Lenin Disputed - Lars T Lih

Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 108-174
brill.nl/hima
Lenin Disputed
Lars T. Lih
Montreal, Quebec
larslih@yahoo.ca
Abstract
Critical discussion of Lenin's What Is to Be Done? is hindered by a series of historical myths. Issues
such as the following need to be studied more empirically and more critically: Did the attitudes
of early readers of WITBD? reflect Lenin's alleged `worry about workers'? Did the events of 1905
cause Lenin to renounce his earlier views about the workers and about party-organisation, giving
rise to disputes with Bolshevik activists? Did either Lenin or Trotsky ever rethink and reject the
ideological positions that Karl Kautsky defended before World-War I? These and related issues
are addressed with close attention to source-material.
Keywords
Lenin, Bolshevism, Trotsky, Kautsky, Menshevism
The principal aim of Lenin Rediscovered was to allow and encourage people
to shift their attention away from a relatively narrow set of passages from What
Is to Be Done? towards a much broader range of historical data. People have
been focusing so intently, and for so long, on what I term the `scandalous
passages' that my aim of shifting attention could not possibly succeed unless I
provided a great deal of historical data. This necessity is the cause of the book's
immoderate length. One central aim of my book is negative and polemical,
namely, to challenge the textbook-interpretation of Lenin's `worry about
workers' in all its varieties. But, once the blinders imposed by the textbook-
interpretation have been removed, what do we see? I would stress four themes
that emerge from the material presented in the book.
The first is the vast influence of what I call `Erfurtianism' on Russian Social
Democracy and on Lenin personally. Erfurtianism was a complex but coherent
outlook that combined the world-historical narrative set out in the writings of
Marx and Engels, an idealised model of the German Social-Democratic Party,
and an ideological self-definition set out to greatest effect in the writings of
(c) Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010

DOI: 10.1163/156920610X533315

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109
Karl Kautsky. As often in such cases, outsiders such as the Russian Social
Democrats were the most purs et durs Erfurtians of all.
The party-model inherent in Erfurtianism was summed up by Kautsky's
merger-formula: `Social Democracy is the merger of socialism and the worker-
movement'. Behind this ideological formula lies the scenario of the inspired
and inspiring leader. To use an image found in both Kautsky and Lenin, the
Social Democrat preached the `good news' of socialism in the confident
expectation that the workers would respond. The spread of socialist awareness
was seen as so powerful that the workers were assigned the role of leader (or
`hegemon') of the people as a whole.
For the Russians, acceptance of this party-model implied a whole political
strategy: `Let us build a party as much like the German SPD as possible under
the autocracy so that we can overthrow the tsar and build a party even more
like the SPD.' This Erfurtian strategy had an enormous impact on many levels.
It led to the creation of an underground of a new type. It gave Russian Social
Democracy its most urgent goal, right up to 1917: to overthrow the tsar
and introduce the political freedom needed for the full SPD-model. Finally,
it explains many developments even after the party emerged from the
underground - among others, the vast propaganda and agitational campaigns
undertaken by the new Soviet state.
The original Erfurtian party-model grew up in countries with relative-
political freedom. The second main theme of my book is the way the Russian
underground grew up as the result of an empirical search for ways to apply
the Erfurtian model under repressive underground-conditions - a search
undertaken by a whole generation of anonymous Russian Social-Democratic
praktiki. The innovative set of institutions that was built up step-by-step
starting in the early 1890s was an underground of a new type. The old Russian
underground aimed at a successful conspiracy [zagovor] in lieu of a mass-
movement that was deemed impossible. The new underground aimed at
creating as much of a mass-party as was possible under tsarist absolutism. This
kind of underground required a culture of konspiratsiia, which can be defined
as `the fine art of not getting arrested'. The two types of `conspiracy' - zagovor
and konspiratsiia - implied two vastly different types of underground.
This Erfurtian underground (no longer an oxymoron) also required
a functional equivalent of the full-time party-workers that constituted
the backbone of European Social Democracy. Lenin christened this type
the `revolutionary by trade [revoliutsioner po professii or professionalnyi
revoliutsioner]'. The name and the type caught on with all factions of the

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Russian underground. Neither konspiratsiia nor `revolutionary by trade' was a
distinctive feature of Bolshevism.
WITBD? did not set forth a new and innovative party-model, but, rather,
presented an idealised version of the empirical creation of the praktiki. In
1905, when the fervent Bolshevik M.G. Tskhakaia described his reaction to
reading WITBD?, he stressed that he had found nothing earth-shaking or
requiring special attention. Nevertheless, he was highly pleased that `a decade
of the practical experience [praktika] of Russian Social Democracy had not
gone to waste. It had found a worthy expression of itself on organisational,
tactical and overall party-issues - an expression that summed up all of Russian
practical experience'.1
A third theme of my book is the insistence that the proper way to grasp
Lenin's individual outlook is not to become obsessed about abstract generalities
concerning `spontaneity' and `consciousness', but, rather, to examine Lenin's
concrete views about the actions of the Russian working class during the years
1895 to 1905. When these views become the centre of attention, Lenin's
romantic optimism about the working class becomes glaringly obvious. Lenin
wrote WITBD? at a time when the revolutionary temperature in Russia was
rising rapidly and the upsurge in worker-militancy was noted by all observers.
Furthermore, in the various disputes within Russian revolutionary circles,
Lenin is always on the side with the most optimistic assumptions about
the revolutionary fervour of the workers, the organisational potential of the
Russian underground, the willingness of other classes to follow the lead of the
workers, and so on. Why did Lenin strive for an organised, centralised,
efficiently-structured party that was staffed with people who knew their
business? Because he had given up on the masses and was looking for a
substitute? Just the opposite: Lenin wanted all these things because he thought
he saw the masses on the move.
Finally, I argue that Lenin understood his own basic outlook and remained
loyal to it. Anyone who thinks this assertion is anodyne and uncontroversial
will change their mind once they have read my critics. It is an article of faith
for many on the Left and on the Right that Lenin was fundamentally opposed
to basic features of what I call Erfurtianism - and, if Lenin himself insisted on
the opposite, he was mistaken. Many people also believe that Lenin continually
`bent the stick' from one extreme to the other, leading to various breakthroughs
to a fundamentally new vision of things - if not in 1902, when he published
WITBD?, then during the revolution of 1905 or after the outbreak of war
in 1914. And, if Lenin insisted that he was the one who remained loyal to the
1. Tretii s"ezd RSDRP: Protokoly 1959, p. 340.

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old orthodoxy and his opponents were the renegades - well, once again, he
was mistaken.
The standard textbook-interpretation of WITBD? puts Lenin's alleged worry
about workers at the centre of things. When I wrote Lenin Rediscovered,
I thought of the textbook-interpretation as a global approach to WITBD?,
Lenin and Bolshevism. WITBD? showed worry about workers, which meant
that Lenin was worried about workers throughout his career, which meant
Bolshevism as a whole was worried about workers. Although my study focused
sharply on WITBD?, the ultimate target was the worry-about-workers approach
to Lenin and Bolshevism generally.
One thing I learned from my critics was that the textbook-interpretation
comes in an extensive range of partial applications. Robert Mayer, for example,
accepts a worry-about-workers approach both regarding WITBD? and
regarding Lenin generally. According to Mayer, Lenin thought that any worker
who disagreed with him must have lost his proletarian soul or never had
it to begin with. This attitude finds expression in WITBD? 's controversial
formulations. Where Mayer differs from the mainstream is his insistence
that WITBD? is not the most important or influential expression of Lenin's
worries. A more revealing clue to Lenin's feelings is his use of the word
razvrashchenie [corruption or perversion], which showed that he felt that the
outlook of most workers had been corrupted, and that they were therefore
useless as revolutionaries. Mayer does no more than tweak the standard
textbook-interpretation.
Ron Suny accepts my argument that Lenin himself did not intend WITBD?
to communicate worry about workers. Yet, for Suny, Lenin's own intentions
are almost irrelevant, since everybody else read WITBD? along the lines of the
textbook-interpretation: Mensheviks, Lenin's Bolshevik-followers and the
Communist Party in power. Thus the standard-scholarly textbook-interpretation
is a perfectly accurate description of the historical impact of WITBD?.
John Molyneux,2 Chris Harman and, to a lesser extent, Paul Le Blanc reject
the textbook-interpretation for Lenin generally, yet mainly accept it for
WITBD? itself. As they see it, Lenin renounced the worry about workers found
in WITBD? only under the impact of unexpected (to him) worker-militancy
in 1905. In their version of events, WITBD?'s avid Bolshevik readers were so
infected with worry about workers that even in 1905 they resisted allowing
workers on local Social-Democratic committees! These writers also duplicate
another feature of the textbook-interpretation: the desire to dig as deep a gulf
as possible between Lenin and other Social Democrats, particular Karl Kautsky.
2. See Molyneux 2006.

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Paul Le Blanc and Alan Shandro are influenced by the textbook-interpretation
in a more subtle way. Though they do not portray Lenin as hand-wringingly
worried about workers, nor as pessimistic about their revolutionary inclinations,
they do present Lenin as centrally concerned about protecting the worker-
outlook from malign influences. Le Blanc emphasises Lenin's views about the
need to educate the workers through long years of hard work, while Shandro
emphasises Lenin's vigilance about combating attempts at bourgeois hegemony
over the workers. In my view, their picture is both accurate and misleading:
accurate, because Lenin really did hold these views; misleading, because it
distorts what is distinctive about Lenin. Not only did Lenin share these views
with other Social Democrats, but Lenin's opponents often insisted on them
with even greater emphasis. Lenin's most characteristic arguments and policies
stemmed, rather, from enthusiasm and exhilaration about the current state of
the Russian and European workers' outlook.
With the partial exception of Ron Suny, none of my critics pay me the
ultimate compliment of having changed their minds. I am praised when I
confirm what the author in question has long believed on the subject. I am
complimented on my industriousness and gently chided for overstating my
originality. I am then put on notice that I have `bent the stick too far' at
precisely the point where I challenge each author's long-held beliefs. Like
Lenin in this respect, I do not see myself as bending the stick too far, but
rather as straightening-out a stick bent out of true alignment by others. My
critics themselves rightly stress the importance of their remaining disagreements
with me. These disagreements all stem from continued loyalty to some aspect
of the textbook-interpretation, which I reject lock, stock and barrel.
I approach these questions as a historian whose only concern is to be true to
the evidence. Reading over my critics, I have come to believe that the greatest
stumbling block to profitable discussion is adamant loyalty to a number of
historical myths. The best use of the space accorded me, therefore, is to
summarise the evidence against these various myths and ask my critics as
firmly as possible to engage with this evidence.3 Each of the following nine
topics is treated in Lenin Rediscovered, but, in all cases, I have added new
evidence, with occasional retraction of some mistakes in my book.
3. In the interests of making the evidence widely available, all Lenin-citations in this essay are
to the English-language Collected Works. Actual quotations have been checked against the
Russian-language texts, as found in Lenin 1958-65a, 1958-65b and 1958-65c.

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I. On translation
There are two ways of approaching the translation of a literary, philosophical
or political classic that originates in a culture with outlooks and assumptions
very different from our own. One is to `make familiar': to make the translation
as painless to read as possible. A translation adopting this strategy strives to
replace strange idioms and turns of speech with local equivalents, even if only
approximate. Such a translation would certainly not retain unfamiliar foreign
words. The other strategy is to `make strange': to embed the work in its own
culture, and emphasise the gap between our automatic assumptions and those
of the author. In such a translation, certain expressions or revealing key-terms
will often be kept in the original language.
There already exist several translations of WITBD? that follow the `making-
familiar' strategy. For a variety of reasons, I chose the path of `making strange'
for my new translation. Robert Mayer is so hostile to the result that he thinks
it cancels out any merits of my commentary, and contests some of my
translation-choices for key-terms. In self-defence, I could cite the words of
Tatyana Shestakov, a reviewer who is a native Russian speaker and who
sympathises with my approach to translation:
Lih does not try to domesticate the source and the target texts, he courageously
leaves foreign elements (in this case Russian words and exclusively Russian
notions of that particular epoch) untouched, but he doesn't leave his reader alone
with them: he explains, contextualizes them and thus makes his reader familiar
with the reality of the Russian historical, social, and political situation in the
beginning of the twentieth century. This model is more characteristic of the
Russian and German schools of translation. . . .
By introducing different options of translation of the same words and
explaining his choices, Lih engages his reader in an active intellectual participation
in the process of discovering the real intentions of Lenin, and the social and
political situation in Russia and in Europe at the beginning of the last century. . . .
Being born in Russia, I have a direct access to the source text and can attest that
Lars T. Lih grasps even the slightest subtleties in the meaning of Russian words as
Lenin uses them. . . .
Usually, in discussing a translated text, scholars argue about how much has
been `lost in translation'. In case of Lars T. Lih and V. Lenin, we can certainly talk
about how much Lenin's work has gained after Lars T. Lih's `interference'. As a
native Russian speaker, who grew up in Moscow being forced to read and reread
Lenin's works in Russian, I can say that in this book Lih has managed not only to
rediscover but also to liven up Lenin's difficult-to-absorb oeuvre. He makes Lenin
sound not only polemical but also surprisingly absorbing.4
4. Shestakov 2005.

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I should note that my translation-choices were made for the specific purpose
of a scholarly translation of WITBD?. I think that `revolutionary by trade' is a
somewhat more accurate translation than `professional revolutionary', but I
often find myself speaking or writing in contexts where it is inconvenient to
explain why, and so I use `professional revolutionary'. I think `spontaneous' is
a misleading translation of stikhinnyi. I prefer `elemental', although there were
reasons (distorted by Mayer), particular to What Is to Be Done?, why `elemental'
could not be used. For this and other reasons, therefore, I kept stikhinost in
Russian. I am confident that anyone who reads all of WITBD? in my translation
will get a good idea of what the word means, even without taking advantage
of my commentary. But, in many other contexts, I cannot expect such devotion
to the issue, and so I use the word `spontaneity' in order to communicate with
my audience.5
According to Mayer, my translation is ugly and grating, not only because I
have a tin-ear, but because I have an ideological agenda:
Lih's translation often transforms Lenin's vigorous prose into a clumsy mess of
ambiguity. In a misguided effort to render Lenin's scandalous passages less scandalous,
Lih substitutes constructions that are vague and ungainly. . . . Lih has purged the
poetry in order to protect Lenin from criticism.
Here, I think, we see the reason why Mayer reacts so violently to my translation-
strategy. He has his own definite interpretation of the book's scandalous
passages, and my translation evidently weakens its plausibility. Let us compare
the standard translation and my translation of one such passage. I choose this
particular passage because Alan Shandro strengthens his critique of my book
by citing it in the older translation (without noting the fact or explaining why
he rejects my rendering).
Standard translation:
Hence, our task, the task of Social Democracy, is to combat spontaneity, to divert
the working-class movement from this spontaneous, trade-unionist striving to
come under the wing of the bourgeois, and to bring it under the wing of
revolutionary Social Democracy.
5. Mayer also argues that `One way to determine what [stikhinost] means is to ask how Lenin's
Russian readers in 1902 understood what he was saying. But Lih does not want to do this
because many who read Lenin's pamphlet thought he meant something like "spontaneity".' In
other words, I avoid looking at reader-reactions to WITBD? in order to suppress inconvenient
evidence. A glance at my Index under `What Is to Be Done?, reactions by', however, reveals entries
for An (Zhordania), Gorev, Krupskaya, Lenin, Luxemburg, Martynov, Miliukov, Nadezhdin,
Olminskii, Parvus, Plekhanov, Potresov, Radchenko, Stalin, Trotsky, Tskhakaia, Valentinov, and
Vorovskii.

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My translation:
Therefore our task - the task of Social Democracy - consists of a struggle with
stikhinost, consists in causing the worker movement to stray away from this
stikhiinyi striving of tred-iunionizm toward accepting the leadership of the
bourgeoisie and in causing the worker movement to go toward accepting the
leadership of revolutionary Social Democracy.6
My translation is undoubtedly more ungainly, and reads less smoothly. In my
view, these defects are amply compensated by a greater accuracy that enables
the serious student of Lenin to avoid common misreadings.
* The Russian word rendered by `to combat' is borba, the word ordinarily
used to render `struggle', as in `class-struggle'.
* `Combat spontaneity' is often read in the manner of Bertrand Wolfe, for
whom Lenin was the self-proclaimed enemy of `spontaneity, the natural
liberty of men and classes to be themselves'.7 By retaining the idiosyncratic
Russian word stikhinost - with its connotations of primitiveness, uncontrolled
impulsiveness, lack of organisation and purposeless violence - I make it less
paradoxical that all Russian Social Democrats wanted to overcome the
initial stikhinost of the Russian worker-movement. Indeed, as noted in
Section IV, the Mensheviks were probably more wary of stikhinost than were
the Bolsheviks.
* I substituted `cause to stray' for `divert', because `cause to stray' is closer to
the Russian idiom here invoked (straying from the path of righteousness).
Furthermore, this rendering allows me to bring out the significant parallelism
Lenin establishes between getting the worker-movement to move away
[otvlech] from tred-iunionizm and getting it to move towards [privlech] Social
Democracy.
* `Spontaneous, trade-unionist striving' is simply inaccurate, since it says that
the workers are striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie. Lenin
does not say `trade-unionist striving', but `the striving of tred-iunionizm'.
Tred-iunionizm is an ideology, whose alien nature was signalled to the
Russian-reader by its ostentatiously English origin (which is one reason I
have merely transcribed it back from Russian). Lenin is therefore saying
that tred-iunionizm, a bourgeois ideology that rejects the need for a Social-
Democratic party, has a stikhiinyi striving to seduce the worker-movement.
Social Democracy must struggle against it.
6. Lih 2006, p. 711 (see pp. 658-67 for discussion).
7. Wolfe 1984, p. 30.

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* I translated the literal expression `under the wing' according to the meaning
of the idiom. I make no great claims for this decision, but I think it adds
clarity.8
In order to really understand what is going on in this passage, the reader also
has to know that Lenin has sarcastically borrowed the term `divert/cause to
stray' from the people he is attacking. In fact, the key-term stikhinost is so
prominent in WITBD? only because it was used in a polemical attack on
Lenin's faction that was published a few days before Lenin sat down to write
his book. Lenin's cut-and-thrust polemical style creates problems for a
translation. Lenin's original reader may have enjoyed his polemical sarcasm,
but, by the time the joke is explained to the modern reader, the humour is
inevitably lost.
Mayer further castigates me for losing the `poetry' of WITBD?, that is, the
rousing eloquence that inspired many of its earliest readers. In my opinion,
WITBD? 's poetry simply does not reside in Lenin's crabbed polemical
formulae, effective as they were in their way.9 Typical of Lenin's whole approach
to politics is a combination of obsessive polemics and inspiring vision. The
polemics are usually front and centre, while the inspiring parts of Lenin's
writings are harder to find. Lenin's enthusiastic vision of the workers leading
the anti-tsarist revolution is all over his writings, but it is almost never set out
systematically - it just pops out here and there, often in the final paragraph or
two of an article.
A scrupulously accurate translation can also convey the effect of these more
inspirational passages. When Lenin really becomes eloquent, he does not need
the specialised jargon, often borrowed from the very people he is attacking,
that he uses when refuting detailed arguments. This following passage from
WITBD? invites the local activist to see herself as part of a vast crusade against
tsarism. Lenin speaks directly, without resorting to the polemical vocabulary
over which Mayer and I clash:
If we genuinely succeed in getting all or a significant majority of local committees,
local groups and circles actively to take up the common work, we would in short
order be able to have a weekly newspaper, regularly distributed in tens of
thousands of copies throughout Russia. This newspaper would be a small part of
a huge bellows that blows up each flame of class struggle and popular indignation
into a common fire. Around this task - in and of itself a very small and even
8. For the reasoning behind my somewhat unidiomatic `worker movement', see Lih 2006,
pp. 68-70.
9. As shown in Section V, many Bolsheviks declared their admiration for Lenin's book despite
the clumsiness of some of these formulae.

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innocent one but one that is a regular and in the full meaning of the word common
task - an army of experienced fighters would systematically be recruited and
trained. Among the ladders and scaffolding of this common organisational
construction would soon rise up Social-Democratic Zheliabovs from among our
revolutionaries, Russian Bebels from our workers, who would be pushed forward
and then take their place at the head of a mobilised army and would raise up the
whole people to settle accounts with the shame and curse of Russia.
That is what we must dream about!10
II. Perverting the worker-outlook
According to Robert Mayer, the controversial formulation in WITBD? about
`from without' is indeed an expression of Lenin's `worry about workers', but
Lenin quickly realised this formulation was impolitic and dropped it. No real
flip-flop in Lenin's outlook was involved, however, because his worry about
workers is revealed in another series of texts starting in 1899.11 The essential
clue hidden in these texts is the word razvrashchenie, variously translated as
`corruption', `perversion', or `leading astray' (my translation). Thus, the
textbook-interpretation is correct about Lenin's outlook and mistaken only in
seeing WITBD? as the classical formulation of it.
Mayer says that I have overlooked this evidence. I can assure him that I read
his provocative article with great interest, weighed his arguments with care,
and examined all the Lenin texts he cited to back up his case. In the first draft
of Lenin Rediscovered, I included a ten-page section explaining why Mayer's
own evidence led me to reject his conclusions. This section hit the cutting-
room floor in a last-minute drive to make my book less of a `behemoth' (as
Mayer describes it).
The excised section explained at length why I adopted the translation
`leading astray'. The definition of razvrashchenie found in Dal's nineteenth-
century dictionary, plus the usage of the word in texts of the time, convinced
me that the word did not have exclusively sexual connotations, but also
referred to false doctrine.12 I searched for a translation that, as I put it,
`preserved the overtones of vice without overemphasising it'.
10. Lih 2006, p. 828. (Zheliabov was a leader of Narodnaya volya, the organisation that
assassinated Tsar Aleksandr II. August Bebel was the worker who became the leader of the
German Social-Democratic Party.)
11. I was therefore mistaken in labeling Mayer's interpretation `double flip-flop' (Lih 2006,
p. 24).
12. In a book published in America in 1919, the following conversation between Lenin and
Raymond Robins is recorded. Lenin says, `The American government is corrupt.' Robins
responds, `You cannot call the American government a bought government.' Lenin explains:
`I should not have used the word corrupt. I do not mean that your government is corrupt

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