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 Lenin as a scientist and publicist (Speech at a meeting of scientists dedicated to the memory of the leader)

First published as a separate edition M., 1924

Published in: Memoirs of V.I. Lenin: In 10 vols. T. 8 / Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the Central Committee of the CPSU. — M.: Politizdat, 1991

The man who departed from us 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.

Along with this, Vladimir Ilyich was characterized by a certain unprecedented spiritual grace, the impression of which was given by the ease with which tasks, both small and large, were solved by him. He was lively, cheerful - a major person. I almost do not remember cases when V. I. would have been darkened for any long time, or when the gigantic work, mental and moral, carried out by him, strained, so to speak, his mental muscles. He handled everything playfully. With great seriousness, a great sense of responsibility, while exacting the same sense of responsibility from others, he was able to envelop the work of both his own and those teams that he involved in the work, with some kind of confident cheerfulness and cheerfulness. We also knew his immeasurable kindness. Part of this kindness was the deepest comradely feeling towards his political collaborators,

But this is only one side, and perhaps the most insignificant, of this giant's kindness, with which he was full, with which he breathed. The other and most important aspect was his bottomless and boundless idealism. Vladimir Ilyich could not stand beautiful phrases, 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 an official and public manner, but even in an intimate, closed way, were heard any phrases that had a moral meaning, speaking of love for people, for their future, about emotional incentives for 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 the proletariat passionately loved Vladimir Ilyich, but also the peasantry, the working masses at all. He had the deepest and most comprehensive sympathy for the suffering of the masses, and he loved passionately, as another who can or knows how, or wants to express his love more or less in rhetorical forms, will never dream, loved the bright future of mankind, whom he served all a life. 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 the features that I have pointed out, his affectionateness and excellent comradely feelings for those close to him, perhaps, despite this, precisely because his kindness was great in scale, a chill emanated from him. He was not good-natured, he would not stop at any sacrifices, his own or others, if these sacrifices seemed to him necessary to solve the basic social problem. In the social sense of the word, he was an intrepid surgeon, and for small, good-natured people, for little good-natured people, it might even seem that Lenin was a cruel, dry, stately geometer, an architect who does not take into account the fact that he has to build from a human forest and that the chips that fly at the same time are human suffering, human lives. Vladimir Ilyich knew this very well, but precisely because of the greatness of the cause, he did not want to reckon with such sacrifices and organically could not. He took everything on an extraordinarily large scale and lived in an atmosphere of questions of an extraordinarily large scale, as others live in their family environment.

All these features of V. I. have long seemed to us to some extent superhuman, if this expression is permissible in this case. All of us, without a single exception, although our party has great talents and people whose names are pronounced along with the name of Lenin, we all, despite the fact that there were others, were always aware of the huge distance between these most important other people and Lenin. It was felt that he was of some other breed by the naturalness with which he carries out his enormous mission, by that absence of tension, in the presence of clarity, clarity and almost absolute infallibility in solving problems. And his spiritual clarity, his kind of instinctive certainty of how to behave in his personal life, in the most everyday relationships, led to the result that extraordinary simplicity always turned out, and precisely because that all this was characterized by extraordinary simplicity. Everyone felt him close, dear. Superhumanity did not surround him with a halo, did not make pathos of the distance between the great man and those around him. He was Ilyich for loved ones, for distant ones, for the whole working world, Ilyich, very affectionate, kind, his own, dear ...

These are not all, of course, but very briefly outlined features of his charming social and intimate personality.

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 by a whole system of committees, 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 the 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 all materials have been satisfactorily exhausted, analysed, commented on 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 V.I., because, grasping at the characterization of the whole work, the whole significance of Lenin, in the conditions of a short speech you run the risk of involuntarily falling into general phrases. 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 depict 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. Of course, for this you need to speak not at a moment when we are all shocked by the deepest grief, when it is difficult to talk about anything, when you feel stricken, temporarily, of course, but still stricken by some kind of collective illness that does not bring sadness to the point of despondency, but still grief, unbearable, and, of course, one would have to talk about this after reading a lot and creating an appropriate plan for the conversation. And what I will say cannot be anything but an improvisation, an occasional speech on this subject. So I ask you to take into account what will be said. But, perhaps, those few thoughts and memories of V.I. that will come to my mind will still be to some extent worthy of the evening dedicated by you to the memory of a great man.

V. I. 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 traits 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. Through a special selection (the severity of which was taken care of by the tsarist government itself), through screening in the direction of the Menshevik types, who did not simultaneously combine theoretical objectivity, intellectual vigilance and strong-willed tension, through the most intimate chemical combination of a part of the intelligentsia with the advanced layer of the working class (and, moreover, not simply qualified and advanced, and advanced in the sense of the greatest preparation for perception and a certain volume of ideas, sparkling with the intensity of strong-willed impulses) - in this way the only party in world history was created that had been preparing for a revolution for 25 years. In addition to the collective experience that the Party had endured during these 25 years, it looked closely at its people, choosing from the best the very best and from the best the even better. In this way, a hierarchy was forged in practice, which was not simply an 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 I not consult with my left foot or with the middle finger of my right hand." Everyone 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 a maximum of irresistible and merciless energy, once choosing a well-known slogan. And of course, this made it possible for us, under the difficult conditions of the communist revolution in Russia and in such an environment as we were, to still be 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 brought up 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,

Marx remarked on the Paris Commune that one of the reasons for the fall of the Commune was the lack of capable leaders. This does not mean that Marx sinned against his own position on the role of the individual in history, and Marx would clarify his thought in the sense that this is not only the reason for the further defeat of the Commune, but that this reason is one of many, perhaps not the most important. , at the same time, there is a symptom that the proletariat did not have people whom it would trust, who would have authority and power, who would have a program, who would know how to act in difficult circumstances, who would have behind them an analysis of the created provisions. About everyone except Blanqui {Blanqui, Louis Auguste - French revolutionary, utopian communist, organizer of a number of secret societies and conspiracies, an active participant in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848. Ed.}, they asked: "Who is this?" - and everyone was "someone like that", and it was known what he would say tomorrow. Some wrote in zigzags in the sense of romance, were internally unbalanced, while others made mistakes because they were not prepared. From this, the French Commune was a great revolution in its moral sense, but in its scope and results - what comparison can there be with our revolution! None! Along with our revolution, it is simply almost an episode. but in its scope and results - what comparison can there be with our revolution! None! Along with our revolution, it is simply almost an episode. but in its scope and results - what comparison can there be with our revolution! None! Along with our revolution, it is simply almost an episode.

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, 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 V. I. 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 proceeding, because capitalism is that basic prerequisite which determines the relative strength of the proletariat. The growth of this force in society, and even in what form the problems will appear before the proletariat both during the struggle itself and after it, the problems of management or the problems of the economic definition of the environment - all this depended on what Russia would be like at the time of the revolution and to what extent the prerequisites for this revolution were 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. Plekhanov, the predecessor and forerunner of V.I., also resolved it, but it had to be resolved again. 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. It doesn't quite match. We see how matters turned in 1905, when Kautsky disagreed with the Menshevik Martov precisely on this question. Martov, drawing conclusions about the fate of the Russian revolution, said that they should be drawn directly from economic premises; since the state of the economy is such-and-such, then the revolution can proceed within such-and-such limits, within such-and-such limits. Kautsky disagreed with him in his pamphlet on the motive forces of the Russian revolution and pointed out that revolutionary practice must be based on an analysis of classes, their forces, the possibility of an alliance, etc. It goes without saying that if Russia were an isolated country, then any the constellation of classes could be explained by basic economic factors, but since it was a revolution in a backward country and existing next to countries where the question of a social revolution seemed urgent, this question took on a different angle, it could be said that a revolution that could to assume a proletarian character, to hold out for a certain number of years, may not turn out to be hopeless, despite the backwardness of the country. I give this as an example. Consequently, it was necessary to orientate oneself in these two most important lines of the social process.

And then after that it became scientific, but scientific and applied work: how, having oriented, seeing your path, seeing obstacles and opportunities, fulfill the role of, say, an employee, 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 - is it 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 the organizer? (As V.I. put it in one of the books, revolutionary bacteria produce a certain fermentation, of course, in a prepared medium, but a fermentation that completely changes the results. So, if this ferment had not taken place, perhaps the path of the working class would have turned out differently for decades.) Can the revolution be helped 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 a Marxist to be a porte-parol? Ed.} and spokesman for the masses, or can he act as the leader of these masses?

And you know how the Bolsheviks resolved all these questions and how our Menshevik comrades of that time, even such great minds as Plekhanov himself, treated this. The working class has self-determined, or rather, certain economic conditions have contributed to its determination. According to the Mensheviks, in order to be the leader of the working class, it was necessary to take into account the stage of its development, to take into account what it could accomplish, to keep pace with it or only one inch ahead, without separating the working intelligentsia from the masses, not to take up permission political problems at a time when the working class is not yet thinking about them, etc. V. I. resolved all these questions in a completely different spirit, which forced the Mensheviks to say that this was Jacobinism and Socialist-Revolutionaryism. In fact, it was real Marxism, and to what a great extent it is sad that this process of conscious organization is still insufficiently developed. It was necessary to give all one's strength to deploy the elements of organized and absolute consciousness among the masses, to cause an upsurge in them under the conditions of the autocratic regime, and then to create a party that would be the headquarters, brain, spokesman, vanguard and leader of the proletariat, not to mention everything the working population of Russia. This problem arose, and V.I. resolved this issue in a positive sense. He assigned a colossal role to the conscious will, to the revolutionary vanguard. And recently, not long before his illness, V. I. expounded this with extraordinary brilliance in his wonderful speeches and articles on the party and class. And then there were special problems. It was necessary to establish all sorts of types of capital, the concentration of its various calibers 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 to 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. V. I. many times, not immediately, perhaps with all the breadth and decisiveness, approached the question of an alliance between the proletariat and the peasants, but in the end he solved it with complete genius and exhaustiveness, the practical results of which are obvious to everyone.

All these problems are solved with the deepest analysis and the ability to conduct laboratory experiments of a social order. V. I. Lenin possessed all the data necessary for a scientifically thinking revolutionary. As a scientist, V.I. was unusually objective and cold, incorruptible; his feeling never pushed him to pleasant but false conclusions. 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 more powerful it was to come forward, the more risky the practical tasks were.

The scientific activity of V. I. is quite diverse, and his scientific education, not just education, but his preparation for scientific work was very wide. As far as I can remember from his well-known works and his conversations, from his interests, which manifested themselves constantly, I can list a number of sciences that interested V.I., and outline some of his attitude towards them. First of all, V. I. was a philosopher and was very interested in philosophy. I know that philosophical fachmans can relate to the philosophical works of V.I. in such a way that these are books "ad hoc" {for this case, for this purpose (lat.). Ed.}, to solve certain topical problems, but this is completely wrong. V. I. 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, to strike at 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 V. I., bourgeois impurities to that philosophical doctrine, which he considered the only correct one for the Marxist social worldview, and therefore for Marxist tactics. It would be difficult for me now to analyze the philosophical features of V. I. in his ideas, in the results of his philosophical work, but his philosophical features in his approach, in assessing the main philosophical problems can be pointed out to some extent. For VI, 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; not being interested in such questions, V.I. cannot approach the matter from an idealistic side. A person 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 at all interesting for them, they are interested in the world as it is, which you can feel, which you can eat, in which you can manage, in which you can do something necessary and good. 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 of a healthy animal man, that something extremely pleasant, 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, which, by analogy with the labor process, draws for itself the whole process of remaking the world, which also analogizes the social problem with technology, 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 a deep connection with what it wants, what it strives for, as the decadent class, cut off, thinks from life, an exploitative class, a class interested in concealing the truth.

This is how Vladimir Ilyich approached philosophical problems. It is necessary that a person be a practitioner, a sober practitioner. This philosophy is materialism, materialism not understood as a philosophical isolated doctrine, but as the totality of the exact sciences from which technical conclusions can be drawn. By analogy with this, it is necessary to build social sciences of any type, then the soil on which we will base any, theoretical or practical, our constructions will be healthy. 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 respect, and anyone who, for various reasons, had to disagree with him and experience his polemical clicks, on reflection and approaching the problem closer, was bound to admit:

This central problem of remaking the world dictated to Vladimir Ilyich his worldview and his deep respect for science in general. I don't know how he would react to the idea that there is no philosophy and that it is a collection of sciences and can be replaced by general conclusions from them. I don't know, maybe he would have reacted positively to this. He treated the exact sciences with great interest and respect. Here he no longer spoke of cabinetry. 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 sorrow that he did not have time to delve into those works that were 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 make alliances with natural scientists who were alien to the idealistic odor. But Vladimir Ilyich considered the introduction of metaphysical and semi-metaphysical ideas into this laboratory of work on the examination of reality contemptible, shameful, and explained purely socially: well, what to do, what of a scientist? A scientist is good, it sounded like a proletarian to him. But the bourgeois scientist—that’s the trouble: in his entire way of life, in his connections, infected, contaminated, he, as a result, introduces into his clear, necessary work, which relates entirely to the problem of construction from the material that is given to us, all kinds of bourgeois rubbish. Whether because of the petty-bourgeois nature of his bias, the acuteness of the interests of his personality and the relationship of this personality to God, etc., whether for this reason or because of his connection with the big bourgeoisie, which dictates its will, the spirit of the scientist is already distorted. Vladimir Ilyich, however, pointed out that in the field of the natural sciences such infection does not go far, that it is, on the whole, a healthy field of science. He preached alliances, ties with the naturalists, and when the Marxist philosophical journal Under the Banner of Marxism was being created, he directly and definitely pointed out that this or that honest scientist, not even a Marxist, conducting a steady scientific induction, scientifically impartial, should already be considered a priori {in advance (lat.). Ed.} our ally, our most precious comrade-in-arms.

V. I. had an interest in economics, until the end of his days (I don’t know how during his illness) 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, V. I. took a pencil and made extremely deep and sharp remarks about possible errors, about the wrong approach to or another 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 devil's advocates, sworn defenders of capital and owners of corrupted brains filled with pseudo-traditions, V.I. demanded codifiers, legal specialists, demanded legal formulations. We were surprised and said: “Why do we need their red words, we will write them ourselves” - this did not satisfy him, and in general his comradely burning mockery often did not approve of the formal aspect of our legislative activity. "Well, in what language it is written, it is inaccurate," he said. He had a fondness for legal-type language, and V. I. was a master of it. This side - "the physical strength of the brain" - seemed to him one of the most charming and necessary. He treated this or that legal formula as a real scientific value, as a great acquisition of the mind.

Then V. I., 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 the Social-Democrats. Labor 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 determined to a large extent the solution of V. I. the national question and the general deviation III International towards non-European countries, and the definition of the final struggle for one proletarian front in Europe, and the slogan of a workers' and peasants' government, acceptable even on a world scale. All this colored communist tactics in a peculiar color and is the greatest merit of Lenin, because this is the theoretical solution of V. I.'s problem - the "problem of problems", because the transformation of the proletarian movement, the proletarian force into a worker-peasant power only strengthened the dictatorship of the proletariat. But one could point to countless examples of this ability of V. I., regardless of the fact that it is a question of the current day, of which he himself is a participant, to see and describe events with the clarity of a Marxist. For example, I think that letters from V. I. from Geneva after the February Revolution, written abroad, published, giving an assessment of what the February Revolution is and what determines now the main features of the behavior of the classes that appear in it, are a masterpiece of historical analysis .

Strictly scientific works, with the exception of the huge work "On Capitalism in Russia", seem to be not so many, the rest seem to be turning into journalism, for which there is a reason; the ideas that are contained here, the form in which 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 a whole academy of scientists who will develop those basic principles that follow from the scientific Ilyich's work.

In the same way, he could not help but be a publicist, and again because he was a Marxist revolutionary. Well, what is it that he will work out this or that idea for himself, what is it that his students and the headquarters of the working class, which is the party, will assimilate them? This was often not enough. He was a profound supporter of the view that at the present time one has to think and act for the working masses and even against certain elements of the working class. He never forgot that a communist is a person who proceeds from an understanding of the interests of his class in their entire scope, in a world scope and in a scope embracing dozens of countries and hundreds of years. His idea, however, was to move on to a time when every cook would be able to run the country, which is the danger of a possible separation of the Communist Party from the working class or from the peasant masses. He portrayed this class system to us. The Party is advancing, as if it were moving the trade unions like a drive belt, and through the trade unions, through the entire working class, we are linking up with the peasantry. At the same time, he said with inner pain and anxiety: but if you fail to do this, then in one of these bridges, in one of these transmission mechanisms, the whole link may burst, and all this will perish. All that is needed is for the Communists to become infected with arrogance, to break away from the masses, to stop explaining to them where they are being led, to stop enlisting their trust and love, for the Party to break away, to turn out to be a useless social formation. But it is worth doing the opposite, starting to learn from the working class as a whole in terms of its mood, submitting to the decline of courage, manifestations of selfishness, in order to perish.

V.I., who madly loved the proletariat, because he felt it as an organizing class, felt its enormous, gigantic inner power, loved it in every single worker with whom he was able 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 before it can control itself, and if he was against arrogance, he was also against proletarian arrogance. No admiration for the blouse, as such, and the masses, as such, was characteristic of him. Therefore, in the opinion of V.I., it was important that the widest dissemination of political consciousness among the masses, and although he knew that this was done not by pamphlets, not by articles, not by speeches, and taught us that this was done through practical participation in the revolution and that the most the best school is the revolution itself, nevertheless, he did not fall into an underestimation of journalism as such, and therefore he was engaged in 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 when it hit the muzhikist deviation, but he was afraid that they would not understand that the task of the proletariat at the present time, as the owner, is to help the peasant economy, to fully meet the needs of the peasant and for the sake of in order to acquire a sufficient economic basis and, in general, for our further activity to obtain a strong political bond with the peasant.

Questions of enlightenment of the peasantry worried V.I. in the deepest way, and hardly anyone in the republic suffered so much from the suffering of the People's Commissariat for Education, to which we are directly related, its obscurity, lack of funds, insufficient scope of its work, as V.I. He came in excitement from 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 for a moment that, perhaps, in addition to eliminating illiteracy, one could somehow step over it by this method of addressing 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 right idea that doesn't work out, pound it, chew it, repeat it, and talk about it twenty times so that it's driven like a nail. 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; it is said that Lenin is rude in his style, but this rudeness does not lead to his thought being indistinct. 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 work, for example, pamphlets about the state (illnesses of leftism or pamphlets on the turn towards NEP), is familiar to everyone. These are such brochures, after which you experience some kind of internal aesthetic excitement: such clarity, simplicity and purity of thought in them. It turns out that this is not due to any conventional polemical methods, not due to figurative 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 social pedagogical power lies in the journalism of V. I. Lenin. From this point of view, the vast 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. V.I. never gave a speech for any other purpose than to teach. 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 whether V.I. was a great orator, then you can answer: "Of course, he was." We have many great speakers. I consider Lev Davydovich Trotsky the greatest master of the oral word who lives in Europe, but still they were not heard in the same way as they were heard by V. I. Lenin. 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 state his thoughts with extraordinary simplicity and, if they were not understood, repeat them several times. Therefore, his gestures were hammering in, and his methods were didactic, which boiled down to making an impression that was undeniable, thoughtful, obvious and clear. V. I. 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 liked 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 V. I. as a theoretician and teacher. If V.I. were only a teacher, then he would be immense even then. Meanwhile, I do not want to say for a single minute that the special topic that I have chosen is dominant among others: Ilyich as an organizer, public figure, practical revolutionary - even more exciting topics, which I will not talk about, there is still a lot about him and often I will have to speak, and I want at least this speech of mine, dedicated to the memory of Ilyich, to return once again to the general charm of his personality.

This is a great misfortune that we have lost Ilyich, and if it did not stun us, did not plunge us into the greatest despondency, then because fate somehow prepared us for this, diverting V. I. from direct work, from direct communication with us for long months. But what a great happiness it was to breathe the same air and work together with such a person!

In general, 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 the life of mankind 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 V.I., 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. And it is strange: when a novelist in a novel or a dramatic work wants to create a positive type, it always turns out to be boring, and strained, and artificial, but negative types are interesting, and the author tries to put some tasteless zest into the positive type in order to give it more life. If you ask whether there were negative traits in V.I., 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 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. And now he is still the most alive in the enormous love that he inspires in himself, in the enormous influence that he spreads around him. What is alive is what is a source of strength, what is alive is what changes the environment around it, and in this respect V.I. among very large representatives of mankind. And great happiness in these bitter hours to remember how in the same room, at the same table, at the same common cause, I happened to sit with this amazing person who could inspire a pessimist and misanthrope with the thought of an error in his judgments, and those who want and can love mankind, gives the best argument for this. Worth working for humanity! worth living! hopefully! not even because Ilyich taught us this as a leader, but because he lived as a person whom it is impossible not to love and whom it is impossible not to be proud of. If there are still people who did not know him enough, or who knew him from afar and did not experience his charms, then it is necessary that everyone, as soon as possible, in these mournful days and weeks, take a closer look at this amazing, wonderful phenomenon. 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. Lenin was its inspirer, spokesman, its personification, its leader, and if he died physically, then morally and politically he lives in our party and the Russian revolution, he lives for fruitful immortality, for such immortality, which, expanding, will embrace the world and will contribute to to that unprecedented and bright upheaval with which V.I. was completely filled, and, perhaps, his unusual beauty was explained precisely by the fact that he, with such complete, indivisibility, lived the dream of this upheaval and real work in order to achieve victory.
January 24, 1924

Lunacharsky A.V.