lenin and his biographers

Canadian Slavonic Papers

Lenin and His BiographersLenin: A Study of the Unity of His Thought by GEORG LUKACS; Nicholas Jacobs; Lenin bySAUL N. SILVERMAN; Lenin's Path to Power: Bolshevism and the Destiny of Russia byGEORGE KATKOV; HAROLD SHUKMAN; Lenin by M. MORGANReview by: R. C. ELWOODCanadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Winter, 1973), pp.566-570Published by: Canadian Association of SlavistsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40866636 .

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REVIEW ARTICLES

Lenin and His Biographers R. C. ELWOOD

Lenin: A Study of the Unity of His Thought, georg lukacs. Translated by Nicholas Jacobs. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1971. Pp. 104. $1.45 (paper).

Lenin. Edited by saul n. silverman. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice- Hall, 1972. Pp. viii, 213.

Lenin's Path to Power: Bolshevism and the Destiny of Russia. George katkov and Harold SHUKMAN. London: Macdonald, 1971. Pp. 127. £.70 (paper).

Lenin, m. c. Morgan. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1971. Pp. xii, 236. $8.75.

The following short account does not for a moment claim to deal in any way exhaustively with the theory and practice of Lenin. . . . There is not nearly enough material available for such an account of Lenin's life-work. . . . The story of Lenin's life must be set in the historical framework of at least the last thirty to forty years. Let us hope a study worthy of the task is soon available. The author of these introductory remarks is himself deeply aware of how difficult it is to write about individual problems before the totality of which they form part has been clarified - to popularize before what is to be popularized has been established with incon- testable scholarship.

Thus wrote the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukacs in 1924, shortly after Lenin's death. Lukacs' expectation of a definitive biography has not been fulfilled in the subsequent half-century despite the surfeit of Leniniana. During the two decades following his death, most of the biographical attempts were either hagiographical, polemical or demo- nical, depending on the nationality and politics of the writer. It was only in the late 1940's, with the appearance of accounts by David Shub and Bertram Wolfe, that some of the mythology was stripped away and a useful outline of Lenin's life and work achieved. Despite the short- comings of these pioneering works, it took another fifteen years before Western scholars again tackled the problem. In 1964, Robert Payne produced a biography which brushed off and spruced up the earlier



REVIEW ARTICLE 567

accounts of Shub, Wolfe, Krupskaia and Trotskii; Stefan Possany tried to "debunk" the founder of the Soviet state by analyzing questionable material found in various police archives; and Louis Fischer wrote an extensive personal account of Lenin's few years in power while virtually ignoring his long period in revolutionary exile. A year later, Adam Ulam used commendable prose and a sound knowledge of his subject to produce the best reappraisal to date. But with the exception of Possony's book, none of these works were based on extensive original research, none used archival sources in the West or the Soviet Union, and none had really satisfactory documentation. The mass of material a potential biographer had to wade through increased in 1970 when Soviet scholars commemorated the centenary of Lenin's birth with a plethora of printed material, scholarly and otherwise. In the West, Leonard Schapiro and Peter Reddaway, on the one hand, and Bernard Eissenstat on the other produced useful collections of essays addressed to various aspects of Lenin's life and work. All these secondary accounts, plus the valuable memoirs of his political opponents in emigration and the extensive but not exhaustive reprinting of his "collected works" in the Soviet Union, has made the writing of a definitive Lenin biography a very demanding task indeed.

None of the short works presently under review, which represent yet another wave of Lcniniana, has attempted this task. Their authors have instead set themselves more modest objectives and have addressed themselves to more limited audiences. The books by Lukacs and Saul Silverman seem to be aimed at the undergraduate market, particularly in the United States; those by George Katkov, Harold Shukman and Michael Morgan are intended for the layman, especially in Great Britain. None will be of much interest to the Lenin specialist or to the scholar of modern Russian history.

Lukacs' Lenin originally appeared in German during 1924. It was written, as its author acknowledges, "without any special preparation" by a Marxist for other European intellectuals in an effort to explain and to justify Lenin's variation of Marxism, his introduction of the New Economic Policy, and the establishment of the Communist International. As his sub-title implies, Lukacs saw a unity between Lenin's theory and actions based on his realization of the "actuality of revolution." Into this framework he fits Lenin's concept of the roles of the proletariat, the party, and the state and his theory of imperialism. Judged against other works published during the 1920's, Lukacs' book is thoughtful



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and insightful. It is curious that none of Lenin's subsequent biographers mentioned above list this work in their bibliographies. Today, however, it seems somewhat dated and most of its arguments are well-known, even if not identified with Lukacs. Its republication in German in 1967 with a 13-page "Postscript" and its translation into English in 1970 therefore deserve explanation. This perhaps can be found in the fact that the translation was commissioned by New Left Books of London. The "New Left's" interest in revolutionary purity, in the unity of theory and practice, and in ideological disputation all help to explain the renewed interest in these aspects of Lenin as well as in Luxemburg and Lukacs himself, in Mao and Marcuse.

Dr. Silverman's Lenin is also addressed to the current crop of socially conscious and ideologically oriented undergraduates. In his extensive introduction and conclusion, he attempts to relate Lenin and Leninism to contemporary radical currents and to show the relevancy of Lenin's "mode of analysis ... for those who wish to understand not only the past . . . but, in their own way, the present." To prove his point, he follows the format of the "Great Lives Observed" series by providing excerpts from Lenin to show how he "looked at the world," from his contemporaries to see how they "viewed" him, and from four biographers (Ulam, Fischer, Richard Lowenthal and Isaac Deutscher) to judge "Lenin in history". Dr. Silverman has worked hard in selecting his excerpts from Lenin's vast volume of writing and appropriately this section makes up over half of his book. He has chosen his material from Lenin's thoughts on imperialism, revolutionary organization, stra- tegy and tactics, achieving power in 1917, exercising power after 1917, and from his reconsiderations during his final years. These snippets have been judiciously cut and have a surprising degree of unity thanks in part to the editor's prefatory notes. While Lukacs would probably approve of this unity, many readers might question the wisdom of pro- ducing a complete theory of imperialism, for example, by drawing snippets both out of their contexts and also out of different vintages of Lenin. Silverman's contemporary views of Lenin before, during and after his seizure of power, which have all been taken from English- language sources, are well-known to the specialist and largely favour- able to their subject (e.g., Krupskaia, Gorkii, Trotskii, Reed).

The book by Drs. George Katkov and Harold Shukman, both Russian historians at St. Antony's College of Oxford University, is meant for an entirely different audience. It is typical of a genre which the English



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have made their own: an attractively produced essay by eminent scholars writing for popular consumption. The most striking feature of books of this series ("Library of the 20th Century"), and ones like it, is the profusion of unique and colourful illustrations. The reproduction of paintings and posters as well as of archival photographs lends a degree of verisimilitude which should attract readers who otherwise might not have an interest in Russian history. The essay itself is highly readable and historically more accurate than many North American attempts at similar illustrated popularizations. Their account of Lenin's childhood, conversion to Marxism, and rise to prominence in the revolutionary movement is conventional and not unlike Dr. Shukman's earlier Lenin and the Russian Revolution. The picture of Lenin after 1914, however, is different, more controversial, and more hostile than that found in the other books under review. The authors' make much of German assist- ance to the Bolsheviks during the war and of Masonic connections within the Provisional Government. They also raise questions about Lenin's involvement in the assassination of German Ambassador von Mirbach and about when his mental faculties began to be affected by the ailment which ultimately resulted in his premature demise. In many respects, they raise more questions in the latter part of the essay than can possibly be satisfactorily answered in the brief space at their disposal.

Michael Morgan's Lenin is the most ambitious and the least satisfactory of the accounts under review. Like Katkov and Shukman, he is an Englishman attempting to write for a broad rather than an academic audience. Unlike them, however, he has neither a command of the Russian language nor a deep understanding of Russian history. This is evident in his treatment of the revolutionary movement: the Petersburg Soviet was not a "committee" in 1905, all Mensheviks were not liqui- dators, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism was not one of Lenin's "major works," the Prague Conference was not a "congress," the Longjumeau party school did not meet in 1910, etc. Like Messrs. Katkov and Shuk- man, Morgan concentrates on Lenin as a political leader but he fails to mention the problems of German money during the revolution, of Bolshevik planning during the July Days, and of Lenin's whereabouts during October 1917. What we have instead is a brief history of the revolution itself rather than of Lenin's political role in it. While the book is reasonably well-written and objective concerning Lenin, it nevertheless presents a strictly two-dimensional picture: we learn little about Lenin in depth, about the character of the man, his habits, his



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likes and dislikes. It should be added that this is also a feature of the other three books under discussion, but none of these purports to be a biography as such. One can only wonder why the Ohio University Press chose to reprint this work in North America for a supposedly academic audience. Only in its brevity is it an improvement over the multitude of biographies which have appeared in the last quarter-century.

But perhaps brevity is no longer a virtue when dealing with Lenin. Perhaps we have had enough one-volume biographies, photographic essays, popularizations, compendiums of specialized articles, selections from his collected works, etc. Perhaps it is now the job of university presses to encourage would-be biographers to produce a multi-volume study which may well be the only way of truly understanding this multi- facetted, complex, controversial, reserved and historically significant individual. "The time has come," concludes Saul Silverman, "to allow Lenin to come in from the cold" but to do this he needs his Deutscher, his Tucker, his Sandburg, or his Schlesinger.



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