Lenin; The
Man, The Dictator and The Master of Terror by Victor Sebestyen Vintage
Books, 2017
With respect
to the Man, as presented by Mr.
Sebestyen, Maxim Gorky’s testimony is by far the most interesting. Take for example, the question of Lenin’s attitude
towards the Jews. According to the author Lenin was almost certainly unaware of
his partially Jewish Ancestry though his sister Anna discovered it in
Switzerland, researched the matter extensively after Lenin’s death and even
wrote a paper for the Lenin Institute. “Absolutely not one word of this letter
to anyone’, responded Stalin when she
presented with her work to him. Lenin, however, once told Gorky: “We do not
have many intelligent people. Russians are a talented people but we are lazy. A
bright Russian is nearly always a Jew or a person with an admixture of Jewish
blood.”
Lenin never tried to conceal or fudge his roots, though the Soviets later created the myth that the founder of the world’s first workers state ‘came from the people’ and was from ‘low social origins. To many of those who knew him, his manner and bearing were revealing. Gorky, a convinced socialist who was born into deep poverty and really did come from the people, said that Vladimir Ilyich had the self- belief of a leader, a Russian nobleman not without some of the psychological traits of that class.
Gorky wrote that one evening, when he and Lenin were listening to a sonata by Beethoven, Lenin said “ I know nothing greater than the Appassionata. I always think with pride that marvelous things human beings can do! But I can’t listen to it often. It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid, nice things and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell. And you mustn’t stroke anyone’s head – you might get your hand bitten off. You have to bit them over the head, without any mercy . . .Hm, Hm, our duty is infernally hard . . .’
When in London, partly to help with learning English, Lenin and his wife Nadya went often to the theatre where Lenin became fascinated by the working-class music hall, which reached the height of its popularity in the Edwardian era. ‘It is the expression of a certain satirical attitude towards generally accepted ideas, to turn them inside out, to distort them, to show the arbitrariness of the usual,’ he wrote enthusiastically to Gorky after one performance in which he wrestled with the English sense of humor. ‘It is a little complicated but interesting.’
Gorky often remarked that ‘Lenin loved to laugh . . .and when he laughed it was with his whole body. On occasions he was overcome with laughter and would laugh sometimes until he cried. He could give to his short characteristic “hm, hm’ an infinite number of modifications, from biting sarcasm to noncommittal doubt. Often in his hm, hm one caught the sounds of the keen humor which a sharp-sighted man experiences who sees clearly through the stupidities of life.”
‘Rages’, however, came upon Lenin regularly and ‘seemingly from nowhere’. ‘The Tremendous expenditure of energy demanded by every campaign that Lenin undertook, driving himself and relentlessly urging others onward, wore him out and drained his strength, one comrade in his clique said. ‘The engine of his will refused to work beyond a certain stage of frenzied tension . . .following an attack of his rage his energy would begin to ebb, and a reaction set in: dullness, loss of strength and fatigue which laid him out. He could neither eat nor sleep. Headaches tormented him. His face became sallow, the light died in his eyes . . .in such a state he was unrecognizable . . .then, what was most important, not to see anyone, not to talk to anyone.’ Gorky saw him in one of these fits of distemper and was frightened for him –‘he looked awful . . .even his tongue seemed to have turned grey.’
Lenin never tried to conceal or fudge his roots, though the Soviets later created the myth that the founder of the world’s first workers state ‘came from the people’ and was from ‘low social origins. To many of those who knew him, his manner and bearing were revealing. Gorky, a convinced socialist who was born into deep poverty and really did come from the people, said that Vladimir Ilyich had the self- belief of a leader, a Russian nobleman not without some of the psychological traits of that class.
Gorky wrote that one evening, when he and Lenin were listening to a sonata by Beethoven, Lenin said “ I know nothing greater than the Appassionata. I always think with pride that marvelous things human beings can do! But I can’t listen to it often. It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid, nice things and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell. And you mustn’t stroke anyone’s head – you might get your hand bitten off. You have to bit them over the head, without any mercy . . .Hm, Hm, our duty is infernally hard . . .’
When in London, partly to help with learning English, Lenin and his wife Nadya went often to the theatre where Lenin became fascinated by the working-class music hall, which reached the height of its popularity in the Edwardian era. ‘It is the expression of a certain satirical attitude towards generally accepted ideas, to turn them inside out, to distort them, to show the arbitrariness of the usual,’ he wrote enthusiastically to Gorky after one performance in which he wrestled with the English sense of humor. ‘It is a little complicated but interesting.’
Gorky often remarked that ‘Lenin loved to laugh . . .and when he laughed it was with his whole body. On occasions he was overcome with laughter and would laugh sometimes until he cried. He could give to his short characteristic “hm, hm’ an infinite number of modifications, from biting sarcasm to noncommittal doubt. Often in his hm, hm one caught the sounds of the keen humor which a sharp-sighted man experiences who sees clearly through the stupidities of life.”
‘Rages’, however, came upon Lenin regularly and ‘seemingly from nowhere’. ‘The Tremendous expenditure of energy demanded by every campaign that Lenin undertook, driving himself and relentlessly urging others onward, wore him out and drained his strength, one comrade in his clique said. ‘The engine of his will refused to work beyond a certain stage of frenzied tension . . .following an attack of his rage his energy would begin to ebb, and a reaction set in: dullness, loss of strength and fatigue which laid him out. He could neither eat nor sleep. Headaches tormented him. His face became sallow, the light died in his eyes . . .in such a state he was unrecognizable . . .then, what was most important, not to see anyone, not to talk to anyone.’ Gorky saw him in one of these fits of distemper and was frightened for him –‘he looked awful . . .even his tongue seemed to have turned grey.’
[Doctors who
read the notes of Lenin’ post-mortem and examined his brain after his death
were surprised that he lived as long as he did. Semashko reported ‘sclerosis of
the blood vessels of Lenin’s brain had gone so far that they were calcified.
When struck with a tweezer they sounded like stone. The walls of many blood
vessels were so thickened and the blood vessel as so overgrown that not even a
hair could be inserted into its openings. Thus, whole sections his brain were
deprived of fresh blood.’]
Lenin often criticized ‘comrade doctors’ and generally advised his friends, including many Bolshevik activists, not to trust them. When he heard Gorky was being treated by an erstwhile Party member, he wrote suggesting – not in jest- that he should consult someone else. ‘The news that a Bolshevik is treating you, by a new method, even if he is only a former Bolshevik, upsets me . . . God save you from doctor comrades in general and doctor Bolsheviks in particular. But really in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred doctor comrades are assess . . .I assure you, except in trivial cases, one should only be treated by men of first-class reputation.”
As for literature, Lenin loathed most contemporary Russian writing. He was contemptuous of Alexander Blok but especially the Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, though both had much praise for Lenin and the Communists, and despite their popularity among the workers. He told Gorky that Mayakovsky ‘shouts, invents words, and doesn’t go anywhere . . .its incomprehensible, difficult to reads, disconnected, drivel. Is he talented? Very talented even? Hmmm. We shall see.” He reacted similarly to modern painting and sculpture “Why turn away from real beauty, a discard it for good and all, just because its “old”? Why worship the new as the god to be obeyed, just because it is “new”. That is nonsense, sheer nonsense’ he told an old comrade two years after seizing power. ‘Art belongs to the people. It must have its roots in the broad mass of the workers. It must be understood and loved by them. It must be rooted in and grow with their thoughts and feelings and desires. It must arouse and develop the artist in them. Are we to give cake and sugar to a minority, when the mass of workers and peasant still lack black bread?
At first censorship under the Bolsheviks operated with a light hand but even before his illness, libraries, the institution beloved by Lenin, the places where he had spent so much of his life, came under attack. From the start of 1920 his wife’s job at the Enlightenment Commissariat was to purge ‘unacceptable’ books from Russia’s public libraries ‘’an act of intellectual vampirism’, Gorky called it. She held the job until Lenin died. She performed the task with her customary zeal- and she had his blessing. Works by ninety-four authors including Kant, Descartes, William James, Pyotr Kropotkin and Ernst Mach were removed. ‘’ This tree of unknowledge was planted by Nadezhda Krupskaya under Lenin, with his direction and advice,’ acknowledge the chairman of the Central Libraries Commission later.
On 11 April 1910 Lenin wrote to Gorky from Geneva: “Life in exile and squabbling are inseparable. Living in the midst of these squabble as and scandals, this hell and ugly scum is sickening. To watch it all is sickening, too. Émigré life is now a hundred times worse than it was before 1905.”
The row this time was within Lenin’s own Bolshevik faction- a groupuscule within the group – but Lenin didn’t mind how small his band of followers was as long as he had someone to do his bidding. He saw a potential rival in Alexander Bogdanov, three years younger than he, tall, burly, ‘a gentle giant with a sweet nature, and with a sparklingly original mind’.
Bogdanov had trained as a physician and studied philosophy at Moscow university. He wrote some interesting science fiction. He was drawn to Marxism and joined a radical ‘reading circle’ allied to the RSDLP, which was enough to get him exiled to Siberia for three years. In the Party split of 1903 he joined the Bolsheviks. He started developing new ideas that tried to fuse Marxism with a kind of mystic spiritualism designed to appeal to Christians and other religious people. It regarded manual labor as a religious rite that turned the masses of workers into God-like beings. Lenin thought the theory was utter hocus-pocus, ‘dangerous garbage’, and had to be challenged ‘from a philosophical, a Marxist, point of view. Gorky was interested in Bogdanov’s theories and Lunacharsky, whom Lenin liked and valued, had been converted to Bogdanov’s ‘God-building’ notions. In reality, Bogdanov was never a serious threat to Lenin’s leadership: as a political tactician he was as hopeless, if not more so, than Martov, and though brilliant in his way he was a dilettante, never a plausible leader.
Gorky, had invited Lenin to stay for a few days in April 1908 at his villa in Capri. He told him that Bogdanov, ‘an extremely talented person with a mild character' , would also be there and he wanted the two of them to talk in a relaxed way and discuss their differences, At first he Lenin said he did not have time to go. But when Gorky asked again he grudgingly agreed, though warning his host that ‘listening to that Bogdanovite drivel makes me swear like a fishwife’.
Lenin was given a luxurious room with a magnificent sea view next to Gorky’s splendid library. The writer told friends later that he was appalled by Lenin’s rudest to Bogdanov. ‘Vladimir Ilyich stood before me even more firm and more inflexible than he had been at the London Congress . . .he was rather cold and in a mocking mood, stern in philosophical conversations and altogether on the alert. Gorky wanted to help start a school in Capri that taught Bogdanov’s spiritual/Marxist theories. He hoped Lenin would give lectures there and contribute to a book of essays in new interpretations of Marxism that he wanted to get published. Lenin would have nothing to do with this ‘total philosophical rubbish . . .this religious atheism’. He told Bogdanov and Gorky, ‘Why should we be offered this type of stuff as Marxist philosophy? I’d rather let myself be hanged and quartered than take part in any publication or in any group that preaches this kind of thing.’
Marxism was a ‘materialist’ philosophy and to Lenin religion insulted a rational person’s intelligence. ‘Those who live by the labor of others are taught by religion to practice charity on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters, and selling them at a moderate price to well-being in heaven. Religion is opium for people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of men.’ In a letter o Gorky after his stay on Capri, Lenin wrote: ‘Any religious idea, any idea of any God at all, even any flirtation with a God, is the most inexpressible foulness, a dangerous foulness . . . Isn’t God-building the worst form of self-humiliation? Everyone who sets about building up God, or who even tolerates such activity, humiliates himself in the worst possible way . . .because he is actually engaged in self-contemplation, self admiration. From the point of view not of the individual but of society, all God-building is the fond self-deception of the thick-witted, the philistine, the dreamy self-humiliation of the vulgar bourgeois.
There was no room for compromise with Bogdanov. On the other hand there was plenty of time for relaxation on Capri. He swam and saw the sights. ‘The Blue Grotto is beautiful’, he wrote to his mother, though it is ‘dramatic’ in the sense that it could be scenery in a theater. On the way here I thought about the Volga all the time. The beauty there is of a different kind; it is simpler and dearer to me.’ He played chess with Bogdanov, who once managed to beat him. Gorky said that he took the loss badly and was in a foul mood afterwards. But this is the only record of Lenin being a bad loser at chess. Others said he was a perfect gentleman at the board, win or lose, and was always happy to talk in a friendly way afterwards about the game.
Lenin showed Gorky the other side of his nature. “At the same time there was in Capri another Lenin – a wonderful companion and light-hearted person with a lively and inexhaustible interest in the world around him, and very gentle in his relations with people. He showed a lively interest in everything. Most days he was on the island he would go out with local fishermen. He would quiz them on their lives –how much they were paid, their families, their education, their beliefs. Maria Andreyeva would go with him to the nearby harbor and act as his interpreter. In this way Lenin possessed the common touch and became friendly with two elderly brothers, Giovanni and Francesco Sparado, who taught him how to fish without a rod, by using his finger and thumb along the line to feel if a fish had taken the bait. ‘Cosi, drin drin,’ they would say, ‘Like this, Understand? When after a few attempts he landed a mullet he laughed and continuously used the phrase ‘drin drin’ for six days. The name seemed to stick and locals on the island referred to him as ‘Signor Drin Drin’.
Gorky returned with Lenin to the mainland and together they climbed Vesuvius and visited Pompeii. Despite the author’s efforts, though, he could not persuade Lenin to tone down his invective against Bogdanov. He spent the best part of thye next year writing a long book, Materialsm and Empirio-Criticism, lambasting Bogdanov and mounting a campaign to ge him expelled from the Social Democratic Party.
Lenin wasn’t interested in the trappings of power. He disliked ostentatious display and lived modestly with Nadya in dull, bourgeois style in contrast to the others about whom Gorky wrote to his wife shortly after the Revolution: ‘Only the commissars lead a pleasant life these days. They steal as much as they can from the ordinary people to pay for their courtesans and their un-socialist luxuries’. Gorky once said that simplicity, in such a dictatorial man, was an example of Lenin’s ‘narcissism’. Martov thought likewise, though at the same time he often said ‘there was no vanity in Lenin – a paradox apparent in few powerful men.
Vladimir Lenin was brilliant at explaining his ideas in simplified, direct ways. Never a man of the people himself, he learned how to speak effectively to an audience using the force of his intellect. Gorky often heard him speak but never forgot the first time. ‘His guttural “r” made him seem a poor speaker, but within a minute I was completely engrossed as everyone else. I had never known anyone who could talk of the most intricate political questions simply . . .no striving after eloquent phrases, but every word uttered distinctly and its meaning marvelously clear. I had not imagined him that way. I felt there was something missing in him . . .he was too plain. There was nothing of ‘the leader’ in him. But, with his arm extended, hand slightly raised, and he seemed to weigh every word with it, and to sift out the remarks of his opponents . . .The unity, completeness, directness and strength of his speech, his whole appearance, was a veritable work of classic art; everything was there and yet there was nothing superfluous, and if there were any embellishments, they were not noticed as such, but were as natural and inevitable as two eyes in a face, or five fingers on a hand.”
Lenin often criticized ‘comrade doctors’ and generally advised his friends, including many Bolshevik activists, not to trust them. When he heard Gorky was being treated by an erstwhile Party member, he wrote suggesting – not in jest- that he should consult someone else. ‘The news that a Bolshevik is treating you, by a new method, even if he is only a former Bolshevik, upsets me . . . God save you from doctor comrades in general and doctor Bolsheviks in particular. But really in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred doctor comrades are assess . . .I assure you, except in trivial cases, one should only be treated by men of first-class reputation.”
As for literature, Lenin loathed most contemporary Russian writing. He was contemptuous of Alexander Blok but especially the Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, though both had much praise for Lenin and the Communists, and despite their popularity among the workers. He told Gorky that Mayakovsky ‘shouts, invents words, and doesn’t go anywhere . . .its incomprehensible, difficult to reads, disconnected, drivel. Is he talented? Very talented even? Hmmm. We shall see.” He reacted similarly to modern painting and sculpture “Why turn away from real beauty, a discard it for good and all, just because its “old”? Why worship the new as the god to be obeyed, just because it is “new”. That is nonsense, sheer nonsense’ he told an old comrade two years after seizing power. ‘Art belongs to the people. It must have its roots in the broad mass of the workers. It must be understood and loved by them. It must be rooted in and grow with their thoughts and feelings and desires. It must arouse and develop the artist in them. Are we to give cake and sugar to a minority, when the mass of workers and peasant still lack black bread?
At first censorship under the Bolsheviks operated with a light hand but even before his illness, libraries, the institution beloved by Lenin, the places where he had spent so much of his life, came under attack. From the start of 1920 his wife’s job at the Enlightenment Commissariat was to purge ‘unacceptable’ books from Russia’s public libraries ‘’an act of intellectual vampirism’, Gorky called it. She held the job until Lenin died. She performed the task with her customary zeal- and she had his blessing. Works by ninety-four authors including Kant, Descartes, William James, Pyotr Kropotkin and Ernst Mach were removed. ‘’ This tree of unknowledge was planted by Nadezhda Krupskaya under Lenin, with his direction and advice,’ acknowledge the chairman of the Central Libraries Commission later.
On 11 April 1910 Lenin wrote to Gorky from Geneva: “Life in exile and squabbling are inseparable. Living in the midst of these squabble as and scandals, this hell and ugly scum is sickening. To watch it all is sickening, too. Émigré life is now a hundred times worse than it was before 1905.”
The row this time was within Lenin’s own Bolshevik faction- a groupuscule within the group – but Lenin didn’t mind how small his band of followers was as long as he had someone to do his bidding. He saw a potential rival in Alexander Bogdanov, three years younger than he, tall, burly, ‘a gentle giant with a sweet nature, and with a sparklingly original mind’.
Bogdanov had trained as a physician and studied philosophy at Moscow university. He wrote some interesting science fiction. He was drawn to Marxism and joined a radical ‘reading circle’ allied to the RSDLP, which was enough to get him exiled to Siberia for three years. In the Party split of 1903 he joined the Bolsheviks. He started developing new ideas that tried to fuse Marxism with a kind of mystic spiritualism designed to appeal to Christians and other religious people. It regarded manual labor as a religious rite that turned the masses of workers into God-like beings. Lenin thought the theory was utter hocus-pocus, ‘dangerous garbage’, and had to be challenged ‘from a philosophical, a Marxist, point of view. Gorky was interested in Bogdanov’s theories and Lunacharsky, whom Lenin liked and valued, had been converted to Bogdanov’s ‘God-building’ notions. In reality, Bogdanov was never a serious threat to Lenin’s leadership: as a political tactician he was as hopeless, if not more so, than Martov, and though brilliant in his way he was a dilettante, never a plausible leader.
Gorky, had invited Lenin to stay for a few days in April 1908 at his villa in Capri. He told him that Bogdanov, ‘an extremely talented person with a mild character' , would also be there and he wanted the two of them to talk in a relaxed way and discuss their differences, At first he Lenin said he did not have time to go. But when Gorky asked again he grudgingly agreed, though warning his host that ‘listening to that Bogdanovite drivel makes me swear like a fishwife’.
Lenin was given a luxurious room with a magnificent sea view next to Gorky’s splendid library. The writer told friends later that he was appalled by Lenin’s rudest to Bogdanov. ‘Vladimir Ilyich stood before me even more firm and more inflexible than he had been at the London Congress . . .he was rather cold and in a mocking mood, stern in philosophical conversations and altogether on the alert. Gorky wanted to help start a school in Capri that taught Bogdanov’s spiritual/Marxist theories. He hoped Lenin would give lectures there and contribute to a book of essays in new interpretations of Marxism that he wanted to get published. Lenin would have nothing to do with this ‘total philosophical rubbish . . .this religious atheism’. He told Bogdanov and Gorky, ‘Why should we be offered this type of stuff as Marxist philosophy? I’d rather let myself be hanged and quartered than take part in any publication or in any group that preaches this kind of thing.’
Marxism was a ‘materialist’ philosophy and to Lenin religion insulted a rational person’s intelligence. ‘Those who live by the labor of others are taught by religion to practice charity on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters, and selling them at a moderate price to well-being in heaven. Religion is opium for people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of men.’ In a letter o Gorky after his stay on Capri, Lenin wrote: ‘Any religious idea, any idea of any God at all, even any flirtation with a God, is the most inexpressible foulness, a dangerous foulness . . . Isn’t God-building the worst form of self-humiliation? Everyone who sets about building up God, or who even tolerates such activity, humiliates himself in the worst possible way . . .because he is actually engaged in self-contemplation, self admiration. From the point of view not of the individual but of society, all God-building is the fond self-deception of the thick-witted, the philistine, the dreamy self-humiliation of the vulgar bourgeois.
There was no room for compromise with Bogdanov. On the other hand there was plenty of time for relaxation on Capri. He swam and saw the sights. ‘The Blue Grotto is beautiful’, he wrote to his mother, though it is ‘dramatic’ in the sense that it could be scenery in a theater. On the way here I thought about the Volga all the time. The beauty there is of a different kind; it is simpler and dearer to me.’ He played chess with Bogdanov, who once managed to beat him. Gorky said that he took the loss badly and was in a foul mood afterwards. But this is the only record of Lenin being a bad loser at chess. Others said he was a perfect gentleman at the board, win or lose, and was always happy to talk in a friendly way afterwards about the game.
Lenin showed Gorky the other side of his nature. “At the same time there was in Capri another Lenin – a wonderful companion and light-hearted person with a lively and inexhaustible interest in the world around him, and very gentle in his relations with people. He showed a lively interest in everything. Most days he was on the island he would go out with local fishermen. He would quiz them on their lives –how much they were paid, their families, their education, their beliefs. Maria Andreyeva would go with him to the nearby harbor and act as his interpreter. In this way Lenin possessed the common touch and became friendly with two elderly brothers, Giovanni and Francesco Sparado, who taught him how to fish without a rod, by using his finger and thumb along the line to feel if a fish had taken the bait. ‘Cosi, drin drin,’ they would say, ‘Like this, Understand? When after a few attempts he landed a mullet he laughed and continuously used the phrase ‘drin drin’ for six days. The name seemed to stick and locals on the island referred to him as ‘Signor Drin Drin’.
Gorky returned with Lenin to the mainland and together they climbed Vesuvius and visited Pompeii. Despite the author’s efforts, though, he could not persuade Lenin to tone down his invective against Bogdanov. He spent the best part of thye next year writing a long book, Materialsm and Empirio-Criticism, lambasting Bogdanov and mounting a campaign to ge him expelled from the Social Democratic Party.
Lenin wasn’t interested in the trappings of power. He disliked ostentatious display and lived modestly with Nadya in dull, bourgeois style in contrast to the others about whom Gorky wrote to his wife shortly after the Revolution: ‘Only the commissars lead a pleasant life these days. They steal as much as they can from the ordinary people to pay for their courtesans and their un-socialist luxuries’. Gorky once said that simplicity, in such a dictatorial man, was an example of Lenin’s ‘narcissism’. Martov thought likewise, though at the same time he often said ‘there was no vanity in Lenin – a paradox apparent in few powerful men.
Vladimir Lenin was brilliant at explaining his ideas in simplified, direct ways. Never a man of the people himself, he learned how to speak effectively to an audience using the force of his intellect. Gorky often heard him speak but never forgot the first time. ‘His guttural “r” made him seem a poor speaker, but within a minute I was completely engrossed as everyone else. I had never known anyone who could talk of the most intricate political questions simply . . .no striving after eloquent phrases, but every word uttered distinctly and its meaning marvelously clear. I had not imagined him that way. I felt there was something missing in him . . .he was too plain. There was nothing of ‘the leader’ in him. But, with his arm extended, hand slightly raised, and he seemed to weigh every word with it, and to sift out the remarks of his opponents . . .The unity, completeness, directness and strength of his speech, his whole appearance, was a veritable work of classic art; everything was there and yet there was nothing superfluous, and if there were any embellishments, they were not noticed as such, but were as natural and inevitable as two eyes in a face, or five fingers on a hand.”
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