Ingerflom on Lih, Lenin Rediscovered

Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10, 1 (Winter 2009): 13969.

Review Article

Lenin Rediscovered, or Lenin Redisguised?

Claudio Sergio NuN iNgerflom

Lars T. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? in Context (with a new translation of Lenins What Is to Be Done? ). 867 pp. Leiden: Brill, 2006. ISBN 9004131205. $174.00.

This book is about entire chapters of Russian history. The problems it raises are subject to academic and political debate. An exhaustive review would be impos-sible because of its length, yet a short review would be useless. By deciding to discuss its main theses, I have chosen an intermediate course.

Structure, Thesis, and Objectives of Lenin RediscoveredAccording to its author, Lenin Rediscovered [is] the first serious academic study of Lenins basic outlook based on a wide range of primary sources (both Russian and German).1 The book is divided into three parts. The first comprises three sections: the contents of Erfurtianism (so called after the town where the Social Democratic Party of Germany [SPD] adopted its new program in 1891); the ideas of the Russian Social Democrats who opposed Lenin; and the prob-lems associated with What Is to Be Done? (henceforth WITBD). The second is a detailed commentary on WITBD, and the third and final part offers a new translation of WITBD. The books central theses are that Lenin was a perfect Erfurtian, that Marx and the SPD were his only matres penser, and that his relationship with the Russian revolutionary past was purely emotional.

According to Lenin Rediscovered, it has been impossible for us to understand WITBD through the textbook interpretationthat is, the one provided by all

Numbers in parentheses refer to page numbers in Lenin Rediscovered or volume and page num-bers in V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed., 55 vols. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel stvo politicheskoi literatury, 195865); English translations draw on V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, 45 vols. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 196475), amended to coincide with the 5th Russian edition. Quotations from WITBD are taken from the translation in Lenin Rediscovered.

1 On Lenin Rediscovered: Remarks by the Author, paper presented at the 2007 Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS), New Orleans, 1.

140 CLAuDIO SERGIO NuN INGERfLOM

or almost all academic historians and politically engaged authors (14). Lenin Rediscovered rejects all the central propositions of the textbook interpretation (20). The elements of this rejection are as follows. first, The keynote of Lenins outlook was not worry but exhilaration about workers; according the textbook interpretation, by contrast, Lenin claimed that the workers could acquire a so-cialist consciousness only with the aid of the Social Democratic intelligentsia. Second, The formulations about spontaneity are not the heart of WITBD. Third, WITBD did not reject the Western model of a Social-Democratic party. fourth, Lenin did not revert to the populist tradition in any way. finally, WITBD [did] not advocate hyper-centralism or an elite conspiratorial party restricted to professional revolutionaries from the intelligentsia.

21st-Century Historians and Early 20th-Century ActorsStarting from the premise that even expert readers have misread [WITBD] and therefore misunderstood Lenin, Lenin Rediscovered sets out literally [to] rediscover a Lenin who is close to the complete opposite of the Lenin of the textbooks (5).

Rediscoverfor the present study is a part of a tradition of WITBD in-terpretation that stretches back to the time of its publication (28). If academic research is undertaken today as part of a tradition supposedly founded and nurtured by participants in the revolutionary movement, can this help affect-ing the research itself? Does this not jeopardize the distance that must be kept between the analyst and his object?

Lenin Rediscovered shows the consequences of this basic choice. Sometimes courageously, it takes sides in the debates of the time.2 In itself, there is noth-ing wrong with the empathy shown to some of the protagonists; after all, who are the historians who can claim, cross their hearts, to harbor no feelings for the heroes of their stories? Empathy can, however, interfere with interpreting sources. The account of the conflict among Rosa Luxemburg, the Mensheviks, and Lenin (2067, 491ff.) is an example: Every page of her attack on Lenin pounds away on the accusation that Lenin wants an all-powerful Central Committee to do the thinking for the Party as a whole. She never gives the least documentation for this description of Lenins views. She does not even mention WITBD (491). What sorts of debates are we studying here? Debates that the protagonists intended to be read by future historians who would want to see the contending parties support their claims with written evidence and proper

2 I stand with Stalin (32); I am happy to discover that the young Stalin, a reader steeped in the atmosphere of Russian Social Democracy, automatically read the passage [in WITBD] as I do, and even happier to report that Lenin particularly praised Stalins article for its treatment of the vexed question of bringing in awareness from without (658); Mensheviks were in a false position and could never escape from it, and Lenin was right about one thing (505); I agree with Bogdanov (523). See also 13435, 224, 317, 348.

LENIN REDISCOVERED, OR LENIN REDISGuISED? 141

citations?3 Or were these polemics among activists that expressed themselves in multiple forms, not just the written word? They argued orally, lived in the underground and in different cities and countries, sometimes without access to published materials that they knew by other means. Their polemics were notor not onlyabout what Lenin wrote but also about the concrete decisions that they lived with every day and about the future of the organization. Nor does Lenins rejection of Rosa Luxemburgs criticisms prove that these lacked perti-nence. (Her description was denied directly by Lenin himself. Once we think about it, her account is highly implausible [491].) In sum, the activists did not follow the academic methods that are ours, and neither should our books aim to become actors in their polemics.

We have to keep our distance from the historical actors. Lenin Rediscovered objects to the textbook interpretations uncritical reading of Lenins adversar-ies,4 but then reads Lenin in the same way: I find it a rather attractive feature of my own interpretation that it allows Lenin to know his own beliefs and to maintain a fundamental consistency in his outlook. These two points go to-gether, since Lenin himself often asserted the fundamental continuity of his views (27). Knowing that he was constantly involved in polemics, must we accept at face value what Lenin asserted about the continuity of his views? To the reader who might wonder about this lack of distance from the past, the author of Lenin Rediscovered responds by setting forth his own unique and dis-tinctive position: Given the previous climate, however, my account will surely be perceived as pro-Lenin (494).5

Could it be that the historians duty is not to reconstruct the contending arguments but rather to decide, with heavy use of adjectives, who was right in those polemics?6 In Lenin Rediscovered, the historian becomes one more actor in the polemics of the past. Thus, when Lenin challenges his adversaries to prove that there was anyone else within Russian Social Democracy who argued as clearly as he did for recruiting workers into the committees, Lenin Rediscovered

3 Apart from criticizing Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin Rediscovered also points out the Mensheviks inability to document Lenins views with Lenins own words (522). 4 A problem arises when scholars uncritically take these partisan sallies as accurate descrip-tions of Lenins actual outlook (518). 5 Lenin Rediscovered praises the non-partisan historian (492) and insists on my non-partisan approach (494) and that My account is intended to be non-partisan (494). 6 See extravagant praise of Chernyshevsky (377). Rosa Luxemburg denounced an ultra-centralist tendency, strict despotic centralism, mechanical submission of the partys militants to their central authority, [and] zombie-like obedience in the Leninist project, to which Lenin Rediscovered replies: Do people really believe that Lenin desired and indeed openly advocated unthinking, zombie-like obedience? We may if we wish, excuse Luxemburgs melodramatic characterisation as exuberant polemics (527); I feel it my duty as a historian to point out that it is not a perceptive or prophetic critique but an unscrupulous hatchet job (526) or fantasies (551). If I had to enter into this debate, I would say that more than lenience toward the CPSu is required to deny the prophetic nature of Rosa Luxemburgs words.


concludes: Nobody responded to this challenge, which still stands for advo-cates of the textbook interpretation (533). It is on this relationship with the actors of the past, and this conception of the historians function, that the nar-rative of Lenin Rediscovered is built.

How to Rejuvenate the Historiography?Notwithstanding its repeatedly stated aim of providing a historiographical alternative, Lenin Rediscovered embraces the same old question to which the textbook interpretation has tirelessly returned: did Lenin follow the Russian revolutionary tradition, or was he a Marxist? Although objecting to the text-book interpretations answer to the question, Lenin Rediscovered confines itself to the very ground chosen by the same interpretation.7 No doubt the histori-ography has often been superficial and has distorted Lenin, but how could its errant ways be limited only to the answers it gives and not have affected the questions themselves? Lenin Rediscovered follows the textbook interpretation in conceiving the relationship between the Russian tradition and the SPD as an irreducible opposition, whereas rejuvenating the historiography and shifting the debate means changing the questions and asking, for example, about the reason for the ideological and human complementarity that we see between those cur-rents during the 1880s and 1890s.

HistoricityI believe that Lenin retained the same Erfurtian outlook throughout the 1890sindeed, at least up to 1917 (114).8 His thought is no longer a research object: If I were asked to present my interpretation of Lenin as concisely as pos-sible, I would quote Lenins sentence from 1894 and then merely add: this was his storyand he stuck to it (118).9 Lenin is deprived of his own history. To ac-complish this, Lenin Rediscovered works with a corpus of texts that are selected in accordance with the books thesis, which means excluding, among others, the economic writings in which Lenin focuses on the agrarian question and the nature of Russian capitalism. The theoretical and methodological premises of Lenin Rediscovered are also to blame. The book conceptualizes the trajectory

7 Lenin Rediscovered asserts that according to the textbook interpretation, Lenin followed Narodnaia Volia and Tkachev but not the SPD. Lenin Rediscovered replies that his model was not Russian; instead, his logic was we must build a party as much like the SPD as possible (151, 169, 377, 405, 415, 592). 8 See also fundamental continuity of his views (27); the straight line from 189596 to WITBD (128); the continuity in his peasant strategy throughout his career (155); and the manuscript Friends of the People (written in 1894, when Lenin was 24 years old) reveal[s] Lenin as a rare exemple of a person who makes his entrance on the political scene with his world-view fully formed (116). 9 Likewise, the whole Plekhanov was supposedly already there in 1889 (98).


of a mans thinking as development10i.e., something that unfoldsand thereby takes an approach so ahistorical as to rule out an investigation into how that thinking might have changed.11 At the same time, the recurrence of the same expression over several years is taken as evidence for the absence of development and that the meaning stayed the same (120, 421). Yet the same signifiers can refer to different signifieds, so we may be dealing not with de-velopment but with changes in thought. Identifying recurrences accomplishes little in the absence of an analysis of Lenins logic, of his silences, of the non-coincidences among his texts or within the same work, depending on whether Lenin was reasoning as economist or politicianin sum, without an analysis of his contradictions, whose existence is denied a priori in Lenin Rediscovered.

EurocentrismTo prove that Lenin was a perfect Erfurtian, Lenin Rediscovered makes a list of themes that characterize the Erfurt Program, and then, using this checklist, we shall show that Lenin was a completely committed Erfurtian . We will therefore proceed chronologically and go through each writing [by Lenin] with checklist in hand (114).12 By adopting the prism of the SPD and searching for convergences, this approach has little chance of finding Lenin to have a logic of his own. A historiographic Eurocentrism that uses conceptual frameworks from Western history to understand Russia is here applied to Lenin. We will list and paraphrase all the explicit references to the SPD model in WITBD (405) to show that for Lenin and his readers, the SPD is the future of the RSDWP [Russian Social Democratic Workers Party]. Lenin Rediscovered pro-duces 19 commentaries on as many passages from WITBD for which the SPD was supposedly the model. This leaves the reader with the sense that the books thesis has been overwhelmingly demonstrated. Juxtaposing these 19 commen-taries in Lenin Rediscovered with Lenins own pages, however, leaves room for

10 Lenin does not develop any new core values between late 1899 and late 1901 (157).11 for a critique of this concept, see Gadamers views on one of the main problems in the analy-sis of historical life, namely the concept of teleology or, to use a current expression, development. This is one of the best-known problems of modern historicism. Nevertheless, the concept of development has absolutely nothing to do with history. Strictly speaking, development is the negation of history. Indeed, development means that everything is already given in the begin-ningenveloped in its beginning. It follows from this that development is merely a becoming-visible, a maturing process, as it plays itself out in the biological growth of plants and animals. This, however, means that development always carries a naturalistic connotation. In a certain sense, therefore, discourse about an historical development harbors something of a contradic-tion. As soon as history is in play, what matters is not what is merely given, but, decisively, what is new. Insofar as nothing new, no innovation, and nothing unforseen is present, there is also no history to relate (H.-G. Gadamer, The Beginning of Philosophy [New York, Continuum, 2000], 16).12 When we turn to the checklist (116); let us go down the list (117); as we go through the checklist (140).


an interpretation that is more nuanced and sometimes even contrary to the one provided in Lihs book.

Lenin Rediscovered has this commentary on the first reference (6: 2528 of the Russian edition of Lenins works): In order to show the importance of a partys theoretical clarity, Lenin gives a long citation from Engels about German workers (405). Engels said that these workers have a remarkable ap-titude for theory and were the first to build a co-ordinated movement that combined political, economic, and theoretical aspects. Lenin Rediscovered adds that Lenin expresses the hope that the Russian workers will occupy a similar place of honor, indicating that the SPD is the only model. However, let us read Lenin not from page 25 but from page 24 of the Russian edition, where he writes that in Russia, the significance of theory is intensified by three circum-stances. first, since the party is only just emerging, debates with other revolu-tionary currents are essential for its future. SecondI quote WITBD from the translation in Lenin Rediscovered but also insert key terms from the Russian originala movement starting up in a young country can be successful only if it assimilates [pri uslovii pretvoreniia]13 the experience of other countries. And this kind of assimilation [pretvorenie] requires more than a simple familiarity with this experience or a simple copying of the latest resolutions. It requires the ability to have a critical attitude toward this experience and to verify it inde-pendently . Third, the national tasks of Russian Social Democracy are unlike those confronted by any other socialist party in the world . Now, we wish only to underline that the role of an advanced fighter can only be fulfilled by a party guided by an advanced theory. And to have some concrete idea of what this means, let the reader recall such forerunners of Russian Social Democracy as Herzen, Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, and the brilliant galaxy of revolutionaries of the 70s (69699, emphasis mine).

Lenin Rediscovered takes into account only the lines that follow this para-graph, that is, where Lenin invokes Engels to bolster his remarks on the impor-tance of theory that he illustrates with the successes of the SPD. Yet those lines are preceded by a reference to his Russian forerunners and what Lenin consid-ered essential, namely, arming oneself with a theory that can offer guidance to fighters.14 Immediately afterwards, he makes reference to Marxism. Are we to ignore one or the other of these passages, or would it not be better to ask why they are together and which elements of the theoretical aspect of the Russians Lenin made his own?

13 The shades of meaning of the Russian noun pretvorenie and verb pretvoriat(it) (rendered in Lenin Rediscovered as assimilation, assimilates) are important. According to Dals dictionary, the verb means izmeniat po vidu, obrazu ili po kachestvu. Pretvorenie does not mean absorb or incorporate without change. The key point is that the entire passage shows that here pretvore-nie means critical attitude, not simple familiarity, much less copying.14 for Lenin Rediscovered, however, Lenin pointed primarly to their [Russian revolutionaries] ability to inspire (415).


By doing so, we can free ourselves from the false alternative of Russian past versus SPD.15 finally, reading all of Lenins corresponding passages makes the 19 references seem less self-evident.16

Lenin Rediscovered systematically sees Lenin as embracing the SPD but fails to notice that often what he was doing was to make arguments from authority to advance his own initiatives amid the polemics among Russians.17 Lenin left Russia for Germany in search of ammunition to bring home for his struggle, whereas Lenin Rediscovered outlines only a one-way conceptual voyage from Germany to Russia.

EvolutionismRussia is an absolutist country (114) whereas Germany is semi-absolutist (93). On the matter of this difference, Lenins outlook was not a pale photo-copy of Western models (114). The essence of his program was, we read, look at the Germans, then go thou and do likewisewith appropriate changes for local conditions (121). At this point, we wait in vain for an explanation of what is specific about Russia. Lenin Rediscovered contents itself with attributing to Lenin the ambition to build a party as much like the SPD as possible under absolutist conditions, so we can overthrow the tsar and obtain the political liberties we need to make the party even more like the SPD! (151). The differ-ence between Russia and Germany was thus a matter of which point they had currently reached in their common journey along an identical historical path. The one was still absolutist and hence had no political liberties, whereas the other was already semi-absolutistitself a problematic conceptand enjoyed the benefit of political liberties. Lenin Rediscovered leads the reader to think that this evolutionary conception was Lenins, yet this was not the case at the time of WITBD.

On the following page, Lenin Rediscovered seems to be in a position to move beyond evolutionism: Of course, the Erfurt Programme must be adjusted to meet Russian conditions. Lenin mentions two main issues requiring creative adaptation: the lack of political freedom and the peasant question. Lenins treat-ment of the peasant issue in this article is his first statement of his proposals of a peasant strategy for Russian Social Democracy. His elaboration and defense of his strategy is a major theme in his writings of the Iskra period. Thus, the

15 All the more as Lenin takes up the same idea from different angles, insisting on the vital need to otrabotat both the Western and the Russian experience to build the party (e.g., 4: 18990).16 Lenin does not mention the SPD, even if it is not far away, in the passages corresponding to references numbers vi, xii, and xiv, as Lenin Rediscovered acknowledges at times (407, 409). References numbers iv, ix, and xviii (4067, 411) correspond to passages where the German case is not present even implicitly. Reference number v (406) corresponds to Lenin (6: 48) where the SPD is used merely as an example to illustrate events that occur in the entire history of international Social Democracy.17 See Lenin (6: 4042) for the reference to number iii (406).


agrarianas opposed to simply peasantquestion was a major one on the eve of WITBD. However, Since WITBD does not take up the peasant question we will not go into the details of Lenins strategy. All that is necessary here is to show that Lenin is searching for an answer to an Erfurtian problem (152). Here Lenin Rediscovered comes close to Lenins laboratory of ideas, but faithful to its methodfollow explicitness onlyit stops outside the door: since WITBD did not deal explicitly with the agrarian question, the economic writings are ignored.

Yet the Agrarian Program of Russian Social Democracy, written between february and the first half of March 1902WITBD was completed in februarymakes explicit Lenins view of the differences between Russia and Germany: in the agrarian sphere, we may perhaps evolve something new. Why new? Because Russian Social Democracy could not remain aloof in solving the urgent and complex alien (non-proletarian) problems (6: 333). This idea of leading the other sections of the people in the struggle against the autocracy is also present in other texts by Lenin. Lenin Rediscovered indicates as much but only to add at every turn that this was nothing new because this thesis came from the SPD. The linguistic coincidence between Lenin and Kautsky is trans-formed into an identity of views and obscures their difference, which Lenin did not conceal: Martynov is quite sure of only one thing : that Kautskys book is good (this is warranted), and that it is sufficient to repeat and transcribe Kautsky without bearing in mind how radically different Russia is with regard to the agrarian program (this is not at all wise) (6: 317 n., emphasis mine).

This difference was radical for two reasons (6: 333): because the party first had to unleash a class struggle, and because that struggle was destined to correct the objective course of Russian capitalism, which meant pulling Russia out of its spontaneous social and economic path and into another type of bour-geois development. This could not be done unless the Russian peasantry acted like the french peasantry in 1789. But in Russia, the labor movement and the party would at once take charge of the revolution so that the peasant revolution would, without discontinuity, become the socialist revolution. Lenins strategy was different from the SPDs strategy because social and economic conditions made Russia radically different from Germany. It was thus not a matter of fol-lowing in Germanys path and overcoming Russias backwardness. Here we find ourselves at the antipodes of the evolutionism that Lenin Rediscovered attributes to Lenin.

far from being details of Lenins strategy, these propositions imply an anti-evolutionist conception of history and an undoubted distance from Eurocentrism. Ignoring this double separation, Lenin Rediscovered has Lenin saying: we differ from earlier Russian revolutionaries because we are supe-rior and we differ from Western Social Democrats because we are perforce inferior (149, emphasis in Lenin Rediscovered ).


Russian Concepts for Imagining RussiaSuch Germanocentrism leaves no room for Russian vernacular concepts that, if taken into account, would permit an interpretation of the young Lenins in-tellectual trajectory and of WITBD that would be incompatible with what is proposed in Lenin Rediscovered. This applies, for example, to the concepts of aziatstvo and aziatchina.

In anti-tsarist thinking, aziatstvo was not used to describe Asia but to ana-lyze Russia in opposition to Europe. Chernyshevskii18 used it with reservations: it was key for Russia19 but unsatisfactory conceptually.20 He associated the term with samodurstvo, the central concept of Dobroliubovs Kingdom of Darkness.21 Readers saw this as a conceptual innovation.22 using the concepts of aziatstvo and samodurstvo, Chernyshevskii described a vertical structure of despotic power that reached from monarch to serf and blocked the creation of horizontal social relationships unmediated by the regime. If this gigantic system of collective liability [krugovaia poruka] was binding and corrupting

18 With his little pencil in hand, Lenin read and reread Chernyshevskii at length; see N. Valentinov, Mes rencontres avec Lnine (Paris: Plon, 1964), 11015. 19 Aziatstvo is what we call the state of affairs where there is no inviolability of rights, where neither persons, labor, nor property are shielded against arbitrary power. In Asiatic states the law is completely powerless. Relying on it means to condemning oneself to ruin. There, force alone rules (N. G. Chernyshevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 15 vols. [Moscow: GIKhL, 1950], 5: 700 [October 1859]).20 Aziatstvo is decidedly unworthy of the profound idea that serves as the foundation of our article (ibid., 700).21 Ibid., 699; N. A.Dobroliubov, Izbrannye filosofskie proizvedeniia, 2 vols. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1948), 2: 5159. Samodurstvo means despotism with a pinch of arrogant stupidity. Samodur/stvo/stvovat appears in Dobroliubovs article some 200 times. In the manuscript, in the sentence despotism [despotizm] represents sure evidence of inner powerlessness, the word despotizm was scratched out and replaced with samodurstvo; see N. A. Dobroliubov, Sobranie sochinenii, 9 vols. (Moscow and Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 196164), 5: 564 n. 39. The word despotizm was older and indicated a type of political power. Samodur was unknown at the be-ginning of the 19th century, but by the mid-1850s it was common in popular speech and we find it in some regional dictionaries (Perm , Tver , Pskovin the latter two as synonymous with upriamets). It describes familial relations among the merchantry and submission to the head of household. Dobroliubov introduced the term into literature, but in this case those signified extended beyond the world of merchants and acquired a sociopolitical dimension by showing how the autocracys relationship with the people was reproduced among the people themselves (Izbrannye filosofskie proizvedeniia, 2: 467). In the same article Dobroliubov uses despotizm as well. Alongside the old word by which readers identified all despotic relations, they thus encoun-tered a new concept that reflected a more specific reality. 22 This represented a complete turnaround for the consciousness of society onto a new con-ceptual path; see N. V. Shelgunov, L. P. Shelgunova, and L. M. Mikhailov, Vospominaniia, (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1966), 1: 136, 199.


the subjects of the empire, what was to be done?23 Who would provide the sup-port for destroying the autocratic system? Note: Chernyshevskii was wondering What is to be done? and Who will provide support? when he concluded that the entire social fabric was infected with aziatstvo.

Aziatstvo also included everything that impaired the development of agricul-ture. Chernyshevskii saw a connection between the situation in the countryside and the strength of autocracy. Lenin rediscovered the term in the midst of an in-tellectual journey made up of successive revisions to his own convictions on the Russian economy. As early as 1894, he used aziatskoe to describe social relations in the countryside.24 We find aziatchina in The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), where he observed that capitalism coexisted with the old system of labor-rent (otrabotka). The latter represented stagnation in the forms of pro-duction (and consequently in all social relations) and the reign of aziatchina (3: 199). Capitalism was enormous progress compared to the old system (3: 199). In other words, in 189899, Lenin saw capitalism as an economic and social formation that was both exterior and subsequent to aziatchina.

This is the vision of capitalism of an orthodox Social Democrat. Yet into this same passage Lenin inserts aziatchina, a concept foreign to Marxs politi-cal economy that belongs to the populist tradition. Lenin Rediscovered rightly sees Marxist orthodoxy and Russias traditional language as belonging to two different theoretical fields. But that being the case, the use of aziatstvo and aziatchina createsto use an analogy from physicsa phase shift in Lenins discourse between his orthodoxy and his non-orthodoxy. Were we to treat this recourse to the Russian conceptual vocabulary as a mere homage to sentiment, as Lenin Rediscovered does each time Lenin refers to the Russian past, we would be erasing the space of the phase shift and rendering Lenins thought smooth. We would be missing both Lenins history itself and the means to access that history, because a phase shift is no mere contradictionit is a gap in the text, an entry into the pathway of the authors thinking.

The Radical Difference of Russian CapitalismLenins reference to aziatchina seems joined to a still timid acknowledgment of Russias distinctiveness. Based on his economic studies, Lenin had found that in agriculture in general the transformative effects of capitalism manifest themselves here most slowly and gradually capitalism penetrates into agriculture particularly slowly and in extremely varied forms (3: 165, 171, emphasis mine). This slowness was no mere problem of temporality, for Russian capitalism no longer looked to him like the Marxian sort that eliminates and

23 N. A. Dobroliubov, Kogda zhe pridt nastoiashchii den? (Nakanune, povest I. S. Turgeneva), in Izbrannye filosofskie proizvedeniia, 2: 283.24 In the agrarian sector, the exploitation of the workers constitutes not only robbery of labor but also the Asiatic abuse of human dignity that is constantly encountered in the countryside (1: 241)


replaces older forms of production. The political implication was that the so-cialists could no longer wager on the passage of time and just wait for capitalism to develop: The essence of the problem of the destiny of capitalism in Russia is often presented as though prime importance attaches to the question: how fast? (i.e., how fast is capitalism developing?). Actually, however, far greater im-portance attaches to the question how exactly? and to the question where from? (i.e., what was the nature of the pre-capitalist economic system in Russia?) (3: 380, Lenins emphasis).

The first sentence is clearly a move away from the orthodox approach, which was also his own position of 1894, which held that countries arrived at capital-ism sooner or later (backwardness could be made up over time). The sec-ond sentence seems strange for an orthodox thinker, since according to Marx, capitalism replaces older forms of production and produces everywhere the same resulta society with two antagonistic classes. Yet Lenin was wondering how this process was taking place in Russia and from where it was coming. His con-cern was not merely economics, for if the process differed from what Marx had foreseen, the social outcome might also be different. Social Democrats therefore had to deal with a past that was still present and rethink how they paired aziat-stvo/aziatchina with the Russian economic and social model that the introduc-tion of capitalism was generating.

In 1894, Lenin had said the opposite when he imagined capitalist develop-ment as occurring with tremendous speed and there was no question of any diversity of forms.25 The vestiges seemed about to disappear and there was no other form of exploitation but the capitalist one.26 His conception of Russian capitalism was abstract, built on a literal reading of Marx. Capitalism was one. Russia was following the same capitalist path as Western Europe. The labor-rent system was already disappearing and the peasantry was split into an agrarian petty bourgeoisie and an agricultural proletariat. This definitively resolve[d] the question of capitalism in Russia (1: 19394, 322, 452).

I have nothing but sympathy for the irritation that Lenin Rediscovered dis-plays toward a Sovietology that takes pleasure in exposing Lenins flip-flops as proof of his inconstancy, but we cannot counter it with a Lenin who has no history. On the points we have discussed, there is an opposition between The Development of Capitalism in Russia and what Lenin wrote in 189495. He 25 Agricultural capitalism does not embrace all social-economic relations in the countryside and still more in the social and the juridical-political sphere these still powerful relics of the old-nobility stratum, which have not yet been destroyed by capitalism precisely because it is underdeveloped (1: 49091, Lenins emphasis). Capitalism began to uproot this pillar of Old Russiathe patriarchal, semi-serf peasantryto drag them out of these medieval and semi-feu-dal conditions and to place them in a modern, purely capitalist environment (1: 251, emphasis mine). 26 [The] exploitation of the working people in Russia is everywhere capitalist in nature, if we leave out of account the moribund remnants of serfdom (1: 310, Lenins emphasis).


abandoned certain approaches and developed new theses. That is what every thinker does, especially if he is a man of action. Without abandoning Theory, the young ulianov was making room in it for Russia.

At the Origins of WITBD: The Agrarian QuestionIn february 1901, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the abolition of serfdom, Lenin wrote The Workers Party and the Peasantry, which begins by recalling the position adopted in 1861 by Chernyshevskii. Like Chernyshevskii, Lenin was convinced that the 1861 reform had not saved the peasantry from re-maining the lowest social estate (4: 430), since the economic elements of the reformthe concessions made to the landlords at the peasants expensepre-served forms of dependence that were more servile than capitalist. It is here that Lenin comes back to the notion of aziatchina. The phase shift of 1898 that we noted earlier between his analysis of the Russian economy (how and whence was Russian capitalism developing?) and his orthodox Marxist language (capi-talism everywhere replaces older forms of production), however, was resolved in 1901 by a change in his social diagnosis: our peasants are suffering not only and not so much from oppression by capital as from oppression by the landlords and the survivals of serfdom. Ruthless struggle against these shackles, which immea-surably worsen the condition of the peasantry and tie it hand and foot, is not only possible but even necessary in the interest of the countrys entire social de-velopment; for the hopeless poverty, ignorance, lack of rights, and degradation, from which the peasants suffer, lay an imprint of aziatchina upon the entire social system of our country (4: 432, emphasis mine).

The vestiges of serfdom were much more to blame for the peasantrys pre-dicament than was capitalism. Indeed, all of Russian society bore the mark of azi-atchina.27 Lenin was weighing narrowly proletarian interests against those of society as a whole (4: 332), and his recourse to traditional Russian concepts was now in harmony with his acknowledgment of a specific type of capitalist tran-sition that differed from Marxs model. He echoed Pavel Aksel rods warning against primitive thinkingthat to explain all misfortunes of the Russian people through quotations from Das Kapital was baseless.28

Lenin therefore reversed his political priorities. At the end of 1899, he had written: Two basic forms of the class struggle are today intertwined in the Russian countryside: (1) the struggle of the peasantry against the privileged landed proprietors and against the remnants of serfdom; (2) the struggle of the emergent rural proletariat against the rural bourgeoisie. for Social Democrats the second struggle, of course, is of greater importance, but they must also indis-pensably support the first struggle(4: 237, emphasis mine).

27 A month before, he had already proposed the Asiatic nature of even those of our institutions that most resemble European institutions (4: 393).28 P. B. Aksel rod, Po povodu novogo narodnogo bedstviia, Rabotnik, no. 56 (1898): 176.


By februaryMarch 1901, however, he was writing: We have seen that in the modern Russian village two kinds of class antagonism exist side by side: first, the antagonism between the agricultural workers and the proprietors; and second, the antagonism between the peasantry as a whole and the landlord class as a whole. The first antagonism is developing and becoming more acute; the second is already largely behind us. And yet, despite this, it is the second an-tagonism that has the most vital and most practical significance for the Russian Social Democrats at the present time (4: 432).

Let us identify what changed. At the end of 1899, there had been class struggle (klassovaia bor ba) in the villages and the social actors were strug-gling. By february 1901, although the beginning of the passage remained al-most identical to the 1899 version, the word struggle had disappeared and was replaced by antagonism (protivopolozhnost ). It is hard to imagine that Lenin would replace the time-honored formula class struggle with class an-tagonism and still mean the same thing. This was a conceptual retreat from the orthodox language. Then came a total reversal of priorities. At the end of 1899, the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie had mattered more than that of the peasantry against the landlords and the survivals of serfdom. In 1901, the antagonism between peasants and landlords mattered more than that between the workers and the entrepreneurs.

It is therefore difficult to accept that Lenins world-view [was] fully formed in 1894 (116) and there was nothing new on the conceptual level between late 1899 and late 1901 (157). How are these changes connected with WITBD? Lenin Rediscovered does not raise this question because it refuses to broach the agrarian question. The exclusion of Lenins economic writings leaves his eco-nomic and social diagnosis of Russia off the scene, yet that is precisely what gave significance to the political and organizational propositions of WITBD. It was, after all, because he was convinced that Russias entire economic, social, and political structure bore the mark of aziatchina that Lenin conceived a political project to correct the objective spontaneous course of Russian history.

Lenins new ideas about the agrarian question and his work on WITBD took form either simultaneously or in rapid succession.29 His new economic views corresponded to his new conception of politics as well as of the party. Without aziatchina or his new vision of the economy, he would not have arrived at his contentious position among Social Democrats on the questions of spon-taneity, conscience, the professional revolutionary, and the party.

29 Lenin described Rabochaia partiia i krestianstvo (Iskra, no. 3, written in februaryMarch and published in April 1901) as the rough outline of an agrarian program (6: 307). This out-line was followed in Iskras next edition by the article Where to Begin? which was defined in turn as the outline of WITBD (5: 9). Thus, the outline of the agrarian program was followed by the outline of the party. Next, the writing of WITBD coincided with the preparation of the first part of Agrarnyi vopros i kritiki Marksa (JuneSeptember 1901) and was immediately followed by Agrarnaia programma russkoi sotsial -demokratii.


Lenin Questions the Spontaneity of Russian CapitalismLenin Rediscovered and the textbook interpretation converge remarkably in situ-ating spontaneity exclusively in the realm of subjectivity, invoking as evidence the famous passage of WITBD about how class consciousness needs to be in-duced because the workers are incapable of achieving it spontaneously.30 Yet to Lenin, that sort of spontaneity was secondary. Subjective spontaneitythe kind experienced by actorswas determined by the spontaneity of Russias capital-ist development. This structural spontaneity, not that of the workers, is what posed a serious problem for him. Optimism and pessimism had nothing to do with it.31

In 1901, Lenin thought that capitalism in Russia carried a deep and lasting imprint from the countrys prior history. The enormous economic, social, and cultural deficit (1: 262) bequeathed by Old Russia was something he no lon-ger imagined, as in 1895, in terms of a generalized backwardness that would inevitably be overcome in time by a capitalism that was already triumphant. Instead, by 1901, eliminating the direct survivals of serfdom was indispensable for capitalism to develop in a way that ensured a bourgeois society where the proletariat could pursue the goal of socialism. True, Russian capitalism on its own could develop spontaneously [stikhiino], but only along its own peculiar road of violence and oppression, ruin and starvation (6: 347).

These lines were not aimed at the effects of capitalist accumulation in gen-eral. They referred instead to the spontaneous development of Russian capital-ism, for it was evolving in the framework of the old regime. Speaking Marxist, we might say that Lenin was condemning the economic structures spontaneity. This spontaneity was turning the Russian peasant virtually into a barbarian.32 As Lenin explained, the remnants [of serfdom] barbarize the process of devel-opment (6: 217, emphasis mine). Henceforth, attacking the political adversary

30 On the translation of stikhiinost/nii into English, see Lenin Rediscovered, 61828. 31 In discussing the attitude of Lenin and other Social Democrats toward the workers, it seems to me that terms like optimistic, skeptical (12021, 349, 351, 35355, 359, 366, etc.), or even over-optimistic (649)even if they were used by the actors themselves (503)do little to enhance our understanding of the issues.32 Labor-rent and bondage, the peasants inequality as a social estate and as citizens, their sub-jection to the privileged landowners, who still have the right to flog them, and their degrading living conditons, which virtually turn the peasants into barbariansall this is not an exception but the rule in the Russian countryside, and in the final analysis this is all a direct survival of serfdom (6: 311; emphasis mine). for several months, Lenin had been returning regularly to this image by associating the signifiers Asiatic-barbarian and cruel forms (5: 323) with Russias capitalist accumulation. Thus, the surviving vestiges condition the Asiatic-barbarian manner in which the millions-strong peasantry grows extinct and keep the entire people ignorant, deprived of rights, and oppressed (Leninskii sbornik, 2 [Moscow: Institut TsK pri VKP, 1924], 39, also 4546, 51). This formulation is almost identical to the 1901 formulation on aziatchina.


was no longer enough, for aziatchina was built into the economic foundation itself.33

Russias structural specificity lay in its tangle of production sites where servile and capitalist traits coexisted as a consequence of the intermingling of seigniorial and peasant lands resulting from the 1861 reform (6: 328). To eliminate what remained of the old regime in Russias agrarian system, the only simple solution was to keep aloof, pass it by, and leave it to the spontane-ous element to clear up this mess (6: 313). Capitalism might thus end up spontaneously eliminating the remaining survivals. Why, then, condemn its spontaneity? Why should it be a fatal mistake (4: 435) for Russian Social Democracy not to make use of the workers movement to push the peasantry into ensuring the fulfillment of the peasant demands of 1861? Why should cor-recting those outrageous injustices (4: 434) of 40 years earlier be socialisms salvation? Because Russias spontaneous transition had the peculiarity that capi-talist development was not creating a bourgeois society. The Social Democrats had to advocate subjective intervention into objective spontaneity because the latter directly retards social development and the class struggle (6: 334). Aziatchina was thus preventing socioeconomic strata from turning into classes and thereby preventing class struggle tout court.

At this point, the radical difference with Germany went beyond the situ-ation in the countryside to affect the industrial proletariat: The role of the peasantry as a class that provides fighters against the autocracy and against the survivals of serfdom is by now played out in the West, but not yet in Russia. In the West the industrial proletariat has long since become completely alienated from the countryside [whereas] in Russiahere Lenin cites Aksel rod the industrial proletariat, both by its composition and by the conditions of its existence, is to a very great extent still connected with the countryside (4: 227, Proekt Programmy nashei partii, late 1899). On the page from which Lenin quotes in this passage, Aksel rod attacks abstract Marxists who have crossed off of their list of real factors determining the Russian proletariats present-day historical position those elements of Russian life that create a reactionary na-tional and historical atmosphere that suffocates the Russian people, and with it the working class. The result has been an abstract doctrine that explains the historical inevitability of capitalist progress.34

The reflection on the peasantrys revolutionary capabilities occurred within this wider reflection on the cost of a historical spontaneity that threatened to continue suffocating the workers for a long time. Spontaneity became a problem for Lenin once he began asking the traditional questions and sharing the fears ar-ticulated earlier by Aksel rod: Russia continues to lack the main prerequisite for 33 Direct survivals of the corve system are maintained, not by any special law but by the actually existing land relationships (6: 326).34 P. B. Aksel rod, K voprosu o sovremennykh zadachakh i taktike russkikh sotsial-demokratov (Geneva, 1898), 11, emphasis mine.


a political struggle against the bourgeoisiethere are no politically ruling classes; instead, there is the tsar and his bureaucrats.35 By asserting that not even the dominant groups were classes, Aksel rod was questioning the very existence of politically established classes and of a class society, and this after he had argued a few pages earlier: Insofar as populism was revolutionarythat is, as it stood up against the estates-and-bureaucracy regime [protiv soslovno-biurokraticheskogo gosudarstva] and the barbaric forms of exploitation and oppression of the popular masses that it upheldto that extent it was bound to become, with the appropriate modifications, a component element of the program of Russian Social Democracy.36

In his doubts about the natural path (4: 234) we can read Lenins fear that bourgeois society (as opposed to the economy)that is, a society of classeswas constituting itself too slowly or indeed not at all. Lenin Rediscovered notwith-standing, neither Aksel rod nor the Lenin of late 1899 had the slightest doubt about their ideological ties to populism. But this connection was not based, as the textbook interpretation imagines, on a political voluntarism out of touch with reality. The link established itself at the point where Lenin recognized a problem, the non-existence of bourgeois society, that everyone knew was the intellectual property of the populists.

Lenin Rediscovered dispossesses Lenin of his own logic also when it seeks to diminish the importance of the word stikhiinost , which occurs only fit-fully in Lenins writings (555). But of what value is this method of analysis, since stikhiinost appears in passages that are decisive for Lenins conception of Russian reality? In other passages he uses the equivalent formulation natural path (estestvennyi put ). Lenin Rediscovered asserts that the reason that Lenin used stikhiinost so much in WITBD is not because of any crise de foi or deep malaise, but simply because Boris Krichevskii used the word at length in an at-tack on Iskra in September 1901 (555). Later he adds that Lenin only used this languagethat is, consciousness and spontaneityfor ad hoc reasons and mostly in Chapter II of WITBD, not before or after. The insistence that Lenins views on stikhiinost are the keys to his whole outlook virtually guarantees an extremely impoverished textual base (616). To imagine Lenin as a prisoner of Krichevskiis language is odd. Lenin used the term in relation to the workers struggle (4: 188, late 1899) well before Krichevskiis attack in 1901 and he had already applied the phrase natural path to capitalism (4: 234, late 1899). Lastly, in Agrarnaia programma russkoi sotsial-demokratii, the term stikhiinost is key to understanding Lenins interpretation of Russias overall development.

for Marxists, the superstructure depends on the base, so the spontane-ous subjective consciousness of the workers was a reflection of their place in a spontaneous objective historical process that in turn was failing to produce 35 Ibid., 15.36 Ibid., 7, emphasis mine. On the continuity between Narodnaia Volia and Social Democracy, see 9.


a bourgeois social order. These doubts about objective spontaneity led Lenin to harbor doubts about subjective spontaneity as well. In sum, failure to oppose the spontaneity of Russian capitalism would be fatal for the Social Democrats because this very spontaneity was threatening to prevent social groups from turning into social classes, which in turn would make the class struggle impos-sible. In other words, aziatchina would not spontaneously change into a modern society with politically constituted social classes.

Not One But Two ConsciousnessesAccording to Lenin Rediscovered (and contrary to the textbook interpretation), Lenin did not claim that the working class as a whole was incapable of attaining class consciousness. When WITBD states that class consciousness must be in-troduced from without, the book argues, Lenin means that Social-Democratic awareness could not have existed among a specific set of workers at some time in the past, that is, during the strikes of the mid-1890s; it was therefore not a general proposition about workers as such, everywhere, at all times (648). When Lenin adds that such consciousness could have been brought in only from outside, it is only because socialism and the worker movement are both originally exterior to each other and have to be brought to each other. This was already present in Marx and Kautsky, so nothing here is specific to Lenin (64849). Yet if this proposition had really been so obvious to Social Democrats, why did Lenin call Kautsky to the rescue? Although Lenin asserted in 1902 that class consciousness could be brought to the workers of 189596 only from outside, Lenin Rediscovered does not explain why he had said just the oppo-site earlier in the mid-1890s. The book cannot explain this because, like the textbook interpretation, it assumes that for Lenin it was all one and the same Social-Democratic awareness, whether it was consciousness as he conceived it in the specific historical situation of 189596 or the consciousness to which he was referring in 1902. In fact, consciousness in 189596 and consciousness in 1902 were historically different for Lenin.

Let us examine this difference. According to the reconstruction, although speculative (636) offered by

Lenin Rediscovered, Lenin had already written at least a draft of his book when he read, in a just-released text by Kautsky, the following lines that he quotes: The carrier of science is not the proletariat but the bourgeois intelligentsia (Kautskys emphasis): modern socialism emerges in the heads of individual members of this stratum and then is communicated by them to proletarians who stand out due to their mental development, who in turn bring it into the class struggle of the proletariat where conditions allow. In this way, socialist awareness to Lenin, soznanieis something brought into the class struggle of the pro-letariat from without (von aussen Hineingetragenes), and not something that emerges from the class struggle in stikhiinyi fashion (urwchsig) (70910).


The sentences over which so much ink has been spilled appear a few pages earlier. They followed Lenins comments on the strikes of the 1890s, which he characterized as a purely stikhiinyi movement: We stated that there could not have been a Social-Democratic awareness [at that time] among the workers. It could have been brought in only from outside. The history of all countries bears witness that exclusively with its own forces the worker class is in a condition to work out only a tred-iunionist awareness, that is, a conviction of the need to unite in unions, to carry on a struggle with the owners, to strive for the prom-ulgation by the government of this or that law that is necessary for the workers and so on. The doctrine of socialism grew out of those philosophic, historical, and economic theories that were worked out by the educated representatives of the propertied class, the intelligentsia. The founders of modern scientific social-ism, Marx and Engels, belonged themselves, according to their social origin, to the bourgeois intelligentsia (702).

The linguistic resemblance between these texts is obvious. Lenin Rediscovered argues that due entirely to the Kautsky passage, Lenin got interested in the theme of who did or did not work out ideological doctrines . Lenins interest in this topic is strictly localized and no part of the ongoing argument of WITBD (640). Inspired by Kautsky, Lenins passage on from without is a digression, a paren-thetical remark that breaks the flow of the narrative (645). This approach leads to the conclusion: what seems to the textbook interpretation as the very heart of WITBD could be erased from the book without trace by snipping a couple of paragraphs (646). The problem with such an erasure is that eliminating this paragraph would mean deleting an important non-coincidence in Lenins writings, for this paragraph follows the description of the mid-1890s strikes as a strike movement that one must call stikhiinyi before anything else (701). Yet in the mid-1890s, Lenin had written that their objective situation naturally led the workers toward a class struggle that was conscious and political (1: 194, 241). Large-scale capitalism supposedly imposed working conditions and a living at-mosphere that forced the class of factory workers to think and act politically (1: 194). The workers were the antipodes of the bourgeoisie, the only social actor definitively differentiated from the old social order and from bourgeois culture and the only one utterly incapable of compromise (1: 311, 359). At the time, the young ulianov confused the economic triumph of capital with the advent of bourgeois society, because he reduced the social to the economic (1: 159). Since all economic exploitation now was capitalist, the workers faced only a single class contradiction (1: 457). As for the other social conflicts, all of them internal to the bourgeoisie, including the exploitation of the peasantry, we Marxists shall remain spectators (1: 374). The consciousness of 1896 was thus about antagonism to-ward manufacturers and did not have to be brought in (2: 102, 104).

WITBD is testimony to a total reversal, with Lenin writing that these strikes, a purely stikhiinyi movement expressed no more than the embryo of a class


struggle. This was a tred-unionist struggle but not yet a Social-Democratic one, and it testified to the antagonism between workers and owners, but there did not exist among these workersnor could it have existed at that timean awareness of the irreconcilable opposition of their interests to the entire political and social order, in other words, a Social-Democratic awareness (7012, em-phasis mine). According to WITBD, the awareness of the worker class is not genuine political awareness if the workers are not taught to respond to each and every occurrence of abuse of power and oppression, violence and malfeasance, no matter which class is affected. The awareness of the worker masses cannot be a genuine class awareness if the workers do not learn to observe each of the other social classes in all the manifestations of their intellectual, moral, and political life (737, Lenins emphasis). Elsewhere he writes, It is not enough to explain the political oppression of the workers (just as it is not enough to explain to them the opposition between their interests and that of the owners). What is necessary is to agitate in relation to each concrete manifestation of political and economic oppression, but since this oppression falls on the most various classes of society surely it is obvious that we will not carry out our task of developing political awareness of the workers, if we do not take upon ourselves the organization of an all-sided indictment of the autocracy? (726, Lenins emphasis).

In 1902, Lenin thus described an understanding of the antagonism with the bourgeoisie (the awareness of 1896) as trade-unionism, the embryo of a class struggle. What kind of awareness did the workers (and the Social Democrats!) need in 1902? An awareness of the irreconcilable opposition of their interests to the entire political and social order. This order was not the bourgeois orderit was the order of aziatchina, of barbarized capitalism, where there was no so-ciopolitical identification of classes, where the national atmosphere suffocated the working masses. The target of the 1896 version of political (or class) aware-ness was the capitalist regime. for the 1902 version of Social Democratic aware-ness, it was aziatchina.

Consequently, and despite the linguistic similarity between their pas-sages, Kautsky and Lenin were in fact referring to two totally different types of consciousness. for Kautsky, it was the awareness of a proletariat that be-longed to a bourgeois society. for Lenin in 1902, the Russian proletariat was too closely connected with aziatchina to be part of bourgeois society (meaning the entire matrix of social relations, not merely the political realm to which Lenin Rediscovered refers when it speaks of Russian absolutism or Germanys semi-absolutism).37 The difference between these consciousnesses is of crucial

37 But why, then, does Lenin quote Kautsky? Lenin Rediscovered is right that the entire Kautsky passage could be cut and there would be no perceptible seam in WITBD (637), but not because spontaneity is a non-issue. The reason lies elsewhere: the relationship between the objective spontaneous element and the subjective factor was a topic of polemics among socialists; in these


importance, not because that of 1902 was of any greater complexity than that of 1896 (or than the version described by Kautsky), but because they took for granted two different historical realities and were therefore supposed to develop from two different places. In 189496, that place was the exploitation of the working class. In 19012, the place was both prior and external to class, for the place was the political. It was prior, because before the workers could have interests as a class in bourgeois society, they had to destroy what was preventing that society from emerging in the first place. They thus had to destroy what prevented them from constituting themselves as a class. The place was also ex-ternal, because what needed to be destroyed was not the enemy in the workers class struggle but the enemy of any class struggle at allthat is, the vestiges of serfdom (6: 311). This is why, were we to delete from WITBD the passage on from without as proposed in Lenin Rediscovered, not only would we not gain clearer insightwe would in fact have far more difficulty understanding how the political is prior and external to class, that is, nothing more or less than the status and mission of the party that Lenin was proposing.

Was Lenin a Praktik of No Theoretical Originality?Lenin Rediscovered is right to point out that in its time, one key to the success of WITBD was that the praktiki recognized themselves in the pamphlet and studied it intently for its insight on practical questions. To study how WITBD was received in the underground, Lenin Rediscovered relies on accounts by the Lenin loyalists of 19046 (436). The excerpts that the book reproduces bear exclusively on the practical aspects of WITBDs message. Yet we should dis-tinguish between how a book is received and what its internal logic is. The importance accorded by Lenin Rediscovered to the practical aspect diminishes a question that was fundamental to Lenin: what kind of action was effective in Russia? It was not simply, as one might think from reading Lenin Rediscovered, a matter of preventing activists from being arrested and the organization from being dismantled too quickly, although these were serious issues. The question that preoccupied him was much broader. His answer, which varied between 1894 and 1902, operated at three levelspractical, tactical, and theoretical.

This last level is missing from Lenin Rediscovered, which thereby ignores a central tenet of communist discourseand hence of how Leninism, and WITBD in particular, was receivedthat any activist, from Moscow to Paris to Buenos Aires, learned at the moment of joining the party: organizational practice is driven by theoretical choices, because an organizations character is determined by its mission On the first page of chapter 4 of WITBD, which brings these two aspects together, we read: The character of the organization of any institution is naturally and inevitably defined by the content of the ac-

debates, the reference to Kautsky (made possible by the similarity of language) was an argument from authority to win the support of the praktiki.


tivity of that institution (763). Lenin Rediscovered inverts this relationship.38 This is something like an ide fixe than runs through the whole book, from the beginning, where the foundational debates among members of the Russian revolutionary movement (Lenin included) are described as essentially em-pirical (7), all the way to the conclusion, which ends by characterizing Lenin as a praktik (558), with comments on professional revolutionaries in between (461, 463). This reduction to the empirical follows logically from Lenin Rediscovered s general thesisthat Lenins work, and the party itself, were merely an attempt to adapt as faithfully as possible the model of the SPD.

The interpretation of the centrality of the struggle for democratization and political liberties is similarly reductionist. Lenin wanted political freedom be-cause he thought it would bring immeasurable benefit to Russia, to the workers, and to Social Democracy (557). Political freedom and democratization would make a successful struggle for the worker cause possible (132); the practical benefits to the workers movement were articulated by Lenin him-self (141). That these benefits would be useful to the revolutionary struggle is obvious, but must we therefore reduce the achievement of political freedom to a mere utilitarian calculation? (470). At the same time, Lenin is presented as a passionate advocate of political freedom as such (197), and the author even confides that I was taken aback by his obsessive insistence on the virtues of political freedom (206). (Alas, Lenin Rediscovered does not tell us when Lenin gave other political and social actors the benefit of this obsessive insistence.)

Lenin was no unconditional partisan of freedom as such, but neither was his approach driven merely by short-term utilitarian considerations. The practical benefits were of secondary importance. Before there could even be any suc-cessful struggle, the struggle itself first had to become a class struggle, which in turn presupposed that the worker movement became a working class and that class antagonism turned into class strugglethat is, there needed to be an end to stagnation and Asiatic barbarism. Democratization was thus no mere prelimi-nary that would allow the proletariat to organize itself better; rather, it meant transforming the objective, spontaneous course of Russian history through a political action that would ultimately integrate Russia into European history. Here more than ever, Lenin was more than ever an intellectual rooted in Russias 19th century and a man who moved beyond it.

These doubts about the spontaneity of capitalism in Russia, together with the idea of bringing an anti-aziatchina consciousness into the workers move-ment, undergirded an action plan of historical dimensions. The idea was to have the workers movement bring the class struggle to the countryside in order to

38 for example the central dispute on the relationship between the objective factors and the subjectivethat is, the politicalthat pitted Lenin against the authors of the Joint Letter is de-cribed as empirical rather than theoretical . The theoretical debate about material elements is simply a reflection of this empirical dispute, an empirical clash (349). In fact, this debate was eminently theoretical.


push the peasants to launch a revolution that would destroy all the older forms of production and social relations. In other words, universalize the political to rectify objective spontaneity. far from being empirical, the debate that this proj-ect implied touched on the essence of the political. We need only to think of the re-evaluation of the political that goes on todayas a weapon of the weak against certain forms of globalization in the worldto appreciate how much the role that Lenin assigned to the political underlay a debate that was eminently theoretical.

A Theoretical Innovation: The Role of the Political, or the Birth of LeninismAccording to Lenin, it was Russias peculiarities (4: 220)that is, the charac-ter of its capitalist transitionthat determined the complexity of the practical tasks: capitalisms elimination of serfdom in the countryside has so confused and complicated social and economic relationships as to make it necessary to ponder deeply over the solution to the immediate practical questions a simple solution cannot be invented (6: 314). The challenge was to think of a different, non-spontaneous path for the transition from what remained of serf-dom to capitalismto think about what separated Russia from the programmatic framework of European Social Democracy, rediscover the french Revolution and the role in it of the peasantry, and prepare a new Social Democratic agrar-ian program that would be Russian. This program would focus on the return of the otrezki (the plots of peasant land confiscated in 1861 and given to the landlords); Lenin regarded these as the specific source of the reproduction of servile relationships because they were situated in a way that ensured, among other things, the preservation of the landlords patriarchal authority over the peasants. Restoring the otrezki was supposed to disentangle servile from capi-talist relations and leave in place only the coercive mechanisms of capitalist economics. This would ensure that the class struggle unfolded without encum-brance. He hoped by the same movement to create a revolutionary situation, since the otrezki could be restored only by force (6: 316). It was here (6: 317) that Lenin inserted his note on the radical difference with Germany and argued against trying to apply Kautsky to Russia.

The was no simple solution, for Russian capitalism would inevitably re-new the pre-capitalist system of social relations (6: 328). Arriving at a different path of development, one founded on purely bourgeois social relations of pro-duction, required a revolutionary action by the peasantry that was conceivable only on condition of supporting small-scale private property and destroying the large landholdings, a postulate contrary to a literal reading of Marx.

Whether Lenin wanted to stress the novelty of his assertion or was having trouble conceptualizing it, the fact remains that he abandoned his customary austere political style and instead wrote:


we must assist the peasants and urge them to destroy all remnants of serf-dom as completely as possible. This meets with general approval, does it not? Well then, if you do agree to follow this path, make an effort to proceed along it independently; do not make it necessary to drag you; do not let the unusual appearance of this path frighten you, do not be put off by the fact that in many places you will find no beaten track at all, and that you will have to crawl along the edge of precipices, break your way through thickets, and leap across chasms. Dont complain about the absence of paths: these complaints will be futile whining, for you should have known in advance that you would be moving, not along a highway that has been graded and leveled by all the forces of social progress, but along trails through out-of-the-way places and back alleys that do have a way out, but from which you, we or anyone else will never find a direct, simple, and easy way outnever, that is, so long as they continue to exist, these out-of-the-way places and back alleys that are disappearing but disappearing excruciatingly slowly. (6: 32526, emphasis mine)

What to do about this excruciating slowness? What this image-filled description (which greatly irritated Plekhanov) and this apparent conceptual poverty concealed was in fact the theoretical innovation that would lie at the heart of Bolshevism: to employ political action to prompt an alternative bourgeois development that would make it possible, along the way, to pursue the goal of socialism.39 Who, however, stood at enough of a remove from aziatchina to be the subject of this kind of political action?

The PartyAccording to Lenin Rediscovered, the party model intended by Lenin did not change during those years. In reality, however, the model evolved along with Lenins interpretation of both Russian capitalism and its effects on the social ac-tors. In 1896, unchanged from 1894, the partys mission was to help the work-ing class, since the exploitation of the workers inevitably led to class struggle (2: 1056). By 1897, Lenin had identified elements of the urban proletariat that were not spontaneously joining the class struggle, and so he put forward a more interventionist conception of the party: instead of pomoch [helping] and sodeistvovat [assisting], we now read about rukovodit [leading] the proletariats class struggle and organizovat [organizing] this struggle (2: 446). But the party as such was not yet constituted as a theoretical problem, and the working class was external to autocracy and aziatchina (2: 45356). Lenin still saw the current difficulties as practical in nature and suggested that others follow the example of the group that he was leading in St. Petersburg in 189596. If it succeeded in

39 for Plekhanovs reaction, see Leninskii sbornik, 3 (Moscow: Institut TsK pri VKP, 1925), 376.


spreading to the rest of the country, this group could become the Russian Social Democratic Party (1: 461).

In 1899, Lenin started to conceive the party as a device to help bring the class struggle to Russia. He had barely begun his discovery of Russias peculiari-ties before positioning himself at a tentative distance from Marxism. The pages where he outlines the partys new mission open with an oath of allegiance to Marx, followed by a paean to Marxisms creative powers that looks startlingly like an anticipatory self-justification against the criticism he was expecting.40 What he says is, of course, we are still Marxists, but being in Russia allows us and, more important, compels us to debate certain theoretical questions. Lenin could no longer hide that he was preparing something new: The history of socialism and democracy in Western Europe, the history of the Russian revolu-tionary movement, the experience of our labor movementsuch is the material we must master to elaborate a purposeful organization and tactics for our party. The analysis of this material must, however, be done independently, since there are no ready-made models to be found anywhere. On the one hand, the Russian labor movement exists under conditions that are quite different from those of Western Europe. It would be most dangerous to have any illusions on this score. On the other hand, Russian Social Democracy differs very substantially from earlier revolutionary parties in Russia, so that the need to learn revolutionary technique and secret organization from the old Russian masters in no way relieves us of the duty to assess them critically and work out our own organiza-tion independently (4: 18990).

While thus casting himself as an innovator relative to Western Social Democracy, he was also distancing himself from Russian tradition and sug-gesting that he would preserve only its practical insights, whereas in reality at that very moment he was taking up problems that the anti-tsarist movement had articulated well before Marxisms arrival in Russia. until then, Lenin had been operating in what I would call stage two (in which he argued that a conscious workers movement was in existence) and acted as though stage one (where the class constituted itself politically) as such did not represent a problem. Aksel rod, also a Marxist but steeped in the populist past, nurtured the deepest fears about whether stage one was real in Russiaabsent for-eign assistance, the working class would not succeed in becoming a conscious 40 We take our stand entirely on the ground of Marxs theory . In no way do we regard Marxs theory as something completed and inviolable; on the contrary, we are convinced that it has only laid the foundation stone for the science that socialists must develop in all directions if they wish to keep pace with life. We think that an independent elaboration of Marxs theory is especially essential for Russian socialists, for this theory provides only general guiding principles, which, in particular are applied in England differently from france and in Germany differently from Russia. We will therefore gladly afford space in our paper for articles on theoretical questions and invite all comrades openly to discuss controversial points (4: 182, 184, late 1899, Lenins emphasis).


movement. That assistance consisted in the triumph of the values of bourgeois civilization. Lenin shared Aksel rods concern but gave his own answerthat to provide such assistance was the job of the party. Marx says that the class strug-gle is always a political struggle but, Lenin adds, that does not mean that every struggle between workers and bosses is always political. It is political only if it is a class struggle. The Social Democrats task was therefore to transform the workers spontaneous struggle into a struggle by the whole class, a struggle by a specific political party (4: 188, Lenins emphasis). The concern here is to widen the local struggle to the entire country (the whole class), but even so, it is the party that turns the spontaneous struggle into a political struggle, that is, a class struggle. The switch from class to party is clear as day. Before spontaneity could be transformed into conscious struggle, the political di-mension needed to be introduced, and that was the job of the party.

Now we see the problem concealed behind Lenins switch from class to party. It is Aksel rods problemstage one, the stage Lenin had previously thought lay in the past. The fact that he was now looking to the party suggests that the doubts affecting his confidence in economic spontaneity had spread to the certainty he had earlier felt about the spontaneous process by which the working class, and Russias social classes in general, constituted themselves. Henceforth, in Russia the party preceded the class struggle. from a party that helped the class struggle to a party without which that struggle could not take place: such was one path of Vladimir ulianovs thinking between 1895 and 1899.

In December 1900, he writes that without the party, the labor movement becomes petty and inevitably becomes bourgeois. In the same text, Social Democracy is charged with bringing socialist ideas and political awareness to the mass of the proletariat and the spontaneous workers movement. Without the party, the proletariat is incapable of rising to the level of conscious class struggle; without the party, the working class cannot lead a political strugglethat is, it is not a class at all (4: 37375). By early 1901, not only did the party precede the class struggle, but it was also constitutive of the working class.

When in October 1901 Lenin explicitly stated that conflicts between classes do not become class struggle (5:322), he was fully focused on the relationship between the workers party and the peasantry. In a few months his thought process had taken another step, one that was decisive for his conception of the party. Let us compare.

In late 1899, he was emphasizing the disadvantages of capitalisms natural path as well as Russias peculiarities (4: 234, 220); his ideas aimed to destroy pre-capitalist survivals and give the class struggle in the countryside a more open and conscious character (4: 236). By februaryMarch 1901, it was apparent that all of Russia bore the mark of aziatchina, and the mission was to carry the class struggle into the countryside (4: 432). At the end of 1899, a class struggle


that was already underway needed to be made more conscious. In 1901, this struggle had to be introduced in the first place. This would be the outcome of the agitation to renew the demands of 1861. In the course of that struggle, the peasantry would constitute itself as a class and destroy aziatchina, thereby opening up an opportunity for the proletariat to constitute itself as a class. By transforming the peasantry into a class, the proletariat itself could become a class. How could the proletariat, which itself was not yet a class, transform the peas-antry into a class? This is where the party came in.

Lenin now awarded the party the status he had earlier attributed to the working classit was the only group that was free from aziatchina. A new logic now became possible: if the party took charge of eliminating aziatchina, and this coincided with the higher interest of all social development / of the coun-try (4: 220, 432, etc.), the party thereby took charge of that development. That is, the party would take charge of the entire society.

In the Russian Revolutionary TraditionAccording to Lenin Rediscovered, Lenins choice of the title WITBD was di-rectly inspired (563) by Martynov, who, both in September 1901 and in his polemic with Iskra, used formulas such as what we need to do (chto nuzhno delat ) and how we must act (kak nuzhno deistvovat ). It was again Martynov who wrote, toward the end of 1902, that Social-Democratic activists in Russia, naturally, are interested first of all in the question: what is to be done and how is it to be done ? Martynov accused Iskra of giving the wrong answer to the question What is to be done? that Chernyshevskii had posed. Lenin then sup-posedly decided not to let Martynov monopolize Chernyshevskiis memory, and to pay a little homage (564) to the latter by borrowing his title. However, his choice does not indicate anything specifically Chernyshevskian about Lenins argument (562). As before with Krichevskii, Lenin Rediscovered tells us that Lenin let his adversaries dictate to him the choice of his political language.

This is a curious interpretation. The question what is to be done? had long featured in every discussion.41 Moreover, the texts by Martynov that are quoted in Lenin Rediscovered appeared after Lenins Where to Begin (May 1901), which begins with the sentence: The question what is to be done [chto delat ] has in recent years placed itself [vydvigaets ia] before Russian Social Democrats with particular force (5: 5). In itself the origin of the title, which is discussed on pages 56164, does not merit all this attention. What is difficult to understand, however, is why Lenin Rediscovered, which offers no analysis of Chernyshevskiis thought or even a sketchy comparison of the two WITBDs,

41 In 1878, the anarchist A. Libanov, whom the young ulianov later visited frequently in Samara, published his own WITBD ; and in 1879, A. I. Koshelev published a 71-page pamphlet titled Chto zhe teper delat? (V. Bazanov, A. Libanov i ego traktat Chto delat? Russkaia litera-tura, no. 3 [1963]).


still takes such pains to reaffirm something that was first imposed by Stalinist historiography as its interpretation of Leninism.42

I will limit myself to highlighting just one aspect of the conceptual conver-gence that led both authors to WITBD. We have seen that Chernyshevskii asked chto delat ? after concluding that the entire Russian social fabric was infected with aziatstvo. He then placed his bets on the special man (Rakhmetov, the proto-type of the professional revolutionary) to confront the autocracy. There is thus a causal link between the reign of aziatstvo and the invention of the special man. Aziatstvo had prevented the constitution of horizontal solidarities, thus benefit-ing an entire despotic hierarchy [samodurstvo] that did not govern a hierarchi-cal relationship between one social stratum and the next but instead reduced all inhabitants of the Kingdom of Darkness [temnoe tsarstvo] to individual servile subordination. To find a way out, none, positively none of the usual remedies was effective, there is no natural path leading to change.43 The anti-despotic project could therefore not base itself on a particular social stratum. Instead, its bearers could only be those who had escaped individually from the collective li-ability of samodurstvo. As a devoted reader of feuerbach, Chernyshevskii worked out what we might call an anthropology of revolution, or WITBD 1. Lenin, in turn, concluded that aziatchina ruled everything and social classes had not con-stituted themselves politically, and he too wrote that simple solutions and natu-ral paths were not enoughto fight autocracy, one had to wager on individuals who had detached themselves from aziatchina through their awareness and un-derstanding of reality. from the first issue of Iskra (December 1900), he bet on a party that will attract all that is vital and honest in Russia (4: 377). This was WITBD 2the anthropology of the revolution was back.

On the basis of a parallel reading of the two WITBDs, I would like to point out just one divergence. The new people fear (he made them feel somewhat frightened) the special man, Rakhmetov (he is a different breed), yet he is necessary. He is the mirror of the autocracy, a monster. He has no private life; this opposes him to the new people, the prototypes of the new society, who would suffocate without a private life. The complexity of Rakhmetovs character is antic-ipated by other works where Chernyshevskii and Dobroliubov warned about the danger of a revolution creating a new despotism.44 It would be necessary to ensure that Rakhmetov remain a mere instrument of the new people.45 It seems that Lenin did not see the difference between the special man and the new man, for

42 Studying the conceptual links between Leninism and earlier Russian revolutionary ideas was prohibited from the early 1930s on. 43 N. A. Dobroliubov, Izbrannye filosofskie proizvedeniia, 2: 33.44 On this subject, see Claudio Ingerflom, Le citoyen impossible: Les racines russes du lninisme (Paris: Payot, 1988), esp. chaps. 45; translated into Russian as Nesostoiavshiisia grazhdanin: Russkie korni leninizma (Moscow: Ipol, 1993).45 N. G. Chernyshevskii, Chto delat? ed. T. I. Ornatskaia and S. A. Reiser (Leningrad: Izdatel stvo Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1975), 201, 22124, 265, 22930.


with him, the latter is subsumed under the former. But then, what kind of society did he have in mind? What place would it leave for private life? Lenin did not embrace Chernyshevskiis mistrust of Rakhmetov. This was probably the price of a life of action, something that Chernyshevskii had rejected and from which he even urged the young to abstain.46 So Rakhmetov disappearedfor the time be-ing, there was nothing to be done in Russia, as his mission was to come together with all classes. But he would return to Russia in the near future.47

Which Societys Contours Appear in Lenins WITBD?The structure conceived by Lenin expected the activists to take up all the anti-absolutist demands of all social strata (5: 366, December 1901). Like Rakhmetov, the Social Democrats were to go to all classes of the population. This, in my opinion, is the heart of the structure described in WITBD: one cannot answer the question what is to be done to bring political knowledge to the workers? with the response that the majority of praktiki are contented with,48 namely go to the workers. In order to bring the workers political knowledge, the Social-Democrats must go to all classes of the population (745, Lenins emphasis; see also 790).

Since going to the workers was no longer enough, a new organization had to be created that could reach all classes. The party had a twofold function in this process: (a) to organize the population in the struggle against the autoc-racy, so that society, once politically awakened by the workers movement under party leadership, would break with the inertia of aziatchina; (b) to bring the workers movement into the new political life where it would acquire its class consciousness (74041, 737). This dual function shaped the partys place in society: we need our people to be everywhere, in all social strata, these people are necessary, not only for propaganda and agitation, but even more for organization (752). It goes without saying that our people continued to be Social-Democrats (755): the party represents the interests of one class only (6: 310), yet simultaneously organizes all classes, and actively interven[es] in every liberal issue while defining [its] own, Social Democratic, attitude to that issue (759, Lenins emphasis). The word liberal described the entire social spectrum that was non-proletarian but nonetheless subject to the partys watch-ful eye. In other words, the entire population was to be organized according to the partys interests.49

46 A. I. Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 30 vols. (Moscow: Izdatel stvo Akademiia nauk SSSR, 195465), 27, pt. 1: 164.47 Chernyshevskii, Chto delat? 21314.48 The phrase not to mention those praktiki who are inclined to economism is missing at this point in Lenin

Ingerflom on Lih, Lenin Rediscovered

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