Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (15 page)

There has been a tendency, revived in post-Soviet Russia, to idealize the last years of tsarism as a time of Russian economic expansion and transition to democracy. The first half of the proposition is indubitably true, the second half demonstrably false. In fact, one could more readily argue that the disparity between the two – a booming economy fuelled by government armaments orders and a restless middle class and a dilapidated, anachronistic and inefficient government which hated modernization and deeply distrusted the middle class as a westernizing force that would sap the distinctiveness of Holy Russia – was making a revolution more rather than less likely. Such a revolution would have been bourgeois rather than socialist in its early phases but would have ended the autocracy, though maybe not the monarchy. Arguably, this is what actually happened: the elite began the Revolution in 1917, not the masses. However, that was for the future and by then the massive influence of the First World War had also intervened.

For the moment, however, the situation looked bleak for the Russian left in 1907. Bolshevik membership, insofar as one can judge from scanty evidence, appears to have peaked at 150,000 in the revolutionary years and dropped to 10,000 or so by 1909/10. The atmosphere was one of defeatism and a search for new beginnings.

A prominent group of former Marxists, with Struve in the forefront, continued their transition from Marxism to philosophical idealism and individualism. Indeed, given the difficulty of political activity, theoretical and philosophical issues began to loom large among the radical intelligentsia. Lenin himself picked up his philosophical studies, which had been rather desultory since the end of his Siberian exile, but only, in an increasingly typical fashion, to batter the head not only of his opponents but also of his only prominent allies. How did this come about?

As we have seen, Lenin had manoeuvred himself into a position of near isolation among prominent Marxists by the end of 1903 and 1904. However, his intransigent stand began to attract a new generation of supporters who breathed new life into Bolshevism. The main figures in this group were the brothers-in-law Anatoly Lunacharsky and Alexander Bogdanov. Their importance to Lenin was massively enhanced by the fact that they had links to Russia’s second (after Tolstoy) most popular living writer of the period, Maxim Gorky, who himself had links with wealthy art patrons among Russia’s rising industrial class whom he could tap for money for radical causes. Gorky became a major link in the crucial chain of Bolshevik finance.

Bogdanov and Lenin first met in Geneva in 1904. They established an immediate rapport. Bogdanov had been drawn to Lenin’s intransigent stand against opportunism and Lenin was enthralled by Bogdanov’s knowledge of and contacts with the worker movement back in Russia where Bogdanov was based. The result, rather unusually, seems to have been that Lenin bent some of his ideas in Bogdanov’s direction. In particular, Bogdanov was resolutely workerist. Taking as his fundamentalist text Marx’s injunction that the task of liberating the workers would be undertaken by the workers themselves, Bogdanov attempted to eliminate all non-proletarian influences from the worker movement. Though he was acutely aware of the obvious contradiction here, namely that he himself was an educated intellectual, not a worker, he attempted to carry through his principles. It is not too fanciful to suggest that Bogdanov’s influence can be detected in Lenin’s writing of this time.
⁹
One Step Forward: Two Steps Back
differs mostly from its more famous predecessor in that it criticizes the anarchist, individualist tendencies of a radical intelligentsia which refused to accept discipline.
What is to be Done?
had given a much more positive role to the intelligentsia as the bringers of socialist consciousness from without to the proletariat.

Although there were many points of difference which soon exploded into a bitter argument, for the time being the two men were happy to collaborate with each other. The need to work with Bogdanov had overridden Lenin’s disagreements with him on fundamental principles, not least because he was dependent on Bogdanov for access to Gorky’s funds but also because he had so few supporters at the time. However, once Lenin was forced back into exile and partly because he now had a direct line to Gorky and didn’t need Bogdanov’s mediation so much, the differences began to emerge. The wave of savage repression in Russia from late 1905 to 1907 and even beyond pushed literary and philosophical activity back to the top of the agenda since direct activism was no longer possible. In these years Lenin turned back to philosophy to confront Bogdanov.

Bogdanov was much more of a philosopher than Lenin. He had been deeply influenced by the fashionable German philosophers Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius. He had, if anything, taken their principles even further than they had done themselves to produce what he called ‘monism’. Put crudely, monism was a denial of idealism and dualism. Idealists argued, following Plato, that there was an element of every object akin to its spirit, soul or essence. Thus, a tree, apart from being a tree, embodied ‘treeness’, a table, in addition to its specific characteristics such as construction material, size, shape and purpose, would exemplify a generic ‘tableness’ and so on. Dualists argued that there were two levels of existence – material and spiritual. The spiritual could resemble the essence of the idealists. Bogdanov’s monism dismissed all such concepts. For him there was only one level of existence, the material. On this basis he constructed a complex philosophy based on the axiom that everything in the universe was material, including human consciousness.

In addition to his direct philosophical concepts he also discussed the implication of his ideas for socialism.
¹⁰
In particular, he focused on the question of consciousness. Like everything else, for Bogdanov consciousness was a material entity. But it was also a crucial component of revolution. Bourgeois revolution had been preceded by a long period of developing bourgeois culture going back to the Renaissance. Could there be a proletarian revolution without a corresponding cultural revolution challenging the domination – or hegemony – of bourgeois ideas? For Bogdanov, the answer was a resounding no! To his discomfort, some of his friends and admirers, notably Gorky and Lunacharsky, attempted to popularize this form of socialism as the last great religion – the religion of humanity replacing the religions of God. As a result, the group became know as God-builders because they saw humanity as the creators of God (in the form of the perfect socialist society) rather than the other way round.

Lenin could not abide any of this and he fought it ferociously. One might surmise that, at least in part, Lenin’s animosity arose from political differences and the breakdown was postponed while Bogdanov was sitting on the Bolshevik money pot, but when the break came Lenin’s attack was tempestuous. He attacked Bogdanov more directly since it was still in his interest to maintain good relations with Gorky who could still be useful to him. Lenin even decided to devote himself to catching up on his philosophical studies, largely in the British Museum Reading Room, in order to refute the heretics. The result was another of Lenin’s major works,
Materialism and Empiriocriticism
, published in 1909. It was later enshrined as a philosophical masterpiece in the Soviet Union.

As a philosophical treatise
Materialism and Empiriocriticism
stands almost alone in terms of the depth and ferocity of its insulting language. It is certainly true that Marx and Engels could combine philosophical argument with ridicule in works such as
The German Ideology
and
Anti-Dühring
, but Lenin’s language was even more crude. Only ‘an inmate of a lunatic asylum’ or ‘a charlatan or utter blockhead’ could disagree with him. For Lenin, the German developers of monist ideas, Avenarius, Mach and their followers, wrote ‘gibberish’ and ‘sheer nonsense’. Bogdanov was ‘a jester’. Remarkably, Lenin’s sister Anna, who had helped prepare the volume for publication in Moscow, had urged him to tone down the language and he had, apparently, complied though he insisted in a letter of 9 March that there was no reason for toning down the polemics against the ‘clerical reaction’ (
popovshchina
) of Lunacharsky and Bogdanov [CW 37 414] and again on 21 March that the attacks on the two are ‘not under any circumstances to be toned down’. [CW 37 417]

In the end, the volume is more memorable for its polemic than its philosophy. Its content has not unduly troubled the world philosophical community. At its heart is the simple proposition that there is an objective world that exists outside the consciousness of the individual. In a breathtaking sweep of reductionism, Lenin argued that all idealists, not to mention their opposites, Bogdanov and the monists, denied this and ended up taking the solipsistic position: that is, that we cannot prove anything outside the existence of consciousness itself. Lenin offered little but repetitive assertion of dogmas derived largely from Engels as his contribution to the debate.

While anyone with any philosophical sensitivity would be appalled by the crudity of Lenin’s thought, the volume helped bring the conflict with the Bogdanovites to a crisis. The dispute came to a head at a meeting of the extended editorial board of
Proletarii
which met in Paris from 21 to 30 June 1909. After a tense struggle Lenin won and Bogdanov and his followers were classed as opponents along with the Mensheviks. ‘Bolshevism,’ Lenin said, ‘must now be strictly Marxist.’ Lenin in private correspondence and conversation several times referred to Bogdanov and his group as ‘scoundrels’. He refused to participate in Bogdanov’s Party school held in Gorky’s villa on Capri.

Once again Lenin was determinedly purging his party of heretics. Once again he had broken with the only intellectually serious equals in his movement. Once again he was isolated, though he still tried to maintain good relations with senior figures of international socialism like Rosa Luxemburg, to whom he sent a copy of
Materialism and Empiriocriticism
. However, her attitude to Lenin remained lukewarm. Nothing summed up Lenin’s situation better than a letter to Zinoviev, now one of his closest comrades, a man distinguished by his enthusiastic support for Lenin rather than any originality or creativity on the intellectual or political fronts. Menshevik polemics were described as ‘very vile’; Bogdanov and his supporters were ‘scoundrels’. As for Trotsky, who was making overtures to team up with Lenin, he behaved like ‘a despicable careerist and factionalist’ surrounded by ‘a rascally crew’. He was also a ‘scoundrel’ and ‘swindler’ who ‘pays lip service to the Party and behaves worse than any other of the factionalists’. [CW 34 399
–
400]

The letter was written from the countryside outside Paris to which Lenin and Krupskaya had withdrawn to recover from the customary nervous exhaustion he suffered after a hard fight. They walked in the forest and added the new activity of cycling to their repertoire. The fresh air and summer sun quickly restored Lenin’s equilibrium and, after six weeks’ holiday, he returned fully to the fray in Paris. Lenin had won the disputes and had tightened the definition of Bolshevism even further. While he still retained a sense of belonging to a wider movement of international socialists to which many of his opponents also belonged, he believed intensely that unity would only come about by the whole movement following his principles rather than through any compromise. Unity on any other terms was completely out of the question.

CONSOLIDATING BOLSHEVISM: ORGANIZATIONAL WARS

The break with Bogdanov and his associates, including Gorky with whom Lenin’s relations became very tense for some years, left Lenin bereft once again of major intellectual peers within Bolshevism. By 1909 the fortunes of all the political parties of the left had foundered in the wake of the failure of 1905, swamped by waves of depression and disillusion. These developments did not, however, stop Lenin from continuing his favourite pastime, splitting an ever-smaller party. In particular, he had to resist efforts by the Bogdanovite left to establish themselves, rather than the Leninists, as the true heirs to the Party and, crucially, its funds which were still being held in trust by German socialists in the International Socialist Bureau until such time as the Russian squabbles were resolved. There seemed little prospect of this happening. Lenin was now fighting on two fronts within the Party itself. To the right, the dispute with the Mensheviks had, to some extent, stabilized though Lenin continued to hold out hopes of winning Plekhanov and his immediate supporters over to Bolshevism. But it was the left which offered the greater threat.

Lenin’s writings of the next few years were focused on the struggle against what he termed liquidators and recallists (
otzovists
from the Russian) or ultimatumists. They did not exactly correspond to the two separate factions and were, at times, used almost interchangeably or in tandem. The term liquidator was not new. It had been used to describe the Mensheviks. It continued to refer to those whose policies of decentralization, in Lenin’s view, would lead to the liquidation of the Party in the continuing conspiratorial conditions of post-1905 repression. Recallists were so termed because they wanted to recall the Bolshevik delegates from the Third and Fourth Dumas. They believed Bolshevik participation in what all agreed was a reactionary institution only served to legitimize that institution. As we have seen, Lenin had shared their scepticism in 1906 and supported boycott but in 1907 was converted to the virtues of having elected deputies. His main reason was that the Duma could serve as a tribune from which Bolshevik policies could be proclaimed openly and be reported in the wider press. The deputies’ immunity from arrest (at least until the outbreak of war) also gave them a privileged position. For Lenin, the handful of Bolshevik Duma delegates, numbering six at the most, became a crucial component of the Party from 1913, when the group was formed, until 1914 when they were arrested. The faction leader, Roman Malinovsky, elected to the Duma in 1912, worked closely with Lenin and was one of his most trusted and widely known supporters.