The second October that Lenin believed he saw going on in the countryside was not the only good news he received in late 1918. He ended his book-length polemic against ‘renegade Kautsky’ by writing:
The above lines were written on 9 November 1918. That same night news was received from Germany announcing the beginning of a victorious revolution, first in Kiel and other northern towns and ports, where the vlast has passed into the hands of Soviets of worker and soldier deputies, then in Berlin, where, too, the vlast has passed into the hands of the Soviet.
The conclusion that still remained to be written to my pamphlet on Kautsky and on the proletarian revolution is now superfluous.38
The Bolsheviks were confident that a revolutionary chain-reaction starting in Germany was now unstoppable, a conviction hardly dented by the crushing of the radical socialist Spartacist rebellion in January 1919 and the murder of its leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. In March 1919 a hastily convened and not very representative meeting was held in Moscow to found the long-awaited Third International, which would consist solely of parties purified of any taint of opportunism. Lenin exultantly claimed that the world revolution was now moving forward with ‘the torrential might of millions and tens of millions of workers sweeping everything from their path’.39
Krupskaya tells us that the news of the German revolution made the first anniversary of the revolution ‘some of the happiest days of Lenin’s life’. The British journalist Arthur Ransome, interviewing Lenin in early 1919, felt that ‘more than ever, Lenin struck me as a happy man… His whole faith is in the elemental forces that move people, his faith in himself is merely his belief that he justly estimates the direction of these forces.’40 In this mood of happy confidence, Lenin once again alluded to the frustrated dreams of his brother:
Comrades, behind us there is a long line of revolutionaries who sacrificed their lives for the emancipation of Russia. The lot of the majority of these revolutionaries was a hard one. They suffered the persecution of the tsarist government, but it was not their good fortune to see the triumph of the revolution. The happiness that has fallen to our lot is all the greater. Not only have we seen the triumph of our revolution, not only have we seen it become consolidated amidst unprecedented difficulties, creating a new kind of vlast and winning the sympathy of the whole world, but we are also seeing the seed sown by the Russian revolution springing up in Europe.41
Lenin’s mood of optimism came only after a year of life-and-death crises. What we may call his ‘anniversary period’ started in autumn 1918 around the time of the first anniversary of the October revolution and lasted until summer 1919. In Lenin’s confident view during this period the Russian workers were leading the country down the road toward socialism. Despite all the difficulties and challenges, further progress down that road was guaranteed – at home by the class war in the villages, and abroad by the incipient socialist revolution. The heroic scenario of the proletariat as the vozhd of the narod was vindicated. As Lenin put it on 7 November 1918 at the unveiling of a monument in Moscow to Marx and Engels:
The great world-historic service of Marx and Engels is that they showed the workers of the world their role, their task, their mission, namely, to be the first to rise in the revolutionary struggle against capital and to unite around themselves in this struggle all working and exploited people.
We are living through a happy time, when this prophecy of the great socialists is beginning to be realized.42
5. Beyond the ‘Textbook à la Kautsky’
In early 1923, weeks before his final incapacitating stroke, Lenin wrote about Karl Kautsky for the last time: ‘It need hardly be said that a textbook written à la Kautsky [po kautskomu] was a very useful thing in its day. But it is time, for all that, to abandon the idea that it foresaw all the forms of development of subsequent world history. It would be timely to say that those who think so are simply fools.’1
The contrast between this dour assertion and Lenin’s mood during what I have termed his ‘anniversary period’ – late 1918 through summer 1919 – is striking. During the anniversary period Lenin called Kautsky a renegade because Kautsky was turning his back on his own earlier predictions just as they were coming true. But looking back in 1923 Lenin stated in effect that only a fool would claim (as he himself had done in 1918) that ‘things have turned out just as we said they would’.
Lenin’s heroic scenario had always been very strongly rooted in the ‘textbook à la Kautsky’ – orthodox ‘revolutionary Social Democracy’ of the Second International – and he had gloried in the fact. When and why did he move from his usual stance of aggressive unoriginality to one of reluctant originality? According to the most common account, Lenin’s rethinking began in early 1921 with the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP). Up to late 1920 (we are told) Lenin and the Bolsheviks were so carried away with a feeling of euphoria that they started to believe that harsh civil-war policies – later given the name of ‘war communism’ – represented a short cut or even a leap into full communism. Only economic collapse and peasant rebellion in the winter of 1920–21 convinced them of their mistake. Lenin finally began to understand that the peasants required material incentives in order to produce. The process of rethinking culminated in the bundle of articles and drafts from late 1922 and early 1923 that were later termed ‘Lenin’s testament’. Some writers view Lenin’s rethinking as fundamental, others as relatively superficial, but all tie it strongly to NEP.
The standard account is profoundly misleading. In reality Lenin’s rethinking began in 1919, just as soon as he realized that things were not ‘turning out just as we said they were’. There was no mass euphoria among the Bolsheviks in 1920, no collective hallucination that Russia was on the eve of full communism. On the contrary the Bolsheviks were painfully aware of the manifold compromises and defeats that were leading them away from socialism. The dramatic changes that came with the introduction of NEP in 1921 were just another round of painful compromises. Lenin’s outlook in his final writings can be traced back to concerns that began to surface in 1919.