The Icon and the Axe

A third area of indebtedness to the indigenous traditions of Russian radical thought lay in the Bolshevik expropriation of the populist myth of "the people" as a new source of moral sanction. Shortly after the Bolshevik coup, enemies of the new regime were denounced as "enemies of the people," and ministries of state were rebaptized as "people's commissariats."39 Summary executions soon came to be glorified as "people's justice"; and Bolshevik dictatorships dressed up for export as "people's democracies."40 The vaguely appealing populist belief that "the people" carried within themselves the innate goodness for building a new social order provided the Bolsheviks with the opportunity of camouflaging instruments of state control with the lexicon of popular liberation. Without this widespread belief in "the people" as a regenerative life force, the Bolsheviks would have had far more difficulty convincing the Russian people and themselves that their own coercive measures were morally justified.

A final borrowing from earlier tradition was the subtle Bolshevik adoption of the concept of the "circle" as a new type of dedicated com-

munity in which all distinctions of class and nationality were eliminated. Such Bolshevik concepts as sacrificial "party spirit" and internal "self-criticism" had been in many ways characteristic of Russian intellectual circles from the first secret gatherings of Novikov and Schwarz in the eighteenth century. The idea that diverse social groupings could find common unity and purpose in a circle dedicated to radical change had been present in some of the early masonic groups, and had become dominant with the entrance of non-aristocratic and national minority elements into the main stream of Russian intellectual life in the late nineteenth century. Lenin accepted in practice, if not in theory, the populists' highly un-Marxian idea that the instrument of radical social change would be an alliance of "workers, peasants, and the intelligentsia." "Poor" and "poor middle" peasants were said to be the proletariat of the countryside; and "progressive" intellectuals and "oppressed" nationalities were invited to join the revolutionary movement.41 During the brief period between the end of the Civil War and his physical deterioration and death, Lenin's attitude toward culture was more that of a nineteenth-century Russian radical fervently committed to Westernization and secularization than that of a twentieth-century totalitarian despot. He had been generally unsympathetic with Bogdanov's wartime effort to build a monolithic new "proletarian culture," and permitted a variety of new artistic schools to flourish after the initiation of the more relaxed New Economic Policy in 1921. Lenin disliked the artistic avant-garde, but viewed their work as incomprehensible rather than dangerous, irrelevant rather than subversive. His main cultural preoccupations were with the spread of basic education and the inexpensive mass publication of older literary classics. It was in essence a neo-populist program tempered with a Victorian emphasis on general utility.

Elements of populist evangelism had already appeared in Lenin's call for a new elite to raise the historical "consciousness" of the working class, and in his insistence on beginning with a new journal. Elements of Vic-torianism were already evident in his patronizing, pedagogic manner, his humorless moral puritanism, and his matter-of-fact distaste for either primitive, popular superstition or sophisticated, intellectual metaphysics. Once in power, Lenin did not forbid further flights of fancy; but he did seek to bring Russian culture back to earth. He was interested in the technical task of spreading literacy rather than the imaginative art of creating literature.42

For all the benefits which he received from the radical intellectual tradition and all of his inner links with it, Lenin paved the way for its destruction. It is not just that he severed the ties that Russia had been developing with Westward-looking political and cultural experimentation.