10 Lenin—Beyond Reverence

In this chapter and the next, we turn from Trotsky’s Stalin to Tamás Krausz’s monumental intellectual biography of Lenin. Published in 2015, only months before Woods’s translation of Stalin, Krausz’s Reconstructing Lenin is based on the author’s “40-year immersion in the study of the specifics and historical contexts of Lenin’s thoughts.”1 Paul Buhle’s response to the publication of the Krausz volume was enthusiastic. Referencing the experience of the United States in the late 1960s, Buhle says that members of the New Left movement were not particularly into Lenin. They were more taken with Marcuse, but did not look “reverentially at either,” instead seeking “a third solution.”2 It is from this critical, nonreverential standpoint that Buhle approaches Krausz’s work and concludes by giving it high praise. Krausz “gives us a Lenin who is deeply relevant for the present,” he writes, ending his review with: “We need more ‘leaps,’ and this volume will help us.”3

Buhle suggests that Krausz’s book has succeeded in its professed aim—to reconstruct the intellectual biography of Lenin and, in doing so, to approach Lenin dispassionately and without reverence. As Krausz puts it, he was “looking for a path between the ‘cult’ and ‘anti-cult.’” The “cult” glorified Lenin’s singular and indispensable role as the founder of a party and a state. The “anti-cult” replaced what Krausz calls “uncritical glorification” with a focus on Lenin’s thought “purely as an ideology of legitimization.”4

Finding a path beyond reverence, between the cult and the anti-cult, is a very worthwhile project. The Lenin personality cult will be familiar to any who watched with horror as Lenin statues were built by the thousands in a Soviet Union dominated by totalitarian Stalinism and the Gulag. But when the Soviet Union collapsed, writes Krausz, “the legitimizing ideology of Leninism sank into the pits of history along with the system itself.”5 The anti-cult of personality became prominent in the Soviet Union in the 1980s and accelerated in the post-Soviet era as a “new system cried out for a legitimizing ideology.”6 Krausz’s book is impressive, and its goal laudable. My own book has on many occasions relied on Krausz’s scholarship. But this scholarship sometimes veers off of the nonreverential path. This chapter will look at three such moments—the approach Krausz takes to Lenin’s biography, to Lenin’s analysis of the 1905 revolution, and to Lenin’s relationship to nineteenth-century novelist and social analyst Nikolay Chernyshevsky.

A Biographical Cul-de-sac

The signs that Krausz’s approach will have difficulty rising above the stance of reverence are revealed in the book’s first section, a seventy-page introductory biography of Lenin. Here, Krausz obsessively sketches trivial details of Lenin’s personal life that are of no conceivable use to the project of dissecting Lenin’s epistemology. He notes that Lenin liked cats and enjoyed singing songs of revolution as well as the occasional aria, that he “picked mushrooms passionately,” that he had a humble diet (“soup, bread, fish, and tea”), that he “enjoyed the company of children, perhaps because he could have none himself due to his wife’s autoimmune deficiency,” that he went hunting a few days before his death. “It would have naturally crossed his mind,” Krausz writes, “that he was saying goodbye to the life from which he had received fulfillment: revolution. Yet he was disappointed as his death approached, for the work remained a torso and not an entire body.”7

Other reviewers have called this biographical chapter “excellent” and “sparkling.”8 But if Krausz’s project is to navigate the middle waters between cult and anti-cult, the chapter is in fact distracting, too closely related to the long history of reverential treatment of every aspect of Lenin’s life story.

From 1970 to 1982, the Institute of Marxism-Leninism embarked on a multivolume publishing project (twelve volumes in total) on Lenin’s life, “in which the whole of his life can be traced year after year, by day, and sometimes by hour.”9 We are introduced to this publishing project with a description of Lenin as “the greatest revolutionary and theoretician of Marxism, the creator of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the leader of the Great October Socialist Revolution and the founder of the world’s first socialist state.” Apparently, “millions of people around the world” are eager to know every possible detail about him and “his theoretical and revolutionary-transformational activities.”10 A critical researcher, on reading this panegyric, will be suspicious about the quality and reliability of material written through such a lens of reverence.

The Krausz text, far from distancing itself from this kind of effusive praise, at times embraces it enthusiastically. Krausz insists that the “unity and coherence” in Lenin the mature politician were already visible in Lenin as a youth: “The theoretical and methodological coherence of his investigations is surprising, given that Lenin had not even finished his university education when he had already emerged from his first study of Marx.”11 He castigates “those who … deliberately or unwittingly overlook the coherence of Lenin’s political and historical-theoretical analyses.”12 At times, the unrestrained encomium is almost embarrassing:

Lenin embodied all that was necessary in the Russian Revolution for its survival: his organizational drive focused on decisive fields; he was inspiring to the masses; he had great political flexibility, uncompromising, plebeian and internationalist commitment, and stamina; he was self-sacrificial…. His energy, strength of will, and his passion for life infused his surroundings and became a sort of incitement to significant masses of workers, which was partly instrumental in the party’s, or the Soviet government’s ability to suddenly change tack in its politics whenever this proved necessary.13

Both the emphasis on the trivial and the overly effusive praise are symptomatic of an incomplete break from the stance of reverence, and might explain some of the limitations in Krausz’s sketch of the development of Lenin’s epistemology.

The 1905 “Dress Rehearsal”

Krausz argues, in essence, that self-emancipation was at the core of Lenin’s epistemology. For Lenin, says Krausz, “dialectical materialism (and epistemology) incorporates the self-movement in things, phenomena, processes, as well as the conscious human activity to transform society. Thus, it is not a matter of the historical dialectic of ideas, but rather the self-movement and self-creation of history through social classes and individuals.”14 It was the historical event of the 1905 revolution that actualized this theoretical approach, bringing to the stage of history the self-active urban proletariat organized in workers’ councils (soviets)—the institutional embodiment of workers’ self-activity. Lenin famously called 1905 a “dress rehearsal” for “the revolutions of 1917—both the bourgeois, February revolution, and the proletarian, October revolution.”15 Krausz asserts that “Lenin was the first, along with Rosa Luxemburg, to realize that in historical terms a new form of revolution had taken place in 1905.”16

The equation of Lenin and Luxemburg in their understanding of the 1905 events will not hold up to sustained analysis. Krausz is, of course, right to include Luxemburg as a key theorist of the 1905 events. Her “Mass Strike” remains a classic text, shaped by the great events of which 1905 was the culmination.17 So also does Leon Trotsky’s 1905, which is not mentioned by Krausz but which also rates as a classic.18 Luxemburg and Trotsky, in fact, approach 1905 in ways quite different from Lenin. Their views reflect an epistemology quite different to that of Lenin’s, and these views (along with their epistemology) have stood the test of time much more than have Lenin’s.

Luxemburg saw 1905 as the culmination of years of interaction between economic and political struggle, years during which, through mass strikes, the Russian workers developed the consciousness and organization to challenge the autocracy. She traces an unfolding process of class struggle in the Russian empire, from the strike of St. Petersburg textile workers in 1896 right up to the outbreak of the revolution in 1905.19

The trigger for the Russian Revolution of 1905 occurred on 22 January. As Luxemburg describes it: “The demonstration of 200,000 workers ended in a frightful bloodbath before the czar’s palace. The bloody massacre in St. Petersburg was, as is well known, the signal for the outbreak of the first gigantic series of mass strikes which spread over the whole of Russia within a few days.” She goes on to say: “This January mass strike was without doubt carried through under the immediate influence of the gigantic general strike which in December 1904 broke out in the Caucausus, in Baku, and for a long time kept the whole of Russia in suspense.”20

Luxemburg then traces the history of economic struggle underpinning the entire movement. March 1902 saw a strike in the Caucasus. In November of that same year there was a general strike in Rostov-on-Don. In 1903, “the whole of South Russia in May, June and July was aflame. Baku, Tiflis, Batum, Elisavetgrad, Odessa, Kiev, Nikolaev and Ekaterinoslav were in a general strike in the literal meaning of those words.” The foundation of these great protests was economic. “In Tiflis the strike was begun by 2000 commercial employees…. In Elisavetgrad a strike began in all the factories with purely economic demands…. In Odessa the movement began with a wage struggle…. In Kiev a strike began in the railway workshops on July 21. Here also the immediate cause was miserable conditions of labor, and wage demands were presented…. In Nikolaev the general strike broke out under the immediate influence of the news from Odessa, Baku, Batum and Tiflis.”21

“Thus,” concludes Luxemburg, “the colossal general strike in south Russia came into being in the summer of 1903. By many small channels of partial economic struggles and little ‘accidental’ occurrences it flowed rapidly to a raging sea, and changed the entire south of the czarist empire for some weeks into a bizarre revolutionary workers’ republic.”22 The now “raging sea” of workers’ protests became general. First in Baku, “due to unemployment,” a general strike broke out, the working class “again on the field of battle.” Finally, “in January 1905 the mass strike in St. Petersburg broke out.”

Here also as is well known, the immediate cause was trivial. Two men employed at the Putilov works were discharged on account of their membership in the legal Zubatovian union. This measure called forth a solidarity strike on January 16 of the whole of the 12,000 employees in this works … in a few days 140,000 workers were on strike.23

The defining basis of Luxemburg’s analysis, then, is the powerful foundation of confidence and organization built up in the economic struggle that underpinned the emergence of a political movement.

The young Leon Trotsky approached 1905 from a different but complementary angle. He emphasized the role of the soviets, which came about through “the revolutionary struggle of the Russian proletariat” finding “its culmination—and, at the same time, its tragic conclusion—in the activities of the Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies.”24

The Soviet grew as the natural organ of the proletariat in its immediate struggle for power as determined by the actual course of events. The name of “workers’ government” which the workers themselves on the one hand, and the reactionary press on the other, gave to the Soviet was an expression of the fact that the Soviet really was a workers’ government in embryo…. The Soviet was, from the start, the organization of the proletariat, and its aim was the struggle for revolutionary power.25

Without question a new form of revolution had taken place. It was the introduction, to the world, of workers’ council democracy through the institution of the soviet. Pierre Broué captures this brilliantly:

The first soviet made its appearance at Ivanovo-Voznessensk, the “Russian Manchester.” It was born from a strike committee and daily assemblies of strikers during the seventy-two days of the conflict. The form of the elected council of delegates, controlled by their constituents and recallable at any time, had appeared on Russian soil and was rapidly adopted in all the working-class areas. It seems that it was on the initiative of the print workers that the St. Petersburg soviet was born. It quickly expanded to include factory delegates from all the workers of the capital, representatives of non-working-class unions, and of the different factions of social democracy. It was the soviet that led the general strike and took responsibility for keeping order while simultaneously managing transportation and other public services whose functioning was indispensable for the strike’s success. It was the soviet that … imposed the eight-hour day in workplaces. The soviet took the initiative to publish the daily Izvestiia (News); organized a boycott of taxes; launched the celebrated manifesto warning creditors that the revolution would not pay interest on Russia’s debts; and imposed, against rising inflation, the payment of wages in gold coin. The soviet gave impetus to the organization of unions, organized workers’ self-defence groups that repressed an attempted pogrom by the Black Hundreds [right-wing terrorists]. The St. Petersburg Soviet, by example and through the publicity that was made about it, led to the formation of soviets in all the large cities.26

Trotsky responded to the soviets in a manner that put him ahead of his time. “Placed at the heart of the St. Petersburg Soviet experience,” writes Broué, Trotsky “drew up the balance sheet of its actions, and concluded: ‘There is no doubt that at the next revolutionary explosion, similar councils of workers will form in every country. A pan-Russian soviet of workers, organized by a national congress … will assume leadership.’” That future pan-Russian soviet, Broué quotes Trotsky as saying, would be able to organize “revolutionary collaboration with the army, the peasantry and the plebian sections of the middle classes,” and would organize the abolition of absolutism, the police, and the bureaucratic apparatus. It would be in a position to initiate “the eight-hour day; the arming of the people and, above all, the workers; the transformation of the soviets into revolutionary organs of self-government in the cities, the formation of peasant soviets to direct, on the spot, the agrarian revolution,” and finally, it would be able to ensure “elections to the Constituent Assembly.”27

Trotsky, in 1905, worked closely with the Mensheviks—a faction of the Left that Lenin strongly opposed, but that, like Trotsky, had a clear sense of the importance of the soviets. According to Broué: “The Mensheviks, whose propaganda willingly advanced watchwords such as ‘popular state,’ ‘self-government’ or ‘commune,’ supported the creation of the soviets and in them played a not insignificant role.”28 Israel Getzler says this more forcefully. Placing a strong emphasis on the elective principle in both the party and the wider workers’ movement, he writes:

It may not be unreasonable to suggest that by May 1905 [Menshevik leader Iulii] Martov’s thinking and Menshevik thinking in general had already established the principles which in October 1905, were to become the organization and ideological basis of the Petersburg Soviet, i.e. a representative council of the entire working class elected in industrial plants, factories and workshops by democratic vote.29

By contrast, Lenin’s wing of the Left—the Bolshevik faction—was completely sectarian. Pierre Broué says that the Bolsheviks “were much more reticent [than the Mensheviks] with regard to the soviets. Some among them saw in the soviets an attempt to develop an informal and irresponsible organism in competition with the authority of the party. The Bolsheviks of St. Petersburg began by refusing to participate” in the soviets.30 According to Trotsky: “The part of the Bolshevik Central Committee then in St. Petersburg resolutely opposed an elected non-party organization because it was afraid of competition with the party.”31

The extent to which Lenin shared this sectarian position is not clear. He did challenge it in a letter written from exile to the Bolshevik leadership on the ground: “I think it inadvisable to demand that the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies should accept the Social-Democratic programme and join the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.”32

This certainly shows Lenin pushing back against the sectarianism of the local Bolshevik leadership. But Lenin was very tentative, very unsure of himself, prefacing his remarks with the comment: “I may be wrong, but I believe (on the strength of the incomplete and only ‘paper’ information at my disposal) that politically the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies should be regarded as the embryo of a provisional revolutionary government.”33 This is in sync with a caveat he introduces very early in the letter: “I consider it absolutely necessary to make a most important reservation. I am speaking as an onlooker. I still have to write from that accursed ‘afar,’ from the hateful ‘abroad’ of an exile.”34 Most significantly, the letter was not published in the Bolshevik press of 1905, lying dormant in the archives until 1940, years after Lenin’s death. The fact that a letter from Lenin, written in the midst of revolution and suggesting a complete change of course for the Bolsheviks, should have remained unpublished speaks volumes.

Trotsky sharply differentiates Lenin’s position from that of the local leadership: “The sectarian attitude of the Bolshevik leaders toward the Soviet lasted until Lenin’s arrival in November.”35 Others present a different picture. James White says that Lenin “was rather dismissive of soviets as a means of mobilising the workers.”36 According to Broué, “Lenin himself did not seem to give the Soviets either the importance or the significance that he would give them in 1917.”37

A survey of Lenin’s writings in subsequent years shows clearly that he did not emphasize the mass strike movement, à la Luxemburg, or the soviet experience, à la Trotsky, but rather focussed on an event that has now receded into the obscurity of history: the armed uprising of two thousand militant fighters in Moscow in December (perhaps five hundred of them either Bolshevik or Menshevik).38 “The December action in Moscow,” wrote Lenin, “vividly demonstrated that the general strike, as an independent and predominant form of struggle, is out of date, that the movement is breaking out of these narrow bounds with elemental and irresistible force and giving rise to the highest form of struggle—an uprising.”39 The same emphasis can be found in a piece by Lenin marking the five-year anniversary of the 1905 revolution.40 So focused on armed insurrection was Lenin that in volume 8 of his collected works, which covers the first six months of 1905, the word “insurrection” appears 44 times, “dynamite” twice, “bomb” 4 times, “revolver” 4 times, and “uprising” 202 times, 40 of which are part of the phrase “armed uprising.”41

The 1905 uprising had no chance of success. It was crushed by the overwhelmingly superior armed strength of the tsarist state, leading to a horrific reaction. In February 1907, according to Trotsky, “Lenin characterized the political situation of the country in the following words: ‘The most unrestrained, the most brazen lawlessness … The most reactionary election law in Europe.’”42 Trotsky argued that “Lenin’s prestige was decidedly lowered by the December defeat.”43 It took years, however, for Lenin to admit that the moment for armed uprising had passed. Through 1906 and 1907, Lenin and his Bolshevik comrades, in the face of continuing fierce reaction from the tsar, had not abandoned armed insurrection as an immediate objective.

Today, few looking back on the events of 1905 would identify the failed uprising of two thousand armed workers in Moscow as the highest form of struggle in 1905. Most would identify—à la Luxemburg and Trotsky—the mass strike of hundreds of thousands and the emergence of a network of workers’ councils across the Russian empire as the highest forms of struggle. Certainly in 1906, Lenin had not yet come to this conclusion, calling the general strike “out of date” and identifying the armed uprising as “the highest form of struggle.”44 A January 1917 lecture by Lenin on the 1905 revolution is more rounded: he incorporated some of Luxemburg’s emphasis on the importance of mass strikes and the interaction between the economic and the political, and he at least noted the emergence of “the famous Soviets of Workers’ Deputies,” which he refers to as “a peculiar mass organization.”45

Broué provides a summary of the evolution of Lenin’s thinking about 1905 that parallels the summary given here. In the heat of revolution in 1905, Lenin supported the conservative position of the St. Petersburg Bolsheviks, “in whose eyes the soviet was ‘neither a workers’ parliament, nor an organ of workers’ self-government,’ but only a ‘combat organization for attaining certain definite aims.’”

In 1907 he admitted that it was necessary to scientifically study the question to understand if the soviets truly constituted “a revolutionary power.” In January 1917, at a conference on the 1905 revolution, he only mentioned the soviets in passing, defining them as “organs of struggle.” It was only in the course of the following weeks that he would modify his analysis, under the influence of Bukharin, the Dutch socialist Pannekoek, and above all the role played by the new Russian soviets.46

Clearly, then, Lenin’s position on the 1905 revolution did evolve and mature. By 1917, he was clearer as to the real significance of the event, the importance of the mass strikes, and the importance of the institution of the soviet. But this evolution was painstaking, took years, and lagged far behind the positions of both Luxemburg and Trotsky. Krausz’s claim that “Lenin was the first, along with Rosa Luxemburg, to realize that in historical terms a new form of revolution had taken place in 1905” is simply wrong.

What Is to Be Done … with Chernyshevsky?

If great historical events, such as the 1905 revolution, can be foundational to epistemologies, so can influential works of literature. In this regard, Lenin scholars, Krausz among them, inevitably reference the nineteenth-century figure of Nikolay Chernyshevsky when sketching Leninist epistemologies. Krausz points out what many others have noted—that Lenin’s favourite book as a youth was Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done? Lenin paid explicit homage to this novel, borrowing its title for his famous 1902 pamphlet on party organization.47 Krausz argues that Chernyshevsky’s novel, “in which the protagonist, Rakhmetov, is a revolutionary,” can be “held responsible for Lenin becoming a revolutionary…. During one summer he read the book five times.” Krausz then goes on to make a very strong claim: “Throughout his life, Lenin declared that next to Marx, Engels, and Plekhanov, Chernyshevsky had the greatest influence upon his thinking.”48

Krausz is not alone in this emphasis on Chernyshevsky. China Miéville, in his contribution to books published on the centenary of the revolution, begins his account with a reference to “the trenchant Nikolai Chernyshevsky” and returns to the novel in his epilogue.49 Tariq Ali, in his contribution to the centenary literature, frequently references Chernysehvsky and, like Krausz, makes strong claims as to the novel’s influence on Lenin, saying that “the book that changed him was not Capital, as official hagiographers would later maintain, but Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done?”50 At the same time, both Miéville and Ali display some ambivalence about the literary value of Chernyshevsky’s novel, which Miéville calls a “strange book.”51

As an artifact of a moment in Russian history, What Is to be Done? is worth reading and studying. Chernyshevsky’s novel was part of the literary ferment against tsarist oppression that was so characteristic of nineteenth-century Russian literature. However, those who tackle it in the current period will not encounter an easy book.52 As a work of literature, the novel is laborious and tedious, reminiscent at times of high Stalinist “socialist realism” and at others of writings by the rational egoist Ayn Rand, one of the twentieth century’s most prominent anticommunists. However, a reverential approach to Lenin too often spills over into a reverential silence about these aspects of his favourite author.

Written while the author was imprisoned, completed in 1863, and serialized in the publication Sovremennik (Contemporary), the novel proved “quite too liberal” for the tsarist authorities. As the translators of the 1886 English edition stated in their preface, the novel “was hardly brought out in book form before it was ruthlessly suppressed.” Nonetheless, they wrote, it “made an immense sensation throughout Russia. It is said that hundreds of young girls living in disagreeable circumstances started to follow Véra Pavlovna’s example, and hundreds of young men, to live honorable, lofty, philosophical lives in the fashion of the types represented by Lopukhoóf and Kirsánof.”53

Richard Peace describes the novel’s protagonist, Rakhmetov, as “Chernyshevsky’s answer to Bazarov,” the nihilist protagonist of Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons.54 Writing in the introduction to the 1989 English translation of What Is to Be Done? Michael Katz and William Wagner characterize Bazarov’s world view as “destructive at best. He aims only ‘to clear the ground’ and has absolutely no positive program in mind.”55 In Turgenev’s novel, Bazarov sums up his philosophy by proclaiming to his friend Arkady, “Give us fresh victims! We must smash people!”56 Bazarov fails miserably at love and dies a tormented death after recklessly poisoning himself with typhus during a needless autopsy on a peasant. There is little to learn from his example.

As a role model, Rakhmetov has moved beyond this all-embracing nihilism and is, in that sense, an improvement. But Rakhmetov’s alternative to nihilism has its own problems. He is guided by “a set of original principles to govern his material, moral, and spiritual life,” Chernyshevsky writes. “He said to himself, ‘I shall not drink one drop of wine. I shall not touch any women.’” Although he had been “brought up on a sumptuous diet,” he “gave up white bread and had only black bread at his table. For weeks at a time he never put a lump of sugar into his mouth; for months at a time he ate no fruit, no veal, and no poultry.”57

Apart from the avoidance of women, these ascetic predilections might be understood as a young activist’s desire to live like the “common people.” In Rakhmetov’s words: “Anything the common people eat on occasion, I too can eat on occasion. Anything that is never available to them, I too must never eat. That is essential so that I can appreciate how difficult their life is compared to mine.” But not all of his dietary choices can be so categorized. We learn that “he needed to eat beef, a great deal of beef…. He ordered his landlady to purchase good quality beef, the very best cuts for him.” He also had one habit about which he felt “remorse”—his smoking: “Out of his 400-ruble income, almost 150 went for cigars.”58

The puritanical traits listed to this point strike us as quaint but harmless. Others, though, are bizarre and abhorrent. One morning, Kirsanov (earlier spelled Kirsánof) is summoned by Rakhmetov’s landlady, who senses something amiss. He goes in haste to his friend’s apartment. “Rakhmetov unlocked the door with a broad, grim smile,” and Kirsanov was confronted with a terrible sight.

The back and sides of Rakhmetov’s underclothes … were soaked in blood; there was blood under the bed; the felt on which he slept was also covered with blood; in the felt were hundreds of little nails, heads down and points up sticking out almost half a vershok [nearly an inch]. Rakhmetov had been lying on them all night. “What on earth is this, Rakhmetov?” cried Kirsanov in horror. “A trial,” he replied. “It’s necessary. Improbable, of course, but in any case necessary. Now I know I can do it.”59

This was the man that Chernyshevsky labelled “extraordinary.”

According to Katz and Wagner, Chernyshevsky “drew heavily on British utilitarianism to explain human behavior and to refute idealist conceptions of morality. The resulting theory of rational egoism enabled him to reconcile the individual’s need for personal self-fulfillment with the collective interests of the community.”60 So strong is this rational egoist component of Chernyshevsky that a widely cited defence of Ayn Rand—Chris Matthew Sciabarra’s Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical—sees a direct link between Chernyshevsky and Rand. According to Sciabarra, the ethics of Chernyshevsky amount to “a form of psychological egoism, where each person always acts selfishly,” a stance perfectly in sync with Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.61

Krausz surmises that it was during “the summer that followed his expulsion from Kazan University” that Lenin read What Is to Be Done? five times. That would have been the summer of 1888, when Lenin was eighteen years old. What was it that drove the young Lenin to consume this novel over and over again that summer? Lenin’s student activism, for which he was expelled from Kazan University in December 1887, came only months after the death of his elder brother, Aleksandr, who was arrested and executed in May for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Alexander III. This might well have drawn a grief-stricken teenage Lenin toward Rakhmetov. According to Nathan Haskell Dole and S. S. Skidelsky, “nearly all the characters” of the Chernyshevsky novel “are supposed to be drawn from real life,” including Rakhmetov, who “is considered by many Russians to be a true picture of Karakózof, who in 1866 attempted to assassinate the Emperor Alexander II.”62 Dole and Skidelsky are not speculating about a hidden meaning planted by Chernyshevsky; the novel was finished three years prior to the assassination attempt. It is, rather, a reflection of the way in which the novel was so aligned with the spirit of the time that its readers could easily leap to such a conclusion.

We can have some patience for Lenin’s fascination with the peculiar figure of Rakhmetov. Lenin was young and grieving the loss of his brother. We should have less patience with Lenin’s biographer, who leaves the reader with the false impression that it is Chernyshevsky the novelist who stayed with Lenin all his life—alongside Marx, Engels, and Plekhanov.

Except for the homage to the novel embedded in the title of Lenin’s own What Is to Be Done? Lenin never refers to Chernyshevsky the novelist in the Collected Works.63 He writes with respect about Chernyshevsky “the materialist,” who “ridiculed the petty concessions to idealism and mysticism that were made by the then fashionable ‘positivists.’”64 He praises Chernyshevsky the “revolutionary democrat,” who “approached all the political events of his times in a revolutionary spirit and was able to exercise a revolutionary influence by advocating … the idea of a peasant revolution, the idea of the struggle of the masses for the overthrow of all the old authorities.”65 He cites Chernyshevsky’s careful analysis of the Peasant Reform of 1861. Chernyshevsky, Lenin writes, saw that so-called reform as “vile.” From its inception, “he clearly saw its feudal nature, he clearly saw that the liberal emancipators were robbing the peasants of their last shirt.”66 This “emancipation” of the peasants included punitive “land redemption payments,” which were so extreme that “for half a century the peasants have languished in hunger, and have died on those land allotments, weighted down by such payments.”67

A genuine intellectual biography of Lenin demands that we separate Chernyshevsky the mediocre, Rand-like novelist from Chernyshevsky the dedicated political activist. We should similarly separate the teenage Lenin grieving for his elder brother from the adult Lenin trying to organize a socialist movement. Such separations, however, become impossible once the biographer loses objectivity through an attitude of reverence and deference.

Historical Materialism and the Role of the Individual in History

Paul Buhle says that “Krausz might well be regarded as successor to Georg Lukács,” referring to a 1924 book on Lenin by another philosopher from Hungary.68 Krausz agrees. “The subject of this book,” he writes in the preface to Reconstructing Lenin, “is not unprecedented within the Hungarian field of Lenin research. A publication by Georg Lukács of what he called ‘an occasional study’ on the ‘unity of Lenin’s thought’ came out as early as 1924. His 100-page essay is an autonomous philosophical work of extraordinary value, and as such still has its own independent life.”69

But this puts a whole lot of weight onto a little pamphlet that, as Martin Jay points out, was “hastily written in February 1924, to commemorate the loss” of what Lukács called “the greatest thinker to have been produced by the working-class movement since Marx.”70 The pamphlet is replete with panegyrics of the same type: Lenin was a “genius” who saw “the true essence, the living, active main trends … behind every event of his time.”71

This is compatible with a tradition, already visible before Lenin’s death, of treating him with a reverence that had the flavour of religion (or of a Chernyshevsky novel). In an article titled simply “Lenin,” to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of party organizing in Russia, the always florid Karl Radek wrote: “All revolutionists amongst the proletarians of every country are filled with the thought and the wish that this Moses, who has led the slaves from the land of bondage, may pass with us into the promised land.”72 Reaching back more than two thousand years to find a mythical biblical character as a reference point for a biographical sketch of a living person is both unnecessary and embarrassing.

In the immediate aftermath of Lenin’s death, Trotsky, usually more measured, also wrote in quite florid terms, calling Lenin “the great leader, Lenin, Ilyich, the unique, the only one.” He went on to say, “Lenin is no more. These words fall upon our mind as heavily as a giant rock falls into the sea…. The party is orphaned; and so is the working class.” And finally: “How shall we go forward? Shall we keep to the road, shall we not go astray? For Lenin, comrades, is no longer with us.”73

We can perhaps understand Lukács’s and Trotsky’s emotional responses to the death of a head of state and of a comrade, but we need to put these responses in their context. Part of that context was politics—deadly serious politics that must be appreciated in our reading of both Lukács and Trotsky from that year. Trotsky’s little pamphlet titled “Lenin Is Dead,” as Bertram Wolfe notes, “was written hurriedly because Lenin had just died…. It was rushed to the press because Stalin had cunningly deceived Trotsky about the day of Lenin’s burial to convince the ailing Trotsky that he could not possibly arrive from a sanitarium in the Caucasus in time for the funeral.”74

Martin Jay says something similar about Lukács’s Lenin, which was “probably designed to head off the accusations of heresy stimulated by History and Class Consciousness,” Lukács’s attempt at a philosophical defence of Bolshevism published the year before Lenin’s death. In the small pamphlet to commemorate Lenin, Lukács purged “virtually all references of his ultra-leftist sectarianism.”

Instead, Lenin’s “Realpolitik” … was invoked as an antidote to the utopian musings of the Left sectarians…. He praised Lenin’s theory of the vanguard party with few of those Luxemburgist qualifications evident in at least the early essays of History and Class Consciousness. Although the soviets were still lauded as the locus of dual power under a bourgeois regime and the means by which the split between economics and politics was overcome, they were severed entirely from any notion of majoritarian democracy, for “it must always be remembered that the great majority of the population belongs to neither of the two classes which play a decisive part in the class struggle, to neither the proletariat nor the bourgeoisie.”75

This is awkward territory for both Lukács and Trotsky—and of course, for Krausz. A method by which to analyze the role of the individual in history does not automatically flow from the categories central to historical materialism, a paradigm that is focused on the intersection between political economy, social movements, and class struggle and that consciously disparages the liberal approach (and the Chernyshevsky approach), which fetishizes the role of “great men” (and they are usually men). Yet these hastily written eulogies—and Krausz’s twenty-first-century recapitulation of the same themes—feel much more rooted in either that disparaged liberal tradition or the unexamined Chernyshevsky tradition rather than in historical materialism.76

There are much better attempts at situating the individual—including the individual named Vladimir Lenin—within the wider dynamics of political economy and class struggle. Compare Trotsky’s grief-stricken approach in 1924 to his more dispassionate approach a decade later.

In 1934, Trotsky eschewed the “genius” category employed in Lukács’s 1924 panegyric. “Lenin was not a demiurge of the revolutionary process,” writes Trotsky. “He merely entered into a chain of objective historic forces. But he was a great link in that chain.”77 For Trotsky, that link is one that includes the collective institutional actor, the Bolshevik Party. The October Revolution “was inferred from the whole situation,” but could not have happened “without a party. The party could fulfill its mission only after understanding it. For that Lenin was needed.” Trotsky identifies the equivocation of authoritative leaders such as Lev Kamenev and Joseph Stalin, who were “tossed by the course of events to the right…. Inner struggle in the Bolshevik Party was absolutely unavoidable. Lenin’s arrival merely hastened the process. His personal influence shortened the crisis.”78

This is a much deeper analysis than that provided by Lukács. It does not deny the role of the individual: in fact, Trotsky writes that “the role of personality arises before us here on a truly gigantic scale.” However, “it is necessary only to understand that role correctly, taking personality as a link in the historic chain.”79 However one evaluates the actions of Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolsheviks, at the plane of understanding class struggle dynamics, this analysis is head and shoulders above that put forward by Lukács—and Trotsky—in 1924.

A Plural, Not a Singular, Left

Krausz argues that “it is impossible to excavate the legacy of Lenin without steady determination and strict analysis.”80 However, imbued with the very reverence against which he warns us, his book falters on both counts. In fact, the very existence of one more biography of Lenin (we already have hundreds) poses its own questions. Too much of the Left’s long engagement with the Russian Revolution has been coloured by a counter-intuitive focus on the role of the lone figure of Vladimir Lenin—counter-intuitive because historical materialism, the method claimed by most who focus on 1917, points us not toward individuals but toward political economy and social classes.

In the Russian revolutionary era, probably the key test for any notion of party building was posed by the necessity of opposing an imperialist war. Perhaps the key moment in creating an antiwar movement was the famous Zimmerwald conference of 1915. Krausz implies that it was principally Lenin who pushed for this conference.81 In fact, it was the product of a much wider layer in the antiwar Left than just the Bolsheviks.82 Israel Getzler notes that “though the original initiative came from the Italian socialists,” a key mover was Lenin’s nemesis, Iulii Martov. When leading Italian socialist Odino Morgari was in Paris in April 1915, five months before Zimmerwald, Martov, in the words of Getzler, “worked on” him and “appealed to Robert Grimm to replace what was planned as a conference of socialists of neutral countries only, by an international conference of all socialists pledged to peace.”83

To this point, Lenin and the Bolsheviks had advocated a peculiar and divisive policy known as “revolutionary defeatism.” Sometimes this policy focused only on Russia. A resolution “adopted by the foreign (i.e., outside Russia) sections of the Bolshevik party at their conference in Berne in March 1915” called the defeat of Russian tsarism “under all conditions, the lesser evil.”84 At other times, the policy implied that such an approach should be applied by all socialists to all countries involved in the Great War. In 1915, Lenin and Zinoviev, in their pamphlet Socialism and War, argued that “the Socialists of all the belligerent countries should express their wish that all ‘their’ governments be defeated.”85 Besides being difficult to understand, this position was prone to extreme misinterpretation. In Brian Pearce’s words, there was the “danger of a sterile nihilistic conclusion being drawn from his presentation of the way to fight against the war.” Noticing that Lenin was calling for the defeat of Russia in the war, a Ukrainian nationalist approached him in January 1915 to seek a working agreement, asking for the Bolsheviks to work openly with those allied with Russia’s wartime enemies. Lenin, notes Pearce in his succinct account, had to “rebuff” these “hopeful overtures,” telling the anti-Russian Ukrainian: “We are not travelling the same road.”86 Both Luxemburg and Trotsky saw Lenin’s position as simply social patriotism in reverse. Whereas the “social patriots” lined up with the militarism of their own state, Lenin’s policy would be used by those who were lining up with the militarism of the opposing states—but all militarisms had to be opposed.

At Zimmerwald, Lenin’s position on revolutionary defeatism was supported by just eight delegates. Trotsky, who was with the majority, argued that the Leninist position, sectarian and confusing, pushed a program of action too far into the future. It was not sufficiently organized around activism in the here and now for an immediate peace. Trotsky proposed a manifesto that put the question of an immediate peace at the centre and that provided a socialist analysis as to the causes of the war. In contrast to Lenin putting “defeatism” to the fore, Trotsky advanced the position of “the struggle for peace … a peace without annexations or war indemnities and based on self-determination for all peoples.”87 Lenin, knowing that he was isolated, decided to not vote against this, and Trotsky’s position was carried unanimously and without amendments. But Lenin did not immediately change his mind. “After Zimmerwald,” writes Pearce, “Lenin continued for just over a year to plug away at his ‘defeatism’ thesis.” And, at the next antiwar gathering in Kienthal, in April 1916, he again attempted, without success, to have his defeatist views adopted as the standpoint of the movement. After Kienthal, he published two more pieces defending the defeatist standpoint, but these appear to be his last statements on the matter.88 In their work on the ground, many Bolsheviks, in practice, came around to the more concrete position of Trotsky, Martov, and the majority of the Zimmerwaldians.

Pierre Broué calls Zimmerwald a “decisive turning point” in the construction of a New Left from the ashes of the Second International.89 The pressure of the wider movement pushed Lenin and the Bolsheviks away from their sharply formulated, confusing, and extremely sectarian positions, around which no mass movement could be built, toward more concrete, comprehensible slogans, around which a “peace now” mass movement could be built. It was this internationalist Zimmerwald platform—and its corollary emerging from the follow-up conference at Kienthal—that provided the basis for the creation of a united Left, however temporary, in Russia. This united Left included the fusion, in July 1917, of the four-thousand-strong Mezhraionka (Inter-District Committee) and the Bolsheviks, a union that brought not only Trotsky into the party, but also many prominent activists.90 The anonymous author of “Memoirs of a Bolshevik-Leninist” goes so far as to say that these new recruits “became the ideological and organizational backbone of the Bolshevik Party.”91

The Zimmerwald perspective, shaped by Trotsky, was not, in other words, a momentary step on the road toward Bolshevism but a defining and enduring reorientation of the Left, away from the too strident positions of the Bolsheviks—a reorientation that laid the basis for future unity, not shaped by Lenin the helmsman. It was an emergent, collective Left of which Lenin was a part, but which had many other key players, including Iulii Martov, Leon Trotsky, Clara Zetkin, and Robert Grimm—not to mention Rosa Luxemburg, who had a powerful impact. This decisive moment in the story of the Left and the social movements of the twentieth century was made possible by a plural, not a singular, Left, which is a significant lesson for us from this period.

It is worth reiterating a key point from this narrative. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were pressured into this change of position by developments in the wider movement; they did not think their way toward them on their own. In fact, Lenin’s thinking on the whole question of socialists, imperialism, and war had been, if anything, oblique and confusing. In a series of letters to Inessa Armand, he tried to outline the key points of his theory, saying that socialist policy in the second decade of the twentieth century had to be different from socialist policy in the last decade of the nineteenth century, because: “In 1891 there was no imperialism at all … and there was not, nor could there have been, an imperialist war on the part of Germany.”92 Imperialism was absent from the world stage in 1891? Not only does Lenin’s comment disregard the unlikeliness of such a great change in international political economy occurring in only twenty-five years, but it also ignores the vast expanse of the British Empire, which was at the peak of its power in the very decade when the world had supposedly not yet arrived at imperialism!

Living as we are in the shadow of the hundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, it is timely to attempt to reconstruct Lenin. Krausz’s reconstruction, which was “four decades in the making,” is an impressive, meticulously researched book spanning the decades that marked the end of the cult of Lenin and the entrenching of the anti-cult.93 But it is part of an emergent discourse not yet able to separate itself from a reverential attitude, which, as I have tried to show in this chapter, stands as a barrier to clarity and understanding. While Krausz’s attempt at an epistemological reconstruction of Lenin is a welcome contribution to a necessary conversation, this reconstruction itself requires considerable deconstruction.