We are speaking of the semi-asiatic absence of culture, from which we have not yet extricated ourselves, and from which we cannot extricate ourselves without strenuous effort – although certainly the possibility exists of our doing so, because nowhere are the masses of the narod so interested in real culture as they are in our country; nowhere are the problems of culture posed so profoundly and consistently as they are in our country; in no other country is the state vlast in the hands of the working class which, in its mass, is fully aware of the deficiencies, I shall not say of its culture, but of its literacy; nowhere is the working class so ready to make, and nowhere is it actually making, such sacrifices to improve its position in this respect as in our country.58
Lenin’s Final Year
Lenin’s attempts to move beyond the ‘textbook à la Kautsky’ took its toll. From 1919 his speeches lose their earlier sharpness and become progressively more unfocused, repetitive, digressive. He becomes defensive and halting as he searches for a way to match his ideological scenario with events. A new and unexpected quality appears: Lenin is unsure of himself.
Nevertheless, in his articles published in January 1923 Lenin strove to achieve at least a provisional synthesis. The result is an idiosyncratic blend of anxiety and confidence. Lenin could not really abandon the axioms of the textbook à la Kautsky even when they challenged the legitimacy of socialism in Soviet Russia. Among these axioms are the following: Only a series of revolutions in the advanced countries will crush capitalism. A successful fight for socialism in Russia requires the dissolution of the peasantry into bourgeoisie and proletariat. Small-scale production for the market engenders capitalism. The proletariat will achieve socialism on the basis of the cultural achievements of capitalism. Lenin believed in these axioms all his life, and he couldn’t stop believing them simply because they had become inconvenient. As a result Lenin saw the Bolsheviks encircled by three founts of anxiety: international capitalism, the ‘petty-bourgeois’ peasantry and the dubiously loyal ‘soviet bureaucrat’.
Even so, Lenin looked to the future with confidence, on the basis of an adjusted version of his heroic scenario. If by ‘Lenin’s testament’, we mean his final message to the party, it can be summarized as follows:
Hopes have faded for socialist revolution in Europe anytime in the foreseeable future? Then take courage from the inevitable awakening of the East, while praying that inter-capitalist squabbles will allow socialist Russia to hold out.
Hopes have faded that the peasants would move toward socialist transformation on their own initiative? Then take the Old Bolshevik scenario of class leadership that had vindicated itself during the civil war and apply it to the novel task of leading the ‘middle peasant’ to socialism.
Hopes have faded that soviet-style democracy from below will transform the state? Then use the party to remake the inherited state apparatus from above, and put the highest possible priority on campaigns for mass literacy.
Do all these faded hopes mean that our socialist critics were right and that Russia was not ready for socialism? Yes, but – who’s to say that a proletarian vlast cannot pull itself up by its own bootstraps by itself creating the cultural prerequisites for socialism?
Lenin’s final stroke on 6 March 1923 marks the real end-point of his life and work, although his physical death came almost a year later. During the rest of 1923 Lenin was barely able to communicate. A moving description of Lenin’s state during this period comes from a letter from Yevgeny Preobrazhensky to Bukharin, describing a visit to Lenin in July 1923:
I had just come downstairs with Belenkii [Lenin’s security guard], when in the room to the right of the entrance Belenkii gestured with his arm toward the window: ‘over there, they’re carrying him’. When about twenty-five feet away he noticed me, to our horror, and started to press his hand to his chest and shouting ‘over there, there’ – asking for me. I had just come and had not yet seen M. I. and N. K. [Maria Ulyanova and Krupskaya]. They came running, and M. I., quite upset, said ‘since he’s noticed you, you have to go to him’.
I went, not exactly knowing how to behave or even, really, whom I would see. I decided to keep a happy and cheerful face at all times. I approached him. He pressed my hand firmly, I instinctively embraced him. But his face! It cost me a great effort to keep my mask and not to cry like a baby. In this face there was so much suffering, but not only the sufferings of the present moment. It was as if on his face were photographed and frozen all the sufferings he had undergone during this whole period.59
The final stroke occurred on 21 January 1924. An hour after, Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, known to the world as N. Lenin, breathed his last.
Epilogue
The highly emotional link between the flesh-and-blood individual Vladimir Ulyanov and his public persona N. Lenin consisted of a heroic scenario that gave content and meaning to his statistical investigations, his incessant polemics, his political strategies and all other aspects of his career. The basic contours of this heroic scenario were set out by Lenin in St Petersburg in 1893–4 and remained unchanged for the rest of his life.
Lenin’s scenario can be compressed into a single sentence or expanded into three hundred pages on capitalist development in Russia. The one-sentence version goes something like this: The Russian proletariat carries out its world historical mission by becoming the vozhd of the narod, leading a revolution that overthrows the tsar and institutes political freedom, thus preparing the ground for an eventual proletarian vlast that will bring about socialism. What propels this drama forward is inspired and inspiring class leadership. The party activists inspire the proletariat who inspire the Russian narod who inspire the whole world with their revolutionary feats.
The key words in the preceding summary are a mixture of learned terms imported from Europe (proletariat, revolution, socialism) and a deeply Russian vocabulary (vozhd, narod, vlast). I have transliterated rather than translated the key Russian words. The normal translations – vozhd = leader, narod = people, vlast = power – are not inaccurate, but they bleach the emotional colour out of Lenin’s rhetoric. By now the reader of this book will have seen these words in a variety of contexts and will have acquired a feel for their hard-to-translate connotations.
The combination of an assertively ‘scientific’ terminology and a romantic narrative is brought out with almost naive frankness by one of Lenin’s closest associates, Grigory Zinoviev, in a lecture on party history given in 1923:
The advocates of ‘Economism’ [around the turn of the century] did not acknowledge the hegemonic role of the proletariat. They would say: ‘So what, in your opinion, is the working class, a Messiah?’ To this we answered and answer now: Messiah and messianism are not our language and we do not like such words; but we accept the concept that is contained in them: yes, the working class is in a certain sense a Messiah and its role is a messianic one, for this is the class which will liberate the whole world.