The Lenin question remains in Russia's agenda

By Robert Service

LONDON: Vladimir Putin, the new Russian leader, combines the old and the modern in his political style. His presidential campaign was fought with western opinion polls and television advertising, yet he also acted as both a tsar and a commissar -- when Chechnya refused to come to heel, he sent in the army to raze Grozny.

Like the communist leaders, he burnishes his image as a man of action without concern for democracy, telling regional politicians to produce a majority for him or face dire consequences, and surrounding himself with friends from his KGB days.

And like Lenin in 1917, Putin achieved supremacy while just beginning to learn to make a public speech with confidence.

So the Lenin question has not left the Russian political agenda. Among Putin's few statements in his campaign was the promise to remove Lenin's body from the mausoleum on Red Square and bury it properly.

Nine years of de-communisation have lowered Lenin's prestige -- he now comes only third, after Jesus Christ and Peter the Great, as the historical figure most admired by Russian people.

Yet even many who dislike communism are still in his grasp. Charismatic Lenin founded the Communist party. He created the October Revolution and invented a new state -- one party, one ideology -- which became the model for states in eastern Europe, China and elsewhere.

Lenin's works of Marxist theory were extremely influential. After his death, his ideas were codified as Marxism-Leninism, and his corpse was displayed in the mausoleum, where it is still given a monthly bath in formaldehyde.

He has been a god to some, a devil to others. In the Soviet period, the Lenin papers were locked in an inaccessible vault constructed to withstand an American nuclear attack on Moscow.

The nature of Lenin's personality remained a mystery. Only since 1991 has it been permitted to poke around in these papers, and the picture they disclose is remarkably different from his image both in the west and in Russia.

He used to be portrayed as a political machine without a personality, supposedly so absorbed in the theory and politics of Marxism that nothing -- family, intellectual diversion or even leisure -- existed for him.

The Lenin papers tell a more complicated story. Although he did suppress aspects of his personality, he never got rid of basic emotions, and these, compacted at the core of his personality, reinforced the extraordinary power of his outward behavior.

His passionate nature made him difficult to live with. His family had to make him promise not to talk about politics on holiday.

In his years of power, he threatened to put colleagues "on bread and water in prison" for failing to implement the economic policy. He was probably being rhetorical, but nobody could be quite sure.

Lenin was also a revolutionary romantic. He carried photographs of Karl Marx, and bought a postcard of Emile Zola when the French writer in 1898 took up the cause of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army captain convicted of betraying French secrets to the Germans.

He was desperate to conserve himself for the inevitable great dawn of revolution, and felt meant for a special destiny.

His recurrent fear was that his health would not last long enough to do the job. He was always troubled by insomnia and ulcers and had heart attacks long before his final illness. His nerves played him up.

Around 1900, a Swiss doctor gave him the terrible diagnosis: "It's the brain." Already impatient, Lenin lived the rest of his life as if his personal clock were ticking quickly towards midnight.

As his wife Nadya and his sisters, Anna and Maria, make clear in previously censored parts of their memoirs, he depended on their willingness to cosset him when he was depressed.

He was cunning in playing them off against each other so that they would carry out his errands uncomplainingly. Nadya even put up with his dalliance with the Marxist activist and feminist Inessa Armand, who was captivated by him.

When he broke with her before the World War I, she pleaded: "At the moment I could manage without the kisses: just to see you and talk with you sometimes would be a pleasure -- and this could do no one any harm."

Lenin's family also explains much. His ancestry included Jewish, Swedish and German forebears. He may also have had a Kalmyk grandfather. This is a different descent from that claimed for him by Russian nationalists (who argue that his background explains why he was, allegedly, so anti-Russian).

His family had come in from the social and ethnic margins of the Russian empire. His school-inspector father and his pianist mother wanted to integrate in the professional elite of the new Russia.

As he grew up, Lenin had no time for the old Russia of villages and Christianity. In 1891, when famine and disease plagued his native Volga region, his sister Anna did relief work. Lenin shocked her by saying this was a waste of energy.

The peasantry's plight resulted from capitalism and Anna's charitable work simply alleviated the symptoms without curing the disease.

Lenin believed passionately in modernity: industry, urbanism, education and science. When his family was ostracized after his elder brother was executed in 1887 for trying to assassinate the tsar, Lenin concentrated the whole force of his being into the cause of revolution.

Marxism was his preferred doctrine and he owned up to being "in love" with Karl Marx. Ideology meant more to him than women. But privately, he drew on other influences.

Machiavelli and Darwin had hugely impressed him. So, too, had the ideas of the Orthodox Church priest Father Gapon, who led the procession to the Winter Palace on Bloody Sunday in January 1905.

He closeted himself for days with Gapon, and from him developed the idea of expropriating the entire property of the landed gentry. Lenin sincerely believed in Marxism, but he adjusted it much more audaciously than he pretended.

When I first started writing about Lenin in the early 1980s, the trickiest task was to explain how Lenin's ideas were connected with his political activity.

Some writers contended that his ideas predetermined the activity, others that the ideas were a disguise for a cynical desire for power. My own position was that neither of these contentions was true, but that Lenin was a man of ideological commitment who nevertheless altered his ideas to suit changing circumstances and new opportunities and threats -- and not always for the reasons he gave in public.

He had to manage opinion among his associates, his party and society. Sometimes he spoke straight and sometimes he fudged.

He genuinely believed humanity's future lay with communism and the creation of a world without political or economic oppression. But he also thought this required a most ruthless temporary class dictatorship. He needed to get power before he could explain his strategy to supporters among the workers and even inside his party.

But Lenin's ideas and activity are just two corners of a triangle. The third is his emotional life, and now that the archives are available, we can work out the nature of the triangular relationship.

Lenin was not the robotic politician of legend. He was a flesh-and-blood, over-confident, impatient, brilliant, charming and often troubled revolutionary. His story is incomplete until we take the entire triangle into account.

Lenin was 47 before he gained power. For most of his adulthood, he had been an emigre. He might easily have given up and become the provincial lawyer he had trained to be in the 1890s, before he turned to revolutionary activism.

But he was sustained by internal drives, and although he did not talk about them, they were constant and powerful.

What also emerges from the archives is a sense of the oneness of Lenin. It is sometimes claimed that, as he lay dying, he moderated his dictatorial doctrines.

This is supposed to be proved by his call for the removal of Stalin from the party general secretaryship. But the evidence suggests instead that Lenin died a Leninist. Which is to say that he remained an idealist, but this meant to him staying true to the need for revolutionary persecution.

Lenin's deathbed disagreements with Stalin were about bureaucratic matters that did not touch on the fundamentals of the one-party state.

We can now also see that Lenin's final illness caused him to behave bizarrely in the two years before his death in 1924. When Lenin spoke to his doctor, Liveri Darkevich, he admitted to thinking that he might be going clinically mad. A series of "obsessions" were unhinging him.

Darkevich heard him pour his heart out: "A night doomed to insomnia is a truly terrible thing when you have to be ready in the morning for work, work, work without end." This tiny episode, which happened when Lenin swung between anger and despair, makes it easier to understand why Stalin managed to survive the criticisms made by Lenin. The other central party leaders had reason to think that Lenin's judgment was no longer to be trusted.

Lenin had an enormous impact but he had needed equally enormous luck to make that impact. Without World War I, Russia would not have plunged into military defeat, economic collapse and administrative disintegration in 1917.

Without a radicalized intelligentsia and working class, Lenin would have had few followers and would never have been able to gain power. He made the most of these extraordinary opportunities.

Once he had power, he let nothing stand in the way of his keeping it. His successors maintained the basic system of communist rule until Gorbachev dismantled it in the late 1980s.

Lenin's influence has declined since the fall of the Soviet Union. Marxism-Leninism is ignored even by the Russian Communist party. But many of the social and institutional arrangements of Lenin's regime have yet to be eliminated; the thinking of the Russian people was not changed overnight by the abolition of the USSR; and in China and Cuba he remains a secular saint. The world still lives in his shadow.