The Times Great Lives. Anna Temkin

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      V. I. Lenin

      Dictator of Soviet Russia.

      World revolution as goal.

      21 January 1924

      Nikolai Lenin, whose death is announced on another page, was the pseudonym of Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov, the dictator of Soviet Russia. His real name has almost passed into oblivion. It was under his nom de guerre that he became famous. It is as Lenin that he will pass into history.

      This extraordinary figure was first and foremost a professional revolutionary and conspirator. He had no other occupation; in and by revolution he lived. Authorship and the social and economic studies to which he devoted his time were to him but the means for collecting fuel for a world conflagration. The hope of that calamity haunted this cold dreamer from his schooldays. His is a striking instance of a purpose that from early youth marched unflinchingly towards a chosen goal, undisturbed by weariness or intellectual doubt, never halting at crime, knowing no compunction. The goal was the universal social revolution.

      Lenin was born on April 10, 1870, at Simbirsk, a little town set on a hill that overlooks the middle Volga and the eastward rolling steppes. His father, born of a humble family in Astrakhan, had risen to the position of district director of schools under the Ministry of Education. The atmosphere of the home was that of the middle-class urban intelligentsia, which ardently cultivated book-learning, was keenly interested in abstract ideas, but had little care for the arts and was at best indifferent to the Russian national tradition.

      Of Lenin’s early life little is known. He attended the local high school, the headmaster of which was Feodor Kerensky, father of Alexander Kerensky, whom Lenin was one day to overthrow from political power. The boy appears to have been diligent in his studies, but retiring and morose. In 1887 his elder brother was executed for taking part in an attempt on the life of Alexander iii. This event may possibly have intensified Lenin’s revolutionary sentiments, though emotion never played a great part in his personal life. He was guided by cold logic though he well knew how to work on the feelings of others and to transform them into the motive power he required for his own purposes.

      From the high school he passed on into the University of Kazan where he became a student in the faculty of law. Here he came under the suspicion of the authorities, and was expelled from the university on account of his ‘unsound political views’. He continued his studies privately, and finally took his degree at the University of St Petersburg.

      Marxism in Action

      In the early ’nineties the radical intellectual circles in St Petersburg were stirred by a new development of the Socialist movement. From the ’forties onward Socialism had been the accepted creed of a large proportion of Russian intellectuals, but it was a romantic Socialism, mainly of an agrarian character, and based on an extraordinary sympathy for an idealized peasantry. At the beginning of the ’nineties a small group of young men became enthusiastic advocates of what was known as the scientific Socialism of Karl Marx, and, in articles in reviews and in the theoretical public debates on economic subjects that the autocracy permitted at that time they raised a revolt against the ‘Populist’ Socialism that had become traditional in the intelligentsia. Peter Struve, who later became a Liberal, and even developed Conservative leanings, and Michael Tugan-Baranovsky, who in the end became a popular and highly respected Professor of Political Economy, were the leaders of the Marxian group. Lenin joined them and was greatly assisted by them in his early, literary, efforts, which consisted of polemical articles on the aspects of Socialism that were then in debate. At that time he wrote under the pseudonym of Ilyin.

      Lenin never wrote a first-class scientific work. He was not primarily a theorist or a writer but a propagandist. For him articles and books were but means to an end. It was when the Marxists turned from theoretical discussion to the organization of party effort that Lenin found his true vocation. In 1898 the Russian Social Democratic Party came into being. It was of course a conspirative organization. Political activities were under the ban. No political parties, whether Liberal, Conservative, or Socialist, were permitted publicly to exist. The secret parties, or rather clubs, organized by the revolutionaries, recruited their adherents among the intelligentsia, and only to a very small extent among the workmen and peasants. The Marxists organized among the workmen of St Petersburg and other towns clandestine classes for instruction СКАЧАТЬ