Lenin in His Kremlin Study
[-2] ~ [-1]
__TITLE__
Lenin and Books
__TEXTFILE_BORN__ 2007-11-13T13:46:22-0800
__TRANSMARKUP__ "Y. Sverdlov"
PROGRESS PUBLISHERS MOSCOW
[1]Translated from the Russian ~
Designed by M. Shevtsov
Compiled by A. Z. Okorokov, Cand. Sc. (Hist.)
«J1EHHH H KHHTA* Ha tmeAuucKOM n3t>iKe
__COPYRIGHT__ First printing 1971Man has worshipped books from time immemorial---``the greatest wonders of all the wonders created by mankind"---to use Gorky's true words.
Lenin said that books were a tremendous force. The catalogue of Lenin's private library in the Kremlin lists more than 8,400 titles. And these undoubtedly represent but a small fraction of the total number of books and other publications that interested Lenin in the course of his life.
Lenin's writings include many documents of the greatest interest relating to books-articles, letters, critical reviews, surveys of books, speeches, notes, directives, etc. About 900 books, magazines and newspapers with Lenin's marks on them have been collected in the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. These all contain his profound thoughts on the social character of books and the part they play in the life of society, his comments on individual writers, judgements on particular books, advice to book publishers, suggestions on the work of libraries, and so on.
A rich memoir literature has been written about Lenin. Many of his contemporaries have told us of the way Lenin worked with books, what and how he read, what he thought of works of fiction and political and scientific books.
Lenin's own words and the reminiscences of him published in this collection will help the reader to get a better idea of Lenin as author of outstanding works of Marxist thought, research worker, editor, critic and reader.
The materials are grouped under two headings: ``Lenin on Books" and ``Books in Lenin's Life''. Each part is prefaced by a short introductory commentary containing a brief outline of the contents and any necessary explanations.
The translations in this volume are taken from the English edition of V. I. Lenin's Collected Works prepared by Progress Publishers, Moscow, unless otherwise stated.
7 ~ [8] __ALPHA_LVL1__ LENIN ON BOOKS __ALPHA_LVL2__ [introduction.] [9] ~ [10]This part includes articles, speeches, letters, critical reviews and prefaces which give Lenin's ideas on partisanship of literature, what he expected of fiction and of political literature, and what criteria were regarded by him as the most important in determining the social value and significance of books.
Most of the letters are addressed to his relatives and contain requests for books to be sent to him. They show how much books meant to Lenin, and how broad the range of his reading.
The reader will be able to familiarise himself with Lenin's analysis of the ideological and political content of books-of how with changing social conditions books change too, as do the relations between readers and books, and between society, and literature.
There are also a large number of documents containing Lenin's statements on the role of books as vital weapons in the formation of the new man and in the construction of socialist society.
One can see from Lenin's prefaces to books and from his letters to writers, colleagues and publishing organisations that he was anxious to see that good and useful books were placed before the 11 public so that they could contribute to the building of the new life.
A number of items in this part are devoted to an assessment of the creative work of Tolstoi, Herzcn, Chcrnyshevsky and other Russian writers. They arc important in that they bring out the principles that underlay Lenin's approach to literary phenomena in relation to historical progress and to the life and struggles of the people; and they indicate the guidelines that should always be followed when analysing the ideological and political content of this or that book.
Lenin's opinions of books by reactionary authors written from a politically wrong point of view show how principled he was in assessing particular works -and how contemptuous of books devoid of ideas, books that were empty and remote from the life of ordinary people.
Some of the materials show Lenin's wide experience of the biggest libraries of Petersburg, Moscow, Simbirsk, Kazan, Krasnoyarsk, London, Paris, Berlin, Geneva and other cities. The items on libraries and book publication also convey Lenin's concern to make books available to the broad masses.
[12] __ALPHA_LVL2__ PARTY ORGANISATIONThe new conditions for Social-Democratic work in Russia which have arisen since the October revolution^^2^^ have brought the question of party literature to the fore. The distinction between the illegal and the legal press, that melancholy heritage of the epoch of feudal, autocratic Russia, is beginning to disappear. It is not yet dead, by a long way. The hypocritical government of our Prime Minister is still running amuck, so much so that Izvestia Soveta Rabochikh Deputatov^^3^^ is printed ``illegally''; but apart from bringing disgrace on the government, apart from striking further moral blows at it, nothing comes of the stupid attempts to `` prohibit'' that which the government is powerless to thwart.
So long as there was a distinction between the illegal and the legal press, the question of the party and non-party press was decided extremely simply and in an extremely false and abnormal way. The entire illegal press was a party press, being published by organisations and run by groups which in one way or another were linked with groups of practical party workers. The entire legal press was non-party-since parties were banned-but it `` gravitated'' towards one party or another. Unnatural 13 alliances, strange ``bed-fellows'' and false coverdevices were inevitable. The forced reserve of those who wished to express party views merged with the immature thinking or mental cowardice of those who had not risen to these views and who were not, in effect, party people.
An accursed period of Aesopian language, literary bondage, slavish speech, and ideological serfdom! The proletariat has put an end to this foul atmosphere which stifled everything living and fresh in Russia. But so far the proletariat has won only half freedom for Russia.
The revolution is not yet completed. While tsarism is no longer strong enough to defeat the revolution, the revolution is not yet strong enough to defeat tsarism. And we are living in times when everywhere and in everything there operates this unnatural combination of open, forthright, direct and consistent party spirit with an underground, covert, ``diplomatic'' and dodgy ``legality''. This unnatural combination makes itself felt even in our newspaper: for all Mr. Guchkov's witticisms about Social-Democratic tyranny forbidding the publication of moderate liberal-bourgeois newspapers, the fact remains that Proletary,^^1^^* the Central Organ of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, still remains outside the locked doors of autocratic, police-ridden Russia.
Be that as it may, the half-way revolution compels all of us to set to work at once organising the whole thing on new lines. Today literature, even that published ``legally'', can be nine-tenths party literature. It must become party literature. In contradistinction to bourgeois customs, to the profit-making, commercialised bourgeois press, to bourgeois literary careerism and individualism, ``aristocratic anarchism" and drive for profit, the socialist proletariat must put forward the principle of party literature, 14 must develop this principle and put it into practice as fully and completely as possible.
What is this principle of party literature? It is not simply that, for the socialist proletariat, literature cannot be a means of enriching individuals or groups: it cannot, in fact, be an individual undertaking, independent of the common cause of the proletariat. Down with non-partisan writers! Down with literary supermen! Literature must become part of the common cause of the proletariat, ``a cog and a screw" of one single great Social-Democratic mechanism set in motion by the entire politicallyconscious vanguard of the entire working class. Literature must become a component of organised, planned and integrated Social-Democratic Party work.
``All comparisons are lame,'' says a German proverb. So is my comparison of literature with a cog, of a living movement with a mechanism. And I daresay there will ever be hysterical intellectuals to raise a howl about such a comparison, which degrades, deadens, ``bureaucratises'' the free battle of ideas, freedom of criticism, freedom of literary creation, etc., etc. Such outcries, in point of fact, would be nothing more than an expression of bourgeoisintellectual individualism. There is no question that literature is least of all subject to mechanical adjustment or levelling, to the rule of the majority over the minority. There is no question, either, that in this field greater scope must undoubtedly be allowed for personal initiative, individual inclination, thought and fantasy, form and content. All this is undeniable; but all this simply shows that the literary side of the proletarian party cause cannot be mechanically identified with its other sides. This, however, does not in the least refute the proposition, alien and strange to the bourgeoisie and bourgeois democracy, that literature must by all means and 15 necessarily become an element of Social-Democratic Party work, inseparably bound up with the other elements. Newspapers must become the organs of the various party organisations, and their writers must by all means become members of these organisations. Publishing and distributing centres, bookshops and reading-rooms, libraries and similar establishments-must all be under party control. The organised socialist proletariat must keep an eye on all this work, supervise it in its entirety, and, from beginning to end, without any exception, infuse into it the life-stream of the living proletarian cause, thereby cutting the ground from under the old, semi-Oblomov, semi-shopkeeper Russian principle: the writer does the writing, the reader does the reading.
We are not suggesting, of course, that this transformation of literary work, which has been defiled by the Asiatic censorship and the European bourgeoisie, can be accomplished all at once. Far be it from us to advocate any kind of standardised system, or a solution by means of a few decrees. Cut-and-dried schemes are least of all applicable here. What is needed is that the whole of our Party, and the entire politically-conscious SocialDemocratic proletariat throughout Russia, should become aware of this new problem, specify it clearly and everywhere set about solving it. Emerging from the captivity of the feudal censorship, we have no desire to become, and shall not become, prisoners of bourgeois-shopkeeper literary relations. We want to establish, and we shall establish, a free press, free not simply from the police, but also from capital, from careerism, and what is more, free from bourgeois-anarchist individualism.
These last words may sound paradoxical, or an affront to the reader. What! some intellectual, an ardent champion of liberty, may shout. What, you 16 want to impose collective control on such a delicate, individual matter as literary work! You want workmen to decide questions of science, philosophy, or aesthetics by a majority of votes! You deny the absolute freedom of absolutely individual ideological work!
Calm yourselves, gentlemen! First of all, we are discussing party literature and its subordination to party control. Everyone is free to write and say whatever he likes, without any restrictions. But every voluntary association (including a party) is also free to expel members who use the name of the party to advocate anti-party views. Freedom of speech and the press must be complete. But then freedom of association must be complete too. I am bound to accord you, in the name of free speech, the full right to shout, lie and write to your heart's content. But you are bound to grant me, in the name of freedom of association, the right to enter into, or withdraw from, association with people advocating this or that view. The party is a voluntary association, which would inevitably break up, first ideologically and then physically, if it did not cleanse itself of people advocating anti-party views. And to define the border-line between party and anti-party there is the party programme, the party's resolutions on tactics and its rules and, lastly, the entire experience of international Social-Democracy, the voluntary international associations of the proletariat, which has constantly brought into' its parties individual elements and trends not fully consistent, not completely Marxist and not altogether correct and which, on the other hand, has constantly conducted periodical ``cleansings'' of its ranks. So it will be with us too, supporters of bourgeois ``freedom of criticism'', within the Party. We are now becoming a mass party all at once, changing abruptly to an open organisation, and it is inevitable __PRINTERS_P_17_COMMENT__ 2---2424 17 that we shall be joined by many who are inconsistent (from the Marxist standpoint), perhaps we shall be joined even by some Christian elements, and even by some mystics. We have sound stomachs and we are rock-like Marxists. We shall digest those inconsistent elements. Freedom of thought and freedom of criticism within the Party will never make us forget about the freedom of organising people into those voluntary associations known as parties.
Secondly, we must say to you bourgeois individualists that your talk about absolute freedom is sheer hypocrisy. There can be no real and effective ``freedom'' in a society based on the power of money, in a society in which the masses of working people live in poverty and the handful of rich live like parasites. Are you free in relation to your bourgeois publisher, Mr. Writer, in relation to your bourgeois public, which demands that you provide it with pornography in frames^^*^^ and paintings, and prostitution as a ``supplement'' to ``sacred'' scenic art? This absolute freedom is a bourgeois or an anarchist phrase (since, as a world outlook, anarchism is bourgeois philosophy turned inside out). One cannot live in society and be free from society. The freedom of the bourgeois writer, artist or actress is simply masked (or hypocritically masked) dependence on the money-bag, on corruption, on prostitution.
And we socialists expose this hypocrisy and rip off the false labels, not in order to arrive at a nonclass literature and art (that will be possible only in a socialist extra-class society), but to contrast this hypocritically free literature, which is in reality _-_-_
^^*^^ There must be a misprint in the source, which says ramkakh (frames), while the context suggests romanakb (novels). ---Ed.
18 linked to the bourgeoisie, with a really free one that will be openly linked to the proletariat.It will be a free literature, because the idea of socialism and sympathy with the working people, and not greed or careerism, will bring ever new forces to its ranks. It will be a free literature, because it will serve, not some satiated heroine, not the bored ``upper ten thousand" suffering from fatty degeneration, but the millions and tens of millions of working people-the flower of the country, its strength and its future. It will be a free literature, enriching the last word in the revolutionary thought of mankind with the experience and living work of the socialist proletariat, bringing about permanent interaction between the experience of the past (scientific socialism, the completion of the development of socialism from its primitive, Utopian forms) and the experience of the present (the present struggle of the worker comrades).
To work, then, comrades! We are faced with a new and difficult task. But it is a noble and grateful one-to organise a broad, multiform and varied literature inseparably linked with the Social-Democratic working-class movement. All Social-Democratic literature must become Party literature. Every newspaper, journal, publishing house, etc., must immediately set about reorganising its work, leading up to a situation in which it will, in one form or another, be integrated into one Party organisation or another. Only then will ``Social-Democratic'' literature really become worthy of that name, only then will it be able to fulfil its duty and, even within the framework of bourgeois society, break out of bourgeois slavery and merge with the movement of the really advanced and thoroughly revolutionary class.
Novaya Zhizn, No. 12, November 13, 1905
Signed: N. Lenin
Collected Works, Vol. 10, pp. 44--49
19 __ALPHA_LVL2__ LEV TOLSTOITo identify the great artist with the revolution which he has obviously failed to understand, and from which he obviously stands aloof, may at first sight seem strange and artificial. A mirror which does not reflect things correctly could hardly be called a mirror. Our revolution, however, is an extremely complicated thing. Among the mass of those who are directly making and participating in it there are many social elements which have also obviously not understood what is taking place and which also stand aloof from the real historical tasks with which the course of events has confronted them. And if we have before us a really great artist, he must have reflected in his work at least some of the essential aspects of the revolution.
The legal Russian press, though its pages teem with articles, letters and comments on Tolstoi's eightieth birthday, is least of all interested in analysing his works from the standpoint of the character of the Russian revolution and its motive forces. The whole of this press is steeped to nausea in hypocrisy, hypocrisy of a double kind: official and liberal. The former is the crude hypocrisy of the venal hack who was ordered yesterday to hound Lev Tolstoi, and today to show that Tolstoi is a patriot, and to try to observe the decencies before the eyes of Europe. That the hacks of this kind have been paid for their screeds is common knowledge and they cannot deceive anybody. Much more refined and, therefore, much more pernicious and dangerous is liberal hypocrisy. To listen to the Cadet Balalaikins of Rech, one would think that their sympathy for Tolstoi is of the most complete and ardent kind. Actually, their calculated declamations and pompous phrases about the ``great seeker after God" are false 20 from beginning to end, for no Russian liberal believes in Tolstoi's God, or sympathises with Tolstoi's criticism of the existing social order. He associates himself with a popular name in order to increase his political capital, in order to pose as a leader of the nation-wide opposition; he seeks, with the din and thunder of claptrap, to drown the demand for a straight and clear answer to the question: what are the glaring contradictions of ``Tolstoiism'' due to, and what shortcomings and weaknesses of our revolution do they express?
The contradictions in Tolstoi's works, views, doctrines, in his school, are indeed glaring. On the one hand, we have the great artist, the genius who has not only drawn incomparable pictures of Russian life but has made first-class contributions to world literature. On the other hand, we have the landlord obsessed with Christ. On the one hand, the remarkably powerful, forthright and sincere protest against social falsehood and hypocrisy; and on the other, the ``Tolstoian'', i.e., the jaded, hysterical sniveller called the Russian intellectual, who publicly beats his breast and wails: ``I am a bad wicked man, but I am practising moral self-perfection; I don't eat meat any more, I now cat rice cutlets.'' On the one hand, merciless criticism of capitalist exploitation, exposure of government outrages, the farcical courts and the state administration, and unmasking of the profound contradictions between the growth of wealth and achievements of civilisation and the growth of poverty, degradation and misery among the working masses. On the other, the crackpot preaching of submission, ``resist not evil" with violence. On the one hand, the most sober realism, the tearing away of all and sundry masks; on the other, the preaching of one of the most odious things on earth, namely, religion, the striving to replace officially appointed priests by priests 21 who will serve from moral conviction, i.e., to cultivate the most refined and, therefore, particularly disgusting clericalism. Verily:
Thou art a pauper, yet thou art abundant,
Thou art mighty, yet thou art impotent---
Mother Russia!^^5^^
That Tolstoi, owing to these contradictions, could not possibly understand either the working-class movement and its role in the struggle for socialism, or the Russian revolution, goes without saying. But the contradictions in Tolstoi's views and doctrines are not accidental; they express the contradictory conditions of Russian life in the last third of the nineteenth century. The patriarchal countryside, only recently emancipated from serfdom, was literally given over to the capitalist and the tax-collector to be fleeced and plundered. The ancient foundations of peasant economy and peasant life, foundations that had really held for centuries, were broken up for scrap with extraordinary rapidity. And the contradictions in Tolstoi's views must be appraised not from the standpoint of the present-day workingclass movement and present-day socialism (such an appraisal is, of course, needed, but it is not enough), but from the standpoint of protest against advancing capitalism, against the ruining of the masses, who are being dispossessed of their land-a protest which had to arise from the patriarchal Russian countryside. Tolstoi is absurd as a prophet who has discovered new nostrums for the salvation of mankind-and therefore the foreign and Russian `` Tolstoians'' who have sought to convert the weakest side of his doctrine into a dogma, are not worth speaking of. Tolstoi is great as the spokesman of the ideas and sentiments that emerged among the millions of Russian peasants at the time the bourgeois 22 revolution was approaching in Russia. Tolstoi is original, because the sum total of his views, taken as a whole, happens to express the specific features of our revolution as a peasant bourgeois revolution. From this point of view, the contradictions in Tolstoi's views are indeed a mirror of those contradictory conditions in which the peasantry had to play their historical part in our revolution. On the one hand, centuries of feudal oppression and decades of accelerated post-Reform pauperisation piled up mountains of hate, resentment, and desparate determination. The striving to sweep away completely the official church, the landlords and the landlord government, to destroy all the old forms and ways of landownership, to clear the land, to replace the police-class state by a community of free and equal small peasants-this striving is the keynote of every historical step the peasantry has taken in our revolution; and, undoubtedly, the message of Tolstoi's writings conforms to this peasant striving far more than it does to abstract ``Christian Anarchism'', as his ``system'' of views is sometimes appraised.
On the other hand, the peasantry, striving towards new ways of life, had a very crude, patriarchal, semi-religious idea of what kind of life this should be, by what struggle could liberty be won, what leaders it could have in this struggle, what was the attitude of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois intelligentsia towards the interests of peasant revolution, why the forcible overthrow of tsarist rule was needed in order to abolish landlordism. The whole past life of the peasantry had taught it to hate the landowner and the official, but it did not, and could not, teach it where to seek an answer to all these questions. In our revolution a minor part of the peasantry really did fight, did organise to some extent for this purpose: and a very small part indeed 23 rose up in arms to exterminate its enemies, to destroy the tsar's servants and protectors of the landlords. Most of the peasantry wept and prayed, moralised and dreamed, wrote petitions and sent ``pleaders''-quite in the vein of Lev Tolstoi! And, as always happens in such cases, the effect of this Tolstoian abstention from politics, this Tolstoian renunciation of politics, this lack of interest in and understanding of politics, was that only a minority followed the lead of the class-conscious revolutionary proletariat, while the majority became the prey of those unprincipled, servile, bourgeois intellectuals who under the name of Cadets hastened from a meeting of Trudoviks to Stolypin's anteroom, and begged, haggled, reconciled and promised to reconcile-until they were kicked out with a military jackboot. Tolstoi's ideas are a mirror of the weakness, the shortcomings of our peasant revolt, a reflection of the flabbiness of the patriarchal countryside and of the hidebound cowardice of the ``enterprising muzhik''.
Take the soldiers' insurrections in 1905--06. In social composition these men who fought in our revolution were partly peasants and partly proletarians. The proletarians were in the minority; therefore the movement in the armed forces does not even approximately show the same nation-wide solidarity, the same party consciousness, as were displayed by the proletariat, which became SocialDemocratic as if by the wave of a hand. Yet there is nothing more mistaken than the view that the insurrections in the armed forces failed because no officers had led them. On the contrary, the enormous progress the revolution had made since the time of the Narodnaya Volya^^6^^ was shown precisely by the fact that the ``grey herd" rose in arms against their superiors, and it was this self-dependency of theirs that so frightened the liberal landlords and the 24 liberal officers. The common soldier fully sympathised with the peasants' cause; his eyes lit up at the very mention of land. There was more than one case when authority in the armed forces passed to the mass of the rank and file, but determined use of this authority was hardly made at all; the soldiers wavered; after a couple of days, in some cases a few hours, after killing some hated officer, they released the others who had been arrested, parleyed with the authorities and then faced the firing squad, or bared their backs for the birch, or put on the yoke again-quite in the vein of Lev Tolstoi!
Tolstoi reflected the pent-up hatred, the ripened striving for a better lot, the desire to get rid of the past-and also the immature dreaming, the political inexperience, the revolutionary flabbiness. Historical and economic conditions explain both the inevitable beginning of the revolutionary struggle of the masses and their unpreparedness for the struggle, their Tolstoian non-resistance to evil, which was a most serious cause of the defeat of the first revolutionary campaign.
It is said that beaten armies learn well. Of course, revolutionary classes can be compared with armies only in a very limited sense. The development of capitalism is hourly changing and intensifying the conditions which roused the millions of peasantsunited by their hatred for the feudalist landlords and their government-for the revolutionary-- democratic struggle. Among the peasantry themselves the growth of exchange, of the rule of the market and the power of money is steadily ousting old-fashioned patriarchalism and the patriarchal Tolstoian ideology. But there is one gain from the first years of the revolution and the first reverses in mass revolutionary struggle about which there can be no doubt. It is the mortal blow struck at the former softness and flabbiness of the masses. The lines of 25 demarcation have become more distinct. The cleavage of classes and parties has taken place. Under the hammer blows of the lessons taught by Stolypin, and with undeviating and consistent agitation by the revolutionary Social-Democrats not only the socialist proletariat but also the democratic masses of the peasantry will inevitably advance from their midst more and more steeled fighters who will be less capable of falling into our historical sin of Tolstoiism!
Proletary, No. 35, September n (24), 1908
Collected Works, Vol. 15, pp. 202--09
__ALPHA_LVL2__ TOLSTOI AND THE PROLETARIAN STRUGGLE(Excerpt from the Article)
By studying the literary works of Lev Tolstoi the Russian working class will learn to know its enemies better, but in examining the doctrine of Tolstoi, the whole Russian people will have to understand where their own weakness lies, the weakness which did not allow them to carry the cause of their emancipation to its conclusion. This must be understood in order to go forward.
This advance is impeded by all those who declare Tolstoi a ``universal conscience'', a ``teacher of life''. This is a lie that the liberals are deliberately spreading in their desire to utilise the anti-- revolutionary aspect of Tolstoi's doctrine. This lie about Tolstoi as a ``teacher of life" is being repeated after the liberals by some former Social-Democrats.
The Russian people will secure their emancipation only when they realise that it is not from Tolstoi they must learn to win a better life but from the class the significance of which Tolstoi did not 26 understand, and which alone is capable of destroying the old world which Tolstoi hated. That class is the proletariat.
Rabochaya Gazeta No. 2, December 18 (31), 1910
Collected Works, Vol. 16, pp. 353--54 __ALPHA_LVL2__ LEV TOLSTOI AND HIS EPOCHThe epoch to which Lev Tolstoi belongs and which is reflected in such bold relief both in his brilliant literary works and in his teachings began after 1861 and lasted until 1905. True, Tolstoi commenced his literary career earlier and it ended later, but it was during this period, whose transitional nature gave rise to all the distinguishing features of Tolstoi's works and of Tolstoi-ism, that he fully matured both as an artist and as a thinker.
Through Levin, a character in Anna Karenina, Tolstoi very vividly expressed the nature of the turn in Russia's history that took place during this halfcentury.
__NOTE__ No extra indentation for blockquote.``Talk about the harvest, hiring labourers, and so forth, which, as Levin knew, it was the custom to regard as something very low, ... now seemed to Levin to be the only important thing. 'This, perhaps, was unimportant under serfdom, or is unimportant in England. In both cases the conditions are definite; but here today, when everything has been turned upside down and is only just taking shape again, the question of how these conditions will shape is the' only important question in Russia', mused Levin.'' (Collected Works, Vol. X, p. 137.)
``Here in Russia everything has now been turned upside down and is only just taking shape'',-it is difficult to imagine a more apt characterisation of the period 1861--1905. What ``was turned upside down" is familiar, or at least well known, to every Russian. It was serfdom, and the whole of the ``old 27 order" that went with it. What ``is just taking shape" is totally unknown, alien and incomprehensible to the broad masses of the population. Tolstoi conceived this bourgeois order which was ``only just taking shape" vaguely, in the form of a bogeyEngland. Truly, a bogey, because Tolstoi rejects, on principle, so to speak, any attempt to investigate the features of the social system in this ``England'', the connection between this system and the domination of capital, the role played by money, the rise and development of exchange. Like the Narodniks, he refuses to see, he shuts his eyes to, and dismisses the thought that what is ``taking shape" in Russia is none other than the bourgeois system.
It is true that, if not the ``only important" question, then certainly one of the most important from the standpoint of the immediate tasks of all social and political activities in Russia in the period of 1861--1905 (and in our times, too), was that of ``what shape" this system would take, this bourgeois system that had assumed extremely varied forms in ``England'', Germany, America, France, and so forth. But such a definite, concretely historical presentation of the question was something absolutely foreign to Tolstoi. He reasons in the abstract, he recognises only the standpoint of the ``eternal'' principles of morality, the eternal truths of religion, failing to realise that this standpoint is merely the ideological reflection of the old (``turned upside down'') order, the feudal order, the way of the life of the Oriental peoples.
In Lucerne (written in 1857), Tolstoi declares that to regard ``civilisation'' as a boon is an ``imaginary concept" which ``destroys in human nature the instinctive, most blissful primitive need for good''. ``We have only one infallible guide,'' exclaims Tolstoi, ``the Universal Spirit that permeates us.'' (Collected Works, II, p. 125)~
28In The Slavery of Our Times (written in 1900), Tolstoi, repeating still more zealously these appeals to the Universal Spirit, declares that political economy is a ``pseudo science" because it takes as the ``pattern'' ``little England, where conditions are most exceptional'', instead of taking as a pattern ``the conditions of men in the whole world throughout the whole of history''. What this ``whole world" is like is revealed to us in the article ``Progress and the Definition of Education" (1862). Tolstoi counters the opinion of the ``historians'' that progress is ``a general law for mankind" by referring to ``the whole of what is known as the Orient" (IV, 162). ``There is no general law of human progress,'' says Tolstoi, ``and this is proved by the quiescence of the Oriental peoples.''
Tolstoi-ism, in its real historical content, is an ideology of an Oriental, an Asiatic order. Hence the asceticism, the non-resistance to evil, the profound notes of pessimism, the conviction that ``everything is nothing, everything is a material nothing" (``The Meaning of Life'', p. 52), and faith in the ``Spirit'', in ``the beginning of everything'', and that man, in his relation to this beginning, is merely a `` labourer ... allotted the task of saving his own soul'', etc. Tolstoi is true to this ideology in his Kreutzer Sonata too when he says: ``the emancipation of woman lies not in colleges and not in parliaments, but in the bedroom'', and in the article written in 1862., in which he says that universities train only ``irritable, debilitated liberals" for whom ``the people have no use at all'', who are ``uselessly torn from their former environment'', ``find no place in life'', and so forth (IV, 136--37).
Pessimism, non-resistance, appeals to the ``Spirit'' constitute an ideology inevitable in an epoch when the whole of the old order ``has been turned upside down'', and when the masses, who have been 29 brought up under this old order, who imbibed with their mother's milk the principles, the habits, the traditions and beliefs of this order, do not and cannot see what kind of a new order is ``taking shape'', what social forces are ``shaping'' it and how, what social forces are capable of bringing release from the incalculable and exceptionally acute distress that is characteristic of epochs of ``upheaval''.
The period of 1862--1904 was just such a period of upheaval in Russia, a period in which, before everyone's eyes the old order collapsed, never to be restored, in which the new system was only just taking shape; the social forces shaping the new system first manifested themselves on a broad, nation-wide scale, in mass public action in the most varied fields only in 1905. And the 1905 events in Russia were followed by analogous events in a number of countries in that very ``Orient'' to the ``quiescence'' of which Tolstoi referred in 1862. The year 1905 marked the beginning of the end of `` Oriental'' quiescence. Precisely for this reason that year marked the historical end of Tolstoi-ism, the end of an epoch that could give rise to Tolstoi's teachings and in which they were inevitable, not as something individual, not as a caprice or a fad, but as the ideology of the conditions of life under which millions and millions actually found themselves for a certain period of time.
Tolstoi's doctrine is certainly Utopian and in content is reactionary in the most precise and most profound sense of the word. But that certainly does not mean that the doctrine was not socialistic or that it did not contain critical elements capable of providing valuable material for the enlightenment of the advanced classes.
There are various kinds of socialism. In all countries where the capitalist mode of production prevails there is the socialism which expresses the 30 ideology of the class that is going to take the place ot the bourgeoisie; and there is the socialism that expresses the ideology of the classes that are going to be replaced by the bourgeoisie. Feudal socialism, for example, is socialism of the latter type, and the nature of this socialism was appraised long ago, over sixty years ago, by Marx, simultaneously with his appraisal of other types of socialism.^^7^^
Furthermore, critical elements are inherent in Tolstoi's Utopian doctrine, just as they are inherent in many Utopian systems. But we must not forget Marx's profound observation to the effect that the value of critical elements in Utopian socialism ``bears an inverse relation to historical development''. The more the activities of the social forces which are ``shaping'' the new Russia and bringing release from present-day social evils develop and assume a definite character, the more rapidly is critical-Utopian socialism ``losing all practical value and all theoretical justification"^^8^^.
A quarter of a century ago, the critical elements in Tolstoi's doctrine might at times have been of practical value for some sections of the population in spite of its reactionary and Utopian features. This could not have been the case during, say, the last decade, because historical development had made considerable progress between the eighties and the end of the last century. In our days, since the series of events mentioned above has put an end to `` Oriental'' quiescence, in our days, when the consciously reactionary ideas of Vekhi (reactionary in the narrow-class, selfishly-class sense) have become so enormously widespread among the liberal bourgeoisie and when these ideas have infected even a section of those who were almost Marxists and have created a liquidationist trend-in our days, the most direct and most profound harm is caused by every attempt to idealise Tolstoi's doctrine, to justify or to mitigate 31 his ``non-resistance'', his appeals to the ``Spirit'', his exhortations for ``moral self-perfection'', his doctrine of ``conscience'' and universal ``love'', his preaching of asceticism and quietism, and so forth.
Zvezda, No. 6, January 22,
1911Signed: V. llyin
Collected Works, Vol. 17, PP- 49--53
__ALPHA_LVL2__ IN MEMORY OF HERZENOne hundred years have elapsed since Herzen's birth. The whole of liberal Russia is paying homage to him, studiously evading, however, the serious questions of socialism, and taking pains to conceal that which distinguished Herzen the revolutionary from a liberal. The Right-wing press, too, is commemorating the Herzen centenary, falsely asserting that in his last years Herzen renounced revolution. And in the orations on Herzen that are made by the liberals and Narodniks abroad, phrase-mongering reigns supreme.
The working-class party should commemorate the Herzen centenary, not for the sake of philistine glorification, but for the purpose of making clear its own tasks and ascertaining the place actually held in history by this writer who played a great part in paving the way for the Russian revolution.
Herzen belonged to the generation of revolutionaries among the nobility and landlords of the first half of the last century. The nobility gave Russia the Birons and Arakcheyevs, innumerable ``drunken officers, bullies, gamblers, heroes of fairs, masters of hounds, roisterers, floggers, pimps'', as well as amiable Manilovs. ``But,'' wrote Herzen, ``among 32 them developed the men of December 14, a phalanx of heroes reared, like Romulus and Remus, on the milk of a wild beast... . They were veritable titans, hammered out of pure steel from head to foot, comrades-in-arms who deliberately went to certain death in order to awaken the young generation to a new life and to purify the children born in an environment of tyranny and servility. "^^9^^
Herzen was one of those children. The uprising of the Decembrists awakened and ``purified'' him. In the feudal Russia of the forties of the nineteenth century, he rose to a height which placed him on a level with the greatest thinkers of his time. He assimilated Hegel's dialectics. He realised that it was ``the algebra of revolution''. He went further than Hegel, following Feucrbach to materialism. The first of his Letters on the Study of Nature, ``Empiricism and Idealism'', written in 1844, reveals to us a thinker who even now stands head and shoulders above the multitude of modern empiricist natural scientists and the host of present-day idealist and semiidealist philosophers. Herzen came right up to dialectical materialism, and halted-before historical materialism.
It was this ``halt'' that caused Herzen's spiritual shipwreck after the defeat of the revolution of 1848. Herzen had left Russia, and observed this revolution at close range. He was at that time a democrat, a revolutionary, a socialist. But his ``socialism'' was one of the countless forms and varieties of bourgeois' and petty-bourgeois socialism of the period of 1848, which were dealt their death-blow in the June days of that year. In point of fact, it was not socialism at all, but so many sentimental phrases, benevolent visions, which were the expression at that time of the revolutionary character of the bourgeois democrats, as well as of the proletariat, which had not yet freed itself from the influence of those democrats.
__PRINTERS_P_33_COMMENT__ 3---2424 33Herzcn's spiritual shipwreck, his deep scepticism and pessimism after 1848, was a shipwreck of the bourgeois illusions of socialism. Herzen's spiritual drama was a product and reflection of that epoch in world history when the revolutionary character of the bourgeois democrats was already passing away (in Europe), while the revolutionary character of the socialist proletariat had not yet matured. This is something the Russian knights of liberal verbiage, who are now covering up their counter-revolutionary nature by florid phrases about Herzen's scepticism, did not and could not understand. With these knights, who betrayed the Russian revolution of 1905, and have even forgotten to think of the great name of revolutionary, scepticism is a form of transition from democracy to liberalism, to that toadying, vile, foul and brutal liberalism which shot down the workers in 1848, restored the shattered thrones and applauded Napoleon III, and which Herzen cursed, unable to understand its class nature.
With Herzen, scepticism was a form of transition from the illusion of a bourgeois democracy that is ``above classes" to the grim, inexorable and invincible class struggle of the proletariat. The proof: the Letters to an Old Comrade-to Bakunin-written by Herzen in 1869, a year before his death. In them Herzen breaks with the anarchist Bakunin. True, Herzen still sees this break as a mere disagreement on tactics and not as a gulf between the world outlook of the proletarian who is confident of the victory of his class and that of the petty bourgeois who has despaired of his salvation. True enough, in these letters as well, Herzen repeats the old bourgeois-democratic phrases to the effect that socialism must preach ``a sermon addressed equally to workman and master, to farmer and townsman''. Nevertheless, in breaking with Bakunin, Herzen turned his gaze, not to liberalism, but to the International-to the International led by 34 Marx, to the International which had begun to ``rally the legions" of the proletariat, to unite ``the world of labour'', which is ``abandoning the world of those who enjoy without working".^^10^^
__FIX__ What is 10% horizontal rule between sections? _ _ _ _Failing as he did to understand the bourgeois-- democratic character of the entire movement of 1848 and of all the forms of pre-Marxian socialism, Herzen was still less able to understand the bourgeois nature of the Russian revolution. Herzen is the founder of `` Russian'' socialism, of ``Narodism''. He saw ``socialism'' in the emancipation of the peasants with land, in community land tenure and in the peasant idea of ``the right to land''. He set forth his pet ideas on this subject an untold number of times.
Actually, there is not a grain of socialism in this doctrine of Herzen's, as, indeed, in the whole of Russian Narodism, including the faded Narodism of the present-day Socialist-Revolutionaries. Like the various forms of ``the socialism of 1848" in the West, this is the same sort of sentimental phrases, of benevolent visions, in which is expressed the revolutionism of the bourgeois peasant democracy in Russia. The more land the peasants would have received in 1861 and the less they would have had to pay for it, the more would the power of the feudal landlords have been undermined and the more rapidly, freely and widely would capitalism have developed in Russia. The idea of the ``right to land" and of ``equalised division of the land" is nothing but a formulation of the revolutionary aspiration for equality cherished by the peasants who are fighting for the complete overthrow of the power of the landlords, for the complete abolition of landlordism.
This was fully proved by the revolution of 1905: on the one hand, the proletariat came out quite 35 independently at the head of the revolutionary struggle, having founded the Social-Democratic Labour Party; on the other hand, the revolutionary peasants (the Trudoviks and the Peasant Union^^11^^), who fought for every form of the abolition of landlordism even to ``the abolition of private landownership'', fought precisely as proprietors, as small entrepreneurs.
Today, the controversy over the ``socialist nature" of the right to land, and so on, serves only to obscure and cover up the really important and serious historical question concerning the difference of interests of the liberal bourgeoisie and the revolutionary peasantry in the Russian bourgeois revolution; in other words, the question of the liberal and the democratic, the ``compromising'' (monarchist) and the republican trends manifested in that revolution. This is exactly the question posed by Herzen's Kolokol, if we turn our attention to the essence of the matter and not to the words, if we investigate the class struggle as the basis of ``theories'' and doctrines and not vice versa. Herzen founded a free Russian press abroad, and that is the great service rendered by him. Polyarnaya Zvezda^ took up the tradition of the Decembrists. Kolokol^^13^^ (1857--67) championed the emancipation of the peasants with might and main. The slavish silence was broken.
But Herzen came from a landlord, aristocratic milieu. He had left Russia in 1847; he had not seen the revolutionary people and could have no faith in it. Hence his liberal appeal to the ``upper ranks''. Hence his innumerable sugary letters in Kolokol addressed to Alexander II the Hangman, which today one cannot read without revulsion. Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov and Serno-Solovyevich, who represented the new generation of revolutionary raznochintsi, were a thousand times right when they reproached Herzen for these departures from democracy to liberalism. However, it must be said in fairness to 36 Herzen that, much as he vacillated between democracy and liberalism, the democrat in him gained the upper hand nonetheless.
When Kavelin, one of the most repulsive exponents of liberal scrvility-who at one time was enthusiastic about Kolokol precisely because of its liberal tendencies-rose in arms against a constitution, attacked revolutionary agitation, rose against ``violence'' and appeals for it, and began to preach tolerance, Herzen broke with that liberal sage. Herzen turned upon Kavelin's ``meagre, absurd, harmful pamphlet" written ``for the private guidance of a government pretending to be liberal''; he denounced Kavelin's ``sentimental political maxims" which represented ``the Russian people as cattle and the government as an embodiment of intelligence''. Kolokol printed an article entitled ``Epitaph'', which lashed out against ``professors weaving the rotten cobweb of their superciliously paltry ideas, ex-professors, once open-hearted and subsequently embittered because they saw that the healthy youth could not sympathise with their scrofulous thinking".^^14^^ Kavelin at once recognised himself in this portrait.
When Chernyshevsky was arrested, the vile liberal Kavelin wrote: ``I see nothing shocking in the arrests ... the revolutionary party considers all means fair to overthrow the government, and the latter defends itself by its own means.'' As if in retort to this Cadet, Herzen wrote concerning Chernyshevsky's trial: ``And here are wretches, weed-like people; jellyfish, who say that we must not reprove the gang of robbers and scoundrels that is governing us.''^^15^^
When the liberal Turgenev wrote a private letter to Alexander II assuring him of his loyalty, and donated two goldpieces for the soldiers wounded during the suppression of the Polish insurrection, Kolokol wrote of ``the grey-haired Magdalen (of the masculine gender) who wrote to the tsar to tell him that 37 she knew no sleep because she was tormented by the thought that the tsar was not aware of the repentance that had overcome her".^^16^^ And Turgenev at once recognised himself.
When the whole band of Russian liberals scurried away from Herzen for his defence of Poland, when the whole of ``educated society" turned its back on Kolokol, Herzen was not dismayed. He went on championing the freedom of Poland and lashing the suppressors, the butchers, the hangmen in the service of Alexander II. Herzen saved the honour of Russian democracy. ``We have saved the honour of the Russian name,'' he wrote to Turgenev, ``and for doing so we have suffered at the hands of the slavish majority.''^^17^^
When it was reported that a serf peasant had killed a landlord for an attempt to dishonour the serf's betrothed, Herzen commented in Kolokol: ``Well done!" When it was reported that army officers would be appointed to supervise the `` peaceable'' progress of ``emancipation'', Herzen wrote: ``The first wise colonel who with his unit joins the peasants instead of crushing them, will ascend the throne of the Romanovs.'' When Colonel Reitern shot himself in Warsaw (1860) because he did not want to be a helper of hangmen, Herzen wrote: ``If there is to be any shooting, the ones to be shot should be the generals who give orders to fire upon unarmed people.''^^18^^ When fifty peasants were massacred in Bezdna, and their leader, Anton Petrov, was executed (April 12, 1861), Herzen wrote in Kolokol:
``If only my words could reach you, toiler and sufferer of the land of Russia! ... How well I would teach you to despise your spiritual shepherds, placed over you by the St. Petersburg Synod and a German tsar. . . . You hate the landlord, you hate the official, you fear them, and rightly so; but you still believe in the tsar and the bishop ... do not believe them. The tsar is with them, and they arc his men. It is him you now see-you, the father of a youth murdered 38 in Bczclna, and you, the son of a father murdered in Penza. . . . Your shepherds arc as ignorant as you, and as poor. . . . Such was another Anthony (not Bishop Anthony, but Anton of Bezdna who suffered for you in Kazan. . . . The dead bodies of your martyrs will not perform forty-eight miracles, and praying to them will not cure a toothache; but their living memory may produce one miracle-your emancipation."^^19^^
This shows how infamously and vilely Herzen is being slandered by our liberals entrenched in the slavish ``legal'' press, who magnify Herzen's weak points and say nothing about his strong points. It was not Herzen's fault but his misfortune that he could not see the revolutionary people in Russia itself in the 18405. When in the sixties he came to see the revolutionary people, he sided fearlessly with the revolutionary democracy against liberalism. He fought for a victory of the people over tsarism, not for a deal between the liberal bourgeoisie and the landlords' tsar. He raised aloft the banner of revolution.
_ _ _ _ _In commemorating Herzen, we clearly see the three generations, the three classes, that were active in the Russian revolution. At first it was nobles and landlords, the Decembrists and Herzen. These revolutionaries formed but a narrow group. They were very far removed from the people. But their effort was not in vain. The Decembrists awakened Herzen. Herzen began the work of revolutionary agitation.
This work was taken up, extended, strengthened, and tempered by the revolutionary raznochintsi-from Chernyshevsky to the heroes of Narodnaya Volya. The range of fighters widened; their contact with the people became closer. ``The young helmsmen of the gathering storm" is what Herzen called them. But it was not yet the storm itself.
39The storm is the movement of the masses themselves. The proletariat, the only class that is thoroughly revolutionary, rose at the head of the masses and for the first time aroused millions of peasants to open revolutionary struggle. The first onslaught in this storm took place in 1905. The next is beginning to develop under our very eyes.
In commemorating Hcrzcn, the proletariat is learning from his example to appreciate the great importance of revolutionary theory. It is learning that selfless devotion to the revolution and revolutionary propaganda among the people are not wasted even if long decades divide the sowing from the harvest. It is learning to ascertain the role of the various classes in the Russian and in the international revolution. Enriched by these lessons, the proletariat will fight its way to a free alliance with the socialist workers of all lands, having crushed that loathsome monster, the tsarist monarchy, against which Herzen was the first to raise the great banner of struggle by addressing his free Russian word to the masses.
Sotsial-Dcmokrat No. 26,
May 8 (April 25), 1912
Collected Works, Vol. 18,
pp. 25--31
This bulky tome of 930 large pages of very small type, printed partly in double columns, is an ``attempt to review Russian book treasures in connection with the history of scientific-philosophical and literarysocial ideas''. Thus runs the subtitle of the book.
The second volume, which we are here reviewing, covers the various fields of the social sciences. This 40 includes, among others, socialism in Western Europe as well as in Russia. A publication of this type is obviously of great interest, and the author's plan is on the whole a correct one. It is really impossible to give a sensible ``review of Russian book treasures" and a ``work of reference" for self-education and libraries otherwise than in connection with the history of ideas. What is needed here is ``preliminary remarks" to every section (these the author provides) with a general survey of the subject and an accurate summary of each ideological trend, as well as a list of books for the particular section and for each ideological trend.
The author and his numerous collaborators, as mentioned in the preface, have expended an enormous amount of labour and started an extremely valuable undertaking, which deserves from us the cordial wish that it may grow and develop in scope and depth. Very valuable, among other things, is the fact that the author excludes neither foreign publications nor publications that have been prosecuted. No decent library can dispense with Mr. Rubakin's work.
The faults of this book are its author's eclecticism and the fact that he does not sufficiently enlist, or rather, that he has barely begun to enlist, the cooperation of specialists on definite subjects.
The first fault is perhaps due to the author's peculiar aversion for ``polemics''. In his preface, Mr. Rubakin says: ``Never in my life have I taken part in any polemics, for I believe that in the overwhelming majority of cases polemics are one of the best means of obscuring the truth with all sorts of human emotions.'' The author does not realise, for one thing, that there has never been, nor can there be, any human search for truth without ``human emotions''. The author forgets, secondly, that he has set out to review ``the history of ideas'', and the history of 41 ideas is that of the succession, and consequently of the conflict of ideas.
One of the two-either we ignore the conflict of ideas, in which case it is rather difficult to undertake a review of its history (let alone participate in this conflict), or else we abandon the claim ``never to take part in any polemics''. For example: I turn to Mr. Rubakin's ``preliminary remarks" on the theory of political economy and at once see that the author escapes from this dilemma firstly by means of veiled polemics (a form that has all the demerits of polemics and none of its great merits), and, secondly, by defending eclecticism.
In his outline of Bogdanov's Short Course, Mr. Rubakin ``ventures'' to note the ``interesting'' similarity between one of the deductions made by the ``Marxist'' author and ``N. K. Mikhailovsky's wellknown formula of progress" (p. 815).
O, Mr. Rubakin, who says, ``Never in my life have I taken part in any polemics"....
On the preceding page he eulogises the ``strictly scientific method, profound analysis and critical attitude towards extremely important theories" ofwho would you think?-that exemplary eclecticist Mr. Tugan-Baranovsky! Mr. Rubakin himself is compelled to admit that this professor is somewhat of an adherent of Marxism, somewhat of an adherent of Narodism and somewhat of an adherent of the `` theory of marginal utility'', and yet calls him a `` socialist''! Does not writing a monstrous thing like this amount to indulging in polemics of the worst kind against socialism?
Had Mr. Rubakin divided the 14,000 odd words (i.e., a whole pamphlet) which he wrote as an introduction to the literature on political economy, into four parts, and had he arranged to have them written by, say, a Black-Hundredman, a liberal, a Narodnik, and a Marxist, we would have had a more 42 public polemic, and 999 readers out of a thousand would have discovered the truth a thousand times more easily and quickly.
Mr. Rubakin has resorted to this kind of devicethat of enlisting the co-operation of representatives of ``polemics''-in the question of Bolshevism and Menshevism, and devoted half a page to me and another half to L. Martov. As far as I am concerned, I am quite satisfied with L. Martov's exposition, for example, with his admission that liquidationism amounts to attempts ``at creating a legal workers' party'', and to ``a negative attitude to surviving underground organisations" (pp. 771--72), or with his admission that ``Menshevism saw no other way in which the proletariat could take a useful part in the crisis" (i.e., that of 1905) ``except by helping the bourgeois liberal democrats in their attempts to eject the reactionary section of the propertied classes from political power-but while rendering this assistance, the proletariat was to maintain its complete political independence" (772).
As soon as Mr. Rubakin continues this outline of Menshevism on his own, he falls into error-for example, his assertion that Axelrod ``withdrew'' from liquidationism together with Plekhanov (772). While we do not blame Mr. Rubakin very much for such errors, which are inevitable in the initial stages of a work of this varied and compilatory nature, yet we cannot help wishing that the author would more often employ the method of enlisting the co-operation of representatives of the different trends in all fields of knowledge. This would make for greater accuracy and completeness of the work, as well as for its impartiality; only eclecticism and veiled polemics stand to lose by this.
Prosveshcheniye No. 4, April 1914
Signed: V. 1.
Collected Works, Vol. 20, pp. 259--61
[43] __ALPHA_LVL2__ A LITTLE PICTURE(Excerpt from the Article)
Comrade Sosnovsky, editor of Byednota,^^20^^ has brought me a remarkable book. As many workers and peasants as possible should be made familiar with it. Most valuable lessons, splendidly illustrated by vivid examples, are to be drawn from it on some of the major problems of socialist construction. The book, by Comrade Alexander Todorsky, is called A Year with Rifle and Plough and was published in the little town of Vesyegonsk by the local uyezd Executive Committee to mark the anniversary of the October Revolution.
The author describes the year's experience of the men in charge of organising Soviet power in the Vesyegonsk Uyezd-first the Civil War, the revolt of the local kulaks and its suppression, and then ``peaceful creative life''. The author has succeeded in giving such a simple, and at the same time such a lively, account of the course of the revolution in this rural backwater, that to attempt to retell it could only weaken its effect. This book should be distributed as widely as possible, and it would be very good if many more of those who have been working among the people and with the people, in the very thick of life, sat down to describe their experiences. The publication of several hundred, or even several dozen, such descriptions, the best, most truthfully and plainly told and containing numerous valuable facts, would be infinitely more useful to the cause of socialism than many of the newspaper and magazine articles and books by professional journalists and writers who only too often cannot see real life for the paper they write on.
Written at the end of 1918 or beginning of 1919
Collected Works, Vol. 28, p. 386.
44 . H. OrenaHOB 3JIEKTPMct>I/IKAUMfl P.CfcCP. C FIEPEXCWHOH »A30H MHPOBOFO X03HHCTBA nPEflHCJIOBHH H. /lemma H P. KpmHxaHOBCKoro rOCyflAPCTBEHHOE H3flATE.flbCTBO o 1922 __CAPTION__ I. I. Skvortsov-Stcpanov's dedication:
__CAPTION__
Lenin's dedication:
(Excerpt)
8. ``Freedom of the press" is another of the principal slogans of ``pure democracy''. And here, too, the workers know---and socialists everywhere have admitted it millions of timcs-that this freedom is a deception while the best printing-presses and the biggest stocks of paper are appropriated by the capitalists, and while capitalist rule over the press remains, a rule that is manifested throughout the world all the more strikingly, sharply and cynically the more democracy and the republican system are developed, as in America for example. The first thing to do to win real equality and genuine democracy for the working people, for the workers and peasants, is to deprive capital of the possibility of hiring writers, buying up publishing houses and bribing newspapers. And to do that the capitalists and exploiters have to be overthrown and their resistance suppressed. The capitalists have always used the term ``freedom'' to mean freedom for the rich to get richer and for the workers to starve to death. In capitalist usage, freedom of the press means freedom of the rich to bribe the press, freedom to use their wealth to shape and fabricate so-called public opinion. In this respect, too, the defenders of ``pure democracy" prove to be defenders of an utterly foul and venal system that gives the rich control over the mass media. They prove to be deceivers of the people, who, with the aid of plausible, fine-sounding, but thoroughly false phrases, 47 divert them from the concrete historical task of liberating the press from capitalist enslavement. Genuine freedom and equality will be embodied in the system which the Communists are building, and in which there will be no opportunity for amassing wealth at the expense of others, no objective opportunities for putting the press under the direct or indirect powet of money, and no impediments in the way of any workingman (or groups of workingmen, in any numbers) for enjoying and practising equal rights in the use of public printing-presses and public stocks of paper.
Collected Works, Vol. 28, pp. 460--61
__ALPHA_LVL2__ INTRODUCTION TO THE BOOK BY JOHN REED:With the greatest interest and with never slackening attention I read John Reed's book, Ten Days That Shook the World. Unreservedly do I recommend it to the workers of the world. Here is a book which I should like to see published in millions of copies and translated into all languages. It gives a truthful and most vivid exposition of the events so significant to the comprehension of what really is the Proletarian Revolution and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. These problems are widely discussed, but before one can accept or reject these ideas, he must understand the full significance of his decision. John Reed's book will undoubtedly help to clear this question, which is the fundamental problem of the international labor movement.
Nikolai Lenin
Written at the end of 1919
Collected Works, Vol. 36, p. 519
48 .WN3Hb 3HAHIE''. nerporpafl-b, (loBapcKoR nep., R. 2. KM. 9 11 10. Te/ie<fioHi> 227--42. B. HJILHHTj (H. Jlemmt). rOCVflAPCTBO PEBO/lrOUm mpiciuiia o rocyiapciat i BT. ptiojuotiii. BbinycHi. i. nETPOrPAJVb. 1918- __CAPTION__ Cover of Lenin's The Stale and Revolution, Pctrograd, 1918 49
HAYKA M HEMOKPATMfl.
__CAPTION__
K. A. Timiryazcv's dedication to Lenin:
April 27, 1920
Dear Klimenty Arkadyevich,
Many thanks to you for your book and kind words.^^21^^ I was simply delighted to read your remarks against the bourgeoisie and for Soviet power. I shake your hand very warmly and with all my heart wish you health, health and health again!
Yours, V. Ulyanov (Lenin)
Collected Works, Vol. 35, P- 445
[50] __ALPHA_LVL2__ THE TASKS OF THE YOUTH LEAGUES(Excerpt)
__FIX__ Add a class= to first BR element in LVL2 so that it can be replaced with a bullet instead of simply deleted in context where BRs are unwanted.(The Congress greets Lenin with a tremendous ovation.) Comrades, today I would like to talk on the fundamental tasks of the Young Communist League and, in this connection, on what the youth organisations in a socialist republic should be like in general.
It is all the more necessary to dwell on this question because in a certain sense it may be said that it is the youth that will be faced with the actual task of creating a communist society. For it is clear that the generation of working people brought up in capitalist society can, at best, accomplish the task of destroying the foundations of the old, the capitalist way of life, which was built on exploitation. At best it will be able to accomplish the tasks of creating a social system that will help the proletariat and the working classes retain power and lay a firm foundation, which can be built on only by a generation that is starting to work under the new conditions, in a situation in which relations based on the exploitation of man by man no longer exist.
And so, in dealing from this angle with the tasks confronting the youth, I must say that the tasks of the youth in general, and of the Young Communist Leagues and all other organisations in particular, might be summed up in a single word: learn.
Of course, this is only a ``single word''. It docs not reply to the principal and most essential questions: what to learn, and how to learn? And the whole point here is that, with the transformation of 51 the old, capitalist society, the upbringing, training and education of the new generations that will create the communist society cannot be conducted on the old lines. The teaching, training and education of the youth must proceed from the material that has been left to us by the old society. We can build communism only on the basis of the totality of knowledge, organisations and institutions, only by using the stock of human forces and means that have been left to us by the old society. Only by radically remoulding the teaching, organisation and training of the youth shall we be able to ensure that the efforts of the younger generation will result in the creation of a society that will be unlike the old society, i.e., in the creation of a communist society. That is why we must deal in detail with the question of what we should teach the youth and how the youth should learn if it really wants to justify the name of communist youth, and how it should be trained so as to be able to complete and consummate what we have started.
I must say that the first and most natural reply would seem to be that the Youth League, and the youth in general, who want to advance to communism, should learn communism.
But this reply---``learn communism"---is too general. What do we need in order to learn communism? What must be singled out from the sum of general knowledge so as to acquire a knowledge of communism? Here a number of dangers arise, which very often manifest themselves whenever the task of learning communism is presented incorrectly, or when it is interpreted in too one-sided a manner.
Naturally, the first thought that enters one's mind is that learning communism means assimilating the sum of knowledge that is contained in communist manuals, pamphlets and books. But such a definition of the study of communism would be too crude and 52 inadequate. If the study of communism consisted solely in assimilating what is contained in communist books and pamphlets, we might all too easily obtain communist text-jugglers or braggarts, and this would very often do us harm, because such people, after learning by rote what is set forth in communist books and pamphlets, would prove incapable of combining the various branches of knowledge, and would be unable to act in the way communism really demands.
One of the greatest evils and misfortunes left to us by the old, capitalist society is the complete rift between books and practical life; we have had books explaining everything in the best possible manner, yet in most cases these books contained the most pernicious and hypocritical lies, a false description of capitalist society.
That is why it would be most mistaken merely to assimilate book knowledge about communism. No longer do our speeches and articles merely reiterate what used to be said about communism, because our speeches and articles are connected with our daily work in all fields. Without work and without struggle, book knowledge of communism obtained from communist pamphlets and works is absolutely worthless, for it would continue the old separation of theory and practice, the old rift which was the most pernicious feature of the old, bourgeois society.
It would be still more dangerous to set about assimilating only communist slogans. Had we not realised this danger in time, and had we not directed all our efforts to averting this danger, the half million or million young men and women who would have called themselves Communists after studying communism in this way would only greatly prejudice the cause of communism.
The question arises: how is all this to be blended for the study of communism? What must we take from the old schools, from the old kind of science? 53 It was the declared aim of the old type of school to produce men with an all-round education, to teach the sciences in general. We know that this was utterly false, since the whole of society was based and maintained on the division of people into classes, into exploiters and oppressed. Since they were thoroughly imbued with the class spirit, the old schools naturally gave knowledge only to the children of the bourgeoisie. Every word was falsified in the interests of the bourgeoisie. In these schools the younger generation of workers and peasants were not so much educated as drilled in the interests of that bourgeoisie. They were trained in such a way as to be useful servants of the bourgeoisie, able to create profits for it without disturbing its peace and leisure. That is why, while rejecting the old type of schools, we have made it our task to take from it only what we require for genuine communist education.
This brings me to the reproaches and accusations which we constantly hear levelled at the old schools, and which often lead to wholly wrong conclusions. It is said that the old school was a school of purely book knowledge, of ceaseless drilling and grinding. That is true, but we must distinguish between what was bad in the old schools and what is useful to us, and we must be able to select from it what is necessary for communism.
The old schools provided purely book knowledge; they compelled their pupils to assimilate a mass of useless, superfluous and barren knowledge, which cluttered up the brain and turned the younger generation into bureaucrats regimented according to a single pattern. But it would mean falling into a grave error for you to try to draw the conclusion that one can become a Communist without assimilating the wealth of knowledge amassed by mankind. It would be mistaken to think it sufficient to learn communist slogans and the conclusions of communist science, 54 without acquiring that sum of knowledge of which communism itself is a result. Marxism is an example which shows how communism arose out of the sum of human knowledge.
You have read and heard that communist theory -the science of communism created in the main by Marx, this doctrine of Marxism-has ceased to be the work of a single socialist of the nineteenth century, even though he was a genius, and that it has become the doctrine of millions and tens of millions of proletarians all over the world, who are applying it in their struggle against capitalism. If you were to ask why the teachings of Marx have been able to win the hearts and minds of millions and tens of millions of the most revolutionary class, you would receive only one answer: it was because Marx based his work on the firm foundation of the human knowledge acquired under capitalism. After making a study of the laws governing the development of human society, Marx realised the inevitability of capitalism developing towards communism. What is most important is that he proved this on the sole basis of a most precise, detailed and profound study of this capitalist society, by fully assimilating all that earlier science had produced. He critically reshaped everything that had been created by human society, without ignoring a single detail. He reconsidered, subjected to criticism, and verified on the working-class movement everything that human thinking had created, and therefrom formulated conclusions which people hemmed in by bourgeois limitations or bound by bourgeois prejudices could not draw.
We must bear this in mind when, for example, we talk about proletarian culture. We shall be unable to solve this problem unless we clearly realise that only a precise knowledge and transformation of the culture created by the entire development of mankind will enable us to create a proletarian culture. The 55 lattcr is not clutched out of thin air; it is not an invention of those who call themselves experts in proletarian culture. That is all nonsense. Proletarian culture must be the logical development of the store of knowledge mankind has accumulated under the yoke of capitalist, landowner and bureaucratic society. All these roads have been leading, and will continue to lead up to proletarian culture, in the same way as political economy, as reshaped by Marx, has shown us what human society must arrive at, shown us the passage to the class struggle, to the beginning of the proletarian revolution.
When we so often hear representatives of the youth, as well as certain advocates of a new system of education, attacking the old schools, claiming that they used the system of cramming, we say to them that we must take what was good in the old schools. We must not borrow the system of encumbering young people's minds with an immense amount of knowledge, nine-tenths of which was useless and one-tenth distorted. This, however, does not mean that we can restrict ourselves to communist conclusions and learn only communist slogans. You will not create communism that way. You can become a Communist only when you enrich your mind with a knowledge of all the treasures created by mankind.
We have no need of cramming, but we do need to develop and perfect the mind of every student with a knowledge of fundamental facts. Communism will become an empty word, a mere signboard, and a Communist a mere boaster, if all the knowledge he has acquired is not digested in his mind. You should not merely assimilate this knowledge, but assimilate it critically, so as not to cram your mind with useless lumber, but enrich it with all those facts that are indispensable to the well-educated man of today. If a Communist took it into his head to boast about his communism because of the cut-and-dried 56 conclusions lie had acquired, without putting in a great deal of serious and hard work and without understanding facts he should examine critically, he would be a deplorable Communist indeed. Such superficiality would be decidedly fatal. If I know that I know little, I shall strive to learn more; but if a man says that he is a Communist and that he need not know anything thoroughly, he will never become anything like a Communist.
The old schools produced servants needed by the capitalists; the old schools turned men of science into men who had to write and say whatever pleased the capitalists. We must therefore abolish them. But does the fact that we must abolish them, destroy them, mean that we should not take from them everything mankind has accumulated that is essential to man? Does it mean that we do not have to distinguish between what was necessary to capitalism and what is necessary to communism?
We are replacing the old drill-sergeant methods practised in bourgeois society, against the will of the majority, with the class-conscious discipline of the workers and peasants, who combine hatred of the old society with a determination, ability and readiness to unite and organise their forces for this struggle so as to forge the wills of millions and hundreds of millions of people-disunited, and scattered over the territory of a huge country-into a single will, without which defeat is inevitable. Without this solidarity, without this conscious discipline of the workers and peasants, our cause is hopeless. Without this, we shall be unable to vanquish the capitalists and landowners of the whole world. We shall not even consolidate the foundation, let alone build a new, communist society on that foundation. Likewise, while condemning the old schools, while harbouring an absolutely justified and necessary hatred for the old schools, and appreciating the readiness to 57 destroy them, we must realise that we must replace the old system of instruction, the old cramming and the old drill, with an ability to acquire the sum total of human knowledge, and to acquire it in such a way that communism shall not be something to be learned by rote, but something that you yourselves have thought over, something that will embody conclusions inevitable from the standpoint of presentday education.
That is the way the main tasks should be presented when we speak of the aim: learn communism.
I shall take a practical example to make this clear to you, and to demonstrate the approach to the problem of how you must learn. You all know that, following the military problems, those of defending the republic, we are now confronted with economic tasks. Communist society, as we know, cannot be built unless we restore industry and agriculture, and that, not in the old way. They must be re-established on a modern basis, in accordance with the last word in science. You know that electricity is that basis, and that only after electrification of the entire country, of all branches of industry and agriculture, only when you have achieved that aim, will you be able to build for yourselves the communist society which the older generation will not be able to build. Confronting you is the task of economically reviving the whole country, of reorganising and restoring both agriculture and industry on modern technical lines, based on modern science and technology, on electricity. You realise perfectly well that illiterate people cannot tackle electrification, and that elementary literacy is not enough either. It is insufficient to understand what electricity is; what is needed is the knowledge of how to apply it technically in industry and agriculture, and in the individual branches of industry and agriculture. This has to be learnt for oneself, and it must be taught to the entire rising 58 generation of working people. That is the task confronting every class-conscious Communist, every young person who regards himself a Communist and who clearly understands that, by joining the Young Communist League, he has pledged himself to help the Party build communism and to help the whole younger generation create a communist society. He must realise that he can create it only on the basis of modern education, and if he does not acquire this education communism will remain merely a pious wish.
It was the task of the older generation to overthrow the bourgeoisie. The main task then was to criticise the bourgeoisie, arouse hatred of the bourgeoisie among the masses, and foster class-- consciousness and the ability to unite their forces. The new generation is confronted with a far more complex task. Your duty does not lie only in assembling your forces so as to uphold the workers' and peasants' government against an invasion instigated by the capitalists. Of course, you must do that; that is something you clearly realise, and is distinctly seen by the Communist. However, that is not enough. You have to build up a communist society. In many respects half of the work has been done. The old order has been destroyed, just as it deserved, it has been turned into a heap of ruins, just as it deserved. The ground has been cleared, and on this ground the younger communist generation must build a communist society. You are faced with the task of construction, and you can accomplish that task only by assimilating all modern knowledge, only if you are able to transform communism from cut-and-dried and memorised formulas, counsels, recipes, prescriptions and programmes into that living reality which gives unity to your immediate work, and only if you are able to make communism a guide in all your practical work.
59That is the task you should pursue in educating, training and rousing the entire younger generation. You must be foremost among the millions of builders of a communist society in whose ranks every young man and young woman should be. You will not build a communist society unless you enlist the mass of young workers and peasants in the work of building communism.
This naturally brings me to the question of how we should teach communism and what the specific features of our methods should be.
I first of all shall deal here with the question of communist ethics.
You must train yourselves to be Communists. It is the task of the Youth League to organise its practical activities in such a way that, by learning, organising, uniting and fighting, its members shall train both themselves and all those who look to it for leadership; it should train Communists. The entire purpose of training, educating and teaching the youth of today should be to imbue them with communist ethics.
But is there such a thing as communist ethics? Is there such a thing as communist morality? Of course, there is. It is often suggested that we have no ethics of our own; very often the bourgeoisie accuse us Communists of rejecting all morality. This is a method of confusing the issue, of throwing dust in the eyes of the workers and peasants.
In what sense do we reject ethics, reject morality?
In the sense given to it by the bourgeoisie, who based ethics on God's commandments. On this point we, of course, say that we do not believe in God, and that we know perfectly well that the clergy, the landowners and the bourgeoisie invoked the name of God so as to further their own interests as exploiters. Or, instead of basing ethics on the 60 commandmcnts of morality, on the commandments of God, they based it on idealist or semi-idealist phrases, which always amounted to something very similar to God's commandments.
We reject any morality based on extra-human and extra-class concepts. We say that this is deception, dupery, stultification of the workers and peasants in the interests of the landowners and capitalists.
We say that our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the proletariat's class struggle. Our morality stems from the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat.
The old society was based on the oppression of all the workers and peasants by the landowners and capitalists. We had to destroy all that, and overthrow them but to do that we had to create unity. That is something that God cannot create.
This unity could be provided only by the factories, only by a proletariat trained and roused from its long slumber. Only when that class was formed did a mass movement arise which has led to what we have now-the victory of the proletarian revolution in one of the weakest of countries, which for three years has been repelling the onslaught of the bourgeoisie of the whole world. We can see how the proletarian revolution is developing all over the world. On the basis of experience, we now say that only the proletariat could have created the solid force which the disunited and scattered peasantry are following and which has withstood all onslaughts by the exploiters. Only this class can help the working masses unite, rally their ranks and conclusively defend, conclusively consolidate and conclusively build up a communist society.
That is why we say that to us there is no such thing as a morality that stands outside human society; that is a fraud. To us morality is subordinated to the interests of the proletariat's class struggle.
61What docs that class struggle consist in? It consists in overthrowing the tsar, overthrowing the capitalists, and abolishing the capitalist class.
What are classes in general? Classes are that which permits one section of society to appropriate the labour of another section. If one section of society appropriates all the land, we have a landowner class and a peasant class. If one section of society owns the factories, shares and capital, while another section works in these factories, we have a capitalist class and a proletarian class.
It was not difficult to drive out the tsar-that required only a few days. It was not very difficult to drive out the landowners-that was done in a few months. Nor was it very difficult to drive out the capitalists. But it is incomparably more difficult to abolish classes; we still have the division into workers and peasants. If the peasant is installed on his plot of land and appropriates his surplus grain, that is, grain that he does not need for himself or for his cattle, while the rest of the people have to go without bread, then the peasant becomes an exploiter. The more grain he clings to, the more profitable he finds it; as for the rest, let them starve: ``The more they starve, the dearer I can sell this grain.'' All should work according to a single common plan, on common land, in common factories and in accordance with a common system. Is that easy to attain? You see that it is not as easy as driving out the tsar, the landowners and the capitalists. What is required is that the proletariat re-educate a section of the peasantry; it must win over the working peasants in order to crush the resistance of those peasants who are rich and arc profiting from the poverty and want of the rest. Hence the task of the proletarian struggle is not quite completed after we have overthrown the tsar and driven out the landowners and capitalists; to accomplish that is the task of the 62 system we call the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The class struggle is continuing; it has merely changed its forms. It is the class struggle of the proletariat to prevent the return of the old exploiters, to unite in a single union the scattered masses of unenlightened peasants. The class struggle is continuing and it is our task to subordinate all interests to that struggle. Our communist morality is also subordinated to that task. We say: morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the working people around the proletariat, which is building up a new, a communist society.
Communist morality is that which serves this struggle and unites the working people against all exploitation, against all petty private property; for petty property puts into the hands of one person that which has been created by the labour of the whole of society. In our country the land is common property.
But suppose I take a piece of this common property and grow on it twice as much grain as I need, and profiteer on the surplus? Suppose I argue that the more starving people there are, the more they will pay? Would I then be behaving like a Communist? No, I would be behaving like an exploiter, like a proprietor. That must be combated. If that is allowed to go on, things will revert to the rule of the capitalists, to the rule of the bourgeoisie, as has more than once happened in previous revolutions. To prevent the restoration of the rule of the capitalists and the bourgeoisie, we must not allow profiteering; we must not allow individuals to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest; the working people must unite with the proletariat and form a communist society. This is the principal feature of the fundamental task of the League and the organisation of the communist youth.
63The old society was based on the principle: rob or be robbed; work for others or make others work for you; be a slave-owner or a slave. Naturally, people brought up in such a society assimilate with their mother's milk, one might say, the psychology, the habit, the concept which says: you are either a slaveowner or a slave, or else, a small owner, a petty employee, a petty official, or an intcllcctual-in short, a man who is concerned only with himself, and does not care a rap for anybody else.
If I work this plot of land, I do not care a rap for anybody else; if others starve, all the better, I shall get the more for my grain. If I have a job as a doctor, engineer, teacher, or clerk, I do not care a rap for anybody else. If I toady to and please the powers that be, I may be able to keep my job, and even get on in life and become a bourgeois. A Communist cannot harbour such a psychology and such sentiments. When the workers and peasants proved that they were able, by their own efforts, to defend themselves and create a new society-that was the beginning of the new and communist education, education in the struggle against the exploiters, education in alliance with the proletariat against the selfseekers and petty proprietors, against the psychology and habits which say: I seek my own profit and don't care a rap for anything else.
That is the reply to the question of how the young and rising generation should learn communism.
It can learn communism only by linking up every step in its studies, training and education with the continuous struggle the proletarians and the working people are waging against the old society of exploiters. When people tell us about morality, we say: to a Communist all morality lies in this united discipline and conscious mass struggle against the exploiters. We do not believe in an eternal morality, and we expose the falseness of all the fables about 64 morality. Morality serves the purpose of helping human society rise to a higher level and rid itself of the exploitation of labour.
To achieve this we need that generation of young people who began to reach political maturity in the midst of a disciplined and desperate struggle against the bourgeoisie. In this struggle that generation is training genuine Communists; it must subordinate to this struggle, and link up with it, each step in its studies, education and training. The education of the communist youth must consist, not in giving them suave talks and moral precepts. This is not what education consists in. When people have seen the way in which their fathers and mothers lived under the yoke of the landowners and capitalists; when they have themselves experienced the sufferings of those who began the struggle against the exploiters; when they have seen the sacrifices made to keep what has been won, and seen what deadly enemies the landowners and capitalists are-they are taught by these conditions to become Communists. Communist morality is based on the struggle for the consolidation and completion of communism. That is also the basis of communist training, education, and teaching. That is the reply to the question of how communism should be learnt.
We could not believe in teaching, training and education if they were restricted only to the schoolroom and divorced from the ferment of life. As long as the workers and peasants are oppressed by the landowners and capitalists, and as long as the schools are controlled by the landowners and capitalists, the young generation will remain blind and ignorant. Our schools must provide the youth with the fundamentals of knowledge, the ability to evolve communist views independently; they must make educated people of the youth. While they are attending school, they must learn to become participants in the __PRINTERS_P_65_COMMENT__ 5---2424 65 struggle for emancipation from the exploiters. The Young Communist League will justify its name as the League of the young communist generation only when every step in its teaching, training and education is linked up with participation in the common struggle of all working people against the exploiters. You are well aware that, as long as Russia remains the only workers' republic and the old, bourgeois system exists in the rest of the world, we shall be weaker than they are, and be constantly threatened with a new attack; and that only if we learn to be solidly united shall we win in the further struggle andhaving gained strength-become really invincible. Thus, to be a Communist means that you must organise and unite the entire young generation and set an example of training and discipline in this struggle. Then you will be able to start building the edifice of communist society and bring it to completion.
To make this clearer to you, I shall quote an example. We call ourselves Communists. What is a Communist? Communist is a Latin word. Communis is the Latin for ``common''. Communist society is a society in which all things-the land, the factoriesare owned in common and the people work in common. That is communism.
Is it possible to work in common if each one works separately on his own plot of land? Work in common cannot be brought about all at once. That is impossible. It does not drop from the skies. It comes through toil and suffering; it is created in the course of struggle. The old books are of no use here; no one will believe them. One's own experience of life is needed. When Kolchak and Denikin were advancing from Siberia and the South, the peasants were on their side. They did not like Bolshevism because the Bolsheviks took their grain at a fixed price. But when the peasants in Siberia and the Ukraine experienced the rule of Kolchak and Denikin, they realised that 66 they had only one alternative: either to go to the capitalists, who would at once hand them over into slavery under the landowners; or to follow the workers, who, it is true, did not promise a land flowing with milk and honey, and demanded iron discipline and firmness in an arduous struggle, but would lead them out of enslavement by the capitalists and landowners. When even the ignorant peasants saw and realised this from their own experience, they became conscious adherents of communism, who had gone through a severe school. It is such experience that must form the basis of all the activities of the Young Communist League.
I have replied to the questions of what we must learn, what we must take from the old schools and from the old science. I shall now try to answer the question of how this must be learnt. The answer is: only by inseparably linking each step in the activities of the schools, each step in training, education and teaching, with the struggle of all the working people against the exploiters.
... The generation of people who are now at the age of fifty cannot expect to see a communist society. This generation will be gone before then. But the generation of those who are now fifteen will see a communist society, and will itself build this society. This generation should know that the entire purpose of their lives is to build a communist society. In the old society, each family worked separately and labour was not organised by anybody except the landowners and capitalists, who oppressed the masses of the people. We must organise all labour, no matter how toilsome or messy it may be, in such a way that every worker and peasant will be able to say: I am part of the great army of free labour, and shall be able to build up my life without the landowners and capitalists, able to help establish a communist system. The Young Communist League should teach all young 67 people to engage in conscious and disciplined labour from an early age. In this way we can be confident that the problems now confronting us will be solved. . . . Only by regarding your every step from the standpoint of the success of that construction, and only by asking ourselves whether we have done all we can to be united and politically-conscious working people will the Young Communist League succeed in uniting its half a million members into a single army of labour and win universal respect. (Stormy applause.)
Collected Works, Vol. 31, pp. 283--96, 298--99
__ALPHA_LVL2__ LETTER TO M. N. POKROVSKYComrade M. N. Pokrovsky
Comrade M. N.,
I congratulate you very much on your success. 1 was extremely pleased with your new book, Russian History in Brief Outline.'^^1^^'^^1^^ The presentation and approach are original. It reads with tremendous interest. I think it ought to be translated into the European languages.
Let me make a small remark. To turn it into a textbook (and it should become one), it needs to be supplemented with a chronological index. This is what I mean: do it approximately in this way (i) a column of dates; (2) a column of bourgeois assessments (briefly); (3) a column of your, Marxist assessment, with references to the pages of your book.
Pupils should know both your book and the index,
so that there should be no superficiality, so that they
should know the facts, so that they should learn
68
**-*=>*(.
ft. XL
__CAPTION__
Martin Andcrscn-Ncxo's dedication to Krupskaya and Lenin
on a copy of his Pclle Erobreren
[69]
__CAPTION__
A Letter by Lenin to M. N. Pokrovsky
to compare the old science and the new. What's your
opinion about this supplement?
December 5
With communist greetings,
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Yours,
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Lenin
Written on December 5, 1920
Collected, Works, Vol. 36, p. 530
70 __ALPHA_LVL2__ THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY AND THE TASKS(Excerpt)
More than that-it is not enough to abolish literacy, it is necessary to build up Soviet economy, and for that literacy alone will not carry us very far. We must raise culture to a much higher level. A man must make use of his ability to read and write; he must have something to read, he must have newspapers and propaganda pamphlets, which should be properly distributed and reach the people and not get lost in transit, as they do now, so that no more than half of them are read, and the rest are used in offices for some purpose or other. Perhaps not even one-fourth reach the people. We must learn to make full use of the scanty resources we do possess.
That is why we must, in connection with the New Economic Policy, ceaselessly propagate the idea that political education calls for raising the level of culture at all costs. The ability to read and write must be made to serve the purpose of raising the cultural level; the peasants must be able to use the ability to read and write for the improvement of their farms and their state.
Collected Works, Vol. 33, PP- 74--75
__ALPHA_LVL2__ ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MILITANT(Excerpt from the Article)
Engels long ago advised the contemporary leaders of the proletariat to translate the militant atheist literature of the late eighteenth century for mass 71 distribution among the people. We have not done this up to the present, to our shame be it said (this is one of the numerous proofs that it is much easier to seize power in a revolutionary epoch than to know how to use this power properly). Our apathy, inactivity and incompetence are sometimes excused on all sorts of ``lofty'' grounds, as, for example, that the old atheist literature of the eighteenth century is antiquated, unscientific, naive, etc. There is nothing worse than such pseudo-scientific sophistry, which serves as a screen either for pedantry or for a complete misunderstanding of Marxism. There is, of course, much that is unscientific and naive in the atheist writings of the eighteenth-century revolutionaries. But nobody prevents the publishers of these writings from abridging them and providing them with brief postscripts pointing out the progress made by mankind in the scientific criticism of religions since the end of the eighteenth century, mentioning the latest writings on the subject, and so forth. It would be the biggest and most grievous mistake a Marxist could make to think that the millions of the people ( especially the peasants and artisans), who have been condemned by all modern society to darkness, ignorance and superstition, can extricate themselves from this darkness only along the straight line of a purely Marxist education. These masses should be supplied with the most varied atheist propaganda material, they should be made familiar with facts from the most diverse spheres of life, they should be approached in every possible way, so as to interest them, rouse them from their religious torpor, stir them from the most varied angles and by the most varied methods, and so forth.
The keen, vivacious and talented writings of the old eighteenth-century atheists wittily and openly attacked the prevailing clericalism and will very often prove a thousand times more suitable for arousing 72 people from their religious torpor than the dull and dry paraphrases of Marxism, almost completely unillustrated by skilfully selected facts, which predominate in our literature and which (it is no use hiding the fact) frequently distort Marxism. We have translations of all the major works of Marx and Engels. There are absolutely no grounds for fearing that the old atheism and old materialism will remain unsupplemented by the corrections introduced by Marx and Engels. The most important thing-and it is this that is most frequently overlooked by those of our Communists who are supposedly Marxists, but who in fact mutilate Marxism-is to know how to awaken in the still undeveloped masses an intelligent attitude towards religious questions and an intelligent criticism of religions.
On the other hand, take a glance at modern scientific critics of religion. These educated bourgeois writers almost invariably ``supplement'' their own refutations of religious superstitions with arguments which immediately expose them as ideological slaves of the bourgeoisie, as ``graduated flunkeys of clericalism''.
Two examples. Professor R. Y. Wipper published in 1918 a little book entitled Vozniknovenie Khristianstva (The Origin of Christianity-Pharos Publishing House, Moscow). In his account of the principal results of modern science, the author not only refrains from combating the superstitions and deception which are the weapons of the church as a political organisation, not only evades these questions, but makes the simply ridiculous and most reactionary claim that he is above both ``extremes''---the idealist and the materialist. This is toadying to the ruling bourgeoisie, which all over the world devotes to the support of religion hundreds of millions of rubles from the profits squeezed out of the working people. The well-known German scientist, Arthur Drews, 73 while refuting religious superstitions and fables in his book, Die Christusmythe (The Christ Myth), and while showing that Christ never existed, at the end of the book declares in favour of religion, albeit a renovated, purified and more subtle religion, one that would be capable of withstanding ``the daily growing naturalist torrent" (fourth German edition, 1910, p. 238). Here we have an outspoken and deliberate reactionary, who is openly helping the exploiters to replace the old, decayed religious superstitions by new, more odious and vile superstitions.
This does not mean that Drews should not be translated. It means that while in a certain measure effecting an alliance with the progressive section of the bourgeoisie, Communists and all consistent materialists should unflinchingly expose that section when it is guilty of reaction. It means that to shun an alliance with the representatives of the bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century, i.e. the period when it was revolutionary, would be to betray Marxism and materialism; for an ``alliance'' with the Drewses, in one form or another and in one degree or another, is essential for our struggle against the predominating religious obscurantists.
Pod Znamenem Marksizma,^ which sets out to be an organ of militant materialism, should devote much of its space to atheist propaganda, to reviews of the literature on the subject and to correcting the immense shortcomings of our governmental work in this field. It is particularly important to utilise books and pamphlets which contain many concrete facts and comparisons showing how the class interests and class organisations of the modern bourgeoisie are connected with the organisations of religious institutions and religious propaganda.
All material relating to the United States of America, where the official, state connection between religion and capital is less manifest, is extremely 74 important. But, on the other hand, it becomes all the clearer to us that so-called modern democracy (which the Mensheviks, the Socialist-Revolutionaries, partly also the anarchists, etc., so unreasonably worship) is nothing but the freedom to preach whatever is to the advantage of the bourgeoisie, to preach, namely, the most reactionary ideas, religion, obscurantism, defence of the exploiters, etc.
One would like to hope that a journal which sets out to be a militant materialist organ will provide our reading public with reviews of atheist literature, showing for which circle of readers any particular writing might be suitable and in what respect, and mentioning what literature has been published in our country (only decent translations should be given notice, and they are not so many), and what is still to be published.
_ _ _ _ _In addition to the alliance with consistent materialists who do not belong to the Communist Party, of no less and perhaps even of more importance for the work which militant materialism should perform is an alliance with those modern natural scientists who incline towards materialism and are not afraid to defend and preach it as against the modish philosophical wanderings into idealism and scepticism which are prevalent in so-called educated society.
The article by A. Timiryazev on Einstein's theory of relativity published in Pod Znamenem Marksizma No. 1-2 permits us to hope that the journal will succeed in effecting this second alliance too. Greater attention should be paid to it. It should be remembered that the sharp upheaval which modern natural science is undergoing very often gives rise to reactionary philosophical schools and minor schools, trends and minor trends. Unless, therefore, the problems raised by the recent revolution in natural science are followed, and 75 unless natural scientists are enlisted in the work of a philosophical journal, militant materialism can be neither militant nor materialism. Timiryazev was obliged to observe in the first issue of the journal that the theory of Einstein, who, according to Timiryazev, is himself not making any active attack on the foundations of materialism, has already been seized upon by a vast number of bourgeois intellectuals of all countries; it should be noted that this applies not only to Einstein, but to a number, if not to the majority, of the great reformers of natural science since the end of the nineteenth century.
For our attitude towards this phenomenon to be a politically conscious one, it must be realised that no natural science and no materialism can hold its own in the struggle against the onslaught of bourgeois ideas and the restoration of the bourgeois world outlook unless it stands on solid philosophical ground. In order to hold his own in this struggle and carry it to a victorious finish, the natural scientist must be a modern materialist, a conscious adherent of the materialism represented by Marx, i.e., he must be a dialectical materialist. In order to attain this aim, the contributors to Pod Znamenem Marksizma must arrange for the systematic study of Hegelian dialectics from a materialist standpoint, i.e., the dialectics which Marx applied practically in his Capital and in his historical and political works, and applied so successfully that now every day of the awakening to life and struggle of new classes in the East (Japan, India, and China)-i.e., the hundreds of millions of human beings who form the greater part of the world population and whose historical passivity and historical torpor have hitherto conditioned the stagnation and decay of many advanced European countries-every day of the awakening to life of new peoples and new classes serves as a fresh confirmation of Marxism.
76Of course, this study, this interpretation, this propaganda of Hegelian dialectics is extremely difficult, and the first experiments in this direction will undoubtedly be accompanied by errors. But only he who never does anything never makes mistakes. Taking as our basis Marx's method of applying materialistically conceived Hegelian dialectics, we can and should elaborate this dialectics from all aspects, print in the journal excerpts from Hegel's principal works, interpret them materialistically and comment on them with the help of examples of the way Marx applied dialectics, as well as of examples of dialectics in the sphere of economic and political relations, which recent history, especially modern imperialist war and revolution, provides in unusual abundance. In my opinion, the editors and contributors of Pod Znamenem Marksizma should be a kind of ``Society of Materialist Friends of Hegelian Dialectics''. Modern natural scientists (if they know how to seek, and if we learn to help them) will find in the Hegelian dialectics, materialistically interpreted, a series of answers to the philosophical problems which are being raised by the revolution in natural science and which make the intellectual admirers of bourgeois fashion ``stumble'' into reaction.
Unless it sets itself such a task and systematically fulfils it, materialism cannot be militant materialism. It will be not so much the fighter as the fought, to use an expression of Shchedrin's. Without this, eminent natural scientists will as often as hithertd be helpless in making their philosophical deductions and generalisations. For natural science is progressing so fast and is undergoing such a profound revolutionary upheaval in all spheres that it cannot possibly dispense with philosophical deductions.
Pod Znamenem Mar No. 3, March 1922
Signed: N. Lenin
Collected Works, Vol. 33. pp. 229--34
77 __ALPHA_LVL2__ PREFACE TO I. I. STEPANOV'S^^24^^(Excerpt)
I heartily recommend this book by Comrade Stepanov to all Communists.
The author has succeeded in giving a very able exposition of exceedingly difficult and important problems. He did very well in not writing a book for intellectuals (as is the practice among many of us who copy the worst manners of bourgeois writers), but for the working people, for the masses, for rankand-file workers and peasants. To his book the author has appended a list of references for supplementary reading for the benefit of those who may find it difficult to understand some parts of it without further explanation, as well as for the benefit of those who would like to consult the principal works on this subject published in Russia and abroad. Special reference must be made to the beginning of Chapter VI, where the author splendidly outlines the significance of the New Economic Policy, and magnificently answers the ``airy'' scepticism that is displayed in some quarters about the possibility of electrification. This scepticism is usually a cloak to conceal the absence of serious thought on the subject (that is, if it is not a cloak to conceal whiteguard, Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik hostility to all Soviet construction, which, in fact, is sometimes the case).
N. Lenin
March 18, 1922
Collected Works, Vol. 33, pp. 245--46
78
__CAPTION__
Lenin's dedication:
Citizen O. A. Yermansky has written a very good,
useful book: The Taylor System and the Scientific
Organisation of Labour (Gosizdat, 1922). It is a
79
__CAPTION__
Lenin's note to the Rumyantscv Museum Library
revised edition of his book, The Taylor System, which first appeared in 1918. The book has been substantially enlarged; very important supplements have been added: I. ``Productive Labour and Culture''; II. ``The Problem of Fatigue''. One of the most important sections, earlier entitled ``Labour and Leisure'', only 16 pages long, has now been enlarged to 70 pages (Chapter III: ``Human Labour'').
The book gives a detailed exposition of the Taylor system and, this is especially important, both its positive and negative aspects, and also the principal scientific data on the physiological intake and output in the human machine. On the whole the book is quite suitable, I think, as a standard textbook for all trade union schools and for all secondary schools 80 in general. To learn how to work is now the main, the truly national task of the Soviet Republic. Our primary and most important task is to attain universal literacy, but we should in no circumstances limit ourselves to this target. We must at all costs go beyond it and adopt everything that is truly valuable in European and American science.
Citizen Yermansky's book has one serious flaw which may make it unacceptable as a textbook. It is the author's verbosity. He repeats the same thing again and again without any conceivable need. I suppose the author may be vindicated to some extent by the fact that he was not trying to write a textbook. However, he says on p. VIII that he regards the popular exposition of scientific questions as one of the merits of his book. He is right. But popular exposition should also shun repetition. The people have no time to waste on bulky volumes. Without good reason, Citizen Yermansky's book is much too bulky. That is what prevents it from being a popular book.. . .^^*^^
Written after September 10, 1922
Collected Works, Vol. pp. 368--69
__ALPHA_LVL2__ LETTER TO HIS MOTHER^^25^^(Excerpt)
April 17, 1897
Anyuta,
About books-how to send them, see above. What to send? If I get a fee of some 150 rubles^^27^^ (perhaps in three doses, a teaspoonful every hour-every month, _-_-_
^^*^^ Here the manuscript breaks off.---Ed.
__PRINTERS_P_81_COMMENT__ 8-2424 81 that is), then you can spend some on books. Then buy me the last three issues of Promysly Vladimirskoi gubernii (3 rubles 75 kopeks), Vliyaniye urozhayev, etc., by Chuprov and Posnikov (5 rubles), Ukazatel fabrik i zavodov za 1890 god, St. Petersburg, 1894 (5 rubles?). I will give you further titles later-depending on the size of the fee, which need not be sent all at once (to the Schwester, of course). Write and tell the writer^^*^^ that I should be very glad if he would let me have part of my fee, and if he would agree to send me books instead of money -Russian and foreign, some for review and others for myself. He knows the subjects I am interested in and he could send the books to you. I should be glad to take all sor