The Dilemmas of Lenin. Tariq Ali

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the daily life of the new state. Lenin was a bad patient. He refused to stop reading the newspapers or thinking about politics. While attending what would be his last party congress in April 1922, he felt alienated from the direction the state was taking. He accepted his share of responsibility and, while recognising the role of material causes in setting the party on this path, he was shaken by how far along it the party had gone and concerned with the subjective factor, namely the party and its leadership. ‘Powerful forces’, he wrote, ‘had diverted the Soviet state from its “proper road” ‘. Lenin’s last writings were a courageous attempt to make the party change course. He thought of historical examples of a nation’s defeat when the vanquished had managed to impose their culture on the victors, defeating them in spirit. He felt that the old tsarist bureaucracy had managed to conquer his colleagues, who had easily adopted the old methods of governance, if not the cultural practices, of their past oppressors. Yes, he did write about all of this, as I detail in the concluding chapters of this book. And he apologised: ‘I am, it seems, strongly guilty before the workers of Russia.’ It was almost as if he had been rereading Engels’s essay ‘The Peasant War in Germany’:

      The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents and for the realisation of the measures which that domination would imply. What he can do depends not upon his will but upon the sharpness of the clash of interests between the various classes, and upon the degree of development of the material means of existence, the relations of production and means of communication upon which the clash of interests of the classes is based every time. What he ought to do, what his party demands of him, again depends not upon him, or upon the degree of development of the class struggle and its conditions. He is bound to his doctrines and the demands hitherto propounded which do not emanate from the interrelations of the social classes at a given moment, or from the more or less accidental level of relations of production and means of communication, but from his more or less penetrating insight into the general result of the social and political movement. Thus he necessarily finds himself in a dilemma. What he can do is in contrast to all his actions as hitherto practised, to all his principles and to the present interests of his party; what he ought to do cannot be achieved. In a word, he is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class for whom conditions are ripe for domination. In the interests of the movement itself, he is compelled to defend the interests of an alien class, and to feed his own class with phrases and promises, with the assertion that the interests of that alien class are their own interests. Whoever puts himself in this awkward position is irrevocably lost.

      Lenin, of course, never represented the ‘alien class’. But some of his colleagues did and, as Lenin was only too aware, other observations made by Engels were apposite. Some of Lenin’s last writings were hidden from the Russian people for thirty-three years. And those who revealed them were incapable of implementing the prescriptions. Lenin had seen what had happened to the Party when it was confronted with the task of running a country. He was mortified by the degree of bureaucratisation that had taken place. Before the revolution he had been strongly criticised by Rosa Luxemburg and intemperately so by Leon Trotsky over his conception of the Party as a heavily centralised, clandestine organisation. He had defended himself ably and without resorting to Marx, though he obviously was familiar with this passage from Capital:

      In all kinds of work where there is cooperation of many individuals, the connection and the unity of the process are necessarily represented in a will which commands and in functions, which, as for the leader of an orchestra are not concerned with partial efforts, but the collective activity.

      In his famous addendum to What Is to Be Done? Lenin had utilised the image of an orchestra to illustrate how to organise the party from a central apparatus:

      In order that the centre can not only advise, convince and debate with the orchestra – as has been the case till now – but really to direct it, we need detailed information: who is playing which violin and where? What instrument is being mastered and has been mastered and where? Who is playing a false note (when the music starts to grate on the ear) – and where and why? Whom to relocate to where and how in order to correct the dissonance?

      What this concept assumes is a strong will but also an interplay of equality, democracy and authority inside the party and, by extension, in society as a whole. This is why Lenin believed that a revolution in Germany was so vital and that, had it been successful, it would have helped the Soviet Republic move forward much more easily both economically and politically. As for the ability of a party to work in clandestinity, this was important not just for Russia, but for the Communist-led resistance movements in France, Italy, China, Vietnam and Yugoslavia throughout the Second World War as well. The leaders and parties in these last three countries went on to make revolutions.

      In one of his last injunctions, Lenin insisted that if one was defeated politically through a combination of one’s own mistakes and circumstances, one must learn from the defeat in order to understand why it had occurred and then start one’s work again. Socialism was an approximation and was not born fully formed; therefore socialists must openly admit their mistakes. Without this, they would never progress. Neither Khrushchev nor Gorbachev had the vision or the capacity to start again. Had Lenin lived another five years, the country and the party would have moved forward differently. The New Economic Policy would have been dismantled with greater care, and the brutal leap to industrialisation might not have transpired. Nor would Lenin have killed off the bulk of Old Bolsheviks on the Central Committee and the country as a whole. To what extent and with what degree of success he would have implemented change will always remain a subject for debate.

      Putin’s Russia will not be marking the centenary in either February or October. ‘These dates are not in our calendar,’ Putin said to a leading Indian newspaper publisher and editor. Other Russians, including some of Putin’s opponents, do not even accept that there was a ‘Russian’ Revolution. It was, according to them, all the work of the Jews.¹¹ One of the few who are above criticism these days is Stalin, largely because of the ‘Great Patriotic’ War and partially because his methods of rule are envied by many Russian nationalists today. Mummifying Lenin and his ideas was a lasting ‘achievement’ of the Stalin period. Time, then, to bury Lenin’s body and revive some of his ideas. Future generations in Russia might realise that Lenin still has a bit more to offer than Prince Stolypin.

      The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky committed suicide in 1930. In one of his last poems, written in 1929 and titled ‘Conversation with Comrade Lenin’, Mayakovsky aired his concerns about the activities of the Party in the wake of Lenin’s death:

      Conversation with Comrade Lenin

      Awhirl with events,

      packed with jobs one too many,

      the day slowly sinks

      as the night shadows fall.

      There are two in the room:

      I

      and Lenin –

      a photograph

      on the whiteness of wall.

      The stubble slides upward

      above his lip

      as his mouth

      jerks open in speech.

      The tense

      creases of brow

      hold thought

      in СКАЧАТЬ