Lenin: A Biography By Robert Service, Macmillan, London, 2001.
A good, single volume on Lenin is difficult to find; forgive the truism, but the man has tended to be portrayed either as a secular saint or as a vicious, evil psychopath, a sort of left-wing Prince of Darkness. Ten years on from the disintegration of the Soviet bloc through popular revolution and economic stagnation perhaps a cooler assessment of Lenin can be undertaken. The historiography of the Revolutionary and Soviet periods during these ten years – at least in the West and in English, with which the current reviewer is most familiar – have been dominated by right-wing reactionaries, American cold warriors and the descendants of those Russian social classes who were dispossessed by the March and November revolutions. Robert Service, by no means sympathetic to revolutionary socialism, sets himself the task of striking a balance. He is one of the first Western historians to have access to newly opened personal archives of the Ulianov family held in Moscow, and the book deserves attention because of this. The resulting biography is interesting and useful, but at the same time demonstrates the inherent weakness of the form.
Indeed, both the reader with little prior knowledge of Lenin’s life and thought, as well as the historical trivia junkie, will find much to please them. Service vividly recreates Lenin’s childhood, early life and pre-1917 exile, demonstrating well the factors that influenced his social and intellectual development. Vladimir Illich was from a comfortable family of bourgeois outsiders with Tartar and Jewish as well as Russian origins. He grew up in Simbirsk on the Volga, and the Ulianov family were on the social and geographical periphery of the European Russian empire. Elder brother Alexander, a Revolutionary Populist, was executed after his role in actively supporting the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. This gave a personal ingredient to the burgeoning intellectual and political revolt of the precocious Vladimir. On the death of his father Illya in 1886 he became de facto head of the family. His mother, two sisters and younger brother remained close throughout their lives, all three siblings becoming dedicated Bolsheviks themselves. Service develops a fascinating profile of Lenin through his years of exile in Siberia and Western Europe, then later through the October Revolution and into power. He was prolific, intelligent, strong willed, totally dedicated to his cause – the model of the “Professional Revolutionary” he demanded of others. He was also prone to nervous exhaustion and stress, and his massive, self-imposed workload contributed to his lifelong ill health and early death at fifty four.
And so on. Perhaps more interesting, on a deeper level, is the formation of Lenin’s ideas and politics. Here Service correctly identifies Lenin’s enduring fascination with the tradition of Russian populist terrorism, and its influence on his praxis. In particular, Lenin was influenced by Peter Tkachev, the populist who in turn was influenced by the Jacobinism of the French Revolution. Tkachev called for an elite vanguard of revolutionaries, organised centrally, to violently seize power and create an authoritarian regime. As Service points out, in his own writings Lenin was fairly coy in admitting this, citing instead Marx, Engels and Plekhanov. Nevertheless, the influence is apparent in Lenin’s conception of how a revolutionary party should be organised, and what its relationship to the working class ought to be.
Service maintains a good balance between describing Lenin’s thought and preserving the overall chronological structure of the book. His accounts of polemics with other Russian (and foreign) Social Democrats, such as Plekhanov, Trotsky and Kautsky are useful and instructive. Perhaps one of the best instances of this is Service’s description of the disputations within the Bolshevik party over their actual task once they had come to power: that of building state capitalism. Lenin had been clear about this even before the October Revolution. Service points out how Lenin saw the essence of “socialism” as “account keeping and supervision”. One could also add the utter suppression of the working class and peasantry.
The major limitation of this volume, as with the vast majority of historical biography, is that it can fall into the “Great Man” theory of history. The importance of one person is inflated, thereby simplifying and sometimes distorting a description of the historical process. This is occasionally a problem with the present volume. Unlike Services earlier, 1979 classic study The Bolshevik Party in Revolution, 1917-23: A Study In Organisational Change, the Lenin biography tends to focus on the major personalities within the Russian Social Democratic movement. As a result, the description of pre-revolutionary feuds and disputes are superb, but the portions of the book describing events after Lenin’s return to Russia in April 1917 are flat, not putting the thoughts of individuals into any wider context. A working knowledge of the general background is therefore advantageous for the reader to glean the most from the book.
Having said that, such a wider context probably wasn’t in Service’s remit. This biography sets itself the tasks of humanising Lenin and freeing the story of his life from demonisers and sycophants. There can be no doubt it succeeds in this brilliantly. The best one-volume account of Lenin’s life the present reviewer has ever come across, and well worth any reader investigating further.
Robert Worden
No comments:
Post a Comment