Lenin’s Marxist analysis of the development of Russian capitalism undergirded his heroic scenario by proving three things: the proletariat has been given the role of leader; ‘the strength of the proletariat in the process of history is immeasurably greater than its share of the total population’; the deep-rooted remnants of serfdom give rise to the profound revolutionary drive of the peasantry.21 Lenin’s Marx-based heroic scenario helps to explain why he literally fell in love with Marx’s writings. We can imagine Vladimir addressing the ghost of his martyred brother in words such as these: No, Sasha, we will not get to political freedom by throwing away our lives in futile attempts to frighten the government into concessions. There is another way: an epic national struggle in which the urban workers will lead the newly galvanized narod. This will work, Sasha! It is guaranteed by the authority of the greatest socialist of all, Karl Marx.
Lenin Becomes a Revolutionary Social Democrat
His Marxist studies did not distract Lenin from obtaining professional credentials as a lawyer. He managed to obtain permission to take external exams at Petersburg University and in April 1891 he travelled to St Petersburg for that purpose. For the rest of the year he had to answer questions on topics as diverse as Plato’s dialogue The Laws, Roman law and the degrees of ‘unfreedom’ among the peasants of feudal Russia. Despite another family tragedy – his twenty-year-old sister Olga, who was living in St Petersburg, died of typhoid fever on 8 May 1891 – he aced the examination and duly received certification as a lawyer.
Returning to Samara, he could now earn something like a living by defending local peasants on charges typically involving petty theft. But the big city beckoned, and in August 1893 he ended the Volga chapter of his life by moving to St Petersburg. Upon arriving, he dutifully wrote a letter to his mother, telling her that he had found a room that was clear and light, in a building that had a good entrance and was ‘only some fifteen minutes walk from the library’ (a primary consideration for Lenin everywhere he lived). After asking for money to tide him over, he confessed that ‘obviously I have not been living carefully; in one month I have spent a rouble and thirty-six kopecks on the horse trams, for instance. When I get used to the place I shall probably spend less.’22 Lenin used his various contacts to establish himself immediately. He got a position with the lawyer M. F. Volkenstein. Much more important to him, he used letters of introduction in order to join a Marxist circle at the Technology Institute, through which he was able to get in touch with worker study groups. He had found the milieu in which he would spend the rest of his life.
Lenin had already worked out the Marxist underpinnings of his heroic scenario. He had, to his own satisfaction, demonstrated the objective potential for applying a Social Democratic strategy to Russia: an underground party inspires urban factory workers with a sense of their historical mission to lead the narod against tsarism. In St Petersburg in 1893–4 he found reason enough to decide that actual Russian activists and actual Russian workers could work together to realize this potential. Some of these reasons came from developments in international Social Democracy. Among these was the resounding triumph of German Social Democracy during its own ‘outlaw period’. The German Chancellor, Otto Bismarck, had tried to destroy Social Democracy with repressive legislation in 1878 – and lo and behold, by 1891 Bismarck was gone but the German Social Democratic party was still there. Indeed, it seemed as if Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws had made the party stronger. The anti-socialist laws were allowed to lapse, the party held a triumphant congress in the German town of Erfurt at the end of 1891, and a new party programme was adopted that became a model for Social Democrats everywhere. Perhaps Social Democracy could thrive even when subjected to energetic state repression.
The overwhelming influence of the German party on international Social Democracy was further increased by the Erfurt Programme (1892), a book-length explication of the Social Democratic strategy written by the up-and-coming Marxist writer Karl Kautsky. Kautsky was born into a Czech family in 1854 and came to Social Democracy only after a period as a Czech nationalist. He served for a term in the Austrian Social Democratic party and then moved to Germany to become the editor of the theoretical journal Die Neue Zeit (New Times), a post he retained until the First World War. His influence on Russian Social Democracy and Lenin personally was incalculable, and we shall meet him again in every chapter of this book.
In many ways Kautsky’s book was unoriginal popularization. But a clear exposition of basic principles, an inspiring application to the contemporary situation and a compelling overarching narrative can have a profound impact on events, whether it is original or not. More importantly for Lenin personally, Kautsky’s version of Social Democracy also contained a heroic scenario of class leadership – one that, like Lenin’s, assigned the workers a national mission. In the Erfurt Programme Kautsky wrote that Social Democracy has a tendency to become more and more ‘a Volkspartei, in the sense that it is the representative not only of the industrial wage-labourers but of all the labouring and exploited strata – and therefore the great majority of the population, what is commonly known as “the Volk”’ (= narod in Russian).23
Kautsky also emphasized that Social Democrats had a duty, not only to use political freedoms, but to struggle to win them where they were absent. Political freedoms were ‘light and air for the proletariat; he who lets them wither or withholds them – he who keeps the proletariat from the struggle to win these freedoms and to extend them – that person is one of the proletariat’s worst enemies.’24 In short, Lenin could feel that his own heroic scenario had received the authoritative endorsement of one of Europe’s leading Marxists. No wonder Lenin took the trouble to translate the Erfurt Programme into Russian during the summer of 1894.
As we saw in the Introduction, Lenin’s widow Nadezhda Krupskaya identified St Petersburg as the time and place where Lenin acquired his heroic scenario – his confidence that ‘all the labouring masses, all the oppressed’ will follow the industrial working class and thus assure its victory. According to Krupskaya the final push for this life-defining commitment was Lenin’s ‘work among the workers of Piter [St Petersburg], conversations with these workers, attentive listening to their speeches’.
Was Krupskaya suggesting that these workers were committed Marxists who lectured Lenin on the fine points of theory? Not at all. When Lenin moved to St Petersburg and had regular contact for the first time with real workers, he did not learn that the workers were necessarily wonderful and noble people. What he learned was that some of them were fighters who were willing to have conversations with intellectuals like himself. He became convinced that they could indeed play the role assigned to them by the Social Democratic scenario. Lenin also discovered the rudiments of a specifically Social Democratic underground, that is, a set of institutions that allowed Social Democratic activists to have ongoing contact with militant workers.
