Marx-Engels | Lenin | Stalin | Home Page
Lunacharsky on LeninSection I epigraph
Vladimir Ilyich was not one of those people whose greatness becomes clear only after their death; on the contrary, all of us, even those who met him in everyday life, were well aware that a genius lives among us, that a historical figure of world scale lives among us. And it is hardly possible to find a person who would not have the consciousness of this extraordinary and incomparable greatness of our contemporary ULYANOV-LENIN. Vladimir Ilyich does not belong to the number of such persons whose vitality and powerful influence fade with death, whose love weakens after the cessation of their material existence as individuals.
Vladimir Ilyich remains colossally alive with us even now, alive as a social force, and alive in our memories as a charming, truly socialist high personality, incomparable with anything else. To write a biography of Vladimir Ilyich in the way it should be presented to each of his sincere admirers is a task that is both fascinating and grandiose. After all, this means writing the history of the great Russian revolution in its most burning years, writing the history of the world revolution over a quarter of a century, this means touching on the most diverse questions of politics, economics and culture. It also means painting a full-length alfresco colossal figure, the charm of which must be captured and passed on to posterity, a figure that in the moral aspect is decidedly unrivaled. In order to compose such a biography, one needs a combination of great literary talent and psychological sensitivity, on the one hand, and great political experience and sociological depth, on the other. Compared with this artistic biography, the collective works on Vladimir Ilyich will always, in the end, be only preparatory. All those large private criticisms or large extended characterizations and attempts to embrace Lenin as a phenomenon that were made by many of his comrades, including myself at different times and with different approaches, will also be preparatory. We will be happy if in these attempts there are grains necessary for the creation of that deep scientific, factually correct and at the same time exciting biography-poem, which will be one of the most beautiful books of world literature.
February 18, 1924
(From the preface to the 2nd edition of the pamphlet "Revolutionary Silhouettes")Leader of the Proletarian Revolution
The article was published in the journal Krasnoarmeyets, 1920, No. 21–22. The issue is dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the birth of V. I. Lenin. Published with minor abridgements under the same heading in the journal October, 1963, No. I.
Historians-idealists tended and lean toward the idea that history is made by great personalities. First of all, people in positions of power. And if their thought ran into imposing figures of revolutionaries rising to the heights of power from below, then they attributed the revolution itself for more than half to the talents, energy or cunning and art of leaders.“We Marxists know that it is not the personality that creates history, but that history creates the personality. And Vladimir Ilyich was created by history. But what a story! Twenty-five years of the growth of the proletarian party under exceptional political conditions, the entire chain of development of the Russian revolution, on the one hand, and the entire work of the proletariat of the West, manifested in Marxism, on the other. Only the enormous maturity of the vanguard of the working class in Russia made it possible to put forward a whole series of remarkable leaders, and among them the greatest genius."
(“On the characteristics of the October Revolution”)Marxist history explains historical events by social processes that do not depend on anyone's will, by the vicissitudes of class struggle, the strength of which and the nature of aspirations are determined by their role in social production. From this, others draw the conclusion that Marxism assigns no role to great people in history, does not recognize great people.
However, isn't it true, how strange it would be if the significance of great people did not recognize the trend that calls itself Marxism, that is, its very name was derived from the name of a great man.
No, Marxist history, and even more so, Marxist practice, is very attentive to the individual ...
Marxists are not spontaneous. Knowing that a revolution cannot be made, that revolutions do occur, we at the same time perfectly understand that a revolution can be unorganized, chaotic, or it can be introduced into the mainstream of planning and illuminated by the consciousness, if not of all its participants, then of its organizing vanguard. That is precisely the strength of the proletariat, unlike, for example, the peasantry, that it lends itself better to organization and more easily promotes organizers from among its ranks.
The proletariat is the organizing class, which had first to conquer the country, and now it is necessary to arrange it. And he cannot carry out such work without a central headquarters, in which all the news would be combined and from where directives would be given, where all the most valuable experience would be accumulated and where the plan to be implemented would crystallize.<…>
People's revolutions bring to the surface colossal strata of the population, which until then had been cut off from power. It is natural to expect that among these new people, through selection, a certain number of highly gifted individuals will stand out.
"Great events are determined by great causes, but great people are obstetricians who help the revolutionary future to be born as soon as possible."
("From the memories of Jean Zhores")
Add to this that at the head of the revolutionary movement, while it lurks underground, there are people of the highest practical idealism and invincible courage, that they go through a harsh school of conspiracy and hard struggle from below, and you will get an explanation why broad revolutions cannot but have major leaders.
The world does not know a revolution so broad, prepared by such a long struggle, as the social revolution in Russia, which will inevitably turn into a world revolution. That is why one could predict in advance that such a revolution would be headed by people of high political talent and exceptional self-control of character.
It is no accident that a great man is at the head of our party. This is how it should be. The breadth and scope of our revolution and the special, unprecedented features of its main engine, the working class, are reflected in the greatness of his talents, in the steadfastness of his will.
[1920]Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The essay was first published in 1919 in the book The Great Revolution. (October Revolution)”, published by the private publishing house of Grzhebin. After minor re-editing, it was included in the collection " Revolutionary Silhouettes ", published in 1923 by the Moscow publishing house "Transposition" and in 1924 by Ukrgosizdat. Subsequently, it was repeatedly reprinted both as separate editions and as part of collections of works about V. I. Lenin.
... I was in exile when news of the Second Congress began to reach us.By this time Iskra had already been published and gained strength. 1 I did not hesitate to declare myself an Iskra-ist. But I didn’t know Iskra itself very well: the issues reached us scattered, although they did reach us.
In any case, we had such an idea that to the inseparable trinity: Lenin, Martov and Potresov, the foreign trinity was also intimately soldered: Plekhanov, Axelrod and Zasulich.
That is why the news of the split at the Second Congress hit us like a butt on the head. We knew that the last acts of struggle against Rabochaye Dyelo would take place at the Second Congress, 2 but that the split would proceed along such a line that Martov and Lenin would find themselves in different camps, while Plekhanov would split in half, it did not occur to us at all. .
<...> It soon became known among whom this or that line was successful. The majority of the Marxist intelligentsia of the capitals joined the Mensheviks, and they had undoubted success among the most skilled workers; it was the committees, that is, the provincial workers, the professionals of the revolution, who first of all joined the Bolsheviks. And it was, of course, also mainly the intelligentsia, but, undoubtedly, of a different type - not Marxist professors, students and female students, but people who once and for all irrevocably made revolution their profession.
It was mainly this element, to which Lenin attached such great importance, which he called the bacterium of the revolution, that was rallied by the famous Organizing Bureau of the Committees of the Majority, which gave Lenin his army.<…>
At the end of the exile in Kyiv, I managed to see Comrade. Krzhizhanovsky, who at that time played a rather large role, a close friend of Comrade. Lenin, however, oscillating between a purely Leninist position and a position of conciliation. It was he who told me in more detail about Lenin. He characterized him with enthusiasm, characterized his huge mind, inhuman energy, characterized him as an unusually sweet, magnificent comrade, but at the same time noted that Lenin was primarily a political person and that, having parted ways with someone politically, he immediately vomited. and personal relationships. In the struggle, according to Krzhizhanovsky, Lenin was merciless and straightforward.
As soon as I arrived in Kyiv after my exile, I received a direct order from the Bureau of Majority Committees to immediately go abroad and join the editorial board of the Central Organ of the Party. I did it.
I lived in Paris for several months partly because I wanted to get to the bottom of the differences. However, in Paris, I nevertheless immediately became the head of a very small Bolshevik group there and already began to fight the Mensheviks.
Lenin wrote me a couple of short letters in which he called me to hurry to Geneva. Finally he came himself.
His arrival was somewhat unexpected for me. Personally, at first glance, he did not make a very good impression on me. He seemed to me in his appearance as if a little colorless; he did not tell me anything definite, he only insisted on an immediate departure for Geneva.
I agreed to leave.
At the same time, Lenin decided to read a big lecture in Paris on the fate of the Russian revolution and the Russian peasantry.
It was at this lecture that I heard him as a speaker for the first time. Here Lenin was transformed. I was greatly impressed by the concentrated energy with which he spoke, those eyes staring into the crowd of listeners, becoming almost gloomy and piercing like a drill, this monotonous, but full of power movement of the speaker, now forward, then back, this smoothly flowing and all throughly charged speech.
I realized that this man must make a strong and indelible impression as a tribune. And I already knew how strong Lenin was as a publicist with his rude, unusually clear style, his ability to present any idea, even complex, amazingly simple and vary it so that it was finally minted even in the most raw and little accustomed to political thinking mind .
<...> But even then it was clear to me that the dominant feature of his character - that which made up half of his appearance - was will, an extremely definite, extremely intense will, able to concentrate on the immediate task and never go beyond the circle drawn by a strong mind that set every particular task as a link in a huge global political chain.
<...> When I got to know Lenin better, I appreciated another side of him that is not immediately evident: this is the amazing power of life in him. She boils and plays in it. On the day I am writing these lines, Lenin must already be 50 years old, but even now he is still a very young man, quite a youth in his vitality. How infectiously, how sweetly, how childishly he laughs, and how easy it is to make him laugh, what a propensity he has for laughter - that expression of man's victory over difficulties! In the most terrible moments that we had to endure, Lenin was invariably even-tempered and still inclined towards merry laughter.
His anger is also unusually sweet.<…> He always dominates his indignation, and it has an almost playful form. This thunder, "as if frolicking and playing, rumbles in the blue sky." Many times I noted this external seething, these angry words, these arrows of poisonous irony - and next to it there was the same chuckle in the eyes, there was the ability in one minute to end this whole scene of anger, which seemed to be played out by Lenin, because it was necessary, inside he remains not only calm, but also cheerful.
In private life, too, Lenin loves most of all just such unpretentious, direct, simple fun, determined by the seething of forces. His favorites are children and kittens. He can sometimes play with them for hours.
In his work, Lenin brings the same beneficial charm of life ... He writes terribly quickly in a large, sweeping hand; without a single blot, he sketches out his articles, which seem to cost him no effort. He can write at any moment - usually in the morning, just getting out of bed, but also late in the evening, returning after a tiring day, and at any time. He has been reading lately (with the possible exception of a short interval abroad, during the reaction) more in fits and starts than assiduously; but from any book, almost from any page, he will always bring out something new, he will dig out this or that idea necessary for him, which later serves as a weapon for him.
It is especially ignited not from kindred ideas, but from opposite ones. An ardent polemicist is always alive in him.
But if Lenin is somehow ridiculous to call "hard-working", then he is able-bodied to a great extent. I am close to admitting that he is downright indefatigable; if I cannot say this, it is because I know that lately the superhuman efforts that he has to make, nevertheless, towards the end of each week, break his strength somewhat and force him to rest.** Having reviewed these lines now, in March 1923, during Lenin's serious illness, I am nevertheless inclined to admit that neither he nor we took care of him enough. Nevertheless, I am convinced that the heroic nature of Vladimir Ilyich will overcome his illness and that the time is not far off when he will again return to the leadership of the RCP and Russia. (Note 1923).
Alas, not only in March, but even a week before the death of Vladimir Ilyich, we all hoped for this. Decisively all the doctors who treated him assured his family and his closest friends that the matter was on the mend quickly. In this sense, we were somewhat more pessimistic about the matter in March than, say, in December 1923. Meanwhile, the incurable disease continued its work. The doctors were mistaken, and they were misled by the fact that the great brain of Vladimir Ilyich, despite the terrible flaws inflicted on him by the disease, fought so vigorously with its symptoms that it sometimes led to encouraging improvements. -AND. L. (Note 1924).But after all, Lenin knows how to relax. He takes this rest like some kind of bath, during which he does not want to think about anything and gives himself entirely to idleness and, if possible, to his favorite fun and laughter. Therefore, from the shortest rest, Lenin comes out refreshed and ready for a new struggle.
This key of sparkling and somehow naive vitality, next to the firm breadth of mind and intense will, of which I spoke above, is the charm of Lenin. This charm is colossal: people who fall close into his orbit not only give themselves to him as a political leader, but somehow fall in love with him in a peculiar way. This applies to people of various calibers and spiritual moods - from such a subtly vibrating huge talent as Gorky, to some kind of "grey-pawed" peasant who appeared from the depths of the Penza province ...
Let me return to my memories of Lenin before the Great Revolution.
During the first part of our life in Geneva, until January 1905, we devoted ourselves chiefly to the inner party struggle. Here I was struck by Lenin's deep indifference to polemical skirmishes; he did not attach so much importance to the struggle for foreign audiences, which for the most part were on the side of the Mensheviks. He did not appear at various solemn discussions and did not particularly advise me on this. He preferred me to give large, solid essays.No bitterness was felt towards his opponents, but nevertheless he was a cruel political opponent, he took advantage of their every mistake, catching and exposing every hint of opportunism (in which he was absolutely right, because later the Mensheviks themselves fanned all their sparks of that time into a rather opportunistic flame). In the political struggle, he used every weapon except dirty ones. It cannot be said that the Mensheviks behaved in the same way: our relations were quite spoiled, and few of the political opponents managed at the same time to maintain any human personal relations. The Mensheviks have already turned into enemies for us. Especially poisoned the relationship of the Mensheviks to us Dan. Dana Lenin always did not like very much. Martov, on the other hand, he loved and loves,* but he considered him politically weak-willed and losing its general contours behind the subtleties of political thought.
With the onset of revolutionary events** things changed dramatically, we began to gain, as it were, a moral advantage over the Mensheviks. By this time the Mensheviks had definitely turned towards the slogan: push the bourgeoisie forward and strive for a constitution, or at least a democratic republic. Our “revolutionary-technical” point of view, as the Mensheviks claimed, attracted even a significant part of the emigre public, especially young people. We felt the living soil under our feet.
* On the day I was looking through the last proofreading of this silhouette, the news came of Martov's death.
** This refers to the revolution of 1905. —Ed.Lenin at that time was magnificent. With the greatest enthusiasm, he unfolded the prospects for further merciless revolutionary struggle and passionately strove for Russia.<...>
I met him later in St. Petersburg.<…> Of course, even here he wrote many brilliant articles and remained the political leader of the most politically active party, the Bolsheviks.
At that time, Lenin, fearing arrest, rarely spoke as a speaker; as far as I remember, only once, under the name of Karpov, and he was recognized, and he was given a grand ovation. He worked mainly "in the corner", almost exclusively with a pen and at various meetings of the main headquarters of individual parties.<...>
I didn't see Lenin in the Finnish situation, when he had to bite off the reaction.
Lenin and I met again abroad at the Stuttgart Congress. 3Here we were somehow especially close: in addition to the fact that we had to constantly consult, for one of the most important works at the congress was entrusted to me on behalf of our party, we also had many big political conversations here, so to speak, of an intimate nature. We weighed the prospects for a great social revolution, and in general Lenin was a greater optimist than I was. I thought that the course of events would be somewhat slow, that, apparently, we would have to wait until the countries of Asia were also capitalized, that capital still had decent resources, and that we would only see a real social revolution in old age. Lenin was genuinely upset by these prospects. When I developed my evidence for him, I noticed a real shadow of sadness on his strong, intelligent face, and I realized how passionately this man longed during his lifetime not only to see the revolution, but also powerful to do it. However, he did not state anything, he was, apparently, only ready to realistically wait for the movement to go up and behave accordingly. Lenin turned out to have more political sensitivity than everyone else, which is not surprising.<…>I note, by the way, that Lenin is always very shy and somehow hides in the shadows at international congresses - perhaps because he does not believe enough in his knowledge of languages; meanwhile, he speaks good German and is very good at French and English. Be that as it may, Lenin limited his public speeches at congresses to a few phrases, and this changed after Lenin felt himself first to some extent, and then unconditionally, the leader of the world revolution. Already in Zimmerwald and Kienthal (where, however, I was not personally present), Lenin, as far as I know, delivered long and responsible speeches in foreign languages. At the congresses of the Third International, he often delivered long reports and, moreover, did not agree to have them translated by translators, but usually spoke himself, first in German, then in French, always completely freely and expressed his thoughts clearly and flexibly. All the more touching seemed to me a small document that I recently saw in the collections of the Red Moscow Museum. This is a questionnaire written by Vladimir Ilyich himself. Against the question: "Does he speak any language fluently" - Ilyich firmly put: "None." A small touch that perfectly characterizes his extraordinary modesty. It will be appreciated by anyone who was present at the thunderous applause that the Germans, French and other Western Europeans arranged for Ilyich after his speeches delivered in foreign languages.
I am very happy that I did not have to go through, so to speak, in personal contact our long political quarrel with Lenin, when I, together with Bogdanov and others, at one time veered to the left and was in the Vperyod group, 4 which erroneously disagreed with Lenin in its assessment of the need for the party in the era of the Stolypin reaction to use legal opportunities.<…>
I will add to these brief remarks the following. I often had to work with Lenin in drafting various kinds of resolutions, usually this was done collectively—Lenin loves common work in these cases. Recently, I again had to participate in such work in the elaboration of the resolution of the Eighth Congress on the peasant question.
Lenin himself is extremely resourceful in this, quickly finding the appropriate words and phrases, weighing them from different angles, sometimes rejecting them. Extremely glad for any help from outside. When someone manages to find a completely suitable formula: “Here, here, you have said it well, dictate it,” Lenin says in such cases. If certain words seem doubtful to him, he again, staring into space, thinks and says: "Let's say it better like this." Sometimes he cancels the formula proposed by himself with complete confidence, having listened to well-aimed criticism with a laugh.
Such work, under the chairmanship of Lenin, is always carried out with unusual agility and somehow cheerfully. Not only does his own mind work excitedly, but he excites the minds of others to the highest degree.
Now I will not add anything to these my recollections of Vladimir Ilyich before the revolution of 1917. Of course, I still have a lot of impressions and opinions about the absolutely brilliant leadership of the Russian and world revolution, which our leader has made history.
I do not give up the idea of giving a more complete political portrait of Vladimir Ilyich on the basis of later experience: a whole series of new traits - by no means, however, running counter to those noted by me and characterizing directly his personality - of course, enriched my understanding of him over these last six years. years of cooperation. But for such broader and more meaningful portraits, the time will come.
It seems to me that the comrades who wish to republish these pages of the first volume of The Great Revolution, slightly altered by me as editors, will not be mistaken in believing that they also have their own little value in the history of Russia and the present, which is always observed in the widest popular circles. such a heightened and legitimate interest.
[1924]
Iskra is the first all-Russian illegal Marxist newspaper, founded by V. I. Lenin in 1900. The first issue of the newspaper was published in December 1900 in Leipzig, subsequent issues were published in Munich, from July 1902 in London and from the spring of 1903 in Geneva. Lenin was in fact the editor-in-chief and leader of Iskra, he published articles on all the main questions of party building and the class struggle of the Russian proletariat. Soon after the Second Party Congress (July 17 (30) - August 10 (23), 1903), the Mensheviks, with the support of Plekhanov, seized Iskra into their own hands. With No. 52 Iskra ceased to be a militant organ of revolutionary Marxism.
The journal Rabocheye Delo, a non-periodical publication of the Union of Russian Social Democrats Abroad, was published in Geneva from April 1899 to February 1902. Supporters of "economism" grouped around him. The workers promoted the opportunist ideas of subordinating the political struggle of the proletariat to the economic struggle and supported the Bernsteinian slogan of "freedom of criticism" of Marxism.
At the Second Congress of the RSDLP (1903), the workers represented the extreme right, opportunist wing of the party.
The International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart (Seventh Congress of the Second International) was held from August 18 to 24, 1907. The most important issue on the agenda of the congress was the struggle of the international working class and its parties against militarism and war, which was openly prepared by the imperialists of the whole world.
A. V. Lunacharsky was a member of the commission for the development of the resolution "Relationships between political parties and trade unions."
The Vperyod group is an anti-party group that took shape in December 1909 abroad on the initiative of A. A. Bogdanov and G. A. Aleksinsky. It included otzovists, ultimatists, and god-builders (A. A. Bogdanov, G. A. Aleksinsky, A. V. Lunacharsky, M. N. Pokrovsky, and others).
The otzovists believed that in the conditions of reaction the party should only conduct illegal work, they refused to participate in the work of the Duma, cooperative, trade union and other mass legal and semi-legal organizations and considered it necessary to concentrate all party work within the framework of an illegal organization. Ultimatism was a kind of otzovism. The ultimatists differed from the otzovists only in form. They proposed to present an ultimatum to the Social Democratic Duma faction on unquestioning submission of the faction to the decisions of the Central Committee of the Party and, otherwise, to recall the Social Democratic deputies from the Duma. God-builders preached the creation of a new, "socialist" religion, trying to reconcile Marxism with religion. V. I. Lenin defined "god-building" as the ideology of the petty-bourgeois fellow travelers of the revolution, "desperate and tired" (Poln. sobr, soch., v. 48, p. 227). In his works, he sharply criticized the actions of the members of the Forward group. At the end of 1913, the group effectively broke up; finally ceased to exist after the February Revolution of 1917. Lenin wrote in 1912:
“the influence of this group has always been insignificant, and it dragged out its existence solely thanks to conciliation with all kinds of foreign groups that had broken away from Russia and were powerless”
( Poln. sobr. soch., v. 21, p. 209 ).
Waging an uncompromising ideological struggle against the "Vperyodists", Lenin at the same time made every effort to convince those who were mistaken, to help them return to party positions. Lenin exerted much effort in order to retain for the Party such a gifted worker as Lunacharsky. Lenin's hopes were justified: A. V. Lunacharsky, M. N. Lyadov, M. N. Pokrovsky, as well as many other Bolsheviks who joined the Vperyod group, returned to the party and subsequently worked honestly and fruitfully in its ranks. Lunacharsky himself, recalling his delusions of those years, wrote:
“I also suffered from ... a “mythological” urge and also thought not so much to find, but to build by collective forces some very nice god. But my great teacher Lenin and the great party to which I belong healed me very quickly from these intellectual attempts to pour dirty water into the pure spring water of scientific dialectical, materialistic atheism.
( Lunacharsky A.V. Sobr. soch., vol. 6, p. 289 ) .Lenin
On January 27, 1924, the All-Russian Union of Art Workers convened a general meeting of the members of the union to honor the memory of V. I. Lenin. At this meeting, A. V. Lunacharsky delivered a mournful speech. The text of this speech was included in Lunacharsky's pamphlet Lenin, published by the Krasnaya Nov publishing house in 1924, and published in the first issue of the journal Print and Revolution in 1924. In this collection, the article is published under the same title.
Comrades, I want to briefly tell you who Lenin was in the history of Russia, our fatherland, who he was in the history of the world, and then I want to share some personal recollections, or rather, try to give you an outline, a silhouette of Vladimir Ilyich as a living man, because I had to observe him.
“The best part of the intelligentsia, for the most part from the intelligentsia proletariat, goes over to the working people: in the era of Chernyshevsky to the peasantry, in the era of Lenin to the proletariat.”
("Samghin")
Vladimir Ilyich's father was the son of a peasant in the Astrakhan province. 1 Vladimir Ilyich's grandfather plowed the land. This native of the people, the father of Vladimir Ilyich, was a typical raznochinets intellectual, his soul was for the peasantry, he enjoyed great love and trust among the teachers he led - by the end of his life, Vladimir Ilyich's father occupied a more or less prominent place in the field of education in the province but that did not make him an official. He was the most devoted peoplea teacher who sympathized with the revolutionaries and raised his children in a revolutionary spirit. His eldest son, Alexander Ilyich Ulyanov, was a man of brilliant abilities. Many who knew Alexander Ilyich as a student say that he was not inferior to Vladimir Ilyich in his genius. Vladimir Ilyich was still a boy when Alexander Ilyich entered the revolution, into Narodnaya Volya, and became the soul of a great conspiracy to kill the tsar. The plot was discovered, and Alexander Ilyich was hanged. A few days after the hanging of Alexander Ilyich, one of the greatest Russian scientists, Mendeleev, said in his lecture with deep grief: these damned social questions, this, in my opinion, unnecessary passion for the revolution, how much it takes away great talents!
But Alexander Ilyich did not die in vain. Not only, like any heroic Narodnaya Volya member, he left us a heroic tradition, but he planted a new flame in the heart of little Volodya, already ablaze with revolutionary hatred of injustice and revolutionary love for the suffering people, and Vladimir Ilyich swore that he would give his whole life to the people and the fight against the Romanovs. and their henchmen.
Vladimir Ilyich, thus, was connected by blood through his father and brother with the revolution of the former, Narodnaya Volya formation. His mind eagerly searched for ways to help suffering humanity.
In the broadest concept of feeling and thought, Vladimir Ilyich embraced all earthly suffering and wanted to serve as rationally as possible, as powerfully as possible, to bring this suffering to an end. And he was looking for rational, expedient ways to achieve this goal. And then he came across two facts: the teachings of Karl Marx and the development of the proletariat in Russia. The teachings of Karl Marx objectively, like an astronomer studies the heavenly bodies, established the paths along which capital arises, matures and dies, predicted the processes by which the proletariat brought to life and united by capital itself will come to victory over capital.
This teaching of Karl Marx, which made the socialist dream a science, was picked up at that time by several of the best Russian minds, among them the great thinker Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov. Plekhanov has already developed the idea of the applicability of Marxism to Russia in the Russian foreign press. It was a great merit.
Following in the footsteps of the great revolutionaries of Narodnaya Volya, but having already renounced real active struggle, having reduced their revolutionary ardor to revolutionary phrases, the epigones, the degenerates of Narodnaya Volya, are friends of the people in words more than in deeds, who lived on percentages from the great capital of thinkers and figures of their heyday. , Chernyshevsky and Zhelyabov, — asserted that Russia was following a completely peculiar path, that capitalism could not develop in Russia, since its internal market was poor, and it would not achieve an external market, that the proletariat would always be an insignificant minority, which, therefore, could still be focus only on the village, on the community. 2And since it was clear that neither the countryside, nor the community, nor the intelligentsia would lead Russia out of the quagmire through propaganda or terrorist struggle, this epigonian doctrine actually satisfied no one. By the time Vladimir Ilyich entered the arena of activity, the intelligentsia were already moving away in masses from the revolution, or even from sympathy for it.
Tolstoyism developed, narrow-mindedness developed, dragging into the mire of the so-called petty deeds of service to cultural progress over trifles, over trifles, pessimism developed. What lived in the 60s and 70s has died out. In the 1980s, life became twilight and hopeless.
It is understandable why the youth of that time, the youth of the gymnasium and students, immediately pricked up their ears when they heard that there was some kind of new outcome, not a populist one, that there were some new revolutionary paths. And more greedily than others, responded to this news immeasurably the greatest in the entire young generation of that time - Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. He immediately moved from Plekhanov's proofs and careful study of the works of Marx and Engels to thorough statistical studies. He was only 23; Plekhanov's first legal work on the development of a monistic view of history and Peter Struve's sensational book on capitalism in Russia had not yet been published, when Vladimir Ilyich wrote an important essay - an essay now legally published for the first time: "What are "friends of the people" ...", 3a sharp pamphlet against the Narodniks and their obsolete ways, and the most vivid, crystal clear, convincing, scientifically substantiated proof that it is the working class, it is the proletariat, that must and can take the leadership of the entire revolutionary movement into its own hands. Even then, this young man, a student, foresaw that neither the peasantry without the proletariat would ever make a revolution, since it needed a leader, and only the working class could be such a collective leader for it, nor the working class could in Russia on its own and on its own. to do it for himself, but only as an advanced leader of the peasantry, faithful to the interests of the peasants, as a representative of all working people. Vladimir Ilyich saw this natural link between the ruling class, the dictator, and the class representing the vast majority of the population as an undoubted guarantee of victory.
This pamphlet, of course, could not be legally published. But now, when we read it—many for the first time, many even among the old Marxists, since it was under a bushel, I myself was in such a position and read it for the first time only after the revolution—everyone is amazed at the clarity of the view that was expressed there, and understand the significance of the very first appearance of Vladimir Ilyich in the Russian revolution.
Soon after that, he tried to legally publish a book under the name "Tulin", in which he criticized the Marxist book of Pyotr Struve, who turned towards evolution, towards the glorification of capital, towards pseudo-Marxism, conciliatory, emasculated, not flaming with revolutionary energy. 4 Vladimir Ilyich then, in the person of Pyotr Struve, already foresaw the degeneration of Marxism into a petty-bourgeois doctrine, which would be used as a cover for intellectuals, who, in essence, were far from the people, who would want to use even the working class itself for their own petty purposes - for the purposes, perhaps, of a revolution, but a liberal coup, within the framework of a purely bourgeois one. And in the article, signed "Tulin", Vladimir Ilyich, in the person of Pyotr Struve, attacks all the coming reformism and Menshevism. 5
Vladimir Ilyich, as I have already said, was a peasant by birth, he was an intellectual by education. And he was an adoption worker. No less time than how much he sat behind books, as a student, he spent in working circles. He made an unforgettable impression in workers' circles. His thought captured the proletarians. After meeting with him, they devoted themselves once for all, for the rest of their lives, to the revolutionary struggle.
He was expelled from Kazan University for being revolutionary. In Petrograd he was arrested and exiled to Siberia. During his exile, he wrote a decisive work, quite legal (The Development of Capitalism in Russia, 6 ), in which he proved the whole incorrectness of the populist ideas about the impossibility of developing capitalism in Russia - a work so thorough, so skillfully maneuvering huge statistical material, that he immediately put forward Vladimir Ilyich, until then known only in revolutionary circles, to the front ranks of Russian statisticians, researchers of the Russian economy.
Vladimir Ilyich flees from exile abroad. 7 His first thought was to unite with Plekhanov, gather the Marxist-minded emigration and start publishing a newspaper, smuggling it into Russia and thus sowing a new seed. He called the newspaper "Iskra" and under the title "Iskra" placed the words of one Decembrist: "From a spark a flame will ignite." And truly, from this spark, which Vladimir Ilyich directed from there, from abroad, from Switzerland, here, to Russia, such a flame flared up, which is visible from all four corners of the world, a flame like which has never burned before in the world.
Vladimir Ilyich became one of the main leaders of the working class and part of the intelligentsia, who soldered themselves into the Social Democratic Party. Two main trends soon emerged in this party: a trend that actually wanted a bourgeois revolution and wanted to use the workers for it, and a trend that wanted a socialist revolution and found it possible to carry it out. The dispute went like this. The petty-bourgeois wing, which actually wanted a bourgeois revolution and, without realizing it, represented only the left wing of the bourgeoisie, flirting with the working class as the driving force of the bourgeois revolution—this wing said: Russia is not mature, Russia is an economically backward country; and if there is still no socialist revolution anywhere in the world, what kind of socialist revolution is possible in Russia? God be with you, it's all nonsense!
The other wing, the purely workers' wing, said: in Russia there is an enormous charge of revolutionary energy, there is a peasantry demanding an agrarian revolution; if the working class succeeds in linking up with the peasantry, gives the peasantry the landowners' lands, and as a result enlists the fraternal support of the peasantry, then it will become so powerful, the Russian working class, that it will be able not only to carry the democratic revolution to the end, but also to take up advanced revolutionary socialist positions.
This was the main disagreement: to support the liberals, to remain as a second fiddle to them and then sit on the left benches of parliament as an opposition in the Austrian or, at best, in the German way, or, having broken the autocracy, try to break the bourgeoisie too, rely on the peasantry , carry the revolution as far as possible, and call out to the whole world that a turn to socialism is coming. On this, the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks parted, and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin became the head of the Bolshevik wing, and this time not one of the leaders, but the undisputed, most authoritative and - even then - in the literal sense of the word, the adored leader of the revolutionary wing.
The further significance of Vladimir Ilyich in Russian history lies precisely in the fact that he played this role - the leader of Russian Bolshevism. For what did Russian Bolshevism do? Russian Bolshevism, into which all the most steely, most active elements of the people from the working class, the intelligentsia and the peasantry, flowed, this Russian Bolshevism, having first broken down on the insufficient preparedness of the masses in 1905, at first found itself in an insignificant minority in the Workers' and Peasants' Soviets and in 1917 , managed by means of gigantic propaganda, in which the same Vladimir Ilyich occupied the main place, to win over the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies, created from these Soviets a support for seizing power, prompted them to boldly take power into their own hands.<...>
Thanks to the Bolsheviks and Lenin, the Russian revolution did not unfold like a bastard, half-hearted, miscarriage revolution, as happened in Germany or Austria. 8 It developed into a revolution of the greatest, much greater than the French one, a revolution that has stepped over all that have hitherto been in the sense of the complete cleansing of the country of all feudal remnants, of all remnants of the landowner-bureaucratic system, and has taken decisive steps towards communism.
Russia has made a revolution that has placed it on the brink of the worlds. She made the first socialist revolution and calls the West to it. She made the last democratic revolution in Europe and calls the East to it. Having soldered both of these revolutions into an integral system, it won the right to weld the great revolution of the non-European colonial peoples, rebelling against their oppression, with the great revolution of the European and American proletarians, who are changing the fate of mankind from capitalism to communism. And all these great events determine the role of Vladimir Ilyich in world history.II
We are Marxists, who call ourselves by this name because we recognize in Karl Marx a great man who expressed the law of motion of world history and reflected the proletarian struggle in his personality to the extent that world events can be embodied in a human personality.<…>
Karl Marx turned the liberation aspirations of mankind into an exact theory, gave the struggle for freedom a scientific justification, he showed with thousands of examples where and how one can go - that is why he was for us the greatest man in world history.
Now next to this gigantic figure is another figure - Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.Vladimir Ilyich carried out the teachings of Marx. What did the Marxists of the West, the Social Democrats, come to? To the fact that, having vowed before the war of 1914 to refrain from any support of bourgeois militarism and to respond to any attempt by the bourgeoisie to draw the peoples into the war with a workers' boycott, in fact, each in his own country, under the patchwork banners of false patriotism, with their own hands drove the workers as cannon fodder. to protect the interests of the capital of their countries. It was a horrendous, shameful collapse. Only a few protesting voices were heard - the voices of those people who then, not submitting to the wind of chauvinism that seized even the workers, managed to remain true to humanity and socialism, and among these people Lenin immediately came to the fore. At the Social Democratic conferences in Zimmerwald, in Kienthal, and in the then left-wing press, they declared: we are guided not by England and her allies, not by Germany and her allies, we are the great world power of labor and we are enemies of all and every imperialists. And in this world power of labor, I say, Lenin turned out to be the decisive leader at once, the universally recognized leader. Until now, Lenin has been seen as the leader of one, and perhaps less than half, of the still weak Russian movement. But from that time on, the world saw in him a bulwark, a leader, an organizer of genuine internationalism. A whole sea of hands and hearts reached out to Lenin from all sides. All those who hated the war, all those who believed in labor forces, saw in him the harbinger of the greatest world struggle.
Lenin not only gave the revolutionary fighters against imperialism the commandment: in every country to fight against its own government! - but he immediately set an example of such a struggle in Russia. Undeterred by the accusation of defeatism, which amounted to the most vile and vile accusations of venality against Germany, Lenin waged a merciless struggle both against tsarism and against the bourgeois government, which continued to wage an imperialist war after the overthrow of tsarist power. All the European workers' parties were thus given an example of correct tactics.
Lenin had great patience. Never, not once, not a word of reproach escaped his lips, when the appeals that we threw to the West evoked only a weak response. We expected that the Russian revolution, which had decided to put an end to the power of the bankers, factory owners and landowners, would quickly be surrounded by a family of new revolutions in countries more prepared than we were for the attainment of the communist system. Six years have passed. These revolutions are maturing, their procession, the muffled steps of the approaching upheavals, in Germany, for example, are clearly audible. They are already at the door. 9 The world is changing, splitting before our eyes: on the one hand, there is fascism, which tears off any mask of culture and democracy from the bourgeois dictatorship, on the other hand, clairvoyant communism.<…>
Lenin is the world leader, because he is the personification and one of the main engines of a gigantic upheaval, the equal of which history has not known.III
“If there are people who did not know him enough, or who knew from afar and did not experience his charm, then everyone should look at this amazing, wonderful phenomenon as soon as possible.”
(From the report dedicated to the 5th anniversary of the death of V. I. Lenin)
“Marxism teaches that great deeds cannot be accomplished without great enthusiasm, that great epochs inevitably give rise to it.
And enthusiasm was to a great extent inherent in Vladimir Ilyich. He was a man of the broadest love, burning hatred, a passionate desire for the truth of life, for the future, which he saw clearly and to bring humanity closer to, in the end, was his only goal.
(“Lenin and youth”. Article. “Komsomolskaya Pravda”, January 21, 1926)
I now want to pass, comrades, though to a very brief and very weak outline of what Vladimir Ilyich is like as a person.
The first thing that catches your eye, of course, is his gigantic mind.
It was a pleasure to sit in the Council of People's Commissars and watch how Vladimir Ilyich solves problems, how he listens in the most attentive way, ponders, weighs, reviews everything for each question - and there are many questions - and how he then summarizes the question. He summarizes - and there are no more disputes and no more disagreements: if he took the side of some against others or agreed on the views of some and others in an unexpected synthesis, then with such arguments that you cannot go against.
Fatal problems were sometimes posed, requiring gigantic exertion. Vladimir Ilyich did not see this tension. Does this mean that he was not serious about at least one issue? Never. Not the slightest dilettantism! If he doesn't know, he always asks, he prepares the materials. He constantly felt the enormous responsibility that rested on him, and this did not prevent him from being so joyful, so cheerful, so charming in everything he did, that we were all always enchanted. And this, of course, also affected the strength of the mind, in addition to the peculiarities of temperament, which made possible gigantic tension without attempts, without signs of fatigue, exhaustion, despondency.
If we talk about the heart of Vladimir Ilyich, then it affected most of all in his fundamental love. It was not love-kindness in the sense in which the layman understands it.
When he occasionally spoke about truth, about primordial human morality, about goodness, one could feel how unshakable this feeling was in him, and it warmed him and gave him this support, which made him powerful, steel in carrying out his will. If he hated - and he hated political enemies, he had no personal enemies, he hated classes, not individuals - if he hated, then he hated in the name of love, in the name of that love that was wider than today and today's relations.
But this does not mean that Vladimir Ilyich was dry, that he was a fanatic, that for him only business existed. Where he could show his direct affection and cordiality, there he showed them in touching features.The time will come for Ilyich's friends, who stood close to him, to tell what kind of person he was in personal relationships. I want to stop now only on some separate lines. I tell you that a more caring, more tender, more devoted comrade cannot be imagined. And he was such a comrade not only for the assistants who stood nearby, but also for every member of the party and just for everyone who came to his office. Why did these “simple” people, whom he loved, from conversations with whom he took away so much that we sinners could not take out as much information from ten volumes of books as he did from a conversation with some Tver or Ryazan peasant - why did they Did you always leave with such a happy smile on your face? They also visited us, and nothing - they visited and visited, even though they may have seen the difference with the previous officials. But as for Vladimir Ilyich, they left him with special faces. “We have reached the biggest one,” they said. — Prost! He asked questions and explained everything." And if it were possible for Vladimir Ilyich, it seems that he would only bathe in this sea of peasants and workers. He used every opportunity, every free moment for this. I often said: here such and such a thing is appointed, but here there is a period of time, and during this time I will receive walkers - whether from his Simbirsk province, or from Siberia, or from Turkestan. And of course, although he could take 15 minutes, they used to stay for an hour and a half. And then he says, as if a little ashamed of this: “Sorry, I was late, it was very interesting!”
He knew that every mistake is dangerous and, perhaps, it will take a lot of victims, and therefore he was always serious when making decisions. But there was a certainty in him that in the end the enemies would be defeated, and this inspired him with unshakable confidence and created his subtle, cunning, full of mind grin. He knew that history would outwit all cunning people, that history would overcome all powerful enemies, and he knew that history was with him, that he was history's favorite son, that he was her confidant, that he had overheard her heart, what she wanted and what she was leading to.
Comrades, the figure of Lenin is great in Russian history. He made Russia the most advanced republic in the world, closest to communism. He washed away our shame of hundreds of years of slavery, he put Russia ahead of all the peoples of the world. More than anyone else, he gave freedom to its national minorities, he bound the workers and peasants with inseparable bonds, he, who created the Soviet government, at the same time inscribed with his own hand that, as counter-revolutionary sentiments get rid of, Soviet rights should be extended to the entire population without exception. and understand Soviet power as drawing everyone, even the most backward peasant, into the living, real, genuine state work.<…>
When we say that Lenin is great in Russian history, Lenin is great in world history, we do not at all renounce our Marxist teaching that the role of the individual is limited. Lenin was created by the whole course of the Russian revolution. Lenin was created by the powerful will of the maturing Russian proletariat. Lenin was created by current world events. Lenin is the reflection, the creation, the embodiment of the great struggle of the workers and peasants of the whole world. We have entered a great era, so we have great people, and the first of them is Lenin.
At the same time, I would like to say even now, in addition to all this historical assessment, that he was a man in whom historical greatness was in harmony with extraordinary personal charm, in whom the moral and mental sides of nature existed in extraordinary harmony. He was a man so free, so devoted to a great cause, so inwardly gentle, so pure ideologically, so beautiful in every smallest of his manifestations, that you stand at his coffin with these memories in your soul and think: did he have at least some shortcomings, but remember something - well, maybe a sign of some vanity, complacency, some hostile trick towards someone, some weakness, some desire for personal pleasure at the expense of the business that he had to make? Nowhere, nothing, you can't remember.
They say that there are always deathly "purely positive" types in novels. But it was a purely positive type in life. Golden man mind, heart, every movement, a man of solid, pure, unalloyed gold of the best coinage. And you say to yourself: yes, this is the first socialist. This is not only the first socialist in terms of the exploits that he accomplished, this is the first example of what a person can be. The loss of him is not only the loss of a leader, it is the death of a person who is equal in attractive appearance, in charm, we, people who are already under 50 years old and who have seen the sights, do not know and it is unlikely that in our lives we will be so happy to meet again .
Comrades! Of course, it is true that Lenin is alive. Of course, his writings, his traditions, his spirit remained. Can such people die? And even more than that: now Lenin is perhaps more alive than ever. A living person is somehow still criticized, somehow measured against him, but here, on the edge of his grave, we all felt that criticizing and measuring with him is all in vain. A great gift was given to us - dear, irreproachable, unmistakable helmsman. And in this present apotheosis of his Lenin, perhaps even stronger than he was during his lifetime.
And yet each of us feels orphaned. Somehow we, people, were left alone on earth - we, all kinds of people, small people, average people, big people, very big people, but people are people of the usual caliber for our time, some an inch less, some an inch more ... And we will, of course, fight and follow the paths of Lenin. But here is a man so infinitely gifted that he seemed to surpass the boundaries of the human, although in fact he filled them for the first time, for the first time gave the image of a real person as he should be - he is no more. We remained in our environment, in our human company.
Engels, when he buried Marx, said: humanity has become a whole head lower. And we experience the same thing: it has become darker, some kind of twilight. There is no that radiant torch to which they turned in order to better discern the big and the small.
Great is humanity. Endlessly and inexhaustibly rich, it entered a period of crisis and creativity. From its very bottom, people will now rise, who in another era would have passed as silent wise men in some distant village, and now they will be able to rise to the state helm. We will wait for them. We will educate them. And ourselves, each to the best of his ability, each in his post, with trepidation, realizing the greatness of the era, we will work in the direction indicated by all world history, clarified by the genius of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
Comrades, such a great phenomenon as Lenin will, of course, be reflected in world art. Let some colossal images in music, fine arts, theaters not be written directly from Lenin. But remember that we are raised to a great height. Until recently, we looked back and said: “Where are the geniuses, where is the heroic, where is the absolutely bright?” But we saw him, we saw a Man with a capital letter, we breathed the same air with him, we observed him in his historical activity and in everyday life. In it, as in a focus, concentrated rays of light and heat, now walking in broad waves across the earth in the heroism of ordinary workers, peasants and Red Army soldiers.
We are entering a heroic epoch, and its quintessence, its brightest focus and concentration—Lenin—should inspire and elevate us in the artistic creativity to which we, gathered here, are called. Oh, that the art that we will create from today would be worthy of such a person who stood at the head of us! It would be truly great art.
And so it is not only in art, it is so for all aspects of life. No one can equal Lenin, but everyone should. Everyone should do his best to be equal to Lenin and, in everything possible, raise his theoretical thought, his work, his life, his struggle to this level.
January 27, 1924
The documents available in the archives of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the Central Committee of the CPSU indicate that Lenin's father, I. N. Ulyanov, came from the poor townspeople of the city of Astrakhan; Lenin's grandfather was a serf.
Populism is the ideology and movement of the raznochintsy intelligentsia that dominated the bourgeois-democratic stage of the liberation struggle in Russia (1861–1895) and reflected the interests of peasant democracy. Since the birth of populism, two tendencies have been outlined in it - revolutionary and liberal. In the 60s–80s. The revolutionary Narodniks strove for a peasant revolution in various ways. In the 80s–90s. Narodism experienced a serious ideological and organizational crisis. During this period, the liberal populist direction, which had not previously played a significant role, prevailed. The liberal Narodniks, with their demands—an increase in peasant allotments, the reorganization of the peasant bank, and so on—tried to replace the revolutionary liberation movement with petty-bourgeois reformism. Socio-economic views of the liberal populists,
The liberal populists launched an active struggle against Marxism. At a time when capitalism in Russia had become a fact, when the movement of the proletariat was intensifying, the liberal populists repeated the old formulas of populism, historically explicable in the 60s and 70s, continued to prove that capitalism in Russia was a decline, a regression, denied the leading role of the worker class in the revolution.
Here A. V. Lunacharsky has in mind the liberal Narodniks, whose prominent representatives were N. K. Mikhailovsky, V. P. Vorontsov, N. F. Danielson, S. N. Krivenko, and S. N. Yuzhakov.
Lenin's book "What are the "friends of the people" and how do they fight against the Social Democrats?", containing a deep and versatile criticism of the theoretical views, political program and tactics of the liberal populists, was written by him in 1894. She had three editions (parts). The first issue was printed illegally on a hectograph in June 1894 in St. Petersburg. In August, in the town of Gorki, Vladimir province, and since the beginning of September in Moscow, the first and second editions of the book are printed in a separate edition, illegally, on a mimeograph. The printing of the second issue was not completed. In September 1894, the first edition of the third issue was published in St. Petersburg, also printed illegally, on a hectograph. A hectographed edition of the first and third editions of the book was discovered in early 1923 in the Berlin Social Democratic Archive and almost simultaneously in the Saltykov-Shchedrin State Public Library in Leningrad. In the same year, it came out as a separate print from the volume I of the edition of the Works of V. I. Lenin, which was then being prepared for publication.
In 1936, the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the Central Committee of the CPSU received a new copy of the hectographed edition of 1894, which contains numerous editorial corrections made by Lenin, apparently in preparation for the planned publication of the book abroad.
In the Complete Works, the work is printed according to a copy found in 1936. The second edition of the book has not yet been found.
We are talking about Lenin's work "The economic content of populism and its criticism in Mr. Struve's book (Reflection of Marxism in Bourgeois Literature). Regarding the book by P. Struve: "Critical Notes on the Question of the Economic Development of Russia." SPb. 1894", which was written by him in St. Petersburg in late 1894 - early 1895.
"Legal Marxism" as a socio-political movement arose in the 90s of the XIX century among the liberal bourgeois intelligentsia. By this time, Marxism had become fairly widespread in Russia, and bourgeois intellectuals, under the flag of Marxism, began to preach their views in legal newspapers and magazines. That is why they were called "legal Marxists".
The "legal Marxists", criticizing the Narodniks as defenders of small-scale production, tried to use Marxism in this struggle, but only "purified" of all revolutionary spirit. They threw out the most important thing from Marxism—the doctrine of the proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin was the first to recognize the liberal-bourgeois nature of "legal Marxism". The main representatives of "legal Marxism" were P. B. Struve, S. N. Bulgakov, M. I. Tugan-Baranovsky, N. A. Berdyaev. Subsequently, the former leaders of "legal Marxism" (Struve, Tugan-Baranovsky and others) formed the core of the bourgeois Cadet Party.
Work on the book "The Development of Capitalism in Russia" Lenin began in 1896, while in a St. Petersburg prison. He finished the book in January 1899 in exile, in the village of Shushenskoye. The book was published under the pseudonym "Vladimir Ilyin" in March 1899. Brilliantly proving the inconsistency of populist and liberal-bourgeois concepts, Lenin creatively developed the economic teaching of Marx in it on the basis of the concrete historical conditions of Russia; he revealed the patterns, features and contradictions of Russian capitalism, showed the new alignment of class forces in the country, comprehensively substantiated the leading role of the proletariat in the coming bourgeois-democratic revolution. In The Development of Capitalism in Russia, Lenin, for the first time in Marxist literature, gave a study of the position of the peasantry under capitalism and scientifically substantiated the idea of an alliance between the working class and the peasantry.
The term of Lenin's exile ended on January 29 (February 10), 1900. On this day, Lenin, together with N. K. Krupskaya and her mother E. V. Krupskaya, leave the village of Shushenskoye. Lenin leaves abroad, with the official permission of the authorities, on July 16 (29), 1900.
This refers to the November Revolution in Germany and the revolution in Austria (1918). The objective prerequisites that existed in these countries for the development of bourgeois-democratic revolutions into socialist revolutions were not realized. As a result of these revolutions, which did not go beyond bourgeois-democratic transformations, monarchies were overthrown in Germany and Austria and bourgeois republics were formed.
Apparently, A. V. Lunacharsky has in mind the Hamburg uprising of 1923, which was to be the beginning of a general strike and an all-German armed uprising, aimed at overthrowing the domination of monopoly capital and creating an all-German worker-peasant government. But at the decisive moment, the left-wing Social Democrats refused to support the communist proposal for a general strike. The right-wing Social Democrats continued to actively support the bourgeoisie. Due to the betrayal of the leaders of the Social Democracy, who disrupted the unity of action of the proletariat, the uprising was defeated.Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
The article, published in the journal Krasnaya Niva, 1924, No. 7, is based on one of the many versions of the "funeral" speeches delivered by Lunacharsky on the mournful days of farewell to Lenin. In this collection, the article is published with significant abbreviations, since it repeats many of the provisions of the mourning speech, with which A. V. Lunacharsky spoke on January 27, 1924 at a general meeting of members of the All-Russian Union of Artists (see p. 36 ).
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov-Lenin is undoubtedly one of the greatest figures in world history. This is explained primarily by the fact that the events now being experienced are generally a central phenomenon in history. We are on the threshold when, according to Marx, the threshold to the history of mankind ends and the real rational and systematic history of human labor, remaking the world, begins.<…>
Russia turned out to be the country in which the last democratic revolution in Europe had matured. The maturity of this revolution coincided with the birth of the first grandiose proletarian social revolution. This put the figure of Lenin on a giant historical pedestal.<…>
Lenin was a figure unprecedented in history, since he was the first implementer of the proletarian and socialist revolution, which the world had not yet seen. Of course, the implementer of only part of the social revolution, which could be placed within the framework of capitalistically backward Russia. But since this part was the first act of the world revolution, its gigantic significance follows from this.
This, however, is not enough. It is also necessary to pay attention to the fact that the proletariat of the capitalist countries, still internally torn, largely under the influence of Menshevism, would not be in a position to complete the social revolution if the proletarian revolution did not later receive support in the further development of deep into Asia revolution of democratic order. Lenin, the leader of the world proletariat, was well aware of the need to link this revolution with a revolution freeing itself from the fetters of feudalism or capitalist colonialism. Hence his unshakable confidence in the need for a link with the Russian peasantry and the colonial peoples of the world.
Revolutionary Russia, which in this way gives one hand to the advanced proletarians of America and Europe, and the other to the peoples of Asia and Africa in general, is in this respect a revolutionary position of exceptional importance. These worldwide historical circumstances created for Lenin, hardly ever in the history of mankind, a gigantically wide arena of activity.
The question was precisely whether there is such an organized collective force in humanity and, on the other hand, such an exponent and leader of it, who could systematically use these titanic possibilities.
For 25 years, the hammer of the autocracy forged the Russian working revolutionary force and the part of the revolutionary intelligentsia that had infiltrated it and soldered to it. The conspiratorial and at the same time mass working-class party was gradually purged, under these blows it gradually acquired tremendous internal solidarity and amazing discipline, managed to become militant, and in these quarter of a century of struggle was able to choose from its midst the most appropriate leaders.
Thus was created in Russia a party that has not yet been seen in the world in terms of cohesion and talent. Other, conspiratorial parties, were usually distinguished by their narrowness, not realizing the need for broad popular mass action. But a broad people's party like the Western European Social Democracy, without waging a genuine revolutionary heroic struggle, was corrupted in an atmosphere of parliamentarism and legality, without receiving that revolutionary tempering that distinguishes the Russian Communists. Only such a party could nominate a leader like Vladimir Ilyich.
Another remark of great importance following from the foregoing. The Communist Party is the party of scientific socialism. Never before has any party in the world been based on rigorously tested, scientifically constructed premises.
Genuine Marxism, being a rigorous science, at the same time attaches gigantic significance to the organized manifestations of the class and group will. The Communist Party thus combined a cold accounting of the processes taking place in reality with a swift militant activity. This is a real strategy, the first part of which is an absolutely honest and sober look at the problems and the forces that operate within society, and the second part is a certain military tactics that seeks to achieve certain and maximum results by intervening in the system of forces thus known. It is as if Lenin was created by those lines of force that are outlined here and which the Communist Party ties into one tangle.
Lenin, firstly, was the strongest Marxist thinker. He was unquestionably sober and honest in regard to external conditions. He never looked at anything, neither at a friend, nor at an enemy, nor at himself through rose-colored glasses. He tended to understate rather than exaggerate the chances of victory. In his analysis, in a Marxist way, he always reached the economic basis, to the statistical numerical accounting of the real state of social forces.
Lenin would have considered the very possibility of assuming the existence of a major revolutionary who was not at the same time a major theoretician extremely strange. Serious methodological training, a significant amount of knowledge, the ability to honestly, sharply and accurately analyze - all these features are necessary for a new type of revolutionary, and all these features are characteristic of Vladimir Ilyich as a revolutionary theorist to the maximum extent.
Further Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is a remarkable tactician.
No matter how high the level of communist consciousness in the Communist Party, it sometimes lagged behind its leader. The party was largely stunned by Lenin's call to start the revolution immediately in October. Many were breathtaking. However, Lenin was completely right. In the same way, the line taken by Lenin during the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk seemed wrong and unacceptable to many communists, including the largest ones. However, it was precisely this brilliant line that saved the Russian revolution at that time.
Many elements of the party were shocked and even bewildered by the proclamation of the New Economic Policy. Many only much later realized the inevitability and enormous fruitfulness of this step. There are many such examples.<…>
Being a theoretician and tactician of the revolutionary struggle, Lenin is at the same time an amazing statesman.
Finding himself at the head of a complex, unsatisfactory, young, inexperienced state apparatus, spending an incredible amount of effort, Vladimir Ilyich controlled the selection of people and their work, and invariably, day after day, and hour by hour, as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, he built a new state order. . Even on the eve of his serious illness, he still gave new brilliant instructions regarding the further reconstruction of the state machine.
One of the outstanding features of Lenin as a statesman is his diplomatic genius. Like no one else, thanks to Marxist analysis, he was able to explain what is hidden behind all sorts of phrases and notes of our opponent. Western European diplomats were forced to recognize this brilliant insight and this exceptional ability to lead a revolutionary country in the field of international relations.<…>
In this enumeration of the main properties and main ideas of V. I. Lenin as a historical figure, a lot is still missing, a lot even important, but the scope of this biography and characteristics do not allow me to go into further details.<…>
[1924]Lenin and Menshevism
The article was published in 1924 in the magazine "Agitator-propagandist" (Vladimir) No. 18, as well as in the party publications of Arkhangelsk, Gomel, Novgorod, Saratov, Stavropol.
Lenin and Menshevism are antipodes.
"... neither Marx, nor Engels, nor Lenin were impartial ... Their highest objectivity lay precisely in their partisanship." ("Samghin")
Lenin is all struggle. First of all, of course, the struggle against the landlord and bourgeois way of life, against the ruling classes, and, secondly, no less, the struggle against Menshevism.
The struggle against Menshevism at one time seemed like a struggle for a full-fledged and merciless class war against the rulers, a struggle against the defenders of the half-hearted and indecisive forms of such a war.
The further, however, the more it became clear that this was not so, that the seemingly half-hearted form of the Menshevik struggle was in fact a defense of those in power, and moreover, in the most subtle, most poisonous form. Thus, the fight against Menshevism has become one of the main tasks of the general war of the proletarian class against capital.
Lenin encountered Menshevism in its cradle, before it received its current name. It happened like this: in the 1990s, it became clear to all, at least somewhat sensitive representatives of the Russian intelligentsia, that powerful capitalism was developing in Russia, that a proletariat class had been born and was growing, that it was a reliable replacement for the peasantry, on which the intelligentsia had previously counted to fight their autocracy.
A romance between the intelligentsia and the workers began, replacing it with a peasant.
The novel proceeded, of course, under the sign of the readiness of the intelligentsia to serve the interests of the proletariat.
In fact, such intellectuals, even the great majority of them, pursued another goal, namely: to "organize" the proletarian movement, which would be a support for bourgeois-liberal shifts, for the conquest of European orders in Russia.
The involvement of the proletariat in the solution of this problem could, of course, only be connected with the fundamental needs of the working class, with its economic position, and also with its natural ideal—socialism. Therefore, the intelligentsia dressed up as economists and socialists.
However, judging this intelligentsia not by its words, but by its actions, it was not difficult to be convinced that it strove to give the working-class movement the character of moderation and accuracy, so that this movement would not go beyond the role of an echo of bourgeois liberalism.
The most clever trick of pre-Menshevik Menshevism, so-called Economism, Rabocheedelstvo, etc., was an attempt to rely on the backwardness of the worker, on his supposed unwillingness to take shape politically, on his supposedly inherent interest exclusively in the economic struggle.
This is what Vladimir Ilyich called tailism. He vigorously fought against the poisoners of the consciousness of the working class and against the desire to protect the working heads from political infection; Vladimir Ilyich belonged to that minority of the revolutionary intelligentsia who gave themselves wholly to the proletariat and who made it their task to help the proletariat create an independent, powerful revolutionary party.
Lenin managed to win a more or less complete victory over the economists. The overwhelming majority of the Social Democrats rallied around his newspaper Iskra, but by no means all of them were genuine revolutionaries. Here again many of the same disguised liberals crowded. There was a split among the Iskra-ists. And it was here that the split halves received the name Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.
The entire history of Russian Social-Democracy after the Second Congress represents a continuous struggle on the part of Lenin and his associates for the independence of the working class, for its leading role in the coming revolution, for the hegemony of the proletariat, bourgeois revolution, the theory of the need for the proletariat to play the role of an accessory in this revolution.In Western Europe, a split has also begun to appear in the depths of the Social Democracy. The so-called revisionists of Marxism appeared, headed by Bernstein and others.<…> Almost the entire Russian social democracy condemned him, considering themselves adherents of the purely Marxist revolutionary left wing. But here, in fact, there was exactly the same phenomenon that was revealed at the Second Congress of the RSDLP, that is, among the so-called leftists or orthodox people, in fact, a huge number of people were hiding, in fact, under the decoration of revolutionary phrases, they had long turned into the same peaceful renovationists as There were also Bernsteinians. The war revealed this character of the majority of the Social Democracy. It showed the true revolutionaries terrifyingly that the so-called Second International, the vast majority of the leaders and apparatchiks of the workers' parties of the world, are not only sluggish and indecisive fighters against the bourgeoisie, but have turned into direct agents of the bourgeoisie, which spoke its teeth against the proletariat, supposedly waging a struggle, but on actually keeping it in obedience to the ruling classes.<…>
Then Lenin, fully armed with all his Marxist argumentation, his tremendous revolutionary temperament, his organizational genius, entered the struggle against this world Menshevism. The word Menshevik, even in the international language, has become a synonym for this agentry of the bourgeois class, disguised as socialism, which, alas, still keeps a large number of workers dependent on itself. Bolshevism or communism, which is one and the same thing, has become on an international scale the banner of that part of the working class which wants the genuine and complete victory of socialism throughout the globe.
The tactic of mercilessly exposing Menshevism through all sorts of public polemics, the tactic of internally purging the Communist Party of various kinds of centrists, moderates, etc., the tactic of the united front, aimed at wresting the masses from under the influence of Menshevism, drawing them into common practical work, although minimal slogans—these are the methods used by Lenin in order to cure the working class of its bad disease—Menshevism.
Here and there the bourgeoisie is trying to grab hold of fascism as a weapon against Bolshevism. In other countries it prefers a more subtle and poisonous remedy—Menshevism. The Black Hundreds Mussolini, the head of the Italian government, and the Menshevik Macdonald, the head of the British government, recognized the USSR, the republic of the Bolsheviks, the republic of Lenin. But in fact, an irreconcilable and merciless struggle continues. In order to lead it, one must learn from Lenin how to penetrate into the brain and heart of Menshevism, how to deliver terrible blows to it in the face of the working class, resolutely and at the same time patiently, boldly and at the same time carefully destroy the power of Menshevism, the last and cunning form of guardianship of the bourgeoisie. over the working class.
[1924]On the characterization of Lenin as a person
This article was first published in 1926 in the newspaper "Izvestia" No. 18 of January 22 and in the journal "People's Teacher" No. 1.
The more grandiose the movement is before us, and the more completely this or that leader embraces it, the stronger, of course, we must assume his thought and his will. Vladimir Ilyich possessed a distinctively bright, facetedly clear, deeply embracing every subject and therefore almost clairvoyant thought. We also know that even in such a steel apparatus as the communist party forged by twenty years of struggle, Lenin and his will played the role of a kind of motor that often gave the necessary impetus and proved to be a decisive element in all party work. Not for a moment breaking away from the party majority, Lenin was in the full sense of the word the engine of the party.
Lenin himself, of course, was well aware of this side of every big, and even more so great person. For example, he was very fond of talking about Plekhanov's "physical strength of the brain." I myself heard this phrase from him several times and at first did not quite understand it. It is now clear to me that just as a physically strong person is possible who can simply overcome you, overcome you indisputably, put on both shoulder blades, there can also be a physically strong mind, in a collision with which you feel the same irresistible power that subdues you yourself. The physical strength of Lenin's brain still exceeded the enormous physical strength of Plekhanov's brain.
But, so to speak, the volume and scope of thought and will do not yet make a personality. They make a person outstanding, influential, they define him as the largest value in the social fabric, but they do not at all determine the very nature of the individual.It is often thought (and not without reason) that the personal character of a person does not play a big role in history. Indeed, far from denying the role of the individual in history within certain limits, we cannot help but lean towards the position that it is precisely the power of thought, the intensity of the will, that play the first role, because everything else comes from society ... The fact that Marx or Lenin turned out to be revolutionaries, proletarian ideologists and leaders, it was predetermined by time. It can be said that in similar historical and social conditions others would take the same point of view, only they expressed this point of view infinitely more vividly, precisely because of the volume.Other features of the characteristic, although a great person, can be extremely important for his biography, but from the point of view of the analysis of the social role, these features seem to recede into the background.
However, Vladimir Ilyich had some features that were most profoundly inherent to him and only to him, and which, nevertheless, have tremendous social significance.
I want to dwell on two such features that are especially striking and which are especially significant. They are significant because they characterize Lenin as a communist. By this, I do not mean to say that they are inherent in any communist in general, no, but they must be inherent in a complete communist, such a person whom we are building simultaneously with the construction of a new society, a person that, perhaps, each of us would like to be , but what in a truly finished form was Vladimir Ilyich.
The first important feature of which I am talking about here is the absence of any personalism in Lenin. This phenomenon is very profound and deserves careful study in communist literature. I think that this will come with time, when the questions of art will finally live on a proper plan.
Of course, we know quite a few small people who are in part, even precisely because of their smallness, extraordinary larvae. Leo Tolstoy said somewhere that the true value of a person is determined by the figure that is obtained by dividing his good qualities by the degree of his conceit; that is, even a comparatively talented person, if he possesses great conceit, can thereby turn out to be ridiculous and even worse, unnecessary, harmful; and vice versa, a person of modest talents, with a modest opinion of himself, can be nice and highly useful.
It would be simply ridiculous to assume that Ilyich's modesty, which is so often spoken of, bordered on a lack of understanding by him of his own mental and moral strength. But in a person, so to speak, of a bourgeois or, more precisely, of a pre-communist type, such an eminent position and such a consciousness of one's enormous strength is invariably accompanied by personalism. Even if such a type is modest, then you will see his pose in modesty. He certainly carries himself like a precious vessel, he certainly draws attention to himself, he himself, playing his role in history, is more or less an admiring spectator.
This was something that Vladimir Ilyich did not have at all, and this is his extraordinary communist character. That extraordinary simplicity and naturalness that always accompanied him were by no means some kind of “gray marching uniform” that Vladimir Ilyich would like to distinguish from the gold embroidery of other great and many small people of history. No, Vladimir Ilyich was outwardly extremely natural, and flew like a bird and swam like a fish in water in all difficult conditions, because he never observed himself, never studied his own assessment. He never compared his position with the position of others and was completely, without end, without edge, absorbed in the work that he did.
Proceeding from the tasks of this work, he understood well that he himself was a good worker and that this or that work could be done better than such and such a comrade, or that such and such comrades could do this work well only with his help and instructions. But this was dictated, so to speak, by the organizational tasks arising from the work itself.
In the highest degree, in a certain deep and beautiful sense, Vladimir Ilyich was a man of action. Of course, such devotion to a cause, such an unconditional, devoid of any decoration, transformation of oneself into a worker of this work is great and solemn only because the work itself is huge, or rather, is the most huge thing that is generally conceivable in the world.
Vladimir Ilyich lived the life of mankind, above all the life of the oppressed masses, and even more directly, the life of the proletariat, especially the advanced and class-conscious proletariat. It was by such a chain that he was connected with humanity, and he felt both himself and his struggle in the bosom of this humanity as a completely natural thing, completely filling his life.
But precisely because in Vladimir Ilyich there was absolutely no desire to grow, water, decorate his personality, due to, I would say, complete negligence towards his personality, because he transferred this personality entirely to the communist forge, it remained not only powerful , but also unusually integral, unusually characteristic, unlike anyone else, but which can be considered a model for everyone. Yes, we all could not express a better wish for our children and grandchildren, how to be in this respect as close as possible to the model given by Lenin.
And the second feature, on which it is impossible not to stop. Vladimir Ilyich was an unusually cheerful man. This does not mean, of course, that his heart does not shrink, and this is not imprinted with deep sadness on his face, to lead or spectacle of some kind of grief of the working masses he loves; he took everything earthly very close to his heart, very seriously; and yet he was an extraordinarily cheerful man.
Why did such joy, such gaiety live in the heart of Vladimir Ilyich? I believe that it was due to the fact that he was practically a Marxist to the end. A true Marxist sees all tendencies and the future of each given social formation. Vladimir Ilyich could admit that the Communists could make mistakes, that in general circumstances would turn against them, but he could not allow the enemy to win, just as we in early spring, even splashing through puddles, in heavy rain and wind, cannot but know that May will come and heat, sun and flowers.
Vladimir Ilyich played the most difficult game of chess in the world, but he knew in advance that he would checkmate his opponent, or rather he knew that the game in which he was a figure of great importance led by the proletariat would certainly be won.
[1926]From a speech at the Moscow citywide meeting of trade union activists
A. V. Lunacharsky made this speech on February 4, 1924 in the Hall of Columns at the Moscow citywide meeting of members of the boards of trade unions and factory committees, dedicated to the memory of Vladimir Ilyich. The abridged text of the speech was first published in 1924 in the magazine "Young Guard" Nos. 2, 3.
... Vladimir Ilyich was cordial, Nadezhda Konstantinovna told the truth in all of us in a shocking speech at a meeting of the Congress of the Union,1that Vladimir Ilyich did not like to talk about his love, but his heart was full of love for all the oppressed. What moved this man, made him selflessly devote his whole life to serving people - this is love, great love for all the working and oppressed. He discovered the possibility of the revolution relying on the peasantry, he discovered the possibility of relying on the revolution on the Hindus, on the Negroes, not only because his Marxist mind suggested it to him, but also because the great human heart suggested it to him. He was never a working class man in the sense that he wanted to defend the interests of the group, he felt like a working class man because the working class must liberate all of humanity. And this tremendous cordiality, which was expressed in the greatest scope of his love, was also reflected in his every single gesture,
We often observed that he changed this or that detail when his mistakes were pointed out to him, we observed that he liked to work in a team, we watched how he, being a strong man among us, worked together in a team. But, in the end, when Ilyich used to say something, then in the midst of our conversations, it was as if a pound weight would fall among the pound weights, and it must be said that he always considered these pound weights. He was a man of extraordinary simplicity and equality.<…>
This was a man for whom "I" did not exist. He did not stick it out, neither decoratively, nor in the sense of swagger with his successes, from which he warned even the Communists. Sometimes he said to himself: I did stupid things. And if there were cases when he reluctantly handed over a case to someone, it was not because he wanted to advance, but he was afraid that the other would do something wrong. He knew that he had strong shoulders and that if he carried any weight, he needed to grunt more than others. It was a collaborative arrangement.
Vladimir Ilyich demanded that they report to him every hour how things were going, he himself called on the phone and asked and kept repeating; not only did you order, make sure that the matter is brought to the end, and at the same time add some kind of joke ...
I have preserved a piece of paper in which it is written in the margins in red pencil and underlined several times: work out such and such a program, if it has not yet been worked out, hang Lunacharsky, and the signature is V. I. Lenin.The program was not developed, there was something to hang me for. It was a joke, but we knew that this was undoubtedly an important indication - here, they say, you are mistaken. It so happened that Vladimir Ilyich would give some order and it would turn out to be erroneous, due to the fact that he did not know the whole situation of the case. You come to him and say: “Vladimir Ilyich, you made a mistake, you don’t know all the circumstances of the case,” and he will immediately say: “If this is so, it must be corrected.” It is impossible to imagine that Vladimir Ilyich could ever say: "Since I have said so, if you please do it." If he said that, it would be as unnatural as if the sky suddenly collapsed into rubble. "Really, I didn't know that, you're right." In 999 cases out of 1000, however, he was right.<…>
Nadezhda Konstantinovna said that he could sleep for three hours, and for the remaining 3-4 hours Lenin could still continue to work. He gave orders, sent telegrams, could not stop for a single minute. It was scary, but he came out with a smile, always fresh, always doing better than others did. He smiled, but lived with a burning brain. It was not visible that the brain was on fire, that the vessels were turning to stone from the colossal amount of blood they carry to nourish this titanic thought, thinking for everyone, doing a tremendous job for humanity.
It is possible that he was not aware of how tired he was, but he considered that this was not the time to save himself, and therefore remained a man on guard under bullets. Didn't spare himself. You won’t stand in such a post for a long time, but he stood until the very end.<…>
February 4, 1924
This refers to the speech of N. K. Krupskaya at the mourning meeting of the II All-Russian Congress of Soviets on January 26, 1924. The text of the speech was published in the Pravda newspaper on January 27 and, with minor additions, on January 30, 1924.Strokes
The title of these memoirs belongs to the author. Partially, the memoirs were published on February 14, 1960 in the newspaper Izvestia No. 38 and Literaturnaya Gazeta No. 49. In this collection they are published according to a typewritten copy with the author's correction, stored in the fund of unpublished manuscripts of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the Central Committee of the CPSU.
The artist Altman had the happy opportunity to work with Lenin from nature. He made, by the way, quite a large number of sketches*, sketches with a pen, which caught on the fly the various expressions of our teacher's mobile face. 1* Steps (fr.) — a sketch. — Ed.
There are some excellent photographs and films of Lenin. Just as in literature we highly value some recordings of faces in which the intentions and thoughts of the teacher are reflected partly through the prism of another person, so we cannot help but appreciate additional material, such as Altman’s largely subjective, but still extremely accurate sketches. I do not pretend to Altman's accuracy, but here I would like to give a few strokes that have sunk deep into my memory or that arose in my mind later, when I had to think about the grandiose phenomenon - Lenin. Perhaps they will serve as an impetus for this or that artist of pen, chisel or brush, for this or that young reader who has not been lucky enough to breathe the same air with Ilyich.
“If our revolution created such a person, if it had such a leader, this is a symbol and this serves as a manifestation of its gigantic power.”
"The combination of great will and the greatest modesty with such certainty answered what our party needed, that Lenin was at the head of it."
"The Party has in Vladimir Ilyich, the greatest leader, all the purity, all the radiant beauty of humanity."
(From the report dedicated to the 5th anniversary of the death of V. I. Lenin)
His appearance
I am categorically convinced that a great person cannot have a nondescript appearance. You just need to be able to look at it, you need to be able to see it. It is often said that Lenin was outwardly plain and ordinary. There is a certain truth to this, but in general it is nonsense, and here's why. Lenin's mediocrity consisted in the fact that in his very organism, both in terms of structure and in terms of movements, there was nothing theatrical, spectacular, striking, jumping out of the row, conspicuous. And how do you want Lenin to have such features? After all, Lenin was not only a convinced, but an organic, spontaneous democrat. He considered to such an extent tasteless, embarrassing, absurd any imposition of his personality by external effect, something so ridiculous, petty and infinitely distant from himself that, of course, his whole appearance, likewise, his dress and manner were primarily designed for this natural inconspicuousness. After all, it's all unimportant, because he doesn't think about it all, because it's still not reflected in his mind. Hence the boundless simplicity of Lenin's appearance.
His face was especially beautiful when he was serious, somewhat agitated, perhaps a little angry. That's when, under his steep forehead, his eyes began to sparkle with an extraordinary mind, intense thought. And what could be more beautiful than eyes that speak of the intense work of thought! And at the same time, his whole face took on the character of extraordinary power. It seems to me that the greatest similarity can be found here with the powerful expression of a lion - but with a big caveat, if we do not want to fall into banality. The lion, when he is excited by something, has a somewhat wild expression, which has never even remotely appeared on the face of Vladimir Ilyich; when the lion is calm, he is beautiful, but in his eyes there is some kind of oriental phlegm, some kind of majestic half-sleep.
From a purely aesthetic point of view, Ilyich was extraordinarily captivating when he laughed, and especially when he smiled. Altman successfully recorded some of these moments. There was a lot of selflessly childishness in Ilyich's laughter, and the selfless laughter is his victoriousness, this shows the presence both in nature and in consciousness of the habit of feeling like a force. No wonder Ransom 2 noted that Ilyich's laughter is "Marxist laughter."
Ilyich's smile was extremely thin, rather strongly ironic, sly. Who does not remember this charming smile of Ilyich? When he listened to you with that smile, you understood that he knew better, deeper, wider what you were saying to him, that he had already drawn the conclusion that he was, as it were, looking from a high mountain. But at the same time, it was the smile of a man who is ready to throw you a rope and lend a friendly helping hand when you come closer, laugh at your mistake, but laugh softly, in a comradely way. There was something from the older brother, almost, I would say, from the mother, which always caused an explosion of the warmest love for this cunning man with wrinkles around his mocking eyes and eyes full of good laughter.
His movements
It already follows from the foregoing that Vladimir Ilyich had no romantic movements. But since reality sometimes placed him on a gigantic height, concentrated in one particular moment, sometimes a monumental pose was obtained for him involuntarily. Two of them are captured: a pose with an outstretched hand - the real pose of a tribune; the other is when Vladimir Ilyich, forced to speak very loudly in front of a large crowd, powerfully clutches the pulpit with both hands, bends over to one side and speaks with his mouth wide open.
Both of these poses are taken from reality, but they still belong more to the legend. This is not the usual Ilyich, as we knew, this is Ilyich, whom History snatched out in an instant to superhuman heights, Ilyich, directly performing the functions of a leader in the face of a huge crowd.
All the insignificant movements of Vladimir Ilyich were imprinted with an extraordinary simplicity, but this did not prevent them from being beautiful. First of all, his face was infinitely mobile. I have to repent of a grave sin. When you sit in the Council of People's Commissars, you must, of course, deal only with state affairs, and not with the person of your loved one; but I sinned in this respect, and sometimes it gave me infinite pleasure, a little passing over the affairs of some kind of fisheries or a quarrel between two provinces over forests, to enjoy the music of Ilyich's face. There were extremely rare moments when this face remained motionless. All the time, irony or ironic surprise, or genuine surprise, or frowning eyebrows, or a shake of the head, or a gesture of denial, or an expression of special attention ...
From the movements of his whole figure, I remembered two orders of movements. First, the movement of impatience. Outwardly, in his daily life (political, of course - I do not know his family, everyday life at all), Ilyich was very impatient. His gestures were always quick, clear, aimed at a specific goal, but never fussy. (An artist similar to him in Eisenstein's "October" fusses in places). Ilyich's gestures were short, abrupt, purposeful. He always seemed to want to get things done quickly, but that's okay.At moments when the thought completely embraced him and when he wanted to embrace the audience with his thought, his face changed greatly, especially his eyes. They went somewhere deeper and at the same time something persistent, almost hypnotizing, sparkling appeared in them. I often attentively observed this look of Ilyich the speaker. He had an extremely strong effect on the audience, really bewitched it, as if screwing it into the meaning of the speech. But I became convinced, peering, that this is not the penetrating look with which a skillful speaker catches the expression of the faces of his audience, in order to always be aware of exactly whether she is captured or not, and how she reacts; and this is not in the least an artificially hypnotizing look, nor in the least some kind of fakirism over the public. Vladimir Ilyich involuntarily got this look: it was just that the work of his thought became so ebullient and intense that it was probably visible to a large audience. The thought flowed like a mighty river, the gaze was, as it were, turned inward, at these emerging thoughts. But since the birth of thoughts here was accompanied by an enormous effort of will, this gaze turned inward did not acquire the character of thoughtfulness or some absent-mindedness, but, on the contrary, was filled with intense will. So it was born not only in the eyes, but in Ilyich's whole face, that steel, forged, which was the appearance of his oratorical gift. And at the same time, Vladimir Ilyich walked all the time on the stage with completely monotonous steps. Two steps forward, to the edge of the podium, a few words, and mechanically two steps back, again a stop, a few words, and exactly the same two steps forward. At the same time, extremely restrained gestures.
Why such monotony of movement? Because at that time all the attention of consciousness is concentrated on the word, there is no more attention for the state of the body. At the same time, however, the nerves are excited, the state of the body is tense and active, which does not allow it to remain motionless, which is why such an automated, pendulum-like movement left to itself.<…>
Even when you write strokes about Ilyich, it suddenly turns out that your supply is almost inexhaustible. I still have quite a few thoughts and observations regarding certain general psychological and, so to speak, moral and political aspects of Ilyich's personality. In general terms, I once wrote about this, it is necessary to write about it deeper and in more “strokes”. But for the moment I leave this task aside and confine myself to the few external observations that I have just given. I hope the reader will understand that although they are external, they go inward from the external.Recently, V. D. Bonch-Bruevich told me that immediately after his dangerous injury, during the days of his recovery, Vladimir Ilyich called him and several other people and told them approximately the following: “I notice with great displeasure that they are beginning to exalt my personality. It's annoying and harmful. We all know that it's not about personality. I myself would be embarrassed to forbid such a phenomenon. It would also be something funny, pretentious. But you should gradually put a brake on this whole story. I think that Lenin, who could not stand the cult of personality and denied it in every possible way, understood and forgave us in subsequent years. There's nothing to be done about it - we wholeheartedly loved him passionately, not only honored him, namely, were in love with his moral character, and not only with his great mind as a leader - everything merged together into a charming and gigantic image.
And now, when he is no longer among us, we all feel, each in our hearts, a never-ceasing source of ardent love and gratitude for this person. We have nothing to be ashamed of. We have nothing to be ashamed of passing on this love to future generations, because Lenin was a natural phenomenon, despite the almost supernatural dimensions of his gifts and his destiny. He was the offspring of a great revolutionary movement, a great class in a great people. The upheavals of our people in the struggle against the autocracy, the strenuous efforts of the proletariat as the leader of this revolutionary movement, which then rushed towards the immediate goal of political freedom, were a colossal phenomenon, unprecedented in history. At the same time, they captured a multi-million people.
The selection for the revolutionary party was exceptionally rich. Romantics, without the power of objective thought, sifted out into the ranks of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, Marxist theoreticians, without willpower, without a revolutionary movement, retreated into petty-bourgeois Menshevism. In the ranks of the Bolsheviks there remained those who combined respect for a completely accurate and sober thought with a very strong will, seething energy. This party, illegal for decades, required an extraordinary hardening. The heavy and gloomy hammer of autocracy truly crushed, threw out everything fragile from it and forged characters. In this amazing party, in these chosen ones of the thought and will of the 140,000,000 people, there was a constant process—the selection of leaders. The Party and history itself tested people and discarded those of little use. There were those who were tested by a harsh life. This is how our great party pyramid was created, and how could one of the greatest leaders that mankind has ever seen not be at the top of it!
That is why we have nothing to be ashamed of, that we love and revere Ilyich so much. We do not become bad communists. In his personality we feel the broad, social, through him we love what is above all for the current century - the socialist revolution.
In the spring of 1920, in the office of V. I. Lenin in the Kremlin, the artist N. I. Altman made a sculptural portrait of Lenin from nature. For more on this, see Memories of V. I. Lenin. M., 1957, part 2, p. 594.
Ransom, Arthur - English bourgeois writer, contributor to a number of magazines and newspapers. He spent several years in Russia as a correspondent for the Daily News and The Manchester Gurdian newspapers. In 1918 and 1922 he met with Lenin. Author of the book Six Weeks in Soviet Russia (1919); Russian edition of 1924.Lenin as a scientist and publicist
With this speech, A. V. Lunacharsky delivered on January 24, 1924 in the building of Moscow University at a citywide meeting of scientists dedicated to the memory of V. I. Lenin. It was published in the same year by the publishing house Rabotnik Prosveshcheniye as a separate pamphlet.
"Vladimir Ilyich ... published the newspaper Pravda, which was the favorite newspaper of the workers, bringing a fresh stream to the workers' party." ("Lenin and the RCP")
"Vladimir Ilyich gave bright and simple formulas in all their enormous depth." (“Lenin and youth.” Report, January 25, 1924)
[Vladimir Ilyich] was great in all manifestations of his personality. We, who have the good fortune to be more or less close to him, know this well. We were amazed at the gigantic powers of this mind, which manifested itself not only in great works or great acts of his wonderful life full of world significance, but in the process of everyday work, in solving every problem that life put before him. We were also amazed at his tense iron will, a truly spontaneous will, not even remotely having anything in common with that notorious laxity and Oblomovism, in which we Slavs are usually reproached.<…>
Vladimir Ilyich could not stand beautiful phrases, he never used them, never wrote beautifully, never spoke beautifully, and even did not like others to write and speak beautifully, believing that this partly harms the business-like presentation of the question. He terribly disliked sentimentality, and extremely rarely from his lips, not only in official and public, but even intimate, closed, were any phrases that had a moral meaning, speaking of love for people, for their future, about emotional stimuli behavior. Vladimir Ilyich did not like to talk about it, but he was filled to the marrow with devotion to humanity as it is, for its suffering, for its lack of roads and darkness, and in this sense, not only Vladimir Ilyich passionately loved the proletariat, but also the peasantry, the working masses generally. It did not manifest itself outwardly in him, but it was felt like an all-flaming fiery hearth in him was this enormous greatness of heart. Perhaps from him, in spite of his affectionateness and excellent comradely feelings for those close to him, perhaps despite this, precisely because his kindness was great in scale, a chill blew from him. He was not good-natured, he would not stop at any sacrifices, his own or others, if these victims seemed to him necessary to solve the basic social problem. He took everything on an unusually large scale and lived in an atmosphere of questions of an unusually large scale, as others live in their family environment.<…>If we now turn to his work, to what he did, proceeding from his incomparable intellectual power and his integral morality, then there is no way here to give an outline of this inhuman production in the field of theory, in the field of journalism, in the field of public practice. As a scientist, writer, publicist, orator, as the organizer of some underground newspaper, and later as the organizer of an international workers' protest against the betrayal of the social patriots, as the organizer of the greatest world revolution and a state of an unprecedented type, and as the head of this state for five most difficult years, filled with internal and external crises - this man did so many amazing things that, of course, many years and decades will pass until they are satisfactorily exhausted, analyzed, all materials are commented and used. In the rich world, in the rich gallery of the great representatives of the working class, the class called to serve the greatest and most salvific upheaval that human history has known, we still will not find, except for the very founder of the great doctrine - Karl Marx, not a single figure who could to stand next to Lenin both in the quality of his very nature and in the greatness of the work that he created.
Today, here in our meeting, I would like to choose a more special topic for a conversation about Vladimir Ilyich, because, clutching at a characterization of the whole work, the whole significance of Lenin, you run the risk of involuntarily falling into general phrases in the conditions of a short speech. It is impossible to enter into an analysis of even the largest of Lenin's works or acts in a short time. This requires a lot of time and a lot of effort, you need to think and prepare. Enthusiastic phrases and some attempts to give a sense of the volume and scope of this titan of life's work turn out by themselves. I want to take on a narrower topic, although also with great embarrassment. I would like to make an attempt to portray Lenin as a scientist and publicist, to take this side of his activity, which is terribly important and inextricably linked with him as a revolutionary tactician, organizer and statesman.Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, as the leader of the workers' revolution in Russia, could not but be a scientist and publicist. Of course, one could imagine some kind of division of labor in this sense - well, if we had such a leader who would cover either questions of tactics only, or only theory - but this would mean, perhaps, that our the revolution is not real, not the Great Revolution. One of the features of its greatness is that, preparing itself in the atmosphere of the impending crisis of the bourgeois revolution against the autocracy and in the atmosphere of the conquest of the working class—the first socialist revolution—it served as the atmosphere in which the only party in world history, the communist party, crystallized. In addition to the collective experience that the Party has endured during these 25 years, it has closely examined its people, choosing from the best of the very best and from the best of the best. Thus, a hierarchy was forged in practice, which was not a simple apparatus, but was a social organ of consciousness and will that emerged in an organic process. So it did not occur to us the question of how we would obey the top. This did not enter our minds as little as the question: “Should I obey my head and should not it be better to consult with the left foot or with the middle finger of the right hand.” Everything in the party fell into place, the collective thought was connected. It was a colossal disciplined human mechanism, an unusually expedient mechanism that could develop maximum energy, once choosing a well-known slogan. And, of course, this explains that we, under the difficult conditions of the communist revolution in Russia and in such an environment as it was, were still able to win.
Not only, of course, our victory is explained by the structure and preparation of our party, but partly by it, and to a large extent because the very preparation of these features of the party, about which I told you, follows from the given conditions and the fact that the revolution had to take on an enormous scope, because it was a revolution against the entire decrepit, internally obsolete autocratic system, and the first conductor's baton was to be held by the proletariat, which could, in its advanced strata, take advantage of all the experience of the revolutionary proletariat and be fully armed with the most precise, far-reaching conclusions. This is what the underground revolutionary party gave, which was "educated" by the savage autocracy through its persecutions and which at the same time was a mass party marching under the banner of Marxism, scientific socialism. And it would be strange if in a great country that gave its best to this party, during the construction of the entire hierarchical pyramid - if the leader had already appeared, advanced, consolidated - that this leader was not that universal leader, that completely corresponding leader, whom history asked.<…>
I say: it is natural that since a great leader came to the fore during the 25-year preparatory period, and since it was a question of a Marxist revolution in a backward country,1 it is clear that Lenin, the leader of this revolution and the organizer of its apparatus, could not but be a scientist and publicist. . The revolution itself began to be presented from the point of view of Marxism, as Vladimir Ilyich understood it, as a revolutionary science, a scientific problem and assumed two planes of approach, two stages of approach, or, better, two sides. Firstly, it was an enormous theoretical task: it was necessary to orient oneself in the most important aspects of reality, to figure out, for example, in what direction and at what pace the development of capitalism in Russia was going, because capitalism is that basic prerequisite which determines the relative strength of the proletariat. The growth of this force in society, and even the form in which the proletariat faced the problems both during the struggle itself and after it, the problems of governance or the problems of the economic definition of the environment, all depended on what Russia would be like at the time of the revolution. and to what extent the prerequisites for this revolution are ripening. This depended on an analysis of the economic depths of the social process that took place around Lenin, and, secondly, on many very important superstructures that appeared on the changing soil of the economy.This is the first problem that every Marxist should have faced. It was resolved collectively, but this collective work had to be organized. The leader of the revolution himself had to take care of summarizing observations, drawing conclusions from them, creating summarizing works that would simultaneously serve as the basis of our confidence, a certain foundation for subsequent calculations, and a slogan, and a theoretical center around which Marxist thought could organize itself.
Then, of course, partly in connection with this, but not completely coinciding with this, there is another analytical work - an analysis of the relationship between the classes of Russian society, partly in their statics, that is, in their present position, and mainly in their dynamics, in internal changes in the growth and direction of the forces that acted in the bowels of each class.
And then - scientific, but scientific and applied work: how, having oriented, seeing your path, seeing obstacles and opportunities, fulfill the role of a collaborator, organizer, bringing light, consciousness into such a gigantic spontaneous phenomenon as a revolution? Here, general theoretical questions immediately arose: what, in fact, is a revolutionary, what is his role in essence, whether only an educator who throws a ray of light on what is happening, and this ray of light glides and illuminates, perhaps, but nothing organically and fatally changes in the process of revolutionary phenomena, or is the conscious revolutionary an organizer? (As Vladimir Ilyich put it in one of his books, revolutionary bacteria produce a certain fermentation, of course, in a prepared environment, but a fermentation that completely changes the results. So, if this fermentation had not occurred, perhaps, the path of the working class would have turned out to be different for decades ). Is it possible to help the revolution only by taking into account the active forces and assisting them to some extent, or is it necessary to apply maximum creativity and leadership here? Is the real role of the Marxist to be a porte-parol-em* and spokesman for the masses, or can he act as the leader of these masses?
* Speaking on behalf of others (fr.). —Ed.This problem arose, and Vladimir Ilyich resolved this issue in a positive sense. He assigned a colossal role to the conscious will, to the revolutionary vanguard. And lately, not long before his illness, Vladimir Ilyich expounded this with extraordinary brilliance in his wonderful speeches and articles on the Party and the class.2 And then there were already special problems. It was necessary to establish all sorts of types of capital, its concentration in the sense of the ratio of capitalist enterprises, the rate of their development. Taking all this into account, it was necessary to draw conclusions about the possible relationships between classes, and here, as you remember, there was a colossal division between Lenin and Plekhanov, who found that in Lenin's turn towards the peasantry at that time one could hear the old Socialist-Revolutionaries. This watershed was outlined by the fifth year and became the starting point for very many social phenomena and various phases of the revolution. Vladimir Ilyich approached the question of an alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry many times, not at once, perhaps with all the breadth and decisiveness, but in the end he solved it with complete genius and exhaustiveness, the practical results of which are obvious to everyone.
“A great orator and publicist, Lenin used quite often ridicule, irony, giving a satirical character to his argument. This is also an artistic technique. It has its own purely artistic persuasiveness.
(“Fiction is a political weapon”)
All these problems are solved with the deepest analysis and the ability to conduct laboratory experiments of a social nature. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin possessed all the data necessary for a scientifically thinking revolutionary. As a scientist, Vladimir Ilyich was unusually objective and cold, incorruptible; his feeling never pushed him to conclusions that were pleasing to him, but false. He was a real scientific researcher. For him, of course, science was never an end in itself. It was determined, in the last analysis, by the practical task, but the stronger * it had to appear, the more risky the practical tasks were.
The scientific activity of Vladimir Ilyich is quite diverse, and his scientific education, not just education, but his preparation for scientific work was very broad. As far as I can recall from his well-known works and his conversations? Of his interests, which constantly manifested themselves, I can enumerate a number of sciences that interested Vladimir Ilyich, and outline some of his attitude towards them.First of all, Vladimir Ilyich was a philosopher and was very interested in philosophy. Vladimir Ilyich did not have time to devote himself to philosophy as a specialist; he took up these questions in relatively free time, when he got some involuntary leave due to a hitch in the pace of the development of the revolution, moreover, for philosophical works with strictly practical goals: to remind, correct, inflict a blow to someone, some kind of growth, which he considered wrong, etc. - in a word, in a businesslike way and from the point of view of the health of the party. And he believed that the party, as a representative of the proletariat and all that general public that adjoins the party, should observe some discipline in the field of philosophy, not allow itself to be infected by whatever, in the opinion of Vladimir Ilyich, bourgeois impurities to that philosophical doctrine , which he considered the only correct one for the Marxist social outlook, and therefore for Marxist tactics. It would be difficult for me now to analyze the philosophical features of Vladimir Ilyich in his ideas, in the results of his philosophical work, but one can to some extent point out the peculiarities in the approach, in the assessment of the main philosophical problems. For Vladimir Ilyich, as for Marx, as for the proletariat in general, the philosophical question is by no means a cabinet question. He is a materialist because he is not interested in any problem of a man who is busy with his own soul and does not know whether it is immortal or not immortal and whether he can count on it in any way after the trouble with the mortal body; Without being interested in such questions, Vladimir Ilyich cannot approach the matter from an idealistic side. Man, who has an intellectual belief that ideas are something torn off, that they contain the beauty of life, such a person can stay in the air of high ideology and not touch the ground, but for the proletariat and its most brilliant thinkers this is not a problem. They are not interesting for them at all, they are interested in the world as it is. As it is, it is not good in many ways. Direct practical - on the one hand, economic and economic, on the other hand, economic and political problem. The world is a thing that needs to be remade and can be remade. What does each proletarian find in his factory act? He finds material and labor and knows that you can make what you want out of it, the worker is imbued with the deepest, most healthy instinct, that something extremely pleasant can be made from this world, beautiful, such that it will be a great pleasure to live, and that the very process of remaking the world is such a pleasure. When you feel this figure, rich in muscles, which is constantly in contact with nature in the struggle with it, in overcoming it, you will understand that such people do not need idealism, it is harmful, it is alien to them, because it breaks forces, dissipates energy, and sometimes even replaces real goals with illusory ones and does this in deep connection with what it wants, what it strives for, as a decadent class, out of touch with life, an exploiting class, interested in concealing the truth, thinks.
This is how Vladimir Ilyich approached philosophical problems. And this point of view was inherent in Vladimir Ilyich with elemental force, and he knew how to defend it with absolutely unshakable firmness. He had a very strong instinct in this regard, and anyone who, for various reasons, had to disagree with him and experience his polemical clicks, having thought and approaching the problem closer, had to inevitably admit: it’s true, after all, that point of view, which Vladimir Ilyich steadfastly pursues, this is a point of view that ensures maximum sobriety and maximum energy in resolving the fundamental problem that Marx expressed in his famous saying that others interpreted the world, and we are called to remake it. 3
This central problem of remaking the world dictated to Vladimir Ilyich his world outlook and his deep respect for science in general. He treated the exact sciences with great interest and respect. Here he no longer spoke of office space. This work did not seem to him divorced from the revolutionary activities of the world. Some works of Pavlov, Timiryazev, Darwinism or questions of the structure of the atom had an exciting effect on Vladimir Ilyich, and he said with deep regret that he did not have time to delve into those works that are being done in the direction of such a transformation of the world. Vladimir Ilyich realized that it would be good if we could pose our social problems as clearly as a chemist poses his own in a laboratory. In this regard, his respect for exact thought was enormous, and you know that during the period of the revolution he ordered Marxists to conclude, alliances with natural scientists, alien to the idealistic darling. He preached alliances, connections with naturalists, and when the Marxist philosophical journal “Under the Banner of Marxism” was being created, he directly and definitely indicated that this or that honest scientist, not even a Marxist, conducting a steady scientific induction, scientifically impartial, should be considered already a priori our ally, our most precious comrade-in-arms.
Vladimir Ilyich had an interest in economics, he was terribly interested in statistics. Statistical data worked out by correct methods had endless attraction for him, and I remember that at meetings of the Council of People's Commissars, when statistical reports were made, Vladimir Ilyich took a pencil and made extremely deep and sharp remarks about possible errors, about the wrong approach to this or that. question and any approximation.
A lawyer by training, he retained the deepest interest in this case, not, of course, in abstract legal pseudoscience divorced from life, but in the amazing accuracy of the formulations it achieved.
When we had a strong fad against lawyers who seemed to us to be the devil's advocates, sworn defenders of capital and owners of corrupted brains filled with pseudo-traditions, Vladimir Ilyich demanded codifiers, legal specialists, demanded legal formulations. We were surprised and said: “What do we need their red words for, we will write them ourselves,” this did not satisfy him. “Well, in what language it is written, it is inaccurate,” he said. He had a fondness for legal-type formulations, and Vladimir Ilyich was a master of them. He treated this or that legal formula as a real scientific value, as a great acquisition of the mind.Then Vladimir Ilyich, although he did not write historical works in the strict sense of the word, or wrote very few of them, fluently, in passing, was, in my opinion, a remarkable historian. This made him very sensitive to historical works. He himself was a historian, even in the sense of the depth of reflection on this or that problem. He was a historian of his own days and treated them not so much with journalistic excitement as with the tremendous sharpness of the most objective analysis, even an absolutely brilliant analysis of what is the cause of the collapse of c. - for the workers' party in Europe. For example, all the work of Ilyich, which reveals Western European capital, the exploitation by Europe of the colonial peoples, where even the proletarian class itself turned into a class of exploiters and thereby created the prerequisite for the betrayal of the leaders, the work that found out along with this that the exploited peoples, having gone through their regular political revolutions, revolutions of the maturation of their national consciousness, will thereby be drawn into a direct struggle against capital - all this analysis led me to admiration, and the results of this turned out to be simply gigantic, because this also determined to a large extent the resolution by Vladimir Ilyich of the national question and the general deviation of the Third International in side of non-European countries, and the definition of the final struggle for the proletarian front in Europe, and the slogan of a workers' and peasants' government, acceptable even on a world scale. is about the current day whose nickname is himself, with the clarity of a Marxist to see and describe events.
For example, I think that the letters of Vladimir Ilyich from Geneva after the February Revolution, written abroad, which give an assessment of what the February Revolution is and what determines the main features of the behavior of the classes that appear in it, are a masterpiece of historical analysis.4
Strictly scientific works, with the exception of the huge work "The Development of Capitalism in Russia", can be picked up as if not so much, the rest seem to be moving into journalism, for which there is a reason; the ideas that are contained here, the form of how these ideas are derived, and the consideration of the conclusions that suggest themselves and which dictate the tactics of the struggle in the future, are so rich that one can imagine the basic principles that follow from Ilyich's scientific work.In the same way, he could not help but be a publicist, and again because he was a Marxist revolutionary. He never forgot that a communist is a person who proceeds from an understanding of the interests of his class in its entirety, world scope and scope, embracing dozens of countries and hundreds of years, Vladimir Ilyich, who loved the proletariat because he felt it as an organizing class , felt his enormous, gigantic inner power, loved him in every single worker with whom he knew how to speak unusually. He did not forget at all that in Russia the proletarian class is uncultured, wild, that it needs to study, and study a lot. No admiration for the blouse, as such, and the masses, as such, was characteristic of him.
That is why, according to Vladimir Ilyich, it was important to spread political consciousness among the masses as broadly as possible, and although he knew that this was not done in pamphlets, not in articles, not in speeches, and taught us that this was done through practical participation in the revolution and that the best school - this is the revolution itself, nevertheless did not fall into an underestimation of journalism, as such, and therefore dealt with it in the widest possible limits, passionately desiring to speak not only to the party, but also outside the party. He warned against both mistakes. He was afraid of a deviation towards muzhikism, he warned that the party would break its neck if it stumbled into a muzhikish deviation, but he was also afraid that they would not understand that the task of the proletariat at the present time is to help the peasant economy, to go fully towards the peasant and in order to gain sufficient economic base, and in general for our further activity to obtain a strong political bond with the peasant.Questions of enlightenment of the peasantry worried Vladimir Ilyich in the deepest way, and hardly anyone in the republic suffered so much from the sufferings of the People's Commissariat of Education, to which we are directly related, its obscurity, lack of funds, insufficient scope of its work, as Vladimir Ilyich. He was excited by the idea of a possible organization of public readings on legislation, on political issues. This turned out to be utopian, it only partly passed, but he became agitated because it seemed to him that, perhaps, in addition to eliminating illiteracy, one could somehow step over it by this method of appealing to the peasantry. The constant feeling that it was necessary to explain, to explain terribly simply, so that it came to the "cook", was extremely characteristic of him.
This does not mean that he exchanged everything for a walking popular idea and did not understand that many problems can be posed only by using more complex terms and making great demands on the listener. He knew that there were different levels here, but nevertheless he was a publicist, he taught, not overestimating, by the way, the ability to understand these most cultural strata and even party ones. He taught us all the time that if you have a good idea that doesn't work out, pound it, chew it, repeat it. When you see that your idea has not been sufficiently understood, do not drive forward, repeat and repeat. If there is such and such a slogan for a given time, you need to bring it to the bottom and completely saturate the consciousness of the environment to which you are addressing with this slogan.In his journalism, this feature is seen to the highest degree. He is extremely simple as a writer; Lenin is rude in his style, but this rudeness does not make his thought unclear. You can find the most elegant stylists, about whom it cannot be said that they are rude, but their thought is expressed clumsily, and Lenin provides minimal opportunities for any kind of gossip in his slogans, and I think that the impression of indescribable brilliance that many Ilyich's works, for example, pamphlets about the state (about the disease of "leftism" in communism or about the turn towards the NEP), are familiar to everyone. These are such brochures, after which you experience some kind of internal aesthetic excitement: they have such clarity, simplicity and purity of thought. It turns out that this is not due to any conventional polemical methods, not due to figurativeness of speech or wit, but it seems to you that the thought is so clear that even the mind of a child could perceive it, and when you read Lenin, you begin to understand what kind of socio-pedagogical power lies in the journalism of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. From this point of view, the vast amount of material in the 18 volumes of the collected works of Lenin is an example of how a revolutionary publicist should work, who wants to be understandable to the vast majority and at the same time not be misinterpreted, not feed semolina, not adapt to the general level, but to be at the same time exciting, uplifting. Tolstoy said that real art, without losing anything in its subtlety, at the same time can be somehow accessible to both children and illiterate commoners. Something similar was achieved in Lenin's journalism, and that is why it produces such an impression.
So was his oratory. Every speech he made was nothing but a political act that convinced or clarified. Many of his speeches are of historical significance, because they express this or that political conclusion of great importance, and some, perhaps, did not have such world significance and were a repetition of what he worked out, but with which they still argue, but he always taught , and if you ask if Vladimir Ilyich was a great orator, then you can answer: "Of course, he was." Lenin did not flatter the listener and did not want to lure him with this or that beauty of presentation or let him rest on jokes. He neglected them and it was ridiculous for him to even think about it: it was his business to express his thoughts with extraordinary simplicity and, if they were not understood, to repeat several times. Therefore, his gestures were “drilling”, and his methods were didactic, which boiled down to making an impression that was indisputable, thoughtful, obvious and clear. Vladimir Ilyich never talked about trifles. He spoke when he needed to, with unchanging content, inner conviction and hypnotic power.
His voice, full of strong-willed pressure, as well as his gesture, all this completely fascinated the listeners, and one could listen to him as much as one wanted with bated breath, and when endless, truly grateful applause thundered, everyone felt deep regret why he stopped talking - such it was a colossal pleasure to be able to follow the thought of the teacher.
Here is the little hastily and in the order of improvisation that I could say about Vladimir Ilyich as a theoretician and teacher. If Vladimir Ilyich were only a teacher, then even then he would be immense. Meanwhile, I don’t want to say for a single minute that the special topic I have chosen is dominant among others: Ilyich as an organizer, public figure, practical revolutionary - even more exciting topics, which I won’t talk about, about which there are many more and I will often have to speak, and I want to at least return this speech of mine, dedicated to the memory of Ilyich, once again to the general charm of his personality.
The era that we are living through is terribly bitter in its individual moments and extremely majestic and festive in its entirety. And no matter how brilliantly the further epochs of human life unfold, I think that often distant descendants will think with envy about people who live in these very 20s of the 20th century. The era of a gigantic turning point, unprecedented, which will never be forgotten, and its fruit, along with its engine, as happens in history, was Vladimir Ilyich, and in him personally all the charm of this amazing era was affected. And to the gallery of world figures, who have a place in the pantheon of all mankind, another charming personality has been added to this gallery. If you ask whether there were negative traits in Vladimir Ilyich, I don’t know, I don’t remember, I can’t find it from edge to edge in politics, in comradely life, personal, in theory. I don't know, I can't remember a single case; not a single feature to note that could be called negative. There is no such. A positive type from head to toe, a miracle, like a man, and at the same time so alive, so alive that even now, when he lies in the Hall of Columns of the House of the Unions and when a whole nation passes by him, stricken with grief, he is still the most alive of all who now live and breathe here in this city and in this country ...
January 24, 1924
Lenin, in his remarks on N. Bukharin's book "The Economy in Transition", against the phrase: "Therefore, the collapse of the world capitalist system began with the weakest economic systems, with the least developed state-capitalist organization" writes: "wrong: from the" medium-weak ". Without a certain height of capitalism, we would not have succeeded” (Leninsky Sb., XI, p. 397).
A. V. Lunacharsky refers to the articles and speeches of V. I. Lenin at the end of 1922–1923, included in the 45th volume of the Complete Works: “Political report of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) on March 27 to the XI Party Congress”, report on the IV congress of the Comintern "Five years of the Russian revolution and the prospects for world revolution", "Speech at the plenum of the Moscow Soviet on November 20, 1922", "Letter to the Congress", "On cooperation", "On our revolution", "How should we reorganize the Rabkrin", "Less is better" and others. In these works, Lenin continues to develop the most important problems of building socialism, the foreign policy of the Soviet state, and the world workers' and communist movement.
A. V. Lunacharsky refers to the text of the 11 thesis from the work of K. Marx “Theses on Feuerbach”: “Philosophers only explained the world in different ways, but the point is to change it” (Marx K., Engels F. Soch. 2nd ed., vol. 3, p. 4).
V. I. Lenin wrote five “Letters from afar”. Four of them during his stay in Switzerland, in Zurich, and the fifth letter was started in Bern on the eve of his departure from Switzerland for Russia. "Letters from afar" were of great importance for the development of the foundations of the new political course of the Bolshevik Party, because they examined with exhaustive depth the questions that arose before the working class, the working people of Russia immediately after the February Revolution: about the driving forces, nature and direction of this revolution , about state power, about war and peace, about the attitude towards the bourgeois Provisional Government, about the Soviets as a new form of political organization of the working people, about the transition from the bourgeois-democratic stage of the revolution to the socialist stage, and others.
Letters from afar formulated the foundations of the program and tactics that Lenin developed and substantiated upon his return to Russia in the April Theses, Letters on Tactics, and other works.