The Icon and the Axe

Sentiment of all sorts was suppressed in Lenin, whose icy and ascetic manner sets him off strikingly from the traditional loose camaraderie of the intelligentsia and its conviction that feelings were inextricable parts of the thought process. His beloved mother was German, and most of his foreign travel was in Northern Europe: the advanced areas of industrialization and urbanization. Southern Europe with its sunlight, wine, and song played- with one exception-little role in his bleak life.19 Even before he turned to Marxism in the early nineties, Lenin seems to have acquired a hatred for the vagueness, sentimentality, and-above all-futility of the aristocratic intelligentsia. He was embittered by the execution of his elder brother, a revolutionist, in 1887, and soon acquainted himself with revolutionary circles in Kazan. He introduced himself to his future wife, the stolid revolutionary Nadezhda Krupskaia, in 1894, as the younger brother of the

martyred revolutionary, and identified himself in this fashion in a short autobiographical sketch. There are few traces of tenderness in his childless, ideological marriage.30

Lenin's vituperation provides a striking contrast with the accustomed form of discourse even among revolutionary intellectuals. There is some precedent in Marx for his language of denunciation. But his acerbic style and constant imputation of deformity to his opponents often seems closer to the rough-hewn fanaticism of peasant insurrectionists, schismatics, and sectarians-all of whom flourished in the Simbirsk-Samara-Kazan regions of Lenin's youth. His style seems more a throwback to the powerful intermixture of prophecy and epithet in Ivan the Terrible and Avvakum than a continuation of the traditional debates of the nineteenth century.

When earlier revolutionary leaders spoke of "them and us," they were contrasting power with truth, the ruling bureaucracy with the rulers in the world of ideas. For Lenin, however, "purity of ideas" was equated with "impotence."21 Potency requires power, which in turn, demands not truth, "but a true slogan 01 the struggle."22 Morality was not to be based Qn "idealistic" standards or inner feelings, but on the ever-changing dictates of revolutionary expediency. Thus, Lenin was not fundamentally concerned witli truth (pravda) in either of its two meanings of scientific fact (pravda-istind) or moral priaciple, (pravda-spravedlivosf). Pravda became, instead, the title of his newspaper, with its daily directives for action. "Cursed questions" were replaced by cursory commands.

These commands were binding because of a second basic and novel feature of Lenin's teaching: his emphasis on organization. The tradition of secret, disciplined, hierarchical organization had never struck deep roots in the Russian revolutionary tradition-though there was a substantial theoretical literature of Jacobin proposals from such figures as Pestel, Ogarev, Nechaev, and Tkachev. Even the full-time revolutionaries within the People's Will were undisciplined, politically naive, and visionary-their most professional members being members not of an organization but of a "disorganization group." Lenin's new conception was partly dictated by the techniques needed for self-protection against the vastly improved methods of police espionage and enforcement; in part also it followed from the re-examination of revolutionary methods that had gone on steadily since the failure of the People's Will. Increasingly, the idea of consolidation under a more military type of organization had been mooted. The term "cadre," which became such a key concept in Bolshevik organizational thinking, was introduced in the late eighties, along with the idea of the manipulative use of "front" groups.23 The leading theoretician of refurbished revolutionary populism, Victor Chernov, head of the new Social Revolutionary Party, also

insisted in 1901 that unity would have to be superimposed on the revolutionary movement so that "we will not have social democrats and social revolutionaries, but one indivisible party."24

Lenin's final formula for organizational discipline was that of "democratic centralism," whereby decisions were reached on the basis of free discussion among party members, moving from the bottom to the top. Ultimate decisions were reached in the central committee of the party, of which the first secretary was the absolute center. Once made, a decision became totally binding. Such a system logically lent itself to the "substitutism" foreseen from the very beginning by Trotsky, whereby "the party organization supersedes the party as a whole; then the central committee supersedes the organization; and finally a single dictator supplants the central committee."25