Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (10 page)

Jawaharlal Nehru, an Old Harrovian of thirty, then working for Gandhi as an agitator among the peasants, travelled in the next sleeping compartment to Dyer while the General was on his way to give evidence to the Hunter inquiry. He overheard Dyer say to other British officers that he had felt like reducing Amritsar ‘to a heap of ashes’ but ‘took pity on it’. In the morning Dyer ‘descended at Delhi Station in pyjamas with bright pink stripes and a dressing gown’. What he could never forget, wrote Nehru, was the response of the British: ‘This cold-blooded approval of that deed shocked me greatly. It seemed absolutely immoral, indecent; to use public-school language, it was the height of bad form. I realized then … how brutal and immoral imperialism was and how it had eaten into the souls of the British upper classes.’
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As for the inquiry and the Commons debate, the British liberals might have saved their breath. All they succeeded in doing was to help turn Dyer and Amritsar into indelible hate-symbols around which nationalists could rally.

The episode was a watershed in Indian internal security too. ‘From then on’, one historian of British India has put it, ‘it was not the first object of the government to keep order.’
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Security officials, both British and Indian, now hesitated to deal promptly with riotous assemblies. In 1921 when the Muslim ‘Moplahs’ rioted against the Hindus in the Madras area, the provincial government, with Amritsar in mind, delayed bringing in martial law. As a result, over 500 people were murdered and it took a year and huge forces of troops to restore order, by which time 80,000 people had been arrested and placed in special cages, 6,000 sentenced to transportation, 400 to life-imprisonment and 175 executed. Attacks on security forces became frequent and audacious. On 4 February 1922 in the United Provinces, a mob surrounded the police station and, those inside not daring to open fire, all twenty-two of them were torn to pieces or burned alive. From that point onwards, large-scale racial, sectarian and anti-government violence became a permanent feature of Indian life.
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There too, in the largest and most docile colony in human history, the mould of the nineteenth century had been broken.

The disturbances in Europe and the world which followed the seismic shock of the Great War and its unsatisfactory peace were, in one sense, only to be expected. The old order had gone. Plainly it could not be fully restored, perhaps not restored at all. A new order would eventually take its place. But would this be an ‘order’ in the sense the pre-1914 world had understood the term? There were, as we have seen, disquieting currents of thought which suggested the
image of a world adrift, having left its moorings in traditional law and morality. There was too a new hesitancy on the part of established and legitimate authority to get the global vessel back under control by the accustomed means, or any means. It constituted an invitation, unwilled and unissued but nonetheless implicit, to others to take over. Of the great trio of German imaginative scholars who offered explanations of human behaviour in the nineteenth century, and whose corpus of thought the post-1918 world inherited, only two have so far been mentioned. Marx described a world in which the central dynamic was economic interest. To Freud, the principal thrust was sexual. Both assumed that religion, the old impulse which moved men and masses, was a fantasy and always had been. Friedrich Nietzsche, the third of the trio, was also an atheist. But he saw God not as an invention but as a casualty, and his demise as in some important sense an historical event, which would have dramatic consequences. He wrote in 1886: ‘The greatest event of recent times – that “God is Dead”, that the belief in the Christian God is no longer tenable – is beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe.’
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Among the advanced races, the decline and ultimately the collapse of the religious impulse would leave a huge vacuum. The history of modern times is in great part the history of how that vacuum had been filled. Nietzsche rightly perceived that the most likely candidate would be what he called the ‘Will to Power’, which offered a far more comprehensive and in the end more plausible explanation of human behaviour than either Marx or Freud. In place of religious belief, there would be secular ideology. Those who had once filled the ranks of the totalitarian clergy would become totalitarian politicians. And, above all, the Will to Power would produce a new kind of messiah, uninhibited by any religious sanctions whatever, and with an unappeasable appetite for controlling mankind. The end of the old order, with an unguided world adrift in a relativistic universe, was a summons to such gangster-statesmen to emerge. They were not slow to make their appearance.

TWO
The First Despotic Utopias

Lenin left Zurich to return to Russia on 8 April 1917. Some of his comrades in exile accompanied him to the station, arguing. He was to travel back through Germany at the invitation of General Ludendorff, who guaranteed him a safe passage provided he undertook not to talk to any German trade unionists on the way. War breeds revolutions. And breeding revolutions is a very old form of warfare. The Germans called it
Revolutionierungspolitik.
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If the Allies could incite the Poles, the Czechs, the Croats, the Arabs and the Jews to rise against the Central Powers and their partners, then the Germans, in turn, could and did incite the Irish and the Russians. If the Germans used Lenin, as Churchill later put it, ‘like a typhoid bacillus’, they attached no particular importance to him, lumping him in with thirty other exiles and malcontents. The arguing comrades thought Lenin would compromise himself by accepting German aid and tried to dissuade him from going. He brushed them aside without deigning to speak and climbed on the train. He was a fierce little man of forty-six, almost bald but (according to the son of his Zurich landlady) ‘with a neck like a bull’. Entering his carnage he immediately spotted a comrade he regarded as suspect: ‘Suddenly we saw Lenin seize him by the collar and … pitch him out onto the platform.’
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At Stockholm, comrade Karl Radek bought him a pair of shoes, but he refused other clothes, remarking sourly, ‘I am not going to Russia to open a tailor’s shop.’ Arriving at Beloostrov on Russian soil, in the early hours of 16 April, he was met by his sister Maria and by Kamenev and Stalin, who had been in charge of the Bolshevik paper
Pravda.
He ignored his sister completely, and Stalin whom he had not met, and offered no greeting to his old comrade Kamenev whom he had not seen for five years. Instead he shouted at him, ‘What’s this you have been writing in
Pravda?
We saw some of your articles and roundly abused you.’ Late that night he arrived at the
Finland Station in Petrograd. He was given a bunch of roses and taken to the Tsar’s waiting-room. There he launched into the first of a series of speeches, one of them delivered, still clutching the roses, from the top of an armoured car. The last took two hours and ‘filled his audience with turmoil and terror’. Dawn was breaking as he finished. He retired to bed, said his wife, Krupskaya, hardly speaking a word.
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The grim lack of humanity with which Lenin returned to Russia to do his revolutionary work was characteristic of this single-minded man. Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov was born in 1870 at Simbirsk on the Volga, the son of an inspector of primary schools. When he was sixteen, his elder brother Alexander was hanged for conspiring to blow up the Tsar with a bomb which he had made himself. His supposed reaction to his brother’s death, ‘We shall never get there by that road’, is probably apocryphal, since he did not in fact become a Marxist (which meant disavowing terrorism) until later, after he had been forced out of Kazan University for ‘revolutionary activities’. His sister Anna said he was ‘hardened’ by his brother’s execution.
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Certainly politics now obsessed him, then and for ever, and his approach was always cerebral rather than emotional. His contemporaries refer to his ‘unsociability’, his ‘excessive reserve’ and his ‘distant manner’. Aged twenty-two, he dissuaded friends from collecting money for the victims of a famine, on the grounds that hunger ‘performs a progressive function’ and would ‘cause the peasants to reflect on the fundamental facts of capitalist society’.
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Within a year or two he had acquired a double-bottomed suitcase for importing seditious books, and its discovery earned him a three-year sentence in Siberia. The few days before his exile he spent in the Moscow Library, scrabbling for facts and statistics with which to hammer home his theories. In Siberia he married Krupskaya, another subversive.

Men who carry through political revolutions seem to be of two main types, the clerical and the romantic. Lenin (he adopted the pen-name in 1901) was from the first category. Both his parents were Christians. Religion was important to him, in the sense that he hated it. Unlike Marx, who despised it and treated it as marginal, Lenin saw it as a powerful and ubiquitous enemy. He made clear in many writings (his letter to Gorky of 13 January 1913 is a striking example) that he had an intense personal dislike for anything religious. ‘There can be nothing more abominable’, he wrote, ‘than religion.’ From the start, the state he created set up and maintains to this day an enormous academic propaganda machine against religion.
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He was not just anti-clerical like Stalin, who disliked priests because they were corrupt. On the contrary, Lenin had no real
feelings about corrupt priests, because they were easily beaten. The men he really feared and hated, and later persecuted, were the saints. The purer the religion, the more dangerous. A devoted cleric, he argued, is far more influential than an egotistical and immoral one. The clergy most in need of suppression were not those committed to the defence of exploitation but those who expressed their solidarity with the proletariat and the peasants. It was as though he recognized in the true man of God the same zeal and spirit which animated himself, and wished to expropriate it and enlist it in his own cause.
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No man personifies better the replacement of the religious impulse by the will to power. In an earlier age he would surely have been a religious leader. With his extraordinary passion for force, he might have figured in Mohammed’s legions. He was even closer perhaps to Jean Calvin, with his belief in organizational structure, his ability to create one and then dominate it utterly, his puritanism, his passionate self-righteousness, and above all his intolerance.

Krupskaya testifies to his asceticism, and tells us how he gave up all the things he cared for, skating, reading Latin, chess, even music, to concentrate solely on his political work.
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A comrade remarked, ‘He is the only one of us who lives revolution twenty-four hours a day.’ He told Gorky he refused to listen to music often because ‘it makes you want to say stupid, nice things and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell. And now you mustn’t stroke anyone’s head – you might get your hand bitten off.’
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We have to assume that what drove Lenin on to do what he did was a burning humanitarianism, akin to the love of the saints for God, for he had none of the customary blemishes of the politically ambitious: no vanity, no self-consciousness, no obvious relish for the exercise of authority. But his humanitarianism was a very abstract passion. It embraced humanity in general but he seems to have had little love for, or even interest in, humanity in particular. He saw the people with whom he dealt, his comrades, not as individuals but as receptacles for his ideas. On that basis, and on no other, they were judged. So he had no hierarchy of friendships; no friendships in fact, merely ideological alliances. He judged men not by their moral qualities but by their views, or rather the degree to which they accepted his. He bore no grudges. A man like Trotsky, whom he fought bitterly in the years before the Great War, and with whom he exchanged the vilest insults, was welcomed back with bland cordiality once he accepted Lenin’s viewpoint. Equally, no colleague, however close, could bank the smallest capital in Lenin’s heart.

Lenin was the first of a new species: the professional organizer of totalitarian politics. It never seems to have occurred to him, from early adolescence onwards, that any other kind of human activity was
worth doing. Like an anchorite, he turned his back on the ordinary world. He rejected with scorn his mother’s suggestion that he should go into farming. For a few weeks he functioned as a lawyer and hated it. After that he never had any other kind of job or occupation, for his journalism was purely a function of his political life. And his politics were hieratic, not demotic. Lenin surrounded himself with official publications, and works of history and economics. He made no effort to inform himself directly of the views and conditions of the masses. The notion of canvassing an electorate on their doorsteps was anathema to him: ‘unscientific’. He never visited a factory or set foot on a farm. He had no interest in the way in which wealth was created. He was never to be seen in the working-class quarters of any town in which he resided. His entire life was spent among the members of his own sub-class, the bourgeois intelligentsia, which he saw as a uniquely privileged priesthood, endowed with a special gnosis and chosen by History for a decisive role. Socialism, he wrote quoting Karl Kautsky, was the product of ‘profound scientific knowledge …. The vehicle of [this] science is not the proletariat but the bourgeois intelligentsia: contemporary socialism was born in the heads of individual members of this class.’
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