Five-Year Plans passed. Decades passed. Events of incandescent immediacy cooled and hardened. Encased by the cement of time, they turned into great slabs—into the history of the Soviet State.
No artist has painted
A true portrait of Lenin.
Ages to come will complete
Lenin’s unfinished portrait.
Did Poletaev understand the tragic implication of his lines about Lenin? The character traits emphasized by the authors of memoirs and biographies, character traits which once seemed central and which charmed millions of minds and hearts—these traits proved in the end to be entirely incidental to the course of history. The history of the Russian State did not choose these human and humane sides of Lenin’s character but cast them aside as unwanted trash. The history of the State did not need the Lenin who admired War and Peace and who listened to the Appassionata with his face buried in his hands. It did not need Lenin’s modest and democratic tastes; it did not need his warmth and attentiveness toward drivers and secretaries; nor did it need his conversations with peasant children, his kindness toward domestic animals, or the deep pain he felt when Julius Martov ceased to be his friend and became his enemy.
But everything about Lenin that had been seen as temporary and accidental, everything that had been put down to the particular circumstances of the revolutionary underground and the desperate struggles of the first Soviet years—all this turned out to be of lasting, defining importance.
The authors of memoirs say nothing about the aspect of Lenin’s character that led him to order a search of Georgy Plekhanov’s apartment as he lay dying, but it is this aspect of Lenin’s character—the aspect that determined his total intolerance of political democracy—that proved dominant.
A man who has gone up in the world, a merchant or factory owner from a peasant family who now lives in a mansion of his own and travels on his private yacht—such a man may still display peasant traits; he may still love kvass, pickled-cabbage soup, and crude, vivid popular expressions. A field marshal in gold braid may still like to roll his own cigarettes from makhorka ; he may still enjoy the basic humor of the aphorisms that soldiers come out with.
But do these traits, do these tastes and fond memories matter to the millions of people whose fates are determined by the factories owned by the ex-peasant, by the movements of stock prices or armies?
It is not through love of pickled-cabbage soup and makhorka that an industrialist acquires wealth or a general wins glory.
The author of one memoir about Lenin describes going for a Sunday walk with him in the Swiss mountains. Out of breath after a steep climb, they reached a summit and sat down on a rock. The young woman thought that Vladimir Ilyich’s intent gaze was taking in every smallest detail of the beautiful alpine landscape. She felt moved and excited, thinking of the poetry that was flooding his soul. All of a sudden he sighed and said, “These Mensheviks—they’re really fouling things up for us!”
This charming little story tells us a lot about Lenin. On one side of the scales—the whole of Creation. On the other side of the scales—the Party.
October selected those of Vladimir Ilyich’s traits that it needed. It cast away those that it did not need.
Throughout its entire history, the Russian revolutionary movement included within it the most contradictory qualities. The genuine love for the people to be found in many Russian revolutionaries—men whose meekness and readiness to endure suffering has been seen before only in the early Christians—coexisted with a fierce contempt toward human suffering, an extreme veneration of abstract principles, and an implacable determination to destroy not only one’s enemies but also one’s comrades-in-arms, should their interpretation of these principles differ in any slightest way from one’s own. This sectarian single-mindedness, this readiness to suppress today’s living freedom for the sake of a hypothetical future freedom, to transgress ordinary, everyday morality in the name of some future principle—all of this can be found in Pestel, in Bakunin and Nechaev, and in some of what was said and done by members of The People’s Will.
No, it was not only love, not only compassion that led such people along the path of revolution. To find what engendered these people, one needs to look far back into the thousand-year depths of Russian history.
Similar figures existed in previous centuries, but it was the twentieth century that brought them out from the wings and placed them center stage.
This kind of person is like a surgeon in a hospital ward. His interest in the patients and their families, his jokes, the arguments he takes part in, his struggles on behalf of homeless children, and his concern for workers who have reached the age of retirement—all of this is unimportant, trifling, a mere husk. His soul lies in his surgeon’s knife.
What is most important about this man is his fanatical faith in the omnipotence of the surgeon’s knife. It is the surgeon’s knife that is the twentieth century’s true theoretician, its greatest philosophical leader.
During the fifty-four years of his life, Lenin did more than listen to the Appassionata, reread War and Peace, have heart-to-heart talks with peasant delegates, admire the Russian landscape, and worry about whether his secretary had a proper winter coat. This goes without saying; it should be no surprise that Lenin possessed a real face, not only an image.
And one can imagine Lenin giving expression to any number of different character traits and peculiarities in his daily life—in that daily life that we all inevitably lead, whether we are dentists, leaders of nations, or cutters in a ladies’ clothing workshop.
These traits can manifest themselves at any moment of night or day, as a man washes his face in the morning, as he eats his porridge, as he looks out through the window at a pretty woman whose skirt has been caught by the wind, as he uses a match to pick his teeth, as he feels jealous about his wife or tries to make her feel jealous about him, as he looks at his bare legs in the bathhouse and scratches his armpits, as he reads scraps of newspaper in the toilet, trying to piece a torn page together, as he farts and at once tries to mask the sound by coughing or humming.
Such moments occur in the lives of both the great and the small, and they can, of course, be found in Lenin’s life.
Maybe Lenin developed a paunch because he ate too much macaroni and butter, preferring it to vegetables.
Maybe he and his wife had arguments, unknown to the world, about how often he washed his feet or brushed his teeth, or about his reluctance to change a worn shirt with a dirty collar.
And it may indeed be possible to break through the fortifications surrounding a supposedly human but in reality unreal and exalted image of the leader. It may be possible, creeping along silently on your stomach or with quick, sudden dashes, to reach a true, authentic Lenin that no memoirist has described.
But what would we gain from knowing the hidden truth of Lenin’s behavior in bathroom, bedroom, or dining room? Would this help us toward a deeper understanding of Lenin, the leader of the new Russia, the founder of a new world order? Would we be able to find any real correlation between the true nature of Lenin and the nature of the State he founded? In order to establish such a correlation, we would have to assume that Lenin behaved in the same way as a political leader as he did in his everyday life. This assumption, however, would be arbitrary and mistaken; such correlations, after all, are as likely to be inverse as to be direct—people behave differently in different spheres of their life.
In his personal relationships—when he gave someone help, when he stayed the night with friends or went out for a walk with them—Lenin was always polite, sensitive, and kind. Yet Lenin was always rude, harsh, and implacable toward his political opponents. He never admitted the least possibility that they might be even partially right, that he might be even partially wrong.
“Venal...lackey...groveler...hireling...agent...a Judas bought for thirty pieces of silver...”—these were the words Lenin used of his opponents.
It was never Lenin’s aim, in a d
ispute, to win his opponent over to his own views. He did not even truly address his opponent; the people for whom his words were intended were the witnesses to the dispute. Lenin’s aim was always to ridicule his opponent, to compromise him in the eyes of witnesses. These witnesses might be a few close friends, they might be an audience of a thousand conference delegates, or they might be the million readers of an article in a newspaper.
Lenin’s concern in an argument was not with truth but with victory. He needed, at all cost, to be victorious—and to this end he was happy to employ any rhetorical means. He was equally ready to trip his opponent from behind, to give him a metaphorical slap in the face, or to daze him with a metaphorical blow on the head.
It seems clear that Lenin’s behavior in his private, everyday life had no connection with how he behaved as the leader of a new world order.
And when the dispute moved from the pages of newspapers and magazines to the streets, when it moved to military battlefields or to fields of rye—then too there was nothing that Lenin shrank from, no tactics too vicious for him to employ.
Lenin’s intolerance, his unshakable drive to achieve his purpose, his contempt for freedom, his brutality toward those who did not share his views, his unwavering readiness to wipe off the face of the earth not only fortresses but also whole districts, regions, and provinces that challenged his view of the truth—all this was a part of Lenin long before October. All this was deep-rooted; all these aspects of Lenin’s character and behavior were present in the young Volodya Ulyanov.
All his abilities, all his will and passion were directed toward one end: the seizure of power.
To this end he sacrificed everything. In order to seize power he sacrificed what was most holy in Russia: her freedom. This freedom was childishly helpless; it was inexperienced and naive. How could this eight-month-old baby, born in a land with a heritage of a thousand years of slavery—how could this infant freedom have acquired experience?
The cultured, intellectual side of Lenin—which had once seemed what was deepest and truest about him—always receded into the background as soon as the going got difficult. Lenin’s true character then manifested in his iron will—in his frenzied, unyielding strength of will.
What led Lenin along the path of revolution? Love for people? A wish to put an end to the misery of the peasantry, to the workers’ poverty and lack of rights? A faith in the truth of Marxism, in the rectitude of his own Party?
The Russian Revolution, for him, had nothing to do with Russian freedom. But the power to which he so passionately aspired was not something he needed personally.
And here we come to something unique about Lenin: the simplicity of his character engendered a certain complexity.
In order to crave power so fiercely, one must be endowed with enormous political ambition. This love of power is something crude and simple. But this driven figure, who was capable of anything in his pursuit of power, was modest in his private life and did not seek power for his own self. It is at this point that Lenin’s simplicity ends and his complexity begins.
If we try to imagine a private Lenin who is an exact equivalent of the political Lenin, we will be confronted with a ranting dogmatist—someone harsh and primitive, high-handed, domineering, pitiless, insanely ambitious.
It is frightening even to think of Lenin behaving in this way in his everyday life—toward his friends and family, toward someone he shared an apartment with.
But that was not how it was. The private man turned out to be the inverse of the man on the world stage. Plus and minus, minus and plus.
And the overall picture turns out to be very different; it turns out to be complicated, in some ways tragic.
Insane political ambition together with an old jacket, a glass of weak tea, a student garret.
The ability to trample one’s opponent into the mud without a second thought, to deafen and stun him during an argument, combined with a sweet smile, with a shy sensitivity.
Implacable cruelty, a contempt for freedom—the holy of holies of the Russian Revolution—along with a pure, youthful delight in fine music or a good book.
Lenin...First there is the deified image. Then there is the image created by his enemies—an image all of a piece, an image that has him behaving as harshly and cruelly in his everyday life as in his role as leader of the new world order. Finally, there is a third image—an image that seems to me to be closer to reality but that is not easy to make sense of.
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In order to understand Lenin, we have to do more than examine his qualities as a politician or the qualities he showed in everyday life. We have to correlate Lenin’s character first with the supposed national character of the Russian people and then with the overall thrust of Russian history.
In his asceticism and natural modesty, Lenin had an affinity with Russian pilgrims. In his faith and directness, he answered to the folk ideal of a religious teacher. In his attachment to Russian nature, to its forests and meadows, he was akin to the Russian peasantry. His receptivity to Hegel and Marx and Western thought as a whole, his ability to absorb and give expression to the spirit of the West, was the manifestation of a deeply Russian trait first pointed out by Chaadaev. It is the same universal sympathy, the same astonishing ability to enter deep into the spirit of another nation, that Dostoevsky famously saw in Pushkin. This receptivity makes Lenin akin both to Pushkin and to Peter the Great.
Lenin’s fanatical, possessed quality is similar to the religious faith, the religious frenzy of Avvakum. And Avvakum is an entirely native-born, Russian phenomenon.
In the nineteenth century, Russian thinkers looked to the Russian national character, the Russian soul, and Russian religious nature for an explanation of Russia’s historical path.
Chaadaev, one of the most intelligent figures of that century, emphasized the ascetic and sacrificial quality of Russian Christianity, its undiluted Byzantine purity.
Dostoevsky saw universality, an aspiration toward the universally human, as the true foundation of the Russian soul.
Twentieth-century Russia loves to repeat the predictions made about it by earlier Russian thinkers and prophets: Gogol, Chaadaev, Belinsky, Dostoevsky.
But who would not like to repeat such things about himself?
The nineteenth-century prophets predicted that Russia would, in the future, lead the spiritual evolution not only of Europe but also of the entire world.
These foretellers were speaking not of Russian military glory but of the glory of the Russian heart, of Russian faith, of the example that Russia would set.
Gogol’s flying troika...Dostoevsky’s “It is for the Russian soul, all-human and all-unifying, to accommodate within itself, in brotherly love, all our brothers, and, in the end, perhaps, to speak the final word of the great general harmony, of the final brotherly concord of all tribes according to the law of the Gospel of Christ...” Chaadaev’s “Then we will naturally take our place among the nations chosen to act amid humanity not only as battering rams but also through their ideas...” Gogol’s “Russia, are you not also like the bold troika which no one can overtake? The road is a cloud of smoke under your wheels, the bridges thunder...”
And then, in the same letter, Chaadaev brilliantly put his finger on a striking feature of Russian history: “the enormous fact of the gradual enslavement of our peasantry, which can only be seen as the strictly logical consequence of our entire history.”
The implacable suppression of the individual personality—its total, servile subjection to the sovereign and the State—has been a constant feature of Russian history. This too was seen and recognized by the Russian prophets.
But along with the suppression of the individual by prince, landowner, sovereign, and State, the Russian prophets sensed a purity, profundity, and clarity unknown to the Western world. They saw a Christlike power—the power of the Russian soul—and they prophesied a great and brilliant future for this soul. These prophets all agreed that the Christian ideal had been e
mbodied in the Russian soul in an ascetic, Byzantine, anti-Western manner—in a way quite independent of the State—and that the forces inherent in the Russian soul would manifest themselves as a powerful influence on the peoples of Europe. They believed that these forces would purify and transform the life of the Western world, enlightening it in the spirit of brotherhood, and that the Western world would joyfully and trustingly follow this Russian man who was so universal in his humanity. These prophecies of Russia’s most powerful minds and hearts had one fatal flaw in common. They all saw the power of the Russian soul and its significance for the world, but they all failed to see that this soul had been a slave for a thousand years, that its peculiarities had been engendered by the absence of freedom. However all-powerful you are, what can you give to the world if you have been a slave for a thousand years?
The nineteenth century, however, seemed at last to have brought closer the time foretold by the Russian prophets, the time when Russia, always so receptive to other teachings and other examples, always so greedy to absorb other spiritual influences, was herself preparing to act on the world.
For a hundred years Russia had been drinking in a borrowed idea of freedom. For a hundred years—through the lips of Pestel, Ryleyev, Herzen, Chernyshevsky, Lavrov, Bakunin; through the lips of her writers; through the lips of such martyrs as Zhelyabov, Sofya Perovskaya, Timofey Mikhailov, and Kibalchich; through the lips of Plekhanov, Kropotkin, and Mikhailovsky; through the lips of Sazonov and Kalyaev; through the lips of Lenin, Martov, and Chernov; through the lips of her classless intelligentsia; through the lips of her students and progressive workers—for a hundred years Russia had been imbibing the work of the thinkers and philosophers of Western freedom. This thinking was carried by books, by university faculties, by young men who had studied in Paris and Heidelberg. It was carried by the boots of Napoleon’s soldiers. It was carried by engineers and enlightened merchants. It was carried by impoverished Westerners who came to Russia to work and whose sense of their own innate human dignity evoked the envious astonishment of Russian princes.