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From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 25, 21 June 1948, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Lenin, A Biography
by David Shub
Doubleday and Co., 1948, $5.
The author of this book, a Social Democratic journalist, employs the medium of a “biography” in order to achieve a political aim. He seeks not so much to tell the story of Lenin’s life and work but rather to discredit Leninism as a system of ideas and a method of action.
Since Lenin died, there have been two schools of writers bent on “proving” that Leninism and Stalinism are one and the same. On the one side, there is the legion of hacks in the Kremlin’s employ, and on the other, the countless- enemies of revolutionary Marxism in the service of world capitalism.
Each school serves different masters. Both however, stand to benefit from the perpetuation of this historical lie. The Kremlin cannot maintain its grip if it openly divests itself of the usurped banner of Bolshevism. For their part, the imperialists and all their flunkeys are able to utilize the crimes of Stalinism as a potent weapon against communism.
As in the various Stalinist biographies, so in the pages of Shub’s book there is no trace left of Lenin as a creative social thinker, who has taken his place alongside of Marx and Engels. Nor is there any trace of Lenin as a proletarian revolutionist, a true internationalist, sustained by confidence in the world working class and imbued with faith in the future of mankind. Instead of the living Lenin there is a monstrous caricature. Lenin is converted into an idol, with the inhuman features of the incumbent despot in the Kremlin.
Shub disposes of Lenin’s ideas differently than the Stalinist “biographers,” but no less fraudulently. Shub is a Menshevik, who under the guise of an “objective” biographical narrative, twists facts and quotations so as to fit them into the hoary charges of Menshevism against Lenin.
Lenin’s distinguishing trait was Iris ideological intransigence. He was an orthodox Marxist, an implacable ehemy of all forms of revisionism. Unable to cope with Lenin in the field of Marxist ideas, his Menshevik opponents resorted to vilification. Lenin, they said, was “dogmatic, intolerant of differences of opinion.” He divided the .“world sharply between those who were with him and those who were against him.” He refused to work with or even listen to those whose “opinions were contrary to his own.” He surrounded himself only with those “men whose obedience to him was absolute and unquestioning.” He commanded and presumably demanded of his followers “veneration and blind obedience.” All these and other slanders of Lenin’s bitter political opponents are carefully catalogued in Shub’s book and palmed off as biographical. “facts.”
Central in all attacks against Lenin is the charge of political “immorality.” Here, too, Shub hews closely to the Menshevik line, portraying Lenin not as the disciple of Marx aird Engels, but as the spiritual reincarnation . of Russian anarchism, in particular Bakunin, Nechaiev and Tkachev. Any means, no matter how sordid, any crime, no matter how vile, justifies the end – that was the credo of a Nechaiev. And the “moralist” Shub cynically pretends that this was also the guiding line of Lenin.
Shub digs enthusiastically in all the garbage of the past in order to portray Lenin, as the chieftain of a gang of criminals and moral degenerates. The leader of the greatest social upheaval in history is depicted as a man who distrusted the masses. Shub pretends to find this distrust expressed in the stress Lenin placed on the role of “professional revolutionists.” Lenin, according to Shub, counterposed a “revolutionary elite” to the “politically inarticulate mass.” Passages from Lenin’s book, What is To Be Done, are ripped out of context in an effort to show that Lenin allegedly viewed the role of the party in relation to the working class in the same way as most anarchists view the role of a “revolutionary minority.”
To sustain his thesis of Lenin’s distrust of the masses, Shub repeats Martov’s canard that Lenin was at first “fearful” of the Soviets; and Shub then goes on to add that Lenin’s 1917 slogan “All Power to the Soviets” was simply a “brilliant cover” for Lenin’s real design to impose the dictatorship of his own party. Lenin, according to Shub, “concealed” this aim successfully not only from the Russian masses, but “from his own general staff as well.”
“Immoral” Lenin as a super-conspirator – there you have Shub’s “biography” in a nutshell. The whole Bolshevik policy and strategy in 1917 is reduced to a series of cunning conspiracies. With the October uprising as the culmination of all this diabolical plotting.
Shub is even bold enough to reproduce the slander that, the Bolsheviks and the October Revolution itself had been financed by “German gold.” He is not quite brazen enough to try to revive the frame-up of Lenin, Trotsky and other Bolshevik leaders as “German spies.” He simply seeks to demonstrate that they were “amoral” enough to take gold from the Kaiser – on the basis of all the old “evidence” that has been exploded long ago. Such is this stern judge who indicts Lenin for his morals!
This “biographer” has no scruples whatever about his source material. He dips liberally into the cesspool of White Guard publications, even for the allegedly most intimate details. of Lenin’s life. Such for example is the “romance” he reports between Lenin and a certain Mme. Elizabeth L. These “revelations” appeared in 1936 in Paris as a Russian story copyrighted by one Alexinsky, whom Shub vouches for as “a former close friend and associate of Lenin for many years.”
Shub conveniently omits to mention that this Alexinsky who turned into a rabid reactionary, also happens to be a notorious scoundrel. During World War I he was branded as a “dishonest slanderer” and expelled from the Paris Association of Foreign Journalists, a body of Allied and neutral correspondents. On this same grounds Alexinsky was barred in 1917 by the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries from participating in the Executive Committee. This same Alexinsky then played a prominent role in the attempted frame-up of Lenin as a “spy of the Kaiser.” What source could be more “authentic”?
It is hardly surprising that Shub’s “researches” have met with a warm response, in the capitalist press and from such “socialists” as Norman Thomas.
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