The Icon and the Axe

Elaborating Marx's theory of a coming dictatorship of the proletariat, Lenin insisted that such a form of rule would emerge only after the total destruction of the bourgeois state machine; that the dictatorship would then "wither away" with the imminent transformation to full communism;26 but that it would, in the interim, exert power "that is unrestricted by any laws."27

What Lenin actually brought to Russia was the dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party: his own "party of a new type" which, once in power, was renamed "Communist" to set it off from the more familiar European label of "socialist" or "social democratic."28

Within this party, relationships were to be animated not just by the mechanical laws of democratic centralism but by the untranslatable principle of partiinost'. This "party-mindedness" or "sacrificial party spirit" appealed to the sectarian impulse to find new life in some dedicated, secret group. Lenin sought to preserve and develop the sacrificial revolutionary tradition of Chernyshevsky and of his own elder brother to develop "complete comradely confidence among revolutionaries."29 He refused to call himself a materialist (even a dialectical one) unless it be recognized-as he wrote in 1894-that "materialism contains within itself, so to speak, partiinost'."30

Even more appealing to intellectuals than the new spirit within Lenin's party was its promise to overcome their classic separation from "the people." Lenin insisted that "all distinctions between workers and intellectuals" be "utterly eliminated"31 within his party; but that, at the same time, it must act as a "vanguard" within, rather than a "Blanquist" clique outside, other mass movements of the age. In fleeing from "Blanquism," the party must not fall into "tail-endism": the renunciation of Revolutionarj' goals in favor of "gazing with awe upon the 'posteriors' of the Russian

proletariat."32 Indeed, no "spontaneous" movement will produce the all-important political changes for which strategic organization and discipline are required. Lenin's party offered the intellectuals an intoxicating sense of identification with the true interests of the masses, a program for involvement in their activities, and the promise of union with them in the coming liberation.

Lenin's manifesto and proposal of 1902, What Is To Be Done?, had given Russia a new answer to that classic question, which induced Lenin's Bolsheviks to split from the Mensheviks at the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1903. Unlike Chernyshevsky's What Is To Be Done? of 1863, Lenin's did not present the picture of a new social order; unlike Tolstoy's What Is To Be Done? of 1883, Lenin's does not call for a regeneration of individual moral responsibility. Lenin called rather for a new organization dedicated to the attainment of power by an ethic of expediency.

In the wake of the Revolution of 1905 Lenin introduced a series of opportunistic modifications of traditional Marxist doctrine: the neo-populist idea of a fusion (smychka) of poor peasants with workers in the revolutionary party;33 the conception of a "growing over" (pererastanie) of the bourgeois into the proletarian revolution without the long interim which Marx had foreseen; and the idea that imperialism was the "highest stage" of a new cannibalistic finance capitalism, that was inevitably leading to world war and world-wide revolution.34

Liberal democracy rather than autocracy was Lenin's principal foe as he steered his party along the road to power in the chaotic and fateful year of 1917. He was aided in exile and in his return from Switzerland in April by autocratic Germany; he overthrew not a tsarist, but a provisional democratic Russian government. Constitutional Democrats were the first political rivals he arrested after the coup d'etat of November 7; and the Constituent Assembly was forcibly dismissed in January after only one meeting. Lenin rejected not just the "parliamentary cretins" of liberalism, but also those more orthodox Marxists like the Mensheviks and Plekhanov, who believed that socialist forms of ownership could only be superimposed on an advanced industrial society that had developed democratic political institutions.

The one indispensable pre-condition for Bolshevik success in gaining and holding power was the First World War. It put intolerable strains on the old Russian Empire and on Russia's brief experiment with democracy in 1917. Wartime divisions among the European powers and post-war lassitude enabled Lenin to consolidate power in the critical 1918-21 period. Yet Lenin's ability to capitalize on such conditions stemmed from his realization

that crisis was part of the nature of things, and that the job of a revolutionary party was not to create revolutionary situations, but to provide organized leadership for them.