squeezed out of the tsarist authorities under extreme duress and appeared to promise basic constitutional rights and liberties, Lenin returned to Russia legally on November 21, 1905. Even so, by December 17, police surveillance had driven him underground. He supported the heroic but catastrophically premature workers’ armed uprising in Moscow in December. As conditions worsened he retreated to Finland and then, in December 1907, left the Russian Empire for another prolonged west European sojourn that lasted until April 1917. Even before the failure of the 1905 revolution, the party split continued to attract an inordinate amount of Lenin’s attention. The break with Leon Trotsky in 1906 and Bogdanov in 1908 removed the last significant thinkers from the Bolshevik movement, apart from Lenin himself, who seemed constitutionally incapable of collaborating with people of his own intellectual stature. The break with Bogdanov was consummated in Lenin’s worst book, Materialism and Empiriocriticism (1909), a na?ve and crudely propagandistic blunder into the realm of philosophy.
Politically, Lenin had wandered into the wilderness as leader of a small faction that was situated on the fringe of Russian radical politics and distinguished largely by its dependence on Lenin and its refusal to contemplate a compromise that might reunite the party. Lenin was also distinguished by a ruthless morality of only doing that which was good for the revolution. In its name friendships were broken, and re-made, at a moment’s notice. Later, when in power, he urged occasional episodes of violence and terror to secure the revolution as he understood it, although, like a sensitive war leader, he did so reluctantly and only when he thought it absolutely necessary.
For the next few years Lenin was at his least influential. Had it not been for the backing of the novelist Maxim Gorky, it is unlikely the Bolsheviks could have continued to function. He had close support from Grigory Yevseyevich Zinoviev, Lev Borisovich Kamenev, Inessa Armand (with whom he may have had a brief sexual liaison), and from his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya. He also remained close to his family. When possible, he vacationed with them by the beaches of Brittany and Arca-chon, or in the Swiss mountains. Lenin’s love of nature, of walking and cycling, frequently counteracted the immense nervous stresses occasioned by his political battles. He was prone to a variety of illnesses, which acted as reminders of his father’s early death, convincing him that he had to do things in a hurry. However, the second European exile was characterized by frustration rather than achievement.
FROM OBSCURITY TO POWER (1914-1921)
The onset of the First World War began the transformation of political fortune which was to bring Lenin to power. His attitude to the war was characteristically bold. Despite the collapse of the Second International Socialist Movement and the apparent wave of universal patriotism of August 1914, Lenin saw the war as a revolutionary opportunity and declared, as early as September 1914, that socialists should aim to turn it into a Europe-wide civil war. He believed that the basic class logic of the situation, that the war was fought by the masses to serve the interests of the imperialist bourgeoisie, would eventually become clear to the troops who, being trained in arms, would then turn on their oppressors. He also wrote a major pamphlet, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. A Popular Outline (1916). Returning to the theme of justifying a Marxist revolution in “backward” Russia, he argued that Russia was a component part of world capitalism and therefore the initial assault on capital, though not its decisive battles, could be conducted in Russia. Within months, just such an opportunity arose.
Lenin’s transition from radical outcast to revolutionary leader began after the fall of tsarism in February 1917. A key moment was his declaration,
LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH
in the so-called April Theses, enunciated immediately on his return to Russia (April 16-17, 1917), that the party should not support the provisional government. By accident or design, this was the key to Bolshevik success. As other parties were sucked into supporting the provisional government, they each lost public support. After the Ko-rnilov Affair, when the commander-in-chief, Lavr Kornilov, appeared to be spearheading a counterrevolution in August and September of 1917, it was the Bolsheviks who were the main beneficiaries because they were not tainted by association with the discredited provisional government which, popular opinion believed, was associated with Kornilov’s apparent coup. Even so, it took immense personal effort by Lenin to persuade his party to seize their opportunity. Contrary to much received opinion and Bolshevik myth, the October Revolution was not carefully planned but, rather, improvised. Lenin was in still in hiding in Finland following proscription of the party after the July Days, when armed groups of sailors had failed in an attempt to overthrow the provisional government and the authorities took advantage of the situation to move against the Bolsheviks. He had been vague about details of the proposed revolution throughout the crucial weeks leading up to it, suggesting, at different moments, that it might begin in Moscow, Petrograd, Kronstadt, the Baltic Fleet, or even Helsinki. Only his own emergence from hiding, on October 23rd and 29th and during the seizure of power itself (November 6-7 O.S.) finally brought his party in line behind his policy. The provisional government was overthrown, and Lenin became Chairman of the Soviet of People’s Commissars, a post he held until his death.
October was far from the end of the story. The tragic complexity of the seizure of power soon became apparent. The masses wanted what the slogans of October proclaimed: soviet power, peace, land, bread, and a constituent assembly. Lenin, however, wanted nothing less than the socialist transformation not only of Russia but of the world. Conflict was inevitable. By early 1918, autonomous workers and peasants organizations, including their political parties and the soviets themselves, were losing all authority. Ironically, at this moment one of Lenin’s most libertarian, almost anarchist, writings, State and Revolution, written while he was in Finland, was published. In it he praised direct democracy and argued that capitalism had so organized and routinized the economy that it resembled the workings of the German post office. As a result, he wrote, the transition to socialism would be relatively straightforward.
However, reality was to prove less tractable. Lenin began to talk of “iron discipline” as an essential for future progress, and in The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government (March-April 1918) proclaimed the concept of productionism-the maximization of economic output as the preliminary to building socialism-to be a main goal of the Soviet government. Productionism was an ideological response to Russia’s Marxist paradox, a worker revolution in a “backward” peasant country. Indeed, the weakness of the proletariat was vastly accentuated in the first years of Soviet power, as industry collapsed and major cities lost up to two-thirds of their population through disease, hunger, and flight to the countryside.
Like the events of October, early Soviet policy was also improvised, though within the confines of Bolshevik ideology. Lenin presided over the nationalization of all major economic institutions and enterprises in a crude attempt to replace the market with allocation of key products. He also oversaw the emergence of a new Red Army; the setting up of a new state structure based on Bolshevik-led soviets; and a system of direct appropriation of grain from peasants, as well as the revolutionary transformation of the country. This last entailed the taking over of land by peasants and the disappearance from Soviet territory of the old elites, including the aristocracy, army officers, capitalists, and bankers. To the chaos of the early months of revolution was added extensive protest within the party from its left wing, which saw production-ism and iron discipline as a betrayal of the libertarian principles of 1917. The survival of Lenin’s government looked improbable. However, the outbreak of major civil war in July 1918 gave it a new lease of life, forcing people to choose between imperfect revolution, represented by the Bolsheviks, or out-and-out counter-revolution, represented by the opposition (called the Whites). Most opted for the former but, once the Whites were defeated in 1920, tensions re-emerged and a series of uprisings against the Soviet government took place.
THE FINAL YEARS (1922-1924)
Lenin’s solution to the post-civil war crisis was his last major intervention in politics, because his health began to fail from 1922 onwards, exacerbated by the bullet wounds left after an assassination attempt in August 1918. The key problem in the crisis was peasant disaffection with the grain
appropriation system. Lenin replaced requisitioning by a tax-in-kind, which in turn necessitated the partial restoration of market relations. Nonetheless, the state retained the commanding heights of the economy, including large factories, transport, taxation, and foreign trade. The result was known as the New Economic Policy. It was Lenin’s third attempt at a form of transition. The first, outlined in the April Theses, was based on “Soviet supervision of production and distribution,” a system that had collapsed within the first months of Bolshevik power. The second, later called war communism, was based on iron discipline, state control of the economy, and grain requisitioning. Lenin believed his third solution was the correct one, arrived at through the test of reality. It was accompanied by intellectual and political repression and the imposition of a one-party state on the grounds that
