An attractive aspect of this quality was Lenin’s loyalty and generosity toward “good citizens,” a concept limited to his acolytes: it was the obverse side of hostility toward all outsiders. Much as he personalized disagreements with the latter, within his own ranks he displayed surprising tolerance of dissent. He did not purge dissenters but tried to persuade them; as the ultimate weapon he would use the threat of resignation.
Another attractive aspect of Lenin’s total identification with the revolutionary cause as represented by his party was a peculiar form of personal modesty. Although his successors built a quasi-religious cult around his person, they did this for their private ends: for without him, there was nothing to hold the movement together. Lenin never encouraged such a cult, because he found unacceptable the implication that he had an existence separate from that of the “proletariat”: like Robespierre, he thought that, in the literal sense, he was the “people.”* His “aversion to being singled out as a personality apart from the movement”26 was a modesty rooted in a sense of self-importance far in excess of ordinary vanity. Hence his aversion to memoirs: no leader of the Russian Revolution has left less autobiographical material.†
A stranger to moral qualms, he resembled a pope of whom Ranke wrote that he was endowed with such “complete self-reliance that doubt or fear as to the consequences of his own actions was a pain unknown to his experience.” This quality made Lenin very attractive to a certain type of Russian pseudo-intellectual who would later flock into the Bolshevik Party because it offered certainty in a perplexing world. It appealed especially to the young, semi-literate peasants who left the village to seek industrial work and found themselves adrift in a strange, cold world where the personal relations to which they had been accustomed were replaced by impersonal economic and social ties. Lenin’s party gave them a sense of belonging: they liked its cohesion and simple slogans.
Lenin had a strong streak of cruelty. It is a demonstrable fact that he advocated terror on principle, issued decrees which condemned to death countless people innocent of any wrongdoing, and showed no remorse at the loss of life for which he was responsible. At the same time, it is important to stress that his cruelty was not sadism which derives pleasure from the suffering of others. It rather stemmed from complete indifference to such suffering. Maxim Gorky gained the impression from conversations with Lenin that for him individual human beings held “almost no interest, that he thought only of parties, masses, states.…” On another occasion, Gorky said that for Lenin the working class was what “ore is for a metalworker”27—in other words, raw material for social experiments. This trait manifested itself as early as 1891–92, when the Volga region where Lenin lived was struck by famine. Committees were formed to feed the hungry peasants. According to a friend of the Ulianovs, Lenin alone (echoed, as always, by his family) opposed such aid on the grounds that by forcing peasants off the land and into the cities, where they formed a “proletarian” reserve, the famine was a “progressive” phenomenon.28 Treating human beings as “ore” to build a new society, he sent people to their death before execution squads with the same lack of emotion with which a general orders troops to advance into enemy fire. Gorky quotes a Frenchman that Lenin was a “thinking guillotine.” Without denying the charge, he concedes that he was a misanthrope: “In general, he loved people: he loved them with abnegation. His love looked far ahead, through the mists of hatred.”29 When after 1917 Gorky pleaded with him to spare the life of this or that person condemned to death, Lenin seemed genuinely puzzled why he would bother him with such trivia.
As is usually the case (this held true of Robespierre as well), the obverse side of Lenin’s cruelty was cowardice. This aspect of Lenin’s personality is rarely touched upon in the literature, although there exists a great deal of evidence for it. Lenin showed a characteristic lack of courage while still in his teens when he tried to evade punishment for participating in student disturbances by attempting to withdraw from the university. As we shall note later, he will fail to admit authorship of a manuscript which cost an associate of his two additional years of exile. His invariable reaction to physical danger was flight: he had an uncanny ability to make himself scarce whenever there was the threat of arrest or shooting, even if it meant abandoning his troops. Tatiana Aleksinskii, the wife of the head of the Bolshevik faction in the Second Duma, saw Lenin run from danger:
I first met Lenin in the summer of 1906. I would rather not recall that encounter. Lenin, admired by all Left Social-Democrats, had seemed to me a legendary hero.… Not having seen him up close, because he had lived abroad until the Revolution of 1905, we had imagined him as a revolutionary without fear or blemish.… How keen, therefore, was my disappointment on seeing him [in 1906] at a meeting in the suburbs of Petersburg. It was not only his appearance that made a disagreeable impression on me: he was bald, with a reddish beard, Mongol cheekbones, and an unpleasant expression. It was his behavior during the demonstration that followed. When someone, spotting the cavalry charging the crowd, shouted “Cossacks!” Lenin was the first to flee. He jumped over a barrier. His bowler hat fell off, revealing his bare skull, perspiring and glistening under the sunlight. He fell, got up, and continued to run.… I had a peculiar sensation. I realized there was nothing to do but save oneself. And still …30
These unattractive personal traits were well known to his associates, who consciously ignored them because of Lenin’s unique assets: an extraordinary capacity for disciplined work and total commitment to the revolutionary cause. In the words of Bertram Wolfe, Lenin “was the only man of high theoretical capacity which the Russian Marxist movement produced who possessed at the same time the ability and the will to concern himself with detailed organization work.”31 Plekhanov, who on meeting him in 1895 dismissed Lenin as a second-rate intellect, nevertheless valued him and overlooked his shortcomings because, in the words of Potresov, “he saw the importance of this new man not at all in his ideas but in his initiative and talents as party organizer.”32 Struve, who was repelled by Lenin’s “coldness, contempt, and cruelty,” admits to having “driven away” such negative feelings for the sake of relations which he regarded as “both morally obligatory for myself and politically indispensable for our cause.”33
Lenin was first and foremost an internationalist, a world revolutionary, for whom state boundaries were relics of another era and nationalism a distraction from the class struggle. He would have been prepared to lead the revolution in any country where the opportunity presented itself, and certainly in Germany rather than in his native Russia. He spent nearly one-half of his adult life abroad (from 1900 to 1917, except for two years in 1905–7) and never had a chance to learn much about his homeland: “I know Russia poorly, Simbirsk, Kazan, Petersburg, the exile—that’s all.”34 He held Russians in low esteem, considering them lazy, soft, and not terribly bright. “An intelligent Russian,” he told Gorky, “is almost always a Jew or someone with Jewish blood in his veins.”35 Although he was no stranger to the sentiment of nostalgia for his homeland, Russia was to him an accidental center of the first revolutionary upheaval, a springboard for the real revolution, whose vortex had to be Western Europe. In May 1918, defending the territorial concession he had made to the Germans at Brest-Litovsk, he asserted: “We insist that it is not national interests [but] the interests of socialism, of world socialism that are superior to national interests, to interests of the state.”36