LENIN: COMMUNISM'S CHARTER MYTH

THE scene was symbolic and significant: Soviet leaders gathering solemnly, even reverently last week in Ulyanovsk (formerly Simbirsk), where, 100 years ago, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was born on April 22. They had excellent reason to be reverent and grateful, for their formidable aggregate of power still derives from Lenin's genius and from his achievements as the true architect of Communism. Thus they will invoke his name to legitimize their rule, and adroitly select from his speeches and writings to justify the existing social order. They will cite Lenin to sanctify Russia's quarrel with China, its invasion of Czechoslovakia and its imperious nuclear stance. Outside Russia, wherever there are Communists, men will also congregate in obeisance to the memory of a man who changed the world beyond recognition. Far more than Marx, Lenin is almost the only symbol shared by the world Communist movement, fragmented as it is today by national, ideological and tactical differences.

"Lenin Lives!" is an incantation that has been ritualistically repeated in Russia since his death in 1924; during this centennial year, the official worship of the Lenin cult has approached religious delirium. The Russian penchant for excesses aside, the existence of such a mystique should hardly surprise the West. Every nation requires what sociologists term a charter myth, meaning a founding father and a founding ideology. In the Soviet Union, the need for a charter myth has been particularly insistent. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 attempted to destroy every traditional institution--political, religious and economic--that had held Russia together since the 15th century. From its inception, moreover, the Soviet system has demanded terrible sacrifices of its people that had to be justified in the name of Lenin's ideals. While Stalin ruled by mass police terror, the extraordinary achievement of the Soviet people in industrializing and defending their nation could only be fully explained as an act of faith.

The Remote Invocation

Only Lenin offers a thread of continuity and legitimacy of rule for Russia's present, apparently divided leadership. Virtually all of Lenin's closest Bolshevik comrades--Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev--were dishonored and murdered by Stalin. For 40 years, from Lenin's death in 1924 through Khrushchev's ouster in 1964, every Russian leader was irreversibly disgraced by his successors. Such an interruption in legitimate succession demands a fresh reinforcement of the link between the present leaders and the founding father.

Besides, it seems to be a law of Communist history that the more remote from Leninism the Soviet system becomes, the greater is the effort made to invoke him. Thus the less that Russian leaders are interested in fomenting world revolution and the less that they are concerned with creating a Communist society as Lenin saw it, the greater the volume of Leninist rhetoric. Lenin's real remoteness is underscored by the problems with which a great power must struggle in an age of computer technology. Just as Lenin discovered that there was little in Marx to tell him how to rule Russia once he had seized power, so there is little in Lenin to tell Brezhnev how to build an ABM system.

The Lenin myth portrays him as the master theoretician of Communist revolutions. In fact, not one successful 20th century revolution--not even the Russian--followed the pattern that Lenin advocated. As he saw it, small bands of professional revolutionaries would inspire the masses and lead them in forcibly overthrowing established regimes. This was his hope as he waited in self-imposed exile in Western Europe around the turn of the century. There, amid endless quarrels with rival Socialist exiles, he created his own cadre of disciples who expected revolutions to break out in Europe and then spread throughout the world. Lenin's journal Iskra (The Spark), was printed abroad and smuggled into Russia. "Out of this spark," grandly proclaimed the first issue, "will come a conflagration."

As the years passed and the spark failed to light any major fires, he grew discouraged. Six weeks before the February 1917 revolution, which would depose Czar Nicholas II, Lenin, then 46, told a group of young Socialists in Zurich: "We old people will probably not live to see the decisive battles of the coming revolution." Less than a year later, he was established as the heir of the Romanovs.

The February revolution, Russia's only spontaneous popular uprising, created a constitutional government that Lenin despised. He viewed it as "giving power to the bourgeoisie, because of the proletariat's insufficient awareness and organization." In his immediate shock over the revolution, he even described it as a plot by France and England to prevent Russia from signing a peace treaty with Germany. Lenin may have been unprepared for this momentous turning point, but he had the political genius to capitalize on it. He persuaded the Bolsheviks--a band of perhaps 20,000 disciplined revolutionaries in a population of 150 million--to destroy the ineffectual provisional government of Socialist Revolutionary Alexander Kerensky, which was giving Russia its only democratic moment in history.

As Lenin put it, the Bolshevik seizure of power during the ten world-shaking days of October 1917 was "as easy as lifting a feather." Lenin and his ideas did not arouse the masses to overthrow an exploiting regime, as his early scenario had called for. Instead, he simply but effectively thrust himself into the vacuum of power that had been created by the disintegration of the Russian state and society. In the name of building socialism, he overthrew the "bourgeois" liberties that Russia had barely begun to enjoy, convinced that he knew what was best for the people. "The will of a class is sometimes fulfilled by a dictator," he explained in 1918. "Soviet socialist democracy is not in the least incompatible with individual rule and dictatorship."

Lenin did not start the revolution, but he knew how to harness its spontaneous, anarchic forces and to establish his authority by sheer organization. "Our fighting method is organization," Lenin proclaimed. "We must organize everything." When he had attained power, he evolved a network of interlocking organizations--trade unions, youth groups, administrative hierarchies, control commissions, agitation and propaganda centers--with the party as its nucleus. Before anyone else in history, he recognized the limitless potential of political and social engineering to reach into every aspect of a people's life and transform it. The durability and power of the Soviet regime testify to Lenin's essential genius as the theoretician of political organization.

Lenin applied his theories in the name of Karl Marx but, as Harvard's Samuel P. Huntington observes, "Lenin was not a disciple of Marx, rather Marx was a precursor of Lenin." Marx had not the faintest notion of what practical strategy and tactics could achieve his revolutionary goals. In many ways, Lenin revised--some would say subverted--the teachings of his proclaimed mentor. Marx predicted that the revolution would be possible only in industrially advanced nations, as the inevitable culmination of capitalist development. Lenin demonstrated that a successful Socialist revolution could take place in a backward, predominantly peasant country--thereby turning Communism into a practical program that could be applied to the underdeveloped world rather than to Europe alone. The economics of Marxism are hopelessly antiquated today, and its appeal as a secular religion is surpassed by that of nationalism. That Marxism continues to survive as a movement is a tribute to Lenin, who transformed a social theory into a plan of political action.

Instrument of Tyranny

Lenin always considered the coercive system he built as a temporary necessity. It is, of course, true that Lenin's ultimate goal was the liberation of humanity, and the creation of an egalitarian Utopia when the state, as envisioned by Marx, had withered away. Yet it was under Lenin that the CHEKA was created--the brutal, terrorizing model for all later Soviet secret-police systems. Many former capitalists were sent to forced labor camps or summarily shot. It was Lenin who started the campaign of harassment against well-to-do peasants, which escalated into open warfare when thousands of detachments of Bolsheviks forcibly requisitioned grain and other products. It was Lenin who, after the 1920 Bolshevik victory in the civil war, turned his full attention to building the gigantic machinery of rule that served as the instrument of Russia's new autocracy and, ultimately, of Stalin's tyranny.

In 1923, after a stroke effectively removed him from power, he seems to have grown horrified by much of what he had wrought. From his sick room he railed against the strangulating Soviet bureaucracy and denounced the "Russian chauvinism" that he saw crushing the rights of national minorities. In his testament, which has never been published in Russia, he wrote that Stalin "concentrated boundless power in his hands, and I am not certain he can always use this power with sufficient caution." In a final postscript to his will, he vainly pleaded that Stalin be removed as general secretary of the party.

Inexorably, the question arises of Lenin's responsibility for the horrors of the Stalin era. Probably the essential difference between the two leaders was that Lenin considered coercion as a temporary weapon in Socialism's struggle against its enemies, while Stalin applied it as a method of everyday rule. Yet the fact remains that Lenin created the instrument of power that allowed Stalin to do as he did, and he formulated the principle that ultimately made all of his successor's crimes possible: "Our morality is completely subordinated to the class struggle." Here is the 20th century extension of Ivan Karamazov's doctrine that "if there is no God, everything is permitted." Indeed, Stalin was to Lenin what Smerdyakov was to Ivan, the murderer who made his half brother's deadly aphorism come true.

As all the factions of the world Communist movement join the Russians in celebrating Lenin's birthday, the Lenin who emerges in centennial rhetoric varies sharply in Peking, Rome, Belgrade and Moscow. In China, they cite the Lenin who denounced Czarist Russian expansionism in the Far East, who stressed the threat to revolutionary purity in the unbridled development of bureaucracy, and who believed in the inevitability of world revolution. In Rome, it is the Lenin who stood for every nation's right to self-determination, who observed that when you scratch a Russian Communist, you will find a Russian chauvinist, and who said that Western Communists would do a better job of building Communism than the Russians. In his own country, he is the Lenin who said, "Communism equals Soviet power plus electrification," who thought Russia's main duty to international Communism was to transform itself into a mighty industrial society, and who was profoundly intolerant of any dissent from party policy.

All these Lenins and more are genuine. No other modern leader has combined in one person so many different and often contradictory views and impulses. Yet it is impossible to believe that all who call upon his varying ideas would meet with Lenin's approval. Although something of a campus radical at the University of Kazan, he would no doubt excoriate the passionate bomb throwers of America's S.D.S. and other extremist groups as dangerous amateurs, afflicted with the "infantile disease of leftism." Almost certainly, he would be highly suspicious of Tito's reliance on a market economy and private farming, bewildered by Castro's wild-eyed barbudos, and appalled by Che's adventuristic forays in Latin America. Although he took a certain satisfaction in being revered as the Marx of the 20th century, Lenin was a man of personal modesty; he might well consider the cult of Chairman Mao a trifle excessive. He would be contemptuous of the intellectual poverty of his successors in the Kremlin, and despise their grossly simplistic reiterations of his ideas. Their chauvinism and anti-Semitism would enrage him. The expansion of Communist systems to more than one-third of the globe would please him; the quarrels between Communist countries, verging on armed conflict, would shatter his dream that the victory of revolution would bring peace among nations.

A Many-Faced Lenin

History, as Adam Ulam of Harvard observes, may have vindicated Lenin's tactics, but it has also repudiated his hopes. History has also affected his contemporary relevance. If his criticisms of bourgeois society retain a certain validity for many, his remedies have proved worse than the ills they are intended to cure. Beyond that, the viability of Lenin's thought has been affected by social changes he did not, indeed could not, account for. Like many another Marxist, he grossly underrated the productive vitality and capacity for change in what he considered a moribund capitalist world. Lenin also did not have to confront today's youth. There is a fine irony in the fact that in many nations the revolutionary party he helped create is regarded as reactionary by the anti-Establishment young--witness the ferocious diatribes against French Communism by students involved in the May 1968 revolt. The newest revolutionary impulse is not economic or political but romantic and sensual (at its mildest) or anarchic (at its harshest). The young rebels oppose material progress and the very principle of organization--including Communist organization.

Lenin's heirs in Russia do not face this kind of opposition as yet. Nonetheless they are also caught by the contradictory force of middle-class consumer appetites for a better, wider life and by the insistent demands of the creative and scientific intelligentsia for greater freedoms. It is more than likely that both the Western and Communist nations have entered a new historical period. If Soviet leaders choose to react to it by being flexible and granting greater freedoms, they will be able to find chapter and verse in Lenin to justify their course. If they react to it--as seems far more likely--by further repression, that too will be ratified by the appropriate citations from the charter myth. Lenin's ultimate impact on his country will be decided by lesser men, whose only superiority over him is that they are alive in 1970.

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