Anna Temkin - The Times Great Lives

This extraordinary figure was first and foremost a professional revolutionary and conspirator. He had no other occupation; in and by revolution he lived. Authorship and the social and economic studies to which he devoted his time were to him but the means for collecting fuel for a world conflagration. The hope of that calamity haunted this cold dreamer from his schooldays. His is a striking instance of a purpose that from early youth marched unflinchingly towards a chosen goal, undisturbed by weariness or intellectual doubt, never halting at crime, knowing no compunction. The goal was the universal social revolution.

Lenin was born on April 10, 1870, at Simbirsk, a little town set on a hill that overlooks the middle Volga and the eastward rolling steppes. His father, born of a humble family in Astrakhan, had risen to the position of district director of schools under the Ministry of Education. The atmosphere of the home was that of the middle-class urban intelligentsia, which ardently cultivated book-learning, was keenly interested in abstract ideas, but had little care for the arts and was at best indifferent to the Russian national tradition.

Of Lenin’s early life little is known. He attended the local high school, the headmaster of which was Feodor Kerensky, father of Alexander Kerensky, whom Lenin was one day to overthrow from political power. The boy appears to have been diligent in his studies, but retiring and morose. In 1887 his elder brother was executed for taking part in an attempt on the life of Alexander iii. This event may possibly have intensified Lenin’s revolutionary sentiments, though emotion never played a great part in his personal life. He was guided by cold logic though he well knew how to work on the feelings of others and to transform them into the motive power he required for his own purposes.

From the high school he passed on into the University of Kazan where he became a student in the faculty of law. Here he came under the suspicion of the authorities, and was expelled from the university on account of his ‘unsound political views’. He continued his studies privately, and finally took his degree at the University of St Petersburg.

Marxism in Action

In the early ’nineties the radical intellectual circles in St Petersburg were stirred by a new development of the Socialist movement. From the ’forties onward Socialism had been the accepted creed of a large proportion of Russian intellectuals, but it was a romantic Socialism, mainly of an agrarian character, and based on an extraordinary sympathy for an idealized peasantry. At the beginning of the ’nineties a small group of young men became enthusiastic advocates of what was known as the scientific Socialism of Karl Marx, and, in articles in reviews and in the theoretical public debates on economic subjects that the autocracy permitted at that time they raised a revolt against the ‘Populist’ Socialism that had become traditional in the intelligentsia. Peter Struve, who later became a Liberal, and even developed Conservative leanings, and Michael Tugan-Baranovsky, who in the end became a popular and highly respected Professor of Political Economy, were the leaders of the Marxian group. Lenin joined them and was greatly assisted by them in his early, literary, efforts, which consisted of polemical articles on the aspects of Socialism that were then in debate. At that time he wrote under the pseudonym of Ilyin.

Lenin never wrote a first-class scientific work. He was not primarily a theorist or a writer but a propagandist. For him articles and books were but means to an end. It was when the Marxists turned from theoretical discussion to the organization of party effort that Lenin found his true vocation. In 1898 the Russian Social Democratic Party came into being. It was of course a conspirative organization. Political activities were under the ban. No political parties, whether Liberal, Conservative, or Socialist, were permitted publicly to exist. The secret parties, or rather clubs, organized by the revolutionaries, recruited their adherents among the intelligentsia, and only to a very small extent among the workmen and peasants. The Marxists organized among the workmen of St Petersburg and other towns clandestine classes for instruction in Socialist doctrine.

It was dangerous work, but Russian revolutionaries were never deterred by the fear of imprisonment or exile. Lenin began his career as an active revolutionary in this comparatively innocuous form of effort. He was caught by the police, as many others were, imprisoned, and sent to Siberia. As compared with many others, his experience of police persecution was brief indeed, but it is significant that during his banishment in Siberia his character as a deliberate fomenter of discord among the revolutionary parties was already, sharply, revealed. The older exiles, who held fast to the ‘Populist’ tradition, were for the most part gentle, humane, and easy going. They formed a class apart with a strong esprit de corps, with fixed habits of comradely intercourse. When Lenin and the other Marxists came, the peace was broken, a new aggressive tone was introduced, and perpetual intrigue led to perpetual dissension and suspicion.

How Bolshevism Began

Lenin escaped from Siberia to Western Europe in 1900, and took up his abode in Switzerland. Here he became one of the leaders in the revolutionary activities of the band of refugees organized under the name of the Russian Social Democratic Party, and in 1901 he joined the editorial staff of their review, Iskra (the Spark). The party retained until the Bolshevist Revolution the title of ‘The One (or United) Russian Social Democratic Party’. As a matter of fact it was not long before Lenin himself split the party into two warring sections. At the second congress of the party, held in London in 1903, a fierce discussion arose over questions of tactics, and ended in a vote which yielded a majority (bolshinstvo) for the view advocated by Lenin. The supporters of the majority view came to be known as Bolsheviki, while the adherents of the minority (menshinstvo) were called Mensheviki. Lenin stood at this conference for an extreme centralization of the party organization and for the adoption of direct revolutionary methods, as opposed to the educational and evolutionary tactics advocated by the other side. He displayed then the temperament that moulded his career. A man of iron will and inflexible ambition, he had no scruple about means and treated human beings as mere material for his purpose. Trotsky, then Lenin’s opponent on the question of tactics, and later his chief colleague in the Council of People’s Commissaries, has given a vivid description of Lenin’s conduct on this occasion.

At the second congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party (he wrote) this man with his habitual talent and energy played the part of disorganizer of the party… Comrade Lenin made a mental review of the membership of the party, and came to the conclusion that the iron hand needed for organization belonged to him. He was right. The leadership of Social Democracy in the struggle for liberty meant in reality the leadership of Lenin over Social Democracy.

Dictatorship as a Principle

It is unnecessary to dwell at length on the theoretical side of the controversy between Lenin and the Menshevists. Both sides published in support of their views a large number of fiercely polemical articles and pamphlets, which for the uninitiated make extremely dull reading, though for the patient historian they may provide a vivid illustration of revolutionary mentality. Lenin’s idea was that the Central Committee should absolutely dominate every individual, and every local group in the party. He was opposed to any sort of democratic equality or local autonomy in the party organization. Dictatorship by a compact central group was the principle on which he worked. ‘Give us an organization consisting of true revolutionaries,’ he wrote, ‘and we will turn Russia upside down.’ He regarded his opponents in the party as opportunists and no true revolutionaries. He was for direct action, for cutting loose from all entangling compromise with Liberals and more cautious Socialists.