BY
Ninety-nine years after the
Russian Revolution, let’s free Lenin from distortions of all types.
The US elections might be
center stage at the moment, but there’s an anniversary that should be of real
note for the Left: that of the October Revolution. Ninety-nine years ago,
Vladimir Lenin led his Bolshevik Party to state power in Russia, ushering
in events that would change the shape of the twentieth century.
After years of trying to
“change the world without taking power” and repudiating all aspects of
Leninism, many on the Left have been rediscovering Lenin of late, due in no
small part to the work of historian Lars Lih. Lih has spent years
assailing Cold
War warriors dead set on portraying Lenin as a monstrous precursor to
Stalin. In this respect, there is much to commend in his 2011 biography Lenin,
and other writings on the subject.
There’s reason to be skeptical
of some of his scholarship, however.
There are two Lenins in Lih’s
2011 study. First, there is the esoteric Lenin. This Lenin, Lih writes,
. . . lived the
intense but self-absorbed life of the party intellectual: engaging in endless
polemic with factional opponents, preparing resolutions for party congresses
. . . arguing about the proper interpretation of official party
decisions . . . [writing] polemical books and articles, [launching]
various campaigns against ‘organizational opportunism’, ‘liquidationism’,
‘recallism’ and similar heresies, seemingly without number . . .
This Lenin is only accessible
to the activist few. He is the inessential, “squabbling” Lenin. Lih disparages
him.
Then there is the exoteric
Lenin. He is the essential Lenin, the “inspirational” Lenin. This Lenin
. . . had an inner
political life that lifted him above the day to day skloki(squabbles) and
factional clashes. This was the life of his heroic scenario through which he
interpreted events. . . . The obsessive factional skloki of
émigré life acquired meaning because Lenin saw himself as facilitating the
emergence of the vast energies of the people.
Lenin wanted to inspire the
activist to inspire the proletariat to inspire the narod [people] to
rise up against the tsar, thus giving the whole world another inspiring example
of how to carry out a people’s revolution.
Fortunately, this Lenin is
accessible to all. Lih praises him to the skies.
But Lih’s exoteric Lenin is,
for the most part, a myth. In fact, Lenin became a political leader of such
magnitude precisely because of his capacity for logical argument and rational
polemic — which was far from self-absorbed “squabbling,” as Lih patronizingly
puts it.
Lenin’s literary connection to
the broad masses was most often not direct. He wrote principally for activists
— supporters and opponents alike. Those workers and intellectuals who accepted
Lenin’s views then disseminated the Bolshevik leader’s carefully reasoned
polemics to wider layers of the working class and beyond. Marxist
historian Isaac
Deutscher put it well:
Those who state the case for a
faction or group usually involve themselves in more or less complicated
argument and address the upper and medium layers of their movement, rather than
the rank and file. . . . [Those] who win the cadres of a party
for their more involved argument are likely to obtain the hearing of the rank
and file as well; the cadres carry their argument, in simplified form, deeper
down.
This case-stating Lenin was
the real Lenin — the historical Lenin. He had little in common with the theatrical
Lenin who, as Lih would have it, delivered hosannas to “heroic class
leadership” in and out of season, perennially writing “angry polemics” against
all the “philistines” and “skeptics” who “refused to lift themselves up to the
grand vistas” of the heroic scenario.
In fact, Lenin strongly
criticized those who dismiss political conflict as little more than
unprincipled wrangling, accusing them of being unwilling or unable “to distinguish
between the ‘conflict’ aspect of the struggle of ideas, of the struggle of
trends, and that aspect of it which is a matter of principle.”
The historical, case-stating
Lenin was not bogged down in mere squabbling, as Lih might suggest; rather, Lenin’s
methodical approach to political argument — vastly different from many of his
opponents — is what allowed him to become such an inspiring and motivational
figure.
Lih structures his book around
the concluding paragraph of Lenin’s 1902 pamphlet What Is to Be
Done? There, Lenin issued a clarion call:
When the advanced
representatives of [the working] class assimilate the ideas of scientific
socialism and the idea of the historical role of the Russian worker — when
these ideas receive a broad dissemination — when durable organizations are
created among the workers that transform the present, uncoordinated economic
war of the workers into a purposive class struggle, — then the Russian worker,
elevated to the head of all democratic elements, will overthrow absolutism and
lead the RUSSIAN PROLETARIAT (side by side with the proletariat of ALL
COUNTRIES) by the direct road of open political struggle to THE
VICTORIOUS COMMUNIST REVOLUTION. (Lih’s translation)
Lih derives from Lenin’s call
to action a “heroic scenario” in three acts: Act I is the story of the creation
of a “durable organization,” the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), between
1894–1904; Act II is the struggle
to overthrow Tsarism between 1904–1914; and Act III narrates Lenin’s drive for
the worldwide victory of communist revolution between 1914–1924.
But in each act, Lih’s
exoteric Lenin is of little use — or worse, an impediment — to understanding
the historical Lenin. The concrete particulars of the historical Lenin — his
investigations, polemics, strategies — can neither be derived from, nor seized
by, the abstract generalities of Lih’s theatrical figure.
Act I
According to Lih, the “opening
act of Lenin’s world-historical drama” takes place between 1894-1904. While
in Siberian
exile in the late 1890s, Lenin (ostensibly) developed an “ambitious
plan” to unite the various trends, factions, and groups in Russian social
democracy into a single organization based on a common program.
Shortly after his release,
Lenin moved to Europe and, with future Menshevik leaders Julius Martov and Pavel
Akselrod, launched Iskra in
December 1900 to publicize the plan. In 1902, Lenin wrote his famous What
Is to Be Done? detailing what the Iskrists wanted to accomplish
and how they wanted to accomplish it.
According to Lih, What Is
to Be Done? became an instant hit among Russian socialists because it
glorified the role of the praktiki — the empire’s rank-and-file
activists. In his pamphlet, Lenin celebrated the praktiki as the salt
of the earth, leaders capable of inspiring the people to overthrow the Tsar, to
fight for freedom and democracy, to storm heaven.
The What Is to Be Done? “basic
theme of leadership, as embodied by an inspired agitator or propagandist
spreading the word and raising consciousness, was one that excited many
people,” Lih explains. And more to the point, “Lenin’s vision of party
organization was not his personal innovation, but rather a systematization of
methods collectively worked out by a whole generation of
social-democratic praktiki.”
According to Lih, the “heroic
scenario” described in What Is to Be Done?“provided the activists with a
romantic self-image of leaders who were capable of inspiring boundless
confidence.” Lenin became an “idol” to them.
Iskra’s intense, two-year
campaign to convene a reasonably representative assembly of Russian social
democrats elected by the praktiki came to fruition in August 1903,
when the Second
Congress met first in Brussels and then in London. At the Congress,
however, Lenin’s visionary plan — suddenly and against all odds —
spectacularly fell apart.
Lenin’s “plan hit a completely
unexpected snag at the very moment of its fulfillment” writes Lih. “Ugly mutual
recriminations” flew; “personal animosities” flared; “organizational jockeying
for position” distracted the attention of many; “dense” and “tangled” issues
divided the delegates.
By the end of 1903, the once
dominant party leader going into the Second Congress had been “completely
isolated,” his leadership role apparently finished.
How could this have happened?
Specifically, how could so many praktikihave turned their backs on their
idol? How could the fulfillment of Lenin’s grand plan — “the systematization of
methods collectively worked out by a whole generation of Russian praktiki,”
no less — coincide with the political downfall of the grand planner?
According to Lih:
As always, a cold-eyed look at
reality will reveal the yawning gap between the actual konspiratsiia underground
and its heroic self-inscription into Lenin’s narrative [of heroic
leadership]. . . . Yet his dream, far-fetched as it may have
been, was a historical reality because people believed in it.
But this sort of reasoning is
perilous and difficult to justify. On the one hand, Lih is at pains to assert
that Lenin’s breathtaking vision faithfully reflected the realities of the
Russian social democracy, and that he understood the innermost needs, wants,
dispositions, and aspirations of rank-and-file activists like no other.
On the other hand, once these
activists elect their representatives to the Second Congress, many then act in
a manner wholly contrary to Lenin’s image of them, raising doubts about the
“historical reality” of a “far-fetched” dream these praktiki apparently
did not believe in.
Instead of seeking some
further explanation to reconcile the disparity between Lenin’s theory and
practice — between expectation and results — Lih simply claims inconsistency
between the two — a “yawning gap” between the dream and the reality. A
real “cold-eyed look at reality,” however, can begin to resolve this paradox —
whereas Lih’s heroic scenario can only create it.
Lih demonstrates that, at the
turn of the twentieth century, all Russian
social democrats “were trying to find their way to achieve central
coordination.” Though they were organized into many groups and tendencies,
everyone was striving for this goal.
However, Lih adds to “erect a
national party authority you needed relatively homogenous local committees –
but to obtain homogenous committees, you needed a common party authority” recognized
by all committees, groups, and tendencies.
It was a “vicious circle.” How
to escape from it? “Here’s how,” Lih writes:
Begin with the creation of an
all-Russian political newspaper [Iskra]. . . . At first this
paper would admittedly be the product of a self-appointed and unauthorized group. . . .
This paper would then make an appeal to the local committees to become integral
partners in [Iskra’s] creation . . . thus for the first time, the
committees would be working together on a national project.
But this only finesses the
problem. Lih gets caught up in another vicious circle here because he basically
assumes everyone will get behind the self-appointed, unelected Iskrists.
In Lih’s rendering, all groups
and tendencies other than Iskra appear not to have political and
organizational views of their own. Ostensibly overawed by Iskra’s
technical prowess, on which Lih dwells, they fall in line politically
with Iskra’s plan for uniting all organizations, working harmoniously on a
national project.
This is hard to credit. These
groups had views of their own. In fact, they pushed against Iskra,
refusing to modestly defer to one unelected group and refusing to authorize the
uncontested dissemination of Iskra‘s views across Russia. And because they
had a backbone of their own, they compelled Lenin to write What Is to Be
Done?
Iskra’s plan, of course,
presupposed that there was an indisputable desire for unity among all Russian
social democrats, whatever group they were in. The success of its project was
premised on this overriding desire — without it, without a minimum of good
faith on everybody’s part, the project was pointless. By reiterating this
indisputable point, however, Lih obscures what was in dispute.
In Lih’s account, there is
little sense of the acute struggle that arose at this time over what kind of
political and organizational unity best suited the needs of Russian social
democracy. But this political struggle was the essential characteristic of this
period, around which everything else was predicated. What Is to Be Done? was
its polemical centerpiece.
What Is to Be Done?,
therefore, was not what Lih would have us believe: a technical manual about how
to build an underground organization whose members are trained in the fine art
of eluding the police as they go about spreading the good news of socialism
among the workers. Nor was it a hymnal to the heroic qualities of the
rank-and-file social democrat, although Lenin did pay fulsome tribute to their selflessness,
their devotion to a common cause, and their willingness to fight for a better
world. Instead, What is to be Done? was a forceful critique of Rabochee Delo, one
the other groups striving for unity among social democrats.
Lenin devoted a great many
pages of his pamphlet to an analysis of this “economist”
tendency in Russian social democracy, which, he thought, was a local
manifestation of a much broader revisionist trend in international
social-democratic thinking whose chief ideological spokesperson was Eduard Bernstein,
a prominent German social democrat who advocated a reformist path for the
workers’ movement.
No other individual matter
commanded Lenin’s attention as much as this trend. But one would never know it
from reading Lih. Incredibly, he never even mentions Rabochee Delo in
this context.
Instead, Lih seizes on the
peripheral, cloak-and-dagger aspects of What Is to Be Done?, largely
reducing the realization of Iskra’s project to an internally apolitical,
technical process — a “cat-and-mouse game of false passports, double-bottomed
suitcases, secret printing presses and roving emissaries that often ended in
confusion and despair.”
Lih’s misconceptions
notwithstanding, Lenin was not a schoolmaster inspiring impressionable workers
with heroic paeans, but a social democrat addressing other social democrats —
workers and intellectuals alike — on matters of urgent mutual concern.
Lenin had to argue for Iskra’s
position because the Iskrists did not yet voice the common
aspirations of Russian social democrats. Until they could do so, Lenin’s
partisans would represent but one trend, among others, in Russian social
democracy.
Only a duly constituted and
democratically elected Congress of Russian social democrats could empower
the Iskrists to speak and act for all social democrats in Russia. At
the Second Congress, the assembled delegates reached agreement on some issues
but not on others, and new issues arose for the first time, generating fresh
discussion — hence the acute debates and divisions that characterized the
meeting.
But Lih ignores all this —
apparently, it belongs to the esoteric, inaccessible, squabbling Lenin.
Act II
After the Second Congress, the
economist tendency Lenin had decried became Menshevism.
The Mensheviks looked to the liberal bourgeoisie, organized in the Kadet Party,
to guide the bourgeois-democratic revolution against the Tsar, with the RSDLP
following the Kadets’ lead at a respectful distance.
In contrast, Lenin stuck to
the orthodox Iskrist view that only
the RSDLP-led “heroic working class” — not a liberal-bourgeois
opposition, paralyzed by fear of revolution — could put itself at the head of
“all democratic elements” of Russian society to overthrow Tsarism.
This constituted the “essence
of Bolshevism” in the decade between 1904 and 1914, according to Lih — and
rightly so. However, in Lih’s view, the “only way” the proletariat could “play
its destined leadership role” was “through the institution of the konspiratsiia underground.”
This is far too categorical.
The 1905 Revolution compelled the Tsar
to legalize many formerly illegal working-class institutions and activities,
trade unions above all. The underground konspiratsiia party was
no longer the only way the working class could organize its struggle for
freedom and democracy. Lih’s overly abstract and static conception of
Bolshevism’s essence fails to capture the novel problems facing the RSDLP in
the post-revolutionary period.
The critical question of the
relationship between the legal, aboveground activities of Russian social
democrats, and their illegal, underground activities now appeared for the first
time, a question which social-democratic parties in the West did not have to
face, and to which the Erfurt
Program (1891) — the lodestar of all social-democratic parties — gave
no answer, since Erfurtianism presupposed the legality of working-class
political activity.
The Fourth Congress of
the RSDLP, held in Stockholm in 1906, was forced to take up this unique
issue and decide what to do.
Intriguingly, at this juncture
a majority of the delegates at the Fourth Congress chose to follow the
Mensheviks, not the Bolsheviks. Lih offers no explanation for this development,
instead limiting himself to the offhanded, belittling remark that these “seesaws”
in social-democratic opinion did not matter much.
After lengthy
debates, the delegates rejected resolutions submitted by the Bolsheviks —
which emphasized the need to keep the underground apparatus of the RSDLP intact
as long as Tsarism remained in power.
The majority instead adopted
resolutions submitted by the Mensheviks, which discounted the importance of
that apparatus in the new, post-1905 era of Duma constitutionalism —
during which the Mensheviks hoped the Russian social-democratic labor movement
would fully Europeanize itself, becoming legal and open just like its Western
European counterparts.
Lih’s unifying heroic scenario
cannot explain the divergent reactions of Russian social democrats to the
appearance of the Duma — which, as a parliamentary form, represented yet
another legal institution through which revolutionaries might spread their
message.
The Mensheviks had heralded
the parliamentary assembly as the first step toward a European-style
constitutional state, simultaneously laying the basis for Russian social
democrats to adopt fully the politics and organizational methods of the German Social Democratic
Party — about which Karl
Kautsky had written at great length in The Class Struggle,
his 1892 conspectus on the Erfurt Program.
Indeed, many Mensheviks, the
real Erfurtians of Russian social democracy, had advocated participation in
elections to the Duma as soon as the Tsar announced his intention to establish
it, in his October
Manifesto of 1905.
In contrast, all Bolsheviks at
first followed Lenin’s lead and
called for boycotting elections to this institution, hoping to stop the Tsar
from convening it in the first place — this tactic being part of a broader,
extraparliamentary strategy to overthrow the autocracy itself in favor of a
democratic republic and genuine Europeanization.
The electoral boycott failed,
the Tsar was not overthrown, and the Duma became a reality in 1906. At
this point, Lenin changed his mind and called for participation, aligning
himself with the Mensheviks on this question — though not sharing the
Mensheviks’ assessment of the political significance of such participation.
But the Bolsheviks eventually
split over the issue. Some left Bolsheviks stuck to the boycott tactic, parting
ways with Lenin.
Again, Lih has little of
consequence to say about Lenin’s interventions in these wide-ranging and
intricate discussions over revolutionary strategy and tactics under Russian
conditions. Like Lenin’s participation in the Second Congress, these
interventions too belong to Lih’s esoteric Lenin, not to the theatrical Lenin
he valorizes.
Lih substitutes any serious
analysis of Lenin’s position in these political clashes, instead retelling a
contemporary joke — “police officers escorting a Menshevik and a Bolshevik to
prison” could go “off for a drink,” leaving both scofflaws unsupervised because
a “Menshevik and a Bolshevik would invariably spend the whole time arguing with
each other” instead of making a dash for freedom.
Like the two
police officers, Lih is not interested in, and does not care to report,
what the two social democrats were arguing about.
Finally, and most critically,
the 1905
Revolution itself substantially rewrote the second Act of Lih’s
scenario as well — by falsifying Lenin’s view that the RSDLP alone could
channel the workers’ movement to overthrow Tsarism.
The reverse turned out to be
the case.
The workers’ movement created
the St.
Petersburg Soviet through which the RSDLP had to channel its activities.
The soviet, a non-party organ,
represented the working class as a whole, regardless of political tendency. It
was democratically elected. Since all workers recognized its authority, no
party could lead the working class to victory unless it had the authority of
the soviet behind it. The party could not do it all.
No social democrat at the time
recognized in the soviet the harbinger of a new state, a workers’ state.
Lenin would first do so only in his draft of State and
Revolution, written on the eve of the 1917 revolution.
Lih adamantly refuses to
recognize the pathbreaking significance of that cardinal text, along with the
fresh realities it sought to grasp.
Act III
The chasm between the real
Lenin and the theatrical Lenin is even wider in the third act, whose central
scene is the revolution of 1917.
As described in his
famous April
Theses, Lenin now called for a proletarian-socialist — not
bourgeois-democratic — revolution, a sea-change in perspectives.
In keeping with his fixed
conception of Bolshevism’s “logic,” however, Lih does everything in his power
to deny there was any fundamental change in Lenin’s strategic orientation.
Prior to 1917, apart from Leon
Trotsky, social democrats everywhere held the view that the coming upheaval in
Russia could only take the form of a bourgeois-democratic revolution, because
the material premises for socialist revolution were absent.
The proletariat constituted
but a small minority in Russia whereas the peasantry, scattered across millions
of family-sized farms, formed the vast majority — and had no interest in the
collective, planned organization of production.
Only the development of
capitalism could transform peasants into workers, simultaneously creating the
material, practical basis for both socialist revolution and for socialism. But
the growth of capitalism itself was arduously slow. The coming revolutionary
reconfiguration of class and property relations would fast-track its expansion.
Economically, the
bourgeois-democratic revolution would sweep away the remnants of Russia’s
feudal order — above all, the Tsarist state — and, by giving land to the
peasants, allow production (in agriculture especially) to switch from a slow,
“Prussian tempo” to a fast-moving “American” one.
If this bourgeois revolution
could fully realize its democratic potential, the ideal form of the capitalist
state would be a republic. The workers’ movement would then take full advantage
of freedom of press, assembly, and speech — characteristic features of the
republican form of the capitalist state — to develop freely, along western
European lines.
With these key
bourgeois-democratic tasks solved, Russian social democracy would then press on
and fight for socialism, just like its counterparts in Germany, France, and
other advanced capitalist countries.
That was one way of looking at
things.
But Trotsky
outlined a different view in 1906, claiming that the coming democratic
revolution in Russia could only win as a proletarian-socialist movement.
The working class was to take
power and, with the support of the peasantry, carry out bourgeois-democratic
tasks – peasant expropriation of the landed gentry — simultaneously with
socialist tasks — worker expropriation of the capitalists.
In Trotsky’s account, there is
no non-revolutionary transitional period, however brief, between the
bourgeois-democratic and the proletarian-socialist phases of the revolution.
The victory of socialist
revolution in Russia, Trotsky thought, would inspire workers abroad to do the
same. And the success of the revolution in Russia would depend on successful
proletarian revolutions in the advanced capitalist west in the very near
future.
At first, no one but Trotsky
had this view — which he termed the theory of permanent
revolution. But he was vindicated in 1917 by Lenin’s April Theses, which
were soon adopted as the Bolshevik perspective.
Astonishingly, Lih doesn’t
even mention permanent revolution or refer to Trotsky’s authorship of the
theory. Nor does Lih fully endorse the term “bourgeois-democratic
revolution.” Instead, he repeatedly uses a substitute expression —
“democratic revolution do kontsa,” or democratic revolution to the end.
This term fails to
specify which democratic revolution is to be carried out “to the
end”: the socialist or the bourgeois? And that is why Lih uses it.
Lih smudges the concepts of
bourgeois and socialist revolutions together, relying on an imprecise
formulation that obscures the differences between the two. But Russian social
democrats well understood the difference long before 1917.
Lenin highlighted the two
different “tasks” facing the international working class movement in Several
Theses, written in October 1915:
The task confronting the
proletariat of Russia is the consummation of the bourgeois-democratic
revolution in Russia in order to kindle the socialist revolution in
Europe. The latter task now stands very close to the former, yet it remains a
special and second task, for it is a question of the different classes which
are collaborating with the proletariat of Russia. In the former task, it is the
petty-bourgeois peasantry of Russia who are collaborating; in the latter, it is
the proletariat of other countries.
Lenin’s April Theses later
merged the two tasks in a superior synthesis — something Lih seems unable to
grasp. Instead, Lih distorts both the April Theses and the Several
Theses (arbitrarily retitled by Lih as the October Theses, so that
they can fit with his idiosyncratic interpretation of overriding continuity in
Lenin’s thinking during this period.
Everyone has regarded
Lenin’s Theses as the “expression of a major shift in Lenin’s
outlook,” Lih writes. But this “traditional” and universally held view is
wrong, because “identifying what is new in these theses is quite difficult.”
Lih boldly declares that
the April Theses of 1917 might just as well be called the “October
Theses of 1915” — according to Lih, there is an essential unity between the two
documents.
Lih argues that four elements
appear in both documents — “militant opposition to a government of
revolutionary chauvinists intent on continuing the war”; “all power to the
soviets”; “winning over the peasants by advocating immediate land
seizures”; and “diplomacy bent on changing the imperialist war into a
civil war.”
But Lih fails to see that it’s
in the wider political context that the April Theses acquire their
historically specific meaning and larger political significance.
In 1915, there was no
government of “revolutionary chauvinists” in Russia determined to continue the
war. Instead, there was a war-waging autocracy that Lenin thought must be
overthrown. But in 1917, the Provisional
Government was undoubtedly “chauvinist” – yet its policies were made
not by “revolutionaries” but by determined opponents of revolution, the Kadets.
Lenin thought this government must be overthrown — not militantly opposed.
What was to be
“militantly opposed” — but, crucially, not overthrown — were the policies
of the soviet, where the “revolutionary chauvinists” (the Mensheviks and
the Socialist
Revolutionaries) were in the majority and bent on continuing the war.
“All power to the soviets”
does not appear in Lenin’s 1915 text (a clear-cut mistake on Lih’s part), and
Lenin attributes no special significance to the soviet, devoting but one line
to it. But in 1917, Lenin wrote a whole book about this world-historical
political form, State and Revolution, published in 1918.
Lih trashes this book without
ceremony. It “strikingly lacks the tang” of 1917 Russia, is “pitched at an
abstract level of socialist revolution in general and consists mainly of
angry polemics about the meaning of various passages from Marx and
Engels.” (emphasis added).
In other words it is the
esoteric Lenin again, the obsessive squabbler who Lih insists we should
disregard.
In 1915, Lenin advocated
peasants immediately seizing the gentry’s land as part of a more general demand
for the nationalization of all land — peasant and gentry — by a
bourgeois-democratic state. But by April 1917, he advocated the same by a
workers’ state.
By October 1917, he
reluctantly came around to the idea of the peasants seizing the gentry’s land
and distributing it among themselves — then the Bolsheviks jettisoned their
nationalization platform in favor of the Socialist Revolutionary one: all land
to the peasants.
In 1915, there could be no
diplomacy to transform the imperialist war into a civil war, since only states
can engage in diplomacy. Lenin could not make state policy since he had no
state.
He could only make party
policy to transform the imperialist war into a civil war. And that could happen
only through revolution, not diplomacy.
That event took place in
October 1917, when the Bolsheviks placed all power in the hands of the soviet —
because the Bolsheviks had, by this time, won a majority over the Mensheviks in
the workers’ councils, on the basis of a key plank of the Bolshevik
platform: all power
to the soviets! Only then could the soviet state play a role in promoting
an anti-imperialist peace. In Lenin’s view, the reappearance of the soviet form
in all the urban centers of Russia in 1917 decisively shattered the bourgeois
limitations of the democratic revolution.
But again Lih disagrees.
What was “crucial to Lenin’s whole view of the Russian revolution” was instead
“class conflict within the peasantry.”
This is a gross violation of
historical perspective. The so-called class-conflict within the peasantry only
became an important element of Lenin’s strategic thinking when civil war broke
out in June 1918 — not in his overall conception of the Russian Revolution in
April 1917.
Socialism in One Country?
Lenin never abandoned the
basic perspectives and essential arguments underlying the permanent revolution.
They remained central to his worldview to the end.
These views are even
foundational to Left-wing
Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920) the most important work on
communist politics Lenin published in the post-1917 period. But Lih pays no
attention to this work.
Lih also fails to report much
of value about Lenin’s interventions in the first four Congresses of the Third International,
in 1919, 1920, 1921 and 1922. Presumably, the great international debates over
revolutionary strategy are just so many more examples of pointless bickering
and heresy hunting that can be safely ignored — Lih’s essential Lenin can be
understood without them.
In the spring and fall of 1922
Lenin suffered debilitating strokes. He never fully recovered.
Declining health throughout
much of 1923 prevented him from joining the rest of the Bolshevik leadership in
following revolutionary
developments in Germany that year to prepare for a potential German
October — in line with every Bolshevik’s idea that ultimate salvation could
only come from abroad, through international socialist revolution.
Lenin’s agonizingly long
death-spiral cut him off from world affairs for the last eighteen months of his
life. Lih takes full advantage of Lenin’s crippling illness to project onto
Lenin a new scenario that went “beyond” Kautsky.
On the basis of Lenin’s last
articles — dictated to his secretaries in 1923, well after he was no longer at
the helm of the party or the state, deprived of clear speech and legible
writing — Lih contends that
Lenin needed something like a
miracle, so he again evoked the spirit of What is to be Done? a book
in which he boasted that an ordinary, underground activist, even in isolation
could achieve miracles if he embodied the spirit of inspired and inspiring
leadership.
Lenin ostensibly made an
“adjustment” as Lih puts it, to the “lifelong scenario” Lih attributes to Lenin
when the Bolsheviks adopted the 1921 New
Economic Policy (NEP) in response to peasant uprisings and
working-class protests against War Communism.
All Second International
Marxists, Trotsky included, had taken for granted that material premises for
building socialism in Russia were absent. After the October Revolution they
were still absent. The peasantry was still in the majority, the
workers still in the minority — the latter in favor of socialism, the former
not. How to begin building socialism in Russia when its property relations, in
agriculture especially, stood squarely in the way?
Lih points out that Lenin
never thought force could be used to transform peasants into workers. “There is
nothing more stupid than the very idea of violence in the area of property
relations of the middle peasantry” Lenin declared emphatically in 1920.
This was a “fundamental
contrast with Stalin” Lih writes. Indeed it was — and it is to Lih’s credit
that he at least brings out sharply this basic truth. Lenin was not — and could
not become — Stalin. But what, short of force, could be done then?
Lih lists a whole series of
material measures Lenin thought could win peasants over to socialist
construction, centrally, relying on the “transformative power of socialist
industry” to satisfy the material needs of the peasantry and thus pave the way
for a “socialist transformation of the countryside,” a transition encapsulated
by Lenin’s famous
slogan: “Communism is soviet power plus the electrification of the whole
country.” (In contrast, it could be said that Stalinism is ‘electrification of
the whole country minus soviet power.’)
However, Lih overlooks
that Lenin
explicitly warned against exhortatory speeches about the benefits of
socialism — arguing, “as long as our countryside lacks the material basis for
communism, it will be, I should say, harmful, in fact, I should say, fatal” to
“immediately propagate purely and strictly communist ideas in the countryside.”
Yet, this warning
notwithstanding, Lih’s last chapter, “Beyond the Textbook a la Kautsky,” is
precisely about crafting a new, exhortatory scenario that can apparently
substitute for this “material basis,” or act independently of it, or perhaps
even create it — because it builds on the allegedly can-do, miracle-producing
spirit of What is to be Done?
Lih now brings “cultural”
tasks to the forefront of Lenin’s concerns instead of seeing cultural development,
as Lenin did, as being predicated on an ongoing process of economic development
— transforming peasant household production into modern, socialized production
based on advanced technology.
Many scholars (Moshe Lewin and Teodor Shanin notably)
have expressed reservations about whether Lenin and the Bolsheviks correctly
grasped the political economy of peasant smallholding, noting that this
precapitalist form of economy posed serious, possibly insuperable barriers to
uncoerced economic advance, to building socialism collectively. Lih, however,
chooses not to pursue this line of inquiry.
Instead, and in keeping with Lih’s
notion of the activist-as-miracle-worker, the main way forward in Russia —
toward a democratic socialism free of bureaucracy and privilege — was through
“mass education for the narod,” workers and peasants alike.
This task was “handed to the
party, acting from above.” “Improving the material position of the
schoolteacher” by making a “real shift in budgetary priorities toward
education” was the first, small step toward this distant goal.
The party could lead the
people to the promised land — a task all the more easily accomplished “if the
party could use the state to eliminate all rivals and to monopolize channels of
communication” to spread the socialist gospel. It would apparently be a benign
“educational dictatorship” over the people and for the people — but not by the
people.
This scenario went “beyond
Kautsky” according to Lih. And it certainly did. In fact, in a central
respect, the scenario Lih attributes to Lenin is a throwback to the scenario of
the pre-Marxist, utopian socialists.
Utopian socialism is
just what Russian revolutionaries believed in before the emergence of the
working-class movement in Russia in the last decade of the nineteenth century.
They too thought revolutionaries could educate “the people” (meaning the
peasantry) to achieve a socialist self-transformation of their way of life
despite their material conditions.
This is what Lenin’s older
brother, Alexander,
believed in. He mounted the scaffold for his heroism in 1887, when the Tsar
decreed his execution by hanging for participating in an assassination plot.
Lenin fought against many
things in his life. One of them was utopian socialism — and its belief in
miracles. But still Lih is confident that Lenin in the last months of his
paralyzed life ultimately called on the “spirit of class leadership to
accomplish one more round of miracles.”
Lih does not call Lenin a
utopian socialist straight out. But he allows the reader to draw the conclusion
that he was.
In the end, it would appear
that Lenin was a provincial, illusion-laden man of his times, irrelevant to our
times and our world; an unrealistic dreamer who believed in miracles.
According to Lih, this
unrealistic dreamer took a “dangerous step” beyond Kautsky and Second
International Marxism in 1917 when — throwing realpolitik to the wind
— Lenin recklessly “went beyond Old Bolshevism’s strategy of democratic
revolution in alliance with the whole peasantry” in favor of socialist
revolution.
What is this if not an
admission that the permanent revolution theory adopted in the April Theses by
Lenin did break with Old Bolshevism’s conception of the
bourgeois-democratic revolution, did break with Kautskyism?
But this is the least of it.
Lih’s reproof of Lenin for
contravening Second International Marxist orthodoxy is simply yet another
repetition of the now century-old argument espoused by the Mensheviks and
Kautsky — Russia was not ready for socialism and therefore not ready for
socialist revolution.
For Lih, Kautskyism is
the nec plus ultra of Marxism. To transgress its limits is to court
great danger.
Lih’s biography is a poor
introduction to Lenin’s thinking – but is an excellent introduction to what Lih
thinks about Lenin.
Rediscovering Lenin
Lih’s readers on the left are,
on the whole, favorably predisposed toward Lenin — and well they should be.
Consequently, Lih’s outwardly favorable view of Lenin is readily accepted by
the Left today.
In sharp contrast, no such
favorable predisposition existed among Lenin’s readers in Lenin’s day — at
least not for much of his life.
All the more reason for Lenin
to deploy involved and complex political arguments, buttressed by consequent
social analysis, to defend his standpoint. These arguments constitute the bulk
of Lenin’s Collected
Works. Lenin had to win his readers over to his views and, once won, keep
them from being won over to his opponents’ views.
In either case, Lenin had to
explain the substance and meaning of these disagreements.
With few exceptions, despite
his commendable work to assail Cold War caricatures of Lenin, Lih looks right
through those explanations.
“Praise me less and understand
me more.” That is the most appropriate epitaph for Lenin’s tombstone
(should the man ever be buried) – and a suitable epigram for Lih’s study of
Lenin.
