Authors: Vasily Grossman
The cultured, intellectual side of Lenin—which had once seemed what was deepest and truest about him—always receded into the background as soon as the going got difficult. Lenin’s true character then manifested in his iron will—in his frenzied, unyielding strength of will.
What led Lenin along the path of revolution? Love for people? A wish to put an end to the misery of the peasantry, to the workers’ poverty and lack of rights? A faith in the truth of Marxism, in the rectitude of his own Party?
The Russian Revolution, for him, had nothing to do with Russian freedom. But the power to which he so passionately aspired was not something he needed personally.
And here we come to something unique about Lenin: the simplicity of his character engendered a certain complexity.
In order to crave power so fiercely, one must be endowed with enormous political ambition. This love of power is something crude and simple. But this driven figure, who was capable of anything in his pursuit of power, was modest in his private life and did not seek power for his own self. It is at this point that Lenin’s simplicity ends and his complexity begins.
If we try to imagine a private Lenin who is an exact equivalent of the political Lenin, we will be confronted with a ranting dogmatist—someone harsh and primitive, high-handed, domineering, pitiless, insanely ambitious.
It is frightening even to think of Lenin behaving in this way in his everyday life—toward his friends and family, toward someone he shared an apartment with.
But that was not how it was. The private man turned out to be the inverse of the man on the world stage. Plus and minus, minus and plus.
And the overall picture turns out to be very different; it turns out to be complicated, in some ways tragic.
Insane political ambition together with an old jacket, a glass of weak tea, a student garret.
The ability to trample one’s opponent into the mud without a second thought, to deafen and stun him during an argument, combined with a sweet smile, with a shy sensitivity.
Implacable cruelty, a contempt for freedom—the holy of holies of the Russian Revolution—along with a pure, youthful delight in fine music or a good book.
Lenin...First there is the deified image. Then there is the image created by his enemies—an image all of a piece, an image that has him behaving as harshly and cruelly in his everyday life as in his role as leader of the new world order. Finally, there is a third image—an image that seems to me to be closer to reality but that is not easy to make sense of.
I
n order
to understand Lenin, we have to do more than examine his qualities as a politician or the qualities he showed in everyday life. We have to correlate Lenin’s character first with the supposed national character of the Russian people and then with the overall thrust of Russian history.
In his asceticism and natural modesty, Lenin had an affinity with Russian pilgrims. In his faith and directness, he answered to the folk ideal of a religious teacher. In his attachment to Russian nature, to its forests and meadows, he was akin to the Russian peasantry. His receptivity to Hegel and Marx and Western thought as a whole, his ability to absorb and give expression to the spirit of the West, was the manifestation of a deeply Russian trait first pointed out by Chaadaev. It is the same universal sympathy, the same astonishing ability to enter deep into the spirit of another nation, that Dostoevsky famously saw in Pushkin. This receptivity makes Lenin akin both to Pushkin and to Peter the Great.
Lenin’s fanatical, possessed quality is similar to the religious faith, the religious frenzy of Avvakum. And Avvakum is an entirely native-born, Russian phenomenon.
In the nineteenth century, Russian thinkers looked to the Russian national character, the Russian soul, and Russian religious nature for an explanation of Russia’s historical path.
Chaadaev, one of the most intelligent figures of that century, emphasized the ascetic and sacrificial quality of Russian Christianity, its undiluted Byzantine purity.
Dostoevsky saw universality, an aspiration toward the universally human, as the true foundation of the Russian soul.
Twentieth-century Russia loves to repeat the predictions made about it by earlier Russian thinkers and prophets: Gogol, Chaadaev, Belinsky, Dostoevsky.
But who would not like to repeat such things about himself?
The nineteenth-century prophets predicted that Russia would, in the future, lead the spiritual evolution not only of Europe but also of the entire world.
These foretellers were speaking not of Russian military glory but of the glory of the Russian heart, of Russian faith, of the example that Russia would set.
Gogol’s flying troika...Dostoevsky’s “It is for the Russian soul, all-human and all-unifying, to accommodate within itself, in brotherly love, all our brothers, and, in the end, perhaps, to speak the final word of the great general harmony, of the final brotherly concord of all tribes according to the
law of the Gospel of Christ...
” Chaadaev’s “Then we will naturally take our place among the nations chosen to act amid humanity not only as battering rams but also through their ideas...” Gogol’s “Russia, are you not also like the bold troika which no one can overtake? The road is a cloud of smoke under your wheels,
the bridges thunder
...”
And then, in the same letter, Chaadaev brilliantly put his finger on a striking feature of Russian history: “the enormous fact of the gradual enslavement of our peasantry, which can only be seen as the strictly logical consequence of
our entire history
.
”
The implacable suppression of the individual personality—its total, servile subjection to the sovereign and the State—has been a constant feature of Russian history. This too was seen and recognized by the Russian prophets.
But along with the suppression of the individual by prince, landowner, sovereign, and State, the Russian prophets sensed a purity, profundity, and clarity unknown to the Western world. They saw a Christlike power—the power of the Russian soul—and they prophesied a great and brilliant future for this soul. These prophets all agreed that the Christian ideal had been embodied in the Russian soul in an ascetic, Byzantine, anti-Western manner—in a way quite independent of the State—and that the forces inherent in the Russian soul would manifest themselves as a powerful influence on the peoples of Europe. They believed that these forces would purify and transform the life of the Western world, enlightening it in the spirit of brotherhood, and that the Western world would joyfully and trustingly follow this Russian man who was so universal in his humanity. These prophecies of Russia’s most powerful minds and hearts had one fatal flaw in common. They all saw the power of the Russian soul and its significance for the world, but they all failed to see that this soul had been a slave for a thousand years, that its peculiarities had been engendered by the absence of freedom. However all-powerful you are, what can you give to the world if you have been a slave for a thousand years?
The nineteenth century, however, seemed at last to have brought closer the time foretold by the Russian prophets, the time when Russia, always so receptive to other teachings and other examples, always so greedy to absorb other spiritual influences, was herself preparing to act on the world.
For a hundred years Russia had been drinking in a borrowed idea of freedom. For a hundred years—through the lips of Pestel, Ryleyev, Herzen, Chernyshevsky, Lavrov, Bakunin; through the lips of her writers; through the lips of such martyrs as Zhelyabov, Sofya Perovskaya, Timofey Mikhailov, and Kibalchich; through the lips of Plekhanov, Kropotkin, and Mikhailovsky; through the lips of Sazonov and Kalyaev; through the lips of Lenin, Martov, and Chernov; through the lips of her classless intelligentsia; through the lips of her students and progressive workers—for a hundred years Russia had been imbibing the work of the thinkers and philosophers of Western freedom. This thinking was carried by books, by university faculties, by young men who had studied in Paris and Heidelberg. It was carried by the boots of Napoleon’s soldiers. It was carried by engineers and enlightened merchants. It was carried by impoverished Westerners who came to Russia to work and whose sense of their own innate human dignity evoked the envious astonishment of Russian princes.
And so, fertilized by the ideas of freedom and of the dignity of man, the Russian Revolution ran its course.
And what did the Russian soul do with these Western ideas? How did she transform them within herself? Into what kind of crystal did she make them precipitate? What kind of shoot would she cause to spring from the subconscious of history?
“Russia, where are you rushing to?...She gives no answer.”
Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of revolutionary teachings and creeds, leaders and parties, programs and prophecies came as suitors to the young Russia who had cast off the chains of tsarism. As they paraded before her, the captains of Russian progress gazed longingly, passionately and pleadingly into her face.
And then there they stood in a great circle—moderates, fanatics, laborists, populists, friends of the workers, advocates of the peasantry, liberal factory owners, light-seeking men of the church, crazy anarchists.
Invisible threads—ties that even they themselves were often unable to sense—bound these men to the ideals of Western parliaments and constitutional monarchies, to the ideals of erudite cardinals and bishops, to the ideals of factory owners and educated landowners, to the ideals of preachers, university professors, and trade-union leaders.
The slave girl’s gaze, the great slave girl’s searching, doubting, evaluating gaze came to rest on Lenin. It was him she chose.
As in an old tale, he guessed her hidden thought. He interpreted her perplexing dream, her innermost secret.
But is this truly what happened?
He became her chosen one not only because she chose him but also because he chose her.
She followed him because he promised her mountains of gold and rivers flowing with wine. She followed him, willingly at first, trusting him, along a merry, intoxicating path lit by the burning estates of landowners. Then she began to stumble, to look back, ever more terrified of the path now stretching before her—but the grip of the iron hand that led her was growing tighter and tighter.
And he, imbued with apostolic faith, walked on, leading Russia behind him, failing to realize that he had succumbed to a strange delusion. In Russia’s obedient walk, in her renewed, postrevolutionary submissiveness, in her maddening pliancy, everything that he had brought her from the revolutionary, freedom-loving West was being transformed. Everything he had brought to Russia was drowning and perishing.
He believed that his unshakable, dictatorial power guaranteed that the ideal he believed in, the gift he had brought to his country, would be preserved in all its purity.
He rejoiced in this power. He identified it with the justice of his faith—and then, for one terrible moment, he realized that his unyielding strength as the leader of a country so gentle, a country so submissive and easily influenced, was really a supreme form of impotence.
And the tighter his grip, the sterner his stride, the more obedient Russia became to his educated and revolutionary violence—the less power Lenin possessed to struggle against the truly satanic force of Russia’s serf past.
Like some thousand-year-old alcoholic solution, the principle of slavery in the Russian soul had only grown stronger. Like aqua regia, smoking from its own strength, it dissolved the metal and salt of human dignity, entirely changing the inner life of Russian man.
Throughout nine hundred years Russia’s vast spaces—which appeared, on a superficial view, to have engendered a sweeping breadth of soul, a sense of daring and freedom—were no more than a mute alembic for slavery.
Throughout nine hundred years Russia appeared to be moving away from remote forest settlements, from smoke-filled huts without chimneys, from the distant hermitages of breakaway sects, from log palaces. Throughout nine hundred years Russia’s future seemed to be a matter of the factories of the Urals, of the coal of the Donbass, of the Hermitage Museum and the stone palaces of Petersburg; it seemed to be embodied in powerful artillery, in the metal smiths and lathe operators of Tula, in frigates and steam hammers.
Everything seemed entirely clear; to a superficial observer, there could be no doubt that Russia was moving toward the West and growing in enlightenment.
But the more the surface of Russian life came to resemble the surface of Western life, the more evocative of Western life grew the roar of Russia’s factories, the rattle of her carriages, the clickety-clack of her train wheels, the flapping sails of her ships and the crystal gleam of her palace windows—the deeper became the hidden abyss that separated the innermost essence of Russian life from that of Western life.
The evolution of the West was fertilized by the growth of freedom; Russia’s evolution was fertilized by the growth of slavery. This is the abyss that divides Russia and the West.
The history of humanity is the history of human freedom. The growth of human potentiality is expressed, above all, in the growth of freedom. Freedom is not, as Engels claimed, “the recognition of necessity.” Freedom is the direct opposite of necessity; freedom is necessity overcome. Progress, in essence, is the progress of human freedom. What is life itself, if not freedom? The evolution of life is the evolution of freedom.
Russia has always evolved in a peculiar way; what has evolved has been the degree of non-freedom. Year by year serfdom grew harsher and the peasants’ right to their land more tenuous. Meanwhile, Russian science, technology, and learning continued to advance, merging with the growth of slavery.
The birth of Russian statehood was marked by the final enslavement of the peasantry; in 1497, Autumn Yuri’s Day, November 26, the peasant’s last day of freedom, was abolished. No longer could a peasant choose to
move from one landlord to another
.
After this, the number of free “wanderers” kept dwindling, the number of serfs continued to grow, and Russia began to make herself felt as a part of Europe. After being tied to the land, the peasant was then tied first to the owner of the land and then to the officials representing the State and the army. The landowner, meanwhile, was granted first the right to pass judgment on his serfs and then the right to subject them to “the Moscow torture” (as it was christened four centuries ago); this meant tying a man’s hands behind his back, lifting him off the ground by his wrists, and beating him with a knout. And Russian metallurgy continued to progress; grain warehouses grew larger; the State and its army grew stronger; the world saw the dawn of Russian military glory; and literacy increased.
The remarkable work of Peter the Great, who laid the foundations of Russian scientific and industrial progress, involved an equally remarkable progress in the severity of serfdom. The serfs who worked the land were still further reduced in status—until they enjoyed no more rights than a landlord’s household serfs; the few remaining “wanderers” were enserfed. Peter also enserfed the peasant farmers of the far north and of the southern and eastern frontiers. There was a similar increase in the burdens placed on the peasants owned by the State; this too was in the interests of Petrine enlightenment and progress. Peter believed that he was bringing Russia closer to the West—and that was indeed the case. But the abyss between freedom and non-freedom continued to grow.
Then came the dazzling age of Catherine the Great, the age of a wonderful flowering of Russian arts and Russian enlightenment—and the age when serfdom reached its highest development.
And so, Russian progress and Russian slavery were shackled together by a thousand-year-long chain. Every move forward toward the light only deepened the black pit of serfdom.
The nineteenth century, however, was a very special century for Russia.
This century shook the fundamental principle of Russian life: the link between progress and serfdom.