Art in Search of History
ULAM, ADAM B.
Art in Search of History Lenin in Zurich By Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Translated by H. T. Willets Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 309 pp. $8.95. Reviewed by Adam B. Ulam Professor of Government and...
...As with most of Solzhenitsyn's work, it can best be characterized as art in search of historical truth...
...By procuring German money for Lenin's party he enables the Bolsheviks to grow in strength and seize the Revolution...
...Perhaps...
...Fate has sent the author, like his subject, into exile in Switzerland, enabling him, he notes wryly, to "collect much important additional material...
...This is a truly apocalyptic vision and it explains why, for Solzhenitsyn, Lenin towers above other Soviet figures...
...What is more certain is that scholars will question a number of Solz-henitsyn's basic interpretations...
...No fair-minded critic can deny, however, that both artistically and philosophically he presents it with great power and skill...
...Croak, damn you...
...That also endows him with extra-human dimensions, but as an omniscient seer leading his people to the promised land of socialism and forging the path all mankind must follow...
...Was Lenin possessed by an irrational hatred of his own country...
...Many who have no sympathy at all for Communism will contest Solzhenitsyn's thesis on historical or political grounds...
...But Stalin did not beget Communism?now synonymous with elemental evil to Solzhenitsyn, once a convinced Marxist-Leninist...
...The description of the revolutionary as lover is rather unconvincing...
...suddenly the detached organ begins to expand, seizing control of the researcher and the laboratory, then becoming a threat to the whole community...
...In August 1914, at the outbreak of the conflict that would kill millions, "a joyful inspiration took shape in his dynamic mind, such a war is a gift from history [it] must not be fumbled, must not be wasted...
...Could such a man, in his 40s, come under the spell of a woman to the extent that "with Inessa beside him, he had painfully bent his will to hers, but now that she was far away he could attain almost complete freedom from her...
...The technique reminds the reader of the traditional horror movie plot: A careless scientist finds a way to keep the brain of a dead stranger alive...
...A lesser writer might have made Lenin a conventional villain-fanatic...
...Stalin was a "blind and [personally] unimportant instrument" of the forces un-leased by the Bolshevik Revolution...
...This is clearly presented as an antithesis to the official Soviet image of Lenin...
...Lenin's emotions and thoughts are depicted as if in a series of film clips, with little treatment of what he actually does and says...
...He has quite a healthy instinct for self-preservation as well when exposed to danger...
...he silently curses his homeland...
...the findings have not been uniformly persuasive...
...Not content with collecting millions and women, the hideously fat Parvus speculates in wars and revolutions...
...Indeed, in Gulag he explicitly rejected the notion—still fashionable among Communists and non-Communists alike —that Stalin was the source of oppression in the Soviet system...
...Communism, Solzhenitsyn argues, cannot be fought effectively merely by denouncing its "excesses," like Stalinism, or by demanding that it reform...
...Yet despite his resources and an intellect that Solzhenitsyn ranks superior to Lenin's, Parvus fails to achieve power and fame as one of the makers of history...
...Leninism, the very essence of the doctrine, is fundamentally inhuman and evil, and unless we clearly recognize this Russia cannot be regenerated nor the West saved...
...Reviewed by Adam B. Ulam Professor of Government and Director of the Russian Research Center, Harvard...
...Solzhenitsyn's considered view should come as no surprise to those who have read The First Circle or The Gulag Archipelago...
...So in advance of the larger work, expected to take many years to complete, he has given us a portrait of the father of Communism, and hence, in his opinion, of the man responsible for much of the evil of our time...
...Seven of them...
...In fact, hasn't that been one of the main troubles with Communism...
...In the case of day-to-day political decisions, Solzhenitsyn's Lenin emerges as a shrewd and pragmatic tactician...
...Some will see this as a veiled criticism of the West's recent efforts to domesticate Soviet Communism through trade and concesions...
...Lenin in Zurich is free from such superficialities...
...In a similar fashion, Lenin's mind grows into the Bolshevik Revolution and Soviet Communism, threatening the whole world with spiritual, if not in fact physical destruction...
...author, "Ideologies and Illusions: Revolutionary Thought from Herzen to Solzhenitsyn" Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's latest book consists of chapters extracted from his prose-epic-in-pro-gress about Russia in World War I and the Revolution, including one omitted from the already published August 1914...
...Or was what he said about his comrades at least partly true of him: "Scratch some Communists and you will find Great Russian chauvinists...
...No, the Revolution and the system it produced were shaped by the mind of another man: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin...
...In contrast to the enigma of Lenin's mind, the book's second hero, Helphand-Parvus, embodies the more ordinary vices of those who have been responsible for Russia's tragedy and the West's decline: greed, vanity, an inordinate desire for power and fame...
...Much as we may disagree with and criticize Lenin in Zurich, though, it must not be considered a political tract or a morality play...
...Like the doomed scientist who is a staple of the horror movie, he becomes a tool, and in a sense victim, of the man he tried to manipulate...
...This endeavor has not always been successful...
...The focus is on his mind as it devises strategems of slaughter and enslavement of whole nations, appearing almost separate from its possessor, an independent force...
...Yet what a grandiose enterprise it is, illuminated by an uncompromising honesty...
...Although he was a moral monster, the roots of his monstrousness can be traced to very human emotions: the lust for power, fear, sadism...
...Few historians have been as painstaking, and fewer still can even approach the artistry of the greatest living writer in the Russian language...
...Was Lenin really unique or was his restless, tortured mind still a product of the Russian revolutionary tradition...
...A less astute student of history might have sought the key to his hero's obsessions in some of the currently fashionable motifs of psychohistory...
...Lenin is shown to be in love with Inessa Armand, too, and on the basis of hardly definitive evidence a long-lasting affair is constructed: " happy years...
...All you're good for is oppressing others...
...The author relentlessly examines his protagonist at three crucial stages in his ascent from leader of a small ideological sect to prophet of modern politics: at the start of the War, at the height of his isolation and seeming political impotence in Zurich in 1916, and at the moment he receives the unexpected and won-drously bewildering news that the Tsarist regime has collapsed...
...The author makes his subject fascinating and perplexing, offering none of the simple explanations for his behavior and mental processes...
Vol. 59 • May 1976 • No. 11
