His solution to the problem was to declare that Russia already was capitalist. This eccentric view, which no other student of the Russian economy is known to have shared, rested on an idiosyncratic interpretation of statistical data on agriculture. Lenin convinced himself that the Russian village was in the throes of “class differentiation” which transformed a minority of peasants into a “petty bourgeoisie” and the majority into a landless rural proletariat. Such calculations, derived from those which Engels had made in regard to the German peasantry, had little to do with the facts of the case: but to Lenin they served as a guarantee that Russia did not have to postpone the revolution ad infinitum, until her capitalism was fully matured. Arguing that fully 20 percent of Russia’s rural population in some provinces qualified as “bourgeois,” and given the industrial boom then underway, Lenin felt emboldened to declare in 1893–94 that “at the present time capitalism already constitutes the basic background of Russia’s economic life” and “essentially our order does not differ from the Western European.”16
By declaring “capitalist” a country four-fifths of whose population consisted of peasants, most of them self-sufficient, small-scale communal farmers, Lenin could proclaim it ripe for revolution. Furthermore, since the “bourgeoisie” was already in power, it represented not an ally but a class enemy. In the summer of 1894, Lenin wrote a sentence that summarized the political philosophy to which, except for a brief interlude (1895–1900), he would remain faithful for the rest of his life:
The Russian worker, leading all the democratic elements, will bring down absolutism and lead the Russian proletariat (along with the proletariat of all the countries) by the direct road of open political struggle to the triumphant Communist Revolution.17
Although the vocabulary was Marxist, the underlying sentiment of this passage was People’s Wilclass="underline" indeed, as Lenin would many years later confide to Karl Radek, he had sought to reconcile Marx with the Narodnaia Volia.18 The Russian worker, to whom the People’s Will had also attributed the role of a revolutionary vanguard, was to launch a “direct” assault on the autocracy, topple it, and on its ruins erect a Communist society. Nothing is said about the mission of capitalism and the bourgeoisie in destroying the economic and political foundations of the old regime. It was an anachronistic ideology, for at the time when Lenin formulated it, Russia had a burgeoning Social-Democratic movement which rejected such an old-fashioned adaptation of Marx’s theories.
On his arrival in St. Petersburg—the city that one day would bear his name—the twenty-three-year-old Lenin was a fully formed personality. The first impression which he made on new acquaintances, then and later, was unfavorable. His short, stocky figure, his premature baldness (he had lost nearly all hair before he was thirty), his slanted eyes and high cheekbones, his brusque manner of speaking, often accompanied by a sarcastic laugh, repelled most people. Contemporaries are virtually at one in speaking of his unprepossessing, “provincial” appearance. On meeting him, A. N. Potresov saw a “typical middle-aged tradesman from some northern, Iaroslavl-like province.” The British diplomat Bruce Lockhart thought Lenin looked like a “provincial grocer.” For Angelica Balabanoff, an admirer, he resembled a “provincial schoolteacher.”19
But this unattractive man glowed with an inner force that made people quickly forget their first impressions. His strength of will, indomitable discipline, energy, asceticism, and unshakable faith in the cause had an effect that can only be conveyed by the overused term “charisma.” According to Potresov, this “unprepossessing and coarse” individual, devoid of charm, had a “hypnotic impact”:
Plekhanov was respected, Martov loved, but they only followed unquestioningly Lenin, the one indisputable leader. Because Lenin alone embodied the phenomenon, rare everywhere but especially in Russia, of a man of iron will, inexhaustible energy, combining a fanatical faith in the movement, in the cause, with an equal faith in himself.20
A fundamental source of Lenin’s strength and personal magnetism was the quality alluded to by Potresov—namely, the identification of his person with the cause: in him, the two became indistinguishable. This phenomenon was not unknown in socialist circles. In his study of political parties, Robert Michels has a chapter called “Le Parti c’est moi,” in which he describes similar attitudes among German Social-Democratic and trade-union leaders, including Bebel, Marx, and Lassalle. He quotes an admirer of Bebel’s who said that Bebel “always regards himself as the guardian of party interests and his personal adversaries as enemies of the party.”21 Potresov made a similar observation about the future leader of Bolshevism:
Within the framework of Social-Democracy or outside it, in the ranks of the general public movement directed against the autocracy, Lenin knew only two categories of people and phenomena, his own and not his own. His own, those which in one way or another came within the sphere of influence of his organization, and the others, which did not, and which by virtue of this fact alone he regarded as enemies. Between these polar opposites—comrade-friend and dissenter-enemy—for Lenin there existed no intermediate spectrum of social and personal human relations …22
Trotsky left an interesting example of this mentality. Recounting his visit with Lenin in London, he says that when showing him the sights Lenin invariably referred to them as “theirs,” by which he meant, according to Trotsky, not England’s, but “the enemy’s”: “This note was always present when Lenin spoke of any kind of cultural values or new achievements … they understand or they have, they have accomplished or succeeded—but as enemies!”23
The normal “I/we—you/they” dichotomy, translated into the stark dualism “friend-enemy,” which in Lenin’s case went to uncompromising extremes, had two important historic consequences.
By thinking in this manner, Lenin was inevitably led to treat politics as warfare. He did not need Marx’s sociology to militarize politics and treat all disagreements as susceptible of resolution in one way only: by the dissenter’s physical annihilation. Lenin read Clausewitz late in life, but he was a Clausewitzian long before, intuitively, by virtue of his entire psychic makeup. Like the German strategist, he conceived war not as the antithesis of peace but as its dialectical corollary; like him, he was exclusively concerned with gaining victory, not with the uses to which to put it. His outlook on life was a mixture of Clausewitz and Social Darwinism: when, in a rare moment of candor, Lenin defined peace as a “breathing spell for war,” he inadvertently allowed an insight into the innermost recesses of his mind.24 This manner of thinking made him constitutionally incapable of compromise, except for tactical purposes. Once Lenin and his followers came to power in Russia, this attitude automatically permeated the new regime.
The other consequence of his psychological makeup was an inability to tolerate any dissent, whether in the form of organized opposition or even mere criticism. Given that he perceived any group or individuals not members of his party and not under his personal influence as ipso facto enemies, it followed that they had to be suppressed and silenced. That such actions were implicit in Lenin’s mentality, Trotsky noted as early as 1904. Comparing Lenin to Robespierre, he attributed to him the Jacobin’s dictum: “I know only two parties—that of good citizens and that of bad citizens.” “This political aphorism,” Trotsky concluded, “is engraved in the heart of Maximilian Lenin.”25 Here lay the germs of government by terror, of the totalitarian aspiration to complete control of public life and public opinion.