Lenin’s cultural equipment was exceedingly modest for a Russian intellectual of his generation. His writings show only a superficial familiarity with Russia’s literary classics (Turgenev excepted), most of it apparently acquired in secondary school. Tatiana Aleksinskii, who worked closely with Lenin and his wife, noted that they never went to concerts or the theater.37 Lenin’s knowledge of history, other than that of revolutions, was also perfunctory. He had a love for music, but he preferred to suppress it in accord with that asceticism that so impressed and alarmed contemporaries. He told Gorky:
I cannot listen much to music, it excites my nerves. I feel like talking nonsense and caressing people who, living in such a filthy hell, can create such beauty. Because today one must not caress anyone: they will bite off your hand. One must break heads, pitilessly break heads, even if, ideally, we are opposed to all violence.38
Potresov found that with the twenty-five-year-old Lenin one could discuss only one subject: the “movement.” He was interested in nothing else and had nothing interesting to say about anything else.* In sum, not what used to be called a man of many parts.
This cultural poverty was yet another source of Lenin’s strength as a revolutionary leader, for unlike better-educated intellectuals, he carried in his head no excess baggage of facts and ideas to act as a brake on his resolve. Like his mentor, Chernyshevskii, he dismissed differing opinions as “twaddle” and refused even to consider them except as objects of ridicule. Inconvenient facts he ignored or reinterpreted to suit his purposes. If his opponent was wrong in anything, he was wrong in everything: he never conceded the opposing party any merit. His manner of debating was combative in the extreme: he thoroughly assimilated Marx’s dictum that criticism “is not a scalpel but a weapon. Its object is the enemy, [whom] it wishes not to refute but to destroy.”39 In this spirit, he used words like ammunition, to annihilate opponents, often by means of the crudest ad hominem assaults on their integrity and motives. On one occasion, he conceded that he saw nothing wrong with using calumny and confounding workers when this served his political purposes. When in 1907, having charged the Mensheviks with betrayal of the working class, he was made to appear before a socialist tribunal, he admitted with brazen effrontery the charge of slander:
This formulation is calculated, as it were, to arouse in the reader hatred, revulsion, contempt for the people who act in this manner. This formulation is calculated not to persuade but to smash [their] ranks—not to correct the opponent’s error, but to destroy, to rub his organization off the face of the earth. This formulation, indeed, arouses the worst thoughts, the very worst suspicions of the opponent, and, indeed, in contrast to the formulation which convinces and corrects, it “sows confusion in the ranks of the proletariat.” … That which is not permissible among the members of a single party is permitted and obligatory for the parts of a party that has fallen apart.40
He thus constantly engaged in what one historian of the French Revolution, Auguste Cochin, called “dry terror”: and from “dry terror” to “bloody terror” was, of course, only a short step. When a fellow socialist once warned Lenin that his intemperate attacks on an opponent (Struve) could inspire some worker to kill the object of his wrath, Lenin calmly responded: “He ought to be killed.”41
The mature Lenin was made of one piece and his personality stood out in strong relief. After he had formulated the doctrine and practice of Bolshevism, which happened in his early thirties, he surrounded himself with an invisible protective wall which alien ideas could not penetrate. Henceforth, nothing could change his mind. He belonged to that category of men of whom the Marquis de Custine had said that they know everything except what one tells them. One either agreed with him or fought him: and disagreement with Lenin always awakened on his part destructive hatred, the urge to “rub” his opponents “off the face of the earth.” This was his strength as revolutionary and weakness as statesman: invincible in combat, he lacked the human qualities necessary to understand and guide mankind. In the end, this flaw would defeat his effort to create a new society, for he simply could not comprehend how people could live side by side in peace.
In the fall of 1893 Lenin moved to St. Petersburg, ostensibly to practice law, but in fact to make connections with radical circles and launch his revolutionary career.42 To the Social-Democrats whom he contacted on arrival he appeared “too red”—that is, still too much of a People’s Will adherent. He soon broadened his circle of acquaintances, joining a group of brilliant Social-Democratic intellectuals, whose leading spirit was the twenty-three-year-old Peter Struve—like Lenin, the son of a high official, but unlike him, a cosmopolitan who had been in the West and acquired an extraordinarily broad range of knowledge. The two had many discussions. Their disagreements centered mainly on Lenin’s simplistic notion of capitalism and his attitude toward the “bourgeoisie.” Struve explained to Lenin that far from having acquired a Western-type capitalist economy, Russia had barely taken the first step on the path to capitalist development, as he would convince himself once he saw the West with his own eyes. He also explained to him that Social-Democracy could flourish in Russia only if the middle class, prodded by industrial labor, introduced such liberties as freedom of the press and the right to form political parties. Lenin remained unconvinced.
In the summer of 1895 he traveled abroad and met with Plekhanov and the other veterans of the Social-Democratic movement. He was told it was a profound mistake to reject the “bourgeoisie”: “We turn our faces to the liberals,” Plekhanov said, “whereas you turn your back.”43 Akselrod argued that in any joint action with the “liberal bourgeoisie” the Social-Democrats would not lose control because they would retain “hegemony” in the joint struggle, guiding and manipulating their temporary allies in a direction that best served their own interests.
Lenin, who worshipped Plekhanov, was impressed. How deeply he was convinced cannot be determined: but it is a demonstrable fact that upon his return to St. Petersburg in the autumn of 1895 he made the debut as an orthodox Social-Democrat, committed to organizing workers for the struggle against the autocracy in a common front with the “liberal bourgeoisie.” The change was striking: in the summer of 1894, he had written that socialism and democracy were incompatible; now he argued that they were inseparable.44 Russia in his eyes was no longer a capitalist but a semi-feudal country, and the main enemy of the proletariat was not the bourgeoisie allied with the autocracy but the autocracy itself. The bourgeoisie—at any rate, its progressive element—was an ally of the working class:
The Social-Democratic Party declares that it will support all the strata of the bourgeoisie engaged in the struggle against the autocratic government.… The democratic struggle is inseparable from the socialist one; [it is] impossible to wage a successful fight for the cause of labor without the attainment of full liberty and the democratization of Russia’s political and social regime.45
Conspiracy and coup d’état he now dismissed as impracticable. It is important to bear in mind, however, that Lenin’s change of heart on the role of the “liberal bourgeoisie” was firmly anchored in the premise, stated by Akselrod, that in the campaign against the autocracy the revolutionary socialists would lead and the bourgeoisie follow.