read his work. More often than not, and on every continent, Lenin was misinterpreted and misused for instrumentalist purposes by his own side: parties and sects large and tiny who claimed his mantle.
The Lenin cult, which he loathed even in its most incipient form, was a disaster for his thought. His texts, never intended or written as a catechism, were mummified, making it difficult to understand his political formation. This phenomenon must be situated at the confluence of two historical processes. Lenin was a product of Russian history and the European labour movement. Both posed questions of class and party, of agency and instrument. The synthesis developed by Lenin was thus determined by the intermingling of two very different currents that can be characterised, broadly speaking, as anarchism and Marxism. He played a crucial role in the triumph of the latter.
That is why, before moving on to discuss some specific problems confronted by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, I will explain at length the history and prehistory of both currents. Without this excavation, it’s not easy to understand the dilemmas that confronted Lenin.
It takes imagination to misread Lenin and Trotsky or present them as liberals underneath the mask. Whatever one might think of them, the lucidity of their prose leaves little room for political misinterpretation. As Perry Anderson has recently reminded us, the fate of Gramsci, the third major thinker produced by the Communist tradition of the Third International, has been somewhat different and for specific reasons relating to his imprisonment by the Italian fascists.1
First things first. Without Lenin there would have been no socialist revolution in 1917. Of this much we can be certain. Fresh studies of the events have only hardened this opinion. The faction and later the party that he painstakingly created from 1903 onward was simply not up to the task of fomenting revolution during the crucial months between February and October 1917, the freest period ever in Russian history. A large majority of its leadership, before Lenin’s return, was prepared to compromise on many key issues. The lesson here is that even a political party – specifically trained and educated for the single purpose of producing a revolution – can stumble, falter and fall at the critical moment.
This is where the Bolsheviks as a party were headed strategically and tactically before April 1917. No party can ever be right all the time. Nor can a political leader, not even one with the most exceptional qualities and strength of will. In this particular case, however, Lenin understood that if the moment were not seized, reaction would triumph once again. Events favoured him. He dragged a reluctant party leadership behind him by winning the support of grassroots Bolsheviks and, more importantly, soldiers completely alienated from the war. For the latter it was the slogans from frontline Bolshevik agitators that articulated what they themselves were thinking and whispering to each other in the trenches or as they participated in mass desertions. History handed Lenin a gift in the shape of the First World War. He grasped it with both hands and used it to craft an insurrection. It is revolutions that make history happen. Liberals of every sort, with rare exceptions, are found on the other side.2
The First World War was Lenin’s initial dilemma. The person he admired the most and regarded as his mentor was the German socialist Karl Kautsky. It was the latter’s capitulation to the war fever in Germany that shook Lenin. He had thought that an understanding of Marx was sufficient inoculation against most intellectual plagues, especially that of enthusiasm for imperialist wars. He solved the problem by an angry public break with the German Socialist Party, agreeing with Rosa Luxemburg’s definition of it as ‘a stinking corpse’. This, alas, turned out not to be the case. This ‘corpse’ weighs heavily on German workers to this day.
The next dilemma he was to confront concerned the path to revolution. After February 1917 this was not an abstract question. Lenin opted for a socialist revolution, creating mayhem inside his own party. At one point he denounced the old Bolsheviks as ‘conservatives’ mired in a centrist marsh. He won them back only after they had realised that the Petrograd workers were politically ahead of them.
There have been long debates on the role of individuals in history. The eighteenth-century view that history was made by conscious individuals faced a strong challenge in the century that followed, and from many eminent pre-Marxist historians for whom no serious discussion of history was possible without analysing social and economic conditions. The view that social and material forces create the conditions in which individuals are transformed and act in a way that would be impossible in different circumstances was systematised by Marx and Engels and generally accepted for most of the twentieth century. This applies to individuals of all kinds: Napoleon and Bismarck as well as Lenin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro.
Had the English Revolution been delayed, Oliver Cromwell and his family would have crossed the Atlantic and settled in the dissenter stronghold of New England. Had the French Revolution not occurred, Bonaparte would have left France as he was planning to do and sought employment in the Russian Imperial Army. As Kropotkin wrote in his classic history of the French Revolution, a book that became part of the common heritage of the Russian revolutionary movement, context determined all:
That is why the French Revolution, like the English Revolution of the preceding century, happened at the moment when the middle classes, having drunk deep at the sources of current philosophy, became conscious of their rights, and conceived a new scheme of political organisation. Strong in their knowledge and eager for the task, they felt themselves quite capable of seizing the government by snatching it from a palace aristocracy which, by its incapacity, frivolity and debauchery, was bringing the kingdom to utter ruin. But the middle and educated classes could not have done anything alone, if, consequent on a complete chain of circumstances, the mass of the peasants had not also been stirred, and, by a series of constant insurrections lasting for four years, given to the dissatisfied among the middle classes the possibility of combating both King and Court, of upsetting old institutions and changing the political constitution of the kingdom.
Without the First World War and February 1917, Lenin would have died in exile, one of the many Russian revolutionaries destined to miss the fall of the autocracy. Trotsky could easily have become a Russian novelist in the classic tradition. Even when conditions favour revolutionary upheavals, however, there are rarely organisations capable of taking advantage of them. Failed insurrections, uprisings and revolutions litter the history of our world. Why did Spartacus lose? Why did Toussaint Louverture win? Each answer is embedded in the history of the epochs in which they lived. Likewise, Lenin.
It was the Iron Chancellor in newly created Germany who insisted on underplaying his own role, arguing the intelligent conservative position in an address to the North German Reichstag in 1869:
Gentlemen, we can neither ignore the history of the past nor create the future. I would like to warn you against the mistake that causes people to advance the hands of their clocks, thinking that thereby they are hastening the passage of time. My influence on the events I took advantage of is usually exaggerated; but it would never occur to anyone to demand that I should make history. I could not do that even in conjunction with you, although together, we could resist the whole world. We cannot make history: we must wait while it is being made. We will not make fruit ripen more quickly by subjecting it to the heat of a lamp; and if we pluck the fruit before it is ripe we will only prevent its growth and spoil it.
Bismarck’s heirs or, to be more precise, German artillery fire prematurely ripened the fruit in Russia. Lenin was confident that once the fruit trees of Germany and Russia had been grafted together, the rest of the continent, with the exception of Britain, would be rotten-ripe for revolution. Whatever else, he was not shy of making history, of compressing the experience of a decade into a single day. Events did not unfold quite as he had expected in the rest of Europe, but for contingent reasons rather than objective conditions.
This book is a contextualisation without which the history of the Russian Revolution is incomprehensible.
For instance, the terrorist phase of the nineteenth century,
