The philosophical side of Lenin’s mind was strong on conviction, but dogmatic. He was absolutely certain that ‘Marx’s philosophy is consummate philosophical materialism’,36 and the only true theory. In one of his last works, criticizing the Menshevik Sukhanov, he wrote: ‘You say that to create socialism one must have civilized behaviour. Fine. But why couldn’t we create the prerequisites for civilized behaviour from the start, by expelling the landowners and expelling the capitalists, and then start the movement to socialism? Where have you ever read that such changes in the usual historical order are not acceptable or impossible?’37 In other words, if the Marxist books have not prohibited it, any ‘historical order’ is permissible.
The aesthetic side of Lenin’s mind was less despotic, perhaps because art was less closely associated with politics than law and philosophy, or perhaps because he did not feel as confident in this sphere. Berdyaev may have exaggerated in calling Lenin backward and primitive in art, but only slightly. His taste was extremely conservative, while his range of knowledge of literature was more extensive. He cited and used Chernyshevsky more than any other writer – more than 300 times in his collected works, indeed – but he also quoted from a range of nineteenth-century Russian writers whose interests and themes tended towards the social and political. He wrote an article on Tolstoy, but he cited Dostoevsky only twice in all of his works.38 Preferring the classics to contemporary writing, he nevertheless much admired Gorky’s novel The Mother, which dealt with social and political problems on an accessible artistic level.
His earlier friendship with Lenin did not prevent Gorky from attacking the Bolsheviks fiercely in 1917 and 1918 in his Petrograd newspaper Novaya zhizn’. Under the heading ‘Untimely Thoughts’, he managed to publish forty-eight of these articles before the paper was closed down on Lenin’s orders in July 1918. Soon after the Bolshevik coup, on 7 (20) November 1917, Gorky had written: ‘Lenin and his comrades-in-arms think they can commit any crime, like the massacre at Petrograd, the storming of Moscow, abolition of freedom of speech, the senseless arrests – all the abominations that used to be committed by Plehve and Stolypin.* This is where today’s leader is taking the proletariat, and it should be understood that Lenin is not an omnipotent magician, but a cold-blooded trickster who spares neither the honour nor the lives of the proletariat.’39
Needless to say, these and many other articles which Gorky wrote at the time were not included in the thirty-volume edition of his works. Soon, however, Gorky altered his tone, aware that the regime was enduring and that he could not manage without its help and that of Lenin. In April 1919 he called on Lenin to ask him to release the Left SR N.A. Shklovskaya, secretary of the poet Alexander Blok. She was set free six months later. In September 1920 he asked Lenin to allow the publisher Z.I. Grzhebin to emigrate. Given Lenin’s personal magnetism, these visits had an effect, and soon Gorky was virtually tamed.
While Lenin himself approached art and literature as a consumer, as Party leader he saw in them a powerful instrument of political influence. It was perhaps for this reason that he was so hostile to Futurism and the other modernist trends in art. And no doubt when he urged the closure of the opera and ballet it was because he thought they were ‘court arts remote from the people’, and he could not see how singers and dancers might inspire the detachments that were carrying out food requisitioning. For him, the chief purpose of art was in developing ‘the best models, traditions, results of existing culture from the point of view of the world outlook of Marxism and the conditions of proletarian life in the epoch of the dictatorship’.40
Many biographers and people who met Lenin attest to the enormous ‘physical force’ of his mind. Perhaps this was because he usually crushed his opponent in argument with his absolute refusal to compromise; perhaps it was the uncompromising convictions themselves, the one-dimensional, virtually fanatical conviction. In any event, many people began to stress the force of Lenin’s mind, and to relate it to the shape of his head. Lunacharsky, for instance, remarked that ‘the structure of his skull is truly striking. One has to study him for a little while to appreciate its physical power, the contours of the colossal dome of his forehead and to sense something I can only describe as a physical emanation of light from its surface.’41 No one is able to confirm whether light really did emanate from Lenin’s forehead. Instead, we must make do with the five editions of his collected works, the forty volumes of the Lenin miscellanies, thousands of unpublished documents, thousands of works of hagiography and a handful of dispassionate, honest books about him. We do, however, have his plans and blueprints, and above all his actions, to judge him by.
Every Soviet schoolboy knew the story of the Second Party Congress of 1903 and the difference between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks: Lenin and his ‘rock-hard’ followers ‘saw the Party as a combat organization, every member of which had to be a selfless fighter, prepared for everyday pedestrian tasks as well as to fight with a gun in his hand’, while Martov, ‘supported by all the wavering and opportunistic elements, wanted to turn the Party into an assembly room’. ‘With such a party,’ Lenin’s official biography informed us, ‘the workers would never have been victorious and taken power into their hands.’42 If a student should add that Plekhanov, though wavering and indecisive, sided with Lenin, he would earn an extra mark. Such a student would not, however, be told that it was in fact Martov’s more loosely defined formula for membership that was passed by the Congress, nor that it was only because Lenin obtained a majority in elections to the Party central organs that he could call his group the Majorityites, or Bolsheviks, while the ‘opportunists’ naturally became the Minorityites, or Mensheviks.
This laundered version migrated from book to book and became a fixed dogma in the public mind. In the years following October 1917, the term Menshevik became synonymous with opportunist, bourgeois conciliator, White Guard ally, foreign spy, enemy of the people. Naturally, this fundamentally affected attitudes towards the Mensheviks. When the Politburo discussed ‘the Menshevik question’ on 5 January 1922, it instructed Iosif Unshlikht, deputy chairman of the Cheka, to find two or three provincial towns, ‘not excluding those on a railway’, where Mensheviks could be settled. He was further told not to obstruct Mensheviks who wanted to leave the country, and that where a subsidy for fares was needed, he should apply to the Politburo.43 The days of mass execution had yet to come.
By concentrating on the organizational factor as the wall dividing the two wings of the Party, aspects of far greater significance were pushed into the background. In fact the true line dividing Bolsheviks and Mensheviks was not the issue of organization. The only true social democrats were the Mensheviks: they recognized democracy, parliament and political pluralism as values that could avert violence as a means of achieving social development. Democracy for them was a permanent value, not a political front. The Bolsheviks, by contrast, became increasingly convinced of the value of violence. And when they came to power, they believed they had conquered not only the bourgeoisie, but also their former Party comrades, the Mensheviks. ‘October,’ Stalin declared, ‘means the ideological victory of Communism over social democracy, of Marxism over reformism.’
Why did the Bolsheviks win? What was the appeal of their programme? Why did they survive, when it became clear they represented