Vejas Liulevicius
speaker
414 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Vejas Liulevicius’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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He was, although I think that he would have agreed that what was necessary was a cataclysm on the scale of the First World War to make this happen. The First World War shatters so many of the certainties of the 19th century that we talked about as a dynamic period with argument between ideologies, it scrambles all sorts of earlier debates.
It renegotiates the status of the individual versus an all-powerful state and the claims of the state because to win or even just to survive in World War I. You need to centralize, centralize, centralize, and to put everything onto an authoritarian wartime footing in country after country.
So Lenin earlier had already articulated the possibility that this might happen by talking about how the entire globe already was connected. and there's a chain of capitalist development that is connecting different countries so that the weakest link in the chain, if it breaks, if it pops open, it might actually inaugurate much bigger processes and start a chain reaction.
And that's what he intended to do and has the chance to do in the course of 1917. Incidentally, just to get a sense of the sheer chaos and the... human, on an individual human level, what the absence of established authority meant. There's few works of literature that are as powerful as Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago for giving the whole sweep of contending forces in a power vacuum.
It's an amazing testimony to that time and place.
Right, and it had antecedents. Even though Lenin and his colleagues are competing amongst each other for the title of most faithful disciple of Marx and most true to the received theory in practice, there's other influences, earlier influences that operate in the Russian context that were not operative, let's say, in the German context.
And here you have to step back and think about the nature of czarism. which had maintained still into the 20th century the notion of a divine right to rule, that God had ordained the Tsarist system and its hierarchies, and that to question these was sinful and politically not advisable. And the restrictive nature of Russian society at this point dominated by the Tsarist establishment.
its harshness, its reactionary nature meant that people who in another context, in another country, might have been reformers could instead very easily be provoked into becoming revolutionaries. And Lenin is a perfect example of this because his older brother was executed as a result of being in a radical revolutionary movement who was arrested and executed for association with terrorism.
And earlier generations of Russian radicals had founded populist groups that would aim to engage in terrorism and resistance against the Tsarist regime. And this included people who called themselves nihilists.
And these nihilists were materialists who saw themselves ushering in a new age by absolute rejection of earlier religious traditions and aiming for material answers to the challenges of the day. Among them was Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who wrote a what's been called the worst book ever written. It was, in fact, one of Lenin's favorite books. In Russian, it's Shtodielat.
In English, it gets translated, What is to be done? And it's a utopian novel about revolutionaries and how revolutionaries should act with one another in open ways, new ways, non-traditional ways, in order to help usher in the coming revolution. Lenin loved the work. and said it had the great merit of showing you how to be a revolutionary.
So there's the Marxist influence, and then there's Russian populist nihilist influence, which is also a very live current in Lenin's thinking. And when you add these things together, you get an explosive mix, because Lenin, as a result and part of this family trauma of his brother, becomes a
absolutely irreconcilable enemy of the Tsarist regime and sets about turning himself into what you might call a guided missile for revolution. He turns himself into a machine to produce revolutionary change. And I mean that with little hyperbole.
Lenin at one point shared with friends that he loved listening to music, but he tried not to listen to beautiful music like Beethoven because it made him feel gentle. What the revolution demanded was realism, hardness, absolute steely resolve. So Lenin worries even fellow revolutionaries by the intensity of his single-minded focus to revolution. He spends his days thinking about the revolution.
He probably dreamt about the revolution. And so 24-7, it's an existence where he's paired off other human elements quite deliberately in order to turn himself into an effective instigator of revolution. So when the opportunity comes in 1917, he's primed and ready for that role.
The light is science. The light is science and materialism.
The nihilists, some of them did a very bad job of hiding their political beliefs because they were famous for wearing blue-tinted spectacles, kind of the sunglasses of the late 19th century, as a way of shielding their eyes from light, but also having a and realistic view of reality outside.
So nihilists, as the name would suggest, do reject all prior certainties, but they make an exception for science and see that as the possibility for founding an entirely new mode of existence.
That's right. That's right. So prior generations of nihilists or populists had resembled Lenin's single-mindedness by arguing that one needed total devotion for this. If to play this role in society, it was not enough to be somewhat committed. Total commitment was necessary. And the other theme that's at work here, obviously, is
If we consider Lenin affected by Marxist ideas and the homegrown Russian revolutionary tradition that predates the arrival of Marxist socialism in Russia— It's the theme of needing to adapt to local conditions.
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