Most of Lenin’s biographers have understandably concentrated on his social and political rôle, but it is also important to balance that against his strictly human, moral and intellectual qualities, and to do so without forgetting the historical context. The historical Lenin was a child of his time: troubled, cruel, expectant, alarming. History neither accuses nor justifies, it is a means to understand, to discern the patterns that characterize a distant age. We say the word ‘Lenin’ and we see in our mind’s eye a man whose high forehead and large bald patch suggest the embodiment of intellect – as well as the commonplace.
Gleb Krzhizhanovsky, an early associate of Lenin’s who held high office in the Soviet government, made an attempt in his book Velikii Lenin to define the essence of Lenin’s genius (to which the book was dedicated), but was more successful in describing his subject’s exterior appearance. It was, he wrote, simple and modest: ‘Short of stature and wearing his usual cloth cap, he could easily have passed unnoticed in any factory district. All one could say of his appearance was that he had a pleasant, swarthy face with a touch of the Asiatic. In a rough country coat he could just as easily have passed in a crowd of Volga peasants.’ Clearly, this description was intended to stress the ‘folksiness’, the ‘depth’, the ‘link with the lower orders’, but Krzhizhanovsky also noticed an important element: Lenin’s eyes, the mirror of the human mind. Those eyes, he wrote, ‘were unusual, piercing, full of inner strength and energy, dark, dark brown …’18 It was a feature noticed by many, especially by the writer A.I. Kuprin in his graphic description, ‘Instant Photography’. Lenin, he wrote, ‘is short, broad-shouldered and lean. He looks neither repellent, militant nor deep-thinking. He has high cheekbones and slanting eyes … The dome of his forehead is broad and high, though not as exaggerated as it appears in foreshortened photographs … He has traces of hair on his temples, and his beard and moustache still show how much of a fiery redhead he was in his youth. His hands are large and ugly … I couldn’t stop looking at his eyes … they are narrow; besides which he tends to screw them up, no doubt a habit of concealing short sight, and this, and the rapid glances beneath his eyebrows, gives him an occasional squint and perhaps a look of cunning. But what surprised me most was their colour … Last summer in the Paris zoo, seeing the eyes of a lemur, I said to myself in amazement: at last I’ve found the colour of Lenin’s eyes! The only difference being that the lemur’s pupils were bigger and more restless, while Lenin’s were no more than pinpricks from which blue sparks seemed to fly.’19 The writer Ariadna Tyrkova, who had seen Lenin at close quarters more than once, drew a simpler picture: ‘Lenin was an evil man. And he had the evil eyes of a wolf.’20
A physical detail, while of no decisive significance to Lenin’s political portrait, may nevertheless highlight his main characteristic, namely his powerful mind, a mind that was too often not merely pragmatic, flexible and sophisticated, but also malevolent and perfidious. His radical pragmatism explains the actions he took to bring about the defeat of his own country in the First World War in order to get his party into power. His radicalism compelled him to accept the loss of entire national regions of the former tsarist empire, although when complete disintegration was threatened he cast aside his internationalism and started defending that empire, by then transformed into its Soviet form.
It was power, not love of fatherland, that prompted him to save Russia. He had, after all, shown his contempt – to put it mildly – for Russia and the Russians. Writing in the autumn of 1920 to Jan Berzin, a Central Committee member of Latvian origin, about publishing Communist propaganda, he complained that things were going badly. He advised Berzin to invite two Swiss comrades from Zurich, and to pay them ‘arch-generously’. He went on: ‘Hand out the work to Russian idiots: send the cuttings here, but not occasional issues (as these idiots have been doing until now).’21 Without a blush, he could call his fellow-countrymen idiots who could only be trusted to do the simplest tasks, while left-wingers from Zurich had to be paid ‘archgenerously’. This is only a short note, but a very eloquent one, and similar evidence of Lenin’s attitude to Russianness is abundant, though of course well hidden in the archives.
In the middle of 1922 the civil war was over and Russia lay in ruins. It seemed that at last the cruelty would end. Lenin pointed out that ‘although coercion is not our ideal’, the Bolsheviks could not live without it, even where ideas, views and the human spirit are concerned. He recommended the death penalty, commuted in mitigating circumstances to deprivation of liberty or deportation abroad, ‘for propaganda or agitation or belonging to or aiding organizations supporting that part of the international bourgeoisie that does not recognize the … Communist system’.22 This proposal was later incorporated into the infamous Article 58 of the Criminal Code, under which millions constructed and then filled the concentration camps. Lenin is the source of the totalitarian ideology of intolerance. By creating the Cheka, the punitive organ of the dictatorship and his favourite brainchild, Lenin influenced the outlook of the Communists who soon came to believe that the amoral was moral, if it was in the Party’s interest. S.I. Gusev, a member of the Party Central Control Commission, addressing the XIV Congress in December 1925, declared: ‘Lenin once taught us that every member of the Party must be an agent of the Cheka, that is, we must watch and inform … I believe every member of the Party should inform. If we suffer from anything, it is not from denunciation, but from non-denunciation. We might be the best of friends, but once we start to differ in politics, we must not only break off our friendships, we must go further and start informing.’23 Leninist doctrine had donned the police agent’s cloak.
It is often said that, as he felt death approaching, Lenin was horrified by what he had done and was willing to rethink much. It may be so, but it is impossible to prove. Even had he wanted to change things, which is doubtful, he took his intentions with him to the grave. It is also said that Lenin failed to build ‘true socialism’, even with the aid of the New Economic Policy. But if one looks closely at his understanding of this ‘new policy’, one can clearly discern old Bolshevik features. NEP, as far as Lenin was concerned, was bridled capitalism, and it could be ‘slapped down’ at any time. When reports started coming in about profiteering by traders, the so-called ‘Nepmen’, Lenin reacted quickly: ‘… we need a number of model trials with the harshest sentences. The Justice Commissariat obviously doesn’t understand that the New Economic Policy requires new methods of applying punishment of new harshness.’24
Lenin never concealed his belief that the new world could only be built with the aid of physical violence. In March 1922 he wrote to Kamenev: ‘It is the biggest mistake to think that NEP will put an end to the terror. We shall return to the terror, and to economic terror.’25 And indeed there was to be enough terror of every kind. After many decades we Russians condemned it, refusing for shame to answer the question of who had started it and who had made it into a sacred object of revolutionary method. I do not doubt that Lenin wanted earthly happiness for the people, at least for those he called ‘the proletariat’. But he regarded it as normal to build this ‘happiness’ on blood, coercion and the denial of freedom.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin did not appear fully fledged on the scene as the leader of the radical wing of Russian social democracy. At the end of the nineteenth century, when he was not quite thirty, he was merely one among