XI

CONCLUSION

LENIN OVER BOLSHEVISM

This will be the century of authority, a century of Right, a century of Fascism. For if the nineteenth century was a century of individualism (liberalism always signifying individualism), it may be expected that this will be the century of collectivism, and hence the century of the state.

—BENITO MUSSOLINI

There is little question of avoiding collectivism. The only question is whether it is to be founded on willing cooperation or the machine gun.

—GEORGE ORWELL, 1984

We live in a century of collectivism, as Mussolini observed, in which the state has all too often triumphed over the individual. Yet we must keep in mind Orwell’s observation as well; collectivism is both altruism and authority, a force for good or evil in the world. Collectivism may enhance the public welfare or lead to genocide. But it is an undeniable part of our twentieth-century world.

The story of the Russian Revolution is, in part, the story of the triumph of Lenin over the collectivist aspects of Bolshevism. Both Lenin’s authority and Bogdanov’s proletarian myth were crucial to the emergence of the Soviet political system after 1917. The dominance of a single leader legitimized by revolution and the “dictatorship of the proletariat” was the logical outcome of a Jacobin tradition extending back to the French Revolution. The dehumanization of the individual as a bourgeois fiction no longer needed in a socialist society, and the elevation of the collective to immortal glory, was also a necessary prelude to Soviet self-sacrifice. By 1930, Leninist authority had given way to the Stalinist cult of personality, and Bogdanov’s collectivism to proletarian culture, collectivization, party loyalty, and Soviet patriotism.

Authoritarianism and collectivism were symbiotic, as well as distinct. The deification of a single political leader had as its corollary the submission and self-sacrifice of millions of individual members of society. Throughout Russian history political autocracy went hand in hand with the collective submissiveness of the Russian Orthodox church, the naive monarchism of the peasant, and the martyrdom of the radical intelligentsia. Russian traditions of individual liberty and rights were never strong. Among the Bolsheviks they were further weakened by the discovery of European relativism as expounded by Mach and others. Bolshevism came of age at the precise time when European individualism was under attack from many sides.

European relativism and collectivism helped provide Bolshevism with two fundamental ideas: first, that truth was merely what proved useful and had no absolute measure of validity; second, that the individual was a fiction, less useful than the collective. Even when Lenin attacked the other Bolsheviks for their discovery of myth and the collective, he felt their appeal. His public defense of Marxist orthodoxy against modernist heresy was itself constantly changing and shifting with the political issues of the day. What Lenin understood best, however, was that relativist myth is most effective when disguised as orthodox truth. Lenin’s political personality was formed in the Manichean tradition of Russian Orthodoxy, with the certainty of true faith; Bogdanov’s emerged from the European modernist rebellion against absolute truth and individual autonomy. Both contributed to Bolshevism.

After the 1917 revolution, Lenin and Leninism became the objects of new cults, fostered in part by the other Bolsheviks. Bonch-Bruevich, Krasin, Lunacharsky, Bogdanov, and Stalin all helped deify Lenin, in life and after death. In so doing they helped justify the view that any individual may be sacrificed to the immortal collective, now the Leninist party. Already in 1920 the writer Evgenii Zamiatin in his novel We showed that unbridled collectivism could easily lead to the absolute authority of the individual “well doer” over the collective and submissive masses, the transformation of Easter into the Day of Unanimity, and the acceptance of death as the ultimate dissolution of self in the universe.¹

Many Bolsheviks refused to accept this drift toward authoritarianism, and attempted to keep their syndicalist ideas alive in a variety of short-lived splinter groups claiming to derive their legitimacy from workers, not the party. The dream of workers’ control persisted into the mid-1920s among those for whom the initials N.E.P. stood for “New Exploitation of the Proletariat.” But the major figures of prerevolutionary collectivism made their peace with the new regime. The ruler cult of Lenin was heartily endorsed by Lunacharsky, who supervised the building of the mausoleum in Red Square; Krasin, who designed the sarcophagus and refrigeration unit; and Stalin, who supported the entire endeavor in the Politburo. But in the end the Lenin cult was not a collectivist substitute for religion, but a “party effort to fuse religious and political ritual to mobilize the population.”²

Many of the other Bolsheviks had also vanished from the scene by the time Stalinism emerged in the 1930s. The legendary Kamo was killed in 1922; years later Stalin had the monument on his grave in Tiflis removed and his sister arrested. Krasin died in 1926 after a distinguished postrevolutionary career in diplomacy and foreign trade. Bogdanov perished in 1928 while conducting a blood transfusion experiment on himself, perhaps a suicide. And Lunacharsky died a broken man in France in 1933 after watching Stalin begin the process of cultural transformation, destruction, and export of art objects that characterized the First Five Year Plan. And although Lunacharsky had urged that Krasin be memorialized “in the immortal Leninist spirit, in the immortal spirit of the immortal proletariat,” the collectivists vanished from history.³

In the 1940s and 1950s the concept of totalitarianism sufficed to explain Soviet history in a manner satisfactory to most Western observers. The nightmare of a particular generation faced with the evils of Stalinism and National Socialism became the analytic framework for another generation of scholars in the West. More recently we have seen that Bolshevism, Leninism, and Stalinism are distinct, if related, phenomena, whose ideological labels often covered up significant diversity, originality, confusion, and rivalry. We can no longer equate Bolshevism with Lenin, nor Leninism with Stalinism. As one observer has written, “Lenin’s Bolshevism was a composite of disparate and even conflicting elements evolved over a long period of years and in response to changing circumstances,” whereas Stalinism represented a “fringe phenomenon of Bolshevism” that triumphed in the 1930s and 1940s under the banner of excessive Russian nationalism and police authority.⁴

Collectivism was in the air after 1900, and Bolshevism reflected its appeal. “The individual,” wrote the sociologist Ludwig Gumplowicz in 1902, “is not prior to his group, rather the group is prior to the individual. We are born in a group and we die in it—the group preceded us and will survive us.”⁵ Creative collectivity, the collective unconscious, and collectivism all marked the shift from a century of individualism and liberalism to one of totalitarian movements and states, purges, true believers, and genocide in the name of a collective ideal. Once the individual was denied the right to exist in theory, he could be destroyed in fact, his only crime that he existed in the first place and did not belong to the right group. In the brave new world of totalitarianism, executioners and victims became locked in a bureaucratic and ideological embrace from which there was often no escape except death. It was a collectivism of the machine gun, not willing cooperation.

The persistence of syndicalism within Bolshevism also suggests a common root of fascism and Stalinism as variants of totalitarianism. As A. J. Gregor has observed, “Mussolini’s development was surprisingly similar to that followed by Lenin after 1900,” although Mussolini’s proletarian syndicalism became virulent nationalism by 1914. Both men developed Marxist movements adapted to their national environments under the influence of syndicalism. The collective, whether class or nation, provided the useful myth for mesmerizing and mobilizing the inchoate urban and rural masses of two developing nations. Bogdanov and the other Bolsheviks admitted the strategy of socialism as surrogate religion; Lenin did not. Lenin drew upon syndicalism only after disguising it as Marxist orthodoxy and defeating his Bolshevik rivals who espoused syndicalist views.⁶

Here we have seen that Leninist authority and Bolshevik collectivism were different sides of the same coin, and that Stalinism owed as much to the myth-making syndicalism and anti-individualism of Stalin’s youth as to the dictatorial authority of Lenin. Stalin himself was a Leninist by convenience more than conviction, frequently at odds with Lenin and politically drawn to the ethic of direct action, expropriation, and self-sacrifice. One of the first to use the term “Leninism,” Stalin was never an obedient Leninist. But he ultimately achieved the power to eliminate those who might remember that fact.

It would be wrong to blame Lenin and the other Bolsheviks for the final and terrible excesses of Stalinism. But together they created preconditions of individual authority, collectivist myth, and relativism which were essential to Stalinism. The deification of one man, the sacrifice of millions of individuals, and the elimination of truth as a measure of reality were all consistent with the complicated debates between Lenin and the other Bolsheviks which form the subject of this book. Lenin ultimately triumphed over the other Bolsheviks, in life as in death. But Leninism and Stalinism combined elements of both individual authority and collectivist self-sacrifice that continue to be essential to the Soviet experience as we know it in the twentieth century.