Ingerflom On Lih, Lenin Rediscovered

Review Article
Lenin Rediscovered, or Lenin Redisguised?

Claudio Sergio Nun Ingerflom
Lars T. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? in Context (with a new

translation of Lenins What Is to Be Done?). 867 pp. Leiden: Brill, 2006. ISBN
9004131205. $174.00.
This book is about entire chapters of Russian history. The problems it raises are
subject to academic and political debate. An exhaustive review would be impossible because of its length, yet a short review would be useless. By deciding to
discuss its main theses, I have chosen an intermediate course.
Structure, Thesis, and Objectives of Lenin Rediscovered
According to its author, Lenin Rediscovered [is] the first serious academic study
of Lenins basic outlook based on a wide range of primary sources (both Russian
and German). The book is divided into three parts. The first comprises three
sections: the contents of Erfurtianism (so called after the town where the
Social Democratic Party of Germany [SPD] adopted its new program in 1891);
the ideas of the Russian Social Democrats who opposed Lenin; and the problems associated with What Is to Be Done? (henceforth WITBD). The second is
a detailed commentary on WITBD, and the third and final part offers a new
translation of WITBD. The books central theses are that Lenin was a perfect
Erfurtian, that Marx and the SPD were his only matres penser, and that his
relationship with the Russian revolutionary past was purely emotional.
According to Lenin Rediscovered, it has been impossible for us to understand
WITBD through the textbook interpretationthat is, the one provided by all
Numbers in parentheses refer to page numbers in Lenin Rediscoveredor volume and page numbers in V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed., 55 vols. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe
izdatelstvo politicheskoi literatury, 195865); English translations draw on V. I. Lenin,
Collected Works, 45 vols. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 196475), amended to coincide with
the 5th Russian edition. Quotations from WITBD are taken from the translation in Lenin
Rediscovered.
On Lenin Rediscovered: Remarks by the Author, paper presented at the 2007 Convention of
the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS), New Orleans, 1.
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10, 1 (Winter 2009): 13969.
140 claudio sergio nun ingerflom
or almost all academic historians and politically engaged authors (14). Lenin
Rediscovered rejects all the central propositions of the textbook interpretation
(20). The elements of this rejection are as follows. First, The keynote of Lenins
outlook was not worry but exhilaration about workers;according the textbook
interpretation, by contrast, Lenin claimed that the workers could acquire a socialist consciousness only with the aid of the Social Democratic intelligentsia.
Second, The formulations about spontaneity are not the heart of WITBD.
Third, WITBD did not reject the Western model of a Social-Democratic
party. Fourth, Lenin did not revert to the populist tradition in any way.
Finally, WITBD [did] not advocate hyper-centralism or an elite conspiratorial
party restricted to professional revolutionaries from the intelligentsia.
21st-Century Historians and Early 20th-Century Actors
Starting from the premise that even expert readers have misread [WITBD]
and therefore misunderstood Lenin, Lenin Rediscovered sets out literally [to]
rediscover a Lenin who is close to the complete opposite of the Lenin of the
textbooks (5).
Rediscoverfor the present study is a part of a tradition of WITBD interpretation that stretches back to the time of its publication (28). If academic
research is undertaken today as part of a tradition supposedly founded and
nurtured by participants in the revolutionary movement, can this help affecting the research itself? Does this not jeopardize the distance that must be kept
between the analyst and his object?
Lenin Rediscovered shows the consequences of this basic choice. Sometimes
courageously, it takes sides in the debates of the time. In itself, there is nothing wrong with the empathy shown to some of the protagonists; after all, who
are the historians who can claim, cross their hearts, to harbor no feelings for
the heroes of their stories? Empathy can, however, interfere with interpreting
sources. The account of the conflict among Rosa Luxemburg, the Mensheviks,
and Lenin (2067, 491ff.) is an example: Every page of her attack on Lenin
pounds away on the accusation that Lenin wants an all-powerful Central
Committee to do the thinking for the Party as a whole. She never gives the least
documentation for this description of Lenins views. She does not even mention
WITBD (491). What sorts of debates are we studying here? Debates that the
protagonists intended to be read by future historians who would want to see
the contending parties support their claims with written evidence and proper
I stand with Stalin (32); I am happy to discover that the young Stalin, a reader steeped in
the atmosphere of Russian Social Democracy, automatically read the passage [in WITBD] as I
do, and even happier to report that Lenin particularly praised Stalins article for its treatment of
the vexed question of bringing in awareness from without (658); Mensheviks were in a false
position and could never escape from it, and Lenin was right about one thing (505); I agree
with Bogdanov (523). See also 13435, 224, 317, 348.
lenin rediscovered, or lenin redisguised?
141
citations? Or were these polemics among activists that expressed themselves

in multiple forms, not just the written word? They argued orally, lived in the
underground and in different cities and countries, sometimes without access to
published materials that they knew by other means. Their polemics were not
or not onlyabout what Lenin wrote but also about the concrete decisions that
they lived with every day and about the future of the organization. Nor does
Lenins rejection of Rosa Luxemburgs criticisms prove that these lacked pertinence. (Her description was denied directly by Lenin himself. Once we think
about it, her account is highly implausible [491].) In sum, the activists did not
follow the academic methods that are ours, and neither should our books aim
to become actors in their polemics.
We have to keep our distance from the historical actors. Lenin Rediscovered
objects to the textbook interpretations uncritical reading of Lenins adversaries, but then reads Lenin in the same way: I find it a rather attractive feature
of my own interpretation that it allows Lenin to know his own beliefs and to
maintain a fundamental consistency in his outlook. These two points go together, since Lenin himself often asserted the fundamental continuity of his
views (27). Knowing that he was constantly involved in polemics, must we
accept at face value what Lenin asserted about the continuity of his views?
To the reader who might wonder about this lack of distance from the past, the
author of Lenin Rediscovered responds by setting forth his own unique and distinctive position: Given the previous climate, however, my account will surely
be perceived as pro-Lenin (494).
Could it be that the historians duty is not to reconstruct the contending
arguments but rather to decide, with heavy use of adjectives, who was right in
those polemics? In Lenin Rediscovered, the historian becomes one more actor in
the polemics of the past. Thus, when Lenin challenges his adversaries to prove
that there was anyone else within Russian Social Democracy who argued as
clearly as he did for recruiting workers into the committees, Lenin Rediscovered
Apart from criticizing Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin Rediscovered also points out the Mensheviks
inability to document Lenins views with Lenins own words (522).

A problem arises when scholars uncritically take these partisan sallies as accurate descriptions of Lenins actual outlook (518).

Lenin Rediscovered praises the non-partisan historian (492) and insists on my non-partisan
approach (494) and that My account is intended to be non-partisan (494).

See extravagant praise of Chernyshevsky (377). Rosa Luxemburg denounced an ultracentralist tendency, strict despotic centralism, mechanical submission of the partys militants
to their central authority, [and] zombie-like obedience in the Leninist project, to which Lenin
Rediscovered replies: Do people really believe that Lenin desired and indeed openly advocated
unthinking, zombie-like obedience? We may if we wish, excuse Luxemburgs melodramatic
characterisation as exuberant polemics (527); I feel it my duty as a historian to point out that
it is not a perceptive or prophetic critique but an unscrupulous hatchet job (526) or fantasies
(551). If I had to enter into this debate, I would say that more than lenience toward the CPSU
is required to deny the prophetic nature of Rosa Luxemburgs words.
concludes: Nobody responded to this challenge, which still stands for advocates of the textbook interpretation (533). It is on this relationship with the
actors of the past, and this conception of the historians function, that the narrative of Lenin Rediscovered is built.
How to Rejuvenate the Historiography?
Notwithstanding its repeatedly stated aim of providing a historiographical
alternative, Lenin Rediscovered embraces the same old question to which the
textbook interpretation has tirelessly returned: did Lenin follow the Russian
revolutionary tradition,or was he a Marxist? Although objecting to the textbook interpretations answer to the question, Lenin Rediscovered confines itself
to the very ground chosen by the same interpretation. No doubt the historiography has often been superficial and has distorted Lenin, but how could its
errant ways be limited only to the answers it gives and not have affected the
questions themselves? Lenin Rediscovered follows the textbook interpretation in
conceiving the relationship between the Russian tradition and the SPD as an
irreducible opposition, whereas rejuvenating the historiography and shifting the
debate means changing the questions and asking, for example, about the reason
for the ideological and human complementarity that we see between those currents during the 1880s and 1890s.
Historicity
I believe that Lenin retained the same Erfurtian outlook throughout the
1890sindeed, at least up to 1917 (114).His thought is no longer a research
object: If I were asked to present my interpretation of Lenin as concisely as possible, I would quote Lenins sentence from 1894 and then merely add: this was
his storyand he stuck to it (118). Lenin is deprived of his own history. To accomplish this, Lenin Rediscovered works with a corpus of texts that are selected
in accordance with the books thesis, which means excluding, among others,
the economic writings in which Lenin focuses on the agrarian question and
the nature of Russian capitalism. The theoretical and methodological premises
of Lenin Rediscovered are also to blame. The book conceptualizes the trajectory
Lenin Rediscovered asserts that according to the textbook interpretation, Lenin followed
Narodnaia Volia and Tkachev but not the SPD. Lenin Rediscovered replies that his model was
not Russian; instead, his logic was we must build a party as much like the SPD as possible
(151, 169, 377, 405, 415, 592).

See also fundamental continuity of his views (27); the straight line from 189596 to
WITBD (128); the continuity in his peasant strategy throughout his career (155); and the
manuscript Friends of the People (written in 1894, when Lenin was 24 years old) reveal[s] Lenin
as a rare exemple of a person who makes his entrance on the political scene with his world-view
fully formed (116).

Likewise, the whole Plekhanov <<word missing?>> was supposedly already there in 1889
(98).
143
of a mans thinking as development10 i.e., something that unfoldsand

thereby takes an approach so ahistorical as to rule out an investigation into
how that thinking might have changed.11 At the same time, the recurrence of
the same expression over several years is taken as evidence for the absence of
development and that the meaning stayed the same (120, 421). Yet the same
signifiers can refer to different signifieds, so we may be dealing not with development but with changes in thought. Identifying recurrences accomplishes
little in the absence of an analysis of Lenins logic, of his silences, of the noncoincidences among his texts or within the same work, depending on whether
Lenin was reasoning as economist or politicianin sum, without an analysis of
his contradictions, whose existence is denied a priori in Lenin Rediscovered.
Eurocentrism
To prove that Lenin was a perfect Erfurtian, Lenin Rediscovered makes a list of
themes that characterize the Erfurt Program, and then, using this checklist,
we shall show that Lenin was a completely committed Erfurtian. We will
therefore proceed chronologically and go through each writing [by Lenin] with
checklist in hand (114).12 By adopting the prism of the SPD and searching for
convergences, this approach has little chance of finding Lenin to have a logic
of his own. A historiographic Eurocentrism that uses conceptual frameworks
from Western history to understand Russia is here applied to Lenin. We will
list and paraphrase all the explicit references to the SPD model in WITBD
(405) to show that for Lenin and his readers, the SPD is the future of the
RSDWP [Russian Social Democratic Workers Party]. Lenin Rediscovered produces 19 commentaries on as many passages from WITBD for which the SPD
was supposedly the model. This leaves the reader with the sense that the books
thesis has been overwhelmingly demonstrated. Juxtaposing these 19 commentaries in Lenin Rediscovered with Lenins own pages, however, leaves room for
Lenin does not develop any new core values between late 1899 and late 1901 (157).
For a critique of this concept, seeGadamers views on one of the main problems in the analysis of historical life, namely the concept of teleology or, to use a current expression, development.
This is one of the best-known problems of modern historicism. Nevertheless, the concept of
development has absolutely nothing to do with history. Strictly speaking, development is the
negation of history. Indeed, development means that everything is already given in the beginning enveloped in its beginning. It follows from this that development is merely a becomingvisible, a maturing process, as it plays itself out in the biological growth of plants and animals.
This, however, means that development always carries a naturalistic connotation. In a certain
sense, therefore, discourse about an historical development harbors something of a contradiction. As soon as history is in play, what matters is not what is merely given, but, decisively, what
is new. Insofar as nothing new, no innovation, and nothing unforseen is present, there is also
no history to relate (H.-G. Gadamer, The Beginning of Philosophy [New York, Continuum,
2000], 16).
12
When we turn to the checklist (116); let us go down the list (117); as we go through the
checklist (140).
10
11
an interpretation that is more nuanced and sometimes even contrary to the one
provided in Lihs book.
Lenin Rediscovered has this commentary on the first reference (6: 2528
of the Russian edition of Lenins works): In order to show the importance
of a partys theoretical clarity, Lenin gives a long citation from Engels about
German workers (405). Engels said that these workers have a remarkable aptitude for theory and were the first to build a co-ordinated movement that
combined political, economic, and theoretical aspects.Lenin Rediscovered adds
that Lenin expresses the hope that the Russian workers will occupy a similar
place of honor, indicating that the SPD is the only model. However, let us
read Lenin not from page 25 but from page 24 of the Russian edition, where he
writes that in Russia, the significance of theory is intensified by three circumstances. First, since the party is only just emerging, debates with other revolutionary currents are essential for its future. SecondI quote WITBD from the
translation in Lenin Rediscovered but also insert key terms from the Russian
originala movement starting up in a young country can be successful only if
it assimilates [pri uslovii pretvoreniia]13 the experience of other countries. And
this kind of assimilation [pretvorenie] requires more than a simple familiarity
with this experience or a simple copying of the latest resolutions. It requires the
ability to have a critical attitude toward this experience and to verify it independently. Third, the national tasks of Russian Social Democracy are unlike
those confronted by any other socialist party in the world. Now, we wish
only to underline that the role of an advanced fighter can only be fulfilled by
a party guided by an advanced theory. And to have some concrete idea of what
this means, let the reader recall such forerunners of Russian Social Democracy
as Herzen, Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, and the brilliant galaxy of revolutionaries
of the 70s (69699, emphasis mine).
Lenin Rediscovered takes into account only the lines that follow this paragraph, that is, where Lenin invokes Engels to bolster his remarks on the importance of theory that he illustrates with the successes of the SPD. Yet those lines
are preceded by a reference to his Russian forerunners and what Lenin considered essential, namely, arming oneself with a theory that can offer guidance to
fighters.14 Immediately afterwards, he makes reference to Marxism. Are we to
ignore one or the other of these passages, or would it not be better to ask why
they are together and which elements of the theoretical aspect of the Russians
Lenin made his own?
The shades of meaning of the Russian noun pretvorenie and verb pretvoriat(it) (rendered in
Lenin Rediscovered as assimilation, assimilates) are important. According to Dals dictionary,
the verb means izmeniat po vidu, obrazu ili po kachestvu. Pretvorenie does not mean absorb
or incorporate without change. The key point is that the entire passage shows that here pretvorenie means critical attitude, not simple familiarity, much less copying.
14
For Lenin Rediscovered, however, Lenin pointed primarly to their [Russian revolutionaries]
ability to inspire (415).
13
145
By doing so, we can free ourselves from the false alternative of Russian past
versus SPD.15 Finally, reading all of Lenins corresponding passages makes the
19 references seem less self-evident.16
Lenin Rediscovered systematically sees Lenin as embracing the SPD but fails
to notice that often what he was doing was to make arguments from authority
to advance his own initiatives amid the polemics among Russians.17 Lenin left
Russia for Germany in search of ammunition to bring home for his struggle,
whereas Lenin Rediscovered outlines only a one-way conceptual voyage from
Germany to Russia.
Evolutionism
Russia is an absolutist country (114) whereas Germany is semi-absolutist
(93). On the matter of this difference, Lenins outlook was not a pale photocopy of Western models (114). The essence of his program was, we read, look
at the Germans, then go thou and do likewisewith appropriate changes for
local conditions (121). At this point, we wait in vain for an explanation of
what is specific about Russia. Lenin Rediscovered contents itself with attributing
to Lenin the ambition to build a party as much like the SPD as possible under
absolutist conditions, so we can overthrow the tsar and obtain the political
liberties we need to make the party even more like the SPD! (151). The difference between Russia and Germany was thus a matter of which point they had
currently reached in their common journey along an identical historical path.
The one was still absolutist and hence had no political liberties, whereas the
other was already semi-absolutistitself a problematic conceptand enjoyed
the benefit of political liberties. Lenin Rediscovered leads the reader to think that
this evolutionary conception was Lenins, yet this was not the case at the time
of WITBD.
On the following page, Lenin Rediscovered seems to be in a position to move
beyond evolutionism: Of course, the Erfurt Programme must be adjusted to
meet Russian conditions. Lenin mentions two main issues requiring creative
adaptation: the lack of political freedom and the peasant question. Lenins treatment of the peasant issue in this article is his first statement of his proposals of
a peasant strategy for Russian Social Democracy. His elaboration and defense
of his strategy is a major theme in his writings of the Iskra period. Thus, the
All the more as Lenin takes up the same idea from different angles, insisting on the vital need
to otrabotat both the Western and the Russian experience to build the party (e.g., 4: 18990).
16
Lenin does not mention the SPD, even if it is not far away, in the passages corresponding
to references numbers vi, xii, and xiv, as Lenin Rediscovered acknowledges at times (407, 409).
References numbers iv, ix, andxviii (4067, 411) correspond to passages where the German case
is not present even implicitly. Reference number v (406) corresponds to Lenin (6: 48) where
the SPD is used merely as an example to illustrate events that occur in the entire history of
international Social Democracy.
17
See Lenin (6: 4042) for the reference to number iii (406).
15
agrarian as opposed to simply peasant question was a major one on the eve
of WITBD. However, Since WITBD does not take up the peasant question
we will not go into the details of Lenins strategy. All that is necessary here is
to show that Lenin is searching for an answer to an Erfurtian problem (152).
Here Lenin Rediscovered comes close to Lenins laboratory of ideas, but faithful
to its methodfollow explicitness onlyit stops outside the door: since WITBD
did not deal explicitly with the agrarian question, the economic writings are
ignored.
Yet the Agrarian Program of Russian Social Democracy, written between
February and the first half of March 1902WITBD was completed in
Februarymakes explicit Lenins view of the differences between Russia and
Germany: in the agrarian sphere, we may perhaps evolve something new. Why
new? Because Russian Social Democracy could not remain aloof in solving
the urgent and complexalien (non-proletarian) problems (6: 333). This idea
of leading the other sections of the people in the struggle against the autocracy
is also present in other texts by Lenin. Lenin Rediscovered indicates as much but
only to add at every turn that this was nothing new because this thesis came
from the SPD. The linguistic coincidence between Lenin and Kautsky is transformed into an identity of views and obscures their difference, which Lenin did
not conceal: Martynov is quite sure of only one thing: that Kautskys book
is good (this is warranted), and that it is sufficient to repeat and transcribe
Kautsky without bearing in mind how radically different Russia is with regard
to the agrarian program (this is not at all wise) (6: 317 n., emphasis mine).
This difference was radicalfor two reasons (6: 333): because the party
first had to unleash a class struggle, and because that struggle was destined to
correct the objective course of Russian capitalism, which meant pulling Russia
out of its spontaneous social and economic path and into another type of bourgeois development. This could not be done unless the Russian peasantry acted
like the French peasantry in 1789. But in Russia, the labor movement and the
party would at once take charge of the revolution so that the peasant revolution
would, without discontinuity, become the socialist revolution. Lenins strategy
was different from the SPDs strategy because social and economic conditions
made Russia radically different from Germany. It was thus not a matter of following in Germanys path and overcoming Russias backwardness. Here we find
ourselves at the antipodes of the evolutionism that Lenin Rediscovered attributes
to Lenin.
Far from being details of Lenins strategy, these propositions imply
an anti-evolutionist conception of history and an undoubted distance from
Eurocentrism. Ignoring this double separation, Lenin Rediscovered has Lenin
saying: we differ from earlier Russian revolutionaries because we are superior and we differ from Western Social Democrats because we are perforce
inferior (149, emphasis in Lenin Rediscovered).
147
Russian Concepts for Imagining Russia

Such Germanocentrism leaves no room for Russian vernacular concepts that,
if taken into account, would permit an interpretation of the young Lenins intellectual trajectory and of WITBD that would be incompatible with what is
proposed in Lenin Rediscovered. This applies, for example, to the concepts of
aziatstvo and aziatchina.
In anti-tsarist thinking, aziatstvo was not used to describe Asia but to analyze Russia in opposition to Europe. Chernyshevskii18 used it with reservations:
it was key for Russia19 but unsatisfactory conceptually.20 He associated
the term with samodurstvo, the central concept of Dobroliubovs Kingdom of
Darkness.21 Readers saw this as a conceptual innovation.22 Using the concepts
of aziatstvo and samodurstvo, Chernyshevskii described a vertical structure of
despotic power that reached from monarch to serf and blocked the creation
of horizontal social relationships unmediated by the regime. If this gigantic
system of collective liability [krugovaia poruka] was binding and corrupting
With his little pencil in hand, Lenin read and reread Chernyshevskii at length; see N.
Valentinov, Mes rencontres avec Lnine (Paris: Plon, 1964), 11015.
19
Aziatstvo is what we call the state of affairs where there is no inviolability of rights, where
neither persons, labor, nor property are shielded against arbitrary power. In Asiatic states the law
is completely powerless. Relying on it means to condemning oneself to ruin. There, force alone
rules (N. G. Chernyshevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 15 vols. [Moscow: GIKhL, 1950], 5:
700 [October 1859]).
20
Aziatstvo is decidedly unworthy of the profound idea that serves as the foundation of our
article (ibid., 700).
21
Ibid., 699; N. A.Dobroliubov, Izbrannye filosofskie proizvedeniia, 2 vols. (Moscow:
Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo politicheskoi literatury, 1948), 2: 5159. Samodurstvo means
despotism with a pinch of arrogant stupidity. Samodur/stvo/stvovat appears in Dobroliubovs
article some 200 times. In the manuscript, in the sentence despotism [despotizm] represents
sure evidence of inner powerlessness, the word despotizm was scratched out and replaced with
samodurstvo; see N. A. Dobroliubov, Sobranie sochinenii, 9 vols. (Moscow and Leningrad:
Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 196164), 5: 564 n. 39. The word
despotizm was older and indicated a type of political power. Samodur was unknown at the beginning of the 19th century, but by the mid-1850s it was common in popular speech and we
find it in some regional dictionaries (Perm, Tver, Pskovin the latter two as synonymous with
upriamets). It describes familial relations among the merchantry and submission to the head
of household. Dobroliubov introduced the term into literature, but in this case those signified
extended beyond the world of merchants and acquired a sociopolitical dimension by showing
how the autocracys relationship with the people was reproduced among the people themselves
(Izbrannye filosofskie proizvedeniia, 2: 467). In the same article Dobroliubov uses despotizm as
well. Alongside the old word by which readers identified all despotic relations, they thus encountered a new concept that reflected a more specific reality.
22
This represented a complete turnaround for the consciousness of society onto a new conceptual path; see N. V. Shelgunov, L. P. Shelgunova, and L. M. Mikhailov, Vospominaniia,
(Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1966), 1: 136, 199.
18
the subjects of the empire, what was to be done?23 Who would provide the support for destroying the autocratic system? Note: Chernyshevskii was wondering
What is to be done? and Who will provide support? when he concluded
that the entire social fabric was infected with aziatstvo.
Aziatstvo also included everything that impaired the development of agriculture. Chernyshevskii saw a connection between the situation in the countryside
and the strength of autocracy. Lenin rediscovered the term in the midst of an intellectual journey made up of successive revisions to his own convictions on the
Russian economy. As early as 1894, he used aziatskoe to describe social relations
in the countryside.24 We find aziatchina in The Development of Capitalism in
Russia (1899), where he observed that capitalism coexisted with the old system
of labor-rent (otrabotka). The latter represented stagnation in the forms of production (and consequently in all social relations) and the reign of aziatchina
(3: 199). Capitalism was enormous progress compared to the old system (3:
199). In other words, in 189899, Lenin saw capitalism as an economic and
social formation that was both exterior and subsequent to aziatchina.
This is the vision of capitalism of an orthodox Social Democrat. Yet into
this same passage Lenin inserts aziatchina, a concept foreign to Marxs political economy that belongs to the populist tradition. Lenin Rediscovered rightly
sees Marxist orthodoxy and Russias traditional language as belonging to two
different theoretical fields. But that being the case, the use of aziatstvo and
aziatchina createsto use an analogy from physicsa phase shift in Lenins
discourse between his orthodoxy and his non-orthodoxy. Were we to treat this
recourse to the Russian conceptual vocabulary as a mere homage to sentiment,
as Lenin Rediscovered does each time Lenin refers to the Russian past, we would
be erasing the space of the phase shift and rendering Lenins thought smooth.
We would be missing both Lenins history itself and the means to access that
history, because a phase shift is no mere contradictionit is a gap in the text, an
entry into the pathway of the authors thinking.
The Radical Difference of Russian Capitalism
Lenins reference to aziatchina seems joined to a still timid acknowledgment
of Russias distinctiveness. Based on his economic studies, Lenin had found
that in agriculture in general the transformative effects of capitalism
manifest themselves here most slowly and gradually capitalism penetrates
into agriculture particularly slowly and in extremely varied forms (3: 165, 171,
emphasis mine). This slowness was no mere problem of temporality, for Russian
capitalism no longer looked to him like the Marxian sort that eliminates and
N. A. Dobroliubov, Kogda zhe pridt nastoiashchii den? (Nakanune, povest I. S.
Turgeneva), in Izbrannye filosofskie proizvedeniia, 2: 283.
24
In the agrarian sector, the exploitation of the workers constitutes not only robbery of labor
but also the Asiatic abuse of human dignity that is constantly encountered in the countryside
(1: 241)
23
149
replaces older forms of production. The political implication was that the socialists could no longer wager on the passage of time and just wait for capitalism
to develop: The essence of the problem of the destiny of capitalism in Russia
is often presented as though prime importance attaches to the question: how
fast? (i.e., how fast is capitalism developing?). Actually, however, far greater importance attaches to the question how exactly? and to the question where from?
(i.e., what was the nature of the pre-capitalist economic system in Russia?) (3:
380, Lenins emphasis).
The first sentence is clearly a move away from the orthodox approach, which
was also his own position of 1894, which held that countries arrived at capitalism sooner or later (backwardness could be made up over time). The second sentence seems strange for an orthodox thinker, since according to Marx,
capitalism replaces older forms of production and produces everywhere the same
result a society with two antagonistic classes. Yet Lenin was wondering how
this process was taking place in Russia and from where it was coming. His concern was not merely economics, for if the process differed from what Marx had
foreseen, the social outcome might also be different. Social Democrats therefore
had to deal with a past that was still present and rethink how they paired aziatstvo/aziatchinawith the Russian economic and social model that the introduction of capitalism was generating.
In 1894, Lenin had said the opposite when he imagined capitalist development as occurring with tremendous speed and there was no question of any
diversity of forms.25 The vestiges seemed about to disappear and there was no
other form of exploitation but the capitalist one.26 His conception of Russian
capitalism was abstract, built on a literal reading of Marx. Capitalism was one.
Russia was following the same capitalist path as Western Europe. The labor-rent
system was already disappearing and the peasantry was split into an agrarian
petty bourgeoisie and an agricultural proletariat. This definitively resolve[d]
the question of capitalism in Russia (1: 19394, 322, 452).
I have nothing but sympathy for the irritation that Lenin Rediscovered displays toward a Sovietology that takes pleasure in exposing Lenins flip-flops
as proof of his inconstancy, but we cannot counter it with a Lenin who has no
history. On the points we have discussed, there is an opposition between The
Development of Capitalism in Russia and what Lenin wrote in 189495. He
Agricultural capitalism does not embrace all social-economic relations in the countryside
and still more in the social and the juridical-political sphere these still powerful relics of
the old-nobility stratum, which have not yet been destroyed by capitalism precisely because it is
underdeveloped (1: 49091, Lenins emphasis). Capitalism began to uproot this pillar of Old
Russiathe patriarchal, semi-serf peasantryto drag them out of these medieval and semi-feudal conditions and to place them in a modern, purely capitalist environment (1: 251, emphasis
mine). <<your emphasis went missing somewhere during formatting: please indicate where
it should be>>
26
[The] exploitation of the working people in Russia is everywhere capitalist in nature, if we
leave out of account the moribund remnants of serfdom (1: 310, Lenins emphasis).
25
abandoned certain approaches and developed new theses. That is what every
thinker does, especially if he is a man of action. Without abandoning Theory,
the young Ulianov was making room in it for Russia.
At the Origins of WITBD: The Agrarian Question
In February 1901, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the abolition of
serfdom, Lenin wrote The Workers Party and the Peasantry, which begins by
recalling the position adopted in 1861 by Chernyshevskii. Like Chernyshevskii,
Lenin was convinced that the 1861 reform had not saved the peasantry from remaining the lowest social estate (4: 430), since the economic elements of the
reformthe concessions made to the landlords at the peasants expensepreserved forms of dependence that were more servile than capitalist. It is here that
Lenin comes back to the notion of aziatchina. The phase shift of 1898 that we
noted earlier between his analysis of the Russian economy (how and whence
was Russian capitalism developing?) and his orthodox Marxist language (capitalism everywhere replaces older forms of production), however, was resolved in
1901 by a change in his social diagnosis: our peasants are suffering not only
and not so much from oppression by capital as from oppression by the landlords and
the survivals of serfdom. Ruthless struggle against these shackles, which immeasurably worsen the condition of the peasantry and tie it hand and foot, is not
only possible but even necessary in the interest of the countrys entire social development; for the hopeless poverty, ignorance, lack of rights, and degradation,
from which the peasants suffer, lay an imprint of aziatchina upon the entire social
system of our country (4: 432, emphasis mine).
The vestiges of serfdom were much more to blame for the peasantrys predicament than was capitalism. Indeed, all of Russian society bore the mark of aziatchina.27 Lenin was weighing narrowly proletarian interests against those of
society as a whole (4: 332), and his recourse to traditional Russian concepts was
now in harmony with his acknowledgment of a specific type of capitalist transition that differed from Marxs model. He echoed Pavel Akselrods warning
against primitive thinkingthat to explain all misfortunes of the Russian
people through quotations from Das Kapital was baseless.28
Lenin therefore reversed his political priorities. At the end of 1899, he had
written: Two basic forms of the class struggle are today intertwined in the
Russian countryside: (1) the struggle of the peasantry against the privileged
landed proprietors and against the remnants of serfdom; (2) the struggle of the
emergent rural proletariat against the rural bourgeoisie. For Social Democrats
the second struggle, of course, is of greater importance, but they must also indispensably support the first struggle(4: 237, emphasis mine).
A month before, he had already proposed the Asiatic nature of even those of our institutions
that most resemble European institutions (4: 393).
28
P. B. Akselrod, Po povodu novogo narodnogo bedstviia, Rabotnik, no. 56 (1898): 176.
27
151
By FebruaryMarch 1901, however, he was writing: We have seen that in

the modern Russian village two kinds of class antagonism exist side by side:
first, the antagonism between the agricultural workers and the proprietors; and
second, the antagonism between the peasantry as a whole and the landlord class
as a whole. The first antagonism is developing and becoming more acute; the
second is already largely behind us. And yet, despite this, it is the second antagonism that has the most vital and most practical significance for the Russian
Social Democrats at the present time (4: 432).
Let us identify what changed. At the end of 1899, there had been class
struggle (klassovaia borba) in the villages and the social actors were struggling. By February 1901, although the beginning of the passage remained almost identical to the 1899 version, the word struggle had disappeared and
was replaced by antagonism (protivopolozhnost). It is hard to imagine that
Lenin would replace the time-honored formula class struggle with class antagonism and still mean the same thing. This was a conceptual retreat from the
orthodox language. Then came a total reversal of priorities. At the end of 1899,
the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie had mattered more than that
of the peasantry against the landlords and the survivals of serfdom. In 1901, the
antagonism between peasants and landlords mattered more than that between
the workers and the entrepreneurs.
It is therefore difficult to accept that Lenins world-view [was] fully formed
in 1894 (116) and there was nothing new on the conceptual level between late
1899 and late 1901 (157). How are these changes connected with WITBD?
Lenin Rediscovered does not raise this question because it refuses to broach the
agrarian question. The exclusion of Lenins economic writings leaves his economic and social diagnosis of Russia off the scene, yet that is precisely what gave
significance to the political and organizational propositions of WITBD. It was,
after all, because he was convinced that Russias entire economic, social, and
political structure bore the mark of aziatchina that Lenin conceived a political
project to correct the objective spontaneous course of Russian history.
Lenins new ideas about the agrarian question and his work on WITBD
took form either simultaneously or in rapid succession.29 His new economic
views corresponded to his new conception of politics as well as of the party.
Without aziatchina or his new vision of the economy, he would not have arrived
at his contentious position among Social Democrats on the questions of spontaneity, conscience, the professional revolutionary, and the party.
Lenin described Rabochaia partiia i krestianstvo (Iskra, no. 3, written in FebruaryMarch
and published in April 1901) as the rough outline of an agrarian program (6: 307). This outline was followed in Iskras next edition by the article Where to Begin? which was defined in
turn as the outline of WITBD (5: 9). Thus, the outline of the agrarian program was followed
by the outline of the party. Next, the writing of WITBD coincided with the preparation of the
first part of Agrarnyi vopros i kritiki Marksa (JuneSeptember 1901) and was immediately
followed by Agrarnaia programma russkoi sotsial -demokratii.
29
Lenin Questions the Spontaneity of Russian Capitalism

Lenin Rediscovered and the textbook interpretation converge remarkably in situating spontaneityexclusively in the realm of subjectivity, invoking as evidence
the famous passage of WITBD about how class consciousness needs to be induced because the workers are incapable of achieving it spontaneously.30 Yet to
Lenin, that sort of spontaneity was secondary. Subjective spontaneitythe kind
experienced by actorswas determined by the spontaneity of Russias capitalist development. This structural spontaneity, not that of the workers, is what
posed a serious problem for him. Optimism and pessimism had nothing to do
with it.31
In 1901, Lenin thought that capitalism in Russia carried a deep and lasting
imprint from the countrys prior history. The enormous economic, social, and
cultural deficit (1: 262) bequeathed by Old Russia was something he no longer imagined, as in 1895, in terms of a generalized backwardness that would
inevitably be overcome in time by a capitalism that was already triumphant.
Instead, by 1901, eliminating the direct survivals of serfdom was indispensable
for capitalism to develop in a way that ensured a bourgeois society where the
proletariat could pursue the goal of socialism. True, Russian capitalism on its
own could develop spontaneously [stikhiino], but only along its own peculiar
road of violence and oppression, ruin and starvation (6: 347).
These lines were not aimed at the effects of capitalist accumulation in general. They referred instead to the spontaneous development of Russian capitalism, for it was evolving in the framework of the old regime. Speaking Marxist,
we might say that Lenin was condemning the economic structures spontaneity.
This spontaneity was turning the Russian peasant virtually into a barbarian.32
As Lenin explained, the remnants [of serfdom] barbarize the process of development (6: 217, emphasis mine). Henceforth, attacking the political adversary
On the translation of stikhiinost/nii into English, see Lenin Rediscovered, 61828.

In discussing the attitude of Lenin and other Social Democrats toward the workers, it seems
to me that terms like optimistic, skeptical (12021, 349, 351, 35355, 359, 366, etc.), or
even over-optimistic (649) even if they were used by the actors themselves (503) do little
to enhance our understanding of the issues.
32
Labor-rent and bondage, the peasants inequality as a social estate and as citizens, their subjection to the privileged landowners, who still have the right to flog them, and their degrading
living conditons, which virtually turn the peasants into barbarians all this is not an exception
but the rule in the Russian countryside, and in the final analysis this is all a direct survival of
serfdom (6: 311; emphasis mine). For several months, Lenin had been returning regularly to
this image by associating the signifiers Asiatic-barbarian and cruel forms (5: 323) with Russias
capitalist accumulation. Thus, the surviving vestiges condition the Asiatic-barbarian manner in
which the millions-strong peasantry grows extinct and keep the entire people ignorant, deprived
of rights, and oppressed (Leninskii sbornik, 2 [Moscow: Institut TsK pri VKP, 1924], 39, also
4546, 51). This formulation is almost identical to the 1901 formulation on aziatchina.
30
31
153
was no longer enough, for aziatchina was built into the economic foundation
itself.33
Russias structural specificity lay in its tangle of production sites where
servile and capitalist traits coexisted as a consequence of the intermingling
of seigniorial and peasant lands resulting from the 1861 reform (6: 328). To
eliminate what remained of the old regime in Russias agrarian system, the only
simple solution was to keep aloof, pass it by, and leave it to the spontaneous element to clear up this mess (6: 313). Capitalism might thus end up
spontaneously eliminating the remaining survivals. Why, then, condemn its
spontaneity? Why should it be a fatal mistake (4: 435) for Russian Social
Democracy not to make use of the workers movement to push the peasantry
into ensuring the fulfillment of the peasant demands of 1861? Why should correcting those outrageous injustices (4: 434) of 40 years earlier be socialisms
salvation? Because Russias spontaneous transition had the peculiarity that capitalist development was not creating a bourgeois society. The Social Democrats
had to advocate subjective intervention into objective spontaneity because
the latter directly retards social development and the class struggle (6: 334).
Aziatchina was thus preventing socioeconomic strata from turning into classes
and thereby preventing class struggle tout court.
At this point, the radical difference with Germany went beyond the situation in the countryside to affect the industrial proletariat: The role of the
peasantry as a class that provides fighters against the autocracy and against the
survivals of serfdom is by now played out in the West, but not yet in Russia. In
the West the industrial proletariat has long since become completely alienated
from the countryside [whereas] in Russiahere Lenin cites Akselrod
the industrial proletariat, both by its composition and by the conditions of its
existence, is to a very great extent still connected with the countryside (4: 227,
Proekt Programmy nashei partii, late 1899). On the page from which Lenin
quotes in this passage, Akselrod attacks abstract Marxists who have crossed
off of their list of real factors determining the Russian proletariats present-day
historical position those elements of Russian life that create a reactionary national and historical atmosphere that suffocates the Russian people, and with it
the working class. The result has been an abstract doctrine that explains the
historical inevitability of capitalist progress.34
The reflection on the peasantrys revolutionary capabilities occurred within
this wider reflection on the cost of a historical spontaneity that threatened to
continue suffocating the workers for a long time. Spontaneity became a problem
for Lenin once he began asking the traditional questions and sharing the fears articulated earlier by Akselrod: Russia continues to lack the main prerequisite for
Direct survivals of the corve system are maintained, not by any special law but by the
actually existing land relationships (6: 326).
34
P. B. Akselrod, K voprosu o sovremennykh zadachakh i taktike russkikh sotsial-demokratov
(Geneva, 1898), 11, emphasis mine.
33
a political struggle against the bourgeoisiethere are no politically ruling classes;

instead, there is the tsar and his bureaucrats.35 By asserting that not even the
dominant groups were classes, Akselrod was questioning the very existence of
politically established classes and of a class society, and this after he had argued
a few pages earlier: Insofar as populism was revolutionarythat is, as it stood
up against the estates-and-bureaucracy regime [protiv soslovno-biurokraticheskogo
gosudarstva] and the barbaric forms of exploitation and oppression of the popular
masses that it upheldto that extent it was bound to become, with the appropriate
modifications, a component element of the program of Russian Social Democracy.36
In his doubts about the natural path (4: 234) we can read Lenins fear that
bourgeois society (as opposed to the economy) that is, a society of classeswas
constituting itself too slowly or indeed not at all. Lenin Rediscovered notwithstanding, neither Akselrod nor the Lenin of late 1899 had the slightest doubt
about their ideological ties to populism. But this connection was not based, as
the textbook interpretation imagines, on a political voluntarism out of touch
with reality. The link established itself at the point where Lenin recognized a
problem, the non-existence of bourgeois society, that everyone knew was the
intellectual property of the populists.
Lenin Rediscovered dispossesses Lenin of his own logic also when it seeks
to diminish the importance of the word stikhiinost, which occurs only fitfully in Lenins writings (555). But of what value is this method of analysis,
since stikhiinost appears in passages that are decisive for Lenins conception of
Russian reality? In other passages he uses the equivalent formulation natural
path (estestvennyi put). Lenin Rediscovered asserts that the reason that Lenin
used stikhiinost so much in WITBD is not because of any crise de foi or deep
malaise, but simply because Boris Krichevskii used the word at length in an attack on Iskra in September 1901 (555). Later he adds that Lenin only used this
languagethat is, consciousness and spontaneityfor ad hoc reasons and
mostly in Chapter II of WITBD, not before or after. The insistence that Lenins
views on stikhiinost are the keys to his whole outlook virtually guarantees an
extremely impoverished textual base (616). To imagine Lenin as a prisoner of
Krichevskiis language is odd. Lenin used the term in relation to the workers
struggle (4: 188, late 1899) well before Krichevskiis attack in 1901 and he had
already applied the phrase natural path to capitalism (4: 234, late 1899).
Lastly, in Agrarnaia programma russkoi sotsial-demokratii, the term stikhiinost is
key to understanding Lenins interpretation of Russias overall development.
For Marxists, the superstructure depends on the base, so the spontaneous subjective consciousness of the workers was a reflection of their place in
a spontaneous objective historical process that in turn was failing to produce
Ibid., 15.
Ibid., 7, emphasis mine. On the continuity between Narodnaia Volia and Social Democracy,
see 9.
35
36
155
a bourgeois social order. These doubts about objective spontaneity led Lenin to
harbor doubts about subjective spontaneity as well. In sum, failure to oppose the
spontaneity of Russian capitalism would be fatal for the Social Democrats
because this very spontaneity was threatening to prevent social groups from
turning into social classes, which in turn would make the class struggle impossible. In other words, aziatchina would not spontaneously change into a modern
society with politically constituted social classes.
Not One But Two Consciousnesses
According to Lenin Rediscovered (and contrary to the textbook interpretation),
Lenin did not claim that the working class as a whole was incapable of attaining
class consciousness. When WITBD states that class consciousness must be introduced from without, the book argues, Lenin means that Social-Democratic
awareness could not have existed among a specific set of workers at some time
in the past,that is, during the strikes of the mid-1890s; it was therefore not
a general proposition about workers as such, everywhere, at all times (648).
When Lenin adds that such consciousness could have been brought in only
from outside, it is only because socialism and the worker movement are both
originally exterior to each other and have to be brought to each other. This was
already present in Marx and Kautsky, so nothing here is specific to Lenin (648
49). Yet if this proposition had really been so obvious to Social Democrats, why
did Lenin call Kautsky to the rescue? Although Lenin asserted in 1902 that
class consciousness could be brought to the workers of 189596 only from
outside, Lenin Rediscovered does not explain why he had said just the opposite earlier in the mid-1890s. The book cannot explain this because, like the
textbook interpretation, it assumes that for Lenin it was all one and the same
Social-Democratic awareness, whether it was consciousness as he conceived it
in the specific historical situation of 189596 or the consciousness to which he
was referring in 1902. In fact, consciousness in 189596 and consciousness in
1902 were historically different for Lenin.
Let us examine this difference.
According to the reconstruction, although speculative (636) offered by
Lenin Rediscovered, Lenin had already written at least a draft of his book when he
read, in a just-released text by Kautsky, the following lines that he quotes: The
carrier of science is not the proletariat but the bourgeois intelligentsia (Kautskys
emphasis): modern socialism emerges in the heads of individual members of
this stratum and then is communicated by them to proletarians who stand out
due to their mental development, who in turn bring it into the class struggle
of the proletariat where conditions allow. In this way,socialist awareness
to Lenin, soznanieis something brought into the class struggle of the proletariat from without (von aussen Hineingetragenes), and not something that
emerges from the class struggle in stikhiinyi fashion (urwchsig) (70910).
The sentences over which so much ink has been spilled appear a few pages
earlier. They followed Lenins comments on the strikes of the 1890s, which he
characterized as a purely stikhiinyi movement: We stated that there could not
have been a Social-Democratic awareness [at that time] among the workers. It
could have been brought in only from outside. The history of all countries bears
witness that exclusively with its own forces the worker class is in a condition
to work out only a tred-iunionist awareness, that is, a conviction of the need to
unite in unions, to carry on a struggle with the owners, to strive for the promulgation by the government of this or that law that is necessary for the workers
and so on. The doctrine of socialism grew out of those philosophic, historical,
and economic theories that were worked out by the educated representatives of
the propertied class, the intelligentsia. The founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, belonged themselves, according to their social origin, to
the bourgeois intelligentsia (702).
The linguistic resemblance between these texts is obvious. Lenin Rediscovered
argues that due entirely to the Kautsky passage, Lenin got interested in the theme
of who did or did not work out ideological doctrines. Lenins interest in this
topic is strictly localized and no part of the ongoing argument of WITBD (640).
Inspired by Kautsky, Lenins passage on from without is a digression, a parenthetical remark that breaks the flow of the narrative (645). This approach leads
to the conclusion: what seems to the textbook interpretation as the very heart
of WITBD could be erased from the book without trace by snipping a couple
of paragraphs (646). The problem with such an erasure is that eliminating
this paragraph would mean deleting an important non-coincidence in Lenins
writings, for this paragraph follows the description of the mid-1890s strikes as a
strike movement that one must call stikhiinyi before anything else (701). Yet
in the mid-1890s, Lenin had written that their objective situation naturally led
the workers toward a class struggle that was conscious and political (1: 194, 241).
Large-scale capitalism supposedly imposed working conditions and a living atmosphere that forced the class of factory workers to think and act politically (1:
194). The workers were the antipodes of the bourgeoisie, the only social actor
definitively differentiated from the old social order and from bourgeois culture
and the only one utterly incapable of compromise (1: 311, 359). At the time, the
young Ulianov confused the economic triumph of capital with the advent of
bourgeois society, because he reduced the social to the economic (1: 159). Since
all economic exploitation now was capitalist, the workers faced only a single class
contradiction (1: 457). As for the other social conflicts, all of them internal to the
bourgeoisie, including the exploitation of the peasantry, we Marxists shall remain
spectators (1: 374). The consciousness of 1896 was thus about antagonism toward manufacturers and did not have to be brought in (2: 102, 104).
WITBD is testimony to a total reversal, with Lenin writing that these strikes,
a purely stikhiinyi movement expressed no more than the embryo of a class
157
struggle. This was a tred-unionist struggle but not yet a Social-Democratic

one, and it testified to the antagonism between workers and owners,but there
did not exist among these workers nor could it have existed at that time an
awareness of the irreconcilable opposition of their interests to the entire political
and social order, in other words, a Social-Democratic awareness (7012, emphasis mine). According to WITBD, the awareness of the worker class is not
genuine political awareness if the workers are not taught to respond to each and
every occurrence of abuse of power and oppression, violence and malfeasance,
no matter which class is affected. The awareness of the worker masses cannot
be a genuine class awareness if the workers do not learn to observe each of
the other social classes in all the manifestations of their intellectual, moral, and
political life (737, Lenins emphasis). Elsewhere he writes, It is not enough
to explain the political oppression of the workers (just as it is not enough to
explain to them the opposition between their interests and that of the owners).
What is necessary is to agitate in relation to each concrete manifestation of
political and economic oppression, but since this oppression falls on the most
various classes of society surely it is obvious that we will not carry out our
task of developing political awareness of the workers, if we do not take upon
ourselves the organization of an all-sided indictment of the autocracy? (726,
Lenins emphasis).
In 1902, Lenin thus described an understanding of the antagonism with the
bourgeoisie (the awareness of 1896)as trade-unionism, the embryo of a class
struggle. What kind of awareness did the workers (and the Social Democrats!)
need in 1902? An awareness of the irreconcilable opposition of their interests
to the entire political and social order. This order was not the bourgeois orderit
was the order of aziatchina, of barbarized capitalism, where there was no sociopolitical identification of classes, where the national atmosphere suffocated
the working masses. The target of the 1896 version of political (or class) awareness was the capitalist regime. For the 1902 version of Social Democratic awareness, it was aziatchina.
Consequently, and despite the linguistic similarity between their passages, Kautsky and Lenin were in fact referring to two totally different types
of consciousness. For Kautsky, it was the awareness of a proletariat that belonged to a bourgeois society. For Lenin in 1902, the Russian proletariat was
too closely connected with aziatchina to be part of bourgeois society (meaning
the entire matrix of social relations, not merely the political realm to which
Lenin Rediscovered refers when it speaks of Russian absolutism or Germanys
semi-absolutism).37 The difference between these consciousnesses is of crucial
But why, then, does Lenin quote Kautsky? Lenin Rediscovered is right that the entire Kautsky
passage could be cut and there would be no perceptible seam in WITBD (637), but not because
spontaneity is a non-issue. The reason lies elsewhere: the relationship between the objective
spontaneous element and the subjective factor was a topic of polemics among socialists; in these
37
importance, not because that of 1902 was of any greater complexity than that
of 1896 (or than the version described by Kautsky), but because they took for
granted two different historical realities and were therefore supposed to develop
from two different places. In 189496, that place was the exploitation of the
working class. In 19012, the place was both prior and external to class, for
the place was the political. It was prior, because before the workers could have
interests as a class in bourgeois society, they had to destroy what was preventing
that society from emerging in the first place. They thus had to destroy what
prevented them from constituting themselves as a class. The place was also external, because what needed to be destroyed was not the enemy in the workers
class struggle but the enemy of any class struggle at allthat is, the vestiges of
serfdom (6: 311). This is why, were we to delete from WITBD the passage on
from without as proposed in Lenin Rediscovered, not only would we not gain
clearer insightwe would in fact have far more difficulty understanding how
the political is prior and external to class, that is, nothing more or less than the
status and mission of the party that Lenin was proposing.
Was Lenin a Praktik of No Theoretical Originality?
Lenin Rediscovered is right to point out that in its time, one key to the success
of WITBD was that the praktiki recognized themselves in the pamphlet and
studied it intently for its insight on practical questions. To study how WITBD
was received in the underground, Lenin Rediscovered relies on accounts by the
Lenin loyalists of 19046 (436). The excerpts that the book reproduces bear
exclusively on the practical aspects of WITBDs message. Yet we should distinguish between how a book is received and what its internal logic is. The
importance accorded by Lenin Rediscovered to the practical aspect diminishes a
question that was fundamental to Lenin: what kind of action was effective in
Russia? It was not simply, as one might think from reading Lenin Rediscovered,
a matter of preventing activists from being arrested and the organization from
being dismantled too quickly, although these were serious issues. The question
that preoccupied him was much broader. His answer, which varied between
1894 and 1902, operated at three levelspractical, tactical, and theoretical.
This last level is missing from Lenin Rediscovered, which thereby ignores
a central tenet of communist discourseand hence of how Leninism, and
WITBD in particular, was received that any activist, from Moscow to Paris
to Buenos Aires, learned at the moment of joining the party: organizational
practice is driven by theoretical choices, because an organizations character
is determined by its mission On the first page of chapter 4 of WITBD, which
brings these two aspects together, we read: The character of the organization
of any institution is naturally and inevitably defined by the content of the acdebates, the reference to Kautsky (made possible by the similarity of language) was an argument
from authority to win the support of the praktiki.
159
tivity of that institution (763). Lenin Rediscovered inverts this relationship.38

This is something like an ide fixe than runs through the whole book, from
the beginning, where the foundational debates among members of the Russian
revolutionary movement (Lenin included) are described as essentially empirical (7), all the way to the conclusion, which ends by characterizing Lenin as
a praktik (558), with comments on professional revolutionaries in between (461,
463). This reduction to the empirical follows logically from Lenin Rediscovereds
general thesisthat Lenins work, and the party itself, were merely an attempt
to adapt as faithfully as possible the model of the SPD.
The interpretation of the centrality of the struggle for democratization and
political liberties is similarly reductionist. Lenin wanted political freedom because he thought it would bring immeasurable benefit to Russia, to the workers,
and to Social Democracy (557). Political freedom and democratization
would make a successful struggle for the worker cause possible (132); the
practical benefits to the workers movement were articulated by Lenin himself (141). That these benefits would be useful to the revolutionary struggle is
obvious, but must we therefore reduce the achievement of political freedom
to a mere utilitarian calculation? (470). At the same time, Lenin is presented as
a passionate advocate of political freedom as such (197), and the author even
confides that I was taken aback by his obsessive insistence on the virtues of
political freedom (206). (Alas, Lenin Rediscovered does not tell us when Lenin
gave other political and social actors the benefit of this obsessive insistence.)
Lenin was no unconditional partisan of freedom as such, but neither was his
approach driven merely by short-term utilitarian considerations. The practical
benefits were of secondary importance. Before there could even be any successful struggle, the struggle itself first had to become a class struggle, which
in turn presupposed that the worker movement became a working class and that
class antagonism turned into class strugglethat is, there needed to be an end to
stagnation and Asiatic barbarism. Democratization was thus no mere preliminary that would allow the proletariat to organize itself better; rather, it meant
transforming the objective, spontaneous course of Russian history through a
political action that would ultimately integrate Russia into European history.
Here more than ever, Lenin was more than ever an intellectual rooted in Russias
19th century and a man who moved beyond it.
These doubts about the spontaneity of capitalism in Russia, together with
the idea of bringing an anti-aziatchina consciousness into the workers movement, undergirded an action plan of historical dimensions. The idea was to have
the workers movement bring the class struggle to the countryside in order to
For example the central dispute on the relationship between the objective factors and the
subjectivethat is, the politicalthat pitted Lenin against the authors of the Joint Letter is decribed as empirical rather than theoretical. The theoretical debate about material elements
is simply a reflection of this empirical dispute, an empirical clash (349). In fact, this debate
was eminently theoretical.
38
push the peasants to launch a revolution that would destroy all the older forms
of production and social relations. In other words, universalize the political to
rectify objective spontaneity. Far from being empirical, the debate that this project implied touched on the essence of the political. We need only to think of
the re-evaluation of the political that goes on todayas a weapon of the weak
against certain forms of globalization in the worldto appreciate how much the
role that Lenin assigned to the political underlay a debate that was eminently
theoretical.
A Theoretical Innovation: The Role of the Political,
or the Birth of Leninism
According to Lenin, it was Russias peculiarities (4: 220) that is, the character of its capitalist transitionthat determined the complexity of the practical
tasks: capitalisms elimination of serfdom in the countryside has so confused
and complicated social and economic relationships as to make it necessary to
ponder deeply over the solution to the immediate practical questions a
simple solution cannot be invented (6: 314). The challenge was to think of a
different, non-spontaneous path for the transition from what remained of serfdom to capitalismto think about what separated Russia from the programmatic
framework of European Social Democracy, rediscover the French Revolution
and the role in it of the peasantry, and prepare a new Social Democratic agrarian program that would be Russian. This program would focus on the return
of the otrezki (the plots of peasant land confiscated in 1861 and given to the
landlords); Lenin regarded these as the specific source of the reproduction of
servile relationships because they were situated in a way that ensured, among
other things, the preservation of the landlords patriarchal authority over the
peasants. Restoring the otrezki was supposed to disentangle servile from capitalist relations and leave in place only the coercive mechanisms of capitalist
economics. This would ensure that the class struggle unfolded without encumbrance. He hoped by the same movement to create a revolutionary situation,
since the otrezki could be restored only by force (6: 316). It was here (6: 317)
that Lenin inserted his note on the radical difference with Germany and argued
against trying to apply Kautsky to Russia.
The was no simple solution, for Russian capitalism would inevitably renew the pre-capitalist system of social relations (6: 328). Arriving at a different
path of development, one founded on purely bourgeois social relations of production, required a revolutionary action by the peasantry that was conceivable
only on condition of supporting small-scale private property and destroying the
large landholdings, a postulate contrary to a literal reading of Marx.
Whether Lenin wanted to stress the novelty of his assertion or was having
trouble conceptualizing it, the fact remains that he abandoned his customary
austere political style and instead wrote:
161
we must assist the peasants and urge them to destroy all remnants of serfdom as completely as possible. This meets with general approval, does
it not? Well then, if you do agree to follow this path, make an effort to
proceed along it independently; do not make it necessary to drag you;
do not let theunusual appearance of this path frighten you, do not be
put off by the fact that in many places you will find no beaten track at all,
and that you will have to crawl along the edge of precipices, break your
way through thickets, and leap across chasms. Dont complain about the
absence of paths: these complaints will be futile whining, for you should
have known in advance that you would be moving, not along a highway
that has been graded and leveled by all the forces of social progress, but along
trails through out-of-the-way places and back alleys that do have a way out,
but from which you, we or anyone else will never find a direct, simple, and
easy way outnever, that is, so long as they continue to exist, these outof-the-way places and back alleys that are disappearing but disappearing
excruciatingly slowly. (6: 32526, emphasis mine)
What to do about this excruciating slowness? What this image-filled

description (which greatly irritated Plekhanov) and this apparent conceptual
poverty concealed was in fact the theoretical innovation that would lie at the
heart of Bolshevism: to employ political action to prompt an alternative bourgeois
development that would make it possible, along the way, to pursue the goal of
socialism.39 Who, however, stood at enough of a remove from aziatchina to be
the subject of this kind of political action?
The Party
According to Lenin Rediscovered, the party model intended by Lenin did not
change during those years. In reality, however, the model evolved along with
Lenins interpretation of both Russian capitalism and its effects on the social actors. In 1896, unchanged from 1894, the partys mission was to help the working class, since the exploitation of the workers inevitably led to class struggle
(2: 1056). By 1897, Lenin had identified elements of the urban proletariat
that were not spontaneously joining the class struggle, and so he put forward a
more interventionist conception of the party: instead of pomoch [helping] and
sodeistvovat [assisting], we now read about rukovodit [leading] the proletariats
class struggle and organizovat[organizing] this struggle (2: 446). But the party
as such was not yet constituted as a theoretical problem, and the working class
was external to autocracy and aziatchina (2: 45356). Lenin still saw the current
difficulties as practical in nature and suggested that others follow the example
of the group that he was leading in St. Petersburg in 189596. If it succeeded in
For Plekhanovs reaction, see Leninskii sbornik, 3 (Moscow: Institut TsK pri VKP, 1925),
376.
39
spreading to the rest of the country, this group could become the Russian Social
Democratic Party (1: 461).
In 1899, Lenin started to conceive the party as a device to help bring the
class struggle to Russia. He had barely begun his discovery of Russias peculiarities before positioning himself at a tentative distance from Marxism. The pages
where he outlines the partys new mission open with an oath of allegiance to
Marx, followed by a paean to Marxisms creative powers that looks startlingly
like an anticipatory self-justification against the criticism he was expecting.40
What he says is, of course, we are still Marxists, but being in Russia allows us
and, more important, compels us to debate certain theoretical questions. Lenin
could no longer hide that he was preparing something new: The history of
socialism and democracy in Western Europe, the history of the Russian revolutionary movement, the experience of our labor movementsuch is the material
we must master to elaborate a purposeful organization and tactics for our party.
Theanalysis of this material must, however, be done independently, since there
are no ready-made models to be found anywhere. On the one hand, the Russian
labor movement exists under conditions that are quite different from those of
Western Europe. It would be most dangerous to have any illusions on this score.
On the other hand, Russian Social Democracy differs very substantially from
earlier revolutionary parties in Russia, so that the need to learn revolutionary
technique and secret organization from the old Russian masters in no way
relieves us of the duty to assess them critically and work out our own organization independently (4: 18990).
While thus casting himself as an innovator relative to Western Social
Democracy, he was also distancing himself from Russian tradition and suggesting that he would preserve only its practical insights, whereas in reality at
that very moment he was taking up problems that the anti-tsarist movement
had articulated well before Marxisms arrival in Russia. Until then, Lenin had
been operating in what I would call stage two (in which he argued that a
conscious workers movement was in existence) and acted as though stage
one (where the class constituted itself politically) as such did not represent a
problem. Akselrod, also a Marxist but steeped in the populist past, nurtured
the deepest fears about whether stage one was real in Russiaabsent foreign assistance, the working class would not succeed in becoming a conscious
We take our stand entirely on the ground of Marxs theory. In no way do we regard Marxs
theory as something completed and inviolable; on the contrary, we are convinced that it has only
laid the foundation stone for the science that socialists must develop in all directions if they wish
to keep pace with life. We think that an independent elaboration of Marxs theory is especially
essential for Russian socialists, for this theory provides only general guiding principles, which, in
particular are applied in England differently from France and in Germany differently from
Russia. We will therefore gladly afford space in our paper for articles on theoretical questions
and invite all comrades openly to discuss controversial points (4: 182, 184, late 1899, Lenins
emphasis).
40
163
movement. That assistance consisted in the triumph of the values of bourgeois

civilization. Lenin shared Akselrods concern but gave his own answerthat to
provide such assistance was the job of the party. Marx says that the class struggle is always a political struggle but, Lenin adds, that does not mean that every
struggle between workers and bosses is always political. It is political only if it
is a class struggle. The Social Democrats task was therefore to transform the
workers spontaneous struggle into a struggle by the whole class, a struggle
by a specific political party (4: 188, Lenins emphasis). The concern here is to
widen the local struggle to the entire country (the whole class), but even so,
it is the party that turns the spontaneous struggle into a political struggle,
that is, a class struggle. The switch from class to party is clear as day. Before
spontaneity could be transformed into conscious struggle, the political dimension needed to be introduced, and that was the job of the party.
Now we see the problem concealed behind Lenins switch from class to
party. It is Akselrods problemstage one, the stage Lenin had previously
thought lay in the past. The fact that he was now looking to the party suggests
that the doubts affecting his confidence in economic spontaneity had spread
to the certainty he had earlier felt about the spontaneous process by which
the working class, and Russias social classes in general, constituted themselves.
Henceforth, in Russia the party preceded the class struggle. From a party that
helped the class struggle to a party without which that struggle could not take
place: such was one path of Vladimir Ulianovs thinking between 1895 and
1899.
In December 1900, he writes that without the party, the labor movement
becomes petty and inevitably becomes bourgeois. In the same text, Social
Democracy is charged with bringing socialist ideas and political awareness to the
mass of the proletariat and the spontaneous workers movement. Without
the party, the proletariat is incapable of rising to the level of conscious class
struggle; without the party, the working class cannot lead a political struggle
that is, it is not a class at all (4: 37375). By early 1901, not only did the party
precede the class struggle, but it was also constitutive of the working class.
When in October 1901 Lenin explicitly stated that conflicts between classes
do not become class struggle (5:322), he was fully focused on the relationship
between the workers party and the peasantry. In a few months his thought
process had taken another step, one that was decisive for his conception of the
party. Let us compare.
In late 1899, he was emphasizing the disadvantages of capitalisms natural
path as well as Russias peculiarities (4: 234, 220); his ideas aimed to destroy
pre-capitalist survivals and give the class struggle in the countryside a more open
and conscious character (4: 236). By FebruaryMarch 1901, it was apparent
that all of Russia bore the mark of aziatchina, and the mission was to carry the
class struggle into the countryside (4: 432). At the end of 1899, a class struggle
that was already underway needed to be made more conscious. In 1901, this
struggle had to be introduced in the first place. This would be the outcome
of the agitation to renew the demands of 1861. In the course of that struggle,
the peasantry would constitute itself as a class and destroy aziatchina, thereby
opening up an opportunity for the proletariat to constitute itself as a class. By
transforming the peasantry into a class, the proletariat itself could become a class.
How could the proletariat, which itself was not yet a class, transform the peasantry into a class? This is where the party came in.
Lenin now awarded the party the status he had earlier attributed to the
working classit was the only group that was free from aziatchina. A new logic
now became possible: if the party took charge of eliminating aziatchina, and
this coincided with the higher interest of all social development / of the country (4: 220, 432, etc.), the party thereby took charge of that development.
That is, the party would take charge of the entire society.
In the Russian Revolutionary Tradition
According to Lenin Rediscovered, Lenins choice of the titleWITBD was directly inspired (563) by Martynov, who, both in September 1901 and in his
polemic with Iskra, used formulas such as what we need to do (chto nuzhno
delat) and how we must act (kak nuzhno deistvovat). It was again Martynov
who wrote, toward the end of 1902, that Social-Democratic activists in Russia,
naturally, are interested first of all in the question: what is to be done and how
is it to be done ? Martynov accused Iskra of giving the wrong answer to the
question What is to be done? that Chernyshevskii had posed. Lenin then supposedly decided not to let Martynov monopolize Chernyshevskiis memory, and
to pay a little homage (564) to the latter by borrowing his title. However, his
choice does not indicate anything specifically Chernyshevskian about Lenins
argument (562). As before with Krichevskii, Lenin Rediscovered tells us that
Lenin let his adversaries dictate to him the choice of his political language.
This is a curious interpretation. The question what is to be done? had
long featured in every discussion.41 Moreover, the texts by Martynov that are
quoted in Lenin Rediscovered appeared after Lenins Where to Begin (May
1901), which begins with the sentence: The question what is to be done [chto
delat] has in recent years placed itself [vydvigaetsia] before Russian Social
Democrats with particular force (5: 5). In itself the origin of the title, which is
discussed on pages 56164, does not merit all this attention. What is difficult
to understand, however, is why Lenin Rediscovered, which offers no analysis of
Chernyshevskiis thought or even a sketchy comparison of the two WITBDs,
In 1878, the anarchist A. Libanov, whom the young Ulianov later visited frequently in
Samara, published his own WITBD; and in 1879, A. I. Koshelev published a 71-page pamphlet
titled Chto zhe teper delat? (V. Bazanov, A. Libanov i ego traktat Chto delat? Russkaia literatura, no. 3 [1963]). <<page nos. for Bazanov?>>
41
165
still takes such pains to reaffirm something that was first imposed by Stalinist
historiography as its interpretation of Leninism.42
I will limit myself to highlighting just one aspect of the conceptual convergence that led both authors to WITBD. We have seen that Chernyshevskii asked
chto delat? after concluding that the entire Russian social fabric was infected with
aziatstvo. He then placed his bets on the special man (Rakhmetov, the prototype of the professional revolutionary) to confront the autocracy. There is thus a
causal link between the reign of aziatstvo and the invention of the special man.
Aziatstvo had prevented the constitution of horizontal solidarities, thus benefiting an entire despotic hierarchy [samodurstvo] that did not govern a hierarchical relationship between one social stratum and the next but instead reduced all
inhabitants of the Kingdom of Darkness [temnoe tsarstvo] to individual servile
subordination. To find a way out, none, positively none of the usual remedies
was effective, there is no natural path leading to change.43 The anti-despotic
project could therefore not base itself on a particular social stratum. Instead, its
bearers could only be those who had escaped individually from the collective liability of samodurstvo. As a devoted reader of Feuerbach, Chernyshevskii worked
out what we might call an anthropology of revolution, or WITBD 1. Lenin, in
turn, concluded that aziatchina ruled everything and social classes had not constituted themselves politically, and he too wrote that simple solutions and natural paths were not enoughto fight autocracy, one had to wager on individuals
who had detached themselves from aziatchina through their awareness and understanding of reality. From the first issue of Iskra (December 1900), he bet on
a party that will attract all that is vital and honest in Russia (4: 377). This was
WITBD 2the anthropology of the revolution was back.
On the basis of a parallel reading of the two WITBDs, I would like to point
out just one divergence. The new people fear (he made them feel somewhat
frightened) the special man, Rakhmetov (he is a different breed), yet he is
necessary. He is the mirror of the autocracy, a monster. He has no private life;
this opposes him to the new people, the prototypes of the new society, who would
suffocate without a private life. The complexity of Rakhmetovs character is anticipated by other works where Chernyshevskii and Dobroliubov warned about the
danger of a revolution creating a new despotism.44 It would be necessary to ensure
that Rakhmetov remain a mere instrument of the new people.45 It seems that
Lenin did not see the difference between the special man and the new man, for
Studying the conceptual links between Leninism and earlier Russian revolutionary ideas was
prohibited from the early 1930s on.
43
N. A. Dobroliubov, Izbrannye filosofskie proizvedeniia, 2: 33.
44
On this subject, see Claudio Ingerflom, Le citoyen impossible: Les racines russes du lninisme
(Paris: Payot, 1988), esp. chaps. 45; translated into Russian as Nesostoiavshiisia grazhdanin:
Russkie korni leninizma (Moscow: Ipol, 1993).
45
N. G. Chernyshevskii, Chto delat? ed. T. I. Ornatskaia and S. A. Reiser (Leningrad:
Izdatelstvo Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1975), 201, 22124, 265, 22930.
42
with him, the latter is subsumed under the former. But then, what kind of society
did he have in mind? What place would it leave for private life? Lenin did not
embrace Chernyshevskiis mistrust of Rakhmetov. This was probably the price of
a life of action, something that Chernyshevskii had rejected and from which he
even urged the young to abstain.46 So Rakhmetov disappearedfor the time being, there was nothing to be done in Russia, as his mission was to come together
with all classes. But he would return to Russia in the near future.47
Which Societys Contours Appear in Lenins WITBD?
The structure conceived by Lenin expected the activists to take up all the antiabsolutist demands of all social strata (5: 366, December 1901). Like Rakhmetov,
the Social Democrats were to go to all classes of the population. This, in my
opinion, is the heart of the structure described in WITBD: one cannot answer
the question what is to be done to bring political knowledge to the workers? with
the response that the majority of praktiki are contented with,48 namely go to the
workers. In order to bring the workers political knowledge, the Social-Democrats
must go to all classes of the population (745, Lenins emphasis; see also 790).
Since going to the workers was no longer enough, a new organization had
to be created that could reach all classes. The party had a twofold function in
this process: (a) to organize the population in the struggle against the autocracy, so that society, once politically awakened by the workers movement under
party leadership, would break with the inertia of aziatchina; (b) to bring the
workers movement into the new political life where it would acquire its class
consciousness (74041, 737). This dual function shaped the partys place in
society: we need our people to be everywhere, in all social strata, these
people are necessary, not only for propaganda and agitation, but even more for
organization (752). It goes without saying that our people continued to be
Social-Democrats (755): the party represents the interests of one class only
(6: 310), yet simultaneously organizes all classes, and actively interven[es] in
every liberal issue while defining [its] own, Social Democratic, attitude to that
issue (759, Lenins emphasis). The word liberal described the entire social
spectrum that was non-proletarian but nonetheless subject to the partys watchful eye. In other words, the entire population was to be organized according to
the partys interests.49
A. I. Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 30 vols. (Moscow: Izdatelstvo Akademiia nauk SSSR,
195465), 27, pt. 1: 164.
47
Chernyshevskii, Chto delat? 21314.
48
The phrase not to mention those praktiki who are inclined to economism is missing at this
point in Lenin Rediscovereds version (6: 79).
49
We must take upon ourselves the task of organizing an all-sided political struggle under the
guidance of our party so that as much help as possible can be given and will be given to that
struggle and to that party by each and every oppositional stratum (751, Lenins emphasis).
46
167
These classes that were to constitute themselves were expected, in a brief

period of time, to race through the long cycle completed by their Western
counterparts. By constituting themselves, they would set in motion the class
struggle that would destroy aziatchina. The end of aziatchina, however, would
also mean the end of these classes progressive role. After that, they would be
measured by the yardstick of socialism. Except for the working class, they were
destined to disappearin short orderthe peasantry by the action of capitalism, the bourgeoisie by that of the proletariat. The party bestowed on itself the
power to constitute classes, but convinced as it was of possessing the science of
social development, it also bestowed on itself the power to determine what place
they were to have in Russia and for how long. Here we can appreciate the full
magnitude of Lenins project: it did not recognize an autonomous existence for the
social classes.
Lenin, Freedom, and the USSR
According to Lenin Rediscovered, the centrality of political freedom in Lenins
platform makes it impossible to draw a direct link between WITBD and
Stalinism (20). The opposition between WITBDs arguments about democracy and Stalinist tyranny (476) recalls the originally Trotskyite thesis about
the good Lenin/evil Stalin. This idealization causes a significant distortion of
Lenins position in 1902apparent, for instance, when Lenin Rediscovered summarizes Lenins view of peasant interests (15355). Convinced that modern
economic development is ending the possibility of independent small-scale production, Lenin supposedly foresaw that the loss of independence can take
place in three different contexts. According to Lenin Rediscovered, the best
context for small producers like the peasants would be a socialist society under
proletarian class rule. In this case, the process of losing independence will take
place voluntarily and without victimization (153, emphasis mine).
This idyllic best context exists only in Lenin Rediscovered. None of
Lenins writings supports it. Quite the contrary, this description ignores what
Lenin wrote, a few days after finishing WITBD, in an exchange with Plekhanov
and Zasulich: If we really knew positively that the petty bourgeoisie would
support the proletariat in the accomplishment of its (the proletariats) revolution, it would be pointless to speak of a dictatorship, for we would then be
fully guaranteed so overwhelmingly a majority that we could get on very well
without a dictatorship. He added that in all cases, the idea that the proletariat
represented all laboring strata meant that we invite (and compel) all to abandon their own point of view and rally to ours, and then went on: the more we
exhibit kindness toward petty producers (e.g., the peasants) in the practical
part of our program, the stricter we must be toward these untrustworthy and
two-faced social elements in the part of our program that deals with principles
and not retreat by one iota from our point of viewthen [we can say to the
peasants:] here, you can have all manner of kindness, and if you want to reject it, well, dont blame us. Then under our dictatorship we will say to ourselves:
theres no use wasting words where its power that we need to use (6: 22931; only
the last sentence is my emphasis). Vera Zasulich grasped immediately what he
meant, and her retort was brief: [Do that] to millions, huh? Just try. [Nad millionami-to? Poprobui-ka.]50 As we can see, it was nowhere in Lenins plans that
under proletarian class rule the process of losing independence would affect
the peasants without victimization. Quite the opposite was true.
Universal access to the political arenathe democratic and anti-autocratic
goal par excellence that lay at the heart of the political project of WITBD was
burdened from the beginning by the partys other function, that of assigning
to each class its place and role in history, a function that figures as the democratic projects perennial counterpart, something like a hidden autocratic flaw
inside the mechanism devised to smash the autocracy. This does not mean that
WITBD formed a blueprint for the Soviet system. But the hidden flaw made
WITBD part of a political culture that was larger than its author. Tsarism in
the 19th century, Lenin, and the Soviets all shared a belief in the possibility of
a regime that could prevent society from acquiring autonomy. Whether that
regime was real or merely imagined, it tried to use its hostility to politics as a
means of self-preservation. The ideological justifications varied divine providence in one case, the laws of social development in the other. But both were
transcendent because they operated outside social praxis. Modern politics by
contrast, ever since its founding by Machiavelli, has been immanent. Of course,
tsarism had its 1905, and the Soviet regime had 1991. But neither the universalization of politics in the former case nor its rediscovery in the latter was part
of their plans.
Lenin Rediscovered in Historiographical Context
The main objectives that one identifies in reading Lenin Rediscovered reconstructing Lenins ideological ties with his Russian interlocutors and with
German Marxism, and putting an end to historiographical myths constitute
amply justified research aims and a commendable aspiration. Lenin Rediscovered
no doubt helps better identify the elements of Marxism held in common by
the young Lenin and the SPD. The pages on the debates surrounding WITBD
provide useful avenues for studying Lenins position among Russian Social
Democrats. Lenin Rediscovered corrects certain chronic errorsfor instance, the
expression party of a new type, which we all thought was Lenins, turns out
to have been invented by historians. Nevertheless, the theoretical premises, the
methods of analysis, the corpus of texts that were chosen, and the reliance on
asking old questions, among other things, have the cumulative effect that Lenin
50
Leninskii sbornik, 2: 8083, Lenins emphasis.
169
Rediscovered inadvertently becomes part of the very chain of interpretation that

it was meant to break.
One part of the criticism that Lenin Rediscovered directs against the textbook interpretation is a worthy effort at restoring the historical truth. It is
unfortunate, however, that virtually the entire academic literature has been unjustly reduced to the textbook interpretation. Lenin Rediscovered would have
gained much by broadening its historiographic base, taking greater advantage of
interpretive advances, and not focusing its discussion on the most superficial or
obviously erroneous accounts. In this sense, a summation of the historiography
on Lenin remains to be constructed.
Translated by Orlando Garcia-Valverde (ogarde@ice.co.cr)
Centre dtudes des mondes russe, caucasien, et centre-europen
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
44, rue de lAmiral Mouchez
75014 Paris
France
c.ingerflom@ssees.ucl.ac.uk

Ingerflom On Lih, Lenin Rediscovered

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Review Article

Lenin Rediscovered, or Lenin Redisguised?

Lars T. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? in Context (with a new

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lenin rediscovered, or lenin redisguised?

citations? Or were these polemics among activists that expressed themselves

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lenin rediscovered, or lenin redisguised?

of a mans thinking as development10 i.e., something that unfoldsand

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lenin rediscovered, or lenin redisguised?

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lenin rediscovered, or lenin redisguised?

Russian Concepts for Imagining Russia

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lenin rediscovered, or lenin redisguised?

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lenin rediscovered, or lenin redisguised?

By FebruaryMarch 1901, however, he was writing: We have seen that in

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Lenin Questions the Spontaneity of Russian Capitalism

On the translation of stikhiinost/nii into English, see Lenin Rediscovered, 61828.

lenin rediscovered, or lenin redisguised?

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a political struggle against the bourgeoisiethere are no politically ruling classes;

lenin rediscovered, or lenin redisguised?

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lenin rediscovered, or lenin redisguised?

struggle. This was a tred-unionist struggle but not yet a Social-Democratic

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lenin rediscovered, or lenin redisguised?

tivity of that institution (763). Lenin Rediscovered inverts this relationship.38

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lenin rediscovered, or lenin redisguised?

What to do about this excruciating slowness? What this image-filled

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lenin rediscovered, or lenin redisguised?

movement. That assistance consisted in the triumph of the values of bourgeois

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lenin rediscovered, or lenin redisguised?

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lenin rediscovered, or lenin redisguised?

These classes that were to constitute themselves were expected, in a brief

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Leninskii sbornik, 2: 8083, Lenins emphasis.

lenin rediscovered, or lenin redisguised?

Rediscovered inadvertently becomes part of the very chain of interpretation that

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