The Icon and the Axe

His prophetic opposition to the war placed him in a strong position for appealing to the war-weary Russian populace. Lenin arrived at the Finland Station surrounded by the aura of a genuine alternative coming from another world to demand an end to war, and promising the beginning of a new era to all who would follow him "with icons against cannon."35 The establishment and consolidation of his dictatorship represents a masterful case study of the opportunism and daring of a gifted strategist clearly focused on the realities of power. Details of the Bolshevik rise to power belong properly to political and military history; but inextricably involved in this story are a number of profound, if only partly conscious, Bolshevik borrowings from the radical traditions of the Russian intelligentsia. In at least four important ways, Bolshevism benefited from these traditions in threading its way from a relatively obscure revolutionary party of twenty-five thousand on the eve of the March revolution of 1917 to the unchallenged ruling force of an empire of 150,000,000 by the end of the Civil War four years later.

The first and most important debt to the Russian intellectual tradition was the conviction that any alternative to tsarist authority must be cemented together by an all-embracing ideology. From the time of the early Boehmists, Martinists, Schellingians, Hegelians, and Fourierists, Russian reformers had tended to gravitate toward Western thinkers who offered a new view of the world rather than mere piecemeal proposals for reform. The turn in the late nineteenth century from romantic ideologists to sweeping pseudo-scientific theorists, such as Comte and Spencer, prepared the way for the Bolsheviks' turn to Marx. Tkachev, the lonely Jacobin theorist who anticipated many of Lenin's elitist ideas, had written to Engels in 1874 that Russia, in contrast to the West, required "an intelligentsia-dominated revolutionary party."36 Lenin provided such a party far more adequately than the Mensheviks, for whom Marx provided a rational guide for practical social and economic changes rather than a prophetic invocation for the coming millennium. Lenin was truer to the tradition of ideinosf, of being "possessed with an idea," than most rival groups, who in the turbulence of 1917 still seemed immersed in the world of meshchanstvo: of philistinism and "small deeds." The ideiny, or ideological quality, of Lenin's party helped attract a much-needed increment of gifted intellectuals to its ranks in 1917: the so-called mezhraiontsy, or "interregional" group, of Trotsky, Lunacharsky, Bogdanov, and others.

In the second place, Lenin benefited from the Russian predilection for

theories of history that promise universal redemption but attach special importance to Russian leadership. The appeal of such philosophies of history had been a constant feature of the Russian intellectual tradition, and was rooted in the subconscious hold of an historically oriented theology. The old belief in a coming millennium had been secularized by a century of preaching that "the golden age lies ahead and not behind us"; and a people steeped in Utopian thought patterns were attracted by Lenin's claim that the transition to classless communism was imminent, and that all human problems were about to be solved in the manner that friendly crowds arbitrate occasional squabbles on the street.37

The belief that Russia was destined to provide ideological regeneration for the decaying West had been propagandized by conservative as well as radical theorists. And the radical belief in a coming earthly Utopia had often fascinated even those who rejected it. Dostoevsky, as he moved from radicalism to conservatism, still felt the seductive power of this "marvellous dream, lofty error of mankind":

The Golden Age is the most implausible of all the dreams that ever have been. But for it men have given up their life and all their strength, for the sake of it prophets have died and been slain, without it the peoples will not live and cannot die. . . .3S

For this dream people proved willing to die resisting the counterattacks of the old order during the Civil War. In times of chaos and disruption the most Utopian visions may provide the most practical banner for rallying popular support.