The Unknown Lenin
Pipes, Richard
The Rat in the Hat The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive Edited by Richard Pipes Yale University Press 204 pages / $27.50 REVIEWED BY Joseph Shattan he Unknown Lenin is a misleading...
...72 January 1997 • The American Spectator...
...If I had met Lenin without knowing who he was," wrote Bertrand Russell in 192o, shortly after interviewing the monster, "I should not have guessed that he was a great man, but I should have thought of him as an opinionated professor...
...Most revealing, perhaps, is Lenin's famous and oft-quoted statement to the Russian novelist Maxim Gorky...
...Lenin also urged the Red Army to use the 1922 famine that devastated the Ukraine to destroy the power of the clergy: It is precisely now and only now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy, not stopping [short of] crushing any resistance...The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing for this reason, the better...
...These quotes—selected almost at random from Nathan Leites's 1953 A Study of Bolshevism—appear in Lenin's published works, as do his defense of mass tenor and his call on the working class to convert the First World War (whose outbreak he welcomed) from an "imperialist" war into a civil war...
...Those who still idealize Lenin and contrast him unfavorably with Stalin," writes Pipes, "will find little comfort in the Lenin documents which are now coming to light...
...For that matter, he is exactly the same Lenin who speaks to us through his published works—such monuments to tedium as What Is to Be Done?, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder, and Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism...
...For one thing, they demonstrate that Soviet foreign policy was aggressive and subversive from the JOSEPH SHATTAN is consulting editor of The American Spectator...
...As Pipes dryly notes in his introduction, "It was apparently thought unseemly for the godlike leader of the world revolution to indulge in extramarital love...
...In 1907, well along in his career as a professional revolutionary, he wrote, "He who is afraid of dirtying his hands should not be politically active...
...As the director of the Central Party Archive, G.L...
...In 1892, when he was only 22 96 years old, he tried to dissuade friends from The American Spectator • January 1997 71 collecting money for famine relief by arguing that hunger "performs a progressive function" by causing "the peasants to reflect on the fundamental facts of capitalist society...
...The Unpublished Lenin would have been better, or at least more accurate: the man who emerges from these hitherto secret documents is the same murderous, dogmatic, nihilist we have gotten to know through the writings of Solzhenitsyn, Dmitri Volkogonov, Adam Ulam, Bertram Wolfe, and Richard Pipes himself, editor of the present volume...
...You have to hit them on the head, without any mercy, although our ideal is not to use force against anyone...
...They were listening to Beethoven's Appassionata when Lenin turned to Gorky and (as Gorky recorded) exclaimed: I know nothing that is greater than the Appassionata...
...He was ready to kill his opponents, and he knew what to expect if he lost...
...In the world of turn-of-the-century European socialism, no one was more radical than "Red Rosa," yet she was also one of Lenin's fiercest critics, accusing him of trying to replace czarist absolutism with the dictatorship of "His Excellency the Central Committee of the Social Democratic Party of Russia...
...A 1918 peasant revolt leads Lenin to demand, "The uprising of the five kulak districts should be mercilessly suppressed...
...Not all revolutionaries in Lenin's day endorsed the use of terror, and his former colleagues in the Russian Social Democratic Party, the Western-oriented Mensheviks, broke with Lenin over this question...
...1 versely, "cold warriors" who made the politically unfashionable argument that Stalin was Lenin's legitimate heir will find themselves, as usual, totally vindicated...
...Martov's misgivings about Lenin were fully shared by Rosa Luxemburg, whosimultaneously belonged to the Polish and German socialist parties...
...In the West, students of Soviet history have long been awarethat Lenin had a mistress, the Paris-born, twice-married advocate of "free love," Inessa Teodorovna Armand, but in the Soviet Union this was forbidden knowledge...
...And now you mustn't stroke anyone's head—you might get your hand bitten off...
...I'd like to listen to it every day...
...It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid nice things and stroke the heads of people who would create such beauty while living in this vile hell...
...Genovese argued that Lenin was a revolutionary, and revolutionaries must be brutal: "[Lenin] was not some campus windbag who, with clenched fist raised, engages in legal acts secure in the knowledge that, if the seizure of a building does not lead to the overthrow of the hated establishment, he can expect no few media concessions and media tributes to his `courage' and his `idealism.' Lenin played va banque...
...Lenin's opinions have long since been discredited, but the man himself continues to enjoy a certain following among the more backward elements of the leftist professoriate...
...Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers...Do it in such a way that for hundreds of versts around, the people will see, tremble, know, shout: they are strangling and will strangle to death the bloodsucker kulaks...
...Smirnov, put it in a letter to the Deputy General Secretary of the Central Committee, back in the days when the Soviet Union was still a going concern, "There are documents the contents of which can only be interpreted as encouraging violence against sovereign states—India, Korea, Afghanistan, England, Persia, Turkey, etc...
...But what Luxemburg understood even before the Russian Revolution of 1917, and what historians like Robert Conquest, Tibor Szamuely and Richard Pipes have pointed out long afterwards, is that Lenin belonged to a distinctive Russian political tradition that encouraged brutality among opponents, as well as supporters, of the status quo...
...There are several reasons why Soviet authorities would have kept the documents contained in The Unknown Lenin —122 memos and letters by, to, and about the "great leader" — under lock and key...
...Con-44 Lenin belonged to a distinctive Russian political tradition that encouraged brutality...
...Lenin was a revolutionary...
...But not, one hastens to add, any good ones...
...Soviet subjects for seventy years had been hearing that India, Korea, Afghanistan, England, Persia, Turkey, etc...
...Now the terrible secret is out: Lenin's never-before published letters to Armand reveal that he had some human attributes, after all...
...Unlike Luxemburg, most of Lenin's comrades in the Second International considered him an insignificant sectarian with about as much chance of coming to power as Louis Farrakhan has of establishing an Islamic government in America today...
...Brutality was always Lenin's forte...
...Luxemburg proved her revolutionary bona fides in 1919, when she led an ill-fated insurrection in Berlin and was brutally murdered...
...Menshevik leader Yuli Martov helped found the "2 1/2" International (poised between the Socialist Second and the Communist Third), whose slogan was "For dictatorship of the proletariat, but without terror...
...Men combined with the Western political tradition, with its emphasis on democracy and the rule of law, the Marxism that Luxemburg and Lenin both espoused proved relatively innocuous, culminating in nothing more sinister than the cradle-to-grave welfare states of Western Europe...
...The Unknown Lenin may not be able to destroy that following, but at least it will deprive Lenin's defenders of whatever shreds of intellectual respectability they still enjoy...
...But Genovese's syllogism—all revolutionaries are killers...
...Hard or not, Lenin performed his "duty" with such admirable thoroughness that Vyacheslav Molotov, who also served Stalin, unhesitatingly declared that Lenin was the "harsher" of his two masters...
...Hm, hm, our duty is infernally hard...
...Soviet authorities also suppressed these documents because they wanted the citizenry to believe that Lenin's modest needs in the way of feminine companionship were entirely satisfied by his wife, the frumpy but faithful Nadezhda Konstantinova Krupskaya...
...Twelve years later, he was still denouncing "sentimentality" (i.e., moral scruples) and hammering away at the need for dirty hands: "A Communist who says that one should never get one's hands dirty, that he must have clean, Communist hands, that he is going to build a Communist society with clean, Communist hands...
...is an empty phrasemonger...
...had been conspiring against Moscow, and it was feared that exposure to the truth might prove too disillusioning...
...therefore, Lenin was a killer—is too simplistic and in fact flawed in its premise...
...This is a question Pipes does not address, but Eugene Genovese, a leading American historian and the most recent in a long line of Marxist converts to conservatism, offered an answer in a review of The Unknown Lenin in the New Republic...
...very outset...
...But when grafted onto the Russian political tradition, with its belief in dictatorship and contempt for human rights, this same Marxism became absolutely deadly, legitimizing a totalitarian regime that murdered millions...
...The main reason for the suppression of these documents is that they reveal him to be a cold-blooded murderer: His calls for violence and terror against helpless civilians run rampant through these pages...
...I always think with pride—perhaps it is naive of me—what marvelous things human beings can do...
...W by was Lenin such a brutal man...
...We must teach these people a lesson right now, so that they will not dare even to think of any resistance for several decades...
...The Rat in the Hat The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive Edited by Richard Pipes Yale University Press 204 pages / $27.50 REVIEWED BY Joseph Shattan he Unknown Lenin is a misleading title for the latest entry in Yale University Press's estimable Annals of Communism series...
...Then screwing up his eyes and smiling, he added, rather sadly: "But I can't listen to music too often...
...It is marvelous superhuman music...
Vol. 30 • January 1997 • No. 1
