Lenin, the Anarchist? A Constructive Misinterpretation

Lenin, the Anarchist?A Constructive Misinterpretation William Whitham (bio) V. I. Lenin's "thunder-like speech" to Petrograd Bolsheviks on 3 April 1917 "startled and amazed not only me, a heretic who had accidentally dropped in, but all the true believers," remembered Nikolai Sukhanov. The idea of a government of soviets struck "every listener with any experience in political theory" as "a purely anarchist schema," as "a totality of local authority, like the absence of any state in general, like a schema of 'free' (independent) workers' communes." The "April Theses"—advocating a "commune state" and the abolition of the army, police, and bureaucracy—met "protests and exclamations of outrage" from Social Democrats.1 Iosif Gol´denberg declared Lenin an "anarchist" and "the heir of [Mikhail] Bakunin."2 "The pseudo-revolutionary tactics of Lenin are the natural offspring of the pseudo-revolutionary tactics of Bakunin," wrote Georgii Plekhanov in June 1917.3 In January 1918, Iulii Martov argued that Lenin "rehashed the old ideas of Bakunin." The following year, Pavel Aksel´rod called Bolshevism "a savage and pernicious throwback to Bakuninism." In 1924, Mensheviks may have placed a funeral wreath on Lenin's coffin that identified him as "the most outstanding Bakuninist among Marxists."4 "It is well known, I suppose," [End Page 791] mused Mark Aldanov in his 1919 Lenin biography, "that no worse insult could have been offered a Russian Social-Democrat than to call him an anarchist and compare him to Bakunin."5 Anarchists described Lenin similarly, but to praise him. Anatolii Gorelik commented favorably on Lenin's Political Parties in Russia (April 1917) and on State and Revolution (1918), "where he reveals and proves that the Bolsheviks are more anarchist than the anarchists themselves. Many other Bolsheviks expressed themselves the same way."6 Vsevolod "Voline" Eikhenbaum noted "the perfect parallelism between [Lenin's] ideas and those of the Anarchists, except the idea of the State and of Power." Bolshevik activists used "watchwords that, until then, were precisely characteristic of anarchism," including demands for peace, land, and workers' control.7 They initially adopted "certain fundamental principles and methods of Anarchist Communism"—including direct action, antiparliamentarism, soviet democracy, and expropriation—ventured a group of Moscow anarchists in June 1921.8 Grigorii Maksimov went farther. "Lenin, in demanding the abolition of the army, police and officialdom impressed the workers, peasants and soldiers with the idea that a Soviet Republic is an Anarchist Federation of many thousands of Communes-Soviets scattered throughout the vast expanses of Russia, and that this Republic is a full democracy, developed to its logical end—the extinction of the State." The Bolsheviks abandoned "orthodox Marxism" for "Anarchist slogans and methods," Maksimov argued, and "were indeed revolutionists and Anarchists of a sort."9 Upon Lenin's death, Apollon Karelin and other secretaries of the All-Russian Anarcho-Communist Federation eulogized a "great revolutionary."10 The Bolsheviks, Karelin had argued in December 1918, were "in a sense preparing the way for anarchism."11 [End Page 792] If historians have long known that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were briefly seen as anarchists, few have explored how or why this mattered—if it did. Though anarchists were responsible for most of the estimated 17,000 casualties of terrorism in the Russian Empire in 1901–16, they hardly possessed a coherent movement or much ideological salience.12 Of course, Lenin and top Bolsheviks never tired of saying that they were not anarchists. Anarchism meant petit-bourgeois individualism, "in direct opposition to socialism," Lenin wrote in November 1905.13 Lars T. Lih's bracing reinterpretation of Lenin downplays insurrectionism, visions of soviet democracy, and State and Revolution, a text "irrelevant to the events of the previous year." The tactics advocated by Karl Kautsky before 1914—namely, a worker-peasant alliance in Russia and nonagreement with "bourgeois" parties—"led to [the Bolsheviks'] victory in October and the ensuing civil war."14 For Lih, the late Lenin was "a European Social Democrat of Russian origin" (a portrait rejected by many European social democrats). That "Lenin advanced the semi-anarchist slogan of 'smash the state!'" in 1917 is "a common misunderstanding" and "distortion."15 Why was it common? How might it have been consequential or...