Capitalist transformation was thus creating new mass fighters with a stake in a successful political revolution. Foremost among these were the workers in both town and country – even though the political revolution would strengthen bourgeois rule in the short run. Nevertheless, the exploited workers have a life-and-death interest, not only in the far-distant socialist revolution that will end capitalism, but also in the here-and-now democratic revolution for political freedom that will make capitalism less intolerable. As a good Marxist, Lenin is supposed to denounce capitalist exploitation and he duly does. But these condemnations get somewhat lost in the shuffle, because Lenin is more vitally concerned with showing that there are worse things than capitalist exploitation. The kind of pre-capitalist exploitation still prevalent in Russia was worse, because it relied on coercion, personal dependence, lack of mobility and isolation. Worst of all is capitalist exploitation that was intensified by coercive survivals of the pre-capitalist order – first and foremost by tsarism itself.
Capitalism was therefore ‘progressive’, and not only because it was creating new classes that were both willing and able to fight in a nationwide struggle against tsarism. It was also shattering ‘age-old immobility and routine, destroying the settled life of the peasants who vegetated behind their medieval partitions, and creating new social classes striving of necessity towards contact, unification, and active participation in the whole of the economic (and not only economic) life of the country and the whole world’.14 Lenin’s seemingly offhand parenthetical comment – ‘and not only economic’ – reveals the connection between his learned Marxist analysis and his passionate heroic scenario. The new classes are also called upon to participate in the political life of the country, indeed, to revolutionize it.
In the early 1890s, as Lenin was working out his life-long political identity, he also had to fight against another view of Marx’s implications for Russian revolutionary strategy. This view was put forth by the bitterest opponents of the Russian Marxists, namely, the older generation of narodniki or populists who were appalled at the infatuation with Marxism displayed by a younger generation of socialist radicals. For veterans of revolutionary struggles, such as Nikolai Mikhailovsky, the Marxist strategy was grotesquely long-term, passive and callous about the fate of the Russian peasant. According to these hostile witnesses Russian Marxists had written off the peasantry. In fact (in Mikhailovsky’s words) they ‘directly insist on the further devastation of the village’.15 Capitalism (cheered on by the Marxists) would force the crushed and impoverished peasants to migrate to the cities, become factory workers and (after a generation or two of capitalist hell) carry out the socialist revolution.
One of Mikhailovsky’s colleagues, S. N. Krivenko, sharpened the portrait by arguing that simple consistency required Russian Marxists to actively encourage capitalist production, speculate in peasant land and rejoice as peasants were kicked off the land.16 One quip of his was especially successful. Krivenko suggested that if the Marxists thought capitalism was so great, they should open up village taverns to speed it along. One Russian Social Democrat later recalled that, as a young student in St Petersburg in the early 1890s, his fellow students would slap him on the back and say, ‘Hey, Marxist, when are you opening a tavern?’17
Lenin was still in Samara in 1891 when a massive famine hit the Volga region and elsewhere. The famine first horrified and then enraged Russian society as it observed what was widely felt to be the evasion and later the bungling and outright corruption of the official response. According to one memoir account, Vladimir Ulyanov reacted to the famine exactly as predicted by Mikhailovsky and Krivenko. Vasily Vodovozov was on good terms with the Ulyanov family in Samara in the early 1890s. In his memoir, written in the 1920s, he tells us that Vladimir Ulyanov ‘sharply and definitely spoke out against feeding the hungry’. The young Marxist insisted that the famine was ‘a progressive factor. By destroying the peasant economy and throwing the muzhik out of the village into the town, the famine would create a proletariat and aid the industrialization of the region.’ Furthermore, the famine ‘will force the muzhik to think about the foundations of the capitalist system’.18 Young Ulyanov is thus a sort of Marxist Scrooge: Are there no prisons? And the Union workhouses – are they still in operation? And if people would rather die than go there, they had better do it and decrease the surplus population.
Vodovozov’s story is neat, too neat, as a hard-boiled detective might say. The young Lenin becomes a walking, talking embodiment of the most hostile stereotypes of Russian Marxism circulating at the time. Many historians still today believe in the accuracy of this polemical caricature of Russian Marxism in general and Lenin in particular. But Lenin’s actual vision of the ‘other way’ created by capitalism was far otherwise. He saw capitalist transformation of the Russian countryside as the objective force that made the heroic scenario of inspirational class leadership possible in the here and now.
According to the hostile stereotype, the Russian Marxists called on capitalism to crush the peasants, drive them out of the countryside and into the cities, and thus prepare the way for a long-distant socialist revolution. In reality, Lenin gave capitalism the mission of transforming the peasants, making them effective fighters while still in the countryside, and thus making possible a democratic revolution based on the masses and not on the isolated and therefore terror-wielding intelligentsia.
Given his actual scenario, Lenin reacted to the caricature of the Marxist Scrooge with indignant rage. In Friends of the People, he cited the comments by Mikhailovsky and Krivenko quoted earlier and responded: suppose Mikhailovsky did meet someone in some literary salon who spouted this nonsense and passed it off as Marxism. Poseurs like this ‘besmirched the banner’ of Russian Social Democracy. To tell the reading public that this repulsive caricature was an accurate portrayal of Russian Marxism was nothing but the most blatant poshlost or philistinism.19
As the Marxist Scrooge, Lenin is supposed to have actively willed the peasants’ situation to be as bad as possible. But in 1899 he wrote that ‘Social Democrats cannot remain indifferent spectators of the starvation of the peasants and their destruction from death by starvation. Never could there be two opinions among Russian Social Democrats about the necessity of the broadest possible help to the starving peasants.’ An otherwise hostile émigré memoirist remembers Lenin himself working in one of the canteens set up to help the peasants in 1891–2.20