Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (11 page)

Individual members – or one individual member? In practice it was the latter. In the twenty years before his Revolution, Lenin created his own faction within the Social Democrats, the Bolsheviks, split it off from the Mensheviks, or minority, and then made himself absolute master of it. This process, the will to power in action, is well documented by his more critical comrades. Plekhanov, the real creator of Russian Marxism, through whose
Iskra
organization Lenin first came to prominence, accused him of ‘fostering a sectarian spirit of exclusiveness’. He was ‘confusing the dictatorship of the proletariat with dictatorship over the proletariat’ and seeking to create ‘Bonapartism if not absolute monarchy in the old pre-revolutionary style’.
¹¹
Vera Zasulich said that, soon after Lenin joined
Iskra
, it changed from a friendly family into a personal dictatorship. Lenin’s idea of the party, she wrote, was Louis xiv’s idea of the state –
moi!
¹²
The same year, 1904, Trotsky called Lenin a Robespierre and a terrorist dictator seeking to turn the party leadership into a committee of public safety. Lenin’s methods, he wrote in his pamphlet
Our Political Tasks
, were ‘a dull caricature of the tragic intransigence of Jacobinism … the party is replaced by the organization of the party, the organization by the central committee and finally the central committee by the dictator’.
¹³
Six years later, in 1910, Madame Krzhizhanovskaya wrote: ‘He is one man against the whole party. He is ruining the party.’
¹⁴
In 1914 Charles Rappaport, while praising Lenin as ‘an incomparable organizer’, added: ‘But he
regards only himself as a socialist …. War is declared on anyone who differs with him. Instead of combating his opponents in the Social Democratic Party by socialist methods, i.e. by argument, Lenin uses only surgical methods, those of “blood-letting”. No party could exist under the regime of this Social Democratic Tsar, who regards himself as a super-Marxist, but who is, in reality, nothing but an adventurer of the highest order.’ His verdict: ‘Lenin’s victory would be the greatest menace to the Russian Revolution … he will choke it.’
¹⁵
Two years later, on the eve of the Revolution, Viacheslav Menzhinsky described him as ‘a political Jesuit … this illegitimate child of Russian absolutism … the natural successor to the Russian throne’.
¹⁶

The impressive unanimity of this critical analysis of Lenin, coming over a period of twenty years from men and women in close agreement with his aims, testifies to an awesome consistency in Lenin’s character. He brushed aside the attacks, which never seem to have caused him to pause or reconsider for one second. There was no chink in his self-armour. Authoritarian? Of course: ‘Classes are led by parties and parties are led by individuals who are called leaders …. This is the ABC. The will of a class is sometimes fulfilled by a dictator.’
¹⁷
What mattered was that the anointed individual, the man selected by History to possess the gnosis at the appointed time, should understand and so be able to interpret the sacred texts. Lenin always insisted that Marxism was identical with objective truth. ‘From the philosophy of Marxism’, he wrote, ‘cast as one piece of steel, it is impossible to expunge a single basic premise, a single essential part, without deviating from objective truth.’
¹⁸
He told Valentinov: ‘Orthodox Marxism requires no revision of any kind either in the field of philosophy, in its theory of political economy, or its theory of historical development.’
¹⁹
Believing this, and believing himself the designated interpreter, rather as Calvin interpreted scripture in his
Institutes
, Lenin was bound to regard heresy with even greater ferocity than he showed towards the infidel. Hence the astonishing virulence of the abuse which he constantly hurled at the heads of his opponents within the party, attributing to them the basest possible motives and seeking to destroy them as moral beings even when only minor points of doctrine were at stake. The kind of language Lenin employed, with its metaphors of the jungle and the farmyard and its brutal refusal to make the smallest effort of human understanding, recalls the
odium theologicum
with poisoned Christian disputes about the Trinity in the sixth and seventh centuries, or the Eucharist in the sixteenth. And of course once verbal hatred was screwed up to this pitch, blood was bound to flow eventually. As Erasmus sadly observed of the Lutherans and papists, ‘The long war
of words and writings will end in blows’ – as it did, for a whole century. Lenin was not in the least dismayed by such a prospect. Just as the warring theologians felt they were dealing with issues which, however trivial they might seem to the uninitiated, would in fact determine whether or not countless millions of souls burned in Hell for all eternity, so Lenin knew that the great watershed of civilization was near, in which the future fate of mankind would be decided by History, with himself as its prophet. It would be worth a bit of blood; indeed a lot of blood.

Yet the curious thing is that, for all his proclaimed orthodoxy, Lenin was very far from being an orthodox Marxist. Indeed in essentials he was not a Marxist at all. He often used Marx’s methodology and he exploited the Dialectic to justify conclusions he had already reached by intuition. But he completely ignored the very core of Marx’s ideology, the historical determinism of the revolution. Lenin was not at heart a determinist but a voluntarist: the decisive role was played by human will: his. Indeed, for a man who claimed a special ‘scientific’ knowledge of how the laws of History worked, he seems to have been invariably surprised by the actual turn of events. The outbreak of the 1905 abortive Revolution in Russia astounded him. The beginning of the 1914 war came to him like a thunderclap from a clear sky; so it did to others but then they did not claim a private line to History. He was still more shaken by the total failure of the international socialist movement to unite against the war. The fall of the Tsar amazed him. He was staggered when the Germans offered to get him back to Russia. When he arrived there he predicted he would be arrested on the spot, and instead found himself clutching those roses. He was again surprised, no less agreeably, by the success of his own Revolution. But the international uprising he confidently predicted did not materialize. To the end of his days, like the early Christians awaiting the Second Coming, he expected the Apocalypse any moment. What made Lenin a great actor on the stage of history was not his understanding of its processes but the quickness and energy with which he took the unexpected chances it offered. He was, in short, what he accused all his opponents of being: an opportunist.

He was also a revolutionary to his fingertips, and of a very old-fashioned sort. He believed that revolutions were made not by inexorable historical forces (they had to be there too, of course) but by small groups of highly disciplined men responding to the will of a decisive leader. In this respect he had much more in common with the French Jacobin revolutionary tradition of 1789–95, and even with its more recent exponents, such as Georges Sorel, than with the instinctive Marxists, most of whom were German and who saw the
triumph of the proletariat almost as a Darwinian process of evolution. Lenin cut through that kind of sogginess like a knife: ‘Theory, my friend, is grey, but green is the everlasting tree of life.’ Again: ‘Practice is a hundred time more important than theory.’
²⁰
If the whole of Marx appears in his book, wrote Trotsky, ‘the whole of Lenin on the other hand appears in revolutionary action. His scientific works are only a preparation for revolutionary activity’.
²¹
Lenin was an activist, indeed a hyper-activist, and it was this which made him such a violent figure. He was not a syndicalist like Sorel. But the two men shared the same appetite for violent solutions, as Sorel later acknowledged when he defined revolutionary violence as ‘an intellectual doctrine, the will of powerful minds which know where they are going, the implacable resolve to attain the final goals of Marxism by means of syndicalism. Lenin has furnished us with a striking example of that psychological violence.’
²²
Lenin was obsessed by force, almost to the point of lip-smacking at the scent of it. ‘Revolutions are the feast-days of the oppressed classes.’ ‘An oppressed class which does not strive to gain a knowledge of weapons, to be drilled in the use of weapons, to possess weapons, an oppressed class of this kind deserves only to be oppressed, maltreated and regarded as slaves.’ His writings abound in military metaphors: states of siege, iron rings, sheets of steel, marching, camps, barricades, forts, offensives, mobile units, guerrilla warfare, firing squads. They are dominated by violently activist verbs: flame, leap, ignite, goad, shoot, shake, seize, attack, blaze, repel, weld, compel, purge, exterminate.

The truth is, Lenin was too impatient to be an orthodox Marxist. He feared the predicament foreseen by Engels when he had written, ‘The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the moment is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents … he is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class for whom conditions are ripe for domination.’
²³
Russia was a semi-industrialized country, where the bourgeoisie was weak and the proletariat small, and the objective conditions for the revolution not nearly ripe. It was this dilemma which led Lenin into heresy. If ‘proletarian consciousness’ had not yet been created, was it not the task of Marxist intellectuals like himself to speed up the process? In 1902, in
What Is To Be Done?
, he first used the term ‘vanguard fighters’ to describe the new role of a small revolutionary élite.
²⁴
He drew an entirely novel distinction between a revolution created by a mature ‘organization of workers’, in advanced capitalist countries like Germany and Britain, and ‘an organization of revolutionaries’, suitable for Russian conditions. The first was occupational, broad,
public: in short a mass proletarian party. The second was quite different: ‘an organization of revolutionaries must contain primarily and chiefly people whose occupation is revolutionary activity …. This organization must necessarily be not very broad and as secret as possible.’ As such it had to forgo the ‘democratic principle’ which required ‘full publicity’ and ‘election to all posts’. Working within the framework of an autocracy like Russia, that was impossible: ‘The one serious organizational principle for workers in our movement must be strictest secrecy, restricted choice of members, and training of professional revolutionaries. Once these qualities are present something more than democracy is guaranteed: complete comradely confidence among revolutionaries.’ But in the same passage he points out grimly that revolutionaries know ‘by experience that in order to rid itself of an unworthy member an organization of genuine revolutionaries recoils from nothing’.
²⁵
If comrades must, when needs be, murder each other – a point Dostoevsky had already made in
The Devils –
was not this ‘comradely confidence’ a fantasy? Was it not, indeed, belied by what happened to the organization the moment Lenin joined it, and still more when he took it over?
²⁶

Rosa Luxemburg, the most gifted as well as one of the more orthodox of the German Marxists, recognized Lenin’s heresy for what it was: so serious as to destroy the whole purpose and idealism of Marxism. She attributed it to Lenin’s faults of character, both personal and national: ‘The “ego”, crushed and pulverized by Russian absolutism,’ she wrote, ‘reappeared in the form of the “ego” of the Russian revolutionary’ which ‘stands on its head and proclaims itself anew the mighty consummator of history.’ Lenin, she argued, was in effect demanding absolute powers for the party leadership, and this would ‘intensify most dangerously the conservatism which naturally belongs to every such body’. Once granted, such powers would never be relinquished.
²⁷
When Lenin insisted that ‘consciousness’ had to be brought to the proletariat from without, by ‘vanguard elements’, and the revolution pushed forward before it was ripe by ‘vanguard fighters’, he was in fact contradicting the whole ‘scientific’ basis of Marxist theory. She denounced the idea as élitist and non-Marxist, and said it would lead inevitably to ‘military ultracentralism’.
²⁸

Leninism was not only a heresy; it was exactly the same heresy which created fascism. Italy was also a semi-industrialized country, where Marxists were looking for ways to speed up the coming of revolution. Italian Marxists, too, were attracted by Sorel’s notions of revolutionary violence. In 1903, the year after Lenin first used the term ‘vanguard fighters’, Roberto Michaels, in his introduction to the Italian translation of Sorel’s
Saggi di critica del Marxismo
, urged
the creation of a ‘revolutionary élite’ to push forward the proletarian socialist millennium. Such an élite, echoed his colleague Angelo Olivetti, was essential for an under-industrialized country.
²⁹
These ideas were taken up by a third Italian Marxist, Benito Mussolini, who was thirteen years younger than Lenin and just entering politics at this time. His father, a farrier and small property owner, was a socialist-anarchist; his mother a teacher. They filled him with a wide range of political philosophy, which included Nietzsche – he knew all about ‘the will to power’ – and he was much more broadly read than Lenin. But his political formation was fundamentally Marxist. Marx, he wrote, was ‘the father and teacher’; he was ‘the magnificent philosopher of working-class violence’.
³⁰
But, like Lenin, he advocated the formation of ‘vanguard minorities’ which could ‘engage the sentiment, faith and will of irresolute masses’. These vanguards had to be composed of specially trained, dedicated people, élites. Such revolutionary leadership should concern itself with the psychology of classes and the techniques of mass-mobilization, and, through the use of myth and symbolic invocation, raise the consciousness of the proletariat.
³¹
Like Lenin, again, he thought violence would be necessary: ‘Instead of deluding the proletariat as to the possibility of eradicating all causes of bloodbaths, we wish to prepare it and accustom it to war for the day of the “greatest bloodbath of all”, when the two hostile classes will clash in the supreme trial.’
³²
Again, there is the endless repetition of activist verbs, the militaristic imagery.