Lenin and the Making of the Soviet State

Front matter

Lenin and the Making of the Soviet State A Brief History with Documents

Jeffrey Brooks and George Chernyavskiy

THE BEDFORD SERIES IN HISTORY AND CULTURE

Foreword

The Bedford Series in History and Culture is designed so that readers can study the past as historians do.

The historian’s first task is finding the evidence. Documents, letters, memoirs, interviews, pictures, movies, novels, or poems can provide facts and clues. Then the historian questions and compares the sources. There is more to do than in a courtroom, for hearsay evidence is welcome, and the historian is usually looking for answers beyond act and motive. Different views of an event may be as important as a single verdict. How a story is told may yield as much information as what it says.

Along the way the historian seeks help from other historians and perhaps from specialists in other disciplines. Finally, it is time to write, to decide on an interpretation and how to arrange the evidence for readers.

Each book in this series contains an important historical document or group of documents, each document a witness from the past and open to interpretation in different ways. The documents are combined with some element of historical narrative—an introduction or a biographical essay, for example—that provides students with an analysis of the primary source material and important background information about the world in which it was produced.

Each book in the series focuses on a specific topic within a specific historical period. Each provides a basis for lively thought and discussion about several aspects of the topic and the historian’s role. Each is short enough (and inexpensive enough) to be a reasonable one-week assignment in a college course. Whether as classroom or personal reading, each book in the series provides firsthand experience of the challenge— and fun—of discovering, recreating, and interpreting the past.

Lynn Hunt

Preface

V. I. Lenin is one of the few modern political leaders who changed the course of history and helped bring something unique into the world. Like Mussolini and Hitler, Lenin invented a new political system, established new forms of economic relations, and set in place a new social order. Nazism and Italian fascism perished in World War II, but Lenin’s Soviet Union lived on, inspiring like-minded leaders elsewhere to create what amounted to one-party states, especially in the third world and among former colonies. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Leninist-type governments still ruled China, Vietnam, North Korea, and Cuba, as well as parts of Africa and the Middle East.

As the founder of the Soviet state and a key player in the development of its policies, Lenin shaped Russian history. The Soviet Union was the fulfillment of Lenin’s vision, but it was also the outgrowth of a particular historical situation and of the struggles between his supporters and his opponents. This text seeks to document Lenin’s ideas, his plans for Russia, and the policies he instituted by allowing Lenin to reveal himself through his own words. Our selection of documents is designed to provide readers with a better understanding of Lenin’s role in the Soviet state’s development.

This book should prove helpful to students of world history, European and Russian history, political science, and international relations. The introductory essay describes Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and provides an overview of Lenin’s life, allowing students to follow Lenin’s evolution from an angry dissident student to an adept political organizer and theoretician. The introduction concludes with a discussion of Lenin’s last years that raises the question of whether the ailing leader actually tried to shape the country’s future and pick his successor or simply wallowed in indecision, unable to imagine ceding control of the country to any of his colleagues.

vi PREFACE

Part Two of the text is divided into four chapters that focus on the formation of Lenin’s main ideas and their practical fulfillment during the Russian Revolution, the ensuing Civil War, popular unrest and the development of the New Economic Policy, and Lenin’s conflicts with Bolshevik Party leaders over the direction of the party during his protracted final illness. The documents include key theoretical works as well as appeals to the populace and party activists, such as his “Open Letter to the Delegates of the All-Russian Congress of Peasants’ Deputies” from May 1917 (Document 9) and his “Speech to Propagandists on Their Way to the Provinces” from February 1918 (Document 17). A selection of pragmatic statements and secret policy directives reveals a ruthless, authoritarian side of Lenin that he did not wish to make public. To show how he secretly shaped policy, we include his pronouncement on the “Organization of Food Detachments” from June 1918 (Document 35), which set in motion the forcible seizure of peasants’ surpluses, as well as his recently revealed “strictly secret” letter to Molotov for members of the Central Committee detailing his plans for a campaign against the Orthodox Church in March 1922 (Document 54).

Each chapter begins with a brief introduction. The documents are accompanied by headnotes and explanatory gloss notes. At the end of the text, additional pedagogical elements include a chronology of Lenin’s life, a set of questions for consideration and further discussion, and a bibliographical guide to further readings. Photographs of Lenin and his inner circle are provided in the text’s introduction.

A NOTE ABOUT THE TEXT

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of Soviet archives have made it possible to document Lenin’s role in the inner workings of the Bolshevik dictatorship more fully than was possible in the past. Among the fine collections of documents that have been translated into English are The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive, edited by Richard Pipes (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), and Lenin’s Will: Falsified and Forbidden. From the Secret Archives of the Former Soviet Union by Yuri Buranov (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1994). We thank the authors and publishers of these volumes for permission to include selected documents from these works.

We have used the Library of Congress system of transliteration of Russian names, but have kept the accepted English usage of familiar

PREFACE vii names such as that of Trotsky. Until February 1918, Russians used the Julian calendar, which was 12 days behind the Gregorian calendar in the nineteenth century and 13 days behind the Gregorian in the twentieth century. As a result, the February Revolution actually took place in March according to contemporary dating. New-style dates are given in parentheses when appropriate.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are particularly grateful to Melissa Mashburn, our developmental editor. We also warmly thank Mary Dougherty, executive editor; Jane Knetzger, director of development; and Shannon Hunt, associate editor at Bedford/St. Martin’s, and Nancy Benjamin at Books By Design. We are also grateful to our reviewers. They include Dmitry Shlapentokh, Indiana University-South Bend; John Bushnell, Northwestern University; Kenneth Moss, The Johns Hopkins University; Peter Kenez, University of California, Santa Cruz; John Thomas Sanders, United States Naval Academy; Elizabeth Jane Dennison, University of Alaska- Anchorage; Steven G. Marks, Clemson University; and a reviewer who wished to remain anonymous, whom we also thank. Their comments were to the point and helped focus and improve the text. Any shortcomings that remain, however, are the responsibility of the authors alone. Finally, Jeff Brooks thanks his wife, Karen, and Georgiy Chernyavskiy thanks his dear friend, Larisa Dubova.

Jeffrey Brooks Georgiy Chernyavskiy

Contents

Foreword iii

Preface y

PART ONE Introduction: V. I. Lenin’s Life and Legacy

V. I. Lenin and the Founding of the Soviet State The Russia of Lenin’s Youth

Lenin as Revolutionary

World War I and the Russian Revolution Bolshevik Rule and the New Soviet State

War Communism: Ideology or Pragmatism?

Lenin’s Last Active Years: The New Economic Policy and Other Innovations

Lenin’s Decline Lenin’s Legacy

PART TWO The Documents Lenin as a Theorist of Revolution

1. From The Urgent Tasks of Our Movement, December

D.

CONTENTS

. From What Is to Be Done? 1902 . From The Party Organization and Party Literature,

November 1905

. From Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism,

1916 From The State and Revolution, 1917

The Path to the Bolsheviks’ Seizure of Power

From The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution (April Theses), April 1917

. From Speech in Favor of the Resolution on the War,

. From Resolution on the National Question, May 1917 . From An Open Letter to the Delegates of the All-Russian

Congress of Peasants’ Deputies, May 7 (29), 1917

. From The Political Situation, July 10 (23), 1917 . From The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat

It, September 10-14 (September 23-27), 1917

. From One of the Fundamental Questions of the

Revolution, September 27 (October 10), 1917

Toward One-Party Power

From To Workers, Soldiers, and Peasants! October 25 (November 7), 1917

From Resolution of the Central Committee of the RSDLP(B) on the Opposition within the Central Committee, November 2 (15), 1917

Decree on the Arrest of the Leaders of the Civil War against the Revolution, November 28 (December 11), 1917

From Draft Decree on the Dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, January 6 (19), 1918

From Speech to Propagandists on Their Way to the Provinces, February 5, 1918

44 45 ol 92

53 56 of og

61 62

CONTENTS

Interview Granted to an \zvestia Correspondent in Connection with the Left Socialist-Revolutionary Revolt, July 8, 1918

The Bolshevik Terror and the Stigmatization of Public Enemies

19. Draft Resolution on Freedom of the Press, November 4 20.

21. 22. 23.

(17), 1917

Letter to G. I. Blagonravov and V. D. Bonch-Bruevich, December 8 (21), 1917

Telegram to V. L. Pantushkin, June 15, 1918 Letter to G. E. Zinoviev, June 26, 1918

From Report of the Council of People’s Commissars on the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets, July 5, 1918

Telegram to the Penza Gubernia Executive Committee of the Soviets, August 19, 1918

From Letter to Maxim Gorky, September 15, 1919

Problems of War and World Revolution

29. 30.

The Socialist Fatherland Is in Danger! February 21, 1918

V. I. Lenin and others, From Resolution on War and Peace, March 8, 1918

From Letter to the Workers and Peasants apropos of the Victory over Kolchak, August 24, 1919

From Letter to American Workers, August 20, 1918

From Speech at the Opening Session of the Congress, March 2, 1919

From “Left-Wing” Communism —an Infantile Disorder, April-May 1920

From Report on the International Situation and the Fundamental Tasks of the Communist International to the Second Congress of Comintern, July 19, 1920

From Political Report to the Ninth All-Russian Conference of the RCP(B), September 20, 1920

83 86

CONTENTS

War Communism and the Invention of a Command Economy 94.

34. From The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government, March-April 1918 (published in Pravda on April 28,

1918) 94 35. From Organization of Food Detachments, June 27, 1918 97

36. From Speech to the First All-Russian Congress of Land Departments, Poor Peasants’ Committees, and Communes, December 11, 1918 99

37. From Political Report of the Central Committee to the Eighth All-Russian Conference of the RCP(B),

December 2, 1919 101 . Threats to the Revolution: The Development of the New Economic Policy 103 Disputes and Opposition in the Party, 1920-1921 104 38. From The Party Crisis, January 21 (February 3), 1921 104

39. Summary of Lenin’s Remarks at the Conference of the Delegates to the Tenth Congress of the RCP(B) —

Supporters of the Platform of Ten, March 13, 1921 106 40. From Preliminary Draft Resolution of the Tenth

Congress of the RCP on Party Unity, March 1921 108 Anti-Bolshevik Popular Uprisings and the Shift in Policy 111

41. From Report on the Political Work of the Central Committee of the RCP(B) on Tenth Congress of the

RCP(B), March 8, 1921 112 42. Rough Draft of Theses Concerning the Peasants,

February 8, 1921 114 Lenin’s Objective in the New Economic Policy 115

43. From Report on the Substitution of a Tax in Kind for the Surplus Grain Appropriation System, March 15, 1921 115

CONTENTS Xxiii

44. Draft Resolution on the Question of the New Economic Policy for the Tenth Conference of the RCP(B), May 1921 119

45. V. I. Lenin and V. M. Molotov, Telegram to All Provincial and Regional Party Committees of the RCP(B), July 30, 1921 123

46. From The Political Report of the Central Committee of the RCP(B) to the Eleventh Congress of the RCP(B), March 27, 1922 125

Economic Policy under the NEP 129

47. From Five Years of the Russian Revolution and the Prospects of the World Revolution: Report to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International,

November 13, 1922 129 48. Letter to Maxim Gorky, December 6, 1921 134 The Institutionalization of a One-Party System 135 49. From We Have Paid Too Much, April 9, 1922 135 50. Letter to I. V. Stalin, July 17, 1922 139 Toward a Single Spiritual and Cultural System 141 51. Letter to A. V. Lunacharsky, May 6, 1921 142 52. Letter to V. M. Molotov for the Politburo of the CC of

53. From The Tasks of the Youth Leagues, October 2, 1920 144 54. From Letter to V. M. Molotov for the Members of the

CC of RCP(B), March 19, 1922 146 The Sick Leader: De Facto Removal from Power 150 55. Letter to Stalin for Politburo of RCP(B) CC,

June 15, 1922 151 56. From Letter to the Congress: Continuation of the

Notes, December 24, 1922 152 57. Letter to I. V. Stalin, March 5, 1923 155 Lenin’s Last Thoughts 156

58. From On Co-operation, January 4 and 6, 1923 157

Xiv CONTENTS

59. From The Question of Nationalities or “Autonomization,” December 30, 1922 159

APPENDIXES A Chronology of V. I. Lenin’s Life (1870-1924) 162 Questions for Consideration 165 Selected Bibliography 166

Part One

Introduction: V. I. Lenin’s Life and Legacy

V. I. Lenin was born under a divine-right monarchy and died the leader of the world’s first one-party state. He grew up in a rapidly expanding market economy and left behind an economic system in which the state was chief owner and employer. At the time of his death, Russia’s recovery from World War I, the Russian Civil War, and the extreme economic policies Lenin initially instituted was incomplete. Yet power and authority had shifted decisively from wealthy elites to party officials in the new Soviet Republic. For some, Lenin’s Russia embodied the promise of a new world that would be more just and prosperous than the liberal capitalist democracies were. For others, his rule signified a disastrous aberration in Russian and European history. However it is interpreted, Lenin’s impact on the twentieth century is beyond dispute.

V. I. LENIN AND THE FOUNDING OF THE SOVIET STATE

Lenin founded the Soviet state in October 1917 (November, new style)’ and shaped its political processes. He was the first among the leading Bolsheviks to imagine its existence and the chief proponent of its creation. During five years of rule, he helped set its course and became its most vibrant and lasting human symbol. The system that he helped to construct later spread to Eastern and Central Europe, China, Indochina, North Korea, and Cuba. In addition, much of the developing world adopted forms of his one-party rule and statemanaged economic life. In its heyday, the Soviet Union challenged America both militarily and technologically. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, communism still shapes the memory of more than half the world’s population, many of whom still live in modified forms of Soviet-type political systems.

During his years in power, Lenin wielded near absolute influence over the Bolshevik inner circle. While Lenin lived, the Bolsheviks lauded him as a secular saint who set the country and the world on the path to socialism. After he died on January 21, 1924, his col leagues mummified him and exhibited his body under glass in a special mausoleum in Moscow, much to the horror of his wife and other members of his family. Afterward, his cult ran in the background of daily Soviet life, imposing meaning on the country’s historical experience. Even the fall of Russian communism in 1991 failed to dislodge Lenin as a potent symbol of Russian pride.

Our objective in this book is to illuminate, on the basis of his own writings, Lenin’s role as the initiator and architect of the Soviet system. These texts tell an important story. Lenin lived at a time when radio and film were in their infancy, and therefore the printed word had its maximum impact. Printed speeches, telegrams, letters, newspapers, and books were the primary means of communication. When Lenin wanted something done, he usually gave written instructions. Thus he left historians with a long paper trail that could be examined and used to explain how he gained and wielded the power to transform Russia and shape world history.

Soviet editions of Lenin’s writings illustrate both his personal role in the development of Bolshevism and the country’s sociopolitical evolution under his active leadership, which lasted until his first serious stroke in May of 1922. The editors of his Collected Works, including the final, fifth Soviet edition (The Complete Collected Works), selectively excluded more than 3,500 known documents and condensed and “corrected” included texts.” Selections of Lenin’s writings, instructions, and orders published recently from hitherto secret archives provide an opportunity to amplify his official image and construct a more objective picture of the man and of the varied projects he sought to realize.

Lenin and his followers as a rule subordinated ideology to other concerns. In order to justify their abrupt abandonment of one course for another, they sometimes invoked Marx’s dialectical notion that a clash of opposites yields a new synthesis. This does not mean that ideology meant nothing to Lenin, but only that his words cannot usually be understood apart from his actions. Therefore, we have chosen the following selections with Lenin’s practical activity in mind. Readers of this book can consider whether Lenin discarded ideology when it suited him in the pursuit of power or merely showed the flexibility of a successful policymaker working within an ideological framework.

Lenin was something of a chameleon, and the documents offer a variegated picture of him as a theorist, a revolutionary, a state leader, and, finally, an invalid, shunted aside by his would-be successors. In some selections, he appears at his most persuasive, simplifying the tasks to be undertaken, justifying his actions with appeals to social justice, and promising to overcome all obstacles with a heady optimism. Such performances illuminate the influence he had over rank-and-file activists as well as over his colleagues, many of whom were powerful personalities and political figures with followings of their own. In other selections, Lenin speaks as a tough, authoritarian boss, forcing his will on his followers and dealing mercilessly with opponents and “class enemies.” Exploring the text, readers can judge for themselves how ideological or personal Lenin’s quest for power was, how popular or authoritarian his leadership was, how nationalistic or internationalist his ideology was, and how his vision of Russia’s historical development unfolded.

THE RUSSIA OF LENIN’S YOUTH

Lenin grew up in a rebellious era. He was born Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov on April 10, 1870 (April 22, new style), in Simbirsk, a Volga port later renamed Ulyanovsk that became a site of pilgrimage for faithful communists after Lenin’s death. Lenin was the third of six children (see Figure 1). His father was a school inspector, a post of considerable local prestige. Among educated professionals such as Lenin’s father, the memory of Russia’s humiliating defeat by Britain and France in the Crimean War (1853-1856) would have been painfully sharp. After the war, Tsar Alexander II (1818-1881), who reigned from 1855 to 1881, carried out the Great Reforms to address shortcomings revealed by the war. He abolished serfdom in 1861, freeing over twenty million peasants, who were near slaves, from the arbitrary personal, legal, and administrative power of their aristocratic, clerical, or royal owners. He created a judicial system with trial by jury and elective local and regional governmental institutions to provide schooling and other services. He instituted fiscal reform, a liberalization of censorship, and measures to improve and expand education at all levels and for all classes. The last of the Great Reforms, the Universal Military Service Statute of 1874, established a draft applicable to all males, although those with the least education served on active duty the longest (six years), while those with the most education served the least (six months).

The Great Reforms did not eliminate Russia’s discriminatory ladder of hereditary class privilege: the social order of legal estates that set nobles, merchants, priests, and even lower-class city residents above peasants in law, education, and economic life. In an age of democratic reform, these inequalities lost whatever justification they had previously enjoyed. Nevertheless, they remained in place as a source of resentment for the vast majority of the population. In addition, the tsar retained his autocratic power as the source of national legislation and font of judicial authority, responsible only to God.

Despite considerable economic growth during the late nineteenth century, the Russian Empire lagged ever further behind Britain, France, and Germany. In 1870, the year of Lenin’s birth, Russia’s per capita gross domestic product ($1,023 per head in 1990 U.S. dollars) was 48 percent of Western Europe’s; by 1900 it was only 39 percent ($1,218 per head); and by 1913 still no more than 40 percent ($1,488). Russia also trailed Eastern Europe, though it outpaced Asia, much of Latin America, and Africa, where economic growth was stagnant. Furthermore, Russia’s limited wealth was unevenly distributed geographically and in terms of nationality. The nation’s borders extended to the Ottoman Empire (the future Turkey) and Afghanistan in the south; to China and the Pacific Ocean in the east; to the Arctic Ocean in the north; and to Germany, Austro-Hungary, and Romania in the west and southwest. European Russia, the region west of the Ural Mountains (including Poland and the Baltic nations) was generally more developed, while Central Asia and some other non-Russian regions remained almost untouched by economic development. Large parts of Russia, particularly European Russia, were becoming industrialized, so that by 1913 agriculture contributed just over half of the national income in the Empire.‘ In fact, the urban population of European Russia more than tripled between 1863 and 1913, and large cities grew at

Figure 1. Lenin's Family Portrait, 1879

Lenin is on the far right; Lenin’s sister Maria, who took dictation for Lenin in his last years, is seated on the knee of Lenin’s mother, with Alexander, the brother executed as a terrorist, standing in the back between his parents. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-64899.

even greater rates. Moscow’s population rose from 462,000 in 1863 to 1,762,000 in 1914, while St. Petersburg’s population increased from 470,000 to 2,118,000 during the same period. To radicals such as Lenin, the ostentatious displays of new bourgeois wealth in these great cities must have made the ordinary people’s grinding poverty seem all the more unjust and irrational.

Meanwhile, the spread of education created a public likely to view the tsarist social order critically. The number of pupils in primary and secondary schools increased more than tenfold, from 955,000 in 1860 to 9,656,000 in 1914, and the number of students in higher educational institutions increased almost fifteenfold, from 8,500 in 1860 to 127,000 in 1913.° By 1914, more than 20 percent of those receiving a higher education were of peasant origins, up from a mere 3 percent in 1880.’ Overall literacy remained generally low, but that too was changing. According to the 1897 census, 29 percent of men and 13 percent of women in the Empire were literate. This was roughly on a par with backward Spain in 1860 (30 percent male literacy and 20 percent female literacy).* Nevertheless, literacy among the young, particularly men, and among the urban population was rising rapidly. Literacy among army recruits rose from 19 percent in 1870 to 68 percent in 1913.° By 1910, more than three-quarters of the population of St. Petersburg, Russia’s capital, was literate, as was more than two-thirds of Moscow’s.’® As a result, there was no shortage of volunteers to read simple political broadsides and newspapers aloud to others.

While historians still argue about whether prerevolutionary Russia would have failed economically if the Bolsheviks had not seized power, Russia faced grave political and economic challenges." A portion of the educated elite opposed the autocracy even before the Great Reforms, and afterward their dissatisfaction that the liberated peasants were not given more land, outrage at widespread social injustice, and unfavorable comparisons with Western Europe fueled further dissent. In the 1870s, the autocracy’s intellectual critics became known collectively as the intelligentsia, a word that entered the English language and came to refer to a coterie of highly educated, critically minded elites. In Lenin’s youth, the intelligentsia was composed chiefly of two groups. One was the liberals, who dreamed of a Russian parliamentary democracy like that of England and worked for change in the new institutions of local government. The other was the populists, who sought an egalitarian society based on Russia’s traditional peasant communes, the village councils of heads of households that periodically divided the farmland according to the number of working

INTRODUCTION T males in a household. The members of underground revolutionary organizations, the most radical among the populists, employed various means, including violence, to try to overthrow the autocracy or at least compel the tsar to carry out agrarian reform. In 1881, radical populists trying to force the government to accede to their demands assassinated Tsar Alexander II. In response, the tsar’s son, Alexander IIT (1845-1894), who reigned from 1881 to 1894, rejected reform almost entirely. Some activists continued the struggle, including Lenin’s older brother Alexander, who was hanged in 1887 for trying to assassinate the tsar.

The year his brother was arrested and executed, Lenin won a gold medal in his final exams at the gymnasium, an educational institution similar to the American high school, although pupils were younger when they entered. In August 1887, at the age of 17, Lenin began to study law at the University of Kazan, but was arrested for joining a radical group and expelled. Unable to continue his studies, he read his brother’s books and studied Marxism, a revolutionary ideology and economic theory developed by German social theorists Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895). At the time, Marxism was an ideology with adherents worldwide, including the members of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), which in the 1890 national election received 1,472,000 votes. The SPD was reformist, not revolutionary, but its prestige was high after the party survived German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s attempt to crush it in 1878. To the young Lenin and other Russian Marxists, European Marxism meant the SPD.

In 1891, Lenin was at last allowed to take the law examinations at St. Petersburg University. He passed and began work as an attorney in Samara, a scenic port town of Russians and Tatars on the Volga River. The beginning of Lenin’s law career also marked the beginning of his revolutionary career.

LENIN AS REVOLUTIONARY

When Lenin took up politics, revolutionary activity was largely an avocation. He and others, however, gradually turned this avocation into a profession, a career open to talent. Active, ambitious young Russians chose revolutionary work over other occupations as a wager on the future. They sought power in part because, like Lenin, they felt they knew what to do with it. Early Russian Marxists imagined an industrial future for Russia led by the proletariat, or working class, and were encouraged by the signs of industrialization and urbanization that they saw around them. Populism and Marxism, despite their inherent utopianism, were virtual opposites. Populists valued morally committed individuals as agents of change. Populists preferred social reform to political reform. Marxists claimed a science of historical development with social classes rather than individuals as actors in the movement for political reform. Notably, Marxists disavowed terrorism. Most, including Lenin, stressed the need for state power. Populists wished to spare Russia the ills of capitalist industrialization. Although opposed to capitalism itself, Marxists welcomed capitalist industrialization as the fourth of Marx’s five socioeconomic stages of development (primitive, slave-holding, feudal, capitalist, and communist) and thus a necessary step in the development of a communist society. Lenin and his fellow Marxists believed a proletarian revolution would usher in the final phase of human development, a classless communist society.

Eventually, Lenin diverged from Marx and Engels with respect to the stages of history. Marx and Engels argued that every society had to go through a feudal and then a bourgeois (capitalist) stage to reach proletarian rule: Lenin wanted Russia to advance more rapidly. Although the proletariat constituted only a tiny minority of the population, Lenin hoped to use the state to realize the promise of proletarian revolution. At first, Lenin expected backward Russia to be rescued by revolutions in more advanced countries (Documents 29-32). When these revolutions did not materialize, he was eager to create a socialist society in Russia alone (Document 34). He assumed the proletarian revolution would replace inequity and suffering with plentitude and social justice. Lenin presumably sought power for these ends, but he also seems to have sought power as an end in itself.

How did this provincial upstart gain sway over Russian Marxism? He did so gradually, but with a single-minded determination to advance his cause. Lenin began organizing workers in the early 1890s, while writing antipopulist pamphlets and working with Marxist organizations. He was arrested in December 1895 and exiled to the Krasnoiarsk region, in western Siberia. Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaia (1869-1939), a comrade in local Marxist organizing in St. Petersburg, gained permission from the government to join Lenin as his fiancée. They soon married as required under the agreement that permitted her to join a political exile. Krupskaia supported Lenin as a skilled and loyal helpmate throughout his life (Figure 2).

"9

The, "Oey

Figure 2. Lenin and Krupskaia in the Garden at Gorki (undated, probably 1922)

This private country estate, which was named Gorki in the nineteenth century long before the writer Maxim Gorky adopted his pseudonym, was nationalized in 1918 and turned into a museum (“Lenin’s Gorki”) in 1938. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-73312.