Alexander Bogdanov also tried to explain Lenin’s puzzling combination of breadth and narrowness. Bogdanov was a top Bolshevik leader until he was forced out of the faction in 1909. In 1914 he wrote a long, unpublished critique of Lenin’s mental style. He tells us that when Lenin ‘investigated a specific phenomenon, for example, the class composition and character of this or that party, he carries out the task, sometimes brilliantly’. But in larger questions Lenin’s way of thinking was much too rigid: he took over a framework from European experience and applied it to Russia come hell or high water. This intellectual rigidity and authoritarian manner of thinking meant that Lenin was prone to misinterpret a genuinely novel situation, for example, Russia after the 1905 revolution.12
Nikolai Sukhanov – the author of the memoir of 1917 that occasioned Lenin’s 1923 article on the cultural deficit – tried to pin down his own impression of Lenin by making a comparison with Lev Tolstoy: both (writes Sukhanov) were true geniuses in certain very narrow areas, yet they each had ‘no understanding or grasp of the simplest and most generally accessible things’ outside of that area.13
The combination of narrowness of mind and complete assurance gave rise to the abusive polemical style that appalled so many who had to deal with Lenin. Writing to his close friend Nadezhda Kristi in early 1917 the Menshevik leader L. Martov explains why he is happy to think that there is no life after death: ‘In my opinion, one earthly existence is more than enough: do you think it would be drôle to continue polemicizing with Lenin even after death and to continue to listen to his gutter abuse?’14
The same abusive style could be described, in an admiring way, as evidence of ‘intellectual passion’. Russian émigré Moishe Olgin, writing in 1919, describes Lenin in action:
Lenin does not reply to an opponent. He vivisects him. He is as keen as the edge of a razor. His mind works with an amazing acuteness. He notices every flaw in the line of argument. He disagrees with, and he draws the most absurd conclusions from, premises unacceptable to him. At the same time he is derisive. He ridicules his opponent. He castigates him. He makes you feel that his victim is an ignoramus, a fool, a presumptuous nonentity. You are swept by the power of his logic. You are overwhelmed by his intellectual passion.15
The novelist Maxim Gorky knew Lenin quite well and also had mixed feelings that varied over time. In 1920 Gorky was even ready to talk about Lenin’s saintliness! In 1909, however, he wrote a rather harsh letter to Lenin. The letter contained compliments (‘You are someone who I find organically sympathetic’), but also a critique based on Hamlet’s metaphor of playing on someone like a recorder:
Sometimes it seems to me that for you every person is no more than a recorder on which you play this or that melody pleasing to you – that you evaluate each person’s individuality from the point of view of how useful they are to you, for the realization of your aims, opinions, tasks. This way of evaluating people (leaving to one side its profoundly individualist and elitist underlay) necessarily creates a void around you – and while this is not so important in itself, you are a strong character – but the main thing is, this way of evaluating people will surely lead you into making mistakes.16
Gorky was repelled by Lenin’s instrumental attitude to the people around him. Lenin’s close associates understood this feature of Lenin’s personality, but they interpreted it in a different way. Zinoviev, looking back in the early 1930s, wrote that Lenin had an oshchushchenie about his personal mission, that is, a strong ‘feeling’ bordering on physical sensation:
Was there ‘egocentrism’ in Ilich? No.
Were there any dictatorial leanings? No.
But was there an awareness (feeling) that he was called? Yes, this there was! Without that he would not have become Lenin. Without that (precisely a strong feeling), there would be no vozhd at all.
At one time (when V. I. was still fighting for recognition), some one’s relation to him personally (or rather, not ‘personally,’ but politically and theoretically) was for him a criterion, a measure of things. Only we can’t understand this in a vulgar fashion.17
The hero-worshipping attitude to Lenin that existed even before the Bolshevik revolution comes out in a description of Lenin written in 1917 by Nikolai Bukharin, who knew Lenin well. For followers like Bukharin, Lenin himself was the ultimate inspired and inspiring leader:
The Russian and international proletariat has found themselves a worthy vozhd in the person of Lenin. A veteran revolutionary, Lenin was christened on the path of revolution by the blood of his own brother, hanged by the butcher Alexander III. And hatred toward the oppressors took deep root in his soul. Lenin has a highly analytical mind and yet at the same time he is a person of iron will, always travelling the path that he considers the correct one. He is equally firm when he must swim almost alone ‘against the current’ and when he needs to work in the midst of his own people. Revolution is his element. He is a genuine vozhd of the revolution, following out his own logic to the end, scourging any half-heartedness, any refusal to draw conclusions.18
We have summoned character witnesses both friendly and hostile to Lenin, but a certain mystery will always remain. An emblem of this mystery is Lenin’s characteristic laugh. Two visiting Englishmen, interviewing Lenin in 1919 and 1920, reacted to this laugh in different ways:
Arthur Ransome: ‘This little bald-headed, wrinkled man, who tilts his chair this way and that, laughing over one thing or another, ready any minute to give serious advice to any who interrupt him to ask for it, advice so well reasoned that it is to his followers far more compelling than any command, every one of his wrinkles is a wrinkle of laughter, not of worry.’19
Bertrand Russell: ‘He is very friendly, and apparently simple, entirely without a trace of hauteur… I have never met a personage so destitute of self-importance…. He laughs a great deal; at first his laugh seems merely friendly and jolly, but gradually I came to feel it rather grim.’20
We end by repeating the words of Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, who provided the Ariadne’s thread that has guided us through the labyrinth of Lenin’s career. She first met Lenin in St Petersburg in 1894. It was here, she tells us, that Lenin fully committed himself to what he saw as ‘Marx’s grand idea’: ‘only as vozhd of all the labourers will the working class achieve victory’. Once Lenin made this commitment, he never wavered: ‘this thought, this idea illuminated all of his later activity, each and every step.’