From Revolutionary To “Harmless Icon”

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31083, 11 June 1966, Page 4

From Revolutionary To “Harmless Icon”

[Reviewed b® N.H.)

Lenin: The Compulsive Revolutionary. By Stefan T. Possony. Alien and Unwin. 478 pp. Bibliography and Index.

The life of Lenin, ending as it did in the triumph of his revolutionary techniques and the failure of his social ideals, has exercised a unique fascination on scholars and biographers since the death of this first “Communist Tsar” in January 1924. Yet the presentation of Lenin’s life is rendered difficult both by the nature of that life and the subsequent growth of the political system it founded. Lenin once predicted his own fate when he noted that great revolutionaries after death “are often transformed into harmless icons.” For 30 years Stalin deliberately and skilfully fashioned a myth around Lenin and even today the Russian government is reluctant to release the kind of material necessary for a comprehensive life of Lenin. Second, many of Lenin's operations were of an ultrasecret and conspiratorial

nature. Either no record of them exists, or the reports are fragmentary, conflicting and open to various interpretations.

Thus, the definitive biography of Lenin has yet to be written. Previous attempts by Louis Fischer and David Shub, and the account of I.enin's early years in Bertram Wolfe’s “Three Who Made a Revolution,” do no more than point the way. Mr Possony's new biography, in spite of its claim to be based on much new material, hardly equals these predecessors. The “new material” is largely drawn from German military and diplomatic archives. It has the charm of novelty but the author’s emphasis on it gives an unbalanced tone to his whole work. He repeatedly states that he is NOT making Lenin out to be a conscious German agent, and that Lenin and the German General Staff tried to use each other for different

and conflicting ends. But the detailed attention given to dubious financial sources of the pre-revolutionary Bolshevik Party, and to Lenin's undoubted contacts with the Germans (still far from adequately analysed) give the impression that these elements are the most important of all. Yet this was the time when Lenin’s rethinking of his ideological position was surely the overriding factor in his life.

Doubtless Mr Possony’s attention to the impure motives and actions of the Bolshevik “idealists” will be welcomed in the United States where this work was written, but what it really suggests is that a thorough examination of the financial machinations of all the Russian revolutionary parties up to 1917 is needed to clarify once and for all the degree of Lenin’s complicity and participation in what were undoubtedly some of the greatest financial swindles of the 20th century. Of the growth of Lenin’s ideas on the technique of revolution and its ideological justification, Mr Possony has little new to say, though he does retell the tale with vigour and clarity, and his emphasis on the role of various women in Lenin’s life at crucial periods repays careful consideration. At the high points of his tale Mr Possony is a superb raconteur, as in his account of Lenin setting out to lead the Bolshevik coup in St. Petersburg, disguised by a bandage around his face because he had “toothache” and taking a tram from his mistress's apartment to the Bolshevik insurrectionary headquarters. But Mr Possony’s bias then lets him down again. The coup was, as he says, the work of a relatively: few armed Red Guards. But these were not “mainly composed of Chinese labourers, released prisoners of war and unemployed Letts.” The implication that the revolution was a foreign mercenary affair (paid for by the Germans) is unfair to Lenin’s admitted genius as a practitioner of revolution in a violently unstable situation.

Mr Possony’s real and considerable contribution to our understanding of the Lenin legend comes only in the last few chapters where, expanding his sub-title “the compulsive revolutionary,” he attempts a careful and convincing psychological analysis of his subject, paying particular attention to Lenin’s growing disillusion with his own work during the last year of his life when, paralysed by a series of strokes, he could only watch in horror and in silence as Stalin proceeded to consolidate himself by converting the dynamic revolution into a bureaucratic instrument of oppression. Lenin, the author suggests, was a rare psychological phenomenon. a dualistic “schizoid and cyclothymic” personality type. “Contrary to the accepted theory that Lenin centred himself around his

“will to power,” Lenin in a very basic sense was a cerebral being and over-valued ideas formed the core of his integration. . . . The overvaluation of a simple myth—complete redemption through violent revolution—constricted his human existence.” This book's account of Lenin’s relations with Stalin in his last years, and particularly of Stalin’s possible attempts to murder the dying leader, are probably the most complete yet available. Mr Possony concludes there was no murder attempt by Stalin, at least in the usually accepted meaning of the word. The author carefully considers “medical murder”—killing by wrong or inadequate treatment—but concludes that so many doctors were involved, including foreign specialists, that this could not have been kept a secret. But he does show that Stalin had an obsession with this technique of murder disguised as medical treatment, that he may have attempted it on his rival Trotsky as Lenin was dying, that he may have made an attempt on Lenin’s wife and even on his own wife, and that Stalin thought himself the victim of such a “doctor’s plot” as he approached death in 1953.

Instead, Mr Possony concludes, all the various elements of suspicion point to assassination by mental and psychological intervention by Stalin to hasten Lenin’s physical decline. The fears which Stalin inspired in Lenin that “someone” was trying to kill him were in fact part of this personal “psychological warfare.” Stalin’s method also included verbal attacks on Lenin’s policy and personal life, threats against his family, and a deliberate I refusal to ease the very real burden of State carried by the sick leader. When Lenin's wife, Krupskaya, tried to moderate Stalin’s attack she was told by him that “no-one who infects her husband with syphilis has the right to intervene.” And the author’s plausible, if melodramatic conclusion is: “Stalin was gaining the power that was slipping from Lenin’s faltering hands. Lonely, helpless, abandoned, even exposed to ridicule; and with his dreams shattered, Lenin was gripped by fear and despair. Lenin knew only too well that Stalin was a killer and that no-one was able or willing to protect the crippled dictator. The black art which Stalin practised against Lenin was beyond legal punishment. This does not mean that Stalin was innocent. It merely means that Lenin was the victim of a perfect crime.”