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 sorts of things for translation and could distribute them among the people in Minusinsk and Turukhansk^^**^^ (not very urgent), taking the organisation of the work upon myself and guaranteeing its timely and correct fulfilment. That, however, is something special, but I should very much like to arrange for the fees to be paid in books-only if that will not be too much trouble for the writer^^***^^ (add this, word for word). I think I shall have to subscribe to journals and
newspapers-there probably will not be anything in
Shushenskoye. Depending on available finances, you
may subscribe to Russkiye Vedomosti,^^23^^ Russkoye
Bogatstvo?® Vestnik Finansov (without any
supplements), Archiv fur soziale Gesetzgebung und
_-_-_
^^*^^ Here and further the ``writer'' (ecrivain) referred to is
P. B. Struve.---Ed. ^^**^^ etc. Fedoseyev^^28^^ has been sent, I have been told, to the
town of Kirensk in Irkutsk Gubernia. ^^***^^ I rely entirely on his choice, and this method of payment
interests me because it is the only way for me to receive
immediately important new publications; the timeliness of
articles and reviews is very important in magazine work. If I
must first find out here and then order by post, the delay
will be five weeks, minimum (!!!).
Send my best regards to the Bulochkins.^^31^^ Why do you not write about them in greater detail? What sort of finale was there? Could there have been none at all? That would be excellent. If opportunity offers, give my regards to other acquaintances, the bookseller and others.
V. U.
I hope you will inform me beforehand when you intend to go to the West, so that I shall have time to write to you and give you many, many things to do for me.
Sent from Krasnoyarsk to Moscow
Collected Works, Vol. 37, pp. 103--04
__ALPHA_LVL2__ LETTER TO HIS MOTHER(Excerpt)
May 25, 1897 Anyuta,
I think I have also written partly about books, especially about Ukazatel fabrik i zavodov, third _-_-_
^^*^^ Grudge, malice (Ft.).-Ed.
^^**^^ It is not known what this refers to.-Ed.
83 edition, St. Petersburg, 1894 (I think it costs 5 rubles) and the book by Chuprov and Posnikov on grain prices. If they have not been sent with the other books (which would be a pity because in that case they will be travelling about three months), then please send them by post as printed matter. These are the books (and also the Yezhegodnik if you managed to find it) that I need more than any others for my work. Please send me direct any particularly interesting new books, so that I shall get them quicker and shall not lag too far behind. By the way, if a report of the Free Economic Society's discussions on grain prices (in connection with the book by Chuprov and Posnikov) has been published, send it to me.I am still thinking about the possibility of using a Moscow library; have you managed to do anything about it, i.e., have you managed to join some public library? If it is possible to take out books for two months (as you can in St. Petersburg at the library of the Free Economic Society) it would not cost very much to send them by post as printed matter (16 kopeks a pound, and you can send 4 pounds for 64 kopeks, and 7 kopeks to register them), so it would probably be more profitable for me to spend money on postage and have a lot of books than to spend much more money on buying a few books. I imagine that it would be much more convenient for me; the only problem is whether you can get books for such a long period (leaving a deposit, of course) from some good library-the University,^^*^^ or the library of the Moscow Bar Association (you must _-_-_
^^*^^ I think it would be easy for Mitya to arrange this either through some law student or by going straight to the professor of political economy and saying that he wishes to work in that field and take books from the central library. The only thing is that he will have to postpone it now till autumn.
84 get information from there, get their catalogue and find out the terms for the acceptance of new members, etc.), or some other. There arc probably a number of good libraries in Moscow. You can even find out about private libraries. If any of you are staying on in Moscow they can probably find out about all this.If you go abroad, write to me and I will send you details of books from there. Send me more catalogues of all kinds of second-hand books, etc. (libraries, bookshops).
Yours,
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ V.U.
Sent from Shushenskoye to Moscow
Collected Works, Vol. 37, pp. 112--15
__ALPHA_LVL2__ LETTER TO HIS MOTHER(Excerpt)
June 8, alten Styls (June 20)
Anyuta,
I think I have already written to you about the journals and newspapers. I am sorry I have not written to Mark. That oversight will probably cause considerable delay.
Send me more ``literary manifestations" of all kinds-at least catalogues and prospectuses to begin with. The best thing is to write everywhere for them so as to obtain as many as possible. I should very much like to get the classics of political economy and philosophy in the original. It would be a good thing 85 to find out the cheapest editions (people edition,^^*^^ etc.), and the prices. You probably will not find very much except at second-hand booksellers'. However, I shall wait until I hear how you have fixed yourselves up and then there will be time enough to write....
Written on June 8, 1897
Sent from Shushenskoye to Switzerland
Collected Works, Vol. 37, P- "7
__ALPHA_LVL2__ LETTER TO HIS MOTHER(Excerpt)
February 7, 1898
Manyasha should send Nadezhda Konstantinovna the list of books I should like to have-she will look for them in St. Petersburg, if, of course, it is not too late by now.
If we have any other children's picture books let N.K. bring them for Prominsky's children.
A. Semyonov. Obzor istoricheskikh svedenii o promyshlennosti i torgovle. Three volumes. An old book, published in the fifties or sixties, or even earlier.
Sbornik svedenii i materialov po vedomstvu Minister stva fmansov. St. Petersburg, 1865, No. 6.
1866, No. 4 and No. 5.
i86j, No. 6 (June) especially.
Materialy po opisaniyu promyslov Vyatskoi gubernii. Five issues. Vyatka, 1880 (Manyasha already has the second issue).
_-_-_^^*^^ Lenin wrote these words in English.-Ed. 86
86Vasilenko. Promysly selskogo naseleniya Poltavskoi gubernii.
Svod svedenii ob ekonomicheskom polozhenii selskogo naseleniya Yevropeiskoi Rossii. St. Petersburg, 1894. Published by the Office of the Committee of Ministers.
Shcherbina. Economicheskiye otnosheniya v raione Vladikavkazskoi zbeleznoi dorogi.
Bezobrazov. Narodnoye khc/zyaistvo Rossii.
Trudy obshchestva selskikh khozyayev yuzhnoi Rossii (those issues for 1895 that carried articles by Mr.?? Perhaps Borinevich?... on suburban farms near Odessa).
Ragozin. Zhelezo i ugol na yuge Rossii.
Mendeleyev. Tolkovy tarif.
Yuridichesky Vestnik, 1887, Nos. n and 12.
Lyudogovsky. . . . (?Osnovy selskokhozyaistvennoi ekonomii'? or something like it. I do not remember the exact title. A book published in the 705.)
Statistical tables compiled in the Statistical Division of the Council of the Ministry of the Interior according to the data of 1849--52.
Statistichesky vremennik Rossiiskoi imperil. Series I, Issue i, St. Petersburg, 1866.
Vremennik Tsentralnogo statisticheskogo komiteta. 1894, No. 34 (average grain and potato harvest for 1882--92).
Vremennik Tsentralnogo statisticheskogo komiteta. 1889, Nos. 10 and 12.
Vremennik Tsentralnogo statisticheskogo komiteta. The issue for 1897 (one of the last issues) which carried the processed data of the army-horse census of I893--94-
(See the catalogue or the list of publications of the Central Statistical Committee.)
Sent from Shushenskoye to Moscow
Collected Works, Vol. 37, pp. I52--54
87 __ALPHA_LVL2__ LETTER TO HIS SISTER MARIA^^32^^Mile Marie Ouljanoff, Rue des Minimes, 40, Bruxelles, Belgique ~
January 24, 1899
I have received the catalogues you sent, Manyasha. A big merci for them. There are some interesting things in them. I intend sending you a list of the books I should like to acquire. Write and tell me if you have become familiar with Brussels in general and with book publishing and bookselling in particular. I should like to read the verbatim reports of some interesting parliamentary discussions. In Paris, for instance, they are to be found in the Journal officlel, each issue of which can also be bought separately, of course. I do not know whether it is obtainable in Brussels. The Belgian government newspaper most probably publishes similar reports too.
Where did you get the English catalogues? Are there English bookshops in Brussels or did you order them from London?
I am now busy with urgent work; there is not much left for me to do to finish my book, and then I shall most likely have to start contributing to the magazines. That is why I am writing very little, especially as Nadya says that she will write in detail about our life here.
If you come across anything in second-hand bookshops on the economics of farming in France, Britain, etc. (farming statistics, enquetes, the reports of British commissions), or on the history of industrial forms (among others, Babbage, Ure-the older writers on 88 this subject), please buy them if the prices are moderate. Have you much work? When are you thinking of coming home?
All the best,
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Yours,
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ V. U.
Sent from Shushenskoye
Collected Works, Vol. 37, pp. 222--23
__ALPHA_LVL2__ LETTER TO A. N. POTRESOV(Excerpt)
January 26, 1899
I have received your letter of December 24. I am very glad that you have at last got rid of your illness, of which rumours had even reached us. I heard of it during the holidays while I was in Minusinsk, and kept thinking where and how I could obtain news of you. (I thought it inconvenient to write to you directly, as you were said to be seriously ill.) Well, you have now revived just in time for a literary undertaking which is also being revived. Of course, you know already about Nachalo, which is to be started in the middle of February.^^33^^ I hope you have now fully recovered-it is already a month since you wrote the last letter-and that you will be able to work. You are probably fairly well provided for in the matter of books and order the chief new ones? If you are not too short of funds for ordering books, I think you can work even in the backwoods-at least I judge by myself, comparing my life in Samara seven years ago, when I was reading almost exclusively other people's books, and now, when I have begun to acquire the habit of ordering books.
Sent from Shushenskoye to Orlov, Vyatka Gubernia
Collected Works, Vol. 34, p. 28
89 __ALPHA_LVL2__ LETTER TO HIS MOTHER(Excerpt)
September 1, 1899
I did not manage to write to you on Sunday, Mother dearest, and am writing in the middle of the week.
Yesterday we received books by Bernstein and Vandervelde^^*^^ and two issues of Moskovskiye Vedomosti-Bernstein was wrapped in one of them-and half another issue (No. 223) came in a separate packet, which surprised us more than a little. Has something been lost, or has there been a mistake?
As regards Bernstein-I have decided that I may consider it mine; Manyasha did not say exactly that she wants it back by a certain date, but wrote that she is taking stops to obtain another copy. I need that book very much. If, contrary to expectations, Manyasha needs the copy she sent me, she should write to me about it immediately.
Nadya and I started reading Bernstein's book immediately; we have read more than a half and its contents astonish us more and more as we go on. It is unbelievably weak theoretically-mere repetition of someone else's ideas. There are phrases about criticism but no attempt at serious, independent criticism. In effect it is opportunism (or rather, Fabianism-the original of many of Bernstein's assertions and ideas is to be found in the Webbs' recent books), unbounded opportunism and possibilism, and cowardly opportunism at that, since Bernstein does not want to attack the programme directly. There is little doubt but what it will be a fiasco. Bernstein's _-_-_
^^*^^ It is not known which of Vandervelde's books is referred to here.-Erf.
90
__CAPTION__
Demyan Bedny's dedication:
__CAPTION__
Cover of Lenin's Left-Wing Communism,
Sent from Shushcnskoye to Podolsk
Collected Works, Vol. 57, pp. 281--82
__ALPHA_LVL2__ LETTER TO HIS SISTER MARIA(Excerpt)
May 19, 1901
How are you? I hope you have got yourself into a more correct regime for that is so important in solitary confinement.^^34^^ I have just written a letter to Mark in which I described in exceptional detail how best to establish a ``regime''; as regards mental work, I particularly recommended translations, especially both ways-fast do a written translation from the foreign language into Russian, then translate it back from Russian into the foreign language. My own experience has taught me that this is the most rational way of learning a language. On the physical side I have strongly recommended him, and I repeat it to you, to do gymnastics every day and rub himself down with a wet towel. In solitary confinement this is absolutely essential.
I saw from one of your letters that Mother sent on to me that you have found some ways of employing your time. I hope this will enable you to forget, even if only occasionally, your surroundings, and _-_-_
^^*^^ Here a letter in invisible ink is meant.-Ed. 93
93 that the passage of time (which usually passes quickly in prison unless conditions are particularly bad) will be even less noticeable. I also advise you to arrange your work on the books you have in such a way as to vary it; I remember quite well that a change of reading or work-from translation to reading, from writing to gymnastics, from serious reading to fiction-helps a great deal. Sometimes a change of mood for the worse-one's mood changes so easily in prison-is due simply to fatigue from monotonous impressions or monotonous work, and a change of occupation is often enough to bring one back to normal and calm one's nerves. I remember that after dinner, for recreation in the evening, I read fiction regelmassig^^*^^, and never enjoyed it anywhere as much as I did in prison. Yours,
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Vlad. Ulyanov
Sent from Munich to Moscow
Collected Works, Vol. 37, pp. 327--28
__ALPHA_LVL2__ PREFACE TO THE RUSSIAN TRANSLATIONOur purpose in issuing as a separate pamphlet the full collection of Marx's letters to Kugelmann published in the German Social-Democratic weekly, Neue Zeit, is to acquaint the Russian public more closely with Marx and Marxism. As was to be expected, a good deal of space in Marx's correspondence is devoted to personal matters. This is exceedingly valuable material for the biographer. But for _-_-_
^^*^^ Regularly (Ger.).-Erf.
94 the general public, and for the Russian working class in particular, those passages in the letters which contain theoretical and political material are infinitely more important. In the revolutionary period we are now passing through, it is particularly instructive for us to make a careful study of this material, which reveals Marx as a man who responded directly to all questions of the labour movement and world politics. The editors of Neue Zeit are quite right in saying that ``we are elevated by an acquaintance with the personality of men whose thoughts and wills took shape in the period of great upheavals''. Such an acquaintance is doubly necessary to the Russian socialist in 1907, for it provides a wealth of very valuable material indicating the direct tasks confronting socialists in every revolution through which a country passes. Russia is experiencing a ``great upheaval" at this very moment. In the present Russian revolution the Social-Democrat should more and more frequently pattern his policy after that of Marx in the comparatively stormy sixties.We shall, therefore, permit ourselves to make only brief mention of those passages in Marx's correspondence that are of particular importance from the theoretical standpoint, and shall deal in greater detail with his revolutionary policy as a representative of the proletariat.
Of outstanding interest as a contribution to a fuller and more profound understanding of Marxism is the letter of July n, 1868 (p. 42, et seq.).^^35^^ In the form of a polemic against the vulgar economists, Marx in this letter very clearly expounds his conception of what is called the ``labour'' theory of value. Those very objections to Marx's theory of value which naturally arise in the minds of the least trained readers of Capital and for this reason are most eagerly seized upon by the common or garden representatives of ``professorial'' bourgeois ``science'', 95 are here analysed by Marx briefly, simply, and with remarkable lucidity. Marx here shows the road he took and the road to be taken towards elucidation of the law of value. He teaches us his method, using the most common objections as illustrations. He makes clear the connection between such a purely (it would seem) theoretical and abstract question as the theory of value and ``the interest of the ruling classes'', which must be ``to perpetuate confusion''. It is only to be hoped that everyone who begins to study Marx and read Capital will read and re-read this letter when studying the first and most difficult chapters of that book.
Other passages in the letters that are very interesting from the theoretical standpoint are those in which Marx passes judgement on various writers. When you read these opinions of Marx-vividly written, full of passion and revealing a profound interest in all the great ideological trends and in an analysis of them-you realise that you are listening to the words of a great thinker. Apart from the remarks on Dietzgen, made in passing, the comments on the Proudhonists^^36^^ (p. 17) deserve particular attention from the reader. The ``brilliant'' young bourgeois intellectuals who dash ``into the thick of the proletariat" at times of social upheaval, and are incapable of acquiring the standpoint of the working class or of carrying on persistent and serious work among the ``rank and file" of the proletarian organisations, are depicted with remarkable vividness in a few strokes of the pen.^^37^^
Take the comment on Duhring (p. 35)^^38^^, which, as it were, anticipates the contents of the famous Anti-Duhring written by Engels (in conjunction with Marx) nine years later. There is a Russian translation of this book by Zederbaum which, unfortunately, is not only guilty of omissions but is simply a poor translation, with mistakes. Here, too, we have 96 the comment on Thiinen, which likewise touches on Ricardo's theory of rent.^^39^^ Marx had already, in 1868, emphatically rejected ``Ricardo's errors'', which he finally refuted in Volume III of Capital, published in 1894, but which to this very day are repeated by the revisionists---from our ultra-bourgeois and even ``Black-Hundred'' Mr. Bulgakov to the ``almost orthodox" Maslov.
Interesting, too, is the comment on Biichner, with an appraisal of vulgar materialism and of the `` superficial nonsense" copied from Lange (the usual source of ``professorial'' bourgeois philosophy!) (p. 48)/<°
Let us pass to Marx's revolutionary policy. There is among Social-Democrats in Russia a surprisingly widespread philistine conception of Marxism, according to which a revolutionary period, with its specific forms of struggle and its special proletarian tasks, is almost an anomaly, while a ``constitution'' and an ``extreme opposition" are the rule. In no other country in the world at this moment is there such a profound revolutionary crisis as in Russiaand in no other country are there ``Marxists'' ( belittlers and vulgarisers of Marxism) who take up such a sceptical and philistine attitude towards the revolution. From the fact that the revolution is bourgeois in content they draw the shallow conclusion that the bourgeoisie is the driving force of the revolution, that the tasks of the proletariat in this revolution are of an ancillary, not independent, character and that proletarian leadership of the revolution is impossible!
How excellently Marx, in his letters to Kugelmann, exposes this shallow interpretation of Marxism! Here is a letter dated April 6, 1866. At that time Marx had finished his principal work. He had given his final judgement on the German Revolution of 1848 fourteen years before this letter was __PRINTERS_P_97_COMMENT__ 7---2424 97 written.^^41^^ He had himself, in 1850, renounced his socialist illusions that a socialist revolution was impending in i848/'^^2^^ And in 1866, when only just beginning to observe the growth of new political crises, he writes:
``Will our philistines [he is referring to the German bourgeois liberals] at last realise that without a revolution which removes the Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns ... there must finally come another Thirty Years' War...!" (pp. I3-I4)/'^^3^^
There is not a shadow of illusion here that the impending revolution (it took place from above, not from below as Marx had expected) would remove the bourgeoisie and capitalism, but a most clear and precise statement that it would remove only the Prussian and Austrian monarchies. And what faith in this bourgeois revolution! What revolutionary passion of a proletarian fighter who realises the vast significance the bourgeois revolution has for the progress of the socialist movement!
Noting ``a very interesting" social movement three years later, on the eve of the downfall of the Napoleonic Empire in France, Marx says in a positive outburst of enthusiasm that ``the Parisians are making a regular study of their recent revolutionary past, in order to prepare themselves for the business of the impending new revolution''. And describing the struggle of classes revealed in this study of the past, Marx concludes (p. 56): ``And so the whole historical witches' cauldron is bubbling. When will our country [Germany] be so far.'"^^14^^
Such is the lesson to be learned from Marx by the Russian Marxist intellectuals, who are debilitated by scepticism, dulled by pedantry, have a penchant for penitent speeches, rapidly tire of the revolution, and yearn, as for a holiday, for the interment of the revolution and its replacement by constitutional prose. From the theoretician and leader of the 98 proletarians they should learn faith in the revolution, the ability to call on the working class to fight for its immediate revolutionary aims to the last, and a firmness of spirit which admits of no faint-hearted whimpering following temporary setbacks of the revolution.
The pedants of Marxism think that this is all ethical twaddle, romanticism, and lack of a sense of reality! No, gentlemen, this is the combination of revolutionary theory and revolutionary policy, without which Marxism becomes Brentanoism/'^^5^^ Struvism and Sombartism/'^^6^^ The Marxian doctrine has fused the theory and practice of the class struggle into one inseparable whole. And he is no Marxist who takes a theory that soberly states the objective situation and distorts it into a justification of the existing order and even goes to the length of trying to adapt himself as quickly as possible to every temporary decline in the revolution, to discard `` revolutionary illusions" as quickly as possible, and to turn to ``realistic'' tinkering.
In times that were most peaceful, seemingly `` idyllic'', as Marx expressed it, and ``wretchedly stagnant" (as Neue Zeit put it), Marx was able to sense the approach of revolution and to rouse the proletariat to a consciousness of its advanced revolutionary tasks. Our Russian intellectuals, who vulgarise Marx in a philistine manner, in the most revolutionary times teach the proletariat a policy of passivity, of submissively ``drifting with the current'', of timidly supporting the most unstable elements of the fashionable liberal party!
Marx's assessment of the Commune crowns the letters to Kugelmann. And this assessment is particularly valuable when compared with the methods of the Russian Right-wing Social-Democrats. Plekhanov, who after December 1905 faint-heartedly exclaimed: ``They should not have taken up arms'', __PRINTERS_P_99_COMMENT__ 7* 99 Emacs-File-stamp: "/home/ysverdlov/leninist.biz/en/1971/LB197/20071113/197.tx" __EMAIL__ webmaster@leninist.biz __OCR__ ABBYY 6 Professional (2007.11.14) __WHERE_PAGE_NUMBERS__ bottom __FOOTNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ [*]+ __ENDNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ [0-9]+ had the modesty to compare himself to Marx. Marx, says he, also put the brakes on the revolution in 1870.
Yes, Marx also put the brakes on the revolution. But see what a gulf lies between Plekhanov and Marx, in Plekhanov's own comparison!
In November 1905, a month before the first revolutionary wave in Russia had reached its climax, Plekhanov, far from emphatically warning the proletariat, spoke directly of the necessity to learn to use arms and to arm. Yet, when the struggle flared up a month later, Plekhanov, without making the slightest attempt to analyse its significance, its role in the general course of events and its connection with previous forms of struggle, hastened to play the part of a penitent intellectual and exclaimed: ``They should not have taken up arms.''
In September iSjo, six months before the Commune, Marx gave a direct warning to the French workers: insurrection would be an act of desperate folly, he said in the well-known Address of the International.^^47^^ He exposed in advance the nationalistic illusions of the possibility of a movement in the spirit of 1792. He was able to say, not after the event, but many months before: ``Don't take up arms.''
And how did he behave when this hopeless cause, as he himself had called it in September, began to take practical shape in March 1871? Did he use it (as Plekhanov did the December events) to ``take a dig" at his enemies, the Proudhonists and Blanquists who were leading the Commune? Did he begin to scold like a schoolmistress, and say: ``I told you so, I warned you; this is what comes of your romanticism, your revolutionary ravings"? Did he preach to the Communards, as Plekhanov did to the December fighters, the sermon of the smug philistine: ``You should not have taken up arms''?
100No. On April 12, 1871, Marx writes an enthusiastic letter to Kugclmann-a letter which we would like to see hung in the home of every Russian Social-Democrat and of every literate Russian worker.
In September 1870 Marx had called the insurrection an act of desperate folly; but in April 1871, when he saw the mass movement of the people, he watched it with the keen attention of a participant in great events marking a step forward in the historic revolutionary movement.
This is an attempt, he says, to smash the bureaucratic military machine, and not simply to transfer it to different hands. And he has words of the highest praise for the ``heroic'' Paris workers led by the Proudhonists and Blanquists. ``What elasticity,'' he writes, ``what historical initiative, what a capacity for sacrifice in these Parisians! ... (p. 88). History has no like example of a like greatness.''
The historical initiative of the masses was what Marx prized above everything else. Ah, if only our Russian Social-Democrats would learn from Marx how to appreciate the historical initiative of the Russian workers and peasants in October and December 1905!
Compare the homage paid to the historical initiative of the masses by a profound thinker, who foresaw failure six months ahead-and the lifeless, soulless, pedantic: ``They should not have taken up arms"! Are these not as far apart as heaven 'and earth?
And like a participant in the mass struggle, to which he reacted with all his characteristic ardour and passion, Marx, then living in exile in London, set to work to criticise the immediate steps of the ``recklessly brave" Parisians who were ``ready to storm heaven''.
Ah, how our present ``realist'' wiseacres among the 101 Marxists, who in 1906--07 are deriding revolutionary romanticism in Russia, would have sneered at Marx at the time! How people would have scoffed at a materialist, an economist, an enemy of Utopias, who pays homage to an ``attempt'' to storm heaven\ What tears, condescending smiles or commiseration these ``men in mufflers" would have bestowed upon him for his rebel tendencies, utopianism, etc., etc., and for his appreciation of a heaven-storming movement!
But Marx was not inspired with the wisdom of the small fry who are afraid to discuss the technique of the higher forms of revolutionary struggle. It is precisely the technical problems of the insurrection that he discussed. Defence or attack?-he asked, as if the military operations were taking place just outside London. And he decided that it must certainly be attack: ``They should have marched at once on Versailles...''.
This was written in April 1871, a few weeks before the great and bloody May....
``They should have marched at once on Versailles''-^ insurgents should, those who had begun the ``act of desperate folly" (September 1870) of storming heaven.
``They should not have taken up arms" in December 1905 in order to oppose by force the first attempts to take away the liberties that had been won....
Yes, Plekhanov had good reason to compare himself to Marx!
``Second mistake,'' Marx said, continuing his technical criticism: ``The Central Committee" (the military command-note this-the reference is to the Central Committee of the National Guard) `` surrendered its power too soon.. .''.
Marx knew how to warn the leaders against a premature rising. But his attitude towards the 102 heaven-storming proletariat was that of a practical adviser, of a participant in the struggle of the masses, who were raising the whole movement to a higher level in spite of the false theories and mistakes of Blanqui and Proudhon.
``However that may be,'' he wrote, ``the present rising in Paris-even if it be crushed by the wolves, swine, and vile curs of the old society-is the most glorious deed of our Party since the June insurrection. .. ,"^^48^^
And, without concealing from the proletariat a single mistake of the Commune, Marx dedicated to this heroic deed a work which to this very day serves as the best guide in the fight for ``heaven'' and as a frightful bugbear to the liberal and radical ``swine''.®
Plekhanov dedicated to the December events a ``work'' which has become practically the bible of the Cadets.
Yes, Plekhanov had good reason to compare himself to Marx.
Kugelmann apparently replied to Marx expressing certain doubts, referring to the hopelessness of the struggle and to realism as opposed to romanticismat any rate, he compared the Commune, an insurrection, to the peaceful demonstration in Paris on June 13, 1849.
Marx immediately (April 17, 1871) severely lectured Kugelmann.
``World history,'' he wrote, ``would indeed be very easy to make, if the struggle were taken up only on condition of infallibly favourable chances."
In September 1870, Marx called the insurrection an act of desperate folly. But, when the masses rose, Marx wanted to march with them, to learn with them in the process of the struggle, and not to give them bureaucratic admonitions. He realised that to attempt in advance to calculate the chances with 103 complete accuracy would be quackery or hopeless pedantry. What he valued above everything else was that the working class heroically and self-- sacrificingly took the initiative in making world history. Marx regarded world history from the standpoint of those who make it without being in a position to calculate the chances infallibly beforehand, and not from the standpoint of an intellectual philistine who moralises: ``It was easy to foresee ... they should not have taken up. ..''.
Marx was also able to appreciate that there are moments in history when a desperate struggle of the masses, even for a hopeless cause, is essential for the further schooling of these masses and their training for the next struggle.
Such a statement of the question is quite incomprehensible and even alien in principle to our present-day quasi-Marxists, who like to take the name of Marx in vain, to borrow only his estimate of the past, and not his ability to make the future. Plekhanov did not even think of it when he set out after December 1905 ``to put the brakes on''.
But it is precisely this question that Marx raised, without in the least forgetting that he himself in September 1870 regarded insurrection as an act of desperate folly.
``... The bourgeois canaille of Versailles,'' he wrote, ``... presented the Parisians with the alternative of either taking up the fight or succumbing without a struggle. The demoralisation of the working class in the latter case would have been a far greater misfortune than the succumbing of any number of `leaders'.''^^50^^
And with this we shall conclude our brief review of the lessons in a policy worthy of the proletariat which Marx teaches in his letters to Kugelmann.
104The working class of Russia has already proved once, and will prove again more than once, that it is capable of ``storming heaven''.
February 5, 1907
Collected Works, Vol. iz, pp. 104--12
__ALPHA_LVL2__ LETTER TO A. V. LUNACHARSKY(Excerpt)
Geneva ~
January 13, 1908
I read your pamphlet about Stuttgart to the end; the third supplement came very late, I barely managed to read it before leaving. I think you made a good job of it, and all the comrades were very pleased with the pamphlet. We all thought it unnecessary to ``correct'' it; it would have been a pity to mar your vivid and lively style. And there is no syndicalism in it; what it does contain, in my opinion, is a number of major indiscretions ``for use by" Plekhanov and Co. Did you see his carping and base cavilling in Obrazovaniye or Sovremenny Mir? We shall always have opponents of this kind and must be triply cautious. Moreover, you also forgot about the Socialist-Revolutionaries, who have for quite some time now been attacking the German SocialDemocrats, making use of the criticism of the syndicalists and distorting this criticism into vituperation against Marxism.
Sent to Italy
Collected Works, Vol. 43, pp. 179--80
105 __ALPHA_LVL2__ LETTER TO B. N. KNIPOVICH(Excerpt)
June 6, 1912
I read your book^^51^^ with great pleasure, and was very glad to see that you had taken up a serious and large-scale work. This work will certainly enable you to test, deepen and consolidate your Marxist convictions.
I will note some ideas which came into my mind when reading it. It seemed to me that here and there, when studying the results of ``differentiation'', departures from the countryside are overlooked. I will make clear what I mean by this example, (a) first aspect: out of 100 households 25 have no horse = 25 per cent, or have no sowings; (b) second aspect: of 150 households 36 have no sowings = 24 per cent. Diminished differentiation, it would seem? But if 30 households or families have left the village for the town, or migrated, etc., then in fact proletarisation has increased. I think this is a typical example. The statistics always consider the households in existence, remaining ``narrowly statistical" and omitting what is sometimes most important.
Then, the author definitely and more than once confines the subject of his research to the tillage aspect. But in his conclusions he imperceptibly extends the theme, speaking of the whole of agriculture and sometimes even of the whole economy. This leads to error, because some aspects of `` differentiation'', i.e., of the proletarisation of the peasants and the genesis of capital, are, as a consequence, lost (for example, commercial stock-breeding in Yaroslavl Gubernia and other forms of penetration of exchange into agriculture, as it becomes specialised).
106Furthermore. Do not the rows of figures sometimes obscure the types, socio-economic types of farmers (substantial bourgeois farmer; middle farmer; semi-proletarian; proletarian)? This danger is very great because of the qualities of statistical material. The ``rows of figures" carry one away. I would advise the author to take this danger into account: our ``socialists of the chair" unquestionably in this way throttle the living Marxist content of data. They drown the class struggle in rows and rows of figures. This does not occur with the author, but in the big work he has undertaken he ought particularly to take account of this danger, this ``line'' of the socialists of the chair, the liberals and the Narodniks. He should take it into account and trim it down, of course.
Lastly, Maslov has appeared as something like a deus ex machina. Cur? Quomodo? Quibus auxiliis?^^*^^ After all, his theory is very remote from Marxism. The Narodniks rightly called him a ``critic'' ( = opportunist). Perhaps the author took him on trust more by chance?
Written in Paris
Collected Works, Vol. 35, pp. 38--39
__ALPHA_LVL2__ LETTER FROM KRUPSKAYA AND LENIN(Excerpt)
December 26
Volodya and I have decided that after the holidays we will begin a study of the local University library, for, to our shame, we have never been there. _-_-_
^^*^^ Why? How? By what means?---Ed.
107 If there is anything we thirst for here it is good literature. Volodya has practically learned Nadson and Nekrasov by heart and an odd volume of Anna Karenina is being read for the hundredth time. We left our literature (a tiny fraction of what we had in St. Petersburg) in Paris and here there isn't a Russian book to be had anywhere. At times we read with envy the advertisements of second-hand booksellers offering 28 volumes of Uspensky or 10 volumes of Pushkin, etc., etc.Written December 26, 1915 Sent from Cracow to Vologda
Collected Works, Vol. 37 pp. 507--08
__ALPHA_LVL2__ BOOK REVIEWThis extremely useful book briefly catalogues the material on labour protection exhibited at the AllRussia Hygiene Exhibition. It contains a vast amount of valuable statistical data on a number of questions affecting the lives of the workers, such as the number of workers employed in various industries, female and child labour, the working day and wages, sanitary conditions and labour protection, sickness and mortality among the workers, alcoholism, workers' insurance, and so on and so forth.
Appended is an excellent index to the literature on labour protection.
The absence, in many cases, of absolute figures (only percentages are given) is a shortcoming of the book, as is the absence of a general subject index that would enable the reader quickly to find the data he needed on different questions.
108It would be desirable to have these faults eliminated in subsequent editions. All who are interested in the labour question, and all trade unions, insurance and other working-class organisations, will undoubtedly avail themselves of this book. Subsequent editions can and should make this book a systematic catalogue of material on questions concerning the conditions and protection of labour in Russia.
Prosveshchcniyc No. January 1914
Signed: V. I.
Collected Works, Vol. 20, p. 89
__ALPHA_LVL2__ LETTER TO INESSA ARMAND(Excerpt)
I have just read, my dear friend,^^*^^ Vinnichenko's new novel which you sent me.^^52^^ There's balderdash and stupidity! To combine together as much as possible of every kind of ``horror'', to collect in one story ``vice'' and ``syphilis'' and romantic crime, with extortion of money by means of blackmail (with the sister of the blackmailed person turned into a mistress), and the trial of the doctor! All this with hysterical outbursts, eccentricities, claims of having one's ``own'' theory of organising prostitutes-----
The review in Rech says that it is an imitation of Dostoyevsky and that there are good parts in it. There is an imitation, in my opinion, and a supremely bad imitation of the supremely bad in Dosto--- yevsky. Of course, in real life there are individual cases of all the ``horrors'' which Vinnichenko describes. But to lump them all together, and in such a way, means laying on the horrors with a trowel, _-_-_
^^*^^ The words ``my dear friend" were written by Lenin in English.-Erf.
109 frightening both one's own imagination and the reader's, ``stunning'' both oneself and the reader.Once I had to spend a night with a sick comrade (delirium trcmens), and once I had to ``talk round" a comrade who had attempted suicide (after the attempt), and who some years later did commit suicide. Both recollections a la Vinnichenko. But in both cases these were small fragments of the lives of both comrades. But this pretentious, crass idiot Vinnichenko, in self-admiration, has from such things compiled a collection that is nothing but horror-a kind of ``twopenny dreadful''. Brrr.... Muck, nonsense, pity I spent so much time reading it....
Written earlier than June 5, 1914
Sent from Poronin to Lovran (Austria-Hungary, now Yugoslavia)
Collected Works, Vol. 35, pp. 144--45
__ALPHA_LVL2__ LETTER TO MAXIM GORKYFor A. M. Gorky ~
Dear Alexei Maximovich,
I am sending you under registered cover my wife's booklet, Public Education and Democracy.^^^53^^
The author has long been studying educational questions, over twenty years. The booklet is Jbased both on her personal observations and on material about new educational developments in Europe and America. From the contents you will see that the first half also contains a sketch of the history of democratic views. This is also very important, because the views of the great democrats of the past are usually set forth wrongly, or from the wrong standpoint. I don't know whether you are able yourself to take time off to read it, or whether you are interested ; §§ 2 and 12 could serve as an example. 110 Changes in education in the latest, imperialist, epoch are sketched out on the basis of material of recent years, and shed some very interesting light on the question for the democrats in Russia.
You will do me a great favour by helping-directly or indirectly-to publish this booklet. The demand in Russia for literature in this sphere has now probably greatly increased.
Best regards and wishes,
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ V. Ulyanov
Wl. Uljanow. Seidenweg. 43. Bern.
Written before February 8, 1916
Sent from Berne to Petrograd
Collected Works, Vol. 36, p. 367
__ALPHA_LVL2__ NOTE TO SECRETARY^^54^^Books and booklets that are completely of the Left-Socialist and Communist trends in all languages, and the most important ones on the results of the war, economics, politics, etc.
Also fiction about the war.
January 2, 1920
Lenin Miscellany XXIV, p. 311
__ALPHA_LVL2__ PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION(Excerpt)
Preface to the English Edition ~
The comrades who intend to publish my pamphlet against Kautsky in English, which has also been 111 published in German,^^1^^'^^6^^ have asked me to write a preface to the English edition.
I would prefer, in lieu of a short preface, to give a detailed analysis of one of the writings of J. Ramsay Macdonald, who, as far as I know, is one of the most influential and widely read of English writers of practically the same Kautskyan trend. Unfortunately, I was unable to obtain Macdonald's book Parliament and Revolution^^^1^^ which has short chapters on Soviet democracy and Soviet suffrage, but the author's Kautskyan point of view is quite clear from his article ``Socialist Review Outlook" published in The Socialist Review, October-December 1919, of which he is the editor. Macdonald is not a Marxist and the Marxist-tinted opportunism characteristic of Kautsky is not typical of England. ...
Written not later than March 1920
Collected Works, Vol. 42, pp. 185--86
__ALPHA_LVL2__ NOTE TO LYDIA FOTIYEVA^^68^^(Excerpt)
Lydia Alexandrovna:
You can congratulate me on my recovery. The proof is my handwriting, which is beginning to look human again. Start preparing books for me (and sending me lists) of i) science, 2) fiction, 3) politics (the latter last of all, because it is not yet allowed)....
Regards,
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Lenin
Written on July 13, 1922
Collected Works, Vol. 45, Letter No. 746
112 __ALPHA_LVL2__ TO THE ``CLART\'E'' GROUP^^59^^November 15, 1922
Dear Friends,
I take this opportunity to send you best greetings. I have been seriously ill, and for over a year I have not been able to see a single one of the productions of your group. I hope that your organisation ``des anciens combattants"^^*^^ still exists and is growing stronger not only numerically, but also spiritually, in the sense of intensifying and spreading the struggle against imperialist war. It is worth devoting one's whole life to the struggle against this kind of war; it is a struggle in which one must be ruthless and chase to the furthermost corners of the earth all the sophistry that is uttered in its defence.
Best greetings.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Yours,
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Lenin
Collected Works, Vol. 33, P- 434
__ALPHA_LVL2__ A CAPABLY WRITTEN LITTLE BOOKA Dozen Knives in the Back of the Revolution, Paris, 1921. This small volume of stories was written by the whiteguard Arkady Averchenko, whose rage rises to the pitch of frenzy. It is interesting to note how his burning hatred brings out the remarkably strong and also the remarkably weak points of this extremely capably written book. When the author takes for his stories subjects he is unfamiliar with, they are inartistic. An example is the story _-_-_
^^*^^ Ex-servicemen---Ed.
__PRINTERS_P_113_COMMENT__ 8---2424 113 showing the home life of Lenin and Trotsky. There is much malice, but little truth in it, my dear Citizen Averchenko! I assure you that Lenin and Trotsky have many faults in all respects, including their home life. But to describe them skilfully one must know what they are. This you do not know.But most of the stories in the book deal with subjects Arkady Averchenko is very familiar with, has experienced, given thought to and felt. He depicts with amazing skill the impressions and moods of the representative of the old, rich, gorging and guzzling Russia of the landowners and capitalists. That is exactly what the revolution must look like to the representatives of the ruling classes. Averchenko's burning hatred makes some-in fact most-of his stories amazingly vivid. There are some really magnificent stories, as, for example, ``Grass Trampled by Jackboots'', which deals with the psychology of children who have lived and are living through the Civil War.
But the author shows real depth of feeling only when he talks about food; when he relates how the rich people fed in old Russia, how they had snacks in Petrograd-no, not in Petrograd, in St. Petersburg -costing fourteen and a half rubles, fifty rubles, etc. He describes all this in really voluptuous terms. These things he knows well; these things he has experienced; here he makes no mistakes. His knowledge of the subject and his sincerity are most extraordinary.
In his last story, ``Fragments of the Shattered'', he describes an ex-Senator in the Crimea, in Sevastopol, who was ``rich, generous and well-connected'', but who is ``now a day labourer at the artillery dumps, unloading and sorting shells'', and an ex-director of a ``vast steel plant which was considered to be the largest works in Vyborg District. Now he is a salesman at a shop which sells second-hand goods on 114 commission, and has lately even acquired a certain amount of experience in fixing the price of ladies' second-hand robes and plush teddy-bears that people bring to be sold on commission.''
The two old fogies recall the old days, the St. Petersburg sunsets, the streets, the theatres and, of course, the meals at the ``Medved'', ``Vienna'', ``Maly Yaroslavets'', and similar restaurants. And they interrupt their reminiscences to exclaim: ``What have we done to deserve this? How did we get in anyone's way? Who did we interfere with?... Why did they treat Russia so?"...
Arkady Averchenko is not the one to understand why. The workers and peasants, however, seem to understand quite easily and need no explanations.
In my opinion some of these stories are worth reprinting. Talent should be encouraged.
Pravda No. 263, November 22, 1921
Signed: N. Lenin
Collected Works, Vol. 33, pp. 125--26
__ALPHA_LVL2__ TO THE DIRECTOR OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM30. Holford Square. Pentonville. W. C.
Sir,
I beg to apply for a ticket of admission to the Reading Room of the British Museum. I came from Russia in order to study the land question. I enclose the reference letter of Mr. Mitchell.
Believe me, Sir, to be yours faithfully
Jacob Ricbter^^60^^
April 21, 1902
Collected Works, jth Russ. ed., Vol. 6, p. 450
115 __ALPHA_LVL2__ WHAT CAN BE DONE FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION^^61^^There are quite a number of rotten prejudices current in the Western countries of which Holy Mother Russia is free. They assume there, for instance, that huge public libraries containing hundreds of thousands and millions of volumes, should certainly not be reserved only for the handful of scholars or would-be scholars that uses them. Over there they have set themselves the strange, incomprehensible and barbaric aim of making these gigantic, boundless libraries available, not to a guild of scholars, professors and other such specialists, but to the masses, to the crowd, to the mob!
What a desecration of the libraries! What an absence of the ``law and order" we are so justly proud of. Instead of regulations, discussed and elaborated by a dozen committees of civil servants inventing hundreds of formalities and obstacles to the use of books, they see to it that even children can make use of the rich collections; that readers can read publicly-owned books at home; they regard as the pride and glory of a public library, not the number of rarities it contains, the number of sixteenthcentury editions or tenth-century manuscripts, but the extent to which books are distributed among the people, the number of new readers enrolled, the speed with which the demand for any book is met, the number of books issued to be read at home, the number of children attracted to reading and to the use of the library.... These queer prejudices are widespread in the Western states, and we must be glad that those who keep watch and ward over us protect us with care and circumspection from the influence of these prejudices, protect our rich public libraries from the mob, from the hoi polloil
I have before me the report of the New York Public Library for 1911.
116That year the Public Library in New York was moved from two old buildings to new premises erected by the city. The total number of books is now about two million. It so happened that the first book asked for when the reading-room opened its doors was in Russi&n. It was a work by N. Grot, The Moral Ideals of Our Times. The request for the book was handed in at eight minutes past nine in the morning. The book was delivered to the reader at nine fifteen.
In the course of the year the library was visited by 1,658,376 people. There were 246,950 readers using the reading-room and they took out 911,891 books.
This, however, is only a small part of the book circulation effected by the library. Only a few people can visit the library. The rational organisation of educational work is measured by the number of books issued to be read at home, by the conveniences available to the majority of the population.
In three boroughs of New York-Manhattan, Bronx and Richmond-the New York Public Library has forty-two branches and will soon have a fortythird (the total population of the three boroughs is almost three million). The aim that is constantly pursued is to have a branch of the Public Library within three-quarters of a verst, i.e., within ten minutes' walk of the house of every inhabitant, the branch library being the centre of all kinds of institutions and establishments for public education.
Almost eight million (7,914,882 volumes) were issued to readers at home, 400,000 more than in 1910. To each hundred members of the population of all ages and both sexes, 267 books were issued for reading at home in the course of the year.
Each of the forty-two branch libraries not only provides for the use of reference books in the building and the issue of books to be read at home, it is 117 also a place for evening lectures, for public meetings and for rational entertainment.
The New York Public Library contains about 15,000 books in oriental languages, about 20,000 in Yiddish and about 16,000 in the Slav languages. In the main reading-room there are about 20,000 books standing on open shelves for general use.
The New York Public Library has opened a special, central, reading-room for children, and similar institutions are gradually being opened at all branches. The librarians do everything for the children's convenience and answer their questions. The number of books children took out to read at home was 2,859,888, slightly under three million (more than a third of the total). The number of children visiting the reading-room was 1,120,915.
As far as losses are concerned-the New York Public Library assesses the number of books lost at 70--80-90 per 100,000 issued to be read at home.
Such is the way things are done in New York. And in Russia?
Collected Works, Vol. 19, PP. 277--79-
__ALPHA_LVL2__ THE TASKS OF THE PUBLIC LIBRARYIt takes knowledge to participate in the revolution with intelligence, purpose and success.
Because tsarism had played havoc with public education over a period of many years, the library service in Petrograd is in a very bad state.
The following changes, based on principles long practised in the free countries of the West, especially Switzerland and the United States, must be made immediately and unconditionally:~
118
-C BHHTOBHOH
iuiyim=
BECbEfOHCK.
MuiHxe B«ieron«oro yeunoro HCHOJIHIIT««K.
1918.
__CAPTION__
Cover of A. Todorsky's A Year with a Gun and a Plough, a
(1) The public library (the former Imperial Library) must immediately start an exchange^ of books with all public and state libraries in Pctrograd and the provinces and with foreign libraries (in Finland, Sweden, etc.}.
(2) The forwarding of books from one library to another must be made post-free by law.
__NOTE__ Good excerpt for a poster:(3) The library's reading-room must be open, as is the practice with private libraries and reading-rooms for the rich in civilised countries,~
~from 8.00 a.m. to n.oo p.m. daily, not excluding Sundays and holidays.
(4) The required personnel must be immediately transferred to the Public Library from the various offices of the Ministry of Education (with more women, in view of the military demand for men), where nine-tenths of the staff are engaged not merely in useless, but in downright harmful work.
Written in November
1917
Collected Works, Vol. 26, P- 352
__ALPHA_LVL2__ TO THE LIBRARY OF THE RUMYANTSEVIf, according to the rules, reference publications are not issued for home use, could not one get them for an evening, for the night, when the Library is closed. 7 will return them by the morning.
For reference for one day:
I. The two best, fullest, dictionaries of the Greek language, Greek-German, -French, -Russian or -English.
II. The best philosophical dictionaries,
dictionaries of philosophical terms: the German, I think, is
E.isler; the English, I think, is Baldwin; the French,
120
__CAPTION__
Copy of N. G. Chernyshevsky's Works, Vol. I, in Lenin's
library in the Kremlin
[121]
I think, is Frank (if there is nothing newer); the
Russian, the latest you have.
III. A history of Greek philosophy
1) Zeller, the complete and latest edition.
2) Gomperz (the Vienna philosopher): Griechische Denker.
Written on September i, 1920
Collected Works, Vol. 35, P- 454
__ALPHA_LVL2__ TO A. K. CHEBOTARYOVA^^64^^January 2, 1896
I have a plan that has occupied my mind ever since I was arrested, and the more I think of it the more interested I become. I have long been engaged on a certain economic problem (on the sale of manufactured goods on the home market). I had gathered some literature on the subject,.drawn up a plan of operations, and had even written something, expecting to publish as a book if the size exceeds that of an article for a journal. I am very anxious not to abandon this work but I am apparently now faced with the alternative-cither write it here or give it up altogether.
I am well aware that the plan to write it here will meet with many serious obstacles. Perhaps, however, it is worth while trying.
Obstacles that one might call ``independent'' will, I think, be removed. Prisoners are allowed to do literary work; I made a special point of asking the prosecutor about this, although I knew beforehand (even convicts in prison are allowed to write). He also confirmed that there is no limit to the number of books I may receive. Books, moreover, may be returned; consequently one can make use of libraries. And so everything is all right from that point of view.
122There are other, more serious obstacles-getting the books. I need a lot of books-I am giving a list below of those which I have in mind at present-and to obtain them will require a considerable amount of trouble. I do not even know whether they can all be obtained. It will probably be all right to count on the library of the Free Economic Society,^^*^^~^^65^^ which allows books to be taken away for two months on payment of a deposit, but that library is not very complete. If it were possible to use (through some writer or professor^^**^^) the University library or the library of the learned committee of the Ministry of Finance, the question of obtaining books would be settled. Some books would have to be bought, of course, and I think I can allot a certain sum for that.
The last and most difficult problem is that of delivering the books. It is not merely a matter of bringing a couple of books or so; at regular intervals, over a lengthy period they will have to be obtained from the libraries, brought here^^***^^ and taken back. That is something I do not yet know how to arrange. Unless it can be done this way- find some door porter or janitor, or a messenger or some boy whom I could pay to go for books. The exchange of books-because of the conditions under which I work and also because of the terms on which books are lent from the library-would, of course, have to be done correctly and punctually, so all that must be arranged.
``Easier said than done".... I have a very strong feeling that this business will not be easy to carry out and that my ``plan'' may turn out to be mere _-_-_
^^*^^ I have taken books from there and left a deposit of 16 rubles.
^^**^^ Lenin had in mind P. B. Struve, A. N. Potresov and their connections.-E^.
^^***^^ I think that once a fortnight would be enough, or perhaps, even, once a month-if a larger number of books were delivered at a time.
123 fantasy. Perhaps you will think it useful to pass this letter on to somebody, to get some advicc-and I will await an answer.The book list is divided into the two parts into which my essay is divided: A. The general theoretical part. This requires fewer books and I hope, at any rate, to write this part, even though it requires greater preparation. B. The application of theoretical postulates to Russian data. This part requires very many books. The chief difficulties will be caused by (i) publications of local authorities-some of them, incidentally, I have; some can be ordered (minor monographs) and some can be obtained through statisticians with whom we are acquainted; (2) government publications-the records made by commissions, the reports and minutes of congresses, etc. This is very important; it is more difficult to get these. Some of them, probably most of them, are in the library of the Free Economic Society.
The list I am appending is a long one, because it is drawn up for work on an extensive scale.^^*^^ If it should turn out that certain books, or certain classes of books, cannot be obtained, I shall have to narrow down the subject somewhat to suit the situation. This is quite possible, especially as concerns the second part.
I have omitted from the list books that are in the library here; those that I have are marked with a cross.
Since I am quoting from memory I may have mixed up some of the titles and in such cases I have placed(?) against them.^^**^^
Sent from the remand prison in St. Petersburg
Collected Works, Vol. 57, pp. 82--84
_-_-_^^*^^ If it is possible to work on this scale, the list will, of course, be considerably extended in the course of the work.
^^**^^ The list of books appended to the. letter has been lost.-Erf.
124 __ALPHA_LVL2__ TO N. A. RUBAKINJanuary 25, 1913
Dear Comrade,
In answer to your request, I am sending you as brief an ``expose'' as possible. If you had not added that ``the history of the polemics" would not be barred from your book, it would have been quite impossible to give an account of Bolshevism.
Moreover, doubt has been aroused in my mind by your sentence: ``/ shall try to make no changes in your account.'' I must lay down as a condition for it being printed that there are to be no changes whatsoever. (As to purely censorship changes we could, of course, come to a special arrangement.)
If it doesn't suit, please return the sheet.
With fraternal greetings,
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ N. Lenin
My address is: Wl. Uljanow. 47. Lubomirskiego. Krakau. Autriche.
Sent to Clarens (Switzerland)
Collected Works, Vol. 35, P- 73
__ALPHA_LVL2__ TO V. V. VOROVSKYOctober 24, 1919
Comrade V. V. Vorovsky
State Publishing House
Having looked through the pamphlet Third International, March 6-j, 1919, brought out by the State Publishing House, Moscow, 1919 (price 8 rubles), 99 pages, I impose a severe reprimand for such a publication, and demand that all members of the collegium of the State Publishing House should read my present letter, and should work out serious 125 measurcs to guarantee that such an outrage is not repeated.
The pamphlet is a horrible piece of work. A slovenly mess. No table of contents. Some idiot or sloven, evidently an illiterate, has lumped together, as though he were drunk, all the ``material'', little articles, speeches, and printed them out of sequence.
No preface, no minutes, no exact text of the decisions, no separation of decisions from speeches, articles, notes, nothing at all! An unheard-of disgrace!
A great historic event has been disgraced by such a pamphlet.
I demand:
(i) Correction by pasting in. (The guilty persons to be sent to prison and obliged to paste in the additions in every copy.)
That I should be informed:
(za) How many copies were printed?
(zb) How many have been sold?
(3) Reprinting in a decent form. Proofs to be shown to me.
(4) Establishment of a rule that one definite person should be responsible for each publication (a register of responsible persons to be started).
(5) Other measures for introducing order; they are to be worked out and sent to me.
V. Ulyanov (Lenin) Chairman, Council of People's Commissars ~
First published in 1935 in Lenin Miscellany XXIV
Collected Works, Vol. 35, pp. 427--28
__ALPHA_LVL2__ LETTER TO THE STATE PUBLISHING HOUSE(Excerpt)
__FIX__ Should "(Excerpt)" be included in title so table-of-contents shows that the whole document is not present?Please inform me (i) whether there exists in the State Publishing House a general practice under which, when any book or pamphlet without 126 exception is published, there is recorded in writing:
(a) the signature of the member of the Board of the Publishing House who is responsible for editorial supervision of the publication in question;
(b) the signature of the actual editor of the text;
(c) the signature of the responsible proof-reader or publisher or printer.
(2) If not, what objections are there to such a system? What are the present means of supervision?...
Written on December 11, 1920
Collected Works, Vol. 35, p. 466
__ALPHA_LVL2__ INSTRUCTIONAssignment: to compile a reading book for peasants and workers within two weeks.
The book must consist of separate, independent leaflets of two to four printed pages (each leaflet comprising a complete whole).
The presentation must be very popular, for the most backward peasant. The number of leaflets-from 50 to 200; 50 for the first printing.
The subject-matter: the creation of Soviet power and its home and foreign policies.
For example: What is Soviet power? How we run the country. The Decree on Land. The Councils of People's Economy. The nationalisation of the factories. Labour discipline. Imperialism. The imperialist war. Secret agreements. How we offered peace. What we are fighting for now. What is communism? The separation of the church from the state. And so on.
One can and must make use of good old leaflets and adapt old articles.
127The reading book must provide material suitable both for reading in public and at home, for reproduction (of individual leaflets) as well as for translation (with minor additions) into other languages.
Written in December 1918
First published June I, 1936 in Pravda No. 149
Collected Works,
5th Russ. ed., Vol. 37, p. 402
(Excerpt)
In view of Academician I. P. Pavlov's outstanding scientific services, which are of tremendous importance to the working people of the world, the Council of People's Commissars decrees:
.. .2. To authorise the State Publishers to print, in the best printing-house, a de luxe edition of the scientific work prepared by Academician Pavlov, summing up the results of his research over the past twenty years, leaving to Academician I. P. Pavlov the right of property in this work in Russia and abroad.
Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars V. Ulyanov (Lenin)
Moscow, the Kremlin January 24, 1921
Collected Works, Vol. 32, p. 69
[128] __ALPHA_LVL1__ BOOKS IN LENIN'S LIFE __ALPHA_LVL2__ [introduction.] [129] ~ [130]An extremely varied and extensive literature of recollections of Lenin now exists. Many reminiscences describe Lenin the writer of truly outstanding Marxist works, Lenin as research worker, as editor of Party literature, and as critic and reader. The reminiscences of contemporaries published here show what an exceedingly important part books played in Lenin's life and work. The titles themselves-``Lenin and Chernyshevsky'', ``How Lenin Approached the Study of Marx'', ``Ilyich's Favourite Books" and so on-indicate the unusual scope of Lenin's interest in books.
The testimonies of contemporaries give flesh and bones, as it were, to Lenin's own writings included in the first part of this volume and help one to grasp their full meaning. It is for this reason that they are so valuable.
Cuts have been made in the reminiscences where they do not relate directly to the subject of this collection. However at the end of each item the source is given so that the reader can, if he wishes, find the complete text.
__PRINTERS_P_131_COMMENT__ 9* [131] __ALPHA_LVL2__ Nadezhda Krupskaya^^66^^Comrades, I want to say a few words about the influence which Chernyshevsky had on Vladimir Ilyich. Vladimir Ilyich never made direct mention of this influence in his articles or books, but every time he spoke of Chernyshevsky a note of excitement used to come into his voice. Looking through his works one notices that the passages where he mentions Chernyshevsky are written with particular fervour. There is an indirect indication of Chernyshevsky's influence in Lenin's pamphlet What Is To Be Done? Speaking of the period preceding the formation of the party, that is the period between 1894 and 1898, when the workers' movement was beginning to develop rapidly and assumed a mass character, Lenin says that the young people who had joined this movement had been brought up and their ideas had developed under the spell of the revolutionary activity of former revolutionaries, and that it had cost them a great inner battle to free themselves from this influence and embark on a different road, the road of Marxism. This statement has its autobiographical basis.
As a personality, Chernyshevsky impressed Vladimir Ilyich with his irreconcilability, his staunchness, and the dignity and pride with which he endured the unbelievable hardships allotted him by fate. And 132 everything Vladimir Ilyich says of Chernyshevsky is imbued with deep respect for his memory. When times were hard and difficult moments had to be weathered in Party work, Vladimir Ilyich often used to quote Chernyshevsky's words, ``revolutionary struggle is not the pavement of Nevsky Prospekt''. Vladimir Ilyich wrote about this in 1907 during a period of particularly oppressive reaction when the Party was forced to retreat. He recalled Chernyshevsky's words again in 1918 when the difficulties confronting Soviet power reached unprecedented heights, when we were compelled to conclude the Brest-Litovsk treaty and fight the Civil War.
He drew strength from Chernyshevsky's example, and reiterated that a revolutionary Marxist had to be always prepared for any contingency.
But Chernyshevsky's influence on Vladimir Ilyich was not merely confined to his personality. If we glance through Vladimir Ilyich's first illegal work What the ``Friends of the People" Are..., we can see Chernyshevsky's influence with particular clarity. The generation of whom Vladimir Ilyich was speaking, the youth that had joined the revolutionary Social-Democrats in 1894, had grown up in an atmosphere, where-in literature and elsewhere-the peasant reform was being eulogised on all sides. Chernyshevsky, however, evaluated it correctly. And Vladimir Ilyich pointed out that one had to be a genius in the full sense of the word to come to such an evaluation of liberalism at the very time of the peasant reforms and to expose the treacherous role of this liberalism and its class essence.
If we look at Lenin's subsequent activity, we can see that Chernyshevsky had infected him with his uncompromising attitude to liberalism. A marked distrust of liberal phrases and of the liberal position in general permeates the whole of Lenin's work. If we take his Siberian exile, his protest against the 133 ``Credo'', his break with Struvc, and the uncompromising stand which he adopted towards the Cadets and the Menshevik liquidators who were prepared to make a deal with the Cadets-we shall see that Vladimir Ilyich pursued the same uncompromising line as Chernyshevsky had done in his attitude to the liberals who betrayed the peasantry at the time of the 1861 reform. If we seek to draw useful conclusions from Lenin's activity at this period and from this uncompromising stand of his, we shall see that it was thanks to this uncompromising stand taken up by the party that it managed to win the political struggle. The attitude to the liberal bourgeoisie is a question which is inextricably linked with the question of democracy. In his What the ``Friends of the People" Are..., etc. Lenin wrote: ``In Chernyshevsky's epoch the struggle for democracy and the struggle for socialism merged in one inseparable whole.'' In his appraisal of bourgeois-liberal democracy and the democracy of the bourgeois-influenced Narodniks of the eighties, who by then had reconciled themselves to tsarism, Lenin counterposed to these the democracy of revolutionary Marxism. Chernyshevsky had provided an example of uncompromising struggle against the existing system, a struggle in which democracy was indissolubly linked with the struggle for socialism.
Lenin thought highly of Chernyshevsky's activity and of his genuine democracy, which he regarded to be in keeping with the Marxist attitude towards the masses. Marxist teaching did not merely light the way for the struggle on economic grounds waged between the working class and the capitalists, but it embraced the struggle as a whole and in all its manifestations; it elucidated the whole capitalist system, analysed it and at the same time showed how to link the struggle for democracy with the struggle for socialism. Let us recollect how Marx fought Lassalle, 134 what this struggle was about, and how Marx was infuriated by Lassalle's refusal to appreciate the importance of the independent revolutionary activity of the masses, and we shall understand the socialist essence of revolutionary Marxism. The so-called ``legal Marxists'', for instance, utterly failed to understand it, forgetting all the time that Marx always focussed his attention on the working class and on the masses. In Marxism, democracy and the struggle for socialism are inseparably linked together. Neither is it accidental that, whenever Vladimir Ilyich touched upon problems of democracy, he invariably recalled Chernyshevsky, from whom he had first learnt that the struggle for democracy had to be linked with the struggle for socialism. If we examine his teaching on Soviets and Soviet power, we shall see that it is in this very context that the fusion of the struggle for democracy with the struggle for socialism is best realised and receives its fullest reflection. I remember that in 1918, as I was preparing to write a popular pamphlet on Soviets and Soviet power, Vladimir Ilyich brought me a clipping from the French newspaper l'Humanite-I have forgotten the name of the French comrade who had written the article-but in this clipping was written that Soviet power was the most profoundly and consistently democratic power. Vladimir Ilyich told me, as he handed me the clipping, to give particular stress to this fact and to reveal in detail the nature of this genuine democracy which is embodied in the basic structure of Soviet power under which the proletariat is working towards a new and broader democracy.
Marx's writings were translated into Russian as far back as the i86os, but they also had to be translated into the language of Russian facts. And this Lenin did in his book The Development of Capitalism in Russia.... He mentioned several times how 135 well Chernyshevsky was acquainted with Russian reality and how well he knew the facts concerning the redemption of serfs, etc.
In the early stages of his revolutionary career, Vladimir Ilyich did not pay so much attention to Chernyshevsky's philosophical ideas, although he had read Plekhanov's book About Chernyshevsky where particular attention is paid to this aspect of his writings, but at the time he was not so interested in this question. It was only in 1908 when a wide struggle was launched on the philosophical front that he reread Chernyshevsky once again and referred to him as a great Russian Hegelian and a great Russian materialist. And then in 1914, when owing to the imminence of war the national question assumed urgent importance, Vladimir Ilyich in his article ``On National Self-Determination"^^*^^ firmly underlined the fact that Chernyshevsky, like Marx, had understood the full significance of the Polish insurrection.
... In Siberia Vladimir Ilyich kept an album containing photographs of those writers who exerted a particularly strong influence on him. These included pictures of Marx, Engels, Herzen, Pisarev, and two of Chernyshevsky. He also kept a photograph of Myshkin who had attempted to free Chernyshevsky. And then later, in the Kremlin, he had a complete collection of Chernyshevsky's works among the authors always at hand in his study, standing on the shelves next to the works of Marx, Engels and Plekhanov. In his spare moments he used to read Chernyshevsky over and over again.
There is another detail I would like to mention. In his book What the ``Friends of the People" Are Vladimir Ilyich points out how right Kautsky was in saying that Chernyshevsky lived in an epoch when _-_-_
^^*^^ The title of Lenin's article is ``The Right of Nations to Self-Determination".-Erf.
136 every socialist was a poet and every poet a socialist. Vladimir Ilyich read fiction, studied it and enjoyed it. But there was one thing about his reading-for him an author's social attitudes and artistic representation of reality merged into one. He did not separate the two somehow, and just as Chernyshevsky liked to express his ideas in detail in his novels, so Vladimir Ilyich liked books which vividly reflected social ideas and he chose his fiction accordingly.This is all I wanted to say on this subject. The little I have said does not include personal recollections. I do not remember any conversations on the subject. One forgets many things with the years, for after all something new happens every day, and one only remembers scraps of conversation, isolated moments and even then often not the exact words. But I think that in Vladimir Ilyich's works, articles and pamphlets the tremendous influence which Chernyshevsky exerted on him is sufficiently clear for us all to appreciate.
V. I. Lenin on Literature and Art, Moscow, 1967, pp. 239--43
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Nadezhda KrupskayaLenin had a perfect knowledge of Marx. When he came to Petersburg in 1893, we, the Marxists of that time, were amazed at how much he knew of Marx's and Engels's works.
In the nineties, when Marxist circles were just beginning to be organised, everybody studied mainly the first volume of Capital. It was very hard, but 137 possible, to get Capital. But as for Marx's other works, things were rather bad. Most members of our circle had never even seen The Communist Manifesto. I, for instance, first had a chance to read it in 1898, in German, in exile.
There was a strict ban on Marx and Engels. It is enough to say that in 1897 Lenin was compelled to avoid the words ``Marx'' and ``Marxism'' and to make only allegorical reference to Marx in his article ``A Characterisation of Economic Romanticism'', which he wrote for Novoye Slovo (New Word), in order not to endanger the magazine.
Lenin knew French and German and tried to obtain all he could of Marx and Engels in these languages. Anna Ilyinichna (his sister-fi^.) has told us how Lenin read The Poverty of Philosophy in French together with his sister Olga. But he had to read mostly in German. He translated into Russian for himself any very important passages of Marx and Engels that interested him.
Lenin's first major work, What ``The Friends of the People" Are and How They Fight the SocialDemocrats, published by him illegally in 1894, contains references to The Communist Manifesto, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, The Poverty of Philosophy, The German Ideology, a letter of Marx to Arnold Ruge dated 1843, and Engels's books Anti-Duhring and The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
The Friends of the People did much to extend the Marxist outlook of most of the Marxists of those days, who still had little knowledge of Marx's works; it threw new light on many questions and therefore enjoyed great success.
Lenin's next work, The Economic Content of Narodism and Its Critique in Mr. Struve's Book, contains references to The Eighteenth Brumaire, The Civil War in France, Critique of the Gotha 138 Programme and to the second and third volumes of Capital.
Life in emigration in later years enabled Lenin to make a thorough study and so acquire a complete knowledge of all the works of Marx and Engels.
The biography of Marx which Lenin wrote in 1914 for Granat's Encyclopedic Dictionary illustrates extremely well Ilyich's splendid knowledge of Marx.
The innumerable extracts from Marx which Lenin constantly made when reading his works also show this. The Institute of Marxism-Leninism keeps many notebooks containing Vladimir Ilyich's quotations from Marx.
Lenin used these quotations in his work, re-read them and made his own marks on them. But Lenin not only knew Marx, he thought deeply about the whole of his teaching. Speaking at the Third AllRussia Congress of the Komsomol in 1920, Lenin advised young people 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 yourself have thought over, something that will embody conclusions inevitable from the standpoint of present-day education''. ``If a Communist took it into his head to boast about his communism because of the cut-and-dried conclusions he 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.''
And this brings us to the question: How did Lenin approach the study of Marx? One can see the answer to it from the above words of his: it is essential to make Marx's method clear to oneself and to learn from him how to study the specific features of the working-class movement in 139 particular countries. This was what Lenin did. For him Marx's theory was not a dogma but a guide to action. Once he happened to say: ``Anybody who wants Marx's advice. ..'' This was characteristic of him. He always ``consulted'' Marx. At the most difficult moments, at the turning-points of the revolution, he would take up the re-reading of Marx. When you entered his study you could see everyone around him in a state of agitation while Ilyich would be reading Marx and be so absorbed that he had to make an effort to tear himself away. Ilyich did not plunge into reading Marx so as to soothe his nerves or for the purpose of arming himself with faith in the strength of the working class and in its final victory-he possessed enough of this faith himself-but for the sole purpose of `` consulting'' Marx and finding the answers to the current questions of the labour movement. In his article ``Franz Mehring on the Second Duma" Lenin wrote: ``The arguments of such people are based on ill-chosen quotations, they take generalisations on support for the big bourgeoisie against the reactionary petty bourgeoisie and apply them uncritically to the Russian Cadets and the Russian revolution.
``Mehring provides such people with a good lesson. Anybody who wants Marx's advice (my italics-N.K.) on the tasks of the proletariat in the bourgeois revolution should take precisely his statements concerning the epoch of the German bourgeois revolution. It is not for nothing that our Mensheviks so timidly avoid those statements. In them we see the most complete and most clear expression of that ruthless struggle against the bourgeois conciliators that our Russian `Bolsheviks' arc conducting in the Russian revolution.''
To select those of Marx's works that were devoted to the analysis of similar situations, to make a thorough study of them and to compare them to 140 the situation through which we were living in order to bring out the similarities and the differencesthat was Lenin's method. How he applied it to the 1905--1907 Revolution is a perfect illustration of the way he worked. . ..
Of special interest are Vladimir Ilyich's articles of 1907 on Marx's correspondence and work. These are: ``Preface to the Russian Translation of Karl Marx's Letters to Dr. Kugelmann" (Vol. 12, pp. 104--112), ``Franz Mehring on the Second Duma" (Vol. 12, pp. 383--89) and ``Preface to F. A. Sorge's Correspondence" (Vol. 12, pp. 359--78). These articles convey a particularly good idea of Lenin's method of studying Marx, especially the last one. This was written when Lenin was immersed in an intensive study of philosophy in connection with his differences of opinion with Bogdanov and his attention was concentrated on the problems of dialectical materialism.
In his simultaneous study of Marx's statements on questions similar to those that the defeat of the revolution in this country had given rise to, and of the questions of dialectical and historical materialism, Lenin learned from Marx how to apply the method of dialectical materialism to the study of historical development. He wrote in his ``Preface to F. A. Sorge's Correspondence": ``It is highly instructive to compare what Marx and Engels said of the British, American and German working-class movements. Such comparison acquires all the greater importance when we remember that Germany on the one hand, and Britain and America on the other, represent different stages of capitalist development and different forms of domination of the bourgeoisie, as a class, over the entire political life of those countries. From the scientific point of view, we have here a sample of materialist dialectics, the ability to bring to the forefront and stress the 141 various points, the various aspects of the problem, in application to the specific features of different political and economic conditions. From the point of view of the practical policy and tactics of the workers' party, we have here a sample of the way in which the creators of The Communist Manifesto defined the tasks of the fighting proletariat in accordance with the different stages of the national working-class movements in the different countries.''
The 1905 Revolution advanced lor vnmediate solution a great number of new and urgent issues, and it was in order to solve these that Lenin gave even deeper thought to Marx's works. Lenin's method of studying Marx (a truly Marxist one) was thus forged in the fire of revolution.
His method of studying Marx armed Lenin for the struggle against the distortions of Marxism and the attempts to strip away its revolutionary content. We know what a tremendous role Lenin's book The State and Revolution played in the organisation of the October Revolution and in establishing Soviet power. This book is based entirely on his profound study of Marx's revolutionary teachings on the state.
Let us quote the first page of The State and Revolution:
``What is now happening to Marx's theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonise them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the `consolation' of the oppressed 142 classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarising it. Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labour movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism. They omit, obscure or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now ``Marxists' (don't laugh!). And more and more frequently German bourgeois scholars, only yesterday specialists in annihilation of Marxism, are speaking of the ' nationalGerman' Marx, who, they claim, educated the labour unions which are so splendidly organised for the purpose of waging a predatory war!
``In these circumstances, in view of an unprecedentcdly widespread distortion of Marxism, our prime task is to re-establish what Marx really taught on the subject of the state.''
Marx and Engels wrote that their teaching was ``not a dogma but a guide to action'', and Lenin never tired of repeating these words of theirs. It was because of the way he studied the works of Marx and Engels and the practical work of the revolutionary movement-and of the whole atmosphere of the era of proletarian revolution-that Lenin was able to turn Marx's truly revolutionary theory into a real guide to action.
I shall dwell on one more essential point. Not long ago we celebrated the fifteenth year of the existence of Soviet power. In this connection we recalled how the seizure of power was organised in 1917. It did not happen spontaneously, but was deeply thought out beforehand by Lenin, guided by Marx's direct instructions on how to organise an uprising.
The October Revolution, having transferred 143 power to the proletariat, radically changed all the conditions of the struggle, but it was due to the fact that Lenin was not guided by the letter but by the revolutionary essence of the works of Marx and Engels that he was also able to apply Marxism to socialist construction in the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
I have mentioned only a few things. It is necessary to do an enormous amount of research to discover everything Lenin gleaned from Marx and to examine his method of doing so-and at what time and in connection with which task of the revolutionary movement.
I have not even touched on such important matters as the national question, imperialism, and so on. The publication of Lenin's Collected Works and the Lenin collections will make research work easier. The way Lenin studied Marx at all the stages of the revolutionary struggle, from beginning to end, will promote our better, deeper understanding not only of Marx but of Lenin hi/nself, his method of study and his method of putting Marx's teaching into practice.
One should also mention the very important fact that Lenin's study of Marx was not confined to the writings of Marx and of Engels, but extended to what had been written about Marx by his ``critics''. He also studied the way Marx had arrived at this or that view and read the books which had awakened Marx's own thoughts and directed them along the path they took. He studied, if one may say so, the sources of the Marxist outlook, what was taken by Marx, and how, from this or that author. . . .
Budem uchitsa rabotat u Lcnina (We Shall Learn from Lenin How to Work), Moscow, Partizdat, 1933, pp. 17--36
144 __ALPHA_LVL2__ Nadezhda KrupskayaLenin spent a great deal of his time in libraries. When he lived in Samara he borrowed very many books from the local library. And when he came to Petersburg he spent whole days in the Public Library and also borrowed books from the Library of the Free Economic Society and from a number of other libraries. Even when he was in prison his sister used to take library books to him. He wrote out quotations from these books. In Volume 3 of the second edition of Lenin's Collected Works, it is stated that he had to use 583 books in order to write The Development of Capitalism in Russia, which contains many references to these books. Was Lenin able to buy all those books for himself? Many of them had never been on sale-the Zemstvo collections of statistics for instance, which were of particular value to Lenin. But on top of that, Lenin lived like a student in those days, in a small room, spending only half-kopeks on himself. He could not afford the money-at least a thousand rubles-to buy all these books, and he had no time to run around book shops looking for them, as this would have left no time to read them-and without the library catalogues he would never have known of the existence of many of them, anyway. And, finally, he had no room to keep so many books. Reading them enabled Lenin not only to write such a big and important work as The Development of Capitalism in Russia but, at the same time, he acquired a wonderful knowledge of the life of workers and peasants at that time. And without this he would not have made of himself the Lenin we all know. The Development of Capitalism in Russia was published in 1899.
__PRINTERS_P_145_COMMENT__ 10---2424 145While abroad Lenin made even greater use of libraries. He knew foreign languages and read a mass of books written in these languages. He would never have been able to purchase them, for when we were in emigration we had to count every kopek, to save money for tram fares, for food, etc. But without reading books and foreign newspapers and magazines Ilyich would not have been able to carry on with the work he was doing and he would never have possessed the knowledge with which he was so well armed. . . .
Though Lenin worked an enormous amount in libraries when in emigration, this was reflected only to an insignificant extent in his letters to his relatives. When we lived in London in 1902--1903 Vladimir Ilyich spent half his time in the British Museum, where there is the richest library in the world, with splendid service. Ilyich also made ample use of London's reading-rooms, as can be seen from his letter to his mother dated October 27, 1902.
There are a lot of reading-rooms in London-- oneroom places which you enter straight from the street with nothing to sit on, only reading stands and newspapers fixed to wooden rods. You go in, take a newspaper fixed to a rod and replace it after reading. The reading-rooms of this kind are very convenient and are well attended all day long.
During our second emigration, when disputes on philosophical questions ran high and Vladimir Ilyich sat down to write his book Materialism and Empiric-criticism, he left Geneva for London in May 1908, where he stayed over a month specially to work in the British Museum.
In Geneva, where we arrived in 1903, Ilyich used to spend entire days at the Reading Society (Societe de Lecture), which possessed a vast library and wonderful working conditions, and subscribed 146 to a mass of newspapers and magazines in French, German and English. This library was very comfortable for studying. The Society's members were mostly aged professors who seldom visited the library, so Ilyich had the whole study at his disposal, where he was able to write, walk up and down, think over his articles and take any book from the shelves.
While in Geneva Ilyich also took full advantage of the big Kuklin Russian Library there managed by Comrade Karpinsky. Later, when living in other cities, he ordered books from this library by post.
When in Paris Ilyich used mainly the National Library (Bibliotheque Nationale). I wrote to his mother in December 1909 about his work in the library: ``For over a week now he has been getting up at eight o'clock in the morning to go to the library, he returns from there at 2 o'clock. At first he found it difficult to get up so early, but now he is very satisfied and has begun to go to bed early.''
Lenin went to look at a number of other libraries in Paris besides the National Library but they didn't satisfy him very much. There were no catalogues in the National Library covering recent years, and the book-lending service involved a lot of bureaucracy. French libraries are extremely bureaucratic. The district libraries in the city contained almost nothing but fiction and in order to obtain the right to borrow even these books you had to produce a certificate from your landlord, who was to be responsible for the punctual return of books borrowed by his tenant. Our landlord was very slow in giving us such a certificate because of our poor furniture.
Lenin used to judge the general cultural standards of a country by the state of its library service. This is what he wrote from Cracow to his mother on April 22, 1914:
``Paris is an inconvenient place to work in, the __PRINTERS_P_147_COMMENT__ 10* 147 Bibliotheque Nationale is badly organised---we often thought of Geneva, where work went better, the library was convenient, and life was less nerveracking and time-wasting. Of all the places I have been in my wanderings I would select London or Geneva, if those two places were not so far away. Geneva is particularly fine for its general cultural level and the conveniences that make life easier. Here, of course, there can be no talk of culture-it is almost the same as Russia-the library is a bad one and extremely inconvenient, although I scarcely even have to go there. . . .''
When we moved to Berne from Cracow, Ilyich wrote to Maria Ilyinichna on December 22, 1914: ``The libraries here are good, and I have made quite decent arrangements as far as the use of books is concerned. It is even pleasant to read after my daily newspaper work. There is a pedagogical library here for Nadya and she is writing something on pedagogy. . . .''
Vladimir Ilyich wrote to Maria Ilyinichna on February 20, 1916:
``Nadya and I are very pleased with Zurich, there are good libraries here. ..''; and to his mother on March 12, 1916: ``We are now living in Zurich. We came here to work in the libraries. We like the lake here very much and the libraries are much better than those in Berne, so we shall probably stay here longer than we had intended.''
And then, again, he repeats in his letter to Maria Ilyinichna on October 22: ``... the libraries in Zurich are better and it is more convenient to work.''
The Swiss library service is excellent. Especially the inter-library book exchange. The scientific libraries of German Switzerland have got connections with German libraries and Vladimir Ilyich succeeded in getting books he needed from 148 Germany through the library even during the war. Another thing is the wonderful care shown for readers-the absence of any bureaucracy, perfectly compiled catalogues, open shelves, and the solicitous attention of the staff.
In the summer of 1915 we lived up in the mountains-at the foot of the Rothorn-in an exceedingly remote village, and used to receive books by post free of charge. The books were sent in a folded file with an inscribed tag attached, on one side of which was the address of the addressee and on the other the library's address. To return the book one had merely to turn the tag over and take it to the post office.
Vladimir Ilyich praised Swiss culture to the skies and dreamed of how the library service in Russia would be arranged after the Revolution.
Vospominaniya rodnykh o V. I. Lenine (Reminiscences of Lenin by His Relatives), Gospolitizdat, 1955, pp. 198-- 207
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Nadezhda Krupskaya(Excerpt)
The comrade who first introduced me to Ilyich told me that he was a man of scientific bent, that he read scientific books exclusively, that he had never read a novel and never read poetry. This surprised me. I myself in my youth had read all the classics; I knew practically the whole of Lermontov by heart, and such writers as Chernyshevsky, Lev Tolstoi and Uspensky had, somehow, become 149 part of my life. It seemed strange to me that here was a man not the least bit interested in all that.
Afterwards, when in the course of work I became better acquainted with Ilyich, knew how he appraised people, and observed how closely he studied life and people, then the living Ilyich displaced the image of the man who had never read a book dealing with the life of the people.
It so happened that the complications of life prevented us from discussing this subject. It was only later, during our exile in Siberia, that I learned that Ilyich knew the classics as well as I did, and had not only read, but had re-read Turgenev, for instance. I brought with me to Siberia books by Pushkin, Lermontov and Nekrasov. Ilyich arranged them near his bed, alongside Hegel, and read them over and over again in the evenings. Pushkin was his favourite. But it was not only the style that he liked. For example, he was very fond of Chernyshevsky's What Is To Be Done? despite the fact that its style is somewhat naive. I was surprised when I saw how attentively he read this book and how he noticed its finest points. Incidentally, he was very fond of Chernyshevsky, and his Siberian album contained two photographs of this writer, on one of which he had written the dates of the writer's birth and death. This album also contained a photograph of Emile Zola and of Russian writers, Herzen and Pisarev. At one time Ilyich was very fond of Pisarev and read many of his works. In Siberia we also had a copy of Goethe's Faust, and a volume of Heine's poems, both in German.
Upon returning to Moscow from exile Ilyich went to the theatre to see Der Kutscber Hanschel. He said afterwards that he had greatly enjoyed it.
Among the books he liked while in Munich I remember Gerhardt's Bei Mama, and Buttnerbauer by Polenz.
150Afterwards, during our second emigration in Paris, Ilyich found pleasure in reading Victor Hugo's Chatiinents, dealing with the 1848 Revolution; Hugo wrote it while abroad, and copies were smuggled into France. Although there is a naive pomposity in this verse, one feels, nevertheless, the breath of revolution. Ilyich eagerly frequented the cafes, and the suburban theatres in Paris to hear the revolutionary chansonniers, who, in the workingclass districts, sang about everything-about how intoxicated peasants elected a travelling agitator to the Chamber of Deputies, about the bringing up of children, unemployment and so on. Ilyich was particularly fond of Montegus. The son of a Paris Communard, he was a great favourite in the working-class districts. True, in his improvised songsrichly garnished with the flavour of life-there was no definite ideology of any kind, but there was much in them that appealed. Ilyich often hummed his Greeting to the ijth Regiment, which had refused to fire on strikers: ``Salut, salut a vous, soldats du ly-me.'' We had the services of a French charwoman a couple of hours a day. Once Ilyich heard her singing a song about Alsace. He asked her to sing it over again and, afterwards, upon memorising the words, he often sang it himself. The song ended with the words:
Vous avez pris I'Alsace et la Lorraine. Mais malgre vous nous resterons frangais, Vous avez pti germaniser nos plaines, Mais notre cocur-vous ne I'aurez jamais!
(``You have seized Alsace and Lorraine, but in spite of you we shall remain French; you have managed to Germanise our fields, but never will you have our hearts.'')
That was in the year 1909, when reaction was rampant and the Party lay defeated. But its 151 revolutionary spirit had not been broken. And the song suited Ilyich's mood. One should have heard the feeling he put into the words:
Mais notre coeur-vous ne I'aurez jamais!
During those very hard years in emigration, concerning which Ilyich always spoke with a feeling of sadness (when we returned to Russia he repeated once more what he had often said before: ``Why did we ever leave Geneva for Paris?'')-during those grim years he dreamed and dreamed, whether in conversation with Montegus, or fervently singing the song about Alsace, or during the sleepless nights when he read Verhaeren.
Still later, during the war, Ilyich was attracted by Barbusse's Le Feu, which he regarded as an extremely important book-a book which was in tune with his own feelings.
And lastly, in Russia. To Ilyich the new art seemed somehow to be alien and incomprehensible. Once we were asked to a concert in the Kremlin for Red Army men. Ilyich was given a seat in the front row. The actress Gzovskaya, declaiming something by Mayakovsky---``Speed is our body and the drum our heart"---was gesturing right in front of Ilyich, who was taken aback by the suddenness of it all; he grasped very little of the recitation and heaved a sigh of relief when Gzovskaya was replaced by another actor who began to read Chekhov's Evildoer.
One evening Ilyich wanted to see for himself how the young people were getting on in the communes. We decided to visit our young friend Varya Armand who lived in a commune for art school students. I think that we made the visit on the day Kropotkin was buried, in 1921. It was a hungry year, but the young people were filled with enthusiasm. The people in the commune slept practically 152 on bare boards, they had neither bread nor salt, ``But we do have cereals,'' said a radiant-faced member of the commune. With this cereal they boiled a good porridge for Ilyich. Ilyich looked at the young people, at the radiant faces of the boys and girls who crowded around him, and their joy was reflected in his face. They showed him their naive drawings, explained their meaning, and bombarded him with questions. And he, smiling, evaded answering and parried by asking questions of his own: ``What do you read? Do you read Pushkin?"---``Oh no,'' said someone, ``after all he was a bourgeois; we read Mayakovsky.'' Ilyich smiled. ``I think,'' he said, ``that Pushkin is better.'' After this Ilyich took a more favourable view of Mayakovsky. Whenever the poet's name was mentioned he recalled the young art students who, full of life and gladness, and ready to die for the Soviet system, were unable to find words in the contemporary language with which to express themselves, and sought the answer in the obscure verse of Mayakovsky. Later, however, Ilyich once praised Mayakovsky for the verse in which he ridiculed Soviet red tape. Of the books of the day, I remember that Ilyich was enthusiastic about Ehrenburg's war novel. ``You know,'' he said triumphantly, ``that book by Ilya the Shaggy (Ehrenburg's nickname) is a fine piece of work.''
We went to the Art Theatre several times. On one occasion we saw The Deluge, which Ilyich liked very much. The next day we saw Gorky's The Lower Depths. Ilyich liked Gorky the man, with whom he had become closely acquainted at the London Congress of the Party, and he liked Gorky the artist; he said that Gorky the artist was capable of grasping things instantly. With Gorky he always spoke very frankly. And so it goes without saying that he set high standards for a Gorky production. The overacting irritated him. After seeing The 153 Loieer Depths he avoided the theatre for a long time. Once the two of us went to see Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, which he liked very much. And finally, the last time we went to the theatre, in i922-we saw a stage version of Dickens's Cricket on the Hearth. After the first act Ilyich found it dull; the saccharine sentimentality got on his nerves, and during the conversation between the old toymaker and his blind daughter he could stand it no longer and left in the middle of the act.
During the last months of his life I used to read him fiction at his request, usually in the evenings. I read him Shchedrin, and Gorky's My Universities. He also liked to hear poetry, especially Demyan Bedny, preferring his heroic verse to his satirical.
Sometimes, when listening to poetry, he would gaze thoughtfully out of the window at the setting sun. I remember the poem which ended with the words: ``Never, never shall the Communards be slaves.''
As I read, I seemed to be repeating a vow to Ilyich. Never, never shall we surrender a single gain of the Revolution. . ..
Two days before he died I read him a story by Jack London---the book is lying now on the table in his room- Love of Life. This is a powerful story. Over a snowy waste where a human being had never set foot, a man, sick and dying from hunger, makes his way towards a pier on a river. His strength is giving out, he no longer walks, but crawls, and close behind him, also crawling, is a famished and dying wolf; in the ensuing struggle between man and wolf, the man wins; half-dead, and half-crazed, he reaches his goal. Ilyich was carried away by this story. Next day he asked me to read another London story. However, with Jack London the powerful is mixed with the exceedingly weak. The second story was altogether different--- 154 one that preached bourgeois morality: the captain of a ship promises the owner that he will sell the cargo of grain at a good price; he sacrifices his life in order to keep his word. Ilyich laughed and waved his hand.
That was the last time I read to him.
Reminiscences of Lenin by His Relatives, Moscow, 1956, pp. 201--07
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Maxim Gorky(Excerpts)
__FIX__ "•" added here because no punctuation between subsets of title -- just a linebreak. - UPDATE 2007.11.22 - See other FIX regarding adding a class= to BR to retain a bullet in situations where BRs will be deleted.I had not imagined him that way. I felt there was something missing in him. His r's were guttural, and he stood with his thumbs shoved into the armholes of his waistcoat. He was too plain, there was nothing of ``the leader" in him. I am a writer and my job is to take note of details. This has become a habit, sometimes even an annoying one.
When I was led up to G. V. Plekhanov, he stood eyeing me sternly with folded arms, with an air of boredom, like a weary teacher looking at a new pupil. All he said was the usual: ``I'm an admirer of your talent''. Apart from this he said nothing'my memory could cling to. Neither he nor I had the slightest inclination for a ``heart to heart" chat throughout the Congress.
But the bald, r-rolling, strong, thickset man who kept wiping his Socratic brow with one hand and jerking mine with the other began to talk at once, with beaming eyes, of the shortcomings of my book Mother which he had, it appeared, read in the 155 manuscript borrowed from I. P. Ladyzhnikov. I explained that I had written that book in a hurry, but did not manage to tell him why, for he nodded understandingly and gave the reason himself: it was good I had been in a hurry, for that book was an urgent one; many of the workers had been caught up in the revolutionary movement unconsciously, spontaneously and would now read Mother with great benefit.
``A very timely book!" That was his only, but highly valuable compliment. After which he demanded in a business-like tone whether Mother had been translated into any foreign languages and to what extent it had been crippled by the Russian and American censors. Told that its author was to be put on trial, he frowned wryly, threw back his head, closed his eyes, and emitted a burst of amazing laughter; this attracted the attention of the workers. Foma Uralsky came up together with three other men.
__*_*_*__Dropping in on him one day, I saw a volume of War and Peace on his desk.
``That's right. Tolstoi! I meant to read the scene of the hunt, but then remembered I had to write to a comrade. I have no time at all to read. It was only last night that I read your little book on Tolstoi.''
Smiling with narrowed eyes he stretched luxuriously in his armchair and went on in a lowered tone:
``What a rock, eh? What a giant of humanity! That, my friend, is an artist. . . . And-do you know what else amazes me? There was no real muzhik in literature before that count came along.''
His eyes still glinting narrowly, he turned them upon me:~
156``Whom could you measure him with in Europe?''
He answered the question himself:
``No one.''
Rubbing his hands he laughed, obviously pleased.
I had often noticed his pride in Russia, the Russians, and Russian art. That feature seemed strange, even naive in him; but then I learned to distinguish the overtones of his deep-rooted, joyous love of the working people.
Watching the fishermen on Capri cautiously disengaging nets mangled by a shark, he observed:
``Our people are livelier on the job.''
When I expressed my doubts, he said irritably:
``Hm.... See you don't forget Russia while living on this bit of earth.''
V. A. Desnitsky-Stroyev told me that once, travelling with Lenin in Sweden, they sat leafing through a German monograph on Diirer. The Germans, sharing their compartment, asked them what book it was. And it transpired that they had never heard anything about their great painter. Lenin was delighted, and said boastfully to Desnitsky, repeating the sentence twice:
``They don't know their own greats, and we do!''
__*_*_*__His attitude to me was that of a strict mentor and kind ``solicitous friend''.
``You're a curious person,'' he jested one day. ``You seem to be a good realist in literature, but a romanticist where people are concerned. You think everybody is a victim of history, don't you? We know history and say to the victims: 'overthrow the altars, shatter the temples, and drive the gods away!' Yet you would like to convince me that the militant party of the working class is obliged to make the intellectuals comfortable, first and foremost.''
157I may be mistaken, but I felt that Vladimir Ilyich liked discussing things with me.
He urged nearly always: ``Phone me whenever you're around, and we'll get together.''
On another occasion he remarked:
``Discussing things with you is always engaging; you've got a wider and greater range of impressions.''
He asked me about the sentiments of the intellectuals with special stress on the scientists; A. B. Khalatov and I at that time were working with the committee for the improvement of conditions for the scientists. Vladimir Ilyich was also interested in proletarian literature.
``Do you anticipate anything from it?''
I said I expected a great deal, but felt it was essential to organise a literary college with branches of philology, the foreign languages of the East and West, folklore, the history of world literature, and a separate department for the history of Russian literature.
``Hm,'' he reflected, squinting and smiling. ``That's very broad and dazzling! I don't mind it being broad, but it's dazzling, too, isn't it! We haven't any professors of our own in this sphere. As for the bourgeois professors, you can imagine what sort of history they'll give us. ... No, that's more than we can carry now.. .. We'll have to wait some three, perhaps five years.''
He went on plaintively:
``I've no time at all to read!''
Lenin time and again strongly emphasised the propaganda importance of Demyan Bedny's work, but he also said:
``He's a bit crude. He follows the reader, whereas he ought to be a little ahead.''
He distrusted Mayakovsky and was even irritated by him.
158``He shouts, makes up some kind of crooked words, and all of it misses the mark, I think---it misses the mark and is little understandable. It's all so scattered, and difficult to read. He is gifted, you say? And very much so? Hm-mm, we'll live and see! Don't you find that an awful lot of verses are being written? There are whole pages of them in the magazines, and new collections keep appearing nearly every day.''
I said that youth's yearning for song was natural in such days, and that mediocre verses, to my mind, were easier to write than good prose. Verses took less time to write, I observed, and in addition we had many good teachers of prosody.
``That verses are easier than prose is something I won't believe. I can't imagine such a thing. I couldn't write two lines of poetry, no matter what you did to me,'' he said frowning. ``The whole of the old revolutionary literature, as much of it as we have and as there is in Europe, must be made available to the masses.''
V. I. Lenin. A Literary Portrait, by M. Gorky. Moscow, Progress Publishers
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Maxim Gorky(Excerpt)
May 16, 1930, Sorrento ~
I have just finished reading your reminiscences of Vladimir Ilyich. Such a simple, dear and sad book. I feel like shaking your hand from here, from afar. 159 And, well---I don't know, indeed-I'll thank you, shall I, for this book? In general I want to say something to share the excitement that your reminiscences produced in me. And another thing: D. I. Kursky and Lyubimov came to see me yesterday and Kursky spoke about Vogt's work and the structure of Vladimir Ilyich's brain, and I was thinking all night long: ``What a torch of intelligence has gone out, what a heart stopped beating!''. . .
When he talked with me in Capri about the literature of those years and gave a remarkably accurate estimation of the writers of my generation (mercilessly and without effort exposing them to the core) he pointed out to me some important shortcomings of my own stories; and then he reproached me: ``You shouldn't waste your experience on little stories; it is time for you to put it all into one book, some big novel.'' I said that I dreamed of writing a story of one family covering a hundred years, from 1813, the time when Moscow began to grow and expand, up to the present day. The founder of the family, a serf, a village elder, is released by his owner for his heroic deeds as a partisan in 1812. This family produces civil servants, priests, factoryowners, Petrashevites, Nechayevites-men of the seventies and the eighties. He listened very attentively, asked detailed questions, and then said: ``An excellent subject, of course; it is hard, it will take a lot of time. You should be able to cope with the theme but I do not see how you will be able to end the novel. Reality does not provide an ending. No, it must be written after the Revolution-but just now something like Mother is wanted.'' I could not see the end of the book myself, of course. . . .
M. Gorky, Collected Works in Thirty Volumes, Russ. eel., Vol. 30, 1955, pp. 167, 168
160 __ALPHA_LVL2__ Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich^^67^^(Excerpt)
One often hears the question: Was Lenin really able, as preoccupied as he was during the October Revolution, to find the time to take an interest in matters concerning our culture, and did he manage to go into detail on these matters, to discuss the decrees involved, issue the necessary directives himself and watch over their result? We can answer that he not only did all this, but attached great importance to questions of culture at all the stages of his work; he was always interested in them, studied them and encouraged their solution-for example, as regards libraries, book funds, publishing houses, newspapers, periodicals, museums, book centres, etc. . . .
On the third night after the October Revolution I was witness to a very important conversation between Lenin and a few comrades in that room in Smolny which soon became the study of the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars. Lenin was making up a list of the comrades whom he was going to invite to take on the jobs of People's Commissars at the various commissariats. The conversation turned to the Commissariat of EducationKrupskaya proposed Lunacharsky. ``Right,'' said Lenin and included him on the list. Then he suddenly asked, ``Under which commissariat shall book publishing be concentrated, especially that of the classics? Under the People's Commissariat of Education, of course,'' he said, answering his own question.
``How can we publish the classics, Vladimir __PRINTERS_P_161_COMMENT__ 11---2424 161 Ilyich,'' I put in, ``when the tsarist censorship has distorted what our classical authors wrote to such an extent that often only twisted carcasses remain? In Tolstoi's Resurrection alone there are more than five hundred cuts made by the censor.''
``Well,'' Lenin replied, ``we shall have to gather together all original manuscripts and print fully annotated collections, and later publish, with the necessary prefaces and notes, individual works for the broad masses. Meanwhile, until we are able to do that, we shall just have to publish them in the shape they are now.''
This brief talk, which took place at about one o'clock in the morning, was resumed later the same night by Lenin when we were on our way home from Smolny.
``As soon as possible,'' he said, ``it will be necessary to collect all the manuscripts of the classics as well as those of other writers, to put them in perfect order and to publish them along with other materials for the study of our vast literature of the 19th century, our criticism, journalism, and historyall of which reflect many things relating to the revolutionary and social struggles of the time and all that was choked by the censorship.''
He went on to develop in the minutest detail his ideas on how to go about museum and archive work, how to collect libraries, archive materials, manuscripts and autographed papers in private hands relating not only to literature but also to art, criticism, political journalism and history. He stressed of what great value all this would be for our future culture-for which, as he said, we should give such scope as had never been given before anywhere in the world.
``We must show the whole world what real
cultural work means in the country where power has
passed to the working class, where the proletariat
162
BACK TO METHUSELAH
U CA \eJU4 CKnoAu
Jiu5~T~""^
__CAPTION__
George Bernard Shaw's dedication to Lenin
on the title page of Back to Methuselah
__PRINTERS_P_163_COMMENT__
11*
[163]
__NOTE__ Usually
graphic on page [165] (recto)
would be page 164 (verso)
according to pattern earlier in this book.
has firmly established its dictatorship for a long
time to come.''
Lenin returned to this point many times later.
When he was living in Moscow he once happened
to find out by chance that a group of Red Guards
who were staying in a building containing some
writers' manuscripts and correspondence were
destroying them, believing them to be of no
importance. Lenin called me up after midnight and asked
me if I could write a booklet immediately, before
morning, on the importance of archives and
archive valuables, and to write it in a popular
manner so that it could be distributed everywhere
on the very next morning through the Russian
Telegraph Agency (ROSTA) and through the press-and so
that the broad masses of the people should know
that it was not only impermissible to destroy
valuable archive material, but that, on the contrary,
it was necessary to collect them with care. I replied
that I would try to do it and asked him to let me
present what I wrote for his inspection the next
morning. I sat down to work at once and wrote a
booklet with the title: Protect ArbivesI Lenin made
some corrections to it and gave instructions for it
to be printed by ROSTA and, through ROSTA, in
the non-metropolitan newspapers and in Izvestia.
The booklet was then printed in 50,000 copies and
widely spread among our Red Army troops and
distributed to as many other organisations as
possible. It was reprinted several times later and no
doubt did some good, as we began to receive
information from various places that they had
discovered valuable archive papers. Lenin asked the
comrades for someone to travel around Russia
collecting these materials. M. S. Vishnevsky was
chosen. Vishnevsky was provided with a special
authority and he travelled tirelessly all over the
country, bringing back with him to Moscow vast
164
K c««H» ipf PAM3HIA i AmCABflPOBA
HA nnEHAPHOM 3ACEAAHMH
NCTK, tpemuena H KpcMapricnx
JflJTIBI
20 H 22 BHiapn 1921 rofl»
nETEpsypr
rOCXAAPCTBEHHOE HSAATEJIbCTBO
mi
__CAPTION__
Lenin's marks on the title page
of The Electrification of Soviet Russia.
1921
[165]
archives and entire libraries which we took to the
Rumyantsev Museum, now the Lenin State Library
of the USSR.
So, as we see, even at that time, when there seemed to be not a minute to spare to think about archives, museums and libraries, Lenin, as the true guardian of our new socialist country, found the time not only to think about such things, but to take a constant part in organising collection work and in saving materials from destruction-and to check up on all that we, his assistants, were doing, giving us the most valuable general directives in this field.
Sovetskaya bibliografia (Soviet Bibliography), Moscow, 1940, pp. 146--49
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Vladimir Bonch-BruyevichIn June 1919, when I was looking for lists of books published in 1917, 1918 and 1919 which I needed for my work, I came across Knizbnaya Letopis (The Book Record) published by the Book Chamber, which came out in double issues even in those hard years.
Knizbnaya Letopis was not, of course, as complete then as now. The compulsory sending of all new printed matter to the Book Chamber-as happened before the Revolution when everything had to be taken to the censors' committees-had fallen off after the February revolution, and control had not yet been re-established. Without a doubt, many proclamations, appeals, small books and leaflets never got to the Book Chamber, nor to the Public 166 Library, the Library of the Academy of Sciences or the former Rumyantsev Museum. This was what caused big gaps in the book collections of that time. But still, the items collected by the Book Chamber were extremely important, of the greatest interest and vitally necessary for every research worker.
It occurred to me that Lenin would be interested in all this data on new books, so I purchased some copies of the journal for him and gave them to him. Lenin began to look them through and became engrossed in them. He expressed surprise that in spite of the devastation that reigned supreme everywhere, and which had affected the paper and printing industries particularly badly, so many different and good books were being published.
When he was looking through copies of Knizbnaya Letopis Lenin used to make marks in the margins against those titles which aroused his interest, and in this he displayed his usual love of system and order. Apart from underlining the titles that attracted him and writing ``NB'' in the margin in pencil against each of them (sometimes underlining their contents too), he used to write ``No.'' in the right-hand corner of the first page of each copy and underneath it a column of figures in ascending order in a large and distinct hand-the numbers of all the books he wished to read. In some places he wrote very large figures to denote the books in which he was especially interested, and also wrote out their titles again in the lefthand margin-underlining them several times, sometimes drawing a circle around them and writing the word ``especially'' beside them. . ..
He was entirely carried away by what he read and worked through all the numbers in a single day. He must have used up one pencil after another. He was intensely interested in the books of the 167 time and felt a desire to be acquainted with them immediately. . . .
Lenin concentrated his attention on the publications of our immediate political enemies. Out of 74 books which he marked relating to the positions of the various parties on the most burning issues of the day (the remaining three were Bolshevik publications) 71 were written by authors of parties and groups hostile to us-the Plekhanovites, the Bogdanovites, the Popular Socialists and the Cadets among them. Why was this so? I think Lenin was perfectly aware of the fact that it was impossible to ``embrace the unembraceable''. But even though he was exceedingly busy all the time, he wanted to read and look through all the most topical and vital things that were absolutely indispensable for him as the greatest theorist and practical worker of our Party. He wanted to watch all our numerous political enemies very closely, well aware that their political literature-whatever it glossed over and however much it indulged in evasion and demagogywould to a considerable extent reflect their hopes, aspirations, intentions and expectations. And it was on these latter that he fixed his attention. As the leader of the workers' socialist revolution, which had brought in the rule of the proletariat, Lenin viewed all the literary phenomena of 1917 in this way.
That Lenin had the ability to pick out the right books for a given moment, to subordinate his own interests to those of the workers' revolutionary class struggle, the ability to read and study the things that were indispensable for the success of this struggle-that much at least we can conclude from examining this small corner of Lenin's theoretical ``laboratory''.
Literaturnoye nasledstvo (Our Literary Heritage), Nos. 7-8, 1933, pp. 395--99
168 __ALPHA_LVL2__ Anatoly Lunacharsky^^68^^It was on the day that the first Council of People's Commissars was made up. I was told that the Central Committee, in choosing the members of the Government, had decided to commission me with the People's Commissariat of Education. This news was exciting, even frightening, in view of the tremendous responsibility that was being placed on my shoulders.
I ran into Lenin in the corridors of the Smolny (all of us were loaded with work at that time). He beckoned to me with a very serious expression, and said:
``I must have a word or two with you, Anatoly Vasilyevich. Well, I have no time at the moment to give you a lot of instructions as to your new duties, and I can't say that I've a fully worked out system of thoughts on what the Revolution's first steps in the field of education should be. It's obvious that many things will have to be changed completely or guided along new lines. I think you should certainly have a talk with Nadezhda Konstantinovna. She will help you. She has done a great deal of thinking on these questions and I think she had mapped out the correct path. ... As to higher education, here Mikhail Nikolayevich Pokrovsky will be most helpful. But we must be very careful with all these reforms, I think. It is an extremely complicated business. But one thing is clear-we must take care in every possible way to open wide the gates of the institutions of higher learning to the broad masses, especially to young working-class people.
``I consider libraries to be very important. You must work on this yourself. Call all library experts. There are many good things being done in America 169 in this field. Books are a tremendous force and they will have an even greater attraction as a result of the revolution. We must provide readers with large reading-rooms, and mobile libraries which go out to the reader himself. In addition to such a bookson-wheels service, postal services will have to be used. There probably won't be enough books for our enormous population, among which there will be a growing number of people who can read and writeso unless books become mobile and increase in circulation several times, we shall have book starvation. . . .''
Vospominaniya o Vladimire
llyiche Lenine
{Reminiscences of Vladimir
llyich Lenin), Part i,
Gospolitizdat, 1956,
pp. 548--49
I often heard Vladimir llyich Lenin at congresses and conferences. It always amazed me that as a rule he needed less time than the speakers who took the floor before and after him, and yet his speeches left such a tremendous impression.
I spoke to him in private only once. And today I'd like to tell about that unforgettable day when Lenin invited me to his flat.
That memorable evening I saw quite a different Lenin, quite unlike the leader and tribune I had seen at the congresses and conferences. This was a new Lenin-a wonderful friend, a jolly person who took a lively, tireless interest in the whole world 170 and who had an amazingly gentle and loving regard for people.
``Are you writing anything just now?" he asked me.
``It's difficult to write just now: there's so much organisation work to do.''
He frowned.
``Yes, there's plenty of organisation work in our country just now. But you, writers, must draw the workers into literature. You've got to direct all your efforts towards this. Every short story written by a worker must be heartily welcomed. Do workers publish their stories in your magazine?''
``It could be more, Vladimir llyich. They lack knowledge, or culture, I suppose.''
He glanced at me with his narrowed, laughing eyes, and said:
``Oh well, never mind, they'll learn to write and we'll have an excellent proletarian literature, the first in the world. . . .''
These words rang with a fervent faith in Man, in Russian art; there was in them an affection for the working people and an unquenchable, active faith in them.
V. I. Lenin, On Literature and Art, Moscow, 1967, pp. 263--64
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Margarita Fofanova^^70^^Lenin spent his last underground spell ( September-October 1917) in my flat in Vyborgskaya Storona of Petrograd, at the corner of Bolshoi Sampsonyevsky Prospekt and Serdobolskaya Street. It was Flat 41 on the top floor of House 92/1, a four-storeyed building. It is now a Lenin museum-- 171 flat and its present address is: Flat 20, 1/106, Scrdobolskaya Street.
When we were first discussing our time-table for the day and my duties, Lenin said that my ``first and foremost" task was to deliver to him absolutely all the newspapers and magazines printed each day and to deliver them at all costs by nine or ten o'clock in the morning, not later. . . . ``And if you get something earlier, push it under my door.. . ,'' he added.
Lenin read such a tremendous number of newspapers every day that one was simply amazed how he had the time to do it. He had to work a lot in those days, to take extremely responsible decisions, to lead the whole of the preparations for the armed uprising.
In the right-hand corner of my dining-room, at the window, stood my small writing-table with bookshelves beside it. I had small library, mainly books on agriculture. But Lenin soon got to know them so well that we were able to converse about many of the books. Some of my books ``migrated'' to the ``writing-table'' in Lenin's room-it was my schoolgirl daughter's table, a plain board covered with brown oilcloth and having a single shallow drawer.
We first got talking about the writer of two books to which Lenin paid particular attention. He was a zoologist of the last century, one Modest Nikolayevich Bogdanov. In addition to his scientific work Bogdanov wrote stories and sketches for children about the Russian countryside and its wildlife. They were published in the author's lifetime in the magazine Spring, and in the children's collection The Ant. Bogdanov came from Simbirsk Gubernia, went to the Simbirsk Gymnasium and graduated from Kazan University with the degree of Candidate of Natural Sciences. After Bogdanov's death, a friend of his, Professor N. Vagner, collected his essays 172 and published them in the form of a book entitled From Russian Wildlife, which he provided with a preface and a biography of the author.
Lenin remarked: ``Bogdanov is my fellow-- countryman. I went to the same Gymnasium in Simbirsk, but I was born in Simbirsk itself and, like Bogdanov, entered Kazan University-but I didn't graduate from it. . . .''
Lenin picked up From Russian Wildlife several times and was delighted by the stories in it, written with great talent, and he used to read passages aloud to me. He was especially fond of reading parts of ``Deep in the Forest" about a little white owl which flew to ``the wide open spaces of central Russia, to the feather grass steppes of the Ukraine and along the Volga''; and about the lynx---``the mistress, the owner of the depths of the forest''. And he read aloud a story called ``Why the Little Birds Were Sad'', only four or five pages long, from beginning to end several times. Lenin also enjoyed The Little Starling. Reading the book reminded him of his native Simbirsk, his childhood and his youth.
The other book of Bogdanov's Nature's Spongers, described those animals and insects that live entirely at the expense of others-nature's idlers, cadgers and pests (especially as they affected farming). The author went into great detail in his account of the life and ways of these creatures so that people should have a thorough knowledge of them. Lenin was delighted with the title of the book, which he considered very apt, and commented that only a socialist state would be able to deal with ``nature's spongers": ``As soon as we take power, we'll launch an offensive on Nature's own enemies,'' he said.
Nature's Spongers was reprinted 18 times before the October Revolution and a igth time in 1923. I haven't yet found out who suggested this and 173 included it in the plan of the State Publishing House, but I suspect that Lenin had some hand in it.
The third book which interested Lenin was Swamps by V. N. Sukachev (now an Academician, at that time a lecturer at the Stebut Women's Higher Agricultural College, which I attended myself, and also at the Forest Institute, now the Forest Academy).
This book was in the curriculum for the course on pasture cultivation. I was studying it and had left it on the table in the dining-room. One day Lenin said to me: ``You know, I've got interested in what you are reading and I've read the book through. There are some remarkable thoughts in it! And in what an interesting, absorbing way it's written. Swamps are certainly of tremendous economic importance! Just think what is happening in our Mother Russia-and what an enormous proportion of the land is covered with bogs-they could go to make the most abundant peat mines producing cheap fuel, which in turn would mean cheap electricity. ...'' In this connection one may recall the words of Comrade G. M. Krzhizhanovsky: ``Back in December 1919 Lenin called our attention to the broad possibilities of using peat as a source of electric power. He pointed out that we had vast deposits, conveniently located, of high thermal value and comparatively easy to mine.''
In the course of this same conversation with Lenin, I learned that he was a great lover of hunting. I remember him saying:
``Ah, to be lying in wait with a gun in the middle of a marsh.... How wonderful!''
Lenin took Swamps to his table and it was obvious that the thought of putting swamps to use never left him. He returned to the idea repeatedly in conversation. . . .
The fourth book which Lenin discussed with me 174 was The New Earth by William S. Harwood, an account of the successes achieved by modern American farming.
One day, after dinner, Lenin went up to the bookshelves and said: ``I've dug up a remarkable book in your library. Simply amazing. And a very convenient size, too, you can slip it in your pocket. When we take power we shall definitely reprint it. Everyone working in agriculture must know about this book; it is essential that its ideas and arguments be made particularly clear to those actually in charge of agriculture, as well as to argicultural and natural scientists. Look what the author says in the first chapter: 'In the midst of this sad predicament science came to his help,-that sensible science of our advancing day, which has for its ultimate end not merely discovery, but application; which is not so delighted with the formulating of a new law as it is overjoyed at the lifting of a burden.' And the end of the chapter says: 'It will be seen, as we go onward, that many a strange and curious event has lately come to pass in the realm of the New Earth. The period of the New Earth is more than a renaissance, a revival ;-it is an era of creation, the most remarkable in history.' Think how much there is to do, what difficulties lie ahead-to transform the old into the new won't be an easy job.''
In 1918, as soon as the Soviet Government moved to Moscow, Lenin rang me up and asked whether I had with me Harwood's The New Earth and whether I could send it to him at the Kremlin. Lenin sent the book to Professor K. A. Timiryazev, requesting him to look it through and to write a preface for it. The book was to be prepared for printing urgently. Timiryazev changed the title of the book to Regenerated Land, wrote a preface, and the book was published early in 1919.
175Lenin sent me two copies of Regenerated Land. He always kept a pile of copies of the book on his table and he asked all those who came to see him to look at it, agricultural leaders especially, and he suggested that it be widely distributed. . . .
We talked about other books with Lenin too. In conclusion I want to say that personal contact with Lenin, even a very brief talk, always brought one something new. Lenin, as no one else, had the ability to listen to his companion and to say something of great pertinence and of great personal importance to him in reply.
O Vladimire Hyiche Lenine. Vospominaniya (About Vladimir llyich Lenin. Reminiscences), Gospolitizdat, 1963, pp. 289--94
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Maria Essen^^71^^. . . Often during walks or at evening tea Lenin liked to talk about books-his favourite writers Shchedrin, Nekrasov and Chernyshevsky, especially the latter. Lenin regarded Chernyshevsky as not only an outstanding revolutionary, a great scholar and an advanced thinker, but also as a great artist who created unsurpassed images of real revolutionaries-courageous, fearless fighters of the Rakhmetov type. He said of his work: ``It's real literature that teaches, leads, inspires. I read the novel What Is To Be Done? about five times one summer, and every time I discovered more new and exciting ideas in it.''
Lenin valued dedication to an idea most of all in works of art and that is why he appreciated and 176 loved Nekrasov so much. He knew almost all his poems by heart. Once he asked me whether I knew the poem ``Russian Women" by heart. I answered: ``I do, but I am never able to recite it aloud, tears choke me.''
``That's what the power of real art means,'' said Lenin. ``It strikes home.''
Sometimes after musical evenings we went to see our guests off (I stayed with Lenin's family then) and as we walked back to the flat, quiet, tired and a little sad, the songs stirring something in our souls, we did not feel like talking-cvcryone thinking his own thoughts. . . .
Vospominaniya o Vladimire Hyiche Lenine (Reminiscences of Vladimir llyich Lenin], Part i, p. 251
__ALPHA_LVL2__ Shushanik Manucharyants^^72^^... When I first entered Lenin's study I was amazed at the simplicity of the furniture and at the small number of books in the book-cases. It seemed to me that the library of the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars ought to contain many thousands of books. Later, after I had worked in the library for some time, I realised this was n6t so. Lenin kept in his study only what was most essential for his work and for reference purposes. He wanted to avoid crowding his library and asked that the rest of his books be sent to other libraries where they would be available to hundreds of people.
Next day, Lenin asked me not to move a single book from its place as he was accustomed to the __PRINTERS_P_177_COMMENT__ 12---2424 177 way they were arranged. I asked him to let me sort out the fiction from the political literature. ``You may do that,'' he said, but he asked me nevertheless not to touch the revolving shelf on the right side of his writing-desk.
After I had sorted out the fiction I was afraid to touch any other books. Once when Lenin came into his study to work I said to him, ``Vladimir Ilyich, I have nothing to do.''
He looked up from his papers, smiled and said: ``Well, go home and have a rest, then.''
I answered: ``I don't mean now, but in general, as you do not let me touch the books.''
``Do what you like with the books, only please don't touch the revolving shelf.''
Finally he himself asked me to sort out this shelf and to complete it with some reference literature.
On this round revolving shelf, of which Lenin took such care, he kept dictionaries and the minutes, decisions and resolutions of Party and Soviet congresses, of the sessions of the Ail-Union Central Executive Council and the Comintern Congresses, all kinds of statistical reference books, collections of Government decrees and instructions-in a word, everything that he could want at any moment of his work.
In Lenin's study were to be found collected editions of the classics of fiction, encyclopedias, foreign books, pamphlets by Marx, Engels and himself, and other books. Current newspapers bound in monthly sets were also kept in the study on a special shelf.
When I first began to work, Lenin asked me to make up a collection of the pamphlets of Marx and Engels and to bind them together with his own for convenience. I bound, for example, The Manifesto of the Communist Party by Marx and Engels, Plckhanov's translation of which (the Geneva edition), and P. Orlovsky's Lenin considered the best. Lenin's 178 booklets of 1905--1907 were bound too. I offered getting Unpublished Articles (1852, 1853, 1854) by Marx and Engels and War and Revolution (the first issue). He also asked me to obtain his article ``The Bibliography of Marxism" (a supplement to the article on Marx in Granat's Encyclopedic Dictionary, Vol. 28, p. 244) as he wanted to make additions to it.
Lenin paid much attention to getting the letters of Marx and Engels in print. Once he asked me to find Marx's letters to Kugelmann with his own preface.
In spite of being very busy Lenin found the time to look through all the publications he received, and he received quite a lot, not only things published in Russia but much literature from abroad, magazines and newspapers in Russian as well as in foreign languages.
Lenin managed to look through books not only in his spare time but also during meetings. Before a session of the Council of People's Commissars or the Council of Labour and Defence, when he had five minutes to spare, he would ask me: ``What's new?" After glancing at the titles of new publications he used to take them with him to the meeting and when it was over he returned some of the books marked ``for special keeping" (in the study or in his other library next to his flat). . . .
Lenin as a rule gave me instructions orally, but if I did not happen to be there he used to leave notes.
When I suggested getting Chernyshcvsky's collected works and binding them, he agreed and asked me to bind Hcrzen's collected works too, which he already had.
He was often indignant with the way books were bound (``It falls to pieces as soon as you bend it'', he would say) or with the way they were produced or with the choice of material; but if a well __PRINTERS_P_179_COMMENT__ 12* 179 produced book came along he was really happy and pointed out the fact. . . .
I used to feel very upset and disappointed if for some reason or other it was impossible to comply with a request of Lenin's, and this happened sometimes. Once one of the comrades had brought in two magazines, The Economist and New Russia. Lenin showed them to me (I had just come into the conference room) and said: ``And I haven't yet had these!''
I was very much embarrassed. ``It is my fault. I haven't seen to it,'' I said.
Lenin answered: ``Not yours, but someone who ought to be sending me literature on time.''
Lenin often told me to keep a watch on what books he took to his flat and to check that he returned them to the study. If one of the comrades asked him for a book he directed him to me, remarking: ``My librarian is very particular, you know.'' And if he lent books to people, he asked them to leave me notes.
During the S.R. trial, a comrade asked for several books from Lenin's library. I got the books ready and when Lenin came into the study I asked his permission to lend them out, having first warned the comrade that Dcnikin's books Essays on the Russian Disturbances, Vol. i, Issues i and 2 had Lenin's notes in the margins. His reply was: ``You may. It's all right. He will give them back, won't he?''
Lenin had written on Dcnikin's book what he thought of it: ``The author approaches class struggle like a blind puppy.''
Lenin marked books in various characteristic ways. For instance: ``Lenin'', ``Lenin's copy'', ``To Lenin's table'', ``Please return, Lenin's copy'', ``To my library'', ``Keep on the shelf'', ``Keep secret''. Lenin wrote ``Keep on the shelf. 3O/IX-I922. Lenin" on the collection Engels's Political Testament.
180. . . When looking through a critical and bibliographical magazine called Russian Books, published in Berlin, Lenin often made marks in its margins requesting me to get this or that foreign publication. At his request, some books on India were specially ordered.
Once Lenin requested two books, one of which was Nazbivin'x Memoirs, about Tolstoi. I was told that this book was not available, but that Tolstoi's Diary was. Lenin wrote to me:
``Comr. Manucharyants,
``Will you kindly check it?
``I don't need Tolstoi's Diary.
``I need Nazbivin's Memoirs about Tolstoi
published in German in Tolstois Denkwiirdigkeiten.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ``5./XII. Lenin.''
On a second revolving shelf at the left-hand side of the desk was collected all the literature on those questions on which Lenin was working at a particular moment-electrification, the discussion on the trade unions, etc.
Lenin carefully prepared for every speech he made, collecting material and quotations. I had to see that he had all the necessary literature to hand. He would thumb through a book he already knew to sec whether it could give him something.
On May 17, 1922 I received the following note from him:
``Please get from the Socialist Academy the books marked with a blue pencil in the list attached.
``V. Ulyanov (Lenin)''.
``P.S. And if there is one, get a list on this question, Lenin.''
Lenin was obviously intending to write a work on the scientific management of labour. At his request books on this question were selected from his library and a list of the books on it in the library 181 of the Council of Labour and Defence compiled. In addition he wanted me to ask for a list of books on the same question from the Institute of Labour.
Before leaving for Gorki Lenin asked for the books that were to be brought from the Socialist Academy to be left in his study, and he instructed me to call him from his study by the automatic telephone to let him know what had been done. But shortly afterwards Lenin fell ill, and he came back to Moscow only in the autumn, on October 2, 1922. By that time I had prepared all the literature in the additional library next to his flat. On returning from Gorki he came to this library twice, looked through the books and asked me not to remove any of them. But Lenin never wrote this work.
When Lenin was preparing for his speech to the Fourth Congress of the Comintern in November 1922 he asked for the stenographic report and the resolutions of the Third Comintern Congress, for his own report on the New Economic Policy made at the Third Comintern Congress in German, and for his pamphlet The Tax in Kind in German.
In late 1922, when Lenin's library had become very large, I suggested abolishing some sections. Lenin agreed and told me to have a talk with Nadezhda Konstantinovna and Maria Ilyinichna as to which books they wanted to keep.
There was a wonderful openhcartedncss in his attitude towards those around him. He was very attentive and considerate to the rank-and-file workers. It was an easy and joyful thing to work under him.
Vospominaniya o Vladimire
Hyicbe Lcnine
(Reminiscences of Vladimir
llyicb Lenin),
Vol. 2, Gospolitizclat, 1957.
pp. 583--88
~^^1^^ The article ``Party Organisation and Party Literature" was published in the I2th number of the Bolshevik legal newspaper Novaya Zhizn (New Life) upon Lenin's return to Petersburg from emigration in November 1905.
Novaya Zhizn (New Life) -published daily from October 27 (November 9) to December 3 (16), 1905, in St. Petersburg. Lenin became the editor of the paper upon his return to Russia. The paper was the virtual Central Organ of the R.S.D.L.P.
The paper had a circulation of up to 80,000 though it was constantly persecuted, 15 issues out of 27 being confiscated and destroyed. It was closed by the government after issue No. 27; issue No. 28, which was the last, appeared illegally.
p. 13
~^^2^^ This refers to the October 1905 general political strike.
p. 13
^^3^^ Izvestia Soveta Rabochikh Deputatov (Bulletin of the Soviet of Workers' Deputies)-an official newspaper of the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Deputies. It appeared from October 17 (30) to December 14 (27), 1905. Being in effect an information bulletin, it has no permanent staff and was printed by the workers themselves in the printing-works of various bourgeois papers. Altogether ten issues were brought out. Issue No. 11 was seized by the police while being printed.
p. 13
'' Proletary (The Proletarian)-an illegal Bolshevik weekly, Central Organ of the R.S.D.L.P., founded by decision of the Third Party Congress. On April 27 (May 10), 1905, a plenary meeting of the Central Committee of the Party appointed Lenin editor-in-chief of Proletary. The weekly appeared in Geneva from May 14 (27) to November 12 (25), 1905. Twenty-six issues were published in all. The weekly continued the line of the old, Leninist Iskra, and of the Bolshevik paper Vperyod.
Lenin contributed about 90 articles and short items to Proletary. His articles determined the political line of the weekly, its ideological content and Bolshevik course.
It was the only Russian Social-Democratic paper that consistently upheld revolutionary Marxism and dealt with all the principal issues of the revolution developing in Russia. By giving full information on the events of 1905, it roused the broad masses of the working people to fight for the victory of the revolution.
p. 14
__PRINTERS_P_185_COMMENT__ 13--2424 185~^^5^^ From the poem by N. A. Nekrasov ``Who Can Be Happy and Free in Russia''.
p. 22
~^^6^^ Narodnaya Volya (The People's Will)--- an illegal organisation of the revolutionary-minded Narodnik intellectuals founded in 1879 with the object of fighting the autocracy. It existed up to the second half of the eighties.
p. 24
~^^7^^ Here and elsewhere in this article, Lenin refers to The Communist Manifesto (see Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, pp. 21--64).
p. 31
~^^8^^ Marx and Engels, Works, 2nd Russ. ed., Vol. 4, pp. 281, 456.
p. 3^^1^^
~^^9^^ Lenin is quoting from Alexander Herzen's Ends and Beginnings.
P- 33
~^^10^^ The passage is taken from Herzen's letters ``To an Old Comrade" (the fourth and second letters).
p. 3;
~^^11^^ All-Russia Peasant Union-a revolutionary-democratic organisation founded in 1905. Its first and second congresses, held in Moscow in August and November 1905, drew up its programme and tactics. The Union demanded political freedom and the immediate convening of a constituent assembly. It favoured the tactic of boycotting the First Duma. Its agrarian programme included the demand for abolishing private landownership and transferring the monastery, church, crown and state lands to the peasants without compensation. Its policy was half-hearted and vacillating. While insisting on the abolition of the landed estates, the Union was agreeable to partial compensation for the landlords.
The Peasant Union was persecuted by the police ever
since it came into being. It fell to pieces early in 1907.
p. 36
~^^12^^ Polyarnaya Zvezda (The Pole Star)-a literary-political symposium. Its first three issues were published by A. I. Herzen, and the subsequent ones by Herzen and Ogaryov, at the Free Russian Printing Works in London from 1855 to 1862. The last issue appeared in Geneva in 1868. Altogether eight issues appeared.
p. 36
~^^13^^ Kolokol (The Tocsin)-a political periodical, published under the motto of Vivos Voco! (I call on the living!) by A. I. Herzen and N. P. Ogaryov at the Free Russian Printing Works established by Herzen. The periodical was published in London from July i, 1857 to April 1865 and in Geneva from May 1865 to July 1867. It was a monthly, but occasionally it was brought out twice a month. In all 245 issues appeared.
186In 1868 Kolokol was published in French (15 issues appeared), with an occasional supplement in Russian. It had a circulation of 2,500 copies and it was disseminated throughout Russia. It exposed the tyranny of the autocracy, the plunder and embezzlement practised by the civil servants, and the ruthless exploitation of the peasants by the landlords. It issued revolutionary appeals and helped to rouse the people to the struggle against the tsarist government and the ruling classes.
Kolokol was the leading organ of the revolutionary uncensored press and the forerunner of the working-class press in Russia. It played an important role in the development of the general-democratic and revolutionary movement, in the struggle against the autocracy and against serfdom.
p. 36
~^^14^^ An article written by N. P. Ogaryov (see N. P. Ogaryov, Selected Socio-Political and Philosophical Works, Russ. ed., Gospolitizdat, Vol. I, 1952, p. 654).
p. 37
~^^15^^ Lenin quotes from Herzen's article ``N. G. Chernyshevsky" (see A. I. Herzen, Works in Nine Volumes, Russ. ed., Goslitizdat, Vol. 8, p. 209).
p. 37
~^^16^^ Lenin quotes from Herzen's article ``Gossip, Soot, Snuff and the Like" (see A. I. Herzen, Works in Nine Volumes, Russ. ed., Vol. 8, p. no).
p. 38
~^^17^^ From Herzen's letter to I. S. Turgenev of March 10, 1864 (see A. I. Herzen, Works in Nine Volumes, Russ. ed., Vol. 9, p. 500).
p. 38
~^^18^^ See A. I. Herzen, Collected Works in Thirty Volumes, published by the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, Russ. ed., Vol. XIV, Moscow, 1958, p. 233; Kolokol (The Tocsin) of February 15, 1860, Collected Works in Thirty Volumes, Russ. ed., Vol. XV, p. 85; Herzen is wrong: it was not Reitern who shot himself (there is no information to suggest this) but Colonel A. F. Peiker.
p. 38
~^^19^^ Lenin quotes from Herzen's article ``The Fossilised Bishop, the Antediluvian Government and the Deceived People" (see A. I. Herzen, Collected Works in Thirty Volumes, Russ. ed., Vol. XV, 1958, pp. 135--38).
p. 39
~^^20^^ Byednota (The Poor)-a. daily peasant newspaper published in Moscow from March 27, 1918, till January 31, 1931. It was started by decision of the Central Committee of the R.C.P.(B.) in place of the newspapers Derevenskaya Byednota (The Village Poor), Derevenskaya Pravda (The Village Truth) and Soldatskaya Pravda (The Soldiers' __PRINTERS_P_187_COMMENT__ 13* 187 Truth). It actively fought to strengthen the worker-peasant alliance, and to organise and tally the poor and middle peasants around the Communist Party and the Soviet Government. The paper played an important part in the political enlightenment and cultural development of the working peasants, in promoting active, public-minded peasants from among the poor and middle peasants and training a large band of village correspondents.
p. 44
~^^21^^ Timiryazev, K. A. (i843-i92o)-Russian Darwinist, outstanding botanist and physiologist, gifted populariser and propagandist of scientific knowledge, Corresponding Member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. He was the first eminent scientist to welcome the October Socialist Revolution.
Reference is to Timiryazev's book Nauka i Demokratiya. Sbornik statei 1904--1919 (Science and Democracy. Collected Articles 1904--11)19), Moscow, 1920.
p. 50
~^^22^^ Pokrovsky, M. N. (i868-i932)-a member of the Bolshevik Party from 1905 and a prominent Soviet statesman, public figure and historian.
Pokrovsky's book Russian History in Brief Outline, Parts I and II (From Ancient Times to the Second Half of the igtb Century), published by the State Publishing House in December 1920.
p. 68
~^^23^^ Pod Znamenem Marksizma (Under the Banner of Marxism), a philosophical and socio-economic monthly journal published in Moscow from January 1922 to June 1944. p. 74
~^^24^^ Skvortsov-Stepanov, I. 1. (i8vo-i928)-a Party and state worker, writer, historian and economist. Member of the R.S.D.L.P. from 1896; Bolshevik from 1904. An educated Marxist, Skvortsov-Stepanov was a gifted populariser of Marxist-Leninist theory. He translated the three volumes of Marx's Capital and other works by Marx and Engels. At Lenin's request he wrote a book called The Electrification of the R.S.F.S.R. and the Transitional Phase of World Economy, published in 1922.
p. 78
~^^25^^ Ulyanova, Maria Alexandrovna (i83;-i9i6)-mother of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, daughter of A. D. Blank, a doctor, who held advanced views. A well-educated woman, she spoke several languages and was an accomplished musician. Study at home enabled her to qualify as a schoolteacher in 1863. She possessed rare talents as an educationalist and devoted herself entirely to her family and children. Having a strong character and great will power, she shared her children's ideas and brought them up to be honest, 188 industrious and sympathetic towards the needs of the people. She was a warm supporter of her children in their revolutionary struggle and endured the misfortunes that came upon her family with courage and fortitude. Her children's attitude to her was one of love and affection and Lenin always displayed exceptional consideration for her. She is buried in Volkov Cemetery in Leningrad.
p. 81
~^^2^^" Ulyanova-Yelizarova, Anna llyinichna (i864-i93j)-- professional revolutionary, leading figure in the Communist Party, Lenin's elder sister. She joined the revolutionary movement in 1886. She was a member of the first Moscow Committee of the R.S.D.L.P. From 1900 to 1905 she worked in the Jskra organisation and on Bolshevik illegally issued newspapers and was a member of the editorial board of the newspaper Vperyod. Between 1904 and 1906 she maintained contact with the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party which was abroad, and acted as treasurer to the St. Petersburg Committee. From 1908 to 1910 she was engaged in revolutionary activities in Moscow and Saratov and from 1912 to 1914 collaborated in the Bolshevik periodicals Pravda, Prosveshcheniye (Enlightenment) and Rabotnitsa (The Working Woman). She was arrested and exiled a number of times. In 1917 she was secretary to the editorial board of Pravda and editor of the magazine Tkach (The Weaver). From 1918 to 1921 she worked in the People's Commissariat of Education. She was active in the work of founding the Lenin Institute and herself did research work there. She was the author of a number of reminiscences of Lenin.
p. 81
~^^27^^ The fee referred to was probably in payment of his article ``A Characterisation of Economic Romanticism ( Sismondi and Our Native Sismondists)'', the first part of which was published in the April 1897 issue (No. 7) of Novoye Slovo.
p. 81
~^^28^^ Fedoseyev, N. E. (i87i-i898)-one of the most outstanding representatives of the Marxist movement in Russia in the period of its inception. Tortured by constant police persecution and by dirty intrigue, Fedoseyev committed suicide in June 1898. Lenin wrote an article devoted to N. E. Fedoseyev in 1922.
p. 82
~^^29^^ Russkiye Vedomosti (Russian Recorder)-a newspaper published in Moscow from 1863 onwards; it expressed the views of the moderate liberal intelligentsia. Among its contributors in the 18805 and 18905 were the democratic writers V. G. Korolcnko, M. Y. Saltykov-Shchedrin and G. I. Uspensky. It also published items written by liberal Narodniks. In 190; it became the organ of the Right 189 wing of the bourgeois Cadet Party. Lenin said that Russkiye Vedomosti was a peculiar combination of `` Rightwing Cadetism and a strain of Narodism''. In 1918 it was closed down together with other counter-revolutionary newspapers,
p. 82
~^^30^^ Russkoye Bogatstvo (Russian Wealth}-a monthly journal published in St. Petersburg from 1876 to 1918. From the early nineties it held Narodnik liberal views and in 1906 became an organ of the Popular Socialist Party. p. 82
~^^31^^ The Bulochkins-this refers to Zinaida Pavlovna Nevzorova (whose nickname was ``Bulochka'', Russian for ``bread roll'') and her sisters Sofia and Avgusta; Zinaida and Sofia were arrested in 1896 in connection with the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. Apparently Lenin used the surname ``Bulochkin'' in the plural to include Nadezhda Krupskaya, who was arrested on August 12, 1896. ``What sort of finale was there?" means ``What sentence was passed on them?"
p. 85
~^^33^^ Ulyanova, Maria llyinichna (i878-i937)-Lenin's sister and a veteran Bolshevik. She joined the revolutionary movement in her student days and was a professional revolutionary from 1899. She was repeatedly arrested, imprisoned and exiled.
After the February Revolution, from March 1917 to the spring of 1929, she was a member of the editorial board and secretary of Pravda, one of the initiators of the movement of workers' and peasants' correspondents. After the I4th Party Congress she became a member of the Central Control Commission, and after the I7th Congress a member of the Commission of Soviet Control and was also in charge of the Commission's Complaints Bureau. She was decorated with the Order of Lenin in 1933 for her outstanding contribution to the communist education of women workers and peasants. She wrote memoirs and articles about Lenin.
p. 88
~^^33^^ Nachalo (The Beginning)-a scientific literary and political
monthly, organ of the ``legal Marxists'', published in St.
Petersburg in the early months of 1899 under the
editorship of P. B Struve, M. I. Tugan-Baranovsky and others.
G. V. Plekhanov, V. I. Zasulich and others contributed to
it. Lenin wrote a number of book reviews for the journal
which also published the first six paragraphs of Chapter III
of his book The Development of Capitalism in Russia.
p. 89
~^^34^^ This letter was given to Maria Ulyanova in prison and it bears the stamp of the Deputy Prosecutor of the Moscow Department of Justice.
190The Mark referred to in this letter is Mark Timofeyevich Yelizarov (1863--1919), professional revolutionary, Bolshevik, Soviet statesman, husband of Anna llyinichna UlyanovaYelizarova, Lenin's elder sister. He joined the SocialDemocratic movement in 1893, did Party work in St. Petersburg, Moscow and the Volgaside towns, took an active part in the first Russian revolution and was one of the leaders of the railwaymen's general strike in 1905. He was many times arrested and exiled. After the October Revolution he became People's Commissar of Railways and then a member of the Collegium of the People's Commissariat for Trade and Industry.
p. 93
~^^35^^ Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1965, pp. 208--10.
p. 95
~^^36^^ Proudhonism-an unscientific trend in petty-bourgeois socialism, hostile to Marxism, so called after its ideologist, the French anarchist Pierre Joseph Proudhon.
Lenin called Proudhonism the ``dull thinking of a pettybourgeois and a philistine" incapable of comprehending the viewpoint of the working class. The ideas of Proudhonism are widely utilised by bourgeois ``theoreticians'' in their class-collaboration propaganda.
p. 96
~^^37^^ Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1965, pp. 183--84.
p. 96
~^^38^^ Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1965, pp. 199--200.
p. 96
~^^39^^ Karl Marx, Letter to Dr. Kiigelmann, Moscow, 1934, p. 63.
P- 97
/l() Karl Marx, Letter to Dr. Kugelmann, Moscow, 1934, p. 80.
P- 97
~^^41^^ The views of the founders of Marxism on the fundamental issues of the German Revolution of 1848--49 were stated in Engcls's work Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany, printed as a scries of articles in the New 'York Daily Tribune between October 25, 1851 and October 23, 1852. The articles were signed by Marx, who looked them through before sending them to the newspaper. It was established only in 1913 when the correspondence of Marx and Engels was published that Engels was the writer of the articles (see Marx and Engels, Works, 2nd Russ. ed., Vol. 8, pp. 3-113).
P- 97
/l2 See Neue Rheinische Zeitung, ``Politisch-okonomischc Revue'', Nos. 5-6, 1850.
p. 98
~^^43^^ Karl Marx, Letter to Dr. Kugelmann, Moscow, 1934, p. 35.
p. 98
~^^5^^ Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1965, 218--19.
P- 9^^8^^
~^^1^^ Brentanoism-a bourgeois liberal teaching recognising the non-revolutionary ``class'' struggle of the proletariat; it preached the possibility of solving the workers' problems within the framework of capitalism through factory legislation and the organisation of the workers in trade unions. It took its name from the German bourgeois economist, Lujo Brcntano (1844--1931).
p. 99
J Sombartism-libetal bourgeois trend named after Werner Sombart (1863--1041), a vulgar bourgeois economist, one of the ideologists of liberalism in Germany. Sombart, Lenin wrote, has ``substituted Brentanoism for Marxism by employing Marxian terminology, by quoting some of Marx's statements and by assuming a Marxist disguise''. p. 99
' Lenin means The Second Appeal of the General Council of the International Workingmen's Association on the FrancoPrussian War written by Karl Marx.
p. 100
! Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1965,
pp. 262--63.
P- IO3
~^^1^^ Lenin refers to Marx's The Civil War in France. p. 105
' Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1965, p. 264
p. 104
~^^1^^ Reference is to B. N. Knipovich's book K voprosu o difjerentsiatsii russkogo krestyanstva. Differentsiatsiya v sferc Zemledelcheskogo khozyaistva (A Contribution to the Problem of Differentiation of the Russian Peasantry. Differentiation in the Sphere of Farming), St. Petersburg, 1912. p. 106
Lenin refers to the novel Paternal Testaments by the Ukrainian writer Vinnichcnko, a bourgeois nationalist, p. 109
~^^1^^ N. K. Krupskaya's book Public Education and Democracy
was not published by Parus, as had been planned, and was
only issued in 1917 by the Zhizn i Znaniyc Publishers.
p. 110
Lenin wrote this note in reply to a telephone request from a member of the Supreme Council of the National Economy asking him what kind of literature Lenin would like him to buy abroad where he was shortly to go.
p. 111
Lenin did not finish his preface. The pamphlet The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade came out in English at the end of March 1920 without a preface, p. in The German pamphlet N. Lenin. Die Diktatur des Proletariats und der Rcnegat Karl Kautsky came out at the end of December 1919.
p. 112
192~^^57^^ Lenin received Macdonald's book later. It stands in his private library with his marginal notes. Lenin specially marked those passages in the book in which Macdonald tried to play down the class contradictions of capitalist society. These marginal notes were published in Lenin Miscellany XXIV, pp. 253--85.
p. 112
~^^58^^ Foliyeva, Lydia Alexandrovna (born i88i)-a C.P.S.U. member since 1904. She participated in the 1905--07 revolution and in the October Revolution. From 1918 she was secretary of the Council of People's Commissars and of the Council of Labour and Defence, and at the same time was Lenin's private secretary. From 1939 to 1956 she did scientific work at the Central Lenin Museum in Moscow. Now retired on a Party pension.
p. 112
5G The Clarte group of progressive writers and cultural workers was organised by Henri Barbusse in 1919 on the basis of l:'Association Republicaine des Anciens Combattants. Similar groups were set up in other countries, and together they formed the War Veterans International, whose main motto was: War on war. The Clarte group included supporters of the Third International-Henri Barbusse, Anatole France, Paul Vaillant-Couturier-and pacifist writersRomain Rolland, Stefan Zweig, H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Upton Sinclair, Jules Romain, and others. The group published a monthly magazine of the same name (in Paris from October 1919 to January 1928), which in its first years was quite popular in France and abroad. However, the ideological disagreements within the group and its organisational weakness did not permit it to become a large and influential organisation. Soon after Barbusse resigned as editor (in April 1924), the magazine lost its progressive significance. It ceased publication in 1928 and the group disintegrated.
p. 113
co Jacob Richter-oac of Lenin's pseudonyms.
p. 115
~^^61^^ This article was written by Lenin in 1913, and printed in Rabochaya Pravda (Workers' Truth).
p. 116
~^^62^^ Immediately after the October Revolution Lenin sent his suggestions to the Petrograd Public Library on how it should reform its work.
The suggestions quoted here arc from among those conveyed to the Public Library.
p. 118
~^^63^^ Lenin is referring to inter-library book exchanges, p. 120 (i'i This letter was sent from prison to A. K. Chebotaryova, wife of I. N. Chebotaryov, a close friend of the Ulyanov 193 family; since Lenin had boarded with the Chebotaryovs she was officially recognised as a person to whom he was allowed to write a letter from prison. The letter, however, was actually addressed to acquaintances who had not been arrested, including Nadezhda Krupskaya, and its purpose was to find out who else had been arrested besides Lenin. To avoid mentioning names, Lenin linked up the nicknames of his acquaintances with the contents of scientific books he asked to be sent to him.
This is the first of the letters written in prison that have been preserved. Here Lenin outlines his plan of work on his book The Development of Capitalism in Russia which he began in prison and finished in exile.
p. 122
*" Free Economic Society-a privileged learned body, one of the oldest in Europe, founded in St. Petersburg in 1765 for the dissemination throughout the state (says its charter) of information useful in agriculture and industry. p. 12}
~^^00^^ Krupskaya, Nadezbda Konstantinovna (i869-i939)-a veteran Bolshevik, prominent teacher, Lenin's wife. Joined the revolutionary movement in 1890.
In 1917, after her return from emigration together with Lenin, Krupskaya worked in the secretariat of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party. After the October Revolution, she was a member of the Collegium of the People's Commissariat of Education, and from 1929 Deputy Commissar of Education of the R.S.F.S.R. and a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. Krupskaya participated in all the Congresses of the Party (except the 1st and the 5th). From 1924 to 1927 she was also a member of the Central Control Commission and from 1927 a member of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U.(B.). Krupskaya wrote her Reminiscences of Lenin and a number of works on pedagogics. She was decorated with the Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Banner of Labour for her outstanding work in the field of education,
p. 132
~^^67^^ Bonch-Bruyevicb, V. D. (1873--195 ;)-a veteran Communist Party member; since the 2nd Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. associated himself with the Bolsheviks. From 1903 he was in charge of the correspondence department of the C.C. of the R.S.D.L.P. in Geneva, where he set up a library (including C.C. archives) and took part in organising and editing a number of Bolshevik publications. He participated in the February and October revolutions in 1917, and from the early days of the October Revolution until 1920 was 194 the manager of the Council of People's Commissars. He then held a number of executive posts in the national economy, and was later editor-in-chief of the Zhizn i Znaniye Publishing House, organiser and director of the Literary Museum, and in his last years Director of the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences. He was decorated with the Order of Lenin. He was also the author of reminiscences of Lenin and of many works on the history of the Russian revolutionary movement and on literary criticism, ethnography and the history of religion and atheism.
p. 161
~^^8^^ Lunacharsky, Anatoly Vasilyevich (i87;-i933)-prominent Soviet state worker and public figure. An Academician from 1930; joined a social-democratic organisation in 1892 and associated himself with the Bolsheviks after the 2nd Congress of the R.S.D.L.P.; on the editorial boards of the Bolshevik newspapers Vperyod (Forward), Proletary (The Proletarian) and Novaya Zhizn (New Life), working under Lenin. An active participant in the 3rd, 4th (Unity) and 5th Congresses of the R.S.D.L.P.; represented the Bolsheviks at the 1907 Stuttgart Congress of the 2nd International. After the defeat of the first Russian revolution he followed the path of revisionism, joining the Machists and organising the Vperyod anti-party group together with A.A. Bogdanov and other ``Otzovists'' (who wanted to withdraw Bolshevik deputies from the State Duma). He moved away from the Vperyod group in 1911 and set up the ``Proletarian Literature" group. Took an internationalist stand during World War I. At the 6th Congress of the R.S.D.L.P.(B.) was admitted to the Bolshevik Party. After the October Revolution he was for 12 years the People's Commissar for Education of the R.S.F.S.R. and from 1929 chaired the Science Committee under the C.E.C. of the U.S.S.R.; from 1933-Plenipotentiary Representative of the U.S.S.R. in Spain. Lunacharsky was a brilliant public speaker and journalist, an expert on art, history and literature, a literary critic and a playwright.
p. 169
Serafimovich, Alexander Serafimovich (i8(>3-i949)-- prominent Soviet writer, member of the C.P.S.U. from 1918. Studied in the physics and mathematics department of Petersburg University where he met Alexander Ulyanov, Lenin's elder brother. First became acquainted with Marxism at the University. In 1887 he wrote a revolutionary broadsheet in connection with the attempt on the life of Alexander III, for which he was arrested and exiled to the Archangel Gubernia for three years. In exile he became a close friend of P. A. Moiseyenko, an organiser of the 195 1885 strike of the workers of the Morozovskaya Manufaktura. He also began his literary work while in exile, p. 170
``° Fofanova, Margarita Vasilycvna (born i883)-a participant in the revolutionary movement. Joined the R.S.D.L.P. organisation in Perm in 1902, arrested in 1903 and served a term in prison. From late 1904 she did Party work in Archangel, Simferopol, Ufa, Petersburg and other cities. After the February Revolution she was a Deputy of the Petrograd Soviet and did Party work on assignment from the Vyborg Party Committee. Her flat was frequently used as temporary accommodation for comrades returning from exile, prison or emigration. Lenin, who went underground after the July events of 1917, hid in her flat for some time. After the October Revolution she worked in the People's Commissariat of Agriculture, and was Rector of the Moscow Zootechnical Institute. From 192; held managerial and other posts in various organisations. Now a Party pensioner.
p. 171
~^^71^^ Essen, Maria Moiseyevna (i872-i956)-from 1892 an active member of the revolutionary movement, became a professional revolutionary in 1897. From 1897 she was a member of the Kiev branch of ``The League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class" and was arrested and exiled to Yakutia in 1899. Escaped to Geneva in 1902 where she got in touch with Iskra. Became a member of the Petersburg Committee of the R.S.D.L.P. in the same year. In 1903 she was co-opted onto the C.C. of R.S.D.L.P. In 1905, as a member of the Petersburg Party Committee, she organised armed workers' detachments and was repeatedly arrested. In the period of reaction she moved away from the labour movement and did no Party work between 1907 and 1917. In 1918 she joined the Tiflis group of the Internationalists and together with it joined the R.C.P. (B.) in 1920. Did Party work in Georgia from 1921 to 1925, and from 192; to 1927 worked in Moscow at the State Publishing House. From 1927 worked in the Party's History Department under the Central Committee and the Lenin Institute; from 1933 to 1956 she was engaged in literary work.
p. 176
~^^72^^ Manucharyants, Sbushanik Mkrtychevna (born 1889)--- C.P.S.U. member from 1918. From 1920 to 1924 was Lenin's librarian, then Krupskaya's librarian. From 1930 to 1955 she was a research worker at the Marx-- EngelsLenin Institute. Now a Party pensioner.
p. 177
[196] __ALPHA_LVL2__ CHRONOLOGICAL INDEX OF LENIN'S WORKSTo A. K. Chebotaryova, January 2
Letter to His Mother and His Sister Anna, April 17 Letter to His Mother and His Sister Anna, May 25 Letter to His Mother and His Sister Anna, June 8 (20)
1901 ~Letter to His Sister Maria, May 19
1902 ~To the Director of the British Museum
'9°5
Party Organisation and Party Literature
1907 ~Preface to the Russian Translation of Karl Marx's Letters to Dr. Kugelmann
tgoi
Letter to A. V. Lunacharsky, January 13
Lev Tolstoi as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution
1910 ~Tolstoi and the Proletarian Struggle
1911 ~Lev Tolstoi and His Epoch
1912 ~ In Memory of Herzen
Letter to B. N. Knipovich, June 6
191)
To N. A. Rubakin, January 25
What Can Be Done for Public Education
Letter from Krupskaya and Lenin to Lenin's Mother, December
26
197
Book Review. Labour Protection Exhibits at the All-Russia Hygiene Exhibition in St. Petersburg in 191) Book Review. Among Books, Vol. II, Nauka Publishers, Moscow, 1913
1916
Letter to Maxim Gorky, written before February 8
1917
The Tasks of the Public Library in Petrograd
1918
Instruction on Compiling a Reading Book for Workers and Peasants
1919
A Little Picture in Illustration of Big Problems
Theses and Report on Bourgeois Democracy and the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat, March 4 (Materials of the
First Congress of the Communist International)
To Vorovsky, October 24
Introduction to the Book by John Reed: Ten Days That Shook
the World
1920
Preface to the English Edition of the Pamphlet The
Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade
Letter to K. A. Timiryazev, April 27
Letter to M. N. Pokrovsky, December ;
To the Library of the Rumyantsev Museum
The Tasks of the Youth Leagues (Speech Delivered at the
Third All-Russia Congress of the Russian Young Communist
League, October 2)
Letter to the State Publishing House, December n
1921
The New Economic Policy and the Tasks of the Political Education Departments. Report to the Second All-Russia Congress of Political Education Departments, October ij A Capably Written Little Book
1921
On the Significance of Militant Materialism
Preface to I. I. Stepanov's The Electrification of the R.S.F.S.R.
and the Transitional Phase of World Economy
Note to Lydia Fotiyeva, July 1 3
A Fly in the Ointment
To the Clarte Group, November 15
REQUEST TO READERS ~
Progress Publishers would be glad to have your opinion of the translation and design of this book and any suggestions you may have for future publications.
Please send your comments to 21, Zubovsky Boulevard, Moscow, U.S.S.R.
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