The Thinking Reed

Lenin understood no less than Sukhanov or Gorky that Russia was not ready for the transition to socialism. Trotsky solved this problem very simply, by supposing that proletarian revolution in the West would help the Bolsheviks to overcome the backwardness of Russia. Lenin also hoped for revolution in the West (not realizing that the Bolsheviks’ dictatorial methods scared off the Western proletariat from the revolution, thus postponing socialism rather than bringing it nearer). On the whole, though, Lenin’s thinking was incomparably more profound than Trotsky’s for, while appreciating Russia’s backwardness, he saw the task before Bolshevism in the years immediately ahead as precisely to correct that situation and thereby create the possibility of socialism. Anyone who reads the statements made by Lenin after 1917 with an unprejudiced mind will easily perceive that what the Bolsheviks saw as their immediate task was not ‘the construction of socialist society’ but, on the contrary, the strengthening in Russia of civilization and state capitalism in the German manner, because this state capitalism was ‘a complete material preparation for socialism, the threshold of socialism’.15

In aiming directly at state capitalism Lenin, at the same time, made no attempt whatsoever to present this as socialism, but on the contrary reacted against any such verbal deception.16 State capitalism was what, in his view, would make possible the creation of those foundations of civilization which were necessary preconditions for socialism:

Is it not clear that from the material, economic and productive point of view, we are not yet on ‘the threshold’ of socialism? Is it not clear that we cannot pass through the door of socialism without crossing ‘the threshold’ we have not yet reached?17

As I said earlier, the Bolsheviks interpreted Marxism, in a certain sense, as the ideology of modernization and Europeanization. In this lay both their strength and their weakness, for this simplified ideological treatment of Marxism, while rendering socialism more intelligible to many people in Russia, at the same time obliged them to shut their eyes to some very important scientific conclusions that followed from its discoveries. But this was not the main problem. Berdyaev wrote that Peter I was ‘a Bolshevik on the throne’.18 One can also make this comparison the other way round. Politically, Lenin’s party was to a greater degree the party of Peter I than the party of Karl Marx, since it strove first and foremost to ensure that Russia imitated contemporary forms of Western organization. Lenin said that his followers should

not shrink from adopting dictatorial methods to hasten the copying of [state capitalism as in Germany]. Our task is to hasten this copying even more than Peter hastened the copying of Western culture by barbarian Russia, and we must not hesitate to use barbarous methods to hasten the copying of it.19

The Bolsheviks were the party of revolution and of order by virtue of their discipline, their unity and their conviction. They were the only party capable of defending the vestiges of European civilization in Russia, modernizing the country and preserving Russia as an independent and unified power. In 1918 Novaya Zhizn' noted with irritation that very many people, even those who did not agree with Bolshevism, were pleased with the way the Bolsheviks were ‘gathering up the land of Russia’, and compared Lenin with Ivan Kalita, unifying the disintegrated Russian state ‘through an unflinching civil war’.20 Socialist democrats of both the Marxist and the Narodnik tendencies were alienated and fragmented and, in general, could not constitute a serious political force in this backward country. The Social-Revolutionary Party existed, as a united party, only on paper. The Whites, despite their use of methods even harsher than those of the Bolsheviks, were unable to establish a unified political order even in the territories which they occupied.

The Bolsheviks and the Socialist Intelligentsia