By Mahir Ali
Long after the toppling likenesses of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov personified the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, Lenin keeps cropping up in the unlikeliest of places.
Towards the end of his highly readably memoir, Palimpsest, a celebrated US author quotes "the right-wing radio windbag Rush Limbaugh as having proclaimed after the 1994 Republican sweep of Congress, "The age of Lenin and Gore Vidal is over." "I am inclined," adds Vidal, "to dust off my six-shooters ... unless he meant Lennon, not Lenin".
Last September, Newsweek columnist George F. Will dubbed Lenin the Man of the Century, "if the title is a measure not of morality but of consequentiality, if it belongs to the century's emblematic man, the man of new departures and large echoes". He prefaces this comment with the observation, "From Baghdad to the remnants of Yugoslavia, there are a lot of little Lenins out there, practising in public what he preached in secret".
Will bases his comparison between Lenin and the Saddams and Milosevics of today on a tome titled The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive, a Yale University Press compilation of documents withheld from publication by successive Soviet regimes. He was apparently unaware that Russian historian Dmitri Volkogonov had already published a "new biography" of the founder of the Soviet state, using as his raw material those very same "previously unreleased" papers.
This was unfortunate for Will, because his thesis — by no means novel — desperately requires the sustenance that a well-informed Russian reinterpretation of Lenin might have been able to provide. He therefore quotes approvingly not Volkogonov but Richard Pipes, a Harvard scholar who finds greater logic in Hitler's choice of a bogey (the Jews) than in Lenin's (the kulaks) and who describes the Romanovs as "a family that for all its imperial background was remarkably commonplace, guilty of nothing, desiring only to be allowed to live in peace".
(A very large number of Russians who did not support or sympathise with the Bolsheviks would have questioned — with good cause — Pipes' "guilty of nothing" verdict, particularly as far as Nicholas II is concerned.)
Will, meanwhile, would have been pleased to discover that Volkogonov broadly shares his opinion of the events in Yekaterinburg, and devotes a substantial number of pages in his biography to an attempt to prove — inconclusively, as it turns out — that the order to put the Romanovs against the wall came directly from Lenin.
In his effort to condemn Lenin, Wills quotes Pipes as saying that the execution of Nicholas II and his wife and children "marked mankind's entry into 'an entirely new moral realm'," quite ignoring the revolutionary tradition whereby it was fairly common for tyrants and their heirs to be put to death without the courtesy of a trial. And there is no proof that George Will was alarmed by the summary execution of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, notwithstanding his willingness to apply late 20th century moral standards to the conduct of the Bolsheviks.
Will's opinions are not particularly significant: the western tradition of dismissing Lenin as an evil genius and laying at his door a large number of crimes against humanity that he could not possibly have condoned dates back several decades.
Volkogonov's condemnation is considerably more worthy of attention: he wasn't, after all, a disillusioned exile but a self-confessed Stalinist who found the perestroika era of Mikhail Gorbachev an ideal opportunity for conversion to the liberal-bourgeois ideals that are at least partly responsible for Russia's journey into the realm of uneven development.
Volkogonov began his historical journey with a biographical re-evaluation of Josef Stalin and tackled Leon Trotsky before turning to Lenin. Having served both Gorbachev and Yeltsin, Volkogonov died early last year, shortly after his biography of Trotsky had been translated into English.
Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the task of translating Volkogonov was undertaken by that most anti-Soviet of Sovietologists, the US professor Harold Shukman, who approaches the task with a reactionary mind set honed over the decades. It's easy to imagine how he must have relished the task (reasonably lucrative, no doubt) of revealing to the western world the conclusions of a "born again" liberal democrat who, after long years of devotion to a cause, discovers its fatal flaws and decides that Russia and the world would have been better served had the February Revolution not been followed by Red October.
Volkogonov falls — hook, line and sinker — for the theory that Russia would have embarked on the western course of development but for Lenin's intervention. He goes to the extent of citing with barely concealed approval the Menshevik theory that Marxist doctrine necessitated a flourishing capitalist economy (which Russia did not represent in 1917) for socialist foundations successfully to be laid.
The unstated implication is that, had the Duma been allowed to get along with its business under a directionless government, the socialist impetus would have been weakened sufficiently to be incorporated into the characterless post-tsarist mainstream.
It is nonetheless difficult to understand why he goes to such lengths to establish Lenin's Jewish antecedents on the maternal side of his family. Considerably more disconcerting, however, is his effort to blame Lenin for the Stalinist direction adopted by the Soviet state.
Discerning readers should have no trouble locating the inconsistencies and contradictions in Volkogonov's argument, not least where he tries to establish the deportation of hundreds of counter-revolutionaries as the precedent for Stalin's extermination of millions of "dissidents".
The trouble with Volkogonov's account is not so much his tendency to lay too much store by what the CPSU's secret archives have yielded, but the fact that he approaches his subject with the passion of a convert, sparing no effort to make the newly available facts support his predetermined conclusions.
This is not to suggest that the biography, highly jaundiced and selective though it may be, should be dismissed as insignificant. The wealth of details it contains about grey areas such as Lenin's last days cannot but fascinate students of Soviet history.
The book's value would have been considerably enhanced, however, had Volkogonov not fallen prey to ideological constraints. It is nonetheless interesting that while Volkogonov is occasionally forced grudgingly to acknowledge Lenin's greatness, his attempts to paint the founder of the Soviet state as a cold, calculating and heartless individual, so obsessed with the disastrous experiment he had helped to initiate that he disdainfully disregarded the human cost, are generally unconvincing.
A more objective re-evaluation of Lenin would have served a useful purpose in the final decade of the 20th century. Volkogonov, unfortunately, decided to undertake a different project, by joining the ranks of a certain breed of western historians (including Professor Shukman) who have for decades sought to portray the Bolshevik Revolution as an enormous tragedy for Russia and the rest of the world.
Following the transformation in Russia, there is a danger that this view, based on a motivated misinterpretation of history, could acquire the status of received wisdom among the general public. Socialists should combat any such tendency. There is plenty to show that many of the aims of the October Revolution were valid not only in 1917 but are still relevant 80 years later.
The failures of the revolution — not a few of which were propelled by extraneous circumstances — need to be kept in perspective and considered alongside its relative successes, some of which were at least as monumental.
The Bolshevik Revolution was the most significant defining moment of the 20th century, not only because of its consequences for Russia and its neighbours but also because of its inspirational value to exploited and oppressed peoples in industrialised societies and colonised countries alike.
It is also worth remembering that the welfare state was, to a substantial extent, western capitalism's response to the pressures generated by the Soviet example — and it is no coincidence that the erosion of welfare statism has picked up momentum in the "post-communist" 1990s.
It is simplistic and inaccurate to ascribe prime responsibility for Soviet failures to Lenin, just as it is absurd to assume that his absence from the scene would somehow have neutralised the historical forces that necessitated a radical break from Russia's imperialist past.
And there is some comfort to be derived from the likelihood that the celebrations of the free-market ideologues, who are unable to disguise their glee as they dance on what they believe to be the grave of socialism, are premature.
As the contradictions of unadulterated capitalism crystallise, those driven to desperation will increasingly be tempted by the path of revolt — as South Korean workers have lately demonstrated. Not a few of them will turn for inspiration to the Bolshevik example.
The era of Lenin may well extend beyond the century he helped to define.
Dmitri Volkogonov's Stalin (Grove Weidenfeld) and Lenin (Free Press) are both available in Sydney bookstores at heavily discounted prices. His Trotsky , on the other hand, will set you back $40 or more.