How I Remember Lenin An Interview with Ignazio Silone
On the centenary of the birth of Lenin (April 22, 1970), the distinguished Italian writer Ignazio Silone granted an interview to the Corriere della Sera of Milan in which he reminisced about his...
...This political concept calls for antidoctrinaire agility...
...SILONE: The first time I saw him—in 1921, in Moscow—his apotheosis had already begun...
...It is not without significance that the best contemporary Communist thinkers—Garaudy, Bloch, Fischer, Sartre—have never paid much attention to Lenin's philosophical ideas...
...I remember that he used to decipher the Italian news by depending on any assonances that Italian shares with the French or German...
...In any event, to what degree can the Italian Communist party call itself Leninist...
...But Togliatti advised me to let it go, not to get involved in a deviant discussion...
...Indeed, Lenin and his myth had to satisfy the religious thirst of the Russian people, had to answer the questions that for centuries the priests had answered—Who created us...
...it calls for a calculation of balances and a mechanism of idelogical controls...
...in the first, the Bolsheviks were a minority, but in the second, at the close of 1917, they were a majority...
...How could he "liquidate" a major figure of European Communism like that...
...The Leninist concept of the political maneuver—that is, a pluralistic recognition of democratic-parliamentary rights limited to the short time needed to absorb or destroy the other groups —this concept was adopted by all Communist regimes and parties in the postwar period...
...In 1926, Lenin's widow, Krupskaya, had to say bitterly, "Were he alive, at this moment he would be in prison...
...Lenin sanctified in the U.S.S.R...
...Nonetheless, although the conditions assumed by Marxist logic are lacking, although there are no proletarians, the African and LatinAmerican revolutionaries proclaim themselves socialists...
...Hence a kind of scorn, or at least a certain skepticism, which Communist leaders exhibit toward intellectuals, who take seriously what for the former is only a matter of tactics...
...In Italy there is no straight, upward path to power...
...Hence the multiple strategy of the PCI today, which says yes to the demands of every class and category...
...This differing historical and social situation has a bearing also on strategy...
...the papers have also recalled how his commitment to his cause bordered on fanaticism, and have mentioned his allergic distaste for literary intellectualism (Trotsky's, for example), and it's been conceded that while his principles were inflexible, Lenin was open to any compromise...
...AN INTERVIEW WITH IGNAZIO SILONE it is a renunciation of something today in order to recapture it tomorrow, when one has come into power...
...We're discussing the theory of the origin of the world according to Lenin," he told us...
...The Party censured him, but his theory was neither discussed nor disproved...
...And even today the Italian Party's schools still teach a Marxist theory that Communist intellectuals know to be false, but it is a useful, highly effective teaching device to illustrate the exploitation of the worker in terms understandable to the HOW I REMEMBER LENIN masses...
...Because behind the void of a socialism that does not exist there is the myth of Lenin, with the fascination of his triumph...
...Stalin took care of the rest...
...When a saint is created, when a dogma is enunciated—instances when intellectual scruple might well call for some reassessment— the Communists habitually prefer to circumvent the dilemma...
...Which means, after the compromise and when power is securely in hand, one reverts to principles and the concessions are wiped out...
...What exactly did he represent in the history of Communism...
...And the machine devoured the revolution...
...But the historical and social situation in Italy is profoundly different from the one in which Lenin acted and developed his doctrine...
...But he read with blinders...
...In the minds of most Russians—and of many Communists elsewhere in the world —this miracle is established in the firmament of a new history of holiness...
...Even then Lenin was living somewhere between reality and myth...
...for another, the existence of classes, including, in Italy, a lower middle class that was lacking in Russia...
...In that it is free of preconceptions and views politics simply as the conquest of power, the Italian Communist party is still Leninist...
...But the concept of power and the will to power are still the same, only with us the conquest of that power is more difficult...
...In actuality, according to the Leninist notion, compromise is not a renouncing of something in the course of political negotiations in order to obtain valid agreement on some other point...
...Lenin's ideas, however, are much inferior to his myth and the impact of his experience...
...To the Leninist way of thinking, compromise is a mental reservation...
...During one session of a Congress committee, he was speaking of Bela Kun, the leader of the Hungarian revolution...
...Value, surplus value—they do well enough for the lower ranks, was his retort...
...At least nobody has ever abjured it...
...to retain power, Stalin invented the machine of the apparat...
...But for the history of culture, for the world of today, what is Lenin's significance...
...The Congress of the Third International was in session at the time, and Lenin only took part in some of the meetings, rather like the Pope in relation to the Vatican Council...
...Later, when he realized what a heavy burden the Soviets were and that it cost a strenuous effort to make them function, he began to reduce their authority...
...one has to follow many twistings and turnings...
...If the Bolsheviks had been a majority in the Assembly, Lenin would have launched another, an opposite slogan...
...Depending on what the various prospects for seizing power were, his slogans were conceived to fit the occasion...
...Not that he failed to follow international political events, especially those in Italy...
...He didn't want to bother about it...
...Peter's, when they crowd around the Sedia, emanate a fervor that spreads like a wave throughout the basilica...
...The PCI apparat also can be called Leninist...
...They say, the Communists accept this or that compromise...
...Q You knew him, knew the men who surrounded him and who rose to power beside him...
...This is true for Hungary, but is true also for Germany and Italy...
...Who protects us...
...What was the secret of his fascination, of his success...
...Their true purpose was propaganda, and their spirit sectarian...
...He generated contagious enthusiasm, the way the faithful in St...
...Exactly as the Communist press says in eulogizing Lenin: rigid as to principles and open to every compromise...
...Antonio Graziadei, who was one of the most authoritative leaders of Italian Communism, a cultivated and intelligent man, a professor of economics, wrote several books around 1926-27 in which he disputed the Marxist theory of value and surplus value...
...On the centenary of the birth of Lenin (April 22, 1970), the distinguished Italian writer Ignazio Silone granted an interview to the Corriere della Sera of Milan in which he reminisced about his relationship with the leader of the October Revolution...
...Certainly, today as yesterday, one asks oneself whether a party that claims a role in the cultural leadership of the country can introduce blind faith (and bad faith) into its dialogue with the people...
...Who was Lenin, really...
...In the history of Communism, he is the achiever, the man who knew how to win power...
...Remember, it is no small privilege to step up to the tribune of Communism's highest court...
...However, this is a subject that takes us far from your present concern...
...The Party preferred to ignore his arguments...
...Q.: Lenin, the power strategist...
...Moreover, Lenin's genius was concentrated in his study and his knowledge of Russia, and it was on the basis of that knowledge that he refined his technique for the conquest of power...
...Even the official commemorations of Lenin, even the Italian Communist press has been emphasizing in the last few days how open and broad-minded the Soviet leader was in action...
...Q.: Actually, not so far...
...SILONE: Lenin is the real inventor of the way to make a revolution—or rather, let me say he is its codifier...
...it is comprised of men obedient and devoted to the cause, which is the difficult task of winning power...
...And to the degree that he was attentive to and intuitively understanding of realities in his homeland, he exhibited inattention and misunderstanding with regard to other nations...
...Therefore, his slogan was, "All power to the Soviets...
...One incident comes to mind...
...And those assembled atheists applauded the old hypocrite and the tomb of Stalin was removed, as the ghost of Lenin had requested...
...To offer people a religious surrogate is not exclusively a Russian practice...
...But it is a monstrous machine, and the more gigantic it grows to be, the more it devours the substance of the revolution...
...Lenin won, he established Communism for the first time in a great nation, and he has become a point of reference for every revolutionary, Marxist or non-Marxist, populist or anarchist, who has one supreme objective: victory...
...The political formulas, that is, the rules governing relationships between groups, between majorities and minorities, among institutions and differing political tendencies, for Lenin were secondary, accessory, temporary...
...All his books were written to meet the needs of the moment, and today it is impossible to grasp their real meaning unless one knows which polemics were shaking up the Party at the time...
...I remember one case that struck me at the time and does so still...
...I remember how some of his terse remarks which I happened to hear during that 1921 Moscow visit struck me with the force of a physical blow...
...Togliatti and I went to visit a Leninist club of young Russian Communists on the outskirts of Moscow...
...The Italian Communists—in a tradition that extends from Labriola to Gramsci to the present—boast of having achieved an interpretation of Marxism that is stripped of metaphysical claims, yet daily they concede that it is legitimate to leave the masses in the limbo of superstition when the masses indicate that they wish to remain superstitious...
...But one's intellectual and political disappointment upon becoming acquainted with Lenin was rapidly reabsorbed by the almost religious fascination he exerted over others, by the charisma of the conqueror...
...We asked the club's director what they meant...
...You could take whole pages from Lenin's pamphlet Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder and match them against the text of the PCI's condemnation of our Italian ultra-leftists' Manifesto...
...At the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist party, when the eyes of the whole world were trained on Khrushchev and the de-Stalinization earthquake, an elderly woman delegate walked up to the rostrum...
...And one might say that he did so single-handedly, in the sense that in October 1917 it was the intuition and the decision of Lenin, not of others, that overturned history and gave the Communists power together with their revolution...
...Last, the language of the PCI is Leninist in confronting divisions within the Party and the extremism of the Left...
...But to see him, to speak with him face-to-face—to observe his cutting, disdainful judgments, his ability to synthesize, the peremptory tone of his decisions—created impressions of a very different kind that overrode any suggestion of mysticism...
...Think of his attitude toward the Constituent Assembly and toward the Soviets...
...This accounts for the decision Lenin took—when he saw it was necessary —to make the peasants the basis of his support, thereby contradicting Marxist orthodoxy...
...It was a physical, almost a palpable phenomenon...
...The fact is that whether he lived abroad—as he did for the larger part of his life—or lived in his own country, Lenin focused always on Russia, on her problems, her secrets, her psychology...
...It must have been in 1926 or 1927...
...For that matter, there exists also a scientific Lenin cult...
...One can't really talk about socialist revolution for the North African fellahin nor for the Che Guevaras or Camillo Torres of Latin America...
...Besides, as far as I knew, Lenin had never written anything on the subject at all...
...But whenever he came into the hall, the atmosphere changed, became electric...
...the essential thing was power, winning and retaining power...
...On this score, people are often misled...
...Before him, revolution was a sporadic episode in history, not its objective...
...The interview is here reprinted with the permission of Ignazio Silone...
...Later, Stalin added to Lenin's technique another insight, which is the major political lesson bequeathed by Communism to totalitarianism: the new and decisive role that, in a modern mass society and in given circumstances, an efficient, centralized ruling apparatus can play...
...Of course, the masses—which is what Togliatti said to me, in annoyance, when I asked him to give some thought to the Graziadei matter...
...Until one comes full circle...
...Lenin, disciplinary instructor of Communist parties...
...Lenin invented the revolution to gain power...
...Broad-mindedness, fanaticism, scorn for intellectualism, willingness to compromise— does not this strange Leninist cocktail exist also in Italian Communism...
...When I hear some nonsense going the rounds," he said, "my first reaction is to think, ah, Bela Kun's been talking...
...In the wave of revolutions that is overrunning the world, Lenin becomes a point of reference, a constant symbol in situations that are otherwise very different and even antithetical...
...Their concept of revolutionary compromise is Leninist...
...For one thing, as I said earlier, there is the presence of the Church...
...I'm not exaggerating...
...I wanted to argue with him that the world and its origin are what they are and that, as good pragmatists, we Communists accept the lesson of science as we find it, without losing ourselves in other conjectures...
...and for still another, the influence of the intellectuals...
...When we Italian Communists had occasion to talk with him about the situation in our own country, we got the impression that he was cataloguing the various trends and possibilities of Italian AN INTERVIEW WITH IGNAZIO SILONE historical development in terms of the rigid canon of Russian experience, as if Rome were a hundred miles from Moscow, as if the Roman Catholic Church were the Eastern Orthodox Church, as if class interrelations in Italy were no different from those in Russia...
...SILONE: Lenin had a precise, concrete sense of power...
...In a largish room, the boys were gathered around a blackboard filled with strange signs—globes, triangles, arcs—that looked like cabalistic symbols...
...He used to read several French papers and the Corriere della Sera daily—or rather, he read them when they arrived, for there was no air delivery then...
...She related to the assembled delegates how Lenin had appeared to her in a dream and had told her he no longer wanted to have next to him the tomb of that criminal...
Vol. 17 • September 1970 • No. 5
