pean states was caused by the need of advanced
Western countries to find new profitable markets
for investment. Lenin elaborated and went
further. Imperialism, he wrote, was the last stage
of capitalism. It postponed the fulfilment of
Marx’s prophecy. Because the Asiatic and African
labourer was cruelly exploited, employers could
afford to pay their European workers more. But
the extension of the capitalist world could only
postpone, not avert, its collapse. The proletariat
must steel itself for the ultimate takeover and not
compromise. The class struggle, as Marx taught,
was the driving force of historical evolution.
Anything that lessened the class struggle was
treachery against the proletariat.
Lenin’s views were so extreme, ran so much
counter to the world in which he lived, that the
majority of socialists ridiculed him when they were
not accusing him of seeking to divide the social-
ist movement. Those who were not socialists did
not take him seriously. His following, even among
Russian socialists right up to the revolution of
November 1917, was only a minority one.
This fanatical believer in the victory of the pro-
letariat and castigator of bourgeois capitalist
society and its intelligentsia of professors, lawyers
and administrators had, himself, been born into
the strata of society he virulently condemned.
More important privileges had given him the
education and freedom indispensable to his early
success. The founder of communism indubitably
sprang from the Russian tsarist middle class, to
the embarrassment of some of his Soviet biogra-
phers. His real name was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov.
He assumed the name of Lenin later to confuse
the tsarist police. He was born in 1870. His
mother was the daughter of a retired doctor who
had become a small landowner. His father exem-
plified success and social mobility in nineteenth-
century Russia: he had made his way from humble
origins to the post of provincial director of
schools, a position in the Russian civil service enti-
tling him to be addressed ‘Excellency’. Lenin was
not ‘of the people’.
Lenin was only sixteen when his father sud-
denly died. A year later an unnatural tragedy
blighted family life. The eldest son of this emi-
nently respectable family, Alexander, a student in
St Petersburg, had become involved in a terrorist
conspiracy to assassinate the tsar. Apprehended,
he was tried and hanged. Lenin now began to
study and enquire into his brother’s beliefs and
actions, which were a naive and violent response
to autocracy in the tradition of Russian terrorism.
But in Russia there was not yet guilt by associa-
tion. The family was treated with consideration.
Lenin was accepted to study law in the University
at Kazan. However, he was soon involved in
student protests and was expelled. For three years
he read and studied and became engrossed in the
radical writings of his time.
It was during this period that he first discov-
ered in Karl Marx’s writings a revolutionary phi-
losophy and a goal which, according to Marx, was
a scientific certainty. He spent his life working out
the right policies and tactics for Marxists to follow
in order to realise the goals of the proletarian rev-
olution. Unlike many other socialists, his faith in
Marx’s prediction was absolute, akin to that fol-
lowing a religious revelation. This faith and cer-
tainty gave him strength, but Lenin saw no point
in martyrdom. His brother’s gesture had been
heroic but useless. The leader must preserve
himself and avoid danger. It was an aspect of
Lenin’s ice-cold rationality despite his attacks on
the intelligentsia – that he ignored taunts that he
sent others into danger while he himself enjoyed
domesticity and safety abroad in London, Geneva
and Zurich.
A remarkable feature of tsarist Russia at this
time is that despite police surveillance of political
suspects – and Lenin was undoubtedly a suspect
- no political opponent was condemned for his
thoughts, as later in communist countries, but
only for his deeds. Even then punishment by later
standards was frequently lenient. The death
penalty was limited to those involved in assassi-
nation, political murders or plotting such
murders. If sentenced to dreaded fortress impris-
onment a man’s health could be broken. The
lesser sentence of exile to Siberia bears no rela-
tionship to the labour camps of Stalin’s Russia.
The inhospitable climate was a hardship but there
was no maltreatment. Lenin, for instance, when
later on he was sentenced, was free to live in a
comfortable household and to study and read.
1
WAR AND REVOLUTION IN THE EAST, 1917 101
