Lenin and the Twentieth Century: A Bertram D. Wolfe Retrospective

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LENIN: THE RUSSIAN BACKGROUND

Russian despotism grew up in the immensity of Russia, as a response to the boundlessness of the Eurasian plain, the need to bind that vastness together in a single bureaucratic system, and to set up Russia’s huge armies for defense and conquest on all her open frontiers. The great Eurasian plain opposes few obstacles to frost and wind and drought, to migrant hordes and marching armies. In earlier centuries most of the plain was dominated by Asiatic empires, Iranian, Turkish, and Mongol. As the last of these disintegrated, Muscovy spread out from the opposite end of the plain, expanding steadily over several centuries to become the largest land empire in the world. History presents no parallel to its vastness. The Roman Empire at its height would have been lost in it. If we add together the three greatest continuous land empires of the modern world, China, India, and the United States, the three together do not equal the extent of European and Asiatic Russia.

From the beginning the body of Russia grew too fast for its soul. In the words of its great historian, Klyuchevsky, the state swelled up, the people grew feeble. Throughout most of Russia’s history, as is again the case today, the state was stronger than society.

The land was strangely silent. During the centuries when England had its Shakespeare and its Marlowe, Italy its Dante and its Petrarch, France its Corneille and its Racine, Spain its Cervantes and its Lope de Vega, Russia had no voice at all. There was virtually no lay literature and nothing that could be regarded as public opinion. Only in the eighteenth century did the silent land begin to find its voice. Then, in the nineteenth, full-throated, it astonished the world.

Throughout most of her history, marching armies and hordes of invaders caused the Eurasian plain to be sparsely settled, particularly where armies continually clashed near its frontiers. In the more thickly populated West, feudal tenure had grown up on lands that were well populated, where every rood of ground maintained its man. It represented on the whole a system of mutual obligations between vassal and lord, rather than of subjects to a centralized state. But in the comparatively depopulated Russian plain there was always land to spare. Hence the chief problem of statecraft was the artificial creation of fixity. The aim of the powerful centralized state was to fasten each man in his place and his station in life by enforced decree, where the recruiting sergeant and the tax collector could find him in order to raise and supply the great armies that Russia required for the defense of her open boundaries and the expansion of her power. Even as feudalism was disappearing in Western Europe, Russia in the eighteenth century was just beginning to perfect and fix firmly its special type of bondage in an empire in which land was limitless and sparsely occupied and fixity a bureaucratic-military necessity, a mode of governing and of waging war.

When Russia at last became articulate and aware of itself and began to ponder that which made it different from the West, its first thought was of raskreposhchenie, generally translated emancipation but more accurately rendered the loosening of the bonds, those bonds by which the autocratic state tied each man to his place and to his station.

The main reason for the economic and political backwardness of this great land, despite its resources in human beings and in natural wealth, lay in the preservation of bondage until beyond the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1861, as originally he had been bound by decree of the state, the serf was now emancipated by Imperial decree, together with some portion of the land he had hitherto tilled in bondage. But vestiges of the bondage system lingered on until after the abortive Revolution of 1905, when a semi-constitutional order developed and society began to gain independence from and growing strength as against the autocratic state. During the year 1917, after the Tsar fell and the Provisional Government was set up, all the remaining bonds were loosened at once. The freest government in the world, Lenin proclaimed it, even as he prepared to overthrow it and seize power for his dictatorship.¹

Then, under Lenin and his successors, once more the state became stronger than society. Indeed, the state Lenin founded strove to become co-extensive with society. Society itself became completely atomized, with no non-governmental organizations, political parties, trade unions, or non-governmental press of its own.

Under the tsars the state had been powerful and autocratic, but it had concerned itself primarily with a monopoly of political power, although, for reasons which we shall consider in a moment, it made frequent excursions into the economic field. There were many aspects of life in which the tsars could not, and did not, seek to interfere. Thus, for all its might, it was still a limited despotism, that is, a despotism that limited its intervention to certain aspects of life, ignoring others. How Lenin came to the conclusion that there was no aspect of life that he should not seek to control and direct, how and why he overthrew the freest government in the world, how the widespread yet in many senses still limited despotism of the tsars was replaced by the totalitarianism of Lenin and his successors, what there was in Lenin’s character and doctrine that made him aspire to the total organization and total direction of life, is the central theme of our story.

We are prone to think of classic despotism or autocracy as essentially conservative, as seeking in the main to preserve the status quo. Yet Russian autocracy had a more fluctuating and irregular history. In the course of its development into the greatest land empire in the world, the duchy of Moscow had many times to battle for its very existence with the technologically more advanced countries of the West. At such junctures, the problem of the autocracy changed from that of preserving the status quo to that of modernization or Westernization by oriental-despotic methods for the purposes of meeting the technically superior foe. In each such crisis, the state became an innovator, the primary propelling agent of economic transformation for the purposes of conserving its power and waging desperate war. Each such propulsion was as ruthless as it was sporadic, a revolution from above which always strained the resources of a poor but populous land beyond its limits, raised armies of unprecedented size, put formidable burdens upon a given generation of Russian people, and set obstacles to any attempt on their part to evade their burdens by escape to the depopulated frontiers of the empire.

Such periods of extreme exactions and exertions, of which the reign of Peter the Great (1682–1725) is in some sense a model, were likely to be followed by periods of reaction, lassitude, and stagnation, until the next military emergency. Thus did Russian autocracy fluctuate between a conservative holding operation to maintain the status quo and an active, if onesided, policy of revolutionizing Russia forcefully and despotically from above for the purposes of power and war. Lenin was to picture his regime at times as modelled on the paradigm of the regime of Peter the Great, which had westernized Russia by the methods of oriental despotism.

… our task [wrote Lenin] is to teach ourselves the state capitalism of the Germans, to imitate it with all our might, not to spare dictatorial methods in order to hasten the copying of Westernism by barbarous Russia, not shrinking from barbarous methods of struggle against barbarism.²

The greatest industrializer of Russia prior to Lenin and Stalin was Peter the Great. Overnight, alongside the cottage industry, he created a great textile and clothing industry to produce uniforms and sails for men of war, and a great iron and steel industry to produce bayonets, cannon and other munitions.

Later tsars met similar crises in similar fashion. Thus it was in the nineteenth century that the failure of Russia’s massive armies of illiterate serfs to acquit themselves well in the Crimean War against the diminutive armies of the freer West caused Alexander II to abolish bondage by ukaz. Like the industrialization of Peter, this was a revolution from above. Again in the closing years of the nineteenth century, for the logistics of modern warfare, Alexander III (1881–1894) and Nicholas II (1894–1917) backed Count Witte, onetime railway stationmaster, in the great construction of Russia’s railways by the state, the absorption by the state of those lines which were privately owned, and the encouragement by subsidy of an iron and steel industry. Since Russia’s banks by their size and their practices were unfit for capital investment, the Russian state became the great investment banker for heavy industry, too. The state’s leading position in the economy (its possession of what Lenin would call the commanding heights) was further strengthened by the conversion of industry to war after August 1914. What the Bolsheviks took over after 1917, even before Lenin had nationalized a single industry on his own, was the largest state economic machine in the world.

A characteristic formation of nineteenth-century Russia was the intelligentsia, a layer of Russian society to which by training and temperament Lenin belonged, though in the end he was to be the intelligentsia’s undoing. The Russian term is derived from the Latin intelligentia, meaning intelligence. A whole stratum of Russian society applied this somewhat arrogant term to itself, considering itself to be the intelligence and voice of unthinking and voiceless Russia. Its members felt themselves alone and beleaguered in a land where neither court, nor nobility, nor merchants, nor peasants, were cultured or valued culture.

The Russian intelligentsia was something quite different from the educated and professional classes of the West, who by and large were integrated into their respective societies. Quite different, too, from the officials, technicians, managers, propagandists, artists, writers, spiritual policemen, and spiritual servitors of party and state in present-day Russia.

The first recruits for this unique layer of nineteenth-century Russian society came from a cultured minority of conscience-stricken sons of the landowning nobility who were repelled by the uncultured nature of the landowners as a class and who felt that their own privileges were built upon the foundation of the poverty and the dark ignorance of the Russian folk. Within a generation recruits were added from more plebeian layers of society, sons of priests and minor officials, publicists, and particularly seminary students, and various other groups extruded from an uncultured society in rapid transition yet structured in fixed medieval estates, in which they and their kind found no place and no understanding.

Coming thus from various social classes, its members nevertheless formed a class by themselves with a cohesion, a moral code and way of life, even a distinct appearance of their own. The peasants, who felt a latent antagonism and mistrust towards them, could instantly recognize an intelligent when they saw one, even if he came to them dressed in a peasant blouse. They mainly do not see in us people, wrote one of the members of the intelligentsia, we are for them monsters of human shape, without God in our souls.³

The intelligentsia was not held together by sharing a common relation to property or income level, nor by a common occupation or economic function or social origin of status, but by a common belief in the sovereign efficacy of ideas as giving meaning and shape to life, and by a common alienation from the existing society of their day.

They scorned practical work and the very thought of retaining a place, or making a place for themselves, in a society which was not in accord with their sovereign ideas and which they held to be a thing of evil. Their attitude towards all that existed in actual society was one of total rejection. Some of them were in love with the future and some with the past, but none with the present. The idealized past which the one group dreamed of restoring was as unreal as the idealized future which stirred the longings of the other.

The present, for its part, reciprocated by finding no place for them in its midst. They were—a characteristic Russian term—superfluous men, and the best of them showed their virtue by being aware of their superfluity, thus misappraising themselves at the same time as they exalted themselves by their belief in the sovereign efficacy of their intelligence and their ideas. Thus the intelligentsia alternated between self-abasement and self-exaltation.

The Russian intellectual, or rather, to distinguish him from the familiar figure of the West, perhaps we should use his own term, the Russian intelligent, did not love his neighbor or his enemy, being alienated from both, but gave his love to abstract humanity. As Petrashevsky, an early landowner intelligent, put it, Unable to find anything either in the women or in the men [around me] worthy of my adherence, I have turned to devoting myself to the service of humanity. From Petrashevsky, who founded the harmless discussion circle in which Dostoevsky was arrested when it was raided by the police, to Lenin who applied the death penalty to whole categories of men, the same formula applies. They tended to love mankind in the abstract, but to be indifferent, and often ruthless, in dealing with the fate of actual individual men.

The quest of the intelligentsia was a restless and unceasing one, for they took up one great idea after another in tandem fashion, the prevailing idea changing rapidly, several times in the same generation, sometimes as often as twice or more in a single decade. What they were searching for was a single and integral outlook that would give an answer to all the questions of life, reconcile theoretical reason with practical, unite standards of personal conduct with norms of justice, and give a philosophical basis for a regenerating social ideal. No idea less than a Weltanschauung was acceptable to them, and any idea they accepted, however unsuited, they turned into a Weltanschauung.

The questions they asked were as vast as the wide horizons of Russia: What is Russia? Why are we so different from Western Europe and from Asia? What is the meaning of our history? What is our destiny among the nations? What was the thought of the Creator concerning Russia’s mission in history when he created our land? How do we inform our country with our sovereign idea and reshape it in the image of our ideal? How shall we serve the people and make up to them for their deprivations and our privileges? What holy truth is concealed in the people from which we must learn? Is a cultured class justified in the face of an uncultured mass? What lessons can we learn from the West and what is it Russia’s destiny and duty to teach the West? How can we bring our backward country abreast of the present and propel it into the future which our thought