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Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History10, 1 (Winter 2009): 139 69.

Review Article

Lenin Rediscovered, or Lenin Redisguised?

CLAUDIOSERGIONUNINGERFLOM

Lars T. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered:What Is to Be Done? in Context(with a newtranslation 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 aresubject 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 todiscuss 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 studyof Lenins basic outlook based on a wide range of primary sources (both Russianand German).1The book is divided into three parts. The first comprises threesections: the contents of Erfurtianism (so called after the town where theSocial 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 isa detailed commentary on WITBD, and the third and final part offers a newtranslation of WITBD. The books central theses are that Lenin was a perfectErfurtian, that Marx and the SPD were his only matres penser, and that hisrelationship with the Russian revolutionary past was purely emotional.

According to Lenin Rediscovered,it has been impossible for us to understandWITBDthrough 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: Gosudarstvennoeizdatelstvo politicheskoi literatury, 195865); English translations draw on V. I. Lenin,Collected Works,45 vols. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 196475), amended to coincide withthe 5th Russian edition. Quotations from WITBD are taken from the translation in LeninRediscovered.

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

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140 CLAUDIO SERGIO NUN INGERFLOM

or almost all academic historians and politically engaged authors (14). LeninRediscoveredrejects 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 textbookinterpretation, 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-Democraticparty. Fourth, Lenin did not revert to the populist tradition in any way.Finally, WITBD[did] not advocate hyper-centralism or an elite conspiratorialparty 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 Rediscoveredsets out literally [to]rediscover a Lenin who is close to the complete opposite of the Lenin of thetextbooks (5).

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

Lenin Rediscoveredshows the consequences of this basic choice. Sometimescourageously, it takes sides in the debates of the time. 2In itself, there is noth-ing wrong with the empathy shown to some of the protagonists; after all, whoare the historians who can claim, cross their hearts, to harbor no feelings forthe heroes of their stories? Empathy can, however, interfere with interpretingsources. The account of the conflict among Rosa Luxemburg, the Mensheviks,and Lenin (2067, 491ff.) is an example: Every page of her attack on Leninpounds 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 leastdocumentation for this description of Lenins views. She does not even mentionWITBD (491). What sorts of debates are we studying here? Debates that theprotagonists intended to be read by future historians who would want to seethe 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 inthe atmosphere of Russian Social Democracy, automatically read the passage [in WITBD] as Ido, and even happier to report that Lenin particularly praised Sta lins article for its treatment ofthe vexed question of bringing in awareness from without (658); Mensheviks were in a falseposition 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.

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LENIN REDISCOVERED, OR LENIN REDISGUISED? 141

citations?3Or were these polemics among activists that expressed themselvesin multiple forms, not just the written word? They argued orally, lived in theunderground and in different cities and countries, sometimes without access to

published materials that they knew by other means. Their polemics were not

or not onlyabout what Lenin wrote but also about the concrete decisions thatthey lived with every day and about the future of the organization. Nor doesLenins rejection of Rosa Luxemburgs criticisms prove that these lacked perti-nence. (Her description was denied directly by Lenin himself. Once we thinkabout it, her account is highly implausible [491].) In sum, the activists did notfollow the academic methods that are ours, and neither should our books aimto become actors in their polemics.

We have to keep our distance from the historical actors. Lenin Rediscoveredobjects to the textbook interpretations uncritical reading of Lenins adversar-ies,4but then reads Lenin in the same way: I find it a rather attractive featureof my own interpretation that it allows Lenin to know his own beliefs and tomaintain a fundamental consistency in his outlook. These two points go to-gether, since Lenin himself often asserted the fundamental continuity of hisviews (27). Knowing that he was constantly involved in polemics, must weaccept 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, theauthor ofLenin Rediscoveredresponds by setting forth his own unique and dis-tinctive position: Given the previous climate, however, my account will surelybe perceived as pro-Lenin (494).5

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

3 Apart from criticizing Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin Rediscoveredalso 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 Rediscoveredpraises the non-partisan historian (492) and insists on my non-partisanapproach (494) and that My account is intended to be non-partisan (494). 6See extravagant praise of Chernyshevsky (377). Rosa Luxemburg denounced an ultra-centralist tendency, strict despotic centralism, mechanical submission of the partys militantsto their central authority, [and] zombie-like obedience in the Leninist project, to which LeninRediscoveredreplies: Do people really believe that Lenin desired and indeed openly advocatedunthinking, zombie-like obedience? We may if we wish, excuse Luxemburgs melodramaticcharacterisation as exuberant polemics (527); I feel it my duty as a historian to point out thatit 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 CPSUis required to deny the prophetic nature of Rosa Luxemburgs words.

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

rative of Lenin Rediscoveredis built.

How to Rejuvenate the Historiography?Notwithstanding its repeatedly stated aim of providing a historiographicalalternative, Lenin Rediscovered embraces the same old question to which thetextbook interpretation has tirelessly returned: did Lenin follow the Russianrevolutionary tradition, or was he a Marxist? Although objecting to the text-book interpretations answer to the question, Lenin Rediscoveredconfines itselfto the very ground chosen by the same interpretation.7No doubt the histori-ography has often been superficial and has distorted Lenin, but how could itserrant ways be limited only to the answers it gives and not have affected thequestions themselves? Lenin Rediscoveredfollows the textbook interpretation inconceiving the relationship between the Russian tradition and the SPD as anirreducible opposition, whereas rejuvenating the historiography and shifting thedebate means changing the questions and asking, for example, about the reasonfor 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 the1890sindeed, at least up to 1917 (114).8His thought is no longer a researchobject: 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 washis storyand he stuck to it (118).9Lenin is deprived of his own history. To ac-complish this, Lenin Rediscoveredworks with a corpus of texts that are selectedin accordance with the books thesis, which means excluding, among others,the economic writings in which Lenin focuses on the agrarian question andthe nature of Russian capitalism. The theoretical and methodological premises

of Lenin Rediscoveredare also to blame. The book conceptualizes the trajectory

7 Lenin Rediscovered asserts that according to the textbook interpretation, Lenin followedNarodnaia Volia and Tkachev but not the SPD. Lenin Rediscoveredreplies that his model wasnot 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 toWITBD(128); the continuity in his peasant strategy throughout his career (155); and themanuscript Friends of the People(written in 1894, when Lenin was 24 years old) reveal[s] Leninas a rare exemple of a person who makes his entrance on the political scene with his world-viewfully formed (116). 9Likewise, the whole Plekhanov was supposedly already there in 1889(98).

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of a mans thinking as development10i.e., something that unfoldsandthereby takes an approach so ahistorical as to rule out an investigation intohow that thinking might have changed.11At the same time, the recurrence of

the same expression over several years is taken as evidence for the absence ofdevelopment and that the meaning stayed the same (120, 421). Yet the samesignifiers can refer to different signifieds, so we may be dealing not with de-velopment but with changes in thought. Identifying recurrences accomplisheslittle 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 whetherLenin was reasoning as economist or politicianin sum, without an analysis ofhis contradictions, whose existence is denied a prioriin Lenin Rediscovered.

EurocentrismTo prove that Lenin was a perfect Erfurtian, Lenin Rediscoveredmakes a list ofthemes that characterize the Erfurt Program, and then, using this checklist,we shall show that Lenin was a completely committed Erfurtian . We willtherefore proceed chronologically and go through each writing [by Lenin] withchecklist in hand (114).12By adopting the prism of the SPD and searching forconvergences, this approach has little chance of finding Lenin to have a logicof his own. A historiographic Eurocentrism that uses conceptual frameworksfrom Western history to understand Russia is here applied to Lenin. We willlist 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 theRSDWP [Russian Social Democratic Workers Party]. Lenin Rediscoveredpro-duces 19 commentaries on as many passages from WITBDfor which the SPDwas supposedly the model. This leaves the reader with the sense that the booksthesis has been overwhelmingly demonstrated. Juxtaposing these 19 commen-taries in Lenin Rediscoveredwith 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 ofdevelopment has absolutely nothing to do with history. Strictly speaking, development is thenegation 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 certainsense, 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, whatis new. Insofar as nothing new, no innovation, and nothing unforseen is present, there is alsono 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 thechecklist (140).

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an interpretation that is more nuanced and sometimes even contrary to the oneprovided 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 importanceof a partys theoretical clarity, Lenin gives a long citation from Engels aboutGerman workers (405). Engels said that these workers have a remarkable ap-titude for theory and were the first to build a co-ordinated movement thatcombined political, economic, and theoretical aspects. Lenin Rediscoveredaddsthat Lenin expresses the hope that the Russian workers will occupy a similarplace of honor, indicating that the SPD is the only model. However, let usread Lenin not from page 25 but from page 24 of the Russian edition, where hewrites 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 WITBDfrom thetranslation in Lenin Rediscovered but also insert key terms from the Russianoriginala movement starting up in a young country can be successful only ifit assimilates [pri uslovii pretvoreniia]13 the experience of other countries. Andthis kind of assimilation [pretvorenie] requires more than a simple familiaritywith this experience or a simple copyingof the latest resolutions. It requires theability to have a critical attitude toward this experience and to verify it inde-pendently . Third, the national tasks of Russian Social Democracy are unlikethose confronted by any other socialist party in the world . Now, we wishonly to underline that the role of an advanced fighter can only be fulfilled bya party guided by an advanced theory. And to have some concrete idea of whatthis means, let the reader recall such forerunners of Russian Social Democracyas Herzen, Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, and the brilliant galaxy of revolutionariesof the 70s (69699, emphasis mine).

Lenin Rediscoveredtakes into account only the lines that followthis 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 linesare preceded by a reference to his Russian forerunners and what Lenin consid-

ered essential, namely, arming oneself with a theory that can offer guidance tofighters.14Immediately afterwards, he makes reference to Marxism. Are we toignore one or the other of these passages, or would it not be better to ask whythey are together and which elements of the theoretical aspect of the RussiansLenin made his own?

13 The shades of meaning of the Russian nounpretvorenieand verbpretvoriat(it)(rendered inLenin Rediscoveredas assimilation, assimilates) are important. According to Dals dictionary,the verb means izmeniat po vidu, obrazu ili po kachestvu. Pretvoreniedoes not mean absorbor incorporate without change. The key point is that the entire passage shows that herepretvore-niemeans critical attitude, not simple familiarity, much less copying.14 For Lenin Rediscovered, however, Lenin pointed primarly to their [Russian revolutionaries]ability to inspire (415).

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By doing so, we can free ourselves from the false alternative of Russian pastversus SPD.15Finally, reading all of Lenins corresponding passages makes the19 references seem less self-evident.16

Lenin Rediscoveredsystematically sees Lenin as embracing the SPD but failsto notice that often what he was doing was to make arguments from authorityto advance his owninitiatives amid the polemics among Russians.17Lenin leftRussia for Germany in search of ammunition to bring home for his struggle,whereas Lenin Rediscovered outlines only a one-way conceptual voyage fromGermany 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, lookat the Germans, then go thou and do likewisewith appropriate changes forlocal conditions (121). At this point, we wait in vain for an explanation ofwhat is specific about Russia. Lenin Rediscoveredcontents itself with attributingto Lenin the ambition to build a party as much like the SPD as possible underabsolutist conditions, so we can overthrow the tsar and obtain the politicalliberties 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 hadcurrently reached in their common journey along an identical historical path.The one was still absolutist and hence had no political liberties, whereas theother was already semi-absolutistitself a problematic conceptand enjoyedthe benefit of political liberties. Lenin Rediscoveredleads the reader to think thatthis evolutionary conception was Lenins, yet this was not the case at the timeof WITBD.

On the following page, Lenin Rediscoveredseems to be in a position to movebeyond evolutionism: Of course, the Erfurt Programme must be adjusted tomeet Russian conditions. Lenin mentions two main issues requiring creativeadaptation: 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 ofa peasant strategy for Russian Social Democracy. His elaboration and defenseof his strategy is a major theme in his writings of the Iskraperiod. Thus, the

15 All the more as Lenin takes up the same idea from different angles, insisting on the vital needto otrabotatboth 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 correspondingto references numbers vi, xii, and xiv, as Lenin Rediscoveredacknowledges at times (407, 409).References numbers iv, ix, and xviii (4067, 411) correspond to passages where the German caseis not present even implicitly. Reference number v (406) corresponds to Lenin (6: 48) wherethe SPD is used merely as an example to illustrate events that occur in the entire history ofinternational Social Democracy.17 See Lenin (6: 4042) for the reference to number iii (406).

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agrarianas opposed to simplypeasantquestion was a major one on the eveof WITBD. However, Since WITBDdoes 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 Rediscoveredcomes close to Lenins laboratory of ideas, but faithfulto its methodfollow explicitness onlyit stops outside the door: since WITBDdid not deal explicitly with the agrarian question, the economic writings areignored.

Yet the Agrarian Program of Russian Social Democracy, written betweenFebruary and the first half of March 1902WITBD was completed inFebruarymakes explicit Lenins view of the differences between Russia andGermany: in the agrarian sphere, we may perhaps evolve something new. Whynew? Because Russian Social Democracy could not remain aloof in solvingthe urgent and complex alien (non-proletarian) problems (6: 333). This ideaof leading the other sections of the people in the struggle against the autocracyis also present in other texts by Lenin. Lenin Rediscoveredindicates as much butonly to add at every turn that this was nothing new because this thesis camefrom the SPD. The linguistic coincidence between Lenin and Kautsky is trans-formed into an identity of views and obscures their difference, which Lenin didnot conceal: Martynov is quite sure of only one thing : that Kautskys bookis good (this is warranted), and that it is sufficient to repeat and transcribeKautsky without bearing in mind how radicallydifferent Russia is with regardto the agrarian program (this is not at all wise) (6: 317 n., emphasis mine).

This difference was radicalfor two reasons (6: 333): because the partyfirst had to unleasha class struggle, and because that struggle was destined tocorrectthe objectivecourse of Russian capitalism, which meant pulling Russiaout of its spontaneoussocial and economic path and into another typeof bour-geois development. This could not be done unless the Russian peasantry actedlike the French peasantry in 1789. But in Russia, the labor movement and theparty would at once take charge of the revolution so that the peasant revolutionwould, without discontinuity, become the socialist revolution. Lenins strategy

was different from the SPDs strategy because social and economic conditionsmade Russia radicallydifferent from Germany. It was thus not a matter of fol-lowing in Germanys path and overcoming Russias backwardness. Here we findourselves at the antipodes of the evolutionism that Lenin Rediscovered attributesto Lenin.

Far from being details of Lenins strategy, these propositions implyan anti-evolutionist conception of history and an undoubted distance fromEurocentrism. Ignoring this double separation, Lenin Rediscoveredhas Leninsaying: we differ from earlier Russian revolutionaries because we are supe-

rior and we differ from Western Social Democrats because we are perforceinferior (149, emphasis in Lenin Rediscovered).

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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 WITBDthat would be incompatible with what isproposed in Lenin Rediscovered. This applies, for example, to the concepts ofaziatstvoand aziatchina.

In anti-tsarist thinking, aziatstvowas not used to describe Asia but to ana-lyze Russia in opposition to Europe. Chernyshevskii18used it with reservations:it was key for Russia19 but unsatisfactory conceptually.20 He associatedthe term with samodurstvo, the central concept of Dobroliubovs Kingdom ofDarkness.21Readers saw this as a conceptual innovation.22Using the conceptsof aziatstvoand samodurstvo, Chernyshevskii described a vertical structure ofdespotic power that reached from monarch to serf and blocked the creationof horizontal social relationships unmediated by the regime. If this giganticsystem 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 Aziatstvois what we call the state of affairs where there is no inviolability of rights, whereneither persons, labor, nor property are shielded against arbitrary power. In Asiatic states the lawis 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 Aziatstvois decidedly unworthy of the profound idea that serves as the foundation of ourarticle (ibid., 700).21 Ibid., 699; N. A.Dobroliubov, Izbrannye filosofskie proizvedeniia, 2 vols. (Moscow:Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo politicheskoi literatury, 1948), 2: 5159. Samodurstvo meansdespotism with a pinch of arrogant stupidity. Samodur/stvo/stvovatappears in Dobroliubovsarticle some 200 times. In the manuscript, in the sentence despotism [despotizm] representssure evidence of inner powerlessness, the word despotizmwas scratched out and replaced withsamodurstvo; see N. A. Dobroliubov, Sobranie sochinenii, 9 vols. (Moscow and Leningrad:Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 196164), 5: 564 n. 39. The word

despotizmwas older and indicated a type of political power. Samodurwas unknown at the be-ginning of the 19th century, but by the mid-1850s it was common in popular speech and wefind it in some regional dictionaries (Perm , Tver , Pskovin the latter two as synonymous withupriamets). It describes familial relations among the merchantry and submission to the headof household. Dobroliubov introduced the term into literature, but in this case those signifiedextended beyond the world of merchants and acquired a sociopolitical dimension by showinghow 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.

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the subjects of the empire, what was to be done?23Who would provide the sup-port for destroying the autocratic system? Note: Chernyshevskii was wonderingWhat is to be done? and Who will provide support? when he concluded

that the entiresocial fabric was infected with aziatstvo.Aziatstvoalso included everything that impaired the development of agricul-ture. Chernyshevskii saw a connection between the situation in the countrysideand 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 theRussian economy. As early as 1894, he used aziatskoe to describe social relationsin the countryside.24We find aziatchina in The Development of Capitalism inRussia (1899), where he observed that capitalism coexisted with the old systemof 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 andsocial formation that was both exteriorand subsequentto aziatchina.

This is the vision of capitalism of an orthodox Social Democrat. Yet intothis same passage Lenin inserts aziatchina, a concept foreign to Marxs politi-cal economy that belongs to the populist tradition. Lenin Rediscovered rightlysees Marxist orthodoxy and Russias traditional language as belonging to twodifferent theoretical fields. But that being the case, the use of aziatstvo andaziatchina createsto use an analogy from physicsa phase shift in Leninsdiscourse between his orthodoxy and his non-orthodoxy. Were we to treat thisrecourse to the Russian conceptual vocabulary as a mere homage to sentiment,as Lenin Rediscovereddoes each time Lenin refers to the Russian past, we wouldbe 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 thathistory, because a phase shift is no mere contradictionit is a gap in the text, anentry into the pathway of the authors thinking.

The Radical Difference of Russian Capitalism

Lenins reference to aziatchina seems joined to a still timid acknowledgmentof Russias distinctiveness. Based on his economic studies, Lenin had foundthat in agriculture in general the transformative effects of capitalism manifest themselves here most slowly and gradually capitalism penetratesinto agriculture particularly slowlyand in extremely varied forms (3: 165, 171,emphasis mine). This slowness was no mere problem of temporality, for Russiancapitalism 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 laborbut also the Asiatic abuse of human dignity that is constantly encountered in the countryside(1: 241)

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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 capitalismto develop: The essence of the problem of the destiny of capitalism in Russia

is often presented as though prime importance attaches to the question: howfast?(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, whichwas also his own positionof 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 sameresulta society with two antagonistic classes. Yet Lenin was wondering howthis process was taking place in Russiaand from where it was coming. His con-cern was not merely economics, for if the process differed from what Marx hadforeseen, the social outcome might also be different. Social Democrats thereforehad to deal with a past that was still present and rethink how they paired aziat-stvo/aziatchinawith the Russian economic and social model that the introduc-tion of capitalism was generating.

In 1894, Lenin had said the oppositewhen he imagined capitalist develop-ment as occurring with tremendous speedand there was no question of anydiversity of forms.25The vestiges seemed about to disappear and there was noother form of exploitation but the capitalist one.26His conception of Russiancapitalism was abstract, built on a literal reading of Marx. Capitalism was one.Russia was following the same capitalist path as Western Europe. The labor-rentsystem was already disappearing and the peasantry was split into an agrarianpetty 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 Rediscovereddis-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 nohistory. On the points we have discussed, there is an opposition between TheDevelopment of Capitalism in Russia and what Lenin wrote in 189495. He25 Agricultural capitalism does not embrace allsocial-economic relations in the countryside and still more in the social and the juridical-political sphere these still powerful relics ofthe old-nobility stratum, which have not yet been destroyedby capitalism precisely because it isunderdeveloped (1: 49091, Lenins emphasis). Capitalism began to uproot this pillar of OldRussiathe 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, emphasismine). 26 [The] exploitation of the working people in Russia is everywhere capitalist in nature, if weleave out of account the moribund remnants of serfdom (1: 310, Lenins emphasis).

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abandoned certain approaches and developed new theses. That is what everythinker 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 ofserfdom, Lenin wrote The Workers Party and the Peasantry, which begins byrecalling 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 thereformthe concessions made to the landlords at the peasants expensepre-served forms of dependence that were more servile than capitalist. It is here thatLenin comes back to the notion of aziatchina. The phase shift of 1898 that wenoted earlier between his analysis of the Russian economy (how and whencewas Russian capitalism developing?) and his orthodox Marxist language (capi-talism everywhere replaces older forms of production), however, was resolved in1901 by a change in his social diagnosis: our peasants are suffering not onlyandnot so much from oppression by capital as from oppression by the landlords andthe survivals of serfdom. Ruthless struggle against these shackles, which immea-surably worsen the condition of the peasantry and tie it hand and foot, is notonly possible but even necessary in the interest of thecountrys entire social de-velopment; for the hopeless poverty, ignorance, lack of rights, and degradation,from which the peasants suffer, layan imprint of aziatchina upon the entire socialsystem 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.27Lenin was weighing narrowly proletarian interests against those ofsociety as a whole (4: 332), and his recourse to traditional Russian concepts wasnow in harmony with his acknowledgment of a specific type of capitalist tran-sition that differed from Marxs model. He echoed Pavel Akselrods warningagainst primitive thinkingthat to explain all misfortunes of the Russian

people through quotations from DasKapitalwas baseless.28

Lenin therefore reversed his political priorities. At the end of 1899, he hadwritten: Two basic forms of the class struggle are today intertwined in theRussian countryside: (1) the struggle of the peasantry against the privilegedlanded proprietors and against the remnants of serfdom; (2) the struggle of theemergent rural proletariat against the rural bourgeoisie. For Social Democratsthe 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 institutionsthat most resemble European institutions (4: 393).28 P. B. Akselrod, Po povodu novogo narodnogo bedstviia, Rabotnik, no. 56 (1898): 176.

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By FebruaryMarch 1901, however, he was writing: We have seen that inthe 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 classas a whole. The first antagonism is developing and becoming more acute; thesecond is already largelybehind us. And yet, despite this, it is the second an-tagonism that has the most vital and most practical significance for the RussianSocial Democrats at the present time (4: 432).

Let us identify what changed. At the end of 1899, there had been classstruggle (klassovaia borba) 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 andwas replaced by antagonism (protivopolozhnost ). It is hard to imagine thatLenin would replace the time-honored formula class struggle with class an-tagonism and still mean the same thing. This was a conceptual retreatfrom theorthodox language. Then came a total reversal of priorities. At the end of 1899,the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie had mattered more than thatof the peasantry against the landlords and the survivals of serfdom. In 1901, theantagonism between peasants and landlords mattered more than that betweenthe workers and the entrepreneurs.

It is therefore difficult to accept that Lenins world-view [was] fully formedin 1894 (116) and there was nothing new on the conceptual level between late1899 and late 1901 (157). How are these changes connected with WITBD?Lenin Rediscovereddoes not raise this question because it refuses to broach theagrarian question. The exclusion of Lenins economic writings leaves his eco-nomic and social diagnosis of Russia off the scene, yet that is precisely what gavesignificance to the political and organizational propositions of WITBD. It was,after all, because he was convinced that Russias entire economic, social, andpolitical structure bore the mark of aziatchinathat Lenin conceived a politicalproject 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.29His new economicviews corresponded to his new conception of politics as well as of the party.Without aziatchinaor his new vision of the economy, he would not have arrivedat 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 FebruaryMarchand 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 inturn as the outline of WITBD (5: 9). Thus, the outline of the agrarian program was followedby the outline of the party. Next, the writing of WITBDcoincided with the preparation of thefirst part of Agrarnyi vopros i kritiki Marksa ( JuneSeptember 1901) and was immediatelyfollowed byAgrarnaia programma russkoi sotsial -demokratii.

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Lenin Questions the Spontaneity of Russian CapitalismLenin Rediscoveredand 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.30Yet toLenin, that sort of spontaneity was secondary. Subjective spontaneitythe kindexperienced by actorswas determined by the spontaneity of Russias capital-ist development. This structural spontaneity, not that of the workers, is whatposed a serious problem for him. Optimism and pessimism had nothing to dowith it.31

In 1901, Lenin thought that capitalism in Russia carried a deep and lastingimprint from the countrys prior history. The enormous economic, social, andcultural deficit (1: 262) bequeathed by Old Russia was something he no lon-ger imagined, as in 1895, in terms of a generalized backwardness that wouldinevitably be overcome in time by a capitalism that was already triumphant.Instead, by 1901, eliminating the direct survivals of serfdom was indispensablefor capitalism to develop in a way that ensured a bourgeois societywhere theproletariat could pursue the goal of socialism. True, Russian capitalism on itsown could develop spontaneously [stikhiino], but only along its own peculiarroad 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 spontaneousdevelopment of Russiancapital-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.32As Lenin explained, the remnants [of serfdom] barbarizethe process of devel-opment (6: 217, emphasis mine). Henceforth, attacking the political adversary

30 On the translation of stikhiinost/niiinto English, see Lenin Rediscovered, 61828.31 In discussing the attitude of Lenin and other Social Democrats toward the workers, it seemsto me that terms like optimistic, skeptical (12021, 349, 351, 35355, 359, 366, etc.), oreven over-optimistic (649)even if they were used by the actors themselves (503)do littleto 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 degradingliving conditons, which virtually turn the peasants into barbariansall this is not an exceptionbut the rule in the Russian countryside, and in the final analysis this is all a direct survival ofserfdom (6: 311; emphasis mine). For several months, Lenin had been returning regularly tothis image by associating the signifiers Asiatic-barbarianand cruel forms (5: 323) with Russiascapitalist accumulation. Thus, the surviving vestiges condition theAsiatic-barbarianmanner in

which the millions-strong peasantry grows extinct and keep the entire people ignorant, deprivedof rights, and oppressed (Leninskii sbornik, 2 [Moscow: Institut TsK pri VKP, 1924], 39, also4546, 51). This formulation is almost identical to the 1901 formulation on aziatchina.

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was no longer enough, for aziatchinawas built into the economic foundationitself.33

Russias structural specificity lay in its tangle of production sites where

servile and capitalist traits coexisted as a consequence of the interminglingof seigniorial and peasant lands resulting from the 1861 reform (6: 328). Toeliminate what remained of the old regime in Russias agrarian system, the onlysimple 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 upspontaneously eliminating the remaining survivals. Why, then, condemn itsspontaneity? Why should it be a fatal mistake (4: 435) for Russian SocialDemocracy not to make use of the workers movement to push the peasantryinto ensuring the fulfillment of the peasant demands of 1861? Why should cor-recting those outrageous injustices (4: 434) of 40 years earlier be socialismssalvation? Because Russias spontaneoustransition had the peculiarity that capi-talist development was not creating a bourgeois society. The Social Democratshad to advocate subjective intervention into objective spontaneity becausethe latter directly retardssocial development and the class struggle (6: 334).Aziatchinawas thus preventing socioeconomic strata from turning into classesand 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 thepeasantry as a class that provides fighters against the autocracy and against thesurvivals of serfdom is by now played out in the West, but not yet in Russia. Inthe West the industrial proletariat has long since become completely alienatedfrom the countryside [whereas] in Russiahere Lenin cites Akselrod the industrial proletariat, both by its composition and by the conditions of itsexistence, is to a very great extent still connected with the countryside (4: 227,Proekt Programmy nashei partii, late 1899). On the page from which Leninquotes in this passage, Akselrod attacks abstract Marxists who have crossedoff of their list of real factors determining the Russian proletariats present-dayhistorical position those elements of Russian life that create a reactionary na-

tional and historical atmospherethat suffocatesthe Russian people, and with itthe working class. The result has been an abstract doctrine that explains thehistorical inevitability of capitalist progress.34

The reflection on the peasantrys revolutionary capabilities occurred withinthis wider reflection on the cost of a historical spontaneity that threatened tocontinue suffocating the workers for a long time. Spontaneity became a problemfor Lenin once he began asking the traditional questions and sharing the fears ar-ticulated earlier by Akselrod: Russia continues to lack the main prerequisite for33 Direct survivals of the corve system are maintained, not by any special law but by theactually existing land relationships (6: 326).34 P. B. Akselrod, K voprosu o sovremennykh zadachakh i taktike russkikh sotsial-demokratov(Geneva, 1898), 11, emphasis mine.

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a political struggle against the bourgeoisiethere are no politically ruling classes;instead, there is the tsar and his bureaucrats.35By asserting that not even thedominant groups were classes, Akselrod was questioning the very existence of

politically established classes and of a class society, and this after he had argueda few pages earlier: Insofar as populism was revolutionarythat is, as it stoodup against the estates-and-bureaucracy regime [protiv soslovno-biurokraticheskogogosudarstva] and the barbaric forms of exploitation and oppression of the popularmasses that it upheldto that extent it was bound to become, with the appropriatemodifications, 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 thatbourgeois society(as opposed to the economy)that is, a society of classeswasconstituting itself too slowly or indeed not at all. Lenin Rediscovered notwith-standing, neither Akselrod nor the Lenin of late 1899 had the slightest doubtabout their ideological ties to populism. But this connection was not based, asthe textbook interpretation imagines, on a political voluntarism out of touchwith reality. The link established itself at the point where Lenin recognized aproblem, the non-existence of bourgeois society, that everyone knew was theintellectual property of the populists.

Lenin Rediscovereddispossesses Lenin of his own logic also when it seeksto 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 stikhiinostappears in passages that are decisive for Lenins conception ofRussian reality? In other passages he uses the equivalent formulation naturalpath (estestvennyi put). Lenin Rediscoveredasserts that the reason that Leninused stikhiinostso much in WITBDis not because of any crise de foior deepmalaise, but simply because Boris Krichevskii used the word at length in an at-tack on Iskrain September 1901 (555). Later he adds that Lenin only used thislanguagethat is, consciousness and spontaneityfor ad hoc reasons andmostly in Chapter II of WITBD, not before or after. The insistence that Leninsviews on stikhiinostare the keys to his whole outlook virtually guarantees anextremely impoverished textual base (616). To imagine Lenin as a prisoner of

Krichevskiis language is odd. Lenin used the term in relation to the workersstruggle (4: 188, late 1899) well before Krichevskiis attack in 1901 and he hadalready applied the phrase natural path to capitalism (4: 234, late 1899).Lastly, inAgrarnaia programma russkoi sotsial-demokratii, the term stikhiinostiskey 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 ina spontaneous objectivehistorical 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.

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a bourgeois social order. These doubts about objectivespontaneity led Lenin toharbor doubts about subjectivespontaneity as well. In sum, failure to oppose thespontaneity of Russian capitalism would be fatal for the Social Democrats

because this very spontaneity was threatening to prevent social groups fromturning into social classes, which in turn would make the class struggle impos-sible. In other words, aziatchinawould not spontaneouslychange into a modernsociety 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 attainingclass consciousness. When WITBDstates that class consciousness must be in-troduced from without, the book argues, Lenin means that Social-Democraticawareness could not have existed among a specific set of workers at some timein the past, that is, during the strikes of the mid-1890s; it was therefore nota general proposition about workers as such, everywhere, at all times (648).When Lenin adds that such consciousness could have been brought in onlyfrom outside, it is only because socialism and the worker movement are bothoriginally exterior to each other and have to be brought to each other. This wasalready 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, whydid Lenin call Kautsky to the rescue? Although Lenin asserted in 1902 thatclass consciousness could be brought to the workers of 189596 only fromoutside, Lenin Rediscovereddoes not explain why he had said just the oppo-site earlier in the mid-1890s. The book cannotexplain this because, like thetextbook interpretation, it assumes that for Lenin it was all one and the sameSocial-Democratic awareness, whether it was consciousness as he conceived itin the specific historical situation of 189596 or the consciousness to which hewas referring in 1902. In fact, consciousness in 189596 and consciousness in1902 were historically different for Lenin.

Let us examine this difference.

According to the reconstruction, although speculative (636) offered byLenin Rediscovered, Lenin had already written at least a draft of his book when heread, in a just-released text by Kautsky, the following lines that he quotes: Thecarrier of science is not the proletariat but the bourgeois intelligentsia(Kautskysemphasis): modern socialism emerges in the heads of individual members ofthis stratum and then is communicated by them to proletarians who stand outdue to their mental development, who in turn bring it into the class struggleof the proletariat where conditions allow. In this way, socialist awarenessto Lenin, soznanieis something brought into the class struggle of the pro-

letariat from without (von aussen Hineingetragenes), and not something thatemerges from the class struggle in stikhiinyifashion (urwchsig) (70910).

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The sentences over which so much ink has been spilled appear a few pagesearlier. They followed Lenins comments on the strikes of the 1890s, which hecharacterized as a purely stikhiinyimovement: We stated that there could not

have beena Social-Democratic awareness [at that time] among the workers. Itcould have been brought in only from outside. The history of all countries bearswitness that exclusively with its own forces the worker class is in a conditionto work out only a tred-iunionistawareness, that is, a conviction of the need tounite 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 workersand so on. The doctrine of socialism grew out of those philosophic, historical,and economic theories that were worked out by the educated representatives ofthe propertied class, the intelligentsia. The founders of modern scientific social-ism, Marx and Engels, belonged themselves, according to their social origin, tothe bourgeois intelligentsia (702).

The linguisticresemblance between these texts is obvious. Lenin Rediscoveredargues that due entirely to the Kautsky passage, Lenin got interested in the themeof who did or did not work out ideological doctrines . Lenins interest in thistopic 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 leadsto the conclusion: what seems to the textbook interpretation as the very heartof WITBDcould be erased from the book without trace by snipping a coupleof paragraphs (646). The problem with such an erasure is that eliminatingthis paragraph would mean deleting an important non-coincidence in Leninswritings, for this paragraph follows the description of the mid-1890s strikes as astrike movement that one must call stikhiinyibefore anything else (701). Yetin the mid-1890s, Lenin had written that their objective situation naturally ledthe 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 cultureand the only one utterly incapable of compromise (1: 311, 359). At the time, theyoung Ulianov confused the economic triumph of capital with the advent ofbourgeois society, because he reduced the social to the economic (1: 159). Sinceall economic exploitation now was capitalist, the workers faced only a single classcontradiction (1: 457). As for the other social conflicts, all of them internal to thebourgeoisie, including the exploitation of the peasantry, we Marxists shall remainspectators (1: 374). The consciousness of 1896 was thus about antagonism to-ward manufacturers and did not have to be brought in (2: 102, 104).

WITBDis testimony to a total reversal, with Lenin writing that these strikes,a purely stikhiinyimovement expressed no more than the embryo of a class

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struggle. This was a tred-unionist struggle but not yet a Social-Democraticone, and it testified to the antagonism between workers and owners, but theredid not exist among these workersnor could it have existed at that timean

awareness of the irreconcilable opposition of their interests to the entire politicaland social order, in other words, a Social-Democratic awareness (7012, em-phasis mine). According to WITBD, the awareness of the worker class is notgenuine political awareness if the workers are not taught to respond to eachandeveryoccurrence of abuse of power and oppression, violence and malfeasance,no matter which classis affected. The awareness of the worker masses cannotbe a genuine class awareness if the workers do not learn to observe eachofthe other social classes in allthe manifestations of their intellectual, moral, andpolitical life (737, Lenins emphasis). Elsewhere he writes, It is not enoughto explain the political oppression of the workers (just as it is not enough toexplainto them the opposition between their interests and that of the owners).What is necessary is to agitate in relation to each concrete manifestation ofpolitical and economic oppression, but since thisoppression falls on the mostvarious classes of society surely it is obvious that we will not carry out ourtaskof developing political awareness of the workers, if we do not take uponourselves the organization of an all-sided indictmentof the autocracy? (726,Lenins emphasis).

In 1902, Lenin thus described an understanding of the antagonism with thebourgeoisie (the awareness of 1896) as trade-unionism, the embryo of a classstruggle. What kind of awareness did the workers (and the Social Democrats!)need in 1902? An awareness of the irreconcilable opposition of their intereststo the entire political and social order. This orderwas not the bourgeois orderitwas the order of aziatchina, of barbarized capitalism, where there was no so-ciopolitical identification of classes, where the national atmosphere suffocatedthe 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 typesof consciousness. For Kautsky, it was the awareness of a proletariat that be-longed to a bourgeois society. For Lenin in 1902, the Russian proletariat wastoo closely connected with aziatchinato be part of bourgeois society(meaningthe entire matrix of social relations, not merely the political realm to whichLenin Rediscoveredrefers when it speaks of Russian absolutism or Germanyssemi-absolutism).37The difference between these consciousnesses is of crucial

37 But why, then, does Lenin quote Kautsky? Lenin Rediscoveredis right that the entire Kautskypassage 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 objectivespontaneous element and the subjective factor was a topic of polemics among socialists; in these

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importance, not because that of 1902 was of any greater complexity than thatof 1896 (or than the version described by Kautsky), but because they took forgranted two different historical realities and were therefore supposed to develop

from two different places. In 189496, that place was the exploitation of theworking class. In 19012, the place was both prior and external to class, forthe place was the political. It wasprior,because before the workers could haveinterests as a class in bourgeois society, they had to destroy what was preventingthat society from emerging in the first place. They thus had to destroy whatprevented them from constituting themselves as a class. The place was also ex-ternal,because what needed to be destroyed was not the enemy inthe workersclass struggle but the enemy of anyclass struggle at allthat is, the vestiges ofserfdom (6: 311). This is why, were we to delete from WITBDthe passage onfrom without as proposed in Lenin Rediscovered, not only would we not gainclearer insightwe would in fact have far more difficulty understanding howthe political is prior and external to class, that is, nothing more or less than thestatus and mission of the party that Lenin was proposing.

Was Lenin a Praktikof No Theoretical Originality?Lenin Rediscoveredis right to point out that in its time, one key to the successof WITBDwas that the praktiki recognized themselves in the pamphlet andstudied it intently for its insight on practical questions. To study how WITBDwas received in the underground, Lenin Rediscoveredrelies on accounts by theLenin loyalists of 19046 (436). The excerpts that the book reproduces bearexclusively on the practical aspects of WITBDs message. Yet we should dis-tinguish between how a book is received and what its internal logic is. Theimportance accorded by Lenin Rediscoveredto the practical aspect diminishes aquestion that was fundamental to Lenin: what kind of action was effective inRussia? It was not simply, as one might think from reading Lenin Rediscovered,a matter of preventing activists from being arrested and the organization frombeing dismantled too quickly, although these were serious issues. The questionthat 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, andWITBD in particular, was receivedthat any activist, from Moscow to Paristo Buenos Aires, learned at the moment of joining the party: organizationalpractice is driven by theoretical choices, because an organizations characteris determined by its mission On the first page of chapter 4 of WITBD, whichbrings these two aspects together, we read: The character of the organizationof 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 argumentfrom authority to win the support of thepraktiki.

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tivity of that institution (763). Lenin Rediscovered inverts this relationship.38This is something like an ide fixe than runs through the whole book, fromthe 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 asapraktik(558), with comments on professional revolutionaries in between (461,463). This reduction to the empirical follows logically from Lenin Rediscoveredsgeneral thesisthat Lenins work, and the party itself, were merely an attemptto adapt as faithfully as possible the model of the SPD.

The interpretation of the centrality of the struggle for democratization andpolitical 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 democratizationwould make a successful struggle for the worker cause possible (132); thepractical benefits to the workers movement were articulated by Lenin him-self (141). That these benefits would be useful to the revolutionary struggle isobvious, but must we therefore reduce the achievement of political freedomto a mere utilitarian calculation? (470). At the same time, Lenin is presented asa passionate advocate of political freedom as such (197), and the author evenconfides that I was taken aback by his obsessive insistence on the virtues ofpolitical freedom (206). (Alas, Lenin Rediscovereddoes not tell us when Leningave other political and social actors the benefit of this obsessive insistence.)

Lenin was no unconditional partisan of freedom as such, but neither was hisapproach driven merely by short-term utilitarian considerations. The practicalbenefits were of secondary importance. Before there could even be any suc-cessful struggle, the struggle itself first had to become a classstruggle, whichin turn presupposed that the worker movementbecame a working classand thatclass antagonismturned into class strugglethat is, there needed to be an end tostagnation and Asiatic barbarism. Democratization was thus no mere prelimi-nary that would allow the proletariat to organize itself better; rather, it meanttransforming 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 Russias19th century and a man who moved beyond it.

These doubts about the spontaneity of capitalism in Russia, together withthe idea of bringing an anti-aziatchinaconsciousness into the workers move-ment, undergirded an action plan of historical dimensions. The idea was to havethe 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 thesubjectivethat is, the politicalthat pitted Lenin against the authors of theJoint Letteris de-cribed as empirical rather than theoretical . The theoretical debate about material elementsis simply a reflection of this empirical dispute, an empirical clash (349). In fact, this debate

was eminently theoretical.

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push the peasants to launch a revolution that would destroy all the older formsof production and social relations. In other words, universalize the political torectify 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 ofthe re-evaluation of the political that goes on todayas a weapon of the weakagainst certain forms of globalization in the worldto appreciate how much therole that Lenin assigned to the political underlay a debate that was eminentlytheoretical.

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 practicaltasks: capitalisms elimination of serfdom in the countryside has so confusedand complicated social and economic relationships as to make it necessary toponder deeply over the solution to the immediate practical questions asimple solution cannot be invented (6: 314). The challenge was to think of adifferent, non-spontaneous path for the transition from what remained of serf-dom to capitalismto think about what separated Russia from the programmaticframework of European Social Democracy, rediscover the French Revolutionand 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 returnof the otrezki(the plots of peasant land confiscated in 1861 and given to thelandlords); Lenin regarded these as the specific source of the reproduction ofservile relationships because they were situated in a way that ensured, amongother things, the preservation of the landlords patriarchal authority over thepeasants. Restoring the otrezkiwas supposed to disentangle servile from capi-talist relations and leave in place only the coercive mechanisms of capitalisteconomics. This would ensure that the class struggle unfolded without encum-brance. He hoped by the same movement to create a revolutionary situation,since the otrezkicould be restored only by force (6: 316). It was here (6: 317)

that Lenin inserted his note on the radical difference with Germany and arguedagainst 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 differentpath of development, one founded on purely bourgeois social relations of pro-duction, required a revolutionary action by the peasantry that was conceivableonly on condition of supporting small-scale private property and destroying thelarge 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 customaryaustere political style and instead wrote:

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we must assist the peasants and urge them to destroy all remnants of serf-dom as completely as possible. This meets with general approval, doesit not? Well then, if you do agree to follow this path, make an effort toproceed along it independently; do not make it necessary to drag you;

do not let the unusual appearance of this path frighten you, do not beput 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 theabsence of paths: these complaints will be futile whining, for you shouldhave known in advance that you would be moving, not along a highwaythat has been graded and leveled by all the forces of social progress, but alongtrails 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, andeasy way outnever, that is, so long as they continue to exist, these out-of-the-way places and back alleys that are disappearing but disappearingexcruciatingly slowly. (6: 32526, emphasis mine)

What to do about this excruciating slowness? What this image-filleddescription (which greatly irritated Plekhanov) and this apparent conceptualpoverty concealed was in fact the theoretical innovation that would lie at theheart of Bolshevism: to employ political action to prompt an alternative bourgeoisdevelopmentthat would make it possible, along the way, to pursue the goal ofsocialism.39Who, however, stood at enough of a remove fromaziatchinato be

the subject of this kind of political action?

The PartyAccording to Lenin Rediscovered, the party model intended by Lenin did notchange during those years. In reality, however, the model evolved along withLenins interpretation of both Russian capitalism and its effects on the social ac-tors. In 1896, unchanged from 1894, the partys mission was to helpthe work-ing class, since the exploitation of the workers inevitablyled 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 amore interventionist conception of the party: instead ofpomoch[helping] andsodeistvovat [assisting], we now read about rukovodit[leading] the proletariatsclass struggle and organizovat [organizing] this struggle (2: 446). But the partyas such was not yet constituted as a theoretical problem, and the working classwas external to autocracy and aziatchina(2: 45356). Lenin still saw the currentdifficulties as practical in nature and suggested that others follow the exampleof 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.

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

In 1899, Lenin startedto 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 pageswhere he outlines the partys new mission open with an oath of allegiance toMarx, followed by a paean to Marxisms creative powers that looks startlinglylike an anticipatory self-justification against the criticism he was expecting.40What he says is, of course, we are still Marxists, but being in Russia allows usand, more important, compelsus to debate certain theoretical questions. Lenincould no longer hide that he was preparing something new: The history ofsocialism and democracy in Western Europe, the history of the Russian revolu-tionary movement, the experience of our labor movementsuch is the materialwe must master to elaborate a purposeful organization and tactics for our party.The analysis of this material must, however, be done independently, since thereare no ready-made models to be found anywhere. On the one hand, the Russianlabor movement exists under conditions that are quite different from those ofWestern Europe. It would be most dangerous to have any illusions on this score.On the other hand, Russian Social Democracy differs very substantially fromearlier revolutionary parties in Russia, so that the need to learn revolutionarytechnique and secret organization from the old Russian masters in no wayrelieves 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 SocialDemocracy, he was also distancing himself from Russian tradition and sug-gesting that he would preserve only its practical insights, whereas in reality atthat very moment he was taking up problems that the anti-tsarist movementhad articulated well before Marxisms arrival in Russia. Until then, Lenin hadbeen operating in what I would call stage two (in which he argued that aconscious workers movement was in existence) and acted as though stageone (where the class constituted itself politically) as such did not represent a

problem. Akselrod, also a Marxist but steeped in the populist past, nurturedthe 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 Marxstheory as something completed and inviolable; on the contrary, we are convinced that it has onlylaid the foundation stone for the science that socialists mustdevelop in all directions if they wishto keep pace with life. We think that an independent elaboration of Marxs theory is especiallyessential for Russian socialists, for this theory provides only generalguidingprinciples, which, inparticularare applied in England differently from France and in Germany differently fromRussia. We will therefore gladly afford space in our paper for articles on theoretical questionsand invite all comrades openly to discuss controversial points (4: 182, 184, late 1899, Leninsemphasis).

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movement. That assistance consisted in the triumph of the values of bourgeoiscivilization. Lenin shared Aksel rods concern but gave his own answerthat toprovide 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 everystruggle between workers and bosses is always political. It is political only if itis a class struggle. The Social Democrats task was therefore to transform theworkers spontaneous struggle into a struggle by the whole class, a struggleby a specific politicalparty (4: 188, Lenins emphasis). The concern here is towiden 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. Beforespontaneity 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 toparty. It is Akselrods problemstage one, the stage Lenin had previouslythought lay in the past. The fact that he was now looking to the party suggeststhat the doubts affecting his confidence in economic spontaneity had spreadto the certainty he had earlier felt about the spontaneous process by whichthe working class, and Russias social classes in general, constituted themselves.Henceforth, in Russia the party preceded the class struggle. From a party thathelpedthe class struggle to a party without which that struggle could not takeplace: such was one path of Vladimir Ulianovs thinking between 1895 and1899.

In December 1900, he writes that without the party, the labor movementbecomes petty and inevitably becomes bourgeois. In the same text, SocialDemocracy is charged with bringing socialist ideas and political awareness to themass of the proletariat and the spontaneous workers movement. Withoutthe party, the proletariat is incapable of rising to the level of conscious classstruggle; 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 partyprecede the class struggle, but it was also constitutive of the working class.

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

In late 1899, he was emphasizing the disadvantages of capitalisms naturalpath as well as Russias peculiarities (4: 234, 220); his ideas aimed to destroypre-capitalist survivals and give the class struggle in the countryside a more openand conscious character (4: 236). By FebruaryMarch 1901, it was apparent

that allof Russia bore the mark of aziatchina, and the mission was to carry theclass struggle into the countryside(4: 432). At the end of 1899, a class struggle

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that was already underway needed to be made more conscious. In 1901, thisstruggle had to be introduced in the first place. This would be the outcomeof 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, therebyopening up an opportunity for the proletariat to constitute itself as a class. Bytransforming 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 theworking classit was the only group that was free from aziatchina. A new logicnow became possible: if the party took charge of eliminating aziatchina,andthis 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 WITBDwas di-rectly inspired (563) by Martynov, who, both in September 1901 and in hispolemic with Iskra, used formulas such as what we need to do (chto nuzhnodelat) and how we must act (kak nuzhno deistvovat). It was again Martynovwho 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 howis it to be done ? Martynov accused Iskraof giving the wrong answer to thequestion What is to be done? that Chernyshevskii had posed. Lenin then sup-posedly decided not to let Martynov monopolize Chernyshevskiis memory, andto pay a little homage (564) to the latter by borrowing his title. However, hischoice does not indicate anything specifically Chernyshevskian about Leninsargument (562). As before with Krichevskii, Lenin Rediscovered tells us thatLenin let his adversaries dictate to him the choice of his political language.

This is a curious interpretation. The question what is to be done? hadlong featured in every discussion.41Moreover, the texts by Martynov that are

quoted in Lenin Rediscovered appeared afterLenins Where to Begin (May1901), which begins with the sentence: The question what is to be done [chtodelat] has in recent years placed itself [vydvigaetsia] before Russian SocialDemocrats with particular force (5: 5). In itself the origin of the title, which isdiscussed on pages 56164, does not merit all this attention. What is difficultto understand, however, is why Lenin Rediscovered,which offers no analysis ofChernyshevskiis thought or even a sketchy comparison of the two WITBDs,

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

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still takes such pains to reaffirm something that was first imposed by Stalinisthistoriography 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 askedchto delat?after concluding that the entire Russian social fabric was infected withaziatstvo. He then placed his bets on the special man (Rakhmetov, the proto-type of the professional revolutionary) to confront the autocracy. There is thus acausal link between the reign of aziatstvoand the invention of the special man.Aziatstvohad 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 allinhabitants of the Kingdom of Darkness [temnoetsarstvo] to individual servilesubordination. To find a way out, none, positively none of the usual remedieswas effective, there is no natural path leading to change.43The anti-despoticproject could therefore not base itself on a particular social stratum. Instead, itsbearers could only be those who had escaped individually from the collective li-ability of samodurstvo. As a devoted reader of Feuerbach, Chernyshevskii workedout what we might call an anthropology of revolution, or WITBD1. Lenin, inturn, concluded that aziatchinaruled 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 individualswho had detached themselves from aziatchinathrough their awareness and un-derstanding of reality. From the first issue of Iskra(December 1900), he bet ona party that will attract all that is vital and honest in Russia (4: 377). This wasWITBD 2the anthropology of the revolution was back.

On the basis of a parallel reading of the two WITBDs, I would like to pointout just one divergence. The new people fear (he made them feel somewhatfrightened) the special man, Rakhmetov (he is a different breed), yet he isnecessary. 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 wouldsuffocate without a private life. The complexity of Rakhmetovs character is antic-

ipated by other works where Chernyshevskii and Dobroliubov warned about thedanger of a revolution creating a new despotism.44It would be necessary to ensurethat Rakhmetov remain a mere instrument of the new people.45It seems thatLenin 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 wasprohibited 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:Izdatelstvo Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1975), 201, 22124, 265, 22930.

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with him, the latter is subsumed under the former. But then, what kind of societydid he have in mind? What place would it leave for private life? Lenin did notembrace Chernyshevskiis mistrust of Rakhmetov. This was probably the price of

a life of action, something that Chernyshevskii had rejected and from which heeven urged the young to abstain.46So Rakhmetov disappearedfor the time be-ing, there was nothing to be done in Russia, as his mission was to come togetherwith 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 classesof the population. This, in myopinion, is the heart of the structure described in WITBD: one cannot answerthe question what is to be done to bring political knowledge to the workers? withthe response that the majority ofpraktikiare contented with,48namely go to theworkers. In order to bring the workerspolitical knowledge, the Social-Democratsmustgo to all classesof the population (745, Lenins emphasis; see also 790).

Since going to the workers was no longer enough, a new organization hadto be created that could reach all classes. The party had a twofold function inthis process: (a) to organize the population in the struggle against the autoc-racy, so that society, once politically awakened by the workers movement underparty leadership, would break with the inertia of aziatchina; (b) to bring theworkers movement into the new political life where it would acquire its classconsciousness (74041, 737). This dual function shaped the partys place insociety: we need our people to be everywhere, in all social strata, thesepeople are necessary, not only for propaganda and agitation, but even more fororganization (752). It goes without saying that our people continued to beSocial-Democrats (755): the party represents the interests of one class only(6: 310), yet simultaneously organizes all classes, and actively interven[es] inevery liberal issue while defining [its]own, Social Democratic, attitude to thatissue (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 popu

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