More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
‘One need not be a prophet to foretell that the present order of things will have to disappear.’
‘The true realm of freedom’, in Marx’s words: ‘the development of human powers as an end in itself’.
He is a man easily mythologised, idolised, demonised. To his enemies he is a cold, mass-murdering monster; to his worshippers, a godlike genius; to his comrades and friends, a shy, quick-laughing lover of children and cats.
Throughout his life, opponents and friends will excoriate him for the brutality of his takedowns, his flint and ruthlessness. All agree that his is a prodigious force of will. To an extent unusual even among that ilk who live and die for politics, Lenin’s blood and marrow are nothing else.
There is, as Plekhanov puts it, not yet enough proletarian yeast in Russia’s peasant dough to make a socialist cake.
They have come up against a conundrum of left catechism: how does a movement go about being socialist in an unripe country with a weak and marginal capitalism, a vast and ‘backward’ peasantry, and a monarchy that has not had the decency to undergo its bourgeois revolution?
The socialist movement in the empire is always multi-ethnic, disproportionately comprising those of minority groups and nations.
Uttering the word ‘intelligentsia’, he makes the same disgusted face as when he says ‘syphilis’.
Minority in Russian is menshinstvo, majority bolshinstvo. From these words the two great wings of Russian Marxism take their names: Martov’s Mensheviks and Lenin’s Bolsheviks.
But to the workers’ petition calling for the men’s reinstatement he adds demands for a wage increase, improved sanitation, an eight-hour day. Radicals to his left add further calls, resonating far beyond sectional interests: for the freedom of assembly and of the press, the separation of church and state, an end to the Russo-Japanese War, a Constituent Assembly.
Opposition like this could easily be placated. But these authorities are cruel as well as stupid. Thousands of troops are lined up and expectant on the ice.
When the carnage comes to an end, as many as 1,500 people lie dead in the drifts. This is Bloody Sunday.
The impact is incalculable. It unleashes a sea change in popular attitudes. That evening, Gapon, his world view shattered, ‘red hot’, Krupskaya will recall, ‘from the breath of the revolution’, fulminates to a crowd of survivors: ‘We have no Tsar!’
