age, no less than the social and economic changes, bear little relationship to anything that went before in Russian history-not even to the garrison atmosphere and fierce proletarian emphases of the Civil War period. Proletarian origins and Marxist convictions were losing all importance. Indeed, the Marxist intellectuals who had played a key part in refining Communist ideology and building the new Soviet state became increasingly prime victims in the new purges of the thirties, and fanatical proletarian advocates of Revolutionary egalitarianism were denounced as 'levelers' and left deviationists. There was no serious threat to the Soviet state in the late twenties; and by 1930 the depression in the West had made the danger of 'capitalist encirclement' even more remote and contrived. The purpose of this 'second revolution' was-as Stalin made clear in a famous speech in 1931-to create a 'new Soviet intelligentsia'17 dedicated to acquiring the technological skills needed for Soviet construction. The demand for a new intelligentsia required the destruction, or drastic remaking, of the old, including those whose emotional dedication to radical humanism might also stand in the way of building the new authoritarian state. Technological skill alone was not enough. Rigid obedience to party leaders was required. As Stalin put it bluntly in 1935: 'Cadres decide everything,'18 and the ideal cadre is the tempered, 'cast-iron' servant of the dictator. To understand how such a drastic conclusion was reached one must look back to the legacy left by Vladimir IFich Lenin, the founder and patron saint of Bolshevism, the man in whose name Stalin tightened his totalitarian grip on all of Russian society. One must consider as well the relationship which both Lenin and Stalin bear to the complex cultural heritage of the land they ruled.
The Leninist Legacy
At first glance, the powerful and arresting figure of Lenin seems to be only a particularly intense example of the alienated Russian intellectual of the nineteenth century. Born and educated in the Volga region, classic center of Russian revolutionary sentiment, brought up as a member of the petty, provincial nobility in a bookish home where he was closer to his mother than his father, Lenin was an educated and qualified lawyer, but never really had any other profession than that of an illegal publicist turned revolutionary. One is tempted to see in Lenin's sudden vault to power the vindication of the intelligentsia's long-frustrated hopes for a new order in which they would play a key part.
Yet Lenin was different from almost all his intellectual predecessors in nineteenth-century Russia; and it was his profound alienation from the dominant intellectual trends of the late imperial period which enabled him to appear as the bearer of a genuinely new order of things.
First of all, Lenin was uniquely single-minded in an age of diffusion. In the midst of the soaring visionaries, Lenin focused his attention, op QJ1' all-consuming objective that had not traditionally been uppermost in the thinking of the intelligentsia: the attainment of power. His dedication to this objective enabled him to establish a puritanical discipline over his own emotions and those of his associates. By never giving himself over to the enervating enthusiasms of the late imperial period, he avoided its unsettling alternations between Promethean optimism and morbid sensualism. He was able to capitalize on the sense of expectation generated by the intelligentsia without becoming involved in the ebb and flow of its inner feelings.
Sentiment of all sorts was suppressed in Lenin, whose icy and ascetic manner sets him off strikingly from the traditional loose camaraderie of the intelligentsia and its conviction that feelings were inextricable parts of the thought process. His beloved mother was German, and most of his foreign travel was in Northern Europe: the advanced areas of industrialization and urbanization. Southern Europe with its sunlight, wine, and song played- with one exception-little role in his bleak life.19 Even before he turned to Marxism in the early nineties, Lenin seems to have acquired a hatred for the vagueness, sentimentality, and-above all-futility of the aristocratic intelligentsia. He was embittered by the execution of his elder brother, a revolutionist, in 1887, and soon acquainted himself with revolutionary circles in Kazan. He introduced himself to his future wife, the stolid revolutionary Nadezhda Krupskaia, in 1894, as the younger brother of the
martyred revolutionary, and identified himself in this fashion in a short autobiographical sketch. There are few traces of tenderness in his childless, ideological marriage.30
Lenin's vituperation provides a striking contrast with the accustomed form of discourse even among revolutionary intellectuals. There is some precedent in Marx for his language of denunciation. But his acerbic style and constant imputation of deformity to his opponents often seems closer to the rough-hewn fanaticism of peasant insurrectionists, schismatics, and sectarians-all of whom flourished in the Simbirsk-Samara-Kazan regions of Lenin's youth. His style seems more a throwback to the powerful intermixture of prophecy and epithet in Ivan the Terrible and Avvakum than a continuation of the traditional debates of the nineteenth century.
When earlier revolutionary leaders spoke of 'them and us,' they were contrasting power with truth, the ruling bureaucracy with the rulers in the world of ideas. For Lenin, however, 'purity of ideas' was equated with 'impotence.'21 Potency requires power, which in turn, demands not truth, 'but a true slogan 01 the struggle.'22 Morality was not to be based Qn 'idealistic' standards or inner feelings, but on the ever-changing dictates of revolutionary expediency. Thus, Lenin was not fundamentally concerned witli truth (pravda) in either of its two meanings of scientific fact (pravda-istind) or moral priaciple, (pravda-spravedlivosf). Pravda became, instead, the title of his newspaper, with its daily directives for action. 'Cursed questions' were replaced by cursory commands.
These commands were binding because of a second basic and novel feature of Lenin's teaching: his emphasis on organization. The tradition of secret, disciplined, hierarchical organization had never struck deep roots in the Russian revolutionary tradition-though there was a substantial theoretical literature of Jacobin proposals from such figures as Pestel, Ogarev, Nechaev, and Tkachev. Even the full-time revolutionaries within the People's Will were undisciplined, politically naive, and visionary-their most professional members being members not of an organization but of a 'disorganization group.' Lenin's new conception was partly dictated by the techniques needed for self- protection against the vastly improved methods of police espionage and enforcement; in part also it followed from the re-examination of revolutionary methods that had gone on steadily since the failure of the People's Will. Increasingly, the idea of consolidation under a more military type of organization had been mooted. The term 'cadre,' which became such a key concept in Bolshevik organizational thinking, was introduced in the late eighties, along with the idea of the manipulative use of 'front' groups.23 The leading theoretician of refurbished revolutionary populism, Victor Chernov, head of the new Social Revolutionary Party, also
insisted in 1901 that unity would have to be superimposed on the revolutionary movement so that 'we will not have social democrats and social revolutionaries, but one indivisible party.'24
Lenin's final formula for organizational discipline was that of 'democratic centralism,' whereby decisions were reached on the basis of free discussion among party members, moving from the bottom to the top. Ultimate decisions were reached in the central committee of the party, of which the first secretary was the absolute center. Once made, a decision became totally binding. Such a system logically lent itself to the 'substitutism' foreseen from the very beginning by Trotsky, whereby 'the party organization supersedes the party as a whole; then the central committee supersedes the organization; and finally a single dictator supplants the central committee.'25
Elaborating Marx's theory of a coming dictatorship of the proletariat, Lenin insisted that such a form of rule would emerge only after the total destruction of the bourgeois state machine; that the dictatorship would then 'wither away' with the imminent transformation to full communism;26 but that it would, in the interim, exert power 'that is unrestricted by any laws.'27
What Lenin actually brought to Russia was the dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party: his own 'party of a new type' which, once in power, was renamed 'Communist' to set it off from the more familiar European label of
