The Prince of Darkness

Lenin is unquestionably one of the most prominent figures of the century just passed. He qualifies for this distinction not only because he founded the first totalitarian state in history, the kind of state destined to dominate international relations for most of that century, but also because he provided the original model of the revolutionary dictator. He was the first head of state to be designated “leader”--vozhd--a title adopted by the Italian duce, the German fuhrer, the Cuban lider maximo, and other modern dictators who would assert the right to guide--or drag, if necessary--their people to the terrestrial paradise to which they alone held the keys. His destructive fanaticism, directed primarily against Western liberalism, knew no bounds. Hence he would accept no restrictions on his authority, defining the “dictatorship of the proletariat” as “power that is limited by nothing, by no laws, that is restrained by absolutely no rules, that rests directly on coercion.”

Such a man has naturally attracted many biographers. one of the earliest of them was the Menshevik David Shub, whose “Lenin” (1948), though in some respects outdated, benefited enormously from the fact that Shub had been able to observe the Soviet leader at first hand. Among important biographies published subsequently, there were Louis Fischer’s “A Life of Lenin” (1964) and Adam Ulam’s “The Bolsheviks” (1965).

In the 1990s, with the opening of Soviet archives, several thousand Lenin documents, previously locked in secret depositories, were made available to Russian as well as foreign scholars. The most important work based on these materials was the two-volume biography by Dmitrii Volkogonov, a Russian general turned historian, “Lenin: Politicheskii Portret” (1994) (it appeared the same year in a condensed English translation). As may have been expected, the secreted Lenin documents revealed the least savory aspects of his personal and public life, showing him to have been even more brutal and devious than previously known.

Now comes Robert Service of St. Antony’s College at Oxford with a new biography of Lenin. The author is eminently qualified for the task, having spent the bulk of his professional life studying the Soviet leader: Among his published works is a three-volume inquiry into his protagonist’s politics (“Lenin: A Political Life”). To write the present book, he carried out research in Moscow in what used to be known as the Central Party Archive, an institution that has a monopoly on Lenin manuscripts as well as those of most of the other leading figures of the Soviet era. His Lenin is thoroughly researched and well-informed. And yet it presents several puzzling features.

To begin with the distribution of the material. Lenin’s claim to fame rests entirely on his role as founder and first leader of the Soviet state: His contribution to Marxist theory was negligible and had he fallen to his death out of the famous “sealed train” which, in the spring of 1917, carried him across Germany to Finland and thence to Russia, he would have merited no more than a footnote in histories of socialism. Nevertheless, in Service’s biography a mere one-third of the space is devoted to the period from October 1917 until Lenin’s death five years later. The bulk of the book deals with his childhood, youth and struggle for power. There are many new items culled from the archives of Lenin’s immediate family, but the emphasis is surely misplaced. It means that critical facts bearing on his five-year dictatorship are either greatly compressed or altogether ignored.

No less curious is Service’s virtual dismissal of previous Lenin biographies. In the 26 pages of end-notes, there are only a couple of references to Volkogonov’s ground-breaking biography and none to Shub’s, Fischer’s or Ulam’s; Ulam does not even rate mention in the bibliography. Scholarship, like science, is supposed to build on previous knowledge, and it is disconcerting to see a scholar give no recognition to his predecessors.

Such a procedure might perhaps be warranted for a historian who has gained access to critical documentary data unavailable to others or else comes up with an interpretation completely at variance with the prevailing one. But neither happens to be the case with Service’s “Lenin.” His biography adds some interesting details, but the picture that emerges from it is a familiar one. And as for the sources, they are the oddest feature of the book.

The inside cover of the book’s jacket displays a photograph of Robert Service standing in front of a steel door: It is said to represent “[t]he author holding a Lenin file, at the door of the central party archives in Moscow.” His right hand rests on the door, seemingly about to open it; his left cradles a folder labeled “Lenin, Vladimir Il’ich.” The picture conveys the impression that Service had direct access to Lenin’s personal archive. This archive, labeled “Fond [Deposit] 2,” consists of two parts, “Opis [Description] 1 and 2,” the second of which contains over 3,000 documents that were classified “secret” and unpublished while the Soviet regime was in power.

There is wide discrepancy between the suggestion imparted by the author’s photograph and the evidence presented in his book. For one, the entire corpus of Lenin manuscripts, including those in the secret part, has been available to the scholarly community since 1991. We received these documents not by penetrating the vaults but, more mundanely, by filing request slips and having copies of the originals delivered to the reading room. Access through the steel door was reserved exclusively for the archival staff.

Service writes in the introduction:

“(I was fortunate to be in Moscow on the day when the central party archives were ‘unsealed’ after the abortive coup d’etat against Gorbachev and to use the now historical freedom.) Steadily the files became declassified. . . . Lenin as a politician became a more comprehensible figure as a consequence. This was already an enticement to take another look at Lenin.”

But the perplexing fact is that Service makes no use of Lenin’s personal archive. Every archival reference--with one exception--to the Lenin papers comes from published sources, that is, draws upon the work of others. The single direct reference to Fond 2--a letter to his mistress, Inessa Armand--was published four years ago in my “Unknown Lenin.” I do not know how to explain this curious fact, but it casts doubts on the publisher’s claims to originality (“This biography shows us Lenin as we have never seen him. . . .”). Apart from some minutiae culled from the papers of Lenin’s wife, brother and sisters, including facts about his health, Service’s biography presents no new information.

I believe that Service had as his principal aim humanizing Lenin, and to this end he downplayed politics and stressed human-interest stories, drawing on previously unexplored records of contemporaries close to him. This proved a formidable task. It is not that Lenin lacked human qualities but that he ruthlessly suppressed them in the single-minded pursuit of his obsession, a global revolution that, in Trotsky’s words, would overturn the world. It is this secular ascetism that made him give up chess because it interfered with his studies and refuse to listen to Beethoven’s music because, as he told Maxim Gorky, it inspired him to “caress people” whereas “one must . . . pitilessly break heads.”

The book tells some previously unknown or unnoticed anecdotes. For example, it describes how, during the voyage in the “sealed train,” Lenin, who was afflicted with an un-Russian, Germanic passion for order, regulated access to the train’s toilet. It seems that there was a conflict between those Russian passengers who wanted to use the toilet for legitimate bodily functions and those who used it to smoke:

“On Lenin’s initiative, a system of rationing was introduced for toilet access. For this purpose he cut up some paper and issued them as tickets on his authority. There were two types of ticket, one for the normal use of the toilet and the other for a discreet puff on a cigarette. This compelled smokers to limit the number of times they smoked, and quickly the disputes in the queue subsided.”

Service comments:

“It was a comic little episode. Yet, without overdoing the point, we might note that Lenin’s intervention was typical of his operational assumptions. He thought that the socialist way of organizing society required above all a centrally coordinated system of assessing needs, allocating products and services and regulating implementation.”

Further on, we are told how Lenin, in the midst of running the revolution, became fond of a pet:

“Lenin and Nadya [his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya] acquired a cat. They adored the animal, and Lenin was often seen carrying it along the corridor to the Sovnarkom [cabinet] meeting room. The cat knew how to look after itself. In the meeting room, it would snuggle down in Lenin’s armchair in the knowledge that no one would dare to disturb it. Nadya and the maid fed the cat, and, whenever the maid had a day off, Nadya asked a Sovnarkom secretary to take over the duty. She did not trust Lenin to lay out the food as was necessary.”

“In fact,” however, the author adds, “Lenin was dependable in his care of their cat even if he was not always punctual in putting a plate in front of it.” This information comes from an archival source.

Significant as they no doubt are, such human-interest stories are purchased at a price. The price is abridging or altogether ignoring some aspects of Lenin’s life which are of major historic importance.

A couple of Two examples must suffice. Lenin’s most important contribution to revolutionary theory was his thesis, formulated in “What Is to Be Done?” (1902), that the working class (“proletariat”), left to its own devices is incapable of carrying out a revolution: Radical zeal has to be infused in it by a party of professional full-time revolutionaries, i.e. intellectuals. This assertion flatly contradicted Marx’s formula that it is the working class, driven to desperation by poverty, that will overturn the capitalist order. Service is an expert on “What Is to Be Done?” having edited it in English. And yet in the several, pages that he devotes to this book, this central point is not emphasized, so that the reader misses the theoretical underpinning of Bolshevism.

An even more egregious omission occurs in the section that describes the nearly successful attempt on Lenin’s life on Aug. 30, 1918. The would-be assassin was a socialist by the name of Fanny Kaplan (who goes unmentioned). Less than a week after the assassination attempt, the Soviet government, almost certainly with Lenin’s approval and probably on his initiative, issued a decree introducing the “Red Terror.” Under its terms, the Cheka, the political police, had the power to arrest and intern in concentration camps “class enemies” and to execute, without trial, all persons suspected of sedition. Immediately, mass executions began of hostages, many of them officials of the old regime. In Petrograd alone, Lenin’s local party boss, Grigorii Zinoviev, ordered the execution of 512 political prisoners in no way implicated in Fanny Kaplan’s attempt. The executions went on for weeks until the Communist apparatus itself became frightened. Officially initiated in September 1918, terror became henceforth a permanent feature of Soviet administrative practice, reaching unprecedented savagery in 1937 and ’38.

Of this, however, not a word appears in Service’s biography. We learn about the tickets to the train toilet but are left ignorant of the Red Terror. Why this omission it is difficult to tell. Service on a number of occasions relates incidents of terror instigated on Lenin’s orders and minces no words to condemn them. Thus, citing Lenin’s notorious order to the Penza Bolsheviks of August 1918 calling for the public hanging of “no fewer that one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers,” he rightly points out that it called for people being “judicially murdered simply for belonging to a social category” (if “bloodsucker” indeed is a “social category”). Alluding to another Lenin directive threatening to raze the city of Baku, he says that it meant a reversion to the “Middle Ages”: “No moral threshold was sacred.” Yet he ignores the foundations of these and subsequent massacres.

Another glaring omission is the ferocious campaign of agrarian requisitions launched on Lenin’s initiative in the summer of 1918, which forced peasants to surrender their grain for worthless paper money and which was largely responsible for the frightful famine of 1921-’22. That famine, the worst in European history until then--it claimed more than 5 million lives--is disposed of in 10 words--one sixth the space devoted to the feeding of Lenin’s cat.

For Lenin, the famine provided an opportunity to assault the Orthodox church and compel it to surrender its valuables, allegedly to aid the starving peasants, in fact to provide his government with valuables with which to make purchases abroad. Lenin’s inhuman callousness is revealed in one of the most revolting of the documents found in the secret part of his archive. It is a letter to the Politburo written in March 1922:

“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 . . . so as to secure for ourselves a fund of several hundred million gold rubles. . . .”

Although Service does not cite or even refer to this letter, he makes no attempt to whitewash Lenin. He depicts him as a “bookish fanatic” who found “vicious relish in exemplary terror” and felt no compunction twisting ideology to suit his political interests. He speaks scornfully of “the casual fashion in which Lenin treated his Marxism whenever a goal of practical politics was in his sights. . . . If intellectual sleight of hand was sometimes necessary, then so be it.”

The picture that emerges, then, is one of a brutal opportunist for whom grabbing, keeping and expanding power over other human beings was the supreme concern. Yet Service spurns the view which he attributes, not quite fairly to me, that Lenin in power was “merely a psychopath to whom ideas barely mattered and whose fundamental motivation was to dominate and to kill.” One cannot escape the feeling that although Service is well aware of the sinister side of Lenin’s personality, he seems to admire the Soviet leader’s total commitment to his cause that he somehow absolves him of his sins and crimes. It is a not uncommon weakness of academic intellectuals who are as fascinated by power as others are fascinated by money.

The author’s ambivalence emerges in the book’s concluding paragraph, where admiration contends with disapproval, leaving the reader in limbo:

“[Lenin] led the October revolution, founded the USSR and laid out the rudiments of Marxism-Leninism. He helped to turn a world upside down. Perhaps a few years hence he will be seen to have thrust the country and, under Stalin’s leadership, a third of the world down a cul-de-sac. The future does not lie with Leninist communism. But, if the future lies elsewhere, we do not know where exactly. Lenin was unexpected. At the very least, his extraordinary life and career prove the need for everyone to be vigilant. Not many historical personages have achieved this effect. Let thanks be given.”