Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (5 page)

By the end of 1895, despite her incompetence over ciphers, Krupskaya was the one Lenin trusted most with sensitive materials. At the moment of his arrest she had one of only two sets of proofs of the proposed newspaper
Rabochee Delo
. The other one appears to have been seized during the arrests. Krupskaya took the remaining copy to her old friend Nina Alexandrovna Gerd who held on to it until it was thought to be relatively safe to publish it some months later. So strong had the bond become that Krupskaya unhesitatingly applied for permission for her and her mother, at their own expense, to join Lenin in his Siberian exile, which they did. Very often Lenin seems to have found it easier to maintain friendships with women whereas he was constantly quarrelling with other men (and quite a few women) in the revolutionary movement. There were fewer long-term male associates. Sooner or later he broke with almost all of them, at least for a time.

Krupskaya claims that it was through her influence that Lenin first got closer to actual workers than had hitherto been the case, since the secret circles to which he had belonged were largely intellectual. Krupskaya, on the other hand, had for some years been a dedicated teacher in worker education at the Smolensk District Sunday Evening Adult School. She taught many of the workers who were in Lenin’s developing worker study circle in the nearby Nevsky district. Krupskaya’s deeper knowledge of working-class life brought her into closer contact with Lenin.

On Sundays, Vladimir Il’ich usually called to see me, on his way back from working with the circle. We used to start endless conversations. I was wedded to the school then and would have gone without my food rather than miss a chance of talking about the pupils or about Semyannikov’s, Thornton’s, Maxwell’s and other factories around the Neva. Vladimir Il’ich was interested in the minutest detail describing the conditions and life of the workers. Taking the features separately he endeavoured to grasp the life of the worker as a whole – he tried to find out what one could seize upon in order better to approach the worker with revolutionary propaganda. [Krupskaya 21]

According to Krupskaya, Lenin had already developed what became the classic Leninist technique of agitation and propaganda. As she describes the situation, ‘Most of the intellectuals of those days badly understood the workers. An intellectual would come to a circle and read the workers a kind of lecture. For a long time a manuscript translation of Engels’ booklet,
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
, was passed round the circles.’ [Krupskaya 21] One wonders what they could possibly have made of a rather complex, not to say obscure, text of that nature. On the other hand Lenin did not shy away from complicated texts but went through them with the workers.

Vladimir Il’ich read with the workers from Marx’s Capital and explained it to them. The second half of the studies was devoted to the workers’ questions about their work and labour conditions. He showed them how their life was linked up with the entire structure of society, and told them in what manner the existing order could be transformed, The combination of theory and practice was the particu
lar feature of Vladimir Il’ich’s work in the circles. Gradually, other members of our circle also began to use this approach. [Krupskaya 21]

While one might doubt Lenin’s technique was that clear-cut in 1894–5, the issue of linking theory and practice was one which was about to burst forcefully into the radical arena following the appearance, in 1894, of Arkadii Kremer’s pamphlet
On Agitation
. Essentially, two related issues began to emerge. First, it was deemed to be time for the nascent social-democratic, that is worker-oriented and Marxist-influenced, movement to put less emphasis on analysis and more on revolutionary practice. By that was meant the attempt to build a mass movement not follow the example of isolated acts of terrorism which had traditionally been the hallmark of the populist
Narodnaya Volya
. Second, the issue of the relationship between so-called economic struggle and political struggle began to raise its head. Economic struggle meant, essentially, building organizations such as trade unions which would primarily pur
sue workers’ economic interests. Political struggle implied action against the tsarist state and its repressive institutions. The relationship between these two aspects became increasingly controversial as the social-democratic movement emerged. As we have seen, Lenin already showed something of a ‘Bakuninist’ streak, that is he put great stress on political struggle and attacking the state though he seems to have always been sceptical about terrorism as a method of conducting such struggle. In fact, one of Lenin’s first major personal contributions to social-democratic theory and practice was in this area and we will return to it shortly. For the moment, however, we need to look at the content of Lenin’s ideas as they had developed up to early 1895.

LENIN BEGINS TO EMERGE: IDEAS

In the first place there is no doubt that, whatever Volodya’s earliest convictions, the emerging Lenin was definitely in the social-democratic camp. In particular, this meant that he accepted the orthodox Marxist line that the workers were the potentially revolutionary class. Alongside them the peasants played a subsidiary role and were, in any case, doomed to disappear as capitalism divided them into a minority of small landowners and a majority of landless labourers, sometimes known as the rural proletariat. Lenin’s own ideas on this fundamental Marxist point had important twists and turns ahead but the basic orientation was already set. Lenin was in the camp of the workers and had little time for romantic ideas about revolutionary peasants.

Although many of Lenin’s earliest writings have not survived there is ample evidence to show that, at least from 1891, he was criticizing the fundamental propositions of populism. For the first few years of his political career Lenin was an anti-populist polemicist. In 1891, in Samara, he took part in an illegal meeting at the house of a dentist named Kaznelson at which he opposed populist theory on the economic development of Russia. [Weber 4] Presumably this meant that he argued in favour of Russia having to go through the capitalist stage of development before it could attain socialism, it being a basic belief of the populists that perhaps Russia could avoid capitalism and build socialism directly on its already existing semi-socialist institutions.

However, there is an irony about Lenin’s vigorous pursuit of the Marxist line. It was not what Marx himself thought was the case. As we have seen, Marx had been approached directly by Russian populist leaders on this very question. After much hesitation he replied that it was indeed possible that Russia might, under certain conditions, avoid capitalism. One could argue that on this issue the populists were more Marxist than Lenin.
⁴

Be that as it may, and we will have to return to the issue again, for the time being the emerging Lenin was decidedly anti-populist. In early 1893, in his first surviving work, Lenin argued once more against the populist view that capitalism was not developing in Russia. Further works developed the same theme. The essence of his argument, as it appeared in a letter to a fellow social democrat, P.P. Maslov, was that ‘The disintegration of our small producers (the peasants and handicraftsmen) appears to me to be the basic and principal fact explaining our urban and large scale capitalism, dispelling the myth that the peasant economy represents some special structure.’ [CW 43 37]

1894 marks Lenin’s emergence as a significant figure in the as yet tiny social-democratic circles. In early 1894 a police agent reported that, when the populist Vorontsov got the better of his Marxist opponent Davydov, ‘the defence of his [Davydov’s] views was taken over by a certain Ulyanov (supposedly the brother of the hanged Ulyanov) who then carried out the defence with a complete command of the subject.’
⁵
His first major work, ‘Who the “Friends of the People” are and how they Fight the Social Democrats’, was completed in spring 1894. In autumn he was engaged in dialogue with one of the leading Marxist economists of the time, Peter Struve, who later became a liberal, criticizing certain of Struve’s propositions on the Russian economy but joining with him in April 1895 to criticize the populists in a collectively written book of articles entitled
Material on the Nature of our Economic Development
.

A corollary of his polemics against populism and, although it was still rather embryonic, his tendency to defend ‘orthodox’ Marxism against heretics, was present in other of his lost writings. Krupskaya, in particular, points to Lenin writing a number of pamphlets for circulation in the Semyannikov and LaFerme factories in St Petersburg. However, this turn to worker pamphleteering also reflects the experience of his first trip abroad from May to September 1895.

ENCOUNTER WITH THE GREATS: LENIN’S FIRST TRIP ABROAD

It is fashionable to put thoughts into the head of historical characters, though no historian has the power to verify such speculations. But whatever Lenin was thinking as he left Russia, he could hardly have seen what fate had in store for him. It would be twenty-two tumultuous years before tsarism would finally collapse. In that time Lenin was destined to spend only a few more months in Russia proper. Indeed, over the rest of the twenty-nine years of life ahead of him fewer than seven in total would be spent at liberty in Russia. It is also unlikely to have entered his head that he, rather than the great figures of social democracy at whose feet he planned to learn on this first foreign trip, would become the dominant character of the future revolution and the world’s first Marxist ruler.

At the top of Lenin’s visiting list was the ‘father of Russian Marxism’ George Plekhanov, who was living in exile in Switzerland. According to one account, Lenin was overawed in the presence of the great man. [Weber 8] Nonetheless, Plekhanov took to the new arrival. He looked ‘not without warm sympathy, at the able practitioner of revolution he found in front of him’. Plekhanov recommended Lenin to Wilhelm Liebknecht, one of the leading figures of German social democracy whom Lenin visited later in his travels when he was in Berlin, as ‘one of our best Russian friends’. [Weber 9] Before leaving Switzerland Lenin spent a week with him near Zurich. Paris, and a meeting with Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue, followed, then a month and a half in Berlin. He was only able to prolong his trip thanks to the generosity of his mother. He had run out of money by mid-July and was only bailed out by drafts sent in August and September which, ironically, came from Maria’s state pension as the widow of a noble.

On 19 September he returned to Russia complete with illegal literature concealed in the false bottom of his suitcase. He also had a new mission, to help set up a paper aimed at workers and a more formal social-democratic group. The paper was prepared under the name
Rabochee delo
(
The Worker’s Cause
) and the group was formed, with Lenin as a co-founder, under the cumbersome title of The League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. However, both initiatives were abortive. The police were one jump ahead on this occasion and, in the night of 20–21 December 1895, the leadership of the League was arrested. Along with the others Lenin was remanded in custody. A new phase of his life was about to begin, one in which imprisonment and Siberian and foreign exile were to dominate.

VOLODYA/LENIN ON THE EVE OF EXILE

According to Trotsky, a fully fledged Lenin had already emerged as early as autumn 1893. ‘It is, thus, between his brother’s execution and the move to St Petersburg [i.e. 1 September 1893], in these simultaneously short and long six years of stubborn work that the future Lenin was formed … all the fundamental features of his person[ality], his outlook on life and his mode of action were already formed in the interval between the seventeenth and twenty third years of his life.’ Was Trotsky correct? Before looking at the next phase of his life let us think who Lenin was by late 1895.

One thing which was, almost symbolically, evolving was Lenin’s physical appearance. The unfamiliar look of the young Volodya gave way early in life to the well-known iconic figure with a bald head and short beard. The process had already begun in 1889, before he was twenty, when he first grew his beard which, at that time, retained a slightly reddish tinge. He also started losing his hair around then. By the mid-1890s he already appeared old before his time and this, as his associate Krzhizhanovsky pointed out, led to him receiving one of his longest lasting nicknames. Describing the meeting at which he first met Lenin, Krzhizhanovsky wrote ‘He drowned us in a torrent of statistics … His tall forehead and his great erudition earned him the nickname
starik
’ (‘the old man’). [Weber 6–7] One of the best descriptions comes from the memoirs of Potresov, who accompanied him on his travels in Switzerland. Looking back in 1927 on his first meeting with Lenin at around the same time, Potresov, who had become a political opponent of Lenin in the meantime, points to similar features but in a more hostile manner:

He had doubtless passed his twenty fifth birthday when I met him for the first time in the Christmas and New Year holidays
… Lenin was only young according to his birth certificate. One could have taken him for at least a 35–40 year old. The face withered, the head almost bald, a thin reddish beard, eyes which observed one from the side, craftily and slightly closed, an unyouthful, coarse voice.

The effect on Potresov was of ‘a typical merchant from any north Russian province – there was nothing of the “radical” intellectual about him.’ This last comment is very hard to understand unless Potresov meant he lacked urban, gentlemanly finesse. His concluding comment, which backs up this interpretation, is also interesting. ‘No trace either of the service or noble family from which Lenin came.’ [Weber 7] One suspects Lenin would have taken such comments as a compliment on his ability to overcome his class background.