John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

Vekhi sought to isolate Russia from the cultural “degeneration” sweeping fin-de-siècle Europe at the pivot of the 19th and 20th centuries. It was a movement in which, to much surprise, Imperial Russia played a major part. Prior to 1890 Russia’s chief claim to artistic fame was her glittering array of literary talent–a range of poets and novelists including Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and Tolstoy. Although their brilliance was universally acknowledged, it was not until the 1890s that an explosion of Russian artistic talent, in Camilla Gray’s estimation, “began to make a serious contribution to western culture in general”. 7It was announced by the experimental watercolours of Mikhail Vrubel, a fusion of Byzantine art and erotic imagery that created a Russian version of Art Nouveau . Vrubel made his reputation in 1890 with Seated Demon , based on Lermontov’s Romantic epic. He produced several paintings on different aspects of the Demon until the nihilistic, apocalyptic themes of his masterpiece Demon Downcast drove him to a nervous breakdown in 1902. But his work in the 1890s, in particular The Dance of Tamara , had opened the door to a flowering of Russian modern art which found its voice in the “World of Art” movement.

Established by the designer, producer and art critic Alexander Benois, the World of Art magazine ran from 1898 to 1904. It helped organise exhibitions as well as promoting and explaining Russian modernism to the world. After a while the entire enterprise fell under the control and direction of Sergei Diaghilev, the impresario and creative driver of the Ballets Russes , the most significant expression of the World of Art movement. The Ballets Russes never performed within Russia itself due to official censorship, but other manifestations of the World of Art had great impact on the cultural elite of Moscow, St Petersburg and Odessa.

Both the World of Art and its successor The Golden Fleece championed symbolist painting and verse as well as the early works of the emerging Cubist and Futurist movements. During those years, Moscow and St Petersburg were home to radical artists who used Futurist iconography in printing, calligraphy and poetry to challenge and destabilise bourgeois culture. In December 1912, the Russian Futurist movement issued a new manifesto titled A Slap in the Face of Public Taste , which consciously rejected the Grand Masters of Russian literature.

The birth of Russian modernism was bound to impact the revolutionary wing of the intelligentsia. Since the 1880s most Russian intellectuals regarded Marxism and philosophical materialism as the ultimate expression of progressive European culture. After 1905 that assumption was explicitly challenged by Vekhi . Even for those firmly committed to revolutionary politics, the emergence of a vibrant modernist culture within Russia itself–not simply transmitted from France and Germany–was a real alternative to the ABC of Marxism as explicated by Engels, Kautsky and Plekhanov. In 1908, Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Bazarov and other leading Bolsheviks published Studies in the Philosophy of Marxism , which sought to fuse Marx with the work of the neo-Kantians Avenarius and Mach. Even worse, for Lenin, the book was co-edited with the Mensheviks Yuskevich and Valentinov.

Sheila Fitzpatrick considered that the new “empirio-criticism” favoured by Bogdanov and Lunacharsky was “essentially a scientist’s philosophy, seeking to eliminate unnecessary concepts and establish a framework for the rational organisation of empirical observations”. 8But Lenin was not interested in the rational organisation of empirical observations. He believed that “From the philosophy of Marxism, cast of one piece of steel, it is impossible to expunge a single basic premise, a single essential part, without deviating from objective truth, without falling into the arms of bourgeois reactionary falsehood”. 9To counter any deviation from objective truth, he set about intensive reading and research in London and Paris, the result of which was his one major philosophical work, Materialism and Emperio-Criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy (1909).

Lenin’s own philosophy, as expounded in this book and the later Philosophical Notebooks , was internally inconsistent. On the one hand he insisted, with all the exasperation of a bourgeois philistine, that human perception was an accurate copy of external reality. On the other he asserted the universal validity of “the Dialectic”, an analytical method taken secondhand from Hegel and Marx. Dialectics is a philosophy of change and of the relationships that produce change. Its central formulation is the “conflict and unity of opposites”, i.e. that the social, economic and physical forces that comprise human existence contain within themselves the seeds of radical transformation. The key to social development can therefore be found in the contradiction between the object/ present we perceive and its embryonic subject/future, e.g. the capitalist economy gestates a proletariat that will supersede it once the relations of production outgrow the mode of production. Dialectics, applied skillfully, can justify numerous political compromises and betrayals by inferring that the surface level of events–the “facts”–are deceptive, concealing a dialectical truth that only the initiated can discern. Lenin would play this card often.

Materialism and Emperio-Criticism was only one part of a campaign to destroy Bogdanov politically. In late 1909 Lenin hastily arranged a “conference” of the Proletary editorial board in his Paris flat and had it summarily remove Bogdanov, although he had been appointed to his post by the full RSDLP party conference of 1907 and the editorial board had no power to remove him. In many ways the crushing of Bogdanov revealed the essential Lenin. No ideological deviation would be allowed within the Bolshevik faction. New ideas would be swept aside in a tide of scorn and insult. Those proposing them would be accused of deviating from “objective truth”. They would then be subject to rigged internal procedures and expulsion.

For a hard-headed materialist Lenin was often driven by illusions. One of the most damaging was his belief in the honesty of the Bolshevik militant Roman Malinovsky. Malinovsky was General Secretary of the Russian Metalworkers Union and had transferred his allegiance from the Mensheviks. This, and his impeccable proletarian credentials, ensured that Lenin regarded him favourably, and he rose rapidly to become Head of the Russian Bureau of the Bolshevik Central Committee. Malinovsky appeared to be an exemplary class-conscious worker, but some noticed that activists who had dealings with him had a tendency to get arrested shortly after. Martov accused him of working for the Okhrana. Lenin brushed this aside and made Malinovsky leader of the six Bolshevik deputies in the fourth Duma of 1912-14.

But Malinovsky was working for the Okhrana and was instrumental in advancing their agenda to foment as much division between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks as possible. The RSDLP deputies in the Duma had achieved some success as visible tribunes of the working class and the trade unions, and their speeches played a role in igniting the industrial militancy that swept Russia from 1912. Malinovsky ensured this did not continue. He escalated Lenin’s every attack on the Conciliators to make sure that the social democrats remained divided within the Duma. The Okhrana regarded him as its most important and successful agent.

Lenin’s credulous belief in Malinovsky was part of a wider naivety. A world war was coming, but when it arrived no one was more surprised by the failure of the Second International to prevent it than Lenin. His surprise sprang from two massive misconceptions. Firstly, that the European socialist movement was starkly divided between revolutionaries and reformists and that all one’s political actions would follow from which side of the divide one stood on. Secondly, that the rhetorical slogans and Maximum Programmes of the Second International, most especially those of the German Social Democrats, were taken literally by its leaders (incorrigible reformists like Bernstein excepted).