principal Einstellung—to use the new popular German psychological term—was hatred. Lenin took to Marx’s doctrine primarily because it found response in that principal Einstellung of his mind. The doctrine of the class war, relentless and thoroughgoing, aiming at the final destruction and extermination of the enemy, proved congenial to Lenin’s emotional attitude to surrounding reality. He hated not only the existing autocracy (the Tsar) and the bureaucracy, not only lawlessness and arbitrary rule of the police, but also their antipodes—the “liberals” and the “bourgeoisie.” That hatred had something repulsive and terrible in it; for being rooted in the concrete, I should say even animal, emotions and repulsions, it was at the same time abstract and cold like Lenin’s whole being.9
Lenin’s official vita, as formalized in the 1920s, is in its essential features modeled on the life of Christ. Like Christology it depicts the protagonist as unaltered and unalterable, his destiny being predetermined on the day of birth. Lenin’s official biographers refuse to allow that he had ever changed his ideas. He is said to have been a committed orthodox Marxist from the moment he became politically involved. This claim can easily be shown to be wrong.
To begin with, the term “Marxist” had in Lenin’s youth not one but at least two distinct meanings. Classical Marxist doctrine applied to countries with mature capitalist economies. For these Marx purported to provide a scientific theory of development, the inevitable outcome of which was collapse and revolution. This doctrine had an immense appeal to Russian radical intellectuals both because of its claim to scientific objectivity and because of the inevitability of its prediction. Marx was popular in Russia before there was a Russian Social-Democratic movement: in 1880, he boasted that Das Kapital had more readers and admirers there than in any other country.10 But since Russia at the time had hardly any capitalism, however liberally the term is defined, early Russian followers of Marx reinterpreted his theories to suit local conditions. In the 1870s they formulated the doctrine of “separate path,” according to which Russia, developing her own form of socialism based on the rural commune, would make a direct leap to socialism, bypassing the capitalist phase.11 Lenin’s brother adopted this kind of ideology in the program for his People’s Will organization and it was common in Russian radical circles in the 1880s.
Knowledge of the intellectual environment in which Lenin grew up sheds light on the evolution of his ideology. In 1887–91, Lenin was not and could not have been a Marxist in the Social-Democratic sense, because this variant of Marxism was still unknown in Russia. The evidence suggests that from 1887 until approximately 1891 he was a typical follower of the People’s Will. He maintained close association with members of this organization, first in Kazan and then in Samara. He actively sought out its veterans, many of whom settled in the Volga region after being released from prison and exile, to learn the history of that movement and especially its organizational practices. This knowledge he deeply assimilated: even after becoming a leading figure in the Russian Social-Democratic Party, Lenin stood apart from his colleagues by virtue of his belief in a tightly disciplined, conspiratorial, and professional revolutionary party and his impatience with programs calling for a lengthy interlude of capitalism. Like the Narodnaia Volia he scorned capitalism and the “bourgeoisie,” in which he saw not allies of socialism but its sworn enemies. It is noteworthy that in the late 1880s he failed to join the circles active in his region which were beginning to approach Marx and Engels in a “German”—that is, Social-Democratic—spirit.12
In June 1890, the authorities at long last relented and allowed Lenin to take the examinations for the bar as an external student. He passed them in November 1891, following which he devoted himself, not to the practice of law, but to the study of economic literature, especially statistical surveys of agriculture issued by the zemstva. His purpose, in the words of his sister Anna, was to determine the “feasibility of Social-Democracy in Russia.”13
The time was propitious. In Germany, the Social-Democratic Party, legalized in 1890, won stunning successes at the polls. Its superb organization and ability to combine appeals to workers with a broad liberal program won it more parliamentary seats in each successive election. It suddenly appeared conceivable that socialism could triumph in the most industrialized country in Europe through democratic procedures rather than violence. Engels was so impressed by these developments that in 1895, shortly before his death, he conceded that the revolutionary upheavals which he and Marx had predicted in 1848 might never occur and that socialism could well triumph at the ballot box rather than the barricade.14 The example of the German Social-Democratic Party exerted a strong influence on Russian socialists, discrediting the older theories of “separate path” and the revolutionary coup d’état.
Concurrently with the spread of these ideas, Russia experienced a dramatic spurt of industrial development which in the decade 1890–1900 doubled the number of industrial workers and gave Russia a rate of economic growth unmatched by any other country. The indications, therefore, were that Russia had missed the opportunity to bypass capitalism, which even Marx had conceded to be possible, and was destined to repeat the Western experience.
In this changed atmosphere, the theories of Social-Democracy gained a following in Russia. As formulated in Geneva by George Plekhanov and Paul Akselrod and in St. Petersburg by Peter Struve, Russia was to reach socialism in two stages. First she had to go through full-blown capitalism, which would vastly expand the ranks of the proletariat and, at the same time, bring the benefits of “bourgeois” freedoms, including a parliamentary system under which Russian socialists, like the Germans, could gain political influence. Once the “bourgeoisie” had swept autocracy and its “feudal” economic foundations out the way, the stage would be set for the next phase of historic development, the advance to socialism. In the mid-189os these ideas captured the imagination of much of the intelligentsia and all but submerged the older ideology of “separate path,” for which Struve now coined the derogatory term “Populism.”15
Lenin was slow to make this transition, in part because, living in the provinces, he had no access to Social-Democratic literature and in part because its pro-capitalist, pro-bourgeois philosophy clashed with what Struve called “the principal Einstellung” or attitude of his mind. In 1892–93, having read Plekhanov, he seems to have arrived at a halfway position between the ideology of the People’s Will and that of Social-Democracy, not unlike that which his brother had reached five years earlier. He abandoned the notion of a “separate path” and acknowledged the reality which stared everyone in the eye: Russia was destined to tread the path charted in Das Kapital, which he had read in 1889. But he was unwilling to concede that before being ready for revolution Russia had to undergo, for an indeterminate period, a stage of capitalist development during which the “bourgeoisie” lorded it over the country.