The Red Flag: A History of Communism (16 page)

The debate between Lavrov and Bakunin carried distinct echoes of the conflict between Modernist and Radical Marxism. But unlike Marx, both believed in the revolutionary potential of the peasantry – happily so, as there was not yet much of a proletariat in Russia. Yet neither Lavrov’s nor Bakunin’s strategies altered the fundamental conservatism of the regime, and official repression encouraged a turn towards revolutionary violence. Crucial was the failure of the Lavrovite ‘Going to the People’ movement of 1874, when over a thousand young people abandoned their lives in the towns and went to live with the peasantry. Dressing as peasants, the men in red shirts and baggy trousers, and women in white blouses and skirts, they hoped to educate them, enlighten them and encourage them to rise up and demand a redistribution of land. The youths and the peasantry did not always have much in common, but it was official repression, not peasant hostility, that led to the movement’s failure. Large numbers of the youthful idealists were arrested and sentenced in large open trials in 1877–8.
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The lessons seemed clear: the radical movement had to become more organized, secretive and conspiratorial. In 1879 one wing of the Russian socialist movement, the ‘People’s Will’ (
Narodnaia Volia
), created the model for all terrorist organizations in the modern world: it was pyramidal in structure, and was made up of discrete cells, which, for reasons of security, were supposed to be ignorant of the activities of the others. The People’s Will was also the first organization to use the innovative explosive technology recently developed by the businessman Alfred Nobel. That year it passed a death sentence on Alexander II, which was enacted in 1881 when two hand-held bombs were thrown at the Tsar’s carriage.

The harsh repression that followed the assassination only strengthened the terrorists and their most prominent theorist, Petr Tkachev. The
son of a petty nobleman, he argued that only action by a small ‘revolutionary minority’ would bring socialism to the country. It was in the 1880s that Rakhmetov eclipsed Vera and Kirsanov as the role model of choice for Russian youth. Osipanov, one of the members of the terrorist organization that made an assassination attempt on Alexander III in 1887, the ‘Group of March 1’, emulated his hero by sleeping on nails.
What is to be Done?
was also the favourite book of another member of the Group of March 1, Aleksandr Ulianov, and, after his execution, that of his brother, Vladimir – later known as ‘Lenin’.

Russian socialist terrorists continued to operate throughout the 1890s, killing thousands of officials, including several ministers – one author has estimated that over 17,000 people died as a result of terrorism in the twenty years before 1917.
²⁵
Meanwhile the
okhrana
(secret police) fought back, often very effectively. In 1908 it emerged that one of the terrorist leaders was none other than an undercover police agent – Evno Azef.

The temper of politics changed, however, with the devastating famine of 1891. The tsarist state’s failure to deal with the crisis encouraged educated society to take its place and organize famine relief. It now seemed imperative that socialists become involved in peaceful reform. However, it proved impossible to return to the politics of Lavrov and the 1870s. Russia was industrializing rapidly, and the famine had destroyed any lingering idealism about the countryside. The old agrarian socialist consensus that the peasant commune was Russia’s gift to world socialism, and that suitably modernized it would become the germ of the ideal society, was damaged beyond repair; agriculture and the peasantry appeared now to be irremediably backward, the embodiment of Russia’s
aziatchina
, and a new revolutionary class would have to be found. It was this lacuna that explains the attractiveness of Marxism. The principles of Marxism provided an alternative to the tsarist hierarchy, but also promised a new vanguard – the working class – and a path out of backwardness. Moreover they appeared to be ‘scientific’ and Western. As the revolutionary and friend of Lenin, Nikolai Valentinov, remembered:

The ‘Marxism’ adopted by the Russian socialists was firmly of the Modernist variety: a backward Russia would have to endure capitalist development first and as such socialism was a long way away. This was not immediately apparent when Marx was first translated into Russian. When
Capital
was delivered to Skuratov, one of the two tsarist censors deputed to read half of it in 1872, he reported: ‘it is possible to state with certainty that very few people in Russia will read it, and even fewer will understand it’.
²⁷
He concluded that it could be published, arguably the most important mistake made by the censors since
What is to be Done?
appeared nine years before. The Russian edition of the work – the first translation from its original German – was an extraordinary hit among the Russian reading public, massively outselling its Hamburg predecessor. But Skuratov was right that not all would understand it, at least initially. Both agrarian socialists and official, pro-regime newspapers welcomed it, as a warning of the capitalist nightmare of child labour and satanic mills. Yet even though Marx himself seems to have been persuaded in the 1880s that Russia could avoid capitalism and preserve the commune, the message of
Capital
was the exact opposite: capitalism was inevitable. And in 1883, this became the doctrine of the first Marxist organization in Russia, ‘The Liberation of Labour’, founded by the exiled revolutionary Georgii Plekhanov. Plekhanov abandoned the old Russian agrarian socialist faith in the peasantry and declared firmly that Russia would not be ready for socialism until it had been through the travails of capitalism and liberalism. The working class, led by intellectuals in the Social Democratic party, would stage a revolution against the autocracy, but this would bring only liberal democracy, and only at a much later stage socialism. Plekhanov’s doctrine became the orthodoxy amongst Russian Marxists, as did the socialism of Kautsky and the Second International.

Yet the relevance of Kautskian Marxism to Russia was highly debatable. It had been developed in semi-democratic, maturing industrial societies, in which workers were being gradually integrated into the political system, and where liberal democracy, suitably broadened, seemed to be in the interests of the working masses. In Russia, in contrast, much more repressive circumstances contributed to a very different culture. Like the Bavarian worker Nikolaus Osterroth, Russian radical students in the 1890s and 1900s saw their lives as a journey from ‘darkness’ to ‘light’; they were becoming ‘new’, ‘conscious’ people, embracing both the modern city and a socialist identity. However, in Russia they were a much more embattled community, infiltrated by the police. Their culture was a highly moralistic and Manichaean one, in which ‘honourable’, heroic students confronted evil spies. ‘Courts of honour’ were held to expose and ‘purge’ suspected enemies from the student community, their accusers judging them by their public and private lives – practices rather similar to those found in the later Bolshevik party. In these threatening conditions, it is no surprise that a more radical, sectarian vision of politics was to challenge the more inclusive Kautskian tradition.
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Vladimir Ulianov (Lenin) was the figure who adapted Chernyshevskii’s socialism to the modern world, and the Second International’s Modernist Marxism to the conditions of Russia. Both Lenin’s background and personality suited him to the role of Westernizer and modernizer. Although his father was formally an aristocrat – a nobleman who could expect to be addressed as ‘your excellency’ – it would be misleading to think of the Ulianovs as a family with aristocratic values. Lenin’s father was a professional educationalist and had earned his title when he became Director of Schools for Simbirsk Province. Both Lenin’s parents were from mixed ethnic background, his father probably of Russian and indigenous Volga background, and his mother was a Lutheran of mixed German, Swedish and Jewish ancestry. They could, therefore, be seen as ambitious outsiders, eager to succeed and assimilate, and they implanted their socially aspirational self-discipline in their children.
²⁹
They were typical of many professionals of the time who devoted
themselves to improving Russia and her people whilst remaining loyal to the tsar. The Ulianovs were reformist progressives, interested in the latest enlightened ideas, whilst the Lutheranism and German background of Maria, Lenin’s mother, gave the family a particularly Westernizing cast of mind, which Lenin betrayed in later life when he compared Russian laziness unfavourably with Jewish and German discipline.
³⁰
In many ways, then, Lenin’s background was not unlike Marx’s – a professional family of a successful minority ethnicity, willing to assimilate to the dominant ethnicity in an
ancien régime
, but remaining faithful to enlightened ideas and committed to eliminating backwardness and obscurantism. As in other cases, it was the children of these first-generation assimilators who rebelled, convinced that their parents had been too accommodating to the powers that be.

However, whilst Lenin’s background bore some similarity to Marx’s, his character was very different. Lenin was never a Romantic utopian socialist, nor was he a rebel as a child; he enjoyed good relations with his father, and he was a model pupil at school: in his end-of-school report his headmaster stated that ‘The guiding principles of his upbringing were religion and rational discipline’ (a judgement delivered by none other than Fedor Kerenskii, the father of Aleksandr, the head of the liberal Provisional Government whom Lenin overthrew in October 1917).
³¹
Throughout his life, Lenin observed the practices of bourgeois ‘rational discipline’. His desk was spotlessly tidy, he was careful about money (even cutting any scrap of blank paper from letters he received for re-use), and he evinced nothing but contempt for his more bohemian co-editors on the Marxist newspaper
Iskra
(
Spark
).
³²

It is not surprising that Lenin should have found efficient Germanic cultures appealing – especially their post offices. According to his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia, when, exiled from Russia and in an Alpine village, he had ‘nothing but praise’ for Swiss culture and its postmen, who delivered his precious books to him so he could work on his pamphlets.
³³
In 1917 it was only semi-humorously that he described the German postal service as a model of the future socialist state.
³⁴

Yet Lenin was to channel his bourgeois discipline in the service of a revolution against the bourgeoisie. The execution of his brother, Aleksandr, for involvement in revolutionary terrorism doubtless explains a great deal. Vladimir was discriminated against as a member of a suspect family, and he was left not only Aleksandr’s example but also his books,
including
What is to be Done?
Lenin later declared that this work had ‘ploughed him over again and again’. ‘It completely reshaped me.’ ‘This is a book that changes one for one’s whole lifetime.’

It may also be that the book provided the model for the romantic triangle involving his wife, Krupskaia, and the future theorist of socialism and love, Inessa Armand.
³⁶
And there is much of the Rakhmetov about Lenin’s puritanical commitment to revolution and utilitarian rejection of anything that might distract him. Although he did not consume a raw-beef diet or sleep on nails (his health was poor), unusually amongst his fellow revolutionaries, he kept himself fit with gymnastics.

Following his brother’s death in 1887, Lenin entered university in Kazan, but was expelled after a year for his involvement in demonstrations. He joined agrarian socialist groups for a time, but it is no surprise that he was attracted by the Modernist Marxism of Plekhanov, and in 1893 he went to St Petersburg with ambitions to become a Marxist revolutionary and theorist. He became known in revolutionary circles as a particularly hard-line opponent of agrarian socialism. But Lenin also differed from most Russian Marxists of his time in significant ways. He appreciated the difficulties confronting Marxists in Russian circumstances where capitalism was only just emerging: they would effectively condemn Russia to a very long journey to the socialist paradise, and in the meantime radicals would have to tolerate the top-hatted speculators and satanic mills. This was something he found very difficult, for he hated the bourgeoisie as a class more viscerally than many other Marxists, and was especially hostile to ‘bourgeois’ ideas like liberal democracy and the rule of law. According to his wife, his view of the liberal bourgeoisie was poisoned early in his life when local society shunned his mother after the arrest of Aleksandr, and she could not find anybody to accompany her in her carriage on the first stage of her journey to visit him in gaol.
³⁷
His personal experience only strengthened the view, common among Russian Marxists, that the Russian bourgeoisie had a particularly craven attitude towards the aristocracy and the tsarist state. Lenin strongly approved of the sentiments stated in the first Russian Social Democratic Party programme: ‘The further east in Europe one proceeds, the weaker, more cowardly, and baser in the political sense becomes the bourgeoisie and the greater are the cultural and political tasks that devolve on the proletariat.’
³⁸
His hatred of the existing order was doubtless strengthened by his imprisonment in 1895 and his subsequent exile to Siberia in 1897.