This is not a biography, and the reader should know that before opening it. Lenin the Revolutionary is a short thematic textbook — a little over fifty thousand words — written by six Soviet academics and assembled by Progress Publishers for the 110th anniversary of Lenin's birth in April 1980. The contributors are named on the copyright page, which is more than the Institute of Marxism-Leninism ever did for its official Lenin: A Biography: Professor V. P. Filatov took the opening address to the reader, the chapter on the making of the Party and the conclusion; Professor A. A. Babayants the chapter on the Soviet state; Professor V. N. Konyukhovsky four of the five sections on the revolution; Assistant Professors V. T. Kuzmin, G. P. Pozhidayev and Professor Yu. A. Sherkovin one section each. Liv Tudge translated it. There is no date-of-original problem here, which is worth stating because there usually is: the text refers to the 110th anniversary in the past tense, its most recent source is a Brezhnev article in World Marxist Review of 1977, and its closing pages quote his report to the Twenty-Fifth Congress. This is a 1980 book about 1980, and it argues from the fully mature Brezhnev doctrine of "the developed socialist society" — a phrase that appears in the last three pages like a refrain.
The structure tells you what it was for. Chapter I is Lenin as thinker: philosophy, social psychology, economic theory. Chapter II is the building of the Party. Chapter III is the revolution. Chapter IV is the state. The narrative spine is thin and the exposition is thick; whole years pass in a sentence while a dozen pages go to the theory of surplus value. It is a Party-school primer dressed for export — the sort of book a foreign communist or a sympathetic student would be given as a first serious approach to Lenin, short enough to finish and authoritative enough to trust. That combination is exactly what makes it worth examining. A short book cannot mutilate a document at length. It can only omit, and omission at this scale is a technique with its own signature.
Begin with the arithmetic, because in this volume the counts are the argument. Trotsky is named twenty-five times, always as an obstacle. Stalin is named five times, all of them in a single passage about the "Letter to the Congress" and its aftermath. Nadezhda Krupskaya — Lenin's wife, his co-worker in exile, his link to the Georgian oppositionists in his last months — is not named once. Neither is Inessa Armand, nor Kollontai, nor Lunacharsky. The words "Georgia" and "Georgian" do not occur. "Kronstadt" does not occur. The Tenth Party Congress, which is quoted in a footnote, is never narrated as an event. The Military Revolutionary Committee is described but its chairman is never named, and neither is the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, at any point, in either 1905 or 1917.
What emerges is a Lenin without collaborators. This is the volume's distinguishing device and it is not the same device the Institute of Marxism-Leninism used three years later in Lenin: A Biography. The 1983 official life is a de-Stalinised book that still needs Stalin: it has to place him at the Thirteenth Congress, has to explain the Testament, has to concede in an index entry that he committed "gross violation of socialist laws". The 1980 primer simply removes almost everyone. There is no Stalin in October, none in the Civil War, none in the national question, none as author of the autonomisation plan. But the removal is not even-handed, and that is the point. Every anti-Trotsky verdict manufactured in the Stalin period is retained, in full working order, while the man in whose interest they were manufactured has been lifted out of the frame. The reader is left with the conclusions of a factional history whose faction has been made invisible.
Look at what this does to October. The chapter on Lenin's role in the revolution — Pozhidayev's — describes the formation of the Military Revolutionary Committee (it inverts the name to "Revolutionary Military Committee", RMC) accurately enough at first: "a legally constituted body responsible for directing the rising". Then comes the sentence: "The RMC was a non-party body, in contact with the workers and soldiers at large, and united all the sources of revolutionary strength. Though attached to the Petrograd Soviet, it exercised its authority countrywide, under the supervision of the Bolshevik Central Committee and of Lenin, who was himself one of its members." Lenin was in hiding until the night of 24–25 October and belonged to no such body. The chairman of the committee, who did belong to it, is not mentioned. And on the following page the old legend surfaces intact: at the meeting of 16 (29) October, we are told, "operations were to be directed by a Revolutionary Military Centre appointed at a closed session of the Central Committee and subordinated to the Revolutionary Military Committee." Who sat on that Centre is not stated. It is a directing organ with no members.
Its members were Sverdlov, Stalin, Bubnov, Uritsky and Dzerzhinsky. We know this because Trotsky forced the minute into print. In his Letter to the Bureau of Party History, reprinted as the long opening document of The Stalin School of Falsification, he quotes the Central Committee record of 16 (29) October exactly as Pravda published it on 2 November 1927: "The Central Committee created a military revolutionary center with the following members: Sverdlov, Stalin, Bubnov, Uritsky and Dzerzhinsky. This center is to be a constituent part of the Revolutionary Soviet Committee." His comment on the legend built from it is the one sentence this 1980 chapter most needs and cannot survive: of that centre, he writes, "Trotsky was not a member. Neither was Lenin a member of that committee. That fact alone demonstrates that the committee had only a subordinate organizational significance." Trotsky also recovered what Stalin himself had written for the first anniversary, in Pravda of 6 November 1918: "All the work of practical organization of the insurrection was conducted under the immediate leadership of the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, Trotsky." (Readers should note that the direct contemporaneous refutation lives in this Letter to the Bureau of Party History, not in the book's late chapter "How the October Insurrection Actually Took Place", which deals with a different falsification — the charge of "constitutional illusions" — and demolishes it with a 1920 jubilee speech in which Stalin admitted that the Central Committee had proceeded against Lenin's demands and that Lenin, arriving at the Smolny, said: "Yes, you were right.")
That charge, too, is here. "Matters were further complicated when Trotsky also opposed Lenin's line and advised postponement, which would have placed the rising yet deeper in jeopardy." The sentence follows immediately on the account of Zinoviev and Kamenev's disclosure in Novaya Zhizn, so that the reader carries the word "treachery" forward into it.
None of this is new, and it had been identified in print, in English, twenty-one years before this book was printed. Writing as Ernest Germain, Ernest Mandel devoted "Thirty Questions and Thirty Answers about the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union" (Fourth International nos. 10 and 11) to the Khrushchev-era official history, and paused on precisely this passage. The 1959 History, he noted, had abandoned the Short Course's claim that a "Party Centre" with Stalin at its head "in practice guided the insurrection", and correctly reported that the Military Revolutionary Committee "did carry out all the practical work of the insurrection". Then: "one lie by omission committed here by the authors of this History is not to recall that its president was Leon Trotsky." And having named the five members of the Centre, the 1959 editors added the line Mandel quotes with an exclamation: "The entire work of organizing the insurrection was directed by Lenin." Set that beside 1980's "Lenin, who was himself one of its members" and the continuity is not a family resemblance. It is the same operation, performed again, in a book for beginners.
The Testament follows the same law. This volume prints Lenin's remedy: the Congress "should consider replacing him as General Secretary of the Central Committee by someone who 'in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc.'" But the diagnosis that produced the remedy is gone. The word "rude" does not occur anywhere in this book. Lenin's postscript of 4 January 1923 begins by saying that Stalin is too rude, and that this fault, bearable among communists, becomes unbearable in a General Secretary; the primer replaces it with "Lenin was afraid that Stalin, once in a position of power, would fall victim to the grave flaws in his character and wield his authority recklessly" — a vague apprehension about power in general in place of a specific charge against a man.
On Trotsky the treatment is not omission but invention. Lenin's text, as Trotsky published it in "On the Suppressed Testament of Lenin" (December 1932), reads that Trotsky "is distinguished not only by his exceptional abilities – personally he is, to be sure, the most able man in the present Central Committee – but also by his too far-reaching self-confidence and a disposition to be too much attracted by the purely administrative side of affairs." The 1980 book keeps the two faults, discards the judgement they qualify, and adds a charge Lenin never made: Lenin "expressed his lack of faith in Trotsky's political intentions. Trotsky had often opposed the Bolshevik line and defied the Central Committee; Lenin judged him to be an overly self-confident person, fascinated by bureaucratic procedure." Lenin cited one such conflict, over the Commissariat of Ways and Communications, and cited it as evidence of ability. "Often" is the editors'. So is "lack of faith in Trotsky's political intentions" — a phrase Trotsky had anticipated by half a century when he observed that the faults Lenin named "do not bear any relation to 'underestimating the peasants' or 'lacking faith in the inner forces of the revolution' or any other of the inventions of the epigones." And the sentence in which Lenin ruled the whole question out of bounds — that the October episode of Zinoviev and Kamenev "ought as little to be used against them personally as the non-Bolshevism of Trotsky" — is not here at all. The 1983 official life at least printed a version of it, inverted. The 1980 primer does not print it, so there is nothing to invert.
Mandel's fourteenth question described the method exactly, of a book published in 1959: the History "passes over in silence all the praises uttered by Lenin concerning the Bolsheviks he mentions in his Testament (Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Piatakov) and keeps only the criticisms." That is a complete description of this page. Lenin called Bukharin the party's most valuable theoretician and its favourite; the primer records that he "underlined the ideological instability of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and Pyatakov". Nothing but the negatives survives. Mandel's closing remark on the 1959 text — that the omissions are the more grotesque because the Testament had been published in the USSR, so that any reader could compare — held with more force in 1980 than in 1960.
What follows the Testament is the passage a reader should copy out. "Since Stalin was a reliable opponent of Trotsky and the opportunist line and assured the Congress that he would correct the faults that Lenin had spoken of, he was kept on as General Secretary. He took the criticism to heart, was pivotal during the confrontation with Trotsky and the Rightwing opportunists after Lenin's death, and made a valuable contribution to the drive towards socialism." Then, in a new paragraph: "But in time Lenin's words began to lose their power over him: he made some serious mistakes, violating the Leninist norms of Party life and socialist legality." That sentence is where the collectivisation famine, the Terror, the destruction of the officer corps and the deported nations are housed in this book. Twenty-four words, in the past perfect, about a man who has otherwise been erased from his own century.
The national question is handled by a method more economical still. Lenin's last dictated intervention, "The Question of Nationalities or 'Autonomisation'", occurs in this book exactly once: as a footnote reference, supplying the source for an inspiriting sentence about the awakening of the colonial peoples. Its actual subject — that Great-Russian chauvinism had been reproduced inside the Soviet apparatus, that the bullying of Georgian communists had been carried out in the name of the revolution, that Stalin and Dzerzhinsky bore responsibility for it — is not summarised, refuted or mentioned. The formation of the USSR is narrated as a placid ascent to voluntary union; the autonomisation scheme appears only as one of the "other suggestions which arose", authorless. There was in fact a fight, and Trotsky set out its documents in the 1932 essay: Lenin's insistence that it was necessary "to hold Stalin and Dzerzhinsky responsible for all this out-and-out Great-Russian nationalistic campaign"; his warning, passed through a secretary, that "Stalin will make a rotten compromise ... in order then to deceive"; and the note of 5 March 1923 asking Trotsky to take the Georgian case: "That affair is now under 'prosecution' at the hands of Stalin and Dzerzhinsky and I cannot rely on their impartiality. Indeed, quite the contrary!" It is the last day of Lenin's political life. The primer's conclusion, sixty pages later, describes a society "for which the national question, history's most vexing social problem, is no longer an issue, a society permeated with national accord."
Compression is doing work here that scholarship could not do. The 1983 biography had to narrate the Tenth Congress and so had to explain the ban on factions; it praised the ban and passed over Kronstadt in the same paragraph, and the seam showed. The 1980 primer has no chapter in which the Tenth Congress can occur. The New Economic Policy simply appears — "introduced in the spring of 1921" — as the intelligent successor to War Communism, prompted by economic exhaustion. There are no peasant risings, no Kronstadt, no Workers' Opposition, no ban on factions, no 1921–22 famine on the Volga. The opposition of that year survives only as a slogan to be refuted: enemies "launched the catchphrase 'Soviets without Communists'". A shorter book need not lie about a crisis it never had room to mention. That is the specific advantage of the popular form, and it should be named as such.
One further falsification is worth isolating because it is checkable by date alone. In the section on Lenin's wartime writings, the book states that "The articles 'On the Slogan for a United States of Europe' and 'The Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolution' established that socialism could triumph in one country", and adds: "Lenin's fiercest critic on this issue was Trotsky, who denied that the socialist revolution could triumph in one country and insisted that socialism in Russia was out of the question until the proletariat was in power in Europe." No such controversy existed in 1915 or 1916. The doctrine of socialism in one country was advanced in the autumn of 1924, ten months after Lenin's death, and Trotsky's demonstration of this in The Third International After Lenin (chapter I) rests on the plainest possible evidence: the first, 1924 edition of Stalin's own Foundations of Leninism, which stated that for "the final victory of socialism, for the organization of socialist production, the efforts of one country, particularly of such a peasant country as Russia are insufficient", and concluded that these were "the characteristic features of the Leninist theory of the proletarian revolution". The passage was reversed in the next edition. Trotsky quoted it from the 1928 Russian collection Lenin and Leninism. Sixteen years earlier this book's back-dating had been retrospectively contradicted by the man who invented the doctrine.
Now the other side of the account, which is real and should not be swallowed.
The pre-1917 narrative is, with the exception of the passages on Trotsky's "centrism", sound. The account of Lenin's family and of Alexander Ulyanov's execution in May 1887, of Kazan and Samara and the Fedoseyev circles, of the fight over organisation after the Second Congress, of Iskra and the Bureau of Bolshevik Committees and Vperyod, is the standard chronology and it is correct. The war chapters on Kautsky's "ultra-imperialism" and on the collapse of the Second International are a competent short exposition of Lenin's position and no worse for being partisan.
More than that: the account of 1917 between February and October is in places better than its tradition. It reproduces Lenin's September offer of a compromise to the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries in his own words — "We may offer a compromise to these parties. ... And I think we should do so" — and states plainly that "A peaceful takeover again became a possibility", which the Short Course lineage was never comfortable admitting. It reports that Kamenev was Chairman of the Central Executive Committee, that he and Zinoviev and Rykov resigned over the demand for a coalition government, and — most unexpectedly — it argues at length that Lenin never held the dictatorship of the proletariat to require a single party: "the Party and the Soviet Government were ready to reach an agreement with any political party that was not hostile to Soviet power", and the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries did enter the government in November 1917. A reader who takes that argument seriously, and then asks what happened to it, will have begun to read the book against itself.
And Sherkovin's section on Lenin and social psychology is the one chapter here that could not have been written anywhere else. It is an attempt to read Lenin as a theorist of mass consciousness — of "socio-psychical conditions", of the transformation of moods into political fact — and it draws on a real Soviet literature (V. N. Kolbanovsky's essay on Lenin and social psychology, in a 1965 Moscow collection) that has scarcely been translated. The claim that before Lenin "no one had seriously studied social moods, or realised that changes in the mass consciousness have a vital effect on the course of history" is not defensible; the underlying interest is genuine, and it is a reminder that the Soviet academy contained working disciplines and not only liturgy.
The book closes on the developed socialist society, on the Twenty-Fifth Congress, and on Brezhnev's remark that Marxism-Leninism "is the only reliable basis for formulating the right strategy and tactics". It was printed in the year Soviet troops were fighting in Afghanistan and Polish workers were building an independent trade union at Gdańsk. On the second of those, the Fourth International's press was writing in the same weeks: a survey of Polish workers' struggles in Intercontinental Press (vol. 18, no. 34, 15 September 1980) recovered a passage by Andrzej Mandalian from Nowa Kultura of January 1957, which puts the case for reading Lenin's last writings and this book together — Lenin's notes on the national question, he wrote, are "as much if not more of a mindboggling document for Communists as his famous 'Letter to the Congress'", because "As regards nationalities policy, Stalinism found its fullest expression in great power chauvinism."
Read this book, then, for what it is: a competent short exposition of Lenin's thought, resting on a narrative from which the entire subject of Lenin's last struggle has been removed — not argued away, not explained, removed. Its final chapter describes a dying man following the Thirteenth Party Conference of January 1924, which "branded Trotsky's position as a petty-bourgeois deviation, a revision of Leninism", and adds that he did so "with such interest that a full recovery seemed likely". Whatever Lenin was following in those last weeks, that is what the six professors of 1980 needed him to be encouraged by. His own last dictated request, of 5 March 1923, was that someone take up the defence of the Georgians against Stalin. It is not in this book, and neither is Georgia.