The cultural deficit explained the failure of Lenin’s hopes for the soviets, but it also posed a direct challenge to the legitimacy of socialist revolution in backward Russia. Lenin was confronted by this challenge in January 1923 when he read a memoir of the 1917 revolution written by the left-wing socialist Nikolai Sukhanov. In notes dictated soon afterwards Lenin admitted that socialist critics such as Sukhanov had correctly asserted that Russia was not ready for socialism. He responded to these familiar arguments with a flood of rhetorical questions (I count nine in two pages).
Such questions are the rhetorical device of choice for those who are not quite sure of their position. Lenin’s questions boil down to two: weren’t we justified in taking power in 1917 by Russia’s otherwise hopeless situation? Who’s to say we can’t pull off the unexpected task of creating cultural prerequisites for socialism after taking power?53
Lenin’s defensive tone shows his uneasy awareness that there was something deeply unorthodox about this relation between a proletarian vlast and culture. The standard Marxist schema proposed the following sequence:
capitalism→culture→vlast→socialism
For Russia at least, Lenin now maintained that the following sequence was permissible and indeed necessary:
capitalism→vlast→culture→socialism
In Marxist terms, the idea of the proletarian vlast creating the cultural basis for its own successful existence bears a resemblance to the way Baron Munchausen pulled himself out of the mire by his own bootstraps.
Lenin needed something like a miracle, so he again evoked the spirit of What Is to Be Done?, the book in which he boasted that an ordinary underground activist, even in isolation, could achieve miracles if he embodied the spirit of inspired and inspiring leadership. We shall look at two of Lenin’s attempts to put this spirit to work for the revolution, one in 1919 at the height of the civil war, and the other in 1923, now in a considerably chastened form.
In early 1919 the Bolshevik leader Jacob Sverdlov died of typhus. Sverdlov was the organization man of the Bolshevik top staff and his death was a real blow to the efficient running of the party. Lenin’s eulogy for him was the occasion for a classic exposition of his own concept of leadership. In his eulogy Lenin insists that repressive violence, seen by many people as the essence of Bolshevism, was only an enforced necessity. The real essence of Bolshevism was inspired and inspiring class leadership or, as he expresses it here, Bolshevism’s ability to organize the proletariat and through it the narod. A party leader (vozhd) such as Sverdlov can organize the masses because his utter devotion to the cause gives him ‘moral authority’. Sverdlov was only the most outstanding of a whole corps of vozhdi ‘pushed forward’ by the proletariat from its own ranks. According to Lenin these proletarian leaders had started to replace intelligentsia leaders around the beginning of the century.
As so often when discussing heroic leadership, Lenin alluded covertly to the fate of his brother, who had been tragically deprived of the opportunity to become such a leader:
The history of the Russian revolutionary movement over the course of many decades has known a long list of people, devoted to the revolutionary cause, but who did not enjoy the possibility of finding a practical application of their revolutionary ideals. And, in this connection, the proletarian revolution was the first to give these previously isolated individuals, heroes of the revolutionary struggle, a genuine grounding, a genuine base, a genuine framework, a genuine audience and a genuine proletarian army, where these vozhdi could reveal themselves.54
The image of the proletariat as an ‘audience’ for the inspiring leader – an image also found in What Is to Be Done? – brings out the unique quality of Lenin’s heroic scenario.
In his final articles of early 1923 Lenin once again calls upon the aid of proletarian leaders who arise directly from the working class, but now in a much smaller and more prosaic context. The grand vistas of the civil war have receded and Lenin now calls on recruits from the working class to improve the working of the state administrative machinery. The institutional details of his scheme are less important to us than its reliance on class leadership in yet another guise. Just as in What Is to Be Done? Lenin’s 1923 plan was to recruit up-and-coming workers from the bench into responsible posts in the party organization, with the same expectation that this infusion will make the party unbeatable.55
But Lenin was now determined to keep the whole process under control. The task previously given to the masses, acting through the soviets, is now handed to the party, acting from above: ‘We still have the old machinery, and our task now is to remould it along new lines. We cannot do so at once, but we must see to it that the Communists we have are properly placed… Our party, a little group of people in comparison with the country’s total population, has tackled this job. This tiny nucleus has set itself the task of remaking everything, and it will do so.’56
Despite the contrived and mundane nature of the organizational scheme propagated in his final articles, Lenin invested it with his usual emotional fervour. In 1902 he wrote about his scheme for an underground newspaper: ‘That is what we must dream about!’ In 1923 he wrote about his scheme to improve state administrative machinery: ‘These are the lofty tasks I dream of for our Rabkrin [Worker and Peasant Inspection].’57
Lenin’s Rabkrin scheme was an attempt to overcome the cultural deficit that Lenin blamed for the deficiencies of the soviet bureaucracy. It has the air of a desperate improvization, an attempt to square the circle, and as such it was never remotely practicable. But the other prong of Lenin’s attack on the cultural deficit was much more substantive: mass education for the narod. We might call this Lenin’s kukharka strategy, after his famous boast in 1917 that the Bolsheviks would teach the kukharka, the female cook, how to administer the state.
In ‘Pages from a Diary’, the most eloquent of Lenin’s final articles – and one that has not received the attention it deserves – we see for the last time Ilich, son of Ilya Ulyanov, the tsarist educational reformer. After going through some statistics showing Russia’s low literacy, Lenin insists that education of the narod must be made a top priority. The country must make a real shift in budgetary priorities toward education, particularly by improving the material position of the schoolteacher of the narod. The status of the schoolteacher should be higher in Soviet Russia than in any bourgeois society.
True to his lifelong scenario, Lenin sees the ‘gigantic, world-historical cultural task’ of mass education in terms of class leadership, as drawing the peasant ‘away from union with the bourgeoisie and toward union with the proletariat’. At the end of his career Lenin once again summoned up the ultimate guarantor of his ‘other way’: the Russian people on the move, transformed by the pressures of modernity, eager to liquidate the heritage of pre-modern backwardness, or, as Lenin put it, the ‘semi-asiatic absence of culture’: