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International Socialism, June 1973

 

Tirril Harris

The Young Lenin

 

From International Socialism (1st series), No.59, June 1973, p.24.
Transcribed & marked up by by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

 

The Young Lenin
Leon Trotsky
David & Charles, £2.95

Anyone who has had the embarrassment of reading Trotsky’s 1924 Notes on Lenin will find The Young Lenin a welcome relief. Although Trotsky had planned a biography of Lenin since before 1929, it was not until 1933 when he was in France (between Prinkipo and Norway) that he could settle down to it; and even then he was compelled by financial pressure to postpone the second part until he had completed a life of Stalin.

The nine years since Lenin’s death had allowed Trotsky to work through the cloying idealisation of his mourning period. His attitude then was complicated by his being a relative newcomer among the other party mourners; nor was it helped by the complex nature of his earlier relationship with Lenin in the years 1903-1917 when each had enjoyed the full measure of the other’s revolutionary expletives.

By 1933 it had become possible for Trotsky to admit publicly Lenin’s psychological warts, allowing his writing to become proper biography rather than a paean of devotion. He contrasts Vladimir with his elder brother Alexander whose ‘inability to lie ... created a psychic barrier between him and his younger brother, who was far more elastic, more opportunistic in questions of personal morals’.

He tells us that Lenin’s ‘attitude toward the same people changed radically depending on whether at a given moment they were on his side or against him’, though he is quick to qualify any suggestion of criticism: ‘in such "falling in love" and the period of hostility that succeeded it there was not a trace of superficiality, whim or vanity’.

This willingness to admit contradictions in Lenin’s character serves to set Trotsky apart from other contemporary biographers in the account he gives of Lenin’s political development. In fact he uses this difference as a recurrent polemical theme in his characteristic fashion.

He ridicules the stereotyped version of the 14 year old Ilyich ‘taking off his cross and throwing it in the garbage’ (sic) and reconstructs his rejection of religion in a more realistic way from family letters and diaries. He charts Lenin’s course towards Marxism in a similar way, exposing the ‘crude anachronisms’ of the official biographers who tended to represent it as an early and simple choice between terror and Marxism.

Supposedly the conversion was due to his ‘genius’ when faced with the execution of his elder brother for conspiracy in 1887: (‘Even Krupskaya was taken in by the notion of Lenin as a Marxist in 1887’ p.117). Trotsky carefully considers the opportunities for Marxist development that Lenin had in the few years after 1887; his chance to read, for example, Plekhanov’s Our Disagreements and the publications of the Emancipation of Labour Group is unlikely to have occurred earlier than 1891.

Trotsky also carefully examines Lenin’s relationships with members of the People’s Will when he was living in Samara (1889-1893). This gives some idea of how little hard evidence Trotsky had, and how much of the book is intelligent conjecture. His most prized piece of evidence is a 1921 Party questionnaire in which Lenin himself indicated the start of his revolutionary activities as late as ‘1892-3. Samara. Illegal groups of Social Democrats.’

Unfortunately this is just where the biography stops, Lenin’s 23rd year when he took wing for St. Petersburg from Samara. Trotsky’s account is in the tradition of his best historical writing, the exact balance of attention to individual personality and cultural context conveyed in vivid prose, but he has only examined a chrysalis Ilyich. We are still awaiting the account of the dragon-fly.

 
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