The Dilemmas of Lenin. Tariq Ali
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it happened. A bomb was thrown under his iron-clad carriage to stop it. Several Circassians of the escort were wounded. Rysakoff, who flung the bomb, was arrested on the spot. Then, although the coachman of the Tsar earnestly advised the monarch not to get out, saying that he could still drive him in the slightly damaged carriage, Alexander insisted upon alighting. He felt that his military dignity required him to see the wounded Circassians, to condole with them as he had done with the wounded during the Turkish war, when a mad storming of Plevna, doomed to end in a terrible disaster, was made on the day of his fête. He approached Rysakoff and asked him something; and as he passed close by another young man, Grinevetsky, threw a bomb between himself and Alexander II, knowing full well that both of them would be killed. They both survived but only for a few hours.
Alexander II lay upon the snow, bleeding profusely, abandoned by every one of his followers. All had fled. It was cadets, returning from the parade, who lifted the suffering Tsar from the snow and put him in a sledge, covering his shivering body with a cadet mantle and his bare head with a cadet cap. And it was one of the terrorists, Emelianoff, with a bomb wrapped in a paper under his arm and risking arrest and hanging, forgetting for these moments who he was, who rushed with the cadets to the help of the wounded man. The entire operation had been masterminded by Sofia Perovskaya, who had given the signal for the attack.
Thus ended the tragedy of Alexander II’s life. People could not understand how it was possible that a Tsar who had done so much for Russia should have met such a death at the hands of revolutionists. ‘To me’, wrote an intimate, ‘who had the chance of witnessing the first reactionary steps of Alexander II, and his gradual deterioration, who had caught a glimpse of his complex personality, – that of a born autocrat whose violence was but partially mitigated by education, of a man possessed of military gallantry, but devoid of the courage of the statesman, of a man of strong passions and weak will, – it seemed that the tragedy developed with the unavoidable fatality of one of Shakespeare’s dramas. Its last act was already written for me on the day when I heard him address us, the promoted officers, on June 13, 1862, immediately after he had ordered the first executions in Poland.’7
Nechaev lived on till December 1882. His behaviour in prison was exemplary, as attested to by many contemporaries who saw him at close quarters in the fortress. The short stories, memoirs and political pamphlets that he wrote disappeared. General Potapov, the head of the tsarist secret police, realising how useful this prisoner might be in dismantling the terror networks, visited him in his cell after the tsar’s assassination and offered financial rewards and other inducements if Nechaev agreed to become an informer. The enchained prisoner rose to his feet, steadied himself, and used the entire weight of one arm to strike Potapov across the face, drawing much blood. Both his hands and feet were chained and he began to rot. Literally. Within two years Nechaev was dead. He was thirty-five years old.
Nineteenth-century Russian literature is rich in depictions of nihilists, terrorists, revolutionaries. As in life, so in fiction: a single character usually encompassed all three. In Dostoevsky, they were treated severely. Russian novelists did not shy away from politics. They regarded themselves and were seen by their readers as public intellectuals. The 1861 reform heightened the tempo. In the following year, Turgenev wrote Fathers and Sons. The distillation of politics into art transpired without any fuss and with tremendous effect. The novel depicts a generational conflict between liberalism and nihilism. The central character, Bazarov, marked a break for Turgenev. Till now his women had been strong and the men slightly pathetic, weak and self-centred (as in some of Pushkin’s work). Turgenev identified himself and a majority of his peers as Hamlets, incapable of action, which was reflected in his work. Bazarov is a partial exception. He displays a sense of character and is a strong man, but even he, endlessly subjected to the patronizing and smug conceit of his father, is not allowed to triumph. No victory for the brave. Resigned to his fate, he dies passively, much to the anger of Turgenev’s younger readers. By contrast, Ivan Goncharov’s masterpiece, Oblomov, is the self-portrait of an entire social stratum and pitiless in its depiction. Lenin loved this novel. The average Russian nobleman is lazy, indolent, empty-headed and beyond redemption. The novel’s success was celebrated by the entry of a new word into the Russian lexicon: oblomovism, used by liberals, anarcho-Populists and Marxists alike. In The Precipice (1869), Goncharov pillories a nihilist (a word invented by Turgenev as a virtual synonym for a radical student) without restraint. There is not the least trace of sympathy.
The emergence of a social-realist school of writers and critics was partially a response to these liberal writers and largely an attempt to connect with the growing movement of the razochyny. The two most prominent representatives of this increasingly radical wing of the intelligentsia were the essayist, historian and novelist N. G. Chernyshevsky and the fierce literary critic Nikolay Dobrolyubov. Both were sons of respected priests, both recorded happy childhoods; even as they rejected religion and the Orthodox Church in favour of science and materialism, they retained an affection for the moral atmosphere that had prevailed in their respective homes. It was the fierce honesty of their fathers that appealed to them. They loathed hypocrisy on every level: social, political, sexual. And their stinging prose left its mark. On one occasion, Turgenev accosted Chernyshevsky simply to inform him: ‘You are a snake, but Dobrolyubov is a rattlesnake.’
Chernyshevsky’s utopian novel What Is to Be Done? was written in the Peter and Paul Fortress, where he had been incarcerated because of his political beliefs. The hero is a dedicated and ascetic revolutionary (who could not be more different to Bazarov in Fathers and Sons, or the real-life Nechaev) who sacrifices all for the cause. Even his name, Rakhmetov, was chosen with care. He descends from a thirteenth-century Tatar family of the high nobility; the novelist paints a four-page pen portrait of the origins and history of the family. He took for granted that his readers were only too aware that many Tatars (who had by then turned Muslim) had fought under Pugachev against the tsar. A forebear had married a Russian woman, a common occurrence, and the resulting dynasty had retained many positions within the state apparatus. The fictional Rakhmetov’s fictional grandfather had accompanied Alexander I to Tilsit. Given Chernyshevsky’s deep knowledge of Russian history, it’s likely that the character was based on a real person. What we are not told is that the name Rakhmet is of Arab origin, and means ‘mercy’.
While the novel lacked the literary power of Dostoevsky, Turgenev or Tolstoy, it became the bible of the new generation in Russia, the ‘young people’ entering the struggle against the autocracy. It’s difficult to recall a work of fiction that had an analogous impact on political consciousness elsewhere though, half a century ago, an American critic proposed a fascinating comparison.8
The fact that Lenin titled his first major political essay ‘What Is to Be Done?’ is not coincidental. He would have been amazed if a friend had predicted that one day, people would try to read the original in order to better understand its successor. The novel, too, was a call to action and written precisely for that purpose. Judged by its own criteria, it was a huge success. Its sympathetic treatment of women, in particular, was widely noted in a country where patriarchy, little different from contemporary Saudi Arabia, ruled supreme. In contrast to that unfortunate country, however, many women joined secret societies and participated in the acts decided upon by terrorist organisations.9 As we shall see in a later chapter, revolutionary feminists openly acknowledged their debt to the ideas contained in Chernyshevsky’s masterwork, including the role and function of the family and monogamy.
Lenin’s text, first published in 1902, was an attempt to both critique and move beyond the tactical and strategic limitations of prior revolutionary organisations. A break was necessary. The Executive Committee of the People’s Will (Narodnaya Volya) had scored its biggest success on 1 March 1881 by assassinating Alexander II, but also its biggest failure. It had successfully targeted the heart of the regime, but had burnt itself out in the process. The repression was heavy, the hanging chains of Siberia heavier still and though many young suicide terrorists were queuing up to join, the organisation was beginning to disintegrate. Its own leader, Zhelyabov, confessed that ‘we are using up our capital’ and while small groups spontaneously emerged in different parts of the country, they were, in the main, ignored by the radical intelligentsia. The reason was not simply fear (though that played its part) but a feeling that the basic outline of the original programme