Lenin: a biography

Robert Service, Lenin: a biography. Macmillan, 2000

Unlike Orlando Figes, Robert Service notices Lenin stating in 1920: “We’ve always emphasised that a thing such a socialist revolution in a single country can’t be completed”. “Lenin’s zeal for spreading the October Revolution was undiminished… The prospects for an isolated Russia were pathetic”.

Service also knows - from his own unsympathetic but far from worthless book, The Bolshevik Party In Revolution, 1917-1923 (Palgrave Macmillan, 1979) - that “the Bolshevik party was not [a] well-oiled machine of command… Organisationally the party was as anarchic as any other contemporary political party. It was also equally subject to the vagaries of the post and telegraph services…”

He gives, for example, a much more plausible account of Lenin in the July days of 1917 than does Figes.

Service: “Out on to the balcony he went, and told the crowd to stay calm. He asserted that the anti-governmental demonstration should above all be peaceful. This did not go down well… But his judgement held sway…”

Figes: “When [Lenin] was finally persuaded to make an appearance on the balcony, [he] gave an ambiguous speech, lasting no more than a few seconds… He did not even make it clear if he wanted the crowd to continue the demonstration… Perhaps Lenin lost his nerve…”

Service rejects Figes’s ludicrous claim that when Lenin was expelled from Kazan University in 1887 because of a small student demonstration, “this effectively ended Lenin’s chance of making a successful career for himself within the existing social order, and it is reasonable to suppose that much of his hatred for that order stemmed for this experience of rejection”. (Actually, Lenin secured permission to complete his legal studies as an external student, qualified, and practised law, before he became an active revolutionary. But, in any case, the idea that someone devotes their whole life to overthrowing the state just because of a student mishap…)

Service gives an account of What Is To Be Done? which, though flimsy and uncomprehending, at least steers away from the myth that the pamphlet is a blueprint for authoritarian rule.

Service’s Lenin is, in short, less of a caricature demon than Figes’s. In some respects his book gives genuine information.

We learn, for example, that Lenin’s health was collapsing as early as early 1920 - “the headaches, the insomnia and the heart attacks continued to give him trouble”.

“By mid-1921… his health, which had never been wonderful, was in drastic decline. He could no longer put in a full day’s work. The chronic headaches and insomnia had got worse, and he had suffered a series of ’small’ heart attacks… he was seriously ill”.

When we analyse the Bolsheviks’ deeds and misdeeds in 1921 - as we should do, and as anti-Bolsheviks often do with immense sneering at the Bolsheviks’ supposed incomprehension of the democratic principle that the critics can champion so well from their armchairs - we should bear in mind that this was a government not only beset by economic collapse, famine, and mass peasant rebellion, but also run by people exhausted and with their nerves mangled by three years of strain such as we cannot imagine.

It was not just that Lenin was desperately ill long before his stroke in May 1922. Trotsky was much diminished in vitality, and invalid much of the time, from the end of the civil war to about 1926. Other leading Bolsheviks must have felt the same strain.

But Service never looks at the Bolsheviks’ actions in the civil war and 1921 as those of revolutionaries desperately trying to maintain their revolutionary bridgehead until the workers in the West can make their own revolutions; revolutionaries concerned that if they slacken, weaken, and fall, then the result will be not only the massacre of themselves and vast numbers of class-conscious workers in the former Tsarist Empire, but the collapse and disintegration of the revolutionary possibilities brewing in the West.

His method is to work backwards from every ill-tempered and exasperated comment made by Lenin in times of extremity, and the shortage of recorded comments by Lenin that he regretted the brutalities of the civil war (whom, one wonders, should Lenin have asked to record such comments in order to convince Service eighty years later that he “really cared”?). From those things, Service works backwards to a general claim that “the Leninists” believed that they had “irrefutable knowledge of the world - past, present and future” and therefore could and should use any methods to impose their ideas on the population. “Lenin eliminated concern for ethics”.

Service completes the chain with Vodovozov’s story about Lenin’s supposed welcome for the famine of 1891 (which I’ve discussed in my notes on Figes’s book).

Service’s case in brief, is that Lenin was a tense, imperious, highly-strung, short-tempered, self-confident, arrogant character, and to deduce his alleged amoral, authoritarian politics directly from that.

To be sure, all accounts other than Stalinist hagiography suggest that Lenin was anything but an easy-going character.

But Service seems to be brainwashed by the prevailing culture which would have us consider all political choices in function of the supposed personal qualities of Gordon Brown, David Cameron, and the rest of them. He seems unable to understand that politics have autonomy from personality. The leadership of a revolutionary party cannot be exercised effectively by anyone other than people with strong and forceful, even peremptory characters; but to condemn it on those grounds is no more than to sit on the sidelines of history wringing one’s hands and exclaiming: “Oh, if only history were made by nice, gentle, easy-going people!”