Lenin

The same reaction of disappointed anger accounts for Lenin’s feelings toward the person who was probably the central figure in his emotional life during this period: Karl Kautsky. Lenin read with horror Kautsky’s many articles of autumn 1914 in which Kautsky seemed to tie himself in knots, not exactly in order to defend the new opportunism, but to excuse it, to cut it as much slack as possible, to avoid burning bridges within the party. Lenin’s consequent obsession with Kautsky was so overwhelming that it puzzled some of his own sympathizers, who knew that Kautsky was rapidly becoming a marginal figure in German socialism. Kautsky became the focus of Lenin’s anger because he embodied not only the pre-war Marxist orthodoxy to which Lenin still swore loyalty but also the refusal to live up to that orthodoxy when the chips were down. In letters written in autumn 1914 Lenin vented his feelings. ‘Obtain without fail and reread (or ask to have it translated for you) Road to Power by Kautsky [and see] what he writes there about the revolution of our time! And now, how he acts the toady and disavows all that!… I hate and despise Kautsky now more than anyone, with his vile, dirty, self-satisfied hypocrisy.’¹⁰

Lenin followed his own advice: he reread Kautsky’s 1909 publication Road to Power and devoted a whole article to the contrast between what Kautsky wrote there and what he was writing now.¹¹ Indeed, Lenin took his own vision of global revolution more from Kautsky than from any other writer. As Kautsky wrote in Road to Power, ‘today, the battles in the liberation struggle of labouring and exploited humanity are being fought not only at the Spree River and the Seine, but also at the Hudson and Mississippi, at the Neva… and the Dardanelles, at the Ganges and the Hoangho.’¹² In contrast the wartime Kautsky seemed to Lenin to be an embodiment of philistinism, the age-old enemy of Lenin’s heroic scenario, and Lenin’s extensive anti-philistine vocabulary peppers every page of his many anti-Kautsky diatribes. Lenin coined a term for this new and insidious form of philistinism: kautskianstvo, defined as the use of orthodox phraseology as a cover-up for de facto opportunism. Kautskianstvo is usually given the misleading translation ‘Kautskyism’, but this rendering implies that Lenin is rejecting the system of views propagated by Kautsky before the war. On the contrary the term kautskianstvo affirms Lenin’s loyalty to Kautsky’s pre-war views by violently condemning his ‘renegade’ behaviour in failing to live up to them. The intensity of Lenin’s feelings about Kautsky after 1914 reminds one of a disappointed lover – and perhaps that is the best way to look at it. Lenin hated Kautsky because he loved Kautsky’s books.

Immediately upon arriving in Switzerland in September 1914 Lenin moved to get Europe-wide support for his platform. As the anti-war currents in the socialist movement began to get their bearings after the August catastrophe of socialist support for the war, Lenin became the main spokesman for what became known as the Left Zimmerwald movement. The geographic part of this label came from the small resort town 10 kilometres south of Bern, where disaffected socialists from a number of countries came together on 5 September 1915 to discuss aims and strategy. Few in number as they were, and isolated as they seemed to be from the socialist mainstream, the delegates felt confident that their influence could only grow as the war dragged on.

Lenin’s efforts to stake out a position to the left of most Zimmer wald partisans led to the formation of the Left Zimmerwald movement. As opposed to the Zimmerwald majority Lenin wanted no talk of peace as the overriding goal. Only socialist revolution could cut off the capitalist roots of war, and socialist revolution, in the short term, might require more fighting rather than less. Lenin also felt that the Zimmerwald majority was too easy on socialists who supported the war and too sentimental about the possibility of resurrecting the Second International. In private Lenin referred to the Zimmerwald majority as ‘Kautskyite shit-heads’.¹³ Left Zimmerwald was a minority within a minority but Lenin was unfazed. He was confident that the workers would soon support his stand, no matter how grim things looked at present. In a letter of 1915 Lenin calculated the forces he could count on during the upcoming Zimmerwald conference: ‘The Dutch plus ourselves plus the Left Germans plus zero – but that does not matter, it will not be zero afterwards, but everybody.’¹⁴

In early 1916 Lenin and Krupskaya visited Zurich so that Lenin could use the city library to research his book Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (another work that to a large extent is a defence of Kautsky-then against the apostasy of Kautsky-now). The visit kept being prolonged until the couple decided to stay permanently in Zurich. Here they lived, as Krupskaya recalled, ‘a quiet jog-trot life’, renting rooms in a shoemaker’s flat, attending performances by Russian theatrical companies and picking mushrooms (‘Vladimir Ilich suddenly caught sight of some edible mushrooms, and although it was raining, he began to pick them eagerly, as if they were so many Left Zimmerwaldians he were enlisting to our side’).¹⁵ Nevertheless, the role of one crying in the wilderness imposed a tremendous strain. Zinoviev recalled in 1918 that many who knew Lenin were surprised how much his appearance had altered under the stress of the war and the collapse of the International.¹⁶

Despite his engagement with the Left Zimmerwald movement, Lenin did not give up hopes for ‘the commencing revolution in Russia’, only he saw it more than ever as part of a global revolutionary process. As he wrote in October 1915, ‘The task of the proletariat in Russia is to carry out the bourgeois democratic revolution in Russia to the end [do kontsa], in order to ignite the socialist revolution in Europe’ [Lenin’s emphasis]… There is no doubt that a victory of the proletariat in Russia would create extraordinary favourable conditions for the development of revolution both in Asia and in Europe. Even 1905 proved that.’¹⁷

There is a widespread impression that Lenin was growing downhearted and pessimistic about the chance of revolution just weeks before the fall of the tsar in early 1917.¹⁸ In actuality the approach of the Russian revolution during the winter of 1916–17 was visible even to Lenin and his entourage, observing events in far-off Switzerland. In December 1916 Lenin pointed to ‘the mounting mass resentment and the strikes and demonstrations that are forcing the Russian bourgeoisie frankly to admit that the revolution is on the march’.¹⁹ In a letter of 10 February 1917 to Inessa Armand Lenin related that his sources in Moscow were optimistic about the revolutionary mood of the workers: ‘there will surely be a holiday on our street’ (a Russian idiom meaning ‘our day will come’).²⁰

At the end of January 1917 – a few weeks before the February revolution was sparked off by street demonstrations in Petrograd – Lenin’s close comrade, Grigory Zinoviev, also observed that ‘the revolution is maturing in Russia’. Zinoviev also saw the approaching revolution in Russia through the lens of Lenin’s heroic scenario of class leadership. Zinoviev accurately conveyed – though perhaps in more flowery language than Lenin – the emotional fervour behind the Bolshevik scenario:

Oh, if one word of truth – of truth about the war, of truth about the tsar, of truth about the selfish bourgeoisie – could finally reach the blocked Russian village, buried under mountains of snow! Oh, if this word of truth would then penetrate even to the depths of the Russian army that is made up, in its vast majority, of peasants! Then, the heroic working class of Russia, with the support of the poor members of the peasant class, would finally deliver our country from the shame of the monarchy and lead it with a sure hand towards an alliance with the socialist proletariat of the entire world.²¹