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Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography PDF

564 Pages·2015·4.52 MB·English
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Reconstructing Lenin RECONSTRUCTING LENIN An Intellectual Biography TAMÁS KRAUSZ translated by BÁLINT BETHLENFALVY with MARIO FENYO Copyright © 2015 by Támas Krausz and Monthly Review Press English translation copyright © Eszmélet Foundation All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data available from the publisher ISBN pbk 978-158367-449-9 ISBN cloth 978-158367-450-5 — Monthly Review Press 146 West 29th Street, Suite 6W New York, New York 10001 www.monthlyreview.org 5 4 3 2 1 Images following page 296 reproduced by courtesy of the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) and the Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive at Krasnogorsk (RGAKFD). Complete copyright details may be found on page 435. The publication of this book was made possible by the generous support of the National Cultural Fund of Hungary and by the Foundation for Russian Language and Culture. Contents Preface 1. WHO WAS LENIN? Family Education The Personality of Lenin as a Young Man in Exile and as an Émigré The 1905 Revolution and the Second Emigration In Power 2. RUSSIAN CAPITALISM AND THE REVOLUTION The Challenges at the Turn of the Century Break with Narodism Break with Liberalism The Historical Debate: The Nature of the Autocratic State 3. ORGANIZATION AND REVOLUTION Lenin’s Bolshevism: Politics and Theory Lenin and Bogdanov 4. THE WAR AND THE NATIONAL QUESTION Disintegration and Dialectics Lenin and the Great War The National Question and National Self-Determination—“Two Cultures” 5. THE STATE AND REVOLUTION The State and Revolution: Theoretical Background The Philosophy of the October Revolution: A Critical Appraisal of the Modern State and Parliamentarism Revolution and State: The Functional Alternative 6. DICTATORSHIP AND DEMOCRACY IN PRACTICE The Dissolution of the All-Russia Constituent Assembly Violence and Terror: Causes and Consequences The 1922 Wave of Repression: Ending the Civil War Lenin and the Pogroms 7. WORLD REVOLUTION: METHOD AND MYTH The Origin of the Problem The Peace Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and Patriotism The Polish-Soviet War Messianic Leftism 8. THE THEORY OF SOCIALISM—POSSIBILITY OR UTOPIA? The Conceptual Origins of Socialism From Market Economy to War Communism NEP vs. War Communism—Irreconcilable Contradictions The Nature of Power and Party Dictatorship The Period of Transition—“State Capitalism” Bureaucratic Centralism and the Thermidorian Alternative The Theory of Socialism and Its Systemic Coherencies SUMMARY COMMENTS IN PLACE OF A POSTSCRIPT Chronology of Russian History, 1917–1924 Biographical Sketches List of Photographs and Illustrations Bibliography Notes Index Preface MARX’S FAMOUS THESIS, “The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated,”1 was derived from the contradictions of “modern society.” But it was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin who first gave this thesis the bearings of an applied program and objective. Even seen from a distance of decades, the first conscious historical experiment aimed at realizing a “stateless” society (communism), the Russian Revolution, which eliminated the capitalist system of labor, labor distribution, and social classes, is the lasting achievement of Lenin and his revolutionary associates. At the same time, as founder of the Soviet state, Lenin is inextricably bound up with the seven decades of Soviet history that sprang from this antistate, anticapitalist experiment. Even though, for more than two decades, there have been no large organizations, movements, or political parties in Europe of national or international consequence that are promoting social revolution or either “state” or “stateless” socialism in any form, the disputes about Lenin in political theory and specialized areas of historiography have not abated either in Russia or in the rest of the world. Since 1991 it has been clear that the major, community- oriented, socialist perspectives have faded from political practice globally. In such periods, not only historians but intellectual and political groups engaged in surmounting modern bourgeois society along humanist lines attempt to consider the causes of their marginalization, while taking stock of their traditions. They seek to understand the precedents of these traditions—their sources and their roots, and how thought and praxis changed the course of civilization. In this all-encompassing story, Lenin—along with Plekhanov, Martov, Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, George Lukács, Gramsci, a long list—certainly had a fundamental role that cannot be overlooked, even in the twenty-first century. Nonetheless, we are aware that socialist revolutionaries—people whose actions were directed at laying the foundations of a communal-humanist alternative to capitalism—are not held in any great esteem in modern historiography. The historian can be a typical example of the “servile intellectual.” This gives ample reason to keep a strong hold on objectivity, which any historian will need in order to avoid following the fashionable views of the times and preserve a critical approach. Research into Lenin’s legacy has been pushed to the peripheries of current academic literature, but of course this does not mean that new books and studies about Lenin and his lifework do not appear daily.2 While it is obvious that Lenin’s Marxism was essentially of a political nature, and shaped his political struggles, it also had a grasp on virtually all the definitive problems of his age—problems that are undeniably still being reconsidered, under completely new conditions. These interpretations, however, not only preserve the old misconceptions but add the prejudices of our own times. The problem lies in Lenin himself. His legacy allows for a variety of interpretations because, in reality, a “variety” of Lenins existed, and in spite of the inner unity and coherence of his actions he waged a constant struggle upon and within himself. For instance, the immediate pressures of the movement as he tried to escape the clutches of the secret police in 1917 dictated a stance quite different from the theoretician whose concern was to liberate all of humankind. Still another Lenin stands before us during the civil war, at the peak of power, “submerged” in the terror; and contours of yet another Lenin emerge if we consider his “revolutionary and theoretical legacy” after 1922, with his gaze fixed in the distance as he lies seriously ill. There is room for both the Lenin of autumn 1917, who aimed to sweep all state power off the board (think of The State and Revolution), and the Lenin who came after October 1917, a politician and statesman trying to organize the Soviet state. Nonetheless, to subsume Lenin’s theoretical work under his pragmatic political measures, often dictated by mere necessity, is to commit a serious methodological error. And as we shall see, distortions of this kind can be carried through on the basis of rather different, even contradictory, worldviews. Meanwhile, notwithstanding all of Lenin’s “inner struggles,” there existed a line of intellectual development that holds his lifework together. This book explores “the difference and the unity” between these “various” Lenins. The subject of this book is not unprecedented within the Hungarian field of Lenin research. A publication by Georg Lukács of what he called “an occasional study” on the “unity of Lenin’s thought” came out as early as 1924.3 His 100- page essay is an autonomous philosophical work of extraordinary value, and as such still has its own independent life.4 This book, however, has a different purpose: to reconstruct the history of ideas in Lenin’s thought, his sociological and theoretical views. It may seem that the present historical constellation is not suited for an objective approach to Lenin research, but in fact the opposite is true. No current political topicality, no matter its weight, drives the issue as it pleases through the gates of history—and the historical sciences. On the other hand, there are indeed books that seem to have been written for no “logical reason” since they are so alien to the “spirit of their times”; their subject seems obsolete. Yet in many a case the opposite may turn out to be true at some future time (as in the case of Ervin Szabó, Trotsky, or Bukharin). And if the history of the Lenin phenomenon is given some thought, the timeliness of research on him may become clear. The recent memory of innumerable studies, brochures, and books appearing on Lenin’s life and work during the decades of state socialism still haunts Hungary. The first Hungarian historian to speak about Lenin seriously was Gyula Szekfű. In a memorial speech in January 1948, as Hungarian ambassador to Moscow, he spoke in recognition of Lenin’s significance as a statesman and state builder, and the speech soon appeared in print.5 Lenin’s works were published in an incredible variety of forms and in great volume in the years that followed. During the 1960s, a list of works by Lenin available in Hungarian filled a volume.6 Of course, the universal, “systematized” interpretation of Lenin, the “canonical text,” was a Russian monopoly until 1989. This is an obvious explanation for why a single comprehensive Lenin interpretation was not published in Hungary, unless we count the official Soviet biographies, which were published in all east European languages.7 The Lenin centenary was, in a sense, an event of great consequence. It seemed like a turn of some sort, even from a Hungarian vantage point. The time was, after all, the aftermath of 1968 and the rise of the “new left.” It may be found rather surprising, but in 1970, the one hundredth anniversary of Lenin’s birth, Professor György Ránki held a critical Lenin seminar in the history department of Debrecen University (Hungary) as part of the academic “memorial celebrations,” while his teaching assistant, a young Lajos Menyhárt, addressed the Lenin theme in line with his own main interests. At “literary evenings,” students from the Kossuth Lajos University of Sciences and Eötvös Lóránd University made declarations denouncing the social inequalities of the day with demonstrations of a leftist critique of the prevailing system. For the Hungarian intelligentsia, the “literary” “Lenin” of the Hungarian writer László

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