Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography

564 Pages·2015·4.52 MB·English

by  Tamás Krausz

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