Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties by Paul Johnson Page A

wife, Krupskaya, hardly speaking a word. 3
    The grim lack of humanity with which Lenin returned to Russia to do his revolutionary work was characteristic of this single-minded man. Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov was born in 1870 at Simbirsk on the Volga, the son of an inspector of primary schools. When he was sixteen, his elder brother Alexander was hanged for conspiring to blow up the Tsar with a bomb which he had made himself. His supposed reaction to his brother’s death, ‘We shall never get there by that road’, is probably apocryphal, since he did not in fact become a Marxist (which meant disavowing terrorism) until later, after he had been forced out of Kazan University for ‘revolutionary activities’. His sister Anna said he was ‘hardened’ by his brother’s execution. 4 Certainly politics now obsessed him, then and for ever, and his approach was always cerebral rather than emotional. His contemporaries refer to his ‘unsociability’, his ‘excessive reserve’ and his ‘distant manner’. Aged twenty-two, he dissuaded friends from collecting money for the victims of a famine, on the grounds that hunger ‘performs a progressive function’ and would ‘cause the peasants to reflect on the fundamental facts of capitalist society’. 5 Within a year or two he had acquired a double-bottomed suitcase for importing seditious books, and its discovery earned him a three-year sentence in Siberia. The few days before his exile he spent in the Moscow Library, scrabbling for facts and statistics with which to hammer home his theories. In Siberia he married Krupskaya, another subversive.
    Men who carry through political revolutions seem to be of two main types, the clerical and the romantic. Lenin (he adopted the pen-name in 1901) was from the first category. Both his parents were Christians. Religion was important to him, in the sense that he hated it. Unlike Marx, who despised it and treated it as marginal, Lenin saw it as a powerful and ubiquitous enemy. He made clear in many writings (his letter to Gorky of 13 January 1913 is a striking example) that he had an intense personal dislike for anything religious. ‘There can be nothing more abominable’, he wrote, ‘than religion.’ From the start, the state he created set up and maintains to this day an enormous academic propaganda machine against religion. 6 He was not just anti-clerical like Stalin, who disliked priests because they were corrupt. On the contrary, Lenin had no realfeelings about corrupt priests, because they were easily beaten. The men he really feared and hated, and later persecuted, were the saints. The purer the religion, the more dangerous. A devoted cleric, he argued, is far more influential than an egotistical and immoral one. The clergy most in need of suppression were not those committed to the defence of exploitation but those who expressed their solidarity with the proletariat and the peasants. It was as though he recognized in the true man of God the same zeal and spirit which animated himself, and wished to expropriate it and enlist it in his own cause. 7 No man personifies better the replacement of the religious impulse by the will to power. In an earlier age he would surely have been a religious leader. With his extraordinary passion for force, he might have figured in Mohammed’s legions. He was even closer perhaps to Jean Calvin, with his belief in organizational structure, his ability to create one and then dominate it utterly, his puritanism, his passionate self-righteousness, and above all his intolerance.
    Krupskaya testifies to his asceticism, and tells us how he gave up all the things he cared for, skating, reading Latin, chess, even music, to concentrate solely on his political work. 8 A comrade remarked, ‘He is the only one of us who lives revolution twenty-four hours a day.’ He told Gorky he refused to listen to music often because ‘it makes you want to say stupid, nice things and stroke the heads of people who could