This is the question of questions, and I can only glance at it here. Perhaps the most important point to stress is that it is a question – that is, Stalin’s peasant strategy was not the foreordained outcome of a hostility to peasants innate to Marxism or to Bolshevism. In fact, we can say that Lenin took a dangerous step when he moved beyond Old Bolshevism’s strategy of democratic revolution alongside the whole peasantry. He first overestimated the extent of class differentiation in order to be able to take ‘steps toward socialism’ in Russia itself. He then had to recalibrate and he came up with a strategy of moving toward socialism alongside a majority of the peasantry. The cost of this adjustment was an abiding anxiety, even paranoia, about the subversive influence of the vast ‘petty bourgeois’ sea that surrounded the lonely socialist island.
Nevertheless, there is an essential discontinuity between Lenin and Stalin on the peasant question that needs to be stressed, since it is often completely overlooked, even denied. Stalin obviously took over a vision of a socialist countryside from Lenin and indeed from Marxist socialism in general. We may agree or disagree with this vision. But from the point of view both of crimes against humanity and impact on Soviet history, the thing to be explained is not this vision, but the massive use of violence in 1930–34 to impose upon the peasantry a radical change of production methods, and thus of way of life, in a very short space of time.
And on the issue of violence used to impose a fundamental change in production relations, the record could not be clearer: Lenin was against it. In word and deed he emphasized that any such use of violence was a bezobrazie, a ridiculous outrage. And he did this most insistently in 1919, at the height of the civil war. Disappointed as he was with the progress of socialist experiments in the countryside, the use of violence in pursuit of this goal was simply not considered. The radical discontinuity between Lenin and Stalin on this cardinal point was perfectly evident to anti-Stalin Bolsheviks in 1932. In an underground document circulated at this time, these Bolsheviks contrast Stalin’s assault on the peasantry to Lenin’s method of persuading the peasants by ‘genuine examples of the genuine advantages of collective farms organized in genuinely voluntary fashion’. They sardonically observe that the two methods resembled each other as much as Japan’s invasion of Manchuria resembled national self-determination.6
All in all, Lenin’s heroic scenario was far from realistic. Yet perhaps his utter confidence in it was the necessary illusion that enabled him to confront a situation of stormy political and economic collapse. In 1917 Lenin stood tall among the leaders of other Russian parties because they had enough sense to be frightened out of their wits by the oncoming disaster – the social and economic breakdown that was just around the corner – whereas he saw it as an opportunity. Lenin can be viewed as a Noah figure, confidently building his ark as the flood waters rose. As it turned out, the ark was leaky because it was built on unsound assumptions, the voyage involved more suffering than anyone bargained for, and the ark ended up far from where its builder planned. But nevertheless the ark did ride out the storm.
Character Witnesses
I have described the heroic scenario as the link between the flesh-and-blood individual Vladimir Ulyanov and his public persona N. Lenin. This division is of course highly artificial. To give a sense of the human reality of Ulyanov/Lenin, I call on a series of character witnesses – people with some personal knowledge of the man and of the social background that moulded him.
Lenin had strong roots in the Russian literary classics of the nineteenth century, and we can appropriately turn to them for more insight into what might be called ‘the Lenin type’. Lenin always kept with him the photographs of five individuals: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Alexander Herzen, Nikolai Chernyshevky and Dmitri Pisarev. Pisarev was a radical democratic literary critic of the 1860s, and Lenin cited a passage from him about the necessity of dreaming in his 1902 book What Is to Be Done? The following passage was not quoted by Lenin – perhaps because it was too close to his self-image?
The dreamer himself sees in his dream a great and sacred truth; and he works, works conscientiously and with full strength, for his dream to stop being just a dream. His whole life is arranged according to one guiding idea and it is filled with the most strenuous activity. He is happy, despite deprivations and unpleasantness, despite the jeers of unbelievers and despite the difficulties of struggling with deeply rooted ways of thought.7
Pisarev’s stubborn dreamer was an admired type in the culture of Russian radicalism. In order to qualify, Lenin did not need to live the ascetic, self-denying life of such heroes of Russian socialist fiction as Chernyshevky’s Rakhmetov, who slept on a bed of nails to toughen himself up. Lenin once remarked to Gorky that listening to Beethoven made him feel too soft toward the bourgeoisie who could create such beautiful things. Based on this remark, many people have assumed that Lenin gave up music for revolution, but Lenin enjoyed music all his life. When the great Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin met Lenin in the Kremlin after the revolution, he was surprised to learn that this was not their first meeting. Lenin reminded him of a party at Gorky’s in 1905 when Chaliapin sang for the company. ‘It was a marvellous evening’, Lenin reminisced.8
Lenin’s personal lifestyle was rather the stripped-down, orderly, no-frills style of his own ideal ‘revolutionary by trade’. His attitude toward food is emblematic. The Canadian historian Carter Elwood has investigated this topic and concluded that Lenin just didn’t care about food – as long as there was some on his plate, he ate it without complaint.9
Another, much more sardonic, take on the type of the stubborn dreamer comes from Lev Tolstoy’s late novel Resurrection. This novel was published in 1900 and paints a devastating portrait of a morally bankrupt Russia. Toward the end of the novel, we meet some political prisoners on their way to Siberia. Tolstoy rather likes these political prisoners – except for their acknowledged leader, one Novodvorov:
The whole of Novodvorov’s revolutionary activity, though he could explain it very eloquently and very convincingly, appeared to be founded on nothing but ambition and the desire for supremacy. Being devoid of those moral and aesthetic qualities which call forth doubts and hesitation, he very soon acquired a position in the revolutionary world which satisfied him – that of leader of a party. Having once chosen a direction, he never doubted or hesitated, and was therefore certain that he never made a mistake… His self-assurance was so great that it either repelled people or made them submit to him. And as he carried on his activity among very young people who mistook his boundless self-assurance for depth and wisdom, the majority did submit to him and he had great success in revolutionary circles.
Novodvorov behaved well only to those who bowed before him. He couldn’t stand anyone who had his own independent analysis of Russia’s ills.10
Those who knew Lenin tended to see him either as Pisarev’s heroic dreamer or Tolstoy’s petty despot, although most of the witnesses I will cite are somewhat nuanced in their judgements. Georgy Solomon (in whose Brussels apartment Lenin gave the late-night harangue about ‘recallism’ described in chapter Three) was strongly repelled by Lenin’s ‘impenetrable self-satisfaction’. Nevertheless, he was ready to qualify his dislike by adding that when Lenin was not in attack mode, ‘then before you stood an intelligent and broadly educated man, highly erudite, and distinguished by a fair amount of quick-wittedness’.11