On his arrival in St. Petersburg—the city that one day would bear his name—the twenty-three-year-old Lenin was a fully formed personality. The first impression which he made on new acquaintances, then and later, was unfavorable. His short, stocky figure, his premature baldness (he had lost nearly all hair before he was thirty), his slanted eyes and high cheekbones, his brusque manner of speaking, often accompanied by a sarcastic laugh, repelled most people. Contemporaries are virtually at one in speaking of his unprepossessing, “provincial” appearance. On meeting him, A. N. Potresov saw a “typical middle-aged tradesman from some northern, Iaroslavl-like province.” The British diplomat Bruce Lockhart thought Lenin looked like a “provincial grocer.” For Angelica Balabanoff, an admirer, he resembled a “provincial schoolteacher.”19
But this unattractive man glowed with an inner force that made people quickly forget their first impressions. His strength of will, indomitable discipline, energy, asceticism, and unshakable faith in the cause had an effect that can only be conveyed by the overused term “charisma.” According to Potresov, this “unprepossessing and coarse” individual, devoid of charm, had a “hypnotic impact”:
Plekhanov was respected, Martov loved, but they only followed unquestioningly Lenin, the one indisputable leader. Because Lenin alone embodied the phenomenon, rare everywhere but especially in Russia, of a man of iron will, inexhaustible energy, combining a fanatical faith in the movement, in the cause, with an equal faith in himself.
20
A fundamental source of Lenin’s strength and personal magnetism was the quality alluded to by Potresov—namely, the identification of his person with the cause: in him, the two became indistinguishable. This phenomenon was not unknown in socialist circles. In his study of political parties, Robert Michels has a chapter called “Le Parti c’est moi,” in which he describes similar attitudes among German Social-Democratic and trade-union leaders, including Bebel, Marx, and Lassalle. He quotes an admirer of Bebel’s who said that Bebel “always regards himself as the guardian of party interests and his personal adversaries as enemies of the party.”21 Potresov made a similar observation about the future leader of Bolshevism:
Within the framework of Social-Democracy or outside it, in the ranks of the general public movement directed against the autocracy, Lenin knew only two categories of people and phenomena, his own and not his own. His own, those which in one way or another came within the sphere of influence of his organization, and the others, which did not, and which by virtue of this fact alone he regarded as enemies. Between these polar opposites—comrade-friend and dissenter-enemy—for Lenin there existed no intermediate spectrum of social and personal human relations …
22
Trotsky left an interesting example of this mentality. Recounting his visit with Lenin in London, he says that when showing him the sights Lenin invariably referred to them as “theirs,” by which he meant, according to Trotsky, not England’s, but “the enemy’s”: “This note was always present when Lenin spoke of any kind of cultural values or new achievements … they understand or they have, they have accomplished or succeeded—but as enemies!”23
The normal “I/we—you/they” dichotomy, translated into the stark dualism “friend-enemy,” which in Lenin’s case went to uncompromising extremes, had two important historic consequences.
By thinking in this manner, Lenin was inevitably led to treat politics as warfare. He did not need Marx’s sociology to militarize politics and treat all disagreements as susceptible of resolution in one way only: by the dissenter’s physical annihilation. Lenin read Clausewitz late in life, but he was a Clausewitzian long before, intuitively, by virtue of his entire psychic makeup. Like the German strategist, he conceived war not as the antithesis of peace but as its dialectical corollary; like him, he was exclusively concerned with gaining victory, not with the uses to which to put it. His outlook on life was a mixture of Clausewitz and Social Darwinism: when, in a rare moment of candor, Lenin defined peace as a “breathing spell for war,” he inadvertently allowed an insight into the innermost recesses of his mind.24 This manner of thinking made him constitutionally incapable of compromise, except for tactical purposes. Once Lenin and his followers came to power in Russia, this attitude automatically permeated the new regime.
The other consequence of his psychological makeup was an inability to tolerate any dissent, whether in the form of organized opposition or even mere criticism. Given that he perceived any group or individuals not members of his party and not under his personal influence as ipso facto enemies, it followed that they had to be suppressed and silenced. That such actions were implicit in Lenin’s mentality, Trotsky noted as early as 1904. Comparing Lenin to Robespierre, he attributed to him the Jacobin’s dictum: “I know only two parties—that of good citizens and that of bad citizens.” “This political aphorism,” Trotsky concluded, “is engraved in the heart of Maximilian Lenin.”25 Here lay the germs of government by terror, of the totalitarian aspiration to complete control of public life and public opinion.
An attractive aspect of this quality was Lenin’s loyalty and generosity toward “good citizens,” a concept limited to his acolytes: it was the obverse side of hostility toward all outsiders. Much as he personalized disagreements with the latter, within his own ranks he displayed surprising tolerance of dissent. He did not purge dissenters but tried to persuade them; as the ultimate weapon he would use the threat of resignation.
Another attractive aspect of Lenin’s total identification with the revolutionary cause as represented by his party was a peculiar form of personal modesty. Although his successors built a quasi-religious cult around his person, they did this for their private ends: for without him, there was nothing to hold the movement together. Lenin never encouraged such a cult, because he found unacceptable the implication that he had an existence separate from that of the “proletariat”: like Robespierre, he thought that, in the literal sense, he was the “people.”* His “aversion to being singled out as a personality apart from the movement”26 was a modesty rooted in a sense of self-importance far in excess of ordinary vanity. Hence his aversion to memoirs: no leader of the Russian Revolution has left less autobiographical material.†
A stranger to moral qualms, he resembled a pope of whom Ranke wrote that he was endowed with such “complete self-reliance that doubt or fear as to the consequences of his own actions was a pain unknown to his experience.” This quality made Lenin very attractive to a certain type of Russian pseudo-intellectual who would later flock into the Bolshevik Party because it offered certainty in a perplexing world. It appealed especially to the young, semi-literate peasants who left the village to seek industrial work and found themselves adrift in a strange, cold world where the personal relations to which they had been accustomed were replaced by impersonal economic and social ties. Lenin’s party gave them a sense of belonging: they liked its cohesion and simple slogans.
Lenin had a strong streak of cruelty. It is a demonstrable fact that he advocated terror on principle, issued decrees which condemned to death countless people innocent of any wrongdoing, and showed no remorse at the loss of life for which he was responsible. At the same time, it is important to stress that his cruelty was not sadism which derives pleasure from the suffering of others. It rather stemmed from complete indifference to such suffering. Maxim Gorky gained the impression from conversations with Lenin that for him individual human beings held “almost no interest, that he thought only of parties, masses, states.…” On another occasion, Gorky said that for Lenin the working class was what “ore is for a metalworker”27—in other words, raw material for social experiments. This trait manifested itself as early as 1891–92, when the Volga region where Lenin lived was struck by famine. Committees were formed to feed the hungry peasants. According to a friend of the Ulianovs, Lenin alone (echoed, as always, by his family) opposed such aid on the grounds that by forcing peasants off the land and into the cities, where they formed a “proletarian” reserve,
the famine was a “progressive” phenomenon.28 Treating human beings as “ore” to build a new society, he sent people to their death before execution squads with the same lack of emotion with which a general orders troops to advance into enemy fire. Gorky quotes a Frenchman that Lenin was a “thinking guillotine.” Without denying the charge, he concedes that he was a misanthrope: “In general, he loved people: he loved them with abnegation. His love looked far ahead, through the mists of hatred.”29 When after 1917 Gorky pleaded with him to spare the life of this or that person condemned to death, Lenin seemed genuinely puzzled why he would bother him with such trivia.
As is usually the case (this held true of Robespierre as well), the obverse side of Lenin’s cruelty was cowardice. This aspect of Lenin’s personality is rarely touched upon in the literature, although there exists a great deal of evidence for it. Lenin showed a characteristic lack of courage while still in his teens when he tried to evade punishment for participating in student disturbances by attempting to withdraw from the university. As we shall note later, he will fail to admit authorship of a manuscript which cost an associate of his two additional years of exile. His invariable reaction to physical danger was flight: he had an uncanny ability to make himself scarce whenever there was the threat of arrest or shooting, even if it meant abandoning his troops. Tatiana Aleksinskii, the wife of the head of the Bolshevik faction in the Second Duma, saw Lenin run from danger:
I first met Lenin in the summer of 1906. I would rather not recall that encounter. Lenin, admired by all Left Social-Democrats, had seemed to me a legendary hero.… Not having seen him up close, because he had lived abroad until the Revolution of 1905, we had imagined him as a revolutionary without fear or blemish.… How keen, therefore, was my disappointment on seeing him [in 1906] at a meeting in the suburbs of Petersburg. It was not only his appearance that made a disagreeable impression on me: he was bald, with a reddish beard, Mongol cheekbones, and an unpleasant expression. It was his behavior during the demonstration that followed. When someone, spotting the cavalry charging the crowd, shouted “Cossacks!” Lenin was the first to flee. He jumped over a barrier. His bowler hat fell off, revealing his bare skull, perspiring and glistening under the sunlight. He fell, got up, and continued to run.… I had a peculiar sensation. I realized there was nothing to do but save oneself. And still …
30
These unattractive personal traits were well known to his associates, who consciously ignored them because of Lenin’s unique assets: an extraordinary capacity for disciplined work and total commitment to the revolutionary cause. In the words of Bertram Wolfe, Lenin “was the only man of high theoretical capacity which the Russian Marxist movement produced who possessed at the same time the ability and the will to concern himself with detailed organization work.”31 Plekhanov, who on meeting him in 1895 dismissed Lenin as a second-rate intellect, nevertheless valued him and overlooked his shortcomings because, in the words of Potresov, “he saw the importance of this new man not at all in his ideas but in his initiative and talents as party organizer.”32 Struve, who was repelled by Lenin’s “coldness, contempt, and cruelty,” admits to having “driven away” such negative feelings for the sake of relations which he regarded as “both morally obligatory for myself and politically indispensable for our cause.”33
Lenin was first and foremost an internationalist, a world revolutionary, for whom state boundaries were relics of another era and nationalism a distraction from the class struggle. He would have been prepared to lead the revolution in any country where the opportunity presented itself, and certainly in Germany rather than in his native Russia. He spent nearly one-half of his adult life abroad (from 1900 to 1917, except for two years in 1905–7) and never had a chance to learn much about his homeland: “I know Russia poorly, Simbirsk, Kazan, Petersburg, the exile—that’s all.”34 He held Russians in low esteem, considering them lazy, soft, and not terribly bright. “An intelligent Russian,” he told Gorky, “is almost always a Jew or someone with Jewish blood in his veins.”35 Although he was no stranger to the sentiment of nostalgia for his homeland, Russia was to him an accidental center of the first revolutionary upheaval, a springboard for the real revolution, whose vortex had to be Western Europe. In May 1918, defending the territorial concession he had made to the Germans at Brest-Litovsk, he asserted: “We insist that it is not national interests [but] the interests of socialism, of world socialism that are superior to national interests, to interests of the state.”36
Lenin’s cultural equipment was exceedingly modest for a Russian intellectual of his generation. His writings show only a superficial familiarity with Russia’s literary classics (Turgenev excepted), most of it apparently acquired in secondary school. Tatiana Aleksinskii, who worked closely with Lenin and his wife, noted that they never went to concerts or the theater.37 Lenin’s knowledge of history, other than that of revolutions, was also perfunctory. He had a love for music, but he preferred to suppress it in accord with that asceticism that so impressed and alarmed contemporaries. He told Gorky:
I cannot listen much to music, it excites my nerves. I feel like talking nonsense and caressing people who, living in such a filthy hell, can create such beauty. Because today one must not caress anyone: they will bite off your hand. One must break heads, pitilessly break heads, even if, ideally, we are opposed to all violence.
38
Potresov found that with the twenty-five-year-old Lenin one could discuss only one subject: the “movement.” He was interested in nothing else and had nothing interesting to say about anything else.* In sum, not what used to be called a man of many parts.
This cultural poverty was yet another source of Lenin’s strength as a revolutionary leader, for unlike better-educated intellectuals, he carried in his head no excess baggage of facts and ideas to act as a brake on his resolve. Like his mentor, Chernyshevskii, he dismissed differing opinions as “twaddle” and refused even to consider them except as objects of ridicule. Inconvenient facts he ignored or reinterpreted to suit his purposes. If his opponent was wrong in anything, he was wrong in everything: he never conceded the opposing party any merit. His manner of debating was combative in the extreme: he thoroughly assimilated Marx’s dictum that criticism “is not a scalpel but a weapon. Its object is the enemy, [whom] it wishes not to refute but to destroy.”39 In this spirit, he used words like ammunition, to annihilate opponents, often by means of the crudest ad hominem assaults on their integrity and motives. On one occasion, he conceded that he saw nothing wrong with using calumny and confounding workers when this served his political purposes. When in 1907, having charged the Mensheviks with betrayal of the working class, he was made to appear before a socialist tribunal, he admitted with brazen effrontery the charge of slander:
This formulation is calculated, as it were, to arouse in the reader hatred, revulsion, contempt for the people who act in this manner. This formulation is calculated not to persuade but to smash [their] ranks—not to correct the opponent’s error, but to destroy, to rub his organization off the face of the earth. This formulation, indeed, arouses the worst thoughts, the very worst suspicions of the opponent, and, indeed, in contrast to the formulation which convinces and corrects, it “sows confusion in the ranks of the proletariat.” … That which is not permissible among the members of a single party is permitted and obligatory for the parts of a party that has fallen apart.
40
He thus constantly engaged in what one historian of the French Revolution, Auguste Cochin, called “dry terror”: and from “dry terror” to “bloody terror” was, of course, only a short step. When a fellow socialist once warned Lenin that his intemperate attacks on an opponent (Struve) could inspire some worker to kill the object of his wrath, Lenin calmly responded: “He ought to be killed.”41
The mature Lenin was made of one piece and his personality stood out in strong relief. After he had formulated the doctrine and practice of Bolshevism, which happened in his early thirties, he surrounded himself with
an invisible protective wall which alien ideas could not penetrate. Henceforth, nothing could change his mind. He belonged to that category of men of whom the Marquis de Custine had said that they know everything except what one tells them. One either agreed with him or fought him: and disagreement with Lenin always awakened on his part destructive hatred, the urge to “rub” his opponents “off the face of the earth.” This was his strength as revolutionary and weakness as statesman: invincible in combat, he lacked the human qualities necessary to understand and guide mankind. In the end, this flaw would defeat his effort to create a new society, for he simply could not comprehend how people could live side by side in peace.
In the fall of 1893 Lenin moved to St. Petersburg, ostensibly to practice law, but in fact to make connections with radical circles and launch his revolutionary career.42 To the Social-Democrats whom he contacted on arrival he appeared “too red”—that is, still too much of a People’s Will adherent. He soon broadened his circle of acquaintances, joining a group of brilliant Social-Democratic intellectuals, whose leading spirit was the twenty-three-year-old Peter Struve—like Lenin, the son of a high official, but unlike him, a cosmopolitan who had been in the West and acquired an extraordinarily broad range of knowledge. The two had many discussions. Their disagreements centered mainly on Lenin’s simplistic notion of capitalism and his attitude toward the “bourgeoisie.” Struve explained to Lenin that far from having acquired a Western-type capitalist economy, Russia had barely taken the first step on the path to capitalist development, as he would convince himself once he saw the West with his own eyes. He also explained to him that Social-Democracy could flourish in Russia only if the middle class, prodded by industrial labor, introduced such liberties as freedom of the press and the right to form political parties. Lenin remained unconvinced.
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