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Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Revolutionary Leader,
Founder of the Bolshevik State
The immense upheaval created by the First World War had, among its many far-reaching consequences, one which was to reverberate throughout Europe, and in the world beyond, for over seven decades: the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. And at the centre of that earth-shaking event stood Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known to history by the pseudonym he had adopted around 1902: Lenin.
Lenin has a strong claim to be at the forefront, or very close to it, of any parade of makers of Europe's twentieth century. Yet to state the claim raises obvious questions. How far did an event (and its lasting impact) of such magnitude as the Russian Revolution depend upon a single individual? What was Lenin's personal contribution to the establishment, consolidation and lasting impact of Bolshevik rule? After all, he was not even the most dynamic revolutionary driving force in Russia at the time. That was Leon Trotsky, who has been described as 'a revolutionary genius'. And Lenin was dead by the end of January 1924, after just over six years in power, in the last fifteen months or so of which he was largely incapacitated by a series of strokes. What did he do personally to direct the revolutionary reshaping of Russia, and how could he ensure that his policies were carried out in such a vast country - larger than the rest of Europe put together?
Why did Lenin, in any case, turn out to be the leader of the revolution that changed Russian and European history? It was not as if he stood alone in his determination to transform Russia. The disaffection with Tsarist rule and spread of Marxism in the Russian empire from the 1880s onwards had spawned many would-be revolutionaries, some of them significant figures in the numerous subversive political factions and groupings that sprang up. What was special about Lenin? How and why did he emerge to gain acceptance as the dominant revolutionary leader? What personality traits took him to supreme power in the new state and sustained him throughout the savage civil war that followed immediately on the revolution? And in a state whose philosophy elevated the importance of impersonal determinants of history and played down, accordingly, the role of the individual, why did Lenin have such a profound and lasting legacy, inside and outside the Soviet Union? These questions amply indicate that Lenin offers an intriguing case-study in the impact of the individual on history.
Preconditions of Power
Russia in 1917 was ripe for revolution. Massive loss of life in the First World War, mounting demoralization of soldiers at the front, unbearable hardship of the civilian population, and the Tsar's obstinate refusal to contemplate reform equated to a climate of imminent insurrection. Strikes, demonstrations and bread riots accompanied strident demands for peace and growing denunciation of the Tsar. Revolution indeed broke out in February that year. It had nothing to do with Lenin: he was still living in Swiss exile at the time.
In fact, there had already been a short-lived attempted revolution in autumn 1905 as internal disaffection was magnified by the humiliating defeat that year in the Russo-Japanese War. A combination of state oppression and largely cosmetic constitutional concessions towards representative government headed off the worst danger that had faced the regime. The power of the Tsarist autocracy remained intact. The ferment of unrest was, however, only contained, not dispelled.
The reality was that the political system could not be fundamentally changed through gradual reform. Civil society was weak, an independent basis of law non-existent. Violence was commonplace. The property-owning middle class was small, the intelligentsia tiny though disproportionately radicalized under the impact of state oppression and the spread of revolutionary ideas. Beyond a small elite, few people felt that they had any stake in the socio-economic system or the regime that upheld it. Over 80 per cent of the population of the vast and overwhelmingly poor country were peasants, many of them deeply hostile to the state and its officials. Most of them lived in primitive conditions in village communes and were economically dependent on those who owned the land. In the industrial big cities, which had swollen dramatically in size over the preceding two decades, an impoverished, downtrodden proletariat had no legal means of redress for their grievances. Unlike the far larger German industrial working class, which Marxists had seen as the likely fount of revolution, and which by the eve of the First World War was represented by the biggest workers' party in Europe, the urban Russian proletariat had neither a stake in Russian society nor any political means of altering it, short of revolution. This made them available for revolutionary mobilization given the right circumstances.
The First World War provided those circumstances. The disastrous losses - over 2 million dead, around twice as many wounded - and immense hardships of the war created conditions that had not existed in 1905. However deep the disaffection had been then, striking workers and rebellious sectors of the peasantry had not overcome their different interests to produce a coherent and unified revolutionary force. In 1917 the revolutionary potential of the industrial working class at least temporarily joined that of the peasantry. Another difference was of vital importance. In 1905 the military, an essential pivot of the regime, despite some unrest and naval mutiny following the defeat to the Japanese, had remained overwhelmingly loyal to the Tsar. In 1917 the gathering crisis in the Russian army proved unstoppable. Defeatism, desertion and demoralization led to ever more shrill demands for peace, coupled with growing rage against the Tsar and the regime he led, naturally held responsible for the calamity. The extreme disaffection of the front soldiers now allied itself with the revolutionary mood among workers and peasants. This gravely imperilled the Tsarist regime. Another attempt at revolution, as in 1905, was probable at some stage in any event. But without the war as the unifying factor in the drive to destroy the Tsarist regime, it might, as in 1905, once more have proved unsuccessful.
There was another fundamental difference. A successful revolution needs leadership and organization. The 1905 revolution had lacked the leadership that could give it focus and galvanize its disparate rebellious sectors into a single, unstoppable force. And it lacked organization. In 1917 there was Lenin and his small, but ruthlessly committed, tightly knit Bolshevik Party. The confluence between revolutionary uprising and revolutionary leader was far from inevitable. In fact, it depended on an unlikely contingency - beyond Lenin's control - without which the course (and most likely the outcome) of the Russian Revolution would have unquestionably been different. This was the most direct precondition of all.
Only a remarkable stroke of good fortune enabled him to take advantage of the enormous upheaval that followed the uprising in Petrograd in the last week of February 1917, which took him by surprise. Though he expected revolution at some point, as late as January 1917 Lenin thought that he might not live to see it. But when the Tsar was forced to abdicate on 2 March, he knew that the longed-for revolution was a fact. This time, unlike 1905, he had to get back to Russia as soon as possible. In the middle of a European war that was more easily said than done. This is where fortune came to his aid - and, it is not going too far to claim, altered European history.
Had not the German government agreed, via intermediaries, to permit him and around thirty associates to travel from Switzerland to Russia by train, it is hard to see how Lenin would have been in a position to return to revolutionary Petrograd. It was, of course, far from pure chance, and not even an incomprehensible miscalculation, that the Germans agreed to help Lenin. Increasingly under pressure in the war, t hey saw the advantages in promoting revolution in Russia to pave the way for a ceasefire on the eastern front that would allow them to concentrate their efforts in the west. But had they not done so, and had Lenin not returned to Russia that spring, it is doubtful that he would have had the legitimacy among the revolutionaries to take the leadership of the more radical revolution in October. Trotsky, no less, thought the success of that revolution depended on Lenin. But to be on the spot to lead it depended, by a bizarre irony, on the German imperialists he so much detested.
When he returned to Russia in April 1917, Lenin was unknown to the vast majority of Russians. Few Russian workers even knew his name. He had lived for a decade in exile, mainly in western Europe. The Bolshevik Party that he led was fanatical and ruthless, to be sure, but was still little more than a small revolutionary faction without any substantial mass base and a tiny membership of only 23,000 activists at most. In the extraordinary transformation of this hard core into a rapidly expanding party which within months was wielding power in the state, Lenin's single-minded political acuity played a decisive role. Neither the Social Revolutionaries nor the Mensheviks, the two main rival parties to the Bolsheviks in 1917, had a leader to match his organizational brilliance.
Lenin's chances of gaining power did not at first seem high. The February Revolution had toppled the Tsar and led to the formation of a provisional government, whose aim was to lay the foundations for the introduction of widespread social liberties and establish constitutional rule. This rapidly proved illusory. The scale of the political upheaval and revolutionary fervour erased any hope of moving to a stable form of social democracy resting on a legal framework of constitutional government. But this did not mean that the provisional government was from the outset bound to give way to a second - Bolshevik-led - revolution. Moves to end the war would have been popular and could have bought it time. This might have staved off a Bolshevik revolution. Instead, at a time when its authority was visibly waning, the provisional government launched a new, disastrous military offensive, whose failure had the predictable effect of both discrediting itself and pouring oil on the revolutionary fires.
A revolution led by Lenin's Bolshevik Party had, in fact, at first seemed unlikely. Lenin only arrived back in St Petersburg - Petrograd as it was now called - on the night of 3 April. It was the first time he had set foot in his own country for a decade. And within weeks he had left again. In order to avoid arrest he was forced to go into hiding on 6 July and three days later fled in disguise across the border into Finland. It looked as if he might be finished. In fact, he was only just starting.
Personality: Emergence of a Revolutionary Leader
Lenin was unprepossessing in outward appearance. An American journalist, John Reed, who saw him at close quarters during the revolution in 1917, described him as short and stocky, bald, with 'bulging little eyes, a snubbish nose, wide generous mouth, and heavy chin'. He was dressed in shabby clothes - altogether 'unimpressive', wrote Reed, as 'the idol of a mob', but 'a leader purely by virtue of intellect ... with the power of explaining profound ideas in simple terms'. However 'unimpressive' he was in physical appearance, no one who encountered him could overlook him. Nor was there any doubt about his acute intelligence (which he came to ally in his political career with superb political, manipulative and organizational skills). He had astonishing energy and exuded dynamism. He was an electrifying speaker (for those attuned to his wavelength), a gifted polemicist whose sharp mind and aggressive debating style enabled him to triumph in most verbal as well as written disputes, a masterly expositor of Marxist dialectics in his prolific writings. It was not just the quality of his mind. He was immensely strong-willed and sure of himself. His choleric, volatile temperament, intolerance and certainty that he was always right made it difficult for anyone with a more open mind, less dogmatic view, or less assertive manner to fend off his dominance.
He lived for politics. Nothing else mattered much. He was hard to befriend. In fact, he had hardly any genuine friends. Even his later close entourage of associates in the Bolshevik leadership were comrades in a political cause, not personal friends. His small circle of intimates did not stretch much beyond his wife, his sisters and younger brother, and his one-time lover Inessa Armand, who, even after their two-year affair had ended in 1912, stayed close to him until she died in 1920. He was an obsessive individual, punctiliously insistent on pedantic forms of order; even disturbing his neatly arrayed pencils could provoke an outburst of temper. He was ambitious, utterly and determinedly single-minded in pursuit of the intended revolutionary transformation of Russian society. He was intolerant and completely unbending towards Marxist ideologues with rival views, even those whom he had at one time seen as close allies. It could, in fact, practically be guaranteed that at some point or other he would turn against one-time associates and fall out with other Marxist theorists. And towards class enemies - a widely elastic category - he was merciless, openly advocating and welcoming terror to destroy them.
Throughout his life he suffered from ill health. Crippling headaches, insomnia, nervous tension that sometimes took him close to a breakdown, stomach complaints and excessive tiredness (unsurprising, given his punishing work schedule) were recurrent problems that sometimes found release in volcanic explosions of rage. Almost certainly he also developed hypertension and arteriosclerosis, the cause of the severe strokes that would kill him in 1924. Until he took power in Russia in 1917 he was able to recuperate from the pressure that often brought on or exacerbated his bouts of illness through lengthy holidays, during which he enjoyed long walks, swimming and other physical exercise. Relaxation invariably revitalized him. But it was scarcely possible after 1917. It has been plausibly suggested that he sensed he would die early, as his father had done. He had long seen himself as a man of destiny. Perhaps anticipating an early death made him all the more anxious to fulfil his life's work by completing the revolution with all haste.
His background did not at first sight mark him out as a future revolutionary leader. He had been born in 1870 in Simbirsk, a town on the Volga nearly 450 miles to the east of Moscow, to a solidly bourgeois family. The Ulyanovs were a cultured family, interested in literature, art and music. Their household was built on the common middle-class values at the time such as order, hierarchy, obedience. They were not overtly political. They saw themselves as loyal subjects of the Emperor, though favoured liberal, modernizing reforms that would make Russia more like the more enlightened societies of western Europe - a stance which, respected though the Ulyanovs were, was looked on askance by the conservative sectors of the town's upper crust.
Copyright © 2022 by Ian Kershaw. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
