The workers have nothing to lose but their chains; they do not have property, they sell their labour, and this is the only class which has an interest in reconstructing the world along new lines and is capable of leading the peasantry against the bourgeoisie. We avoid semi-mystical terms like Messiah and messianism and prefer the scientific one: the hegemonic proletariat.1
‘Reconstructing the world’ is the proletariat’s mission in the general Marxist narrative, while ‘leading the peasantry’ is a mission much more specific to Bolshevism. Although the role of the proletariat as leader of the narod does have very deep roots in European Marxism, its strategic and emotional centrality is a distinctive feature of Lenin and Bolshevism.
Lenin’s heroic scenario originated as a response to the dead end faced by the Russian revolutionary tradition in the 1880s. An informed British observer, writing in 1905, describes the 1880s as the Russian socialists themselves remembered it:
We thus arrive at the beginning of the eighties. Consider the situation – the People’s Will Party [Narodnaya volya] lying on the ground broken and exhausted, reaction rampant, all that was but a short time ago hopeful, disheartened and embittered. Where shall we turn for light and guidance? To the people? It is mute. To the working-class? There is none. To the educated classes? They are all full of pessimism in the consciousness of their weakness. What, then, next? Is all hope to be given up? Is there no salvation for Russia? At this moment of darkness and despair a new and strange voice resounds through the space – a voice full of harshness and sarcasm, yet vibrating with hope. That is the voice of Russian Social-Democracy.2
The dilemmas of the 1880s had a meaning for Lenin that was not only political but deeply personal, since they destroyed his older brother Alexander, who lost his life in a futile attempt to move the democratic revolution forward. Alexander’s fate led to Lenin’s deep emotional commitment to a heroic scenario that showed him ‘another way’ to achieve Alexander’s aims. Lenin never mentioned his brother in public. But at every stage of his career Lenin adamantly insisted that events were realizing the dream of the martyrs of the Russian revolutionary tradition.
Lenin became a passionate Social Democrat because he thought that this Western European movement showed the way forward for the Russian revolutionaries. Marxist analysis of Russia’s capitalist transformation proved to him that this irresistible force was uprooting old ways of life and turning the masses of the narod into potential fighters for democratic rights. The Social Democratic strategy of party-led class leadership, as embodied in the German SPD, gave him a method for realizing this potential. So vast was the power generated by this combination of objective change and energetic class leadership that it could even operate under tsarist repression – in fact, it could destroy tsarism and establish the political freedom enjoyed by Western Social Democracy. What for Alexander Ulyanov had been a duel between the government and a handful of daring revolutionaries now became an epic national struggle.
Lenin’s dedication to the konspiratsiia underground only makes sense in the context of his vision of a nationwide struggle. In contrast to the conspiratorial underground of the Russian populists the central task of the Social Democratic konspiratsiia underground was to get out the message. For Lenin the underground was a lever of Archimedes that greatly magnified the impact of a relatively feeble and persecuted organization. The underground could turn Russia around, because the seed it sowed fell on the fertile ground of Russia’s militant workers and awakening narod. The party’s role as inspiring class leader remained the same for Lenin even after it left the underground, even after it took power.
As shown by his rhetoric throughout his career, the emotions that Lenin invested in his scenario can only be described by such words as enthusiastic, exalted, romantic. The flip side of emotions such as these is his hatred of ‘philistinism’, that is, everyone and anyone who could not lift themselves up to the grand vistas of his scenario. As he wrote to Inessa Armand in 1916: ‘There it is, my fate. One fighting campaign after another – against political stupidities, philistinism, opportunism and so forth. It has been going on since 1893. And so has the hatred of the philistines on account of it. But still, I would not exchange this fate for “peace” with the philistines.’3
His emotional commitment to his scenario also made Lenin want to base it on the most solid authority possible. This explains Lenin’s love affair (the term is not too strong) with the writings of Marx and Engels. It also explains his life-long love–hate relationship with Karl Kautsky, who gave an authoritative stamp of approval to the key ideas of Old Bolshevism, but who later (as Lenin thought) failed to live up to his own preaching – thus becoming, in Lenin’s mind, the ultimate philistine and renegade.
So far we have looked at some constant themes in Lenin’s outlook. We need also to consider the diversity of Lenin’s concerns throughout his career and the heroic scenario will help us out here as well. The scenario had an internal structure of three distinct episodes, as set forth already in the ‘banner sentence’ of 1894. These episodes grow out of the basic logic of class leadership. In the first episode the Social Democratic party is founded and becomes accepted as leader of the proletariat. This episode is summarized by Kautsky’s foundational formula about ‘the merger of socialism and the worker movement’. In the central episode the proletariat leads the narod in a crusade to overthrow the tsar, ‘the shame and curse of Russia’. In the final episode party and proletariat move toward the climax of the drama, socialist revolution itself.
Each of the three decades of Lenin’s political career matches up neatly with one of the three episodes. The full breakdown is given in the table overleaf. The heroic scenario thus gives us a handy device for recalling the overall contours of Lenin’s career. Since the scenario was an interpretive framework for events, not a prediction of concrete outcomes, it could be mapped onto events in a variety of ways. For example, Lenin’s scenario posits a rapid spread of Social Democratic influence among the workers. At any particular time a judgement call still has to be made about the actual extent of party influence. Although Lenin strove to be accurate and hard-headed in the empirical application of the Social Democratic scenario, he tended as a general rule to push for the most optimistic possible reading, up to and often past the point of plausibility.
A changed reading of the empirical situation could lead to crucial shifts of outlook. Although the goal adopted in 1917 – ‘steps toward socialism’ in Russia, prior to and independent of European revolution – was a far-reaching innovation in Lenin’s political platform, it remained within the logic of the original scenario. Lenin had always argued that socialist revolution was only possible when class conflict within the peasantry had reached an advanced stage, but the timing of this process was explicitly left open. In 1905–7, Lenin argued that the petty bourgeois peasant was still a fervent fighter for the democratic revolution. In 1917–18, Lenin was so eager to take ‘steps toward socialism’ that he grossly overestimated the extent of class polarization within the village.