In Our Time - Lenin

Episode Date: March 16, 2000

For some time, in some intellectual quarters in the West, Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov - also known as Lenin - was regarded as an understandable revolutionary, perhaps a necessary revolutionary given the actions of the Tsars, certainly a sympathetic revolutionary compared with his successor - Stalin. He became an icon in Russia - his body unburied, lying in Red Square in a state of permanent, imminent resurrection. The Russian Presidential Elections take place at the end of the month, and the Acting President, Vladimir Putin, promised that if he won he would finally take the body of Lenin from Red Square and bury him. But whether the country will be able to escape the extraordinary influence of the man, his ideas and his machinery of oppression is another matter. In his short period in power between 1917 and 1924 Vladimir Illyich Lenin invented the one party state, developed a model to export communism around the world and built a completely original political system that remained intact for over seventy years. What drove him and enabled him to achieve success?Robert Service, lecturer in Russian History and Fellow of St Anthony’s College, Oxford and biographer of Lenin; Vitali Vitaliev, author, columnist, broadcaster former Soviet Journalist of the Year.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the Russian presidential elections take place at the end of the month and the acting president, Vladimir Putin, has promised that if he wins,

he'll finally take the body of Lenin from Red Square and bury him. But whether the country will be able to escape the extrater, extraordinary influence of Lenin, his ideas and his machinery of oppression is another matter. Robert Service is the first biographer to have had access to the Lenin archives in Russia, and his book, A Lenin, a biography, contains a lot of new and illuminating information. I'm also joined by Vitale, Vitalev, former Soviet journalist of the year, who was brought up in a Russia where Lenin was the father of the nation. Robert Service, there's a great deal in your book that's new.

What most strikingly is new to people who think they know a bit about Lenin? Well, I think that in years gone by, it was possible to write political studies of the man in terms of what he was like as a party boss or as a world statesman or as a Russian revolutionary. What is now possible is to see where the man came from, what his family was like, what his cultural background was, what his philosophical assumptions were as they were laid down in his early manhood, how he related to people as human beings, what sort of family he had, what sort of associates he had,

and what they did in order to enable him to become the great revolutionary that he was in 1917. Why was it so important to keep so much of this information under wraps? What sort of thing was kept under wraps? Oh, well, practically everything about the personal life that was thought, thought to be uncongenial to the image of Lenin, the revolutionary saint. And since so much of Lenin wasn't very saintly, since he was a rather cummogenly type, since he was a very, very emotional man, since he wasn't a man who was calculating and hugely altruistic in most of his daily dealings, a lot of the personal Lenin was never allowed to come through the sieve. One embarrassment

that the Soviet state had was the fact that Lenin wasn't holy or possibly even at all a Russian. He came from a mixed ethnic background of Jews, Swedes, Germans and possibly Kalmix. And possibly there was a bit of Russian there as well. Over the years under Stalin, Lenin was manufactured into being a classic Russian revolutionary. and the Stalinist state was a disguised form of Russian nationalist state to a large extent. So it would have been an embarrassment to have had a non-Russian to have founded that state. What else besides the Lepagat, anything about the way he behaved as a young man that was new? Yes, I mean, Lenin was a rather strange little boy.

As a baby, he was literally a headbanger. His parents were very worried about him. They lived in a big wooden house, and he would periodically raise his head from the floor and bang it back down on the floor. And they were seriously worried that he was going to damage himself with this sort of behaviour. He was a really raucous little monster of a baby. And he was a rather selfish little boy thereafter. He didn't treat his sisters and brothers as well as they treated him.

He was cheeky to his mother, especially after his father. died. He was an opinionated, self-centered little chapie, and the brothers and sisters thought that and said that to him. His father was an upward demur by a middle-class man on the banks of the Volga, playing a small party in a Chekhov drama, really, wasn't they? Yes, you're right. They could have come out of a Chekhov play, the Ulliano family, because Lenin wasn't his real name. And I think this is the key to a lot of what input we can now see into the adult Lenin. The fact that this was a largely non-Russian family

has an impact, not in terms of ethnicity, but in terms of marginality. The Ulyanavs were on the make. They were professional people. They were people who believed in education, in enlightenment, in achievement. They were people who thought then not a lot about the old Russia. They thought about the new Russia,

the new European Russia, the late 19th century Russia that was being built up at that period. And they were on the margins trying to get into the centre, but they wanted to be part of a centre that would be a different centre, a different Russian centre. And they suffered a series of terrible setbacks. The father dies when Lenin is in his teens, and then the older brother is hanged.

I'll come back to that in a moment. Vitalio Vitale. Can you tell us the Lenin you were regained, required to Revere when you were a boy. Well... Who was Lenin to you when you were a school school? Well, until I certainly had an ability to think properly and on my own, which normally happens at the age of, you know, different people at different times,

but 15, 16, certainly I had a tremendous respect, you know, for Lenin, who was literally a godlike figure. Little kids in the nursery were often fed. you know, this myth about Lenin as a boy at the age of three, four, five. And it was not unusual for them to profess love for Lenin first and love for their parents after that. All this nursery rhymes. I'm a little girl. I don't go to school yet.

I've never met Lenin, but I love him very much, you know. We were all supposed to learn them by heart. Grandfather Lennon, he was everywhere, you know. His portraits were everywhere. So when a child would go to school at the age of seven, normally it would happen. everyone was supposed to join the Oktabriata sort of like lower stage communist organization which was compulsory of course

and carry a little pin of Jan Volodya Ulyan of this cherubic looking little boy with curly hair and so on and I still remember that for the loss of this pin you know I think some sort of a pretty severe punishment was involved whatever it was I can't remember now maybe being deprived of your practice or whatever what sort of things was Lenin glorified

with being a miracle, a miracle, a miraculous little boy. Of course, absolutely. There was a whole chunk of literature, the so-called Leniniana. Children's writers, you know, dozens of them, produced countless books, extolling the virtues of Jan Valodia,

how honest he was, that once, you know, I still, you can't forget this rubbish sometimes, you know, that he broke, by mistake, his mother's caraffer, which his mother loved it very much, and he was too frightened to confess in the beginning, but then he couldn't sleep all night. He was sort of tersing and turning in his bed.

And then, you know, he couldn't take it anymore. And he ran to his parents' bedroom and said, I'm so sorry, mommy and daddy, but it was I who did it, you know. And they say, look how honest and how wonderful he was and how much he loved his sisters and brothers and so on and so forth. Well, certainly, when you became older, you're bound to start taking all this with a grain of soul because that's what primitive propaganda always achieves.

It achieves the completely opposite results from, what it wants to achieve. And certainly there are lots of jokes, you know, obviously about this cult, you know, like, for example, there was a joke about a triple marital bed as opposed to a double marital bed, which was called Lenin is always with us, because that was a popular slogan, which you could see everywhere. Lenin is always with us. Lenin is always alive, you see? So there was a very strong religious context in all this, you know, Lenin is always alive. Lenin never died. He is always with us. He sees everything here. knows everything he guides us.

Extraordinary continuity from Russian Orthodox, isn't it? Extraordinary continuity from Russian. Yes, exactly. That's why Lenin hated religion and priests so much. So what you're saying is by the time you start to think for yourself, there was already among intellectuals a certain degree or developed degree, perhaps, of

skepticism about Lenin. But nevertheless, would you find new and revealing in Robert's new biography? Quite a lot. You see, no matter what the downside of primitive propaganda is I just mentioned it. It still does a job. And certainly the dominating view among the intellectuals,

so-called intellectuals, you know, in the Soviet Union was that basically Lenin was not so bad and it was Stalin who was really a monster, you know, and an evil man, but Lenin was more or less okay and he was modest and so on. And certainly this book basically proves that

it was not true at all. I read many biographies of Lenin published in the West. And I think basically this is the first, to my mind, attempt to portray Lenin, basically as a human being, as a dysfunctional person, as a political adventurist, as opposed to most of other biographies who mostly look basically at Lenin as politician. And there are lots of rumors around this name, of course. And I think Robert Service has managed to write a book that. gives a fairly objective portrait of Lenin. One of the striking things about Lenin's childhood

was that his older brother, Alexander, was executed for attempted regicide in 1887. It took the whole burden of the student plot on himself. And, according to your book, used the court to proclaim his beliefs, and partly because of that was one of the four who were hanged for this. Now, this had a tremendous effect on the family. They were socially ostracized.

What effect do you think that had directly on Lenin's... emotional intellectual development? Oh, I think he was awfully traumatized by this, as anybody would have been, but he revealed very quickly this side to himself of being able to keep it all from himself and from everybody else and putting a lid on things. So he internalized a lot of his pain. He internalized a lot of his hatred, not just for the Romanoff imperial family, but for all of those upper and middle classes in Zimbursk, this vulgar city where he lived,

who ostracized the family, who wouldn't have anything to do with them, wouldn't speak to them in the street, despite the fact that none of them were guilty of any crime whatsoever, they just happened to be related to the brother who was hanged. And I think that this cold, calculating, hating side of Lenin was consolidated at the point when the brother is hanged. And, Tony, why do you think that? I think the archives of Lenin have been unsealed now in the last few years.

This is a huge decision, and why is it taken? Because they must have known. Well, they must have known. They didn't know that bad stuff was going to come out. Well, I've been in that archive, and a lot of, two or three lady archivists know what is in this material, but people suspected, but very few people. If you were an archivist in the Soviet Union before 1991, you had to swear. an oath not to reveal anything in print or orally as to what you knew from those archives.

So there were always grants for suspicion but not for knowledge. You should say it's a bit of a gamble to put it on. Even newspapers more than 20 years old were actually confidential. So why do you think they did it in? Yeah. I think one of the reasons is that the cult of Lenin is no longer official. It stopped being official. It stopped being sort of an officially guarded secret, which does not mean that the cult of Lenin, you know,

a sort of a popular cult of Lenin is over. It's not over yet. He still has plenty of followers, you know, people who still believe that he was, you know, right for Russia. And he's still looking over Russia. He's still there. In many ways, still in the bed. Sometimes this unseen presence, yes.

But he's still in many Russian beds, yes. Did reading Robert Service's book give you a different perspective on your own country's history? Well, I wouldn't say that. I'm a defector myself, so I never had sort of... especially in the last year, in my last year's in the Soviet Union, many illusions about that country, that society and that system. But certainly lots of insights on Lenin himself and these little details, like, for example, I never knew that one of his sort of biggest literary influences in childhood was Uncle Tom's Cabin. Having this book as his literary icon strikes me as quite immature. I mean, we all loved this book in our childhood and so on,

but I think it was a blow, well, to this view that subconsciously one still has, that Lenin was a genius of a sort, you know, that he was sort of unusual from childhood. I think basically the biggest revelation about Lenin, especially, well, about his youngest, was how ordinary a person he was in many ways, apart from being, well, as I said, psychologically unstable, you know. But he was an ordinary man, and I remember, I'll never forget when I first saw him in the mausoleum, you know, I went at the age of nine with my grand. I couldn't believe how ordinary this great man looked. You know, we believed that he was a great man.

So that was one thing. Well, and certainly I knew from other reading and my own research that Lenin was always a control freak, you know, that he was the father of state terrorism. But reading about his journey back to Russia on a German train, you know, this famous journey and how he was rationing toilet paper, you know, that was unbelievable. And that actually tells you much more about, than many academic political biographies. Seems to work, though.

I mean, cutting down the cues to the blues on the trains by issuing big pieces of paper for the real visit and small pieces of paper for the quick smoke. We were told this cleared the cues. He was very petty, you know, in many things so curmudgeonly. Robert Servers, Thomas Carly famous, said that history is the biography of great men. And famously, Tolstoy violently disagreed.

And the forces have been with Tolstoy for the last century. that history moves forward through massive people's involvement, and this isn't only Marxist view, it's accepted. Do you think that the life of Lenin and his individuality was key to the way that the Soviet Union developed, and that actually this business of somebody else would have done it if he hadn't is sort of nonsensical? I'm not a Carlisleon, but I do think that Carlisle had a point that great men, for good or even, can change the course of history. I think that had it not been for the Great War, the First World War, and the consequent military defeat of Russia, its economic collapse, its administrative disintegration,

and also the fact that no great power could intervene in Russian affairs substantially, we would be reading about Lenin in the footnotes of scholarly articles. He was enabled to become a great man and to use all the talents that he had, He was a phenomenally talented person intellectually and practically. He was very charismatic as well in the circles of the party. But that would have not been anything at all but a footnote to a scholarly article, had it not been for the Great War. The Great War smashed Russia, smashed old Russia,

and Lenin came back to a country in chaos. And in such circumstances, a party that did, decisively puts itself forward as an alternative government of reform and of order stands a much better chance than it would do in stable circumstances. And a leader of such a party who confirms the line of the party in the direction of taking power has an exceptional opportunity that is not likely to occur in any other circumstances. To that extent, his career is an example of how great men become great men in history. Do you agree with that, Vitali Vitale? I think that Lenin's character became the character of the Russian state. Yes, in many ways I do agree with that.

I also think that Lenin was extremely lucky as a politician. It was a combination of all these factors that Robert has just mentioned. Plus, luck plays a huge role in politics. And I actually am very pleased with the conversation. conclusions that Robert makes that Lenin was unexpected. Indeed, you know, it's history. If you look back, I think it was Nietzsche who said that history is just a chain of absurdity and incident.

And this is a very good proof of that. Had it not been for his sort of, in many ways, repressed childhood and for his childhood traumas for the great war, for the fact that Russia actually was very much a totalitarian state even before the 1917 revolution. Russian people used to be served slaves, you know, Russian peasants until 1861. Lenin was born only nine years later. And, well, if you read some impartial descriptions of the pre-first World War, Russia, you know, it is just amazing. Like, for example, Bedikas, Russia 1914, he gives advice to travelers to try not to take photos at railway stations because the police doesn't like it, not to bring any foreign newspapers because they're likely to be confiscated.

So it was very much a totalitarian society already. plus certainly the war and Lenin was always of their opinion that revolution needs a war, that wars help revolution, you know, that one can actually ride on top of any major conflict

to establish his own order of things. But I'd like to get back to this point, I'll ask Robert Service about it now, I'd just like to get quite a bit, can you characterize some of the things that happened under Lenin and flowed from Lenny? Can you say these happen because of

Lenin. These things, for example, the one-party state in the way it was formed, which became such a successful export from Russia. This happened because of Lenin, his personality, his ideas, and it would not have happened if it had been somebody else. I would say that. I think that the one-party one-ideology state, the state of legal nihilism, the state of mass collectivist mobilization was largely a product of the doctrines of Lenin. The reason why these doctrines became consolidated into a whole scale ideology have to do with the way that the October revolution took place in 1917, and that was largely the work of Lenin. There would have been a revolution in any case in late 1917, but Lenin had a decisive impact on the kind of revolution that took

place and the way that that revolution went, turning itself into a one-party dictatorship. To that extent then, he moulded the one-party, one ideology state, and since that was then exported to nearly half of the world's states by the 1960s, he had an enormous personal impact. What I would say, however, is that he didn't have a master plan, just as capitalism was developed rather casually and rather on an improvised basis. So was communism. What I tried to show in the book, though, is that although he didn't have a sort of master plan,

he had a set of basic understandings about history and about politics, about dictatorship, about terror, about class struggle, about hierarchy, about discipline, and above all, about leadership, correct leadership. And when he met with difficulties after the October 1917 revolution, he always returned to those assumptions. And out of this came the communist one party, one ideology state. He didn't know he was going to do it before he did it.

But it was largely, I would say this actually, it was largely the work of a single mind leading an extraordinary party of people whose minds were already turning it vaguely in that direction. But he gave it the sort of cutting edge that it would otherwise have lacked. And yes, I would say that this. extraordinary 20th century invention, the one party, one ideology state, wouldn't have been invented without Vladimir Eich Lenin. Why do you think it, Vital, why do you think it worked for so long in Russia this idea,

which since it's departed, or I hope it's departed, has been proved to be rotten to the core? I think I can answer in one word, you know, and this word is terror. Lenin very quickly realized that a system like that could only work, you know, on terror. Fear is a very, very powerful thing. My grandparents were still remembered Stalinist, for example, and the Stalin inherited Lenin's doctrine, basically. They were saying about this animal fear that paralyzed people,

literally when people were fainting from a knock at the door after dark because they all thought, you know, they were going to be arrested, you know, and executed. And this was just taking, you know, this Lenin theory of terror one step forward. Because if you read all this declassified letters of Lenin now, He was very much a proponent of the Bolshevik terror. You know, thank God you don't know, you know, what state terror can do, you know, in several generations. It almost kills essential human genes as those of, you know,

honesty, impartiality, principles. Nothing like that existed. And Lenin was the father of all. Complete immorality, you know, of politics, you know. He was the one who started it. And yet, as you said earlier in this discussion, you had the notion and post-commentators of that, Well, on the whole we can put up with Lenin

because he was a pure intellectual. It was brutalized by Stalin, but we discover that Lenin was capable of, in fact, executed. And I can use that accurately. Brutality on a considerable scale of there. Yes, and was quite casual almost in his delight at applying terror. I mean, there's that terrible letter he wrote in 1918 to the Penza communist saying,

catch a hundred Kulax, rich peasants and priests, and hang them, and hang them so that the people will see, the people will tremble. So he wanted not just to traumatize the middle and upper classes, as we tell you say. And take hostages. Take hostages, yeah. So this is state terrorism, you know, per excellence. But he wanted the effect to be understood by the very people

in whose name he'd made the revolution, the peasants and the workers. There was a big aspect of Lenin then that was connected up with terror. But also, though, he was a man who had a vision of a long-term future in which there would be no oppression, no exploitation, no national discrimination of any kind. He was also an idealist, and we missed something if we think of him as not being motivated by more generous ideas of human organization. And that's the Lenin, who is often picked up by reform communists in the 1980s in the Soviet Union

and communist intellectuals and sympathizers in the West. I've always thought that this was a rather light-headed approach to Lenin, usually an approach to Lenin as he lay dying when he fell out with Stalin and because he fell out with Stalin, it's always been assumed that he wouldn't have had the same kind of terror state that arose in the 1930s. But the antidote to that is to look what he was writing before the revolution, especially his political masterpiece, the state and revolution, which is so often interpreted as if it's a libertarian tract. In fact, it's a tract in favor of dictatorship and against democracy. So we've arrived at the two Lenin's towards the end of this programme, Italy. Lenin, who's worn part of state,

you can see why that travelled were people putting it terribly, clearly wanting to centralise and grab power, saw this as a brilliantly successful model. And if it had worked in such a big place as Russia, it could even work in an even bigger place of China, who could work in a smaller place like Cuba. He could work, and it did. So that's one.

The other side of Lenin, which I'm glad Robert's service brought up, is a Lenin who, in over the last half century in the Western Europe and in parts of America was, if not idealized, he wasn't demonized at all. That part of him seemed to sort of fall off as the aeroplane went over the eurals. And we had Lenin the intellectual, the thinker, the man who was part of progressivism.

Does that surprise you? No, it doesn't surprise me. I think partly it is the result of that very Soviet propaganda, you know, that I mentioned in the beginning and the lead of terror that surrounded that society it was very hard even for Western biographies to get objective information I think if we knew more of the facts

you know like we know now probably there wouldn't have been such a cult of Lenin in the West on the other hand it is certainly idealism you know of the certain part of Western intellectuals of the people who actually never knew and never wanted to know what it felt like

living in the authoritarian state but they were quite happy to advocate it here from, you know, their nice houses and flats in good areas of London and other places, you know, just saying, you know, how great it is, you know. But normally, you know, in the Soviet times, I remember, at 10-day-long trip to Moscow would cure many of them, you know, they would come back and say, we are going to vote Tory now. There's one of the images after 1989 in Eastern Europe and in Soviet Union

is of statues of Lenin being pulled down. Do you think that the Lenin being pulled down has left a dangerous vacuum-mora? possibly, if it can there be a positive vacuum anyway. What impact you think that has had? Well, I think it's easy to pull down a statue, you know, which it's much harder to change the mentality, molded, you know, in several and three, almost four generations of people.

And that's what the main monument to Lenin still is, you know. So in many parts of the former Soviet Union, you know, the ones that I visited where monuments to Lenin used to stand, he still can speak here by his absence. You can almost see the ghost of this monument there. And if you look at what's happening, well, even in Moscow these days, well, you can conclude that Lenin is still very much alive and kicking. The KGB, which was in many ways Lenin's creation, yes, and it's the worst terrorist

organizations in the history of humankind, just in terms of how many millions of people it killed, which has not been reformed at all, you know, it's still there. And the man who was nurtured, you know, by this organization. is now about to take supreme power in Russia, supreme control in Russia. So, yes, I do see in this very sad fact, a bit of Lenin's legacy. And Lenin is still in bed with the Russians.

Absolutely. Well, thank you very much. I've been talking to Robert Service and Vitaly Vitaliav about Robert Service's book, Lenin, a biography. Thank you very much, and thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy

at BBC.com.com.uk, forward slash radio 4.