Lenin’s theory of socialist revolution made no room for any representative elected institutions or direct democracy. Instead, he said, the socialist revolution ‘cannot but be accompanied by civil war’.26 Neither he nor any of his accomplices were troubled by the fact that the people had not empowered them to decide its fate. As the Socialist Revolutionary émigré Boris Savinkov wrote in 1921, in a Warsaw publication: ‘The Russian people do not want Lenin, Trotsky and Dzerzhinsky, not merely because the Bolsheviks mobilize them, shoot them, take their grain and are ruining Russia. The Russian people do not want them for the simple reason that … nobody elected them.’27
On the eve of the Bolshevik coup d’état, in August-September 1917, Lenin wrote his famous work State and Revolution, in which he laid out his ideas on the future socialist state. According to Lenin, ‘when everyone has learned to govern and is in practice independently governing social production, independently accounting for and controlling the spongers, the layabouts, crooks and similar “preservers of capitalist traditions”, then to evade this accounting and control will become so unbelievably difficult, such a rare exception, and will be accompanied, no doubt, by such speedy and serious retribution (for the armed workers, the people who live practical lives, are not sentimental intellectuals and will not permit anyone to fool around with them), that the need to observe the simple, basic rules of any human community will soon become a habit’.28 Lenin placed special emphasis on social control, believing that when it ‘became genuinely universal, general, nationwide’, it would be impossible to refuse to serve the state, ‘there would be no place to hide’.29
Lenin apparently never asked himself why, before 1921, the Bolsheviks were incapable of giving the people anything but chaos, civil war, hunger and terror.30 The fact is, the Bolsheviks had achieved their goal: the Party had power. The revolution was for Lenin a social experiment. If it failed in 1905, it would succeed in 1917, and if not, there was always the future. In an article entitled ‘For the Workers’ Attention’, Gorky wrote in November 1917:
Life in all its complexity is unknown to Lenin, he does not know the masses, he hasn’t lived among them, but he found out in books how to raise the masses onto their hind legs, how to enrage the masses’ instincts easily. To the Lenins, the working class is like iron-ore to a metal-worker. Is it possible, given present circumstances, to cast a socialist state out of this ore? Evidently not. But why not try? What does Lenin risk if the experiment fails?31
To achieve power, the Bolsheviks became wedded forever to violence, while liberty was buried in the marriage. Lenin’s address ‘To the Citizens of Russia’, following his coup, and his decrees promising peace and land, say nothing about liberty as the main aim of the revolution. They were not the Bill of Rights of the English revolution of 1689, nor the American Declaration of Independence of 1776. The Russian revolution, which formally gave the people peace and land, cunningly replaced the idea of liberty with that of the abolition of the exploitation of man by man. In giving the people the spectre of hope, Lenin had found and trapped man’s most robust and vital element, that of faith. He thus condemned the Russians for decades to contenting themselves with hope alone.
What, if any, was the philosophical foundation of Lenin’s approach? He has, after all, been called the most powerful philosopher of the twentieth century by Soviet scholars (the present author included). Had Lenin not come to power, his Materialism and Empiriocriticism (1908) would have been known only to the narrowest circle of experts on the theory of knowledge, and even they would have found it excessively scholastic: ‘Everything in it “corresponding” to the position of dialectical materialism,’ wrote the Russian émigré philosopher Vasili Zenkovsky, ‘is accepted without qualification, while whatever does not, is discarded for that reason alone.’32 Indeed, Lenin himself wrote in this work: ‘Following the path of Marx’s theory, we shall approach closer and closer to the objective truth (while never achieving it); following any other path we shall come to nothing but confusion and lies.’33
In other words, only those who employ Marxist methodology are philosophers and scholars. The peremptory nature of his arguments, his hallmark as a politician, organizer and philosopher, puts one mentally on guard. Lenin’s philosophy was designed to separate the ‘pure’ thinkers from the ‘impure’, the materialists from the idealists. His aim was to demonstrate that a school of philosophy which accepted the existence of religion could not be scientific.
Whether or not Lenin’s reasoning is accepted as plausible or implausible, the principle of Party-mindedness, which he proclaimed as necessary for the philosophical study of scientific knowledge, places the reader beyond the pale of science and in the sphere of ideological opposition to Bolshevik values. After the failure of the 1905 revolution, an upsurge of interest in idealist philosophy occurred in Russia, as it did also in Western Europe, for different reasons. Disappointment with socialist, that is materialist, ideas was driving Russian intellectuals towards a spiritual philosophy which emphasised individual self-perfection as the path to social improvement, rather than the other way round, which was the message and purpose of socialism. In an effort to counter this trend, the Bolshevik intellectuals Alexander Bogdanov and Anatoly Lunacharsky had become interested in the works of the contemporary Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach (the creator of the measurement of the speed of sound) and his mentor, the nineteenth-century Swiss philosopher Richard Avenarius. According to Mach, the attributes of the material world – colour, shape, texture – are conferred on objects by the human mind. In other words, man makes the world as he knows it. The object of this theory was to eliminate the distinction between the spiritual and the physical world, since the world according to Mach is a physical entity given shape by consciousness. Marxist materialism posited the opposite proposition: the physical world, the environment, is what forms and conditions the human mind. Marxists are realists, or materialists, and Machists are idealists.
Bogdanov, a trained biological scientist, took Mach further by asserting that not only the physical world, but society itself, is a product of the human mind, that without the human will to form communal life, society would not have come into being. Society therefore is the expression of consciousness. The object of this line of reasoning was, as has been suggested, to counter the corrosive effect new idealist thinking was having on socialist life in Russia, by showing that Marxist philosophy was sufficiently flexible to absorb such an apparently idealistic notion.
At around this time, 1906 to 1909, Lenin was engaged in complicated relations with Bogdanov and other intellectuals associated with his Bolshevik organization. Partly in competition for intellectual leadership, partly in order to keep control of the organization and its finances, Lenin chose to make an assault on Bogdanov and his allies, by challenging their orthodoxy as Marxists. In order to do so, he read exhaustively in philosophical literature.34 Having accepted Marx’s social-political and philosophical teaching without qualification, Lenin confined himself to nothing more than commenting on it. No social-political theory can be universal, yet that is what Lenin made of Marxism. As for such new idealists as Berdyaev and his fellow thinkers, Lenin’s hostility in the end saved their lives: when in March 1922 he read a collection of articles by Berdyaev, Fedor Stepun, Frank and others, entitled