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

create such beauty while living in this vile hell. And now you mustn’t stroke anyone’s head – you might get your hand bitten off.’ 9 We have to assume that what drove Lenin on to do what he did was a burning humanitarianism, akin to the love of the saints for God, for he had none of the customary blemishes of the politically ambitious: no vanity, no self-consciousness, no obvious relish for the exercise of authority. But his humanitarianism was a very abstract passion. It embraced humanity in general but he seems to have had little love for, or even interest in, humanity in particular. He saw the people with whom he dealt, his comrades, not as individuals but as receptacles for his ideas. On that basis, and on no other, they were judged. So he had no hierarchy of friendships; no friendships in fact, merely ideological alliances. He judged men not by their moral qualities but by their views, or rather the degree to which they accepted his. He bore no grudges. A man like Trotsky, whom he fought bitterly in the years before the Great War, and with whom he exchanged the vilest insults, was welcomed back with bland cordiality once he accepted Lenin’s viewpoint. Equally, no colleague, however close, could bank the smallest capital in Lenin’s heart.
    Lenin was the first of a new species: the professional organizer of totalitarian politics. It never seems to have occurred to him, from early adolescence onwards, that any other kind of human activity wasworth doing. Like an anchorite, he turned his back on the ordinary world. He rejected with scorn his mother’s suggestion that he should go into farming. For a few weeks he functioned as a lawyer and hated it. After that he never had any other kind of job or occupation, for his journalism was purely a function of his political life. And his politics were hieratic, not demotic. Lenin surrounded himself with official publications, and works of history and economics. He made no effort to inform himself directly of the views and conditions of the masses. The notion of canvassing an electorate on their doorsteps was anathema to him: ‘unscientific’. He never visited a factory or set foot on a farm. He had no interest in the way in which wealth was created. He was never to be seen in the working-class quarters of any town in which he resided. His entire life was spent among the members of his own sub-class, the bourgeois intelligentsia, which he saw as a uniquely privileged priesthood, endowed with a special gnosis and chosen by History for a decisive role. Socialism, he wrote quoting Karl Kautsky, was the product of ‘profound scientific knowledge …. The vehicle of [this] science is not the proletariat but the bourgeois intelligentsia: contemporary socialism was born in the heads of individual members of this class.’ 10
    Individual members – or one individual member? In practice it was the latter. In the twenty years before his Revolution, Lenin created his own faction within the Social Democrats, the Bolsheviks, split it off from the Mensheviks, or minority, and then made himself absolute master of it. This process, the will to power in action, is well documented by his more critical comrades. Plekhanov, the real creator of Russian Marxism, through whose Iskra organization Lenin first came to prominence, accused him of ‘fostering a sectarian spirit of exclusiveness’. He was ‘confusing the dictatorship of the proletariat with dictatorship over the proletariat’ and seeking to create ‘Bonapartism if not absolute monarchy in the old pre-revolutionary style’. 11 Vera Zasulich said that, soon after Lenin joined Iskra , it changed from a friendly family into a personal dictatorship. Lenin’s idea of the party, she wrote, was Louis xiv’s idea of the state – moi! 12 The same year, 1904, Trotsky called Lenin a Robespierre and a terrorist dictator seeking to turn the party leadership into a committee of public safety. Lenin’s methods, he wrote in his pamphlet