Free Lenin: A Revolutionary Life by Christopher Read

distance and climate pushed the costs of production above those of more fortunate countries. Whether or not that was the case, populists believed that Russia could, possibly, leap straight from decaying feudalism to socialism.
    For social democrats, as they increasingly began to call themselves, these ideas were anathema. Peasants were not the building blocks of the future, they were a transitional hangover from the past. They may not have been capitalist proprietors but, it was argued, their aspirations were precisely to become such. Rather it was workers who were the bedrock of future socialism. Populist optimism also violated one of the basic assumptions of social democrats. Marx, they argued, had laid down a theory of stages. Primitive communism gave way to property-owning societies of which the most recent were feudalism and capitalism. The one developed into the other and capitalism would develop into socialism and, at the end of history, into communism. The stages were clearly defined and, all social democrats believed, central to Marx’s theory.
    Lenin, as we have seen, cut his social-democratic teeth on defending these assumptions. The seminal work, which Lenin admired deeply, was Plekhanov’s Our Differences which, as its title suggested, marked out the principles of social democracy as opposed to those of populism. In his earliest writings the young Lenin did little more than develop Plekhanov’s insights.
    However, it was during his Siberian exile that Lenin focused on the question in greater detail. In an article, evocatively entitled ‘The Heritage We Renounce’, written in 1898, Lenin summarized his position. First and foremost he had absolutely no time for populist sentimentality about the life of the peasants. In no way was rural society to be idealized. For Lenin, peasants were the victims of unremitting repression by landowners and state. They were poor, ignorant and often lived short, brutish lives curtailed by alcohol and domestic violence. They were not ‘noble savages’ or homespun philosophers as depicted by Tolstoy. Their way of life was artificially kept in the past by oppressive legislation. Emancipation, he argued, had worsened their condition. The commune was not an emanation of their collectivist spirit, it was an alien and inefficient body imposed on them by the state. In Lenin’s words: ‘the Narodnik [populist] falls so low that he even welcomes the police rule forbidding the peasant to sell his land. … Here the Narodnik quite definitely “renounces the heritage”, becomes a reactionary. … For the “peasant” who lives chiefly from the sale of his labour-power, being tied to his allotment and commune is an enormous restriction on his economic activity.’ [SW 1 77] The peasants’ future lay in casting off the shackles of feudalism and allowing rural society to develop towards capitalism. For Lenin, the inner instincts of the peasantry were directed towards becoming small-scale individual proprietors, not socialists. Those who did not succeed in making the transition would fall into an ever-increasing class of agricultural labourers who would be the basis of a rural proletariat, the natural ally of the urban proletariat. This was the class that would provide a foundation for socialism, not the peasantry as a whole, which was doomed to disappear as capitalism worked its way through rural Russia.
    Within this fundamental argument the article contained a number of additional interesting motifs. It followed that Lenin, to a degree, was defending the development of a liberal form of capitalism in Russia. Indeed, he referred without irony to Adam Smith as ‘that great ideologist of the progressive bourgeoisie’. [SW 1 65] Even further, he based his article on a forgotten book by a Russian advocate of liberal capitalism, Skaldin (whose real name was Fyodor Yelenev). Although the article was undoubtedly polemical in tone, Lenin retained certain courtesies which later disappeared from