Finnish radicals and the Russian revolutionary movement, 1899–1907

Despite the mountains of attention that have been heaped upon the his? tory of Vladimir Lenin's views of consciousness and spontaneity, new interpretations and explanations never fail to emerge. This latest interpre? tation, by Anna Krylova, is surely one of the more thoughtful approaches to appear in recent years. It is also provocative, in the best sense, and cer? tain to invite more commentaries beyond the two that are presented here. Let us begin by asking just what problem needs to be addressed? Looked at broadly, the challenge Lenin repeatedly confronted around 1900 was no different from that faced by any dedicated member of the intelligentsia, indeed by any educated person, with strong moral, ethical, and political convictions. Convinced of the value and virtue of his own complex ideas, yet aware that they were not shared by the vast majority of the population, Lenin had no choice but to begin by seeking a strategy or program that would further their wider dissemination. In this respect he was no different from, say, Lev Tolstoi, who also asked "what is to be done" (Tak chto zhe nam delat'? 1886), though Tolstoi's solution was, in a sense, to ask people to rid themselves of the habit of doing anything at all, or at least anything worldly. No less self-righteous and dogmatic in his convic? tions than Lenin and no less of an intelligent, Tolstoi also shared Lenin's sense of urgency, antipathy to gradualism, and impatient insistence that people follow his lead and act here and now, though his wish was that they "act" by not acting?ne-delanie?except in accord with their spiritual needs. (To this one might add another vision Tolstoi shared with Lenin? a world without money and private property.) Accepting people as they were and following their lead (terrible "tailism," to Lenin) was equally unacceptable to both men. Instead, they strove to close the gap between their own worldviews (consciousness to Lenin, spirituality to Tolstoi), their sense of themselves as humanity's conscience in absentia?whether mediated by class or faith, by Marxism or Christianity?and the views of their still-not-conscious latent followers. Both men were tortured by the fear that mankind might fail to rise to their standards in the absence of their own heroic, almost superhuman efforts, and both struggled mightily, with pen and, in Lenin's case, with sword to convince both their edu? cated peers and the ignorant (temnyi) mass to follow their leads. Less heroically and no doubt less brazenly, all of us, to the extent that we seriously value our own special ideas about the world, are daily faced with similar challenges. But if the Russian intelligentsia, and perhaps all intellectuals, have faced such challenges, there can be no doubt that the urge to close this gap takes on special features when the idea to be disseminated entails a fundamental change in the order of things. In the specific case of Lenin, two major sources of inspiration were at play. On the one hand, he was an heir to the early Russian populists (as was Tolstoi, though more indirectly). From the 1870s on, those who shared that heritage were acutely

A Paradigm Lost? Response to Anna Krylova

http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-322-94248-7_17.pdf

Säuberungsriten in Virtuosengemeinschaften

Lenin in der russischen Sozialdemokratie : die Arbeiterbewegung im Zarenreich als Organisationsproblem der revolutionären Intelligenz, 1890-1903

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Lenin in der russischen Sozialdemokratie : die Arbeiterbewegung im Zarenreich als Organisationsproblem der revolutionären Intelligenz, 1890-1903

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Finnish radicals and the Russian revolutionary movement, 1899–1907

A Paradigm Lost? Response to Anna Krylova

Säuberungsriten in Virtuosengemeinschaften