Some of the most quoted words ever written about Lenin are in this book, and the man who wrote them had, a few years earlier, called Lenin's revolution a crime. That tension is the whole interest of the volume, and it is precisely the tension the Soviet edition was designed to smooth away.
The centrepiece is Maxim Gorky's memoir of Lenin — the affectionate, novelist's portrait that, more than any official Life, fixed the human image of the founder in the popular mind. Here is the Lenin who loved to laugh, who played with children and stroked cats, who was plainly, disarmingly kind; and here, above all, is the most famous anecdote in the whole literature, Lenin listening to Beethoven's Appassionata and turning away from it: "I know nothing greater than the Appassionata... but I can't listen to music often, it affects my nerves, I want to say sweet nothings and stroke the heads of people... But today we mustn't stroke anyone's head or we'll get our hand bitten off; we have to hit heads, hit them without mercy." No propagandist invented that; Gorky heard it, and set it down, and it has done more to humanise Lenin — and, read another way, to reveal the cost of his politics — than any speech Lenin gave. The correspondence that fills the first half of the book is genuinely valuable too: two decades of letters in which Lenin coaxes, scolds, argues theology and philosophy with a great writer he admired and could not control, and worries about his health and his money. As a record of a real and difficult friendship between the revolution's leader and its most famous literary sympathiser, it is without equal.
So read it for that. But then notice what is missing, because the omission is the point. Maxim Gorky was not, in 1917, a Bolshevik cheerleader. He opposed the October seizure of power, and he said so at length, in public, week after week, in his own newspaper Novaya Zhizn, in the articles later collected as Untimely Thoughts. He called the insurrection a reckless gamble with the lives and culture of the Russian people; he denounced the closure of the opposition press, the early terror, the contempt for the educated; he accused Lenin and Trotsky to their faces of conducting "a cold-blooded experiment" on the Russian working class, of poisoning it with the "rotten venom" of unlimited power. "Lenin," he wrote, "has no pity for the mass of the people... he works like a chemist in a laboratory, with the difference that the chemist uses dead matter, while Lenin works on living material." This is the same Gorky. These are the thoughts he was thinking in the very years the fond letters were being exchanged. And Untimely Thoughts is not in this book. The Progress edition gives you the friendship and withholds the quarrel; it prints the man who wrote the Appassionata story and suppresses the man who called the revolution a laboratory experiment on living flesh. The selection is the argument, and the argument is that Gorky was always, simply, Lenin's loving friend.
The truth was darker and more interesting, and it did not end well. Gorky made his peace with the Bolsheviks, worked heroically to save writers and scientists from starvation in the famine years, and then — sick, disillusioned, and increasingly at odds with the regime — left Russia in 1921 for a long exile in Italy. He came back under Stalin, and the terms of his return were the terms of his canonisation: he became the official founder of "socialist realism," the first president of the Union of Soviet Writers, the living saint of Soviet letters, lending his enormous prestige to a state that was, as he returned, opening the camps. He praised the White Sea Canal, built by slave labour, in a notorious collective volume. And then, in June 1936, on the eve of the Great Terror, he died — and his death itself became an instrument of the Terror. At the Bukharin trial of 1938 the state charged that Gorky had been murdered, medically assassinated by the "Right-Trotskyite bloc," and several defendants were shot in part for killing a man the regime may well have killed itself; the truth has never been established, and that uncertainty is its own indictment. The genial memoirist of the Appassionata was, by the end, a prisoner of the cult he had helped to build, and possibly a victim of it.
None of this makes the memoir false. Gorky's Lenin is drawn from life, and the affection in it is real; the tradition from which this introduction is written has never doubted that Lenin could be, to those he loved, exactly the man Gorky describes. What the Soviet edition does is not to forge the portrait but to frame it — to take the most authoritative literary witness the revolution ever had and present only the half of him that flatters, editing out the half that, in 1917 and 1918, said in plain Russian what the anti-Stalinist left would spend the next seventy years saying: that a dictatorship unrestrained by any law would consume the freedom it promised, and the people in whose name it ruled. Gorky recanted that warning and was rewarded with sainthood and, perhaps, silenced with a syringe. The warning was right.
Read Lenin and Gorky, then, as two books at war inside one cover. On the surface it is what Progress Publishers meant it to be in 1973: the warm, authorised record of a great friendship, the humanising memoir that made Lenin lovable, literature enlisted as reverence. Underneath, for the reader who brings Untimely Thoughts along in memory, it is the story of how a state takes a critic, keeps the affection and burns the criticism, turns the man into a monument, and — when he has served his purpose — leaves even his death an unsolved question. The Appassionata is still the greatest thing Gorky ever recorded about Lenin. So is the sentence about hitting heads without mercy. This edition wanted you to hear only the first.