Lenin: The Idol and the Man
FEUER, LEWIS S.
Lenin: the Idol and the Man IMPRESSIONS OF LENIN By Angelica Balabanoff Introduction by Bertram D. Wolfe Translated by Isotta Cesari University of Michigan Press 152 pp. $5.00. THE LIFE OF...
...The Notebooks, written in a time of despair, verge toward the esoteric with the view that "after half a century, not a single Marxist had understood Marx...
...It tended to be even more conspiratorial than Lenin...
...writes Payne, "was when, already dying, he apologized to the Russian workers for his crime...
...6") indicates that his one-piece character was an unstable unity threatened by an internal factionalism which matched the external variety...
...Into this book he has poured the political wisdom distilled from the experience, often painful and dearly bought, of two generations...
...Neither ideology nor organizational form were finally crucial in 1917 but rather the immediate political program of peace and land, the readiness to move and work with mass hatred, and a sheer will to power...
...People, when they first met him, were struck by his sadistic tone...
...Actually, the Materialism reaches for a healthy realism...
...For instance, he makes it plain that Lenin was essentially a library man...
...The leader who, after a series of splits, was in 1909 virtually without an organization is scarcely one whom we would call an "organization man...
...A Hebraism that will baffle most readers is the description of Petrograd in November 1917 as a "tohuvovohu capital...
...During the years of exile, he and Krupskaya went often to the theater, but he could almost never sit through an entire performance, with such occasional significant exceptions as Tolstoy's The Living Corpse...
...She writes as one who worked with Lenin, and knew the same exaltations...
...Possony's history sometimes reads like raw, unevaluated intelligence gossip...
...Robert Payne's vividly written book is built upon the thesis that Lenin was the emotional and intellectual heir not of Marx but of Nechayev, the absolute nihilist who worshipped destruction...
...They were keenly interested a year ago in hearing about Wolfe's essay "Lenin and Inessa Armand...
...Of all these books, Louis Fischer's is the most impressive for its immense research...
...In America, therefore, people still turn to Lincoln's speeches for the nobility which lives in them...
...Friederick Adler," for instance, is described awkwardly as "son of the distinguished forerunner of international socialism...
...Some lapses occur in the translation of Angelica Balabanoff's book...
...At one time, he says, the Bolsheviks were practically an operational arm of the Tsarist secret police...
...His underlying feelings would sometimes escape their political self-imprisonment...
...Victor Adler, a keen judge of human nature, thought Lenin was "crazy," while August Bebel, whom Lenin admired, "looked daggers" at him...
...To the Soviet society and the Communist revolutionary movement it is held up as a model of manhood...
...A tendency to dramatic overstatement takes Payne from time to time beyond the evidence...
...His principal formula for organization was "to split...
...In the Soviet Union today younger thinkers are becoming vaguely restless concerning the official Lenin cultural super-ego...
...says Fischer, "is now a modern Russian icon...
...Payne also believes that the German Ambassador Mirbach was murdered at Lenin's behest, though Maria Spiridonova took the responsibility for the Left Social Revolutionaries...
...his brother's execution was not a trauma for him...
...A need for violence festered within Lenin...
...No free Soviet citizen will turn to the endless pages of political polemic which Lenin indited...
...its language is abusive, but G. E. Moore made an academic reputation with arguments which are not more cogent than Lenin's...
...Lenin's effort to politicalize his character brought deep conflicts in him...
...For the total person of these biographies is, in Robert Payne's words, a "sick and neurotic man...
...703 pp...
...672 pp...
...Possony also finds Lenin undersexed and later impotent...
...Does "life" prove things so clearly...
...He doubts the report of the killing of Father Gapon by the Social Revolutionaries though Boris Savinkov wrote a circumstantial account of the episode...
...As a library man, he personally wrote out the decree after the revolution for reorganizing the Petrograd Public Library on the American model...
...He wanted the workers to indulge in lynching, "mass terrorism" he called it, and as late as 1918 still appealed to the example of the individual terrorist Kalyaev...
...Like Possony, he asserts that Inessa Armand was Lenin's mistress...
...He was "a Marxist monk," with nerves but no feelings, says Fischer...
...In Fischer's estimate, "Lenin was the original organization man," and all the biographers share the same high estimate of Lenin's organizing powers and political intuition...
...Nobody knows why Lenin picked Stalin," remarks Fischer...
...The discussions of Soviet foreign policy, especially where the author's personal involvement was high, are invaluable...
...That Lenin loved Inessa is clear, but the published correspondence, as Bertram Wolfe has indicated, supports no further inference...
...For Lincoln stood for the tie of a common humanity even during the passions of civil war, and he refused when he was most surely right to allow Messianic righteousness into his utterance...
...As a gifted amateur, Payne is alert to certain impressions which are apt to elude the professional Soviet experts...
...Robert Payne does a service in quoting at length from Maxim Gorky's frank estimates of Lenin in November, 1917: "It does not worry Lenin in the least that Russia must suffer this tragedy...
...There seems no solid basis for asserting that Lenin was murdered...
...The Lenin who justified before the Party court the practices of an ideological gangster would naturally turn to a physical gangster for "expropriations" and "liquidations...
...Bukharin, and above all, the Menshevik Martov were men whom Lenin loved in this way...
...Yet we can set it down as a law of complementarity of psychological type that every Lenin needs a Stalin or a Malinovsky...
...7.95...
...Bertrand Russell remembered his "grim laugh," and saw him as "an embodied theory" who despised many people...
...Russian populism survives in red dress...
...The document he wrote when he broke with Plekhanov shows a man in emotional distress...
...Louis Fischer's powerful and important book presents a similar analysis of Lenin's character: "He was all of one piece, a great roughhewn, unpolished chunk of granite much more impressive than any sculptor's bust...
...I found, however, that the asides concerning Chicherin, Yoffe, Bullitt, Radek, Karakhan, and Rothstein were highly informative...
...Trotsky, who was unique among the Marxists for his psychoanalytical acumen, wrote of Lenin in a passage which seems to have eluded Fischer's exhaustive research: "He would often fall in love with people in the full sense of the word...
...All he really knew of the foreign cities in which he lived was their libraries...
...The magnitude of the Revolution of 1917 is projected into Lenin as a man...
...Was this vocabulary of "extermination" aimed primarily against the Menshevik within himself...
...Lenin had not a drop of Russian blood in him, says Payne, and "he died of poison administered at the orders of Stalin...
...There are Stalinists who argue today that "life" has shown that only with dictatorship can an underdeveloped area be industrialized...
...Against the Mensheviks, Lenin said to a Party court in 1907, "I shall always conduct a war of extermination...
...To Rosa Luxemburg, however, in 1905 he was a quarrelsome sectarian, a writer of "prattle," and to the youthful Trotsky, "a despot and a terrorist...
...Still, Payne has justly perceived a new note in Lenin's writing in focusing upon this preoccupation with his own guilt...
...LENIN: THE COMPULSIVE REVOLUTIONARY By Stefan T. Possony Regnery...
...The Freemasons emerge as significant financiers of Bolshevism...
...He was trying to hew himself into one piece, to shape his character to political requirements...
...long-frustrated people desperately seeking a new "Little Father...
...Word will reach them of these new Lenin biographies...
...Fischer is much more restrained on this matter...
...he does not know the masses...
...Angelica's recollections were occasionally inaccurate...
...It reminds one very much of the similar use of "life" in Soviet philosophical writings...
...it is one of his qualities for which he is so loved and for which he cannot but be loved...
...The style declines into tabloid vulgarity when the author writes that Krupskaya "became wise to her husband's transgressions...
...If any writer has earned the privilege of sacrificing the formal unities to richness of content, he is certainly Louis Fischer...
...Almost all reminiscences of Lenin were written after the Revolution, when a life-like portrayal of him became virtually impossible...
...the two traits, however, are regarded by psychoanalysts as compatible...
...She wishes to shed light on the "psychological motivations" of Lenin, and depicts him as "a man of one piece," absolutely selfless, a "depersonalized dictator" wholly unlike other dictators, "conscious of his calling as executor of the final verdict of history...
...And on such occasions I would tease him: ? know, I know, you are having a new romance.' Lenin realized this characteristic of his, and would laugh by way of reply, a little embarrassed but a little angry, too...
...But there are, of course, different sorts of "life...
...he would read dictionaries to calm his nerves...
...Here is no Marx or Engels where there is a freshness of intellectual vision, but rather a strident reiteration...
...He was obsessed with his Party factionalism...
...Reviewed by LEWIS S. FEUER Professor of Philosophy and Social Science, University of Calif., Berkeley Our age will have to come to terms with the character of Lenin...
...Lenin is experimenting with their blood...
...its notion of skipping the capitalistic stage of evolution and its place for an intellectual elite were allied to Lenin's revolutionary doctrine...
...Angelica sees Lenin as the depersonalized master builder who "merely wanted to be one among many," but her actual narrative abundantly illustrates what Fischer calls "the monopoly of power" motif in Lenin's character...
...Actually what stands out in the estimated 10 million words that Lenin wrote is how generally devoid of original ideas they are...
...An ideology of "life-ism" tends to arise which has a kinship with historicism...
...He provides, for instance, abundant details on the financing of Lenin's Party by "expropriations" and German Imperial funds...
...Was he seeking to extirpate the external symbols of his own inner guilt...
...The people, she feels, sensed that Lenin was one of them...
...High in the mountains, a companion of his was moved to recite Byron and Shakespeare, but all Lenin could say was: "The Mensheviks really mess things up...
...Actually, he was apologizing only for his failure to intervene against Stalin on the nationalities question, and explaining that his illness had much to do with it...
...Russia, true enough, comes near being such a shadowland, but rational people will have a stronger requirement for evidence...
...The publication of these four works on Lenin begins a new era of intellectual history, for they constitute an inquiry into the basic psychological ego-ideal of Communist society...
...For the Leninist the working class is like a mineral in the hands of a metallurgist...
...Angelica cannot help reporting how he resorted publicly to a vulgar sexual pun against Alexandra Kollontai, and showed an utter duplicity toward the Italian Socialists...
...481 pp...
...These statements seem dead against the evidence...
...Yet quite obviously, all his life Lenin was engaged in a self-surgery of his emotions...
...Krupskaya's first impression of her future husband was of a laughter which "sounded so wicked and dry...
...How reliable an account of American Communism, for instance, would we obtain from the files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation...
...he has not lived with them...
...Lenin kept repeating his demand for armed revolt and seeing its imminent outbreak in such unlikely places as England and the United States...
...When a Soviet critique of Lenin's character begins, it will be a sign that they are arriving at psychological freedom...
...He belittles the considerable evidence for Lenin's devotion to Krupskaya, whom he rather harshly describes as "a prematurely withered old maid...
...The actual organization of the October Revolution was Trotsky's work, with Lenin in hiding...
...Libraries were the only institutions for which he had a concrete socialist plan...
...He was a political irrationalist whom "the mesmeric effect of supreme power" has endowed with a pseudo-rationality...
...This interpretation has all the limitations of its sources...
...Lenin's mind," he writes, "might have enabled him to become one of mankind's great thinkers...
...The theory which sees Lenin as an agent of the German Foreign Office is the outstanding distortion of the police interpretation...
...This sounds as if Lenin was confessing to guilt for the entire Bolshevik Revolution...
...British Museum but railed against the Bibliothèque Nationale...
...He appreciated library socialism...
...Better editing, too, might have rescued Possony's book from an undue number of misprints and misuses of English...
...Stefan Possony's book is an example of what might be called the "police interpretation of history...
...THE LIFE AND DEATH OF LENIN By Robert Payne Simon & Schuster...
...There is a curious overtone to Lenin's fond description of Bukharin as "soft wax": "We know all the softness of Comrade Bukharin...
...All the Party splits which he engendered obsessively were splits within himself...
...8.50...
...I just could not remain in my room, but had to get up and go out...
...Lenin was a coward, he says, and "always surrounded by women like a pasha...
...Possony thinks little of Lenin's Materialism but very highly of his Philosophical Notebooks...
...Each of these biographies makes a contribution to the understanding of Lenin...
...Yet the Social Revolutionary party was also founded on an ideological amalgam of populism with Marxism...
...on the other hand, Fischer gives no account of Lenin's participation in the conferences at Zimmerwald and Kienthal during World War I. Purists may protest that the unity of Lenin's biography is disturbed by Fischer's frequent digression into personal reminiscence of Soviet personalities...
...Angelica Balabanoff, with undiminished idealism, venerates the memory of Lenin, yet she observes in candor that he needed accomplices rather than collaborators...
...The editors might have been more helpful...
...Peter Struve, Lunacharsky...
...Actually it doesn't differ from the conception Marx had in the mid'40s...
...Lenin's personality became a footnote to his tedious pamphlets...
...Litvinov is regarded as conceivably a German spy against the British...
...THE LIFE OF LENIN By Louis Fischer Harper & Row...
...For the plain fact is that in 1918 Lenin was prepared to negotiate for the Allies' cooperation in war against Germany, and the Left Communists were winning the Party to the notion of such a revolutionary war...
...But Lenin's "charisma" seems, however, to have been projected on him by an ignorant...
...It is characteristic of so-called "underdeveloped" countries that the initiative in socialist ideas is taken by intellectuals, and Lenin was describing what took place in Russia just as Marx described the first German Socialist consciousness...
...If Lenin consented for the 18th time to have his head modelled, he was withal, in Angelica's opinion, "free from egocentricity," for he did so only because the illiterate, suspicious Russian peasantry still required such idolatry...
...The empiricist Bogdanov is described as a "mystic," and she has the army of Kornilov at the gates of Petrograd in 1919 when it actually was Yudenich...
...10.00...
...The nights for Lenin were sleepless ordeals...
...Soviet university students today mock at their courses in dialectical materialism...
...Lenin thought of revolution "not as a historian or a social scientist but as a lover," says Louis Fischer...
...Krassin, it is intimated, was also a police spy, and Krupskaya was murdered by Lozovsky's wife...
...I had the feeling that I. too, was locked up in Ward No...
...Lenin, he says, suffered from agoraphobia—a bit hard to understand when we recall how Lenin was always fond of hunting...
...The thesis seems to me overdone, and not to do justice to the constructive elements in Lenin's personality, especially after 1917 when Lenin was urging the virtues of sound accountancy and responsibility on the Communists...
...Possony's picture of Lenin sometimes only vaguely resembles the original man...
...Periodically, especially after Party congresses, his nerves would be so jangled and near collapse that Krupskaya would take him off on long holidays in the country and mountains...
...Lenin had German and Kalmuck grandmothers, and possibly a Jewish maternal grandfather, but Fischer, at least, allows for a Russian paternal grandfather...
...The author has a gift for aphorism...
...his cruelty was part of a desperate struggle with himself...
...Now in her 86th year, the words of her teacher Antonio Labriola still echo in her consciousness: "Ethics, now, consists in this: to make science serve the proletariat...
...Lenin's What is to be Done?, with its intellectual elitism, is in Payne's view derived more from Nechayev than Marx...
...One of Fischer's readers should have caught the erroneous statement that Ferdinand Lassalle helped organize the German Social Democratic Party in 1869...
...Every congress was a crisis," observes Payne...
...A new Soviet liberal generation which gropes for its path to rationality will have to disenthrall itself from the Lenin image...
...His writing has a catechismic, question-and-answer quality, which in the history of political prose is particularly associated with Stalin...
...Lenin reveled in hate, says Louis Fischer...
...Curiously, the Lenin cult is strong even in Possony's book...
...Lenin, he says, "utterly lacked homosexual components, and was attached to his mother...
...This "mono-substantial" conception of Lenin's character seems to me more political theology than political psychology...
...what emerged was a variety of sado-masochist, humbling himself as history's chosen instrument, and taking a sickly pleasure in the destruction of the Party enemy...
...None of the biographers seems to have used the article by Dudden and von Laue, "The RSDLP and Joseph Fels," in The American Historical Review (October, 1955), which depicted Lenin in the exasperations and paradoxes of raising money from English and American bourgeois for the promotion of proletarian revolution...
...it is so multi-meaninged that a certain begging of the question inevitably occurs when appeal is made to its judgment...
...All his life Lenin was repeating the demand for armed insurrection...
...Assist" is used to mean "attend," and "expostulate" is used for "explicate...
...We are finally in a shadow-land where every possibility is taken as a probability...
...The greatest moment of Lenin's life...
...Bolshevism, according to Fischer, united strains of the Narodnik ideology with Marxism...
...Angelica Balabanoff's slender book of tender impressions in a way sets the tone for all these books...
...There are recurrent passages in which "life" is rendering the ultimate conclusions...
...his extraordinary agitation when he read Chekhov's Ward No...
...But he was, Fischer also says, "a political isolationist...
...He liked th...
...6 ("I felt positively afraid...
...The long Soviet sojourn has left its imprint on Fischer's style and philosophy...
...History is the chronicle of divorce between creed and deed," "Revolution is a gamble in impossibilities," "what commenced to wither away was the idea of withering away...
...The iconoclast...
...Yet all of them are finally still so over-awed by the colossal scale of the Bolshevik Revolution that they cannot define the character of Lenin in realistic terms...
...Lincoln's character survived the work of realistic biographers, and still holds its high place as an ideal for America...
...He has no knowledge of life in all its complex variety...
...If an extreme conjuncture of circumstances had not arisen, a war-weary nation ruled by "half-wits," he would have gone down in history as Rosa Luxemburg saw him, a quarrelsome sectarian...
Vol. 47 • August 1964 • No. 15
