Jews.” This close connection between the Mensheviks and the radicalization in the Jewish community would continue in later years. “Eight out of the 17 members of the Menshevik Central Committee in June 1917 were Jews,” writes Mendes. “Leading Jewish Mensheviks prior to and after the Bolshevik revolution included Julius [Iulii] Martov, Pavel Axelrod, Fyodor Dan, Raphael Abramovitch, Mark Liber, Eva Broido, David Dallin and Solomon Schwarz.” Mendes makes a point outlined earlier: “A number of Mensheviks were also active in the [General Jewish Labour] Bund.”68 The Menshevik and Bund stories repeatedly overlap throughout this whole period.

Writings by Martov, the leading figure of the Menshevik Left, had been instrumental in the founding of the Bund in 1897.69 When the Bund left the RSDRP in the fractious year of 1903, this was a damaging blow to the party because the Bund was a far larger operation than all the rest of the RSDRP combined. Just before the outbreak of the 1905 revolution, for instance, the party in Russia, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks combined, had 8,400 members, while the Bund on its own had 23,000.70 Its work was focused on the Jewish Pale of Settlement, where, as noted earlier, 95 percent of the empire’s roughly five million Jews resided at the turn of the century.71 Concentrated thus, the Bund was—at the time of the 1903 fracturing of the RSDRP—the one section of the Left in the Russian empire that would qualify as a party with roots and influence. (A contemporary parallel might be the several thousand members of Québec solidaire, little known in the rest of Canada, but with real influence in Québec.) The Bund rejoined the RSDRP in 1906. At the congress held during that year of reunification, Jewish delegates from the Bund constituted 20 percent of the three hundred in attendance. The Menshevik delegation was 20 percent Jewish, twice the percentage of Jews among the Bolsheviks. From that point on, the Mensheviks would be intimately connected with the Bund. In fact, according to Abraham Ascher, “there was such intimate collaboration between the two groups that several men prominent in the Bund were also leaders of Menshevism.”72

The Bolshevik story is quite different. According to Leonard Schapiro, “in historical origin and in ideology bolshevism is an essentially Russian movement.”73 This, of course, does not mean non-Jewish, since many Jews were also Russian, but it does highlight the fact that Bolshevik influence was centred in the “Great Russian” European part of the Russian empire. The twenty-five provinces that made up the Pale were concentrated in what is today Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine, and were “thus largely outside the major areas of ethnic Russian settlement,” and largely outside the influence of the Bolsheviks.74

A Question of Discourse

As with the earlier “muck of ages” discussion on Orientalism, understanding the contours of antisemitism requires examining the contours of discourse, in particular the casual use of language or research that has the effect of othering a section of humanity. Isaac Deutscher, writing in the late 1940s, said that at the 1907 party congress, “there were few genuine Russians among the moderate Socialists [the Mensheviks]—most of whom were Jews or Georgians.”75 The implication that “Jews or Georgians” were not “genuine Russians” is misleading. However, a report on the 1907 party congress by Joseph Stalin takes us from the misleading to the offensive.

No less interesting is the national composition of the congress. The figures showed that the majority of the Menshevik group were Jews (not counting the Bundists, of course), then came Georgians and then Russians. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of the Bolshevik group were Russians, then came Jews (not counting Poles and Letts, of course), then Georgians, etc. In this connection one of the Bolsheviks (I think it was Comrade Alexinsky) observed in jest that the Mensheviks constituted a Jewish group while the Bolsheviks constituted a true-Russian group and, therefore, it wouldn’t be a bad idea for us Bolsheviks to organise a pogrom in the Party.76

Deutscher characterizes this invocation of pogrom as a “heavy jocular aside” and maintains that “anti-semitism could hardly be read into this … because nobody had been more blunt than Koba in the condemnation of racial hatred.”77 This is beside the point. Racist jokes are not always told by people who are about to engage in racist actions. It does not change the fact that they are nonetheless racist. Contrast Deutscher’s approach with that of Robert Tucker, who writes:

[Stalin’s] heavy-handed treatment of this theme and his lack of embarrassment about quoting Alexinsky’s anti-Semitic remark add credibility to Arsenidze’s memory of his speaking as follows to Georgian workers in Batum in 1905: “‘Lenin,’ Koba would say, ‘is outraged that God sent him such comrades as the Mensheviks! Who are these people anyway! Martov, Dan, Axelrod are circumcised Yids.”78

Tucker’s point is not that Lenin himself would have actually used such language, but that there were unscrupulous and antisemitic members of his organization who would.

By the 1930s, Stalinists would frequently use an antisemitic discourse in their fight with Leon Trotsky by invoking the biblical figure of Judas. As Jeffrey Brooks explains:

By 1937 the contrast between good and evil was fully developed, and the forces were personified in the supreme hero and the supreme enemy. Trotsky was assigned the role of Judas, and Stalin, by implication, that of Christ and God combined. Pravda’s editors employed this contrast during the second purge trial in January 1937, and it suited the anti-Semitic undertone of the campaign against Trotsky in particular and the trial in general.79

There is considerable literature identifying the use of the name “Judas” as a form of disguised antisemitism. Vladimir Lenin, for example, said: “The most important fact about Judas, apart from his betrayal of Jesus, is his connection with anti-Semitism. Almost since the death of Christ, Judas has been held up by Christians as a symbol of the Jews: their supposed deviousness, their lust for money, and other racial vices.”80

Nonetheless, Lenin was not averse to using “Judas” in his polemical writings. In 1933, one of these polemical writings—an unpublished draft of an article from 1911—began to circulate. Trotsky called it “a new bit of gossip emanating from Moscow,” gossip saying that “Lenin had declared that Trotsky was a ‘Judas.’” Trotsky explains that “in one of the moments of accentuation of the emigrant struggle, Lenin angrily called Trotsky a ‘yudushka’ in a note that he wrote.”81 The Russian “Iudushka” (often translated as “Judushka”) is a diminutive form of “Judas.” The proper translation, then, is “little Judas,” which brings out clearly both the racialized reference and the patronizing tone. The standard English translation of the article in question airbrushes the diminutive from the record. I have restored it in the following extract, the title of which is properly translated as “The Little Judas Trotsky’s blush of shame.” Lenin writes: “At the Plenary Meeting, the little Judas Trotsky … vowed and swore that he was true to the Party.” He then describes what happened after the plenum:

The little Judas expelled the representative of the Central Committee from Pravda and began to write liquidationist articles in Vorwärts. In defiance of the direct decision of the School Commission appointed by the Plenary Meeting to the effect that no Party lecturer may go to the Vpered factional school, the little Judas Trotsky did go and discussed a plan for a conference with the Vpered group…. And it is this little Judas who beats his breast and loudly professes his loyalty to the Party, claiming that he did not grovel before the Vpered group and the liquidators. Such is the little Judas Trotsky’s blush of shame.82

Trotsky rebuked the Stalinists for unearthing it and circulating it out of context. He argued that the term appears in a writing of Lenin’s that “was not even an article, but a note written in a moment of anger,” and that, like other “polemical letters” from Lenin, it contained “unavoidable exaggerations.” The note was written, says Trotsky, “a number of years before the October Revolution, the civil war, the building of the Soviet state, and the founding of the Communist International.” To get at “the true relations between Lenin and Trotsky” would involve quoting from “more authoritative documents than that of a note resulting from a conflict in emigration.”83 This is true enough, but Trotsky sidesteps the issue of the racially charged nature of any use of the term “Judas,” let alone “little Judas.” Robert Service suggests that “Lenin or his editorial board had second thoughts about [the] publication” of Lenin’s article “because Yudushka or little Judas had a possible anti-Semitic connotation.”84 Hence, the article remained in the archives until it was dug up in the highly charged context of Stalin’s contest with Trotsky.

Adam Ulam claims that in 1911 and 1912, Trotsky was “regularly called ‘little Judas Trotsky’” by Lenin.85 He does not, however, provide evidence, and in Lenin’s published works, the use of the term “little Judas” does not recur as a term of abuse directed toward Trotsky. But elsewhere in his published works, both “Judas” and “Judushka” are on more than one occasion deployed as descriptors for others with whom he has a dispute.

In 1894, he described the state bureaucracy as “made up mainly of middle-class intellectuals,” who he described as “Judushkas who use their feudal sympathies and connections to fool the workers and peasants.”86 In 1901, he described the typical landlord as “a usurer and a robber, a beast of prey, like any village bloodsucker” possessed with “an ability to conceal his Judas nature under a doctrine of romanticism and magnanimity.”87 That same year, he said that the tsarist government was pursuing a “Judas policy of taking bread from the starving.”88 In 1906, in the wake of the 1905 revolution, he mocked liberals who called for unity: “Why fight, why this internecine strife? wails Judas Cadet.”89 In 1912, he characterized the liberal publication Novoe Vremia as both “nationalist” and “Judas-like.”90

Frequently, he would use a less direct designation for his opponents—deploying the literary figure of Porfirii “Little Judas” Golovlyov, a character in Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s nineteenth-century novel The Golovlyov Family. In 1901, he used this figure to denigrate official declarations of the Russian government.91 In 1902, he dismissed the positions of the newspaper Finlandskaia gazeta as “unctuous twaddle in the spirit of ‘Judas’ Golovlyov.”92 In 1907, he said: “This Judas Golovlyov of a Cadet … really does throw dust in the eyes of the people and stupefy them.”93 In 1908, he criticized a speech by the liberal Mikhail Kapustin, saying, “Judas Golovlyov falls far short in comparison with this parliamentarian.”94 And in 1922, he said that so-called left-wing opponents of the Soviet state “try to conceal their malicious glee and behave mostly like Judas Golovlyov.”95

Trotsky asserts that it was this fictional character that Lenin was invoking when he called him “little Judas,” a fictional character with “no relation at all to the Judas of the Evangel.”96 Perhaps, but invoking the “Judas” Porfirii Golovlyov is not unproblematic. I. P. Foote describes the character Golovlyov this way:

He is not a villain in the conventional sense. He performs no grand acts of wickedness. Such evil as he does is on the mean level suggested by his family nicknames “Judas” and “the bloodsucker.” The enormity of Porfirii lies in his hypocrisy. His life is a grotesque ritual in which any act of meanness is permissible provided that some aphorism, text or proverb can be invoked to justify it. He nauseates chiefly by his incessant moralising and empty talk.97

Saltykov-Shchedrin wrote in an era when those labelled “liberal” in terms of their aspirations to move beyond tsarist autocracy were often simultaneously antisemitic. As David Aberbach points out, “Russian literature prior to the 1880s was full of … anti-Semitic stereotyping.” He includes famous writers in this category, like Lermontov, Turgenev, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy, whose works at times “betray prejudice and hatred nourished by the church and kept alive in the popular imagination…. Pre-1881 Russian writers fell short of their liberal, humanistic ideals when they wrote of Jews.”98 Saltykov-Shchedrin worked closely with the populist poet Nikolai Nekrasov, who, in 1866, published a horrifying poem called “Ballet.” In describing the practicality of “our girls,” the poet writes:

Their ideal is the golden calf
Embodied in the grey-haired Jew,
Whose filthy hand causes these bosoms
To quiver with gold.99

No commentary is necessary.

According to Shmuel Ettinger in his book A History of the Jewish People, in the 1870s, the decade when The Golovlyov Family was written, Saltykov-Shchedrin “had joined Nekrasov and others of the same camp in savagely denouncing the Jews.” By the early 1880s, the violence of anti-Jewish pogroms was forcing many to shift their positions. To his credit, Saltykov-Shchedrin was one of these: in the summer of 1882, he published “a passionate article defending the persecuted Jew.”100 It was too late, however: by this time, his offensive character Porfirii “Judas” Golovlyov had taken on a life of his own in the discourse of other writers.

In explaining the reference to Judas Golovlyov, N. P. Kolikov, who was responsible for the index of names in volume 6 of the fifth edition of Lenin’s Russian-language complete collected works (Polnoe sobranie sochinenii), ignores all this. He writes a general note about Saltykov-Shchedrin, who he describes as “a great Russian writer-satirist and revolutionary democrat.” He mentions the poet Nekrasov as a member of Russia’s “democratic intelligentsia,” but makes no further comment. He says that Lenin thought the portrayal of the character Judas Golovlyov was “immortal” and that he “repeatedly used this character … to expose social groups and political parties hostile to the people.” Lenin also “used others” from the novelist’s works, asserts Kolikov, but he gives no specifics.101 There are, in fact, many occasions where Lenin makes allusions to Saltykov-Shchedrin’s works in his writings, but only one character—Judas Golovlyov—is mentioned repeatedly. Kolikov’s editor’s note is insufficient. In the antisemitic atmosphere of the Russian empire, there could have been no innocent manner with which Lenin could have deployed the words “Judas,” “little Judas,” or “Judas Golovlyov.”

The point here is not to pin the label of antisemite on Lenin. His periodic vulgar literary outbursts and his sometimes careless choices of literary references, crude and unacceptable though they may be, are at odds with much of (early) Bolshevik political practice, which made combatting antisemitism a principle of the socialist movement. The point is to identify the way in which the iconic figure of Lenin was, no more than any of his generation, insulated from “the muck of ages.” Revealed here, as in the discussion of Orientalism, are unexamined prejudices inherited from the society of his day, leading to a recurring habit of casually using epithets that played on old and deep prejudices in Russian culture. More significant is Lenin’s profound anti-intellectualism, on display from 1904 until his death, which led him into a cul-de-sac and helped nurture an environment where his less scrupulous cadre—for instance, Stalin—could, with little effort, drift from anti-intellectualism into the state-sanctioned antisemitism of 1947 to 1953. Honestly confronting these issues underscores the point that was central to chapter 10: we can learn from the life and work of Lenin, but only if we avoid adopting an attitude of reverence.