concession to bourgeois economic interests gave the revolution’s enemies greater power that had to be counteracted by greater political and intellectual control by the party. Lenin remained enthusiastic about the NEP, and did not live to see the complications that ensued in the mid-1920s.
In his last writings, produced during his bouts of convalescence from a series of increasingly severe strokes beginning in May 1922, Lenin laid down a number of guidelines for his successors. These included a cultural revolution to modernize the peasantry (On Co-operation, January 1923) and a modest reorganization of the bureaucracy to get it under control (“Better Fewer but Better,” March 1923, his last article). In his “Testament” (Letter to the Congress, December 1922), Lenin argued that the party should not, in future, antagonize the peasantry. Most controversially, however, he summed up the candidates for succession without clearly supporting any one of them. His criticism of Stalin-that he had accumulated much power and Lenin was not confident that he would use it wisely-was strengthened in January of 1923, after Stalin argued with Krupskaya. Lenin called for Stalin to be removed as General Secretary, a post to which Lenin had only promoted him in 1922. There was no suggestion that Stalin should be removed from the Politburo or Central Committee. In any case, Lenin was too ill to follow through on his suggestions, thereby opening up vast speculation as to whether he might have prevented Stalin from coming to power had he lived longer.
Lenin’s last year was spent at his country residence near Moscow. In the company of Nadezhda Krupskaya and his sisters, he lived out his last months being read to and taken on walks in his wheelchair. In October 1923 he even had enough energy to return for a last look around his Kremlin office, despite the guard’s initial refusal to admit him because he did not have an up-to-date pass. However, his health continued to deteriorate, and he died on the evening of January 21, 1924. See also: BOLSHEVISM; FEBRUARY REVOLUTION; JULY DAYS OF 1917; KORNILOV AFFAIR; KRUPSKAYA, NADEZHDA KONSTANTINOVNA; LENIN’S TESTAMENT; LENIN’S TOMB; NEW ECONOMIC POLICY; OCTOBER MANIFESTO; OCTOBER REVOLUTION; POPULISM; WAR COMMUNISM; WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Carr?re d’Encausse, H?l?ne. (1982). Lenin: Revolution and Power. London: Longman. Claudin-Urondo, Carmen. (1977). Lenin and the Cultural Revolution. Sussex and Totowa, New Jersey: Harvester Press/Humanities Press. Harding, Neil. (1981). Lenin’s Political Thought. 2 vols. London: Macmillan. Harding, Neil. (1991). Leninism. London: Macmillan. Krupskaya, Nadezhda. (1970). Memories of Lenin. London: Panther. Lenin, Vladimir Ilich (1960- 1980) Collected Works. 47 vols. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Lenin, Vladimir Ilich. (1967). Selected Works. 3 vols. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Lewin, Moshe. (1968). Lenin’s Last Struggle. New York: Random House. Pipes, Richard. (1996). The Unknown Lenin. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Read, Christopher. (2003). Lenin: A Revolutionary Life. London: Routledge. Service, Robert. (1994). Lenin: A Political Life. 3 vols. London: Macmillan. Service, Robert. (2000). Lenin: a Biography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shub, David. (1966). Lenin. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Ulam, Adam. (1969). Lenin and the Bolsheviks. London: Fontana/Collins. Volkogonov, Dmitril. (1995). Lenin: Life and Legacy, ed. Harold Shukman. London: Harper Collins. Weber, Gerda, and Weber, Hermann. (1980). Lenin: Life and Work. London: Macmillan. White, James. (2000). Lenin: The Practice and Theory of Revolution. London: Palgrave. Williams, Beryl. (2000). Lenin. London: Harlow Longman.
CHRISTOPHER READ
(1831-1891), social philosopher, literary critic, and novelist.
Konstantin Nikolayevich Leontiev occupied a unique place in the history of nineteenth-century Russian social thought. He was a nationalist and a reactionary whose position differed in significant respects from the thinking of both the Slavophiles and the Pan-Slavists. Some historians refer to Leon-tiev’s social philosophy as Byzantinism.
Leontiev led a varied life, in which he was in turn a surgeon, a diplomat, an editor, a novelist, and a monk. He was raised on a small family estate in the province of Kaluga. After studying medicine at the University of Moscow, he served as a military surgeon during the Crimean War. Following his military service, he returned to Moscow to continue the practice of medicine and to write a series of novels that enjoyed little success. He married a young, illiterate Greek woman in 1861, but continued to engage in a series of love affairs. His wife gradually descended into madness.
In 1863 Leontiev entered the Russian diplomatic service, which led to his assignment to posts in the Balkans and Greece. While serving in that region, he developed an admiration for Byzantine Christianity, which was to remain a dominant theme in his thinking. He was irresistibly attracted to the Byzantine monasticism that he observed during a stay at Mount Athos in 1871 and 1872. Leontiev arrived at the conviction that aesthetic beauty, not happiness, was the supreme value in life. He rejected all humanitarianism and optimism; the notion of human kindness as the essence of Christianity’s social teaching was utterly alien to him. His stance was anomalous in that he lacked strong personal religious faith, yet advocated strict adherence to Eastern Orthodox religion. He believed that the best of Russian culture was rooted in the Orthodox and autocratic heritage of Byzantium, and not the Slavic heritage that Russia shared with Eastern Europeans. He thought that the nations of the Balkans were determined to imitate the bourgeois West. He hoped that despotism and obscurantism could save Russia from the adoption of Western liberalism and constitutionalism, and could give Russia and the Orthodox Christians of the Balkans the opportunity to unite on the basis of their common traditions, drawn from the Byzantine legacy. Leontiev accepted Nikolai Danilevsky’s conception that each civilization develops like an organism, and argued that each civilization necessarily passes through three phases of development, from an initial phase of primary simplicity to a second phase, a golden era of growth and complexity, followed at last by “secondary simplification,” with decay and disintegration. He despised the rationalism, democratization, and egalitarianism of the West of his day, which he saw as a civilization fully in the phase of decline, as evident in the domination of the bourgeoisie, whom he held in contempt for its crassness and mediocrity. He thought it desirable to delay the growth of similar tendencies in Russia, but he concluded, with regret, that Russia’s final phase of dissolution was inevitable, and saw some signs that it had already begun.
Leontiev did not hesitate to endorse harshly repressive, authoritarian rule for Russia in order to stave off the influence of the West and slow the decline as long as possible. He saw Tsarist autocracy and Orthodoxy as the powerful forces protecting tradition in Russian society from the dangerous tendencies toward leveling and anarchy. He glorified extreme social inequality as characteristic of a civilization’s phase of flourishing complexity. Unlike the Slavophiles, Leontiev had little admiration for the Russian peasants, who in his view inclined toward dishonesty, drunkenness, and cruelty, and he repudiated the heritage of the reforms adopted by Alexander II. Toward the end of his life, he became increasingly pessimistic about the possibility of preserving autocracy and aristocracy in Russia.
After leaving the diplomatic service, Leontiev suffered from constant financial stringency, despite finding a position as an assistant editor of a provincial newspaper. His stories about life in Greece did not find a wide audience, although late in his life he did attract a small circle of devoted admirers. In 1891 he took monastic vows and assumed the name of Clement. He died in the Trinity Monastery near Moscow in the same year.
Leontiev was one of the most gifted literary critics of his time, though he was not widely appreciated as a novelist. In Against the Current: Selections from the Novels, Essays, Notes and Letters of Konstantin Leontiev (1969), George Ivask says that in Leontiev’s long novels, “his narration is often capricious, elliptic, impressionistic, and full of lyrical digression depicting the vague moods of his superheroes, who express his own narcissistic ego.” After Leontiev’s death Vladimir Soloviev contributed to the recognition of Leontiev’s erratic
LERMONTOV, MIKHAIL YURIEVICH
brilliance, stimulating a revival of interest in Leon-tiev in the early twentieth century. See also: BYZANTIUM, INFLUENCE OF; DANILEVSKY, NIKOLAI; NATIONALISM IN THE ARTS
Ivask, George, ed. (1969). Against the Current: Selections from the Novels, Essays, Notes and Letters of Konstan-tin Leontiev. New York: Weybright and Talley. Roberts, Spencer, ed. and tr. (1968). Essays in Russian Literature: The Conservative View: Leontiev, Rozanov, Shestov. Athens: Ohio University Press. Thaden, Edward C. (1964). Conservative Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Russia. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
