The Icon and the Axe

Periods of repression and forced isolation were not new in Russian culture, and democracy was a relatively recent and unfamiliar concept for many Russians. What was profoundly revolutionary in Lenin was his deliberate break with a belief that underlay almost all previous Russian radical thought: belief in the existence of objective moral laws for human behavior. With only a few, peripheral exceptions in the nineteenth century, Russian intellectuals had resisted all efforts to find a totally new basis for morality whether in a calculus of social utility in the manner of Bentham or in the manufacture of mythic goals for the self-realizing ego in the manner of Fichte. Russian radicals had continued to use religious terminology, juxtaposing the ethical teachings of Christ to the corrupt practices of a supposedly Christian society; or the language of idealism in relating their ethical passion to the nature of goodness, or to the absolute dictates of conscience.

With Lenin, however, morality was made relentlessly relative, dictated by party expediency. He reviled not just traditional religion and philosophical idealism but also the practical idealism implicit in traditional secular humanism. His movement was to be based on a scientific theory that would free his cause from the charge of myth and purify his ethic of expediency from any trace of caprice and sentimentality. The moralistic exhortations that populists like Lavrov and Mikhailovsky had mixed in with their pseudo-scientific theories of progress were only "bourgeois phrasemongering." Modern revolutionaries needed the resilient armor of science, not the ceremonial uniforms of tradition.

Of course, the open inductive thinking of the modern scientific spirit was totally unfamiliar to Lenin, whose relentlessly political mind tended to equate it with anarchism. His longest philosophic treatise was devoted to refuting the "empirio-criticism" of those most intimately concerned with the philosophical implications of contemporary science.43 In Lenin's activist ideology, morality was deduced from scientific Marxism, of which he, the son of a schoolmaster, was the leading teacher, and he, the student of jurisprudence, the final judge. In the last analysis, arguments were not to be resolved but cut off, because the chief justice was also chief of the Revolutionary army. And this was no ordinary army, but a messianic band scientifically certain of Utopia, ruthlessly fighting for peace.

The full-blown totalitarianism that emerged under Stalin thus had organic roots in Leninist theory. There were no external criteria by which the actions of the Leninist party could be judged and criticized; no limitations established on the types of questions it was entitled to resolve. Nothing could better illustrate the depth of his break with the critical tradition of

Russian letters than his 1905 article insisting that partiinosf in literature requires that literature for the proletariat not only

not be an instrument of gain for individuals or groups, but not be an individual matter at all, independent of the common proletarian cause. Down with non-party writers! Down with literary supermen! Literature must become a part of the common proletarian cause: a "wheel and screw" of the one and only great social-democratic mechanism which is driven by the entire conscious avant-garde of the entire working class. Literature must become a component part of organized, planned, unified social-democratic party-work.44

The fact that there was genuine intra-party dissent and debate in Lenin's lifetime, that he never intended the party to regulate all of human life, and that he was personally fond of simple living and sincerely convinced that a new age was about to dawn-all is of primarily biographical interest. Far more important to the historian is the fact that the totalitarianism of Soviet society under Stalin followed logically (even if it may not have followed necessarily) from the Leninist doctrine of the party.

The Revenge of Muscovy

For the historian of culture, Lenin's brief rule was still something of a chaotic interregnum; and it is the age of blood and iron under Stalin that marks the real watershed. Once his dictatorial power was securely established in the late twenties, Stalin systematically imposed on Russia a new monolithic culture that represented the antithesis of the varied, cosmopolitan, and experimental culture that had continued on into the twenties from pre-Revolutionary days. During the quarter of a century that stretched from the beginning of his first five-year plan in 1928 to his death in 1953, Stalin sought to convert all creative thinkers into "engineers of the human soul." They were to be cheerleaders along his assembly lines-deliberately kept uncertain of what cheer was required of them and denied that last refuge of human integrity in most earlier tyrannies: the freedom to be silent.