Not By Politics Alone: The Other Lenin

Not by Politics Alone ...

– The Other Lenin

This title is one of a series published to commemorate the centenary of V. I. Lenin’s death. The others are as follows:

Imperialism and the National Question, V. I. Lenin

The State and Revolution, V. I. Lenin

Lenin’s Childhood, Isaac Deutscher

Not by Politics Alone ...

– The Other Lenin

edited and introduced by

Tamara Deutscher

This edition first published by Verso 2024

First published by George Allen & Unwin Ltd 1973

© Verso 2024

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author and editor have been asserted

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ISBN-13: 978-1-80429-274-7

ISBN-13: 978-1-80429-275-4 (UK EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-80429-276-1 (US EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lenin, Vladimir Il'ich, 1870-1924, author. | Deutscher, Tamara, editor. | Lenin, Vladimir Il'ich, 1870-1924. Works. Selections. English

Title: Not by politics alone : the other Lenin / V.I. Lenin ; edited and introduced by Tamara Deutscher.

Description: [First Verso edition.] | Brooklyn, NY : Verso, 2024. | First published by George Allen & Unwin Ltd 1973—Copyright page. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023036229 (print) | LCCN 2023036230 (ebook) | ISBN 9781804292747 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781804292761 (US ebk)

Subjects: LCSH: Lenin, Vladimir Il'ich, 1870-1924.

Classification: LCC DK254.L4 D48 2024 (print) LCC DK254.L4 (ebook) | DDC 947.084/1092 [B]—dc23/eng/20230822

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023036229

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023036230

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

PREFACE

A choice of excerpts for an anthology is always somewhat arbitrary. Much more – reminiscences, letters and quotations – might have been included here in order to show that Lenin did not live by politics alone. Quite deliberately I have kept out of this volume such writers as Krupskaya, Trotsky or Gorky, because each of their books on Lenin constitutes an entity from which it would be wrong to cull short passages. Their works are easily available; they are lively, extremely readable and informative. If a somewhat different Lenin emerges from their pens, it is because each of them was a different – and a strong – personality and this coloured their narrative. Nor have I used Lenin’s letters to his relatives which form a whole volume of his Collected Works.

Whenever possible I have tried to go to original Russian sources less known to the Western public; also to bring in the recollections of people who had worked with Lenin for some length of time. As the reader will see from the letter to Inessa Armand reproduced on page 120, Lenin often used to underline words for emphasis. In those of his letters which appear in this book ordinary italics have been used to indicate single underlining and bold italics where Lenin vigorously underlined a word two or three times or more.

I should like to thank Lawrence and Wishart for their generous permission to quote from their edition of Lenin’s Collected Works; in some instances, as I explain in the Introduction, I had to revert to the latest, fifth Russian edition and provide my own translation. The Oxford University Press kindly allowed me to quote from N. Valentinov, Encounters with Lenin; thanks are also due to Preuves for permission to quote Marcel Body’s article, and to the University of Michigan Press for the excerpt from A. Balabanoff’s Impressions of Lenin.

I should like to thank most warmly all my friends who were so good as to help me in my work. Professor E. F. C. Ludowyk once again showed admirable patience in scrutinising the text and my translation and in trying, with infinite tact, to smooth many of my most ungraceful turns of phrase. To Mr F. Samson I am grateful for his most attentive reading of the typescript, for his valuable criticism and also for constant encouragement. My thanks are due to Mr Monty Johnstone, who very kindly put at my disposal his library, helped in the search for some sources and thus spared me hours of unproductive toil. The very first, and nebulous, idea of Not by Politics Alone... emerged from a talk with an American student, Steven Unger. It was his generation of readers, those born after the Second World War, that I had primarily in mind while preparing this anthology.

T.D.

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

  I W ORK AND L EISURE

The Siberian deportee I

G. M. Kzhizhanovsky

The Siberian deportee II

O. Lepeshinskaya and P. N. Lepeshinsky

‘A kind of baritone’

P. N. Lepeshinsky

The sportsman

P. N. Lepeshinsky

In Geneva I

T. S. Bobrovskaya

In Geneva II

M. Essen

In Cracow and Poronin

S. J. Bagotsky

 II L IKE A NY O THER M AN ?

Lenin as a revolutionary leader

M. N. Pokrovsky

Meeting with Kropotkin

V. D. Bonch-Bruevich

Kropotkin’s death

V. D. Bonch-Bruevich

Letter to Alexei Maximych Gorky

V. I. Lenin

‘No rhetoric, please ...’

V. D. Bonch-Bruevich

Cult of personality

V. D. Bonch-Bruevich

Lenin robbed

S.K. Gil

Salary: letter to V. D. Bonch-Bruevich

V. I. Lenin

Expenses on garage: letter to F. E. Dzerzhinsky

V. I. Lenin

Expenses on books: letter to V. D. Bonch-Bruevich

V. I. Lenin

‘Please prolong my leave’: letter to V. M. Molotov

V. I. Lenin

Letter to Y. S. Varga

V. I. Lenin

How to borrow a book: letter to the Library of the Rumyantsev Museum

V. I. Lenin

‘Please look through my pamphlet’: letter to G. V. Chicherin

V. I. Lenin

‘Excuse me, comrades’: letter to W. Koennen, A. Thalheimer and P. Froehlich

V. I. Lenin

III I NESSA A RMAND

Letters to Inessa Armand

V. I. Lenin

Death and funeral

Angelica Balabanoff

Alexandra Kollontay remembers

Marcel Body

IV R EVOLUTION , L ITERATURE AND A RT

What is to be done?

V. I. Lenin

Fine pages of Russian literature

N. Valentinov

In memory of Herzen

V. I. Lenin

Leo Tolstoy as the mirror of the Russian revolution

V. I. Lenin

L. N. Tolstoy and the modern labour movement

V. I. Lenin

Tolstoy and the proletarian struggle

V. I. Lenin

Leo Tolstoy and his epoch

V. I. Lenin

Lessons of the Paris Commune

V. I. Lenin

In memory of the Paris Commune

V. I. Lenin

Party organisation and party literature

V. I. Lenin

What can be done for public education?

V. I. Lenin

Pages from a diary

V. I. Lenin

Illiteracy and socialist construction

Klara Zetkin

Letters to Alexei Maximych Gorky

V. I. Lenin

A talk with Gorky

A. V. Lunacharsky

What to do with counter-revolutionary writers: letter to F. E. Dzerzhinsky

V. I. Lenin

Lenin at an exhibition

A. V. Lunacharsky

Against Mayakovsky: letters to A. V. Lunacharsky and Comrade Pokrovsky

V. I. Lenin

Oblomov still lives – on Mayakovsky

V. I. Lenin

A visit to a students’ hostel

‘Little Inessa’ Armand

With young artists

S. Senkin, M. Garlovsky, N. Altman, Y. Yakovlev

Museums and experimenting youth

A. V. Lunacharsky

On Dostoevsky

G. M. Kzhizhanovsky

Against bureaucratic style

V. D. Bonch-Bruevich

On monumental propaganda

A. V. Lunacharsky

Telegram to the People’s Commissar Lunacharsky

V. I. Lenin

Lenin on cinema

A. V. Lunacharsky

Directives on cinema

V. I. Lenin

On music

A. V. Lunacharsky, Marya Stetskevich

 V W OMEN ’ S R IGHTS

Letters to Inessa Armand

V. I. Lenin

A great beginning

V. I. Lenin

The tasks of the working women’s movement

V. I. Lenin

Soviet power and the status of women

V. I. Lenin

On love in communist society

Klara Zetkin

VI B UREAUCRACY

Lenin and the peasants

V. D. Bonch-Bruevich

The party crisis

V. I. Lenin

International and domestic situation

V. I. Lenin

Conditions for admitting new members to the party

V. I. Lenin

Eleventh Congress of the R.C.P.(b)

V. I. Lenin

Note to L. B. Kamenev on the struggle against Great Russian chauvinism

V. I. Lenin

To the Presidium of the Fifth Congress of the Soviet Employees’ Union

V. I. Lenin

Lenin’s last notes: on the question of nationalities or on ‘autonomisation’

V. I. Lenin

Glossary

Sources

Index

INTRODUCTION

More than any other historical figure, Lenin determined the character and the outlook of our epoch. He developed Marx’s conception of proletarian socialism and brought the fabric of his vision within the ken of the exploited and oppressed masses of the vast Tsarist empire. As a leader of men, he gave purpose and direction to social forces which, disjointed and dispersed, might have spent themselves and achieved nothing. He speeded up a historical process, gave it shape and form, and was the prime mover of events which shook the world. Yet he was no Nietzschean Superman nor a demiurge of history, but was himself shaped and formed by circumstances. His greatness consisted precisely in this: he was the perfect expression of the needs of his time; he saw farther and deeper than most men of his time, and he had an extraordinary insight into those urges and longings of which people, still shackled by an anachronistic mode of existence, had only vague and half-conscious awareness. He formulated the thoughts which agitated the rank and file of his party; he knew the meaning and weight of the clouds which drifted in the air and across the dark skies of autocratic Russia; he harnessed all the winds of change to unleash the storm in which the old established order of government was to founder. When he acted, he acted in accord with the masses. He was their undisputed leader; he was also led by them.

When on the morrow of the great October insurrection he calmly declared: ‘now we shall proceed to build a new social order’, in front of him were less than six years during which he exercised power. Behind him was a quarter of a century of prison, exile, clandestine work, and emigration; a quarter of a century of strenuous preparatory and educative endeavour. By 1917 Lenin, the philosopher, theoretician, economist, journalist, polemicist, literary and social critic, had already produced his great works: The Development of Capitalism in Russia, What is to be Done?, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Just before October, poised on the Finnish border and in hiding, he worked on The State and Revolution which he began with a prophetic remark on the attempts to convert the revolutionary thinkers, after their death, into ‘harmless icons’, to canonise them, while at the same time robbing their revolutionary theory of its substance. The last chapter of the treatise – on the lessons of 1905 and 1917 – was never written: the actual uprising left no time for this: ‘... it was more pleasant and useful to go through the experience of the revolution than to write about it’, remarked Lenin a few weeks later.¹

It is not the aim of this volume to introduce the reader to the essentials of Leninism or to summarise or pre-digest for him Lenin’s monumental ideas. The other Lenin will emerge from these pages: the other and yet the same, the Lenin of everyday reality who lived by politics but not by politics alone, the Lenin of work and leisure, geared to his life’s purpose and yet enjoying to the full all the pleasures of a healthy human existence; neither the humourless monolithic cult-hero of the official mythology nor the humourless bogey man of official anti-communism.

What perhaps impressed Trotsky most in Lenin’s personality – he stressed this time and time again – was Lenin’s singleness of purpose, his extraordinarily tense, unrelenting straining towards his goal: the overthrow of the old autocratic tsarist order and the building up of the foundations of the new, socialist one. Even a less perspicacious observer, and one for whom this tautness of purpose as well as the purpose itself were not matters for admiration, was struck by this characteristic feature: ‘The idea which had taken hold of him’, writes Valentinov, the future Menshevik who in his youth was under Lenin’s spell, ‘at any given moment to tally dominates his mind, turning him into a man possessed. It seemed as if all other aspects of his mental life, all his other interests and wishes, were swept aside and vanished during such periods. There was one idea alone, nothing else, in Lenin’s field of vision: one brightly shining point in the darkness....’² The ‘one idea’ was of such dimensions that it could indeed have filled completely the whole field of vision.

Lenin was not drawn into revolutionary activities on an impulse, by a society in turmoil or on the verge of an upheaval; he chose the life of a professional revolutionary deliberately, after mature reflection, and with eyes fully open. The road dimly perceived by Alexander Ulyanov, his older brother who had perished on the gallows, the road to the transformation of society through society’s own awareness of its wretchedness, through the realisation of the masses of their own strength and potentialities acquired in the course of slow educative work, that road became Lenin’s long before he glimpsed any hope that in his strivings for his idea, he would ever live to see its fulfilment. Yet, his whole being ‘was geared to one purpose’, the purpose of the revolution.

This absolute dedication of his life, this subordination of all inessentials to the needs and requirements of the ultimate aim did not, and could not, make of Lenin a wooden icon of Stalinist hagiography nor the soulless, narrow-minded ‘compulsive’ revolutionary portrayed by Western philistines organically incapable of comprehending the motive power of a truly great idea.

He is earthly –

but not of those

whose nose

delves only into

their own little sty.

He grasped the earth

whole,

all at one go ...

Mayakovsky said of him.³ Precisely because Lenin’s aim was so great and all-embracing, precisely because it concerned the whole of humanity, there was nothing narrow in his outlook; precisely because he acted as he did in the interest of ordinary men and women and expressed their aspiration and unspoken thoughts, it could be truly said of him that no field of human endeavour was alien to him.

Stalin needed the cult of Lenin’s personality before he could embark on building up his own; the innumerable monuments he raised to Lenin were to serve him as stepping-stones or as plinths on which to raise his own statues. And yet the real Lenin was quite unlike the commanding figure in the windswept coat standing high above his native Simbirsk, with his arms outstretched in the histrionic gesture of a Roman emperor ordering his legions to advance – as the sculptor G. Manizer depicted him. Nor did he radiate an incandescent light, a saintly halo playing around his whole body, by which this supernatural being is instantly recognised as in the paintings of a Gerasimov. If Lenin towered above the men of his time, it was by the sheer strength of his thought and by that concord of political imagination and realism which allowed him to see what was to be and did not prevent him from seeing what was. But all this could hardly be conveyed by official sculptors and official portrait painters, who had to paint Lenin in the image in which Stalin the Leader saw himself and wanted others – millions of others – to see him.

In real life Lenin’s physical appearance was strikingly unremarkable (see p. 49). This ordinariness shocked the young Koba-Djugashvili – Stalin, who later recollected that preparing himself to meet Lenin for the first time he ‘had hoped to see the mountain eagle of our party’, the great man, great physically as well as politically. ‘I had fancied Lenin as a giant, stately and imposing. How great was my disappointment to see a most ordinary-looking man, below average height, in no way, literally in no way, distinguishable from ordinary mortals....’ This ‘most ordinary-looking man’ also behaved in a most outrageously ordinary manner: ‘Usually a great man comes late to a meeting so that his appearance may be awaited with bated breath.... How great was my disappointment to see that Lenin had arrived at the conference before the other delegates were there and had settled himself somewhere in a corner and was unassumingly carrying on a conversation, a most ordinary conversation with the most ordinary delegates.’⁴

With a less acute feeling of disappointment many of Lenin’s contemporaries also commented on his unassuming manner and inconspicuous appearance. That he ‘carried on an ordinary conversation’ did not mean, however, that Lenin was at all capable of small or insignificant talk. For this he was too concentrated, too much ‘geared to his purpose’. But he had a special way of conversing which in a casual observer only, strengthened the impression of his ordinariness. Unlike other great men, who talked at their interlocutors displaying before them their knowledge and wisdom, Lenin asked questions – and listened to the answers. Trotsky describes his first meeting with Lenin, when he burst into Lenin’s flat in the very early hours of an October day in 1902 and breathlessly related to him his recent escape from Verkholensk and all the adventures encountered on the way. The same morning, or perhaps the next day, the two men went out ostensibly to look at the sights of London. But, says Trotsky, ‘Vladimir Ilyich had something else in mind... he wanted to get to know me and to examine me.’ And, indeed, during the long walk Trotsky was answering questions – all sorts of questions on the composition of the colony of deportees, on the formation of political groupings, on the various tendencies among them, on theoretical differences in the assessment of Bernstein and Kautsky, on philosophical, political and organisational quarrels, on what Trotsky’s companions read and discussed in the Moscow transfer prison, and what were their comments on The Development of Capitalism in Russia.

This persistent questioning to which Lenin subjected anybody who managed to come abroad, whether it be a worker-delegate to a Congress, an intellectual connected with clandestine activity, or an escapee from a remote corner of the county to which he had been banished by the tsarist court, enabled him in Geneva, Zurich or London to keep in the closest possible contact with the thoughts and feelings and moods of people in Russia (see p. 58). When he finally returned to the country, in April 1917, more perhaps than any other emigré, he felt immediately at home, as if the long years in foreign parts had faded away. He was immediately at one with the masses and with the party, but also ahead of them.

Out of thirty years of political activity, he spent twenty-four as an outlaw, an underground fighter, a political prisoner, an exile. All these years this ‘most earthly of all men’, this great realist, was sustained by nothing more than a dream, a dream of a better, a more just, social order. ‘A Bolshevik who does not dream is a bad Bolshevik’, he used to say. For a quarter of a century he was working towards a goal which seemed to him even more remote than it eventually proved to be. As late as January 1917 he still did not believe that the revolution would come in the lifetime of his generation – and this was only a few months before he returned to Russia. Before the year was out, the revolution had triumphed, and he assumed power which he was to exercise for the most difficult six years of his life.

The two and a half decades he spent in exile were, for all their revolutionary fervour, marked by that considered and deliberate mode of life which one adopts facing a long, long haul, when strength cannot be treated prodigally or wasted. Many reminiscences of his fellow-emigres testify to the well-regulated routine in which not only work, but leisure and rest had their well-defined place. He detested Bohemian revolutionism: it was incompatible with his rationality and purposefulness. But he had the gift of enjoying to the full those pleasures of life which did not interfere with his capacity for work, but on the contrary enhanced it. This showed itself even in the manner in which, as far as it was possible, he used to choose his living quarters during his constant peregrinations. Provided he had a roof over his head, a table to work at, and some shelves for his books, he was not concerned either with the aesthetic qualities of his home or with more than rudimentary comforts. What was decisive, however, was the nearness of a river so that he could skate in the winter and swim in the summer; the proximity of mountains for climbing, or even plain fields and meadows for walking and cycling. When in 1912 he came to live for a time in Cracow, he was not deterred by the dirt, mud and slums of its working-class suburb, but attracted by the Wolski forest and the Blonie (meadows), which so charmed Inessa Armand on one of her visits, that she took as her pseudonym, Blonina – woman of the meadows.⁵