Only at the end of his career did Lenin make serious adjustments to his scenario. In the period following the first anniversary of the revolution – late 1918 and early 1919 – Lenin was still completely convinced that things were ‘turning out just as we said they would’. The course of events soon forced him to take tentative steps beyond ‘the textbook à la Kautsky’, yet the basic logic of the scenario remained. Because Lenin still accepted the basic Marxist axioms that guaranteed his scenario, his adjustments caused him a great deal of anxiety and gave rise to a sense of encirclement by hostile forces such as international capitalism, petty-bourgeois peasantry and soviet bureaucrats. This anxiety was the result precisely of his earlier over-optimism, leading Lenin to make risky wagers that events did not justify.
Even faced with these disappointments Lenin remained loyal to the spirit of his heroic scenario and called on the power of class leadership to accomplish one more round of miracles. His final advice to the party was: hold out against international capitalism while providing an inspiring model for Eastern countries, capture the loyalty of the middle peasant by revealing the advantages of socialism, and attack the cultural deficit both indirectly and head-on. The political testament contained in his last writings is the final, somewhat chastened but still recognizable version of his heroic scenario.
Historical Impact of Lenin’s Scenario
At some point after the Second World War mainstream academic scholarship took a wrong turning and became convinced that Lenin’s essential trait throughout his career was ‘worry about workers’, coupled with a dour, if pragmatic, pessimism. Historians came close to turning Lenin into the philistine he always abominated. This basic misapprehension of Lenin’s outlook made it impossible to give a coherent account of his development and his decisions at key points. The historical impact of the actual Lenin, for good or for ill, cannot be understood apart from his life-long heroic scenario.
The following brief speculative remarks should be prefaced with a disclaimer. Lenin is only a part of Bolshevism, which in turn is only a part of the Russian revolution, which in turn is only a part of the whole period of social upheaval from 1914 to 1921–2 that many Russians term a ‘time of troubles’. Furthermore, much of Lenin’s heroic scenario was not unique to him, but reflected much more widely held viewpoints. As a first approximation, we can say that the general theme of inspired and inspiring class leadership was a general feature of ‘revolutionary Social Democracy’, the theme of proletarian leadership of the narod (‘hegemony of the proletariat’) was a general feature of Bolshevism, while many of the details about class differentiation within the peasantry were peculiar to Lenin and perhaps his closest followers.
The immense cultural impact of Lenin’s heroic scenario on the Soviet Union stems from the fact, first, that it was heroic and, second, that it was a scenario. The culture of the Soviet Union always put a tremendous emphasis on the heroic, although this theme was expressed in different ways over the years. The theme of heroism was embedded in an explicit dramatic scenario about the world-historical mission of the Soviet Union that was propagated at all levels. Terry Pratchett’s novel Witches Abroad describes a somewhat similar society: a tyrannical queen forces everyone in her kingdom to act just as if they were characters in the canonical fairy tales. In the case of the Soviet Union and other communist countries a similar tyranny of narrative expectations met with a particular kind of resistance: the anekdot, the Soviet joke, whose specific flavour comes from subverting a heroic scenario. Socialist realism and the anekdot: these two poles of Soviet culture both stem from the heroic scenario.4
One feature of Lenin’s heroic scenario that had an immense if underappreciated impact is what I have called the kukharka strategy: mass education for both men and women. I have explained the personal origin of this theme by pointing to Lenin’s popular nickname Ilich, son of Ilya, the educational reformer. But since the insistence on equal educational opportunity from both sexes goes back to both of Lenin’s parents, I should also speak of Lenin the son of Maria Aleksandrovna, as well as Lenin the brother of Anna and Maria, the husband of Nadezhda and the friend of Inessa. The economic consequences of the kukharka strategy are illuminated in a recent analysis by the economist Robert C. Allen. Before the Russian revolution Russia had the same non-European demographic pattern as, say, India: high death rate, high birth rate. Yet the Soviet Union did not have the same population explosion as India, with immense consequences for economic growth. The demographic disasters of the Soviet era – the civil war, the famines, the repressions and the Second World War – played an appreciable but not major impact in preventing this explosion. The main reason was a dramatically fast drop in the birth rate, and comparative analysis shows that the education of women was the key factor in this achievement. Allen concludes that ‘if industrialization and urbanization had proceeded less rapidly and if schooling had been expanded slowly and provided to men in preference to women, then population growth would have been explosive’.5
When we turn to the political impact of Lenin’s heroic scenario, we are immediately confronted with a paradox. The central episode of the heroic scenario was the battle to bring political freedom to Russia, yet Lenin founded a regime in which political freedoms – rights of speech, assembly, association, etc. – were conspicuously absent. The paradox is a real one, since the logic of the heroic scenario worked to expand Russia’s political freedom at one stage and to contract it at another. Strange as it may appear, Lenin was as influential as any other single individual in bringing about the political freedom that Russia enjoyed between 1905 and 1917. There would have been no far-reaching revolution in 1905 if sections of the working class had not been prepared to take to the streets demanding political freedom, and there would have been no mass action of this kind if a small band of socialists had not spent over a decade propagating the connection between worker interests, socialist ideals and political freedom. From the very beginning of his political career, Lenin was a prominent and passionate member of this small band.
There are many objective reasons to explain the later failure of political freedom in a country that suffered military defeat, economic breakdown and bloody civil war. Yet although the disappearance of political freedom in Russia was over-determined, the logic of Lenin’s heroic scenario also made its contribution. The purpose of political freedom in this scenario was to allow the Social Democrats to spread the word, particularly in the form of the party-led agitation campaigns that the German Social Democrats had developed to a fine art. How much more effective would these campaigns be if the party could use the state to eliminate all rivals and to monopolize channels of communication? The Bolsheviks consciously adopted this strategy of state monopoly campaignism.
Turning from Lenin’s strangely divided role in the history of political freedom in Russia, we confront another paradoxical outcome. Lenin’s heroic scenario stressed proletarian leadership of a narod that was made up mainly of peasants. The peasants thus play a highly positive role in his scenario. Indeed, pre-war Old Bolshevism was defined by its wager on the revolutionary qualities of the peasantry. Yet less than a decade after his death the regime founded by Lenin ended up by waging war on the peasants and imposing a revolution from above during the collectivization campaign, contributing to a devastating famine. How did this happen?