In December 1887, four months after beginning his studies in law at Kazan University, about 700 kilometres east of Moscow, 17-year-old Vladimir Lenin was arrested at a student demonstration protesting the Russian tsar’s (king’s) University Act, which outlawed student organisations. Lenin joined a growing student movement, made up of brave and dedicated opponents of the monarchy. In his biography, The Young Lenin, Leon Trotsky writes that “the government, with its all-powerful police system and its million soldiers, remained in constant fear of the students”. Maxim Gorky, a student at Kazan in the 1880s and later a novelist, gives a vivid sense of the atmosphere in the student underground in his memoir My Universities. He describes a late-night secret meeting in town:
“In the pitch-black darkness I could sense that many people were there. I could hear dresses rustling, feet shuffling, soft coughing and whispers. A match flared up, lighting my face, and I could make out several dark shapes sitting on the floor against the walls. A young man leaned down from the windowsill and asked me if I had any friends among the workmen, what books I had read and if I had much free time.”
The young man interrogating Gorky was Nikolai Fedoseyev, one of the most serious student leaders in Kazan, whose study circle Lenin joined. Fedoseyev managed to accumulate an impressive underground library in Kazan, with the classics of the Narodnik tradition (agrarian socialism), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, German socialists and the Emancipation of Labour group—the first Russian Marxist organisation, founded in 1883 by exiles. It was here, at 18, that Lenin first read Marx’s Capital. He later recalled: “Fedoseyev was one of the first to proclaim his adherence to the Marxist trend”.
Marx had become a well-known figure in the Russian movement. In 1870, exiled Russian students asked Marx to be their representative on the governing body of the First International, a request he enthusiastically accepted. At the urging of the Russian students, the first non-German edition of Capital was published in Russia in 1872. The censors thought it posed no threat because it was too complicated for anyone to understand. In 1880, Marx proudly commented that in Russia, “Capital is more widely read and acclaimed than anywhere else”.
Marx and Engels anticipated that a revolution in Russia could spark a revolution across Europe. Russia was the true bulwark of the old feudal society. Following the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and the Polish peasant rebellion of 1863, Marx became interested in the Russian peasantry. He closely read the work of the Narodniks and was in contact with their leaders until his death in 1883. When a group of Narodniks assassinated the tsar in 1881, Marx remarked to his daughter Jenny that they were “sterling chaps through and through”. Marx and Engels didn’t support their tactics, but in Lenin’s words, “the heroic struggle of the handful of Russian revolutionaries against the mighty tsarist government evoked a most sympathetic echo in the hearts of these old revolutionaries”.
Engels, who outlived Marx by 12 years, was better able to analyse new developments in Russia. The key question was whether capitalist relations were beginning to dominate the country. By 1894, Engels was certain that Russia was on the path to capitalist development. He predicted:
“[T]he fall of tsarist despotism will ... give the labour movement of the West fresh impetus and create new, better conditions in which to carry on the struggle, thus hastening the victory of the modern industrial working class, without which, present-day Russia can never achieve a socialist transformation.”
Lenin later stated that he became a Marxist in the rural town of Samara, south of Kazan. Trotsky’s biography contains vibrant accounts of Lenin’s activity during this period. Lenin had moved there in 1889, just before the Kazan student circles were suppressed through arrests. A year later, he translated The Communist Manifesto into Russian for his study circle, which included two exiled students, Lalayants and Sklyarenko, both of whom went on to be members of Lenin’s Bolshevik party. The three of them became notorious in Samara for their frequent debates with the Narodniks.
In 1891-92, a terrible famine swept Russia, which Engels believed would have drastic political repercussions. Some half a million died of disease and malnutrition. The famine presented practical questions for the Samara circles. The Narodniks advocated establishing aid canteens to feed starving peasants. Lenin’s circle received considerable moral criticism when they refused to take part in the aid canteens. In Trotsky’s words:
“[T]he Marxists, of course, opposed not aid to the starving, but the illusion that a sea of need could be emptied with the teaspoon of philanthropy. For them, the problem was not merely to mitigate the consequences of a social calamity, but to remove its causes.”
In Samara, Lenin first began applying what he had learnt from Marx and Engels to Russia. He read every new book published about the peasantry and Russia’s economy. He was focused on the very same question that occupied Marx until his death—the capitalist development of Russia. His first articles demonstrate his meticulous application of Marx’s Capital to understanding Russia’s development. Independently, he reached the same conclusion that Engels had: “The transformation of Russia into a capitalist industrial nation proceeds at an ever-quickening pace”. Lenin’s conclusion was accompanied by a practical shift.
In August 1893, he left Samara for the capital, Saint Petersburg, with the intention of joining the student circles in contact with the workers’ movement. Lenin soon became involved in factory agitation, conversing with workers about their conditions and writing pamphlets for distribution. A footnote in Lenin’s 1902 pamphlet What is to be done? recalls his days as a factory agitator:
“I remember as if it were yesterday my ‘first attempt’, one which I would never repeat. I spent many weeks grilling ‘with verve’ one worker about every aspect of the set-up at the enormous factory where he worked. The worker told me with a smile, wiping the sweat away after the end of our labours, ‘working overtime is not as tough for me as answering your questions!’”
Seeking to modernise industry and to access more skilled labour, the tsarist state established schools for Petersburg workers. But the teachers in these Sunday Schools were often anti-tsarist intellectuals, such as Nadezhda Krupskaya and Lenin, who used the institutions to meet workers and discuss socialism with them. Krupskaya recalls one of Lenin’s lessons in her memoirs:
“[He] read Marx's Capital to the workers and explained it to them. He devoted the second half of the lesson to questioning the workers about their work and conditions of labour, showing them the bearing which their life had on the whole structure of society, and showing them in what way the existing order could be changed.”
However, these teachers were about to become students themselves. The country’s first mass strike wave broke out at the end of 1895 in the Petersburg textile factories. Boris Gorev—one of the activists Lenin joined in the city—recalls in his memoirs coming home one day to find two of his fellow activists “dancing around their apartment in sheer delight”. The strikes were evidence that the dangerous and unforgiving work many activists undertook was not in vain. We don’t know if Lenin danced around his apartment, but his writings about the strikes are filled with the same excitement. Lenin came to understand that class struggle taught workers far more than Sunday School lectures ever could:
“The strikes showed the workers who was their real foe when they had the troops and police sent against them ... [The strikes] have taught them to understand the political situation and the political needs of the working class.”
Marx and Engels didn’t live to see the Petersburg strikes. Engels died just months before they broke out. It fell to Lenin to incorporate the rising working-class movement into their analysis of Russia. His arrest and exile after the strikes enabled Lenin to finish the work he had started in Samara. The development of capitalism in Russia was published in 1899 and represents the culmination of the previous decade of Lenin’s work. He had completed what Marx and Engels had devoted the last years of their lives to. In many ways, he had graduated from apprentice to master.
Lenin’s study of Marx and Engels began after his expulsion from university. A few years later, in Samara, he became an active Marxist. But he never stopped studying Marx and Engels. Krupskaya later recalled that “at the most difficult turning points of the revolution, Lenin turned to the study of Marx ... ‘Marx and Engels teachings are not a dogma, but a guide to action.’ These words were constantly repeated by Lenin.” He didn’t treat their works as religious texts. For Lenin, their work took on new meaning in light of concrete historical developments and served as a guide to action. In this way, Lenin’s study of Marx and Engels is a lesson in how to study Lenin.
Lenin evolved alongside a whole generation of revolutionaries. What made him exceptional was not just reading Marx and Engels. From his first days as a law student, Lenin was driven by a burning outrage at the horrors and oppression that surrounded him. To his marrow, he was a revolutionary, determined to dismantle the system that caused so many unthinkable injustices.
Marxism showed him that the system was not just tsarism, but capitalism, and that the working class could liberate all humanity. To live in a world free from oppression, exploitation, war, racism, sexism or nationalism. That was Lenin’s cause, the cause of Marx and Engels, the cause of socialism. To this, Lenin dedicated every waking moment of his life. That motivation can’t be learnt from books.
