ONE afternoon in the summer of 1909, M. Berendson, a Danish business man interested in the European revolutionary movement, was introduced to a group of Russian exiles at a teaparty at Vevey. Among those he met was a certain M. Ulyanov, for whom the other members of the little gathering appeared to entertain the deepest respect, hanging on every word he uttered and solemnly repeating his generalizations almost as though they were attempting to commit them all to memory. There was something in the physique of the man—was it his dome-like head or his deep-set, cruel, steel-grey eyes? -which arrested attention. Even before he had begun to speak, he made himself felt as a person with a certain magnetic force about him; but when he began to talk, his superiority to the common herd of Russian revolutionary exiles became manifest. His converse was quiet, confident, singularly devoid of cloudy denunciation. He abused no individuals; he did not even mention the Tsar. He just explained to a submissive audience of compatriots the measures which he proposed to take when he assumed power in Russia. Nobody among his hearers appeared to challenge his authority or to doubt his success. Even the Danish stranger, a hard-headed business man, found himself insensibly sharing the common assumption that somehow or other M. Ulyanov would have his day. I notice,' he said in parting, that you make no mention of the Tsar.' 'Oh,' replied the Russian, personalities do not concern me. If the Tsar does not accommodate himself to my system, he must find some nail from which to hang himself.' The Dane returned to his hotel in Lausanne and noted in his diary: I met a M. Ulyanov at Vevey a terrible man who intends to be master of Russia.'" 1 At the moment when M. Berendson met him, Vladimir Ilyitch Ulyanov-the "Nikolai Lenin" of the innumerable pamphlets and articles by which he had established an intellectual ascendancy in the revolutionary underworld-was already the acknowledged and autocratic leader of the most highly disciplined of Russian revolutionary parties. In the five years that remained before the outbreak of the world war that he had long foreseen, and that was to open to him the gates of supreme power, he consolidated his commanding position yet further. But before attempting to present in sequence the chief events in the history of this tremendous 1 44 Lenin," article by H. A. L. Fisher, The Cornhill Magazine, March 1924. personality who was to subdue and fascinate first a small band of devoted adherents and then one of the greatest, if most enigmatic, of nations, we must endeavour to sketch in roughly the Russian background before which the uniquely Russian figure of Lenin stands out most clearly. For Lenin was a Russian before he was an internationalist-Russian in the fixity of his purpose, Russian in the Messianic passion he brought to the service of his ideal. The history of modern Russia has been the history of arrested development followed by the perversion of all the life-forces of the State. A great hope was born when the autocracy, shaken by the disasters of the Crimean War, decreed the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. But the Russian peasant, though he ceased to be the private property of his lord and became the owner of his own soul, yet passed rapidly into an economic in place of a legal serfdom. Briefly, the terms of redemption were so high that the peasants (who constitute practically the Russian nation), while they secured their land, could not secure their economic independence, and were forced back into the service of their former lords as hired labourers. Often they paid for their land, now their own, in labour services to the former owner-services which were demanded by the lords not only for the lands held by the peasants, but for the redemption of their persons. Since the serfs and their lands had once been equally the property of the lords, the serfs, when they were emancipated, must pay not only for their land but for their souls! The solution of the agrarian problem was further complicated by the fact that the emancipated peasants still remained members of the primitive communal village unit of Russia-the " Mir," which they could not leave. In a rapidly changing industrial age, the Mir became a clog to all agricultural progress. Land was held in common and repartitioned among the members of the Mir every year. Each holding consisted of many widely scattered strips (a device that ensured that each member of the Mir should have his just share of good and bad land), the cultivation of which involved unnecessary waste of time. In addition, the Mir was the unit of State taxation, and members had to bear the burden of any individual bankruptcy or other failure to pay.1 The continued 1 It will scarcely be credited that the liberty of the peasant was so restricted that he required a passport to move from one village to another. But such was the case. existence of the Mir was the chief cause of the comparative failure of the Zemstvos, or county councils, instituted in 1864, and elected from all classes. The circumstances favourable to their development were absent. The agrarian position after 1861 gave rise to a two-fold movement among the peasants. In the first In the first place the ecomonic consequences of the Emancipation of 1861, whereby they were forced back into dependence on their former lords, gave rise to the intense land-hunger that added the immense momentum of the peasantry to the revolutionary movement of 1917. Then the idea of personal emancipation from the lords gave rise to a movement, weak at first, but steadily increasing in strength, for personal emancipation from the Mir. The traditional Communism of the village was felt as a shackle to individual initiative. Not until after the revolution of 1905 was the agrarian problem squarely and constructively faced by Stolypin. By enabling any peasant who desired to embark on individual farming to leave his Mir, Stolypin began a process which, had it been undertaken immediately after the Emancipation, would gradually and steadily have broken up the medieval organization of the Russian village; facilitated the acquisition of land by the peasant, and developed a powerful class of small farmers independent alike of lord and Mir. Stolypin's ideal was to set in motion forces which in due course must have destroyed the Mir, and equally have extinguished all large landed proprietors who were not willing to embark on intensive and scientific farming. But reforms which required a long period of peaceful work were fatally interrupted by the outbreak of the European War and the convulsions to which it gave rise in the weak and loosely knit fabric of the Russian State. Stolypin was too late to remedy the consequences of the disastrous reaction that gripped Russia after the reforming effort of the 'sixties. The autocracy, terrified by the extravagant hopes of the Liberals, embarked on a system of repression. Repression led to the counter-offensive of the Terrorists, whose activities culminated in the assassination of the Tsar Alexander II. in 1881. Terrorism itself led to intensified reaction. The vicious circle was broken only after the Revolution of 1905, and then, as we have seen, it was too late. The other great factor in the complex of influences making for revolution in Russia was the industrial transformation. Russian industry may be said to date from the 'sixties, although the textile trade had been strongly established round Petrograd and Moscow in the 'forties and 'fifties. The speed of industrial development was astonishing. To take one example, there was a 600 per cent. increase in the production of cast-iron during the years between 1888 and 1900. Between 1885 and 1897 there was an increase in the town population of 33 per cent. The significance of this remarkable advance becomes obvious when it is realized that this is a rate of increase over twice as high as that of the entire population of Russia, which in the same period advanced at the rate of only 15.2 per cent.1 This sudden and catastrophic development of capitalism in Russia was deliberately favoured by the Imperial government, which exerted itself to make the Empire the paradise of industrial adventurers by protecting new enterprises by high tariffs. More than half of the capital on which the new Russian industries depended was foreign. One consequence of the unlimited favours lavished on foreign enterprises in Russia was that the capitalists, while attaining enormous economic, never aspired to corresponding political, power. By a sort of quid pro quo the Imperial government was left uninfluenced politically, whether for good or evil, by the new industrial forces. The economic bourgeoisie was, as a result, singularly timid and unenterprising in its attitude to the autocracy. Another consequence of the headlong development of Russian industry was the creation of stupendous factories where vast aggregates of men, women and children worked under conditions resembling those of the earlier phase of capitalism in Great Britain, and characterized by ruthless exploitation of the workers. In the words of the report of Lord Emmott's "Committee to collect information on Russia (political and economic)," "a study of industrial conditions in Russia discloses a disregard on the part of employers for the dignity of human life and for the social dangers proceeding from the physical and psychological results of sweated labour often performed amid surroundings of a degrading and dehumanizing character." 2 In Petrograd alone there were more factories containing over 5000 workers each than in the whole of capitalist Germany. Of the industrial workers of Russia 1 Farbman, "Bolshevism in Retreat," pp. 15-16. 2 Report: Russia No. 1 (1921), Cmd. 1240, para. 17. 43.8 per cent. worked in factories of over 1000 hands, while only 20.5 per cent. of the industrial population of U.S.A. worked in factories of like size.1 Obviously, such vast aggregations of labour under conditions so retrograde afforded a fruitful soil for the propagation of revolutionary theories. The proletariat became intensely and justly self-conscious in the great factories. There it learned vividly a sense of its own solidarity, and there it rapidly passed from a state of economic hostility to the employer to that of fierce political opposition to the régime on which the capitalists had to lean more and more for the necessary support against the exploited masses. As a result, at the head and forefront of the attack on the autocracy stood the industrial proletariat, largely recruited as it was from the floating population of the villages. The occupational and social stratification which prevented co-operation to so marked a degree among Russian classes had affected least the peasants and the industrial proletariat who still retained contact.2 This notable feature of Russian conditions, that not the bourgeoisie but the proletariat constituted the true opposition to the autocracy, cannot be over-emphasized. The supine timidity of the Russian capitalists and the small middle class was notorious. It justified Plekhanov's prophecy, made in the early 'nineties, that "the Russian Revolution will succeed as a proletarian Revolution, or never succeed at all." 3 It was during the 'nineties and among the industrial workers of the capital city that was afterwards to bear the name by which he will be known to history, that Lenin began his great work. Vladimir Ilyitch Ulyanov was born 10th April 1870, at the town of Simbirsk on the Volga. His father, a man of wide local popularity, was an official of the Ministry of Education and eventually rose to the rank of State Councillor. Under the Imperial system, the elder Ulyanov as a State Councillor automatically entered the lower ranks of the nobility, and so Vladimir Ilyitch was in due course registered at the local police office as an hereditary noble. His mother possessed a small estate in the province of Kazan and after her husband's death received a State pension. 1 Farbman, p. 20. 2 Kurt Wiedenfeld, "The Remaking of Russia," pp. 5-10. 3 Quoted Farbman, p. 14. • Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in February 1924. |