Alexander Solzhenitsyn's portrait of Lenin in Lenin in Zurich, which consists of chapters drawn from three volumes of his work in progress, is of interest in itself, in the light it casts on the historical accuracy of his project, whose avowed purpose is the correction of wide-spread misconceptions concerning the Russian revolution, and in its unwitting revelations about its author.

While using the methods of the literary artist, which permit him to enter his characters' heads, Solzhenitsyn emphasizes in an author's note that his fictional Lenin's "choice of words" and "way of thinking and acting" are drawn from a study of Lenin's works. In a BBC interview he stated: "I gathered every grain of information I could, every detail, and my only aim was to re-create him alive, as he was." Solzhenitsyn's portrait of Lenin is, therefore, to be judged for its historical authenticity as well as its artistry. It is primarily with the former that this paper will be concerned.

In his portrait of Stalin in The First Circle Solzhenitsyn, in cutting the towering figure of the Stalin of Stalinist myth-making down to size, showed him to be a human being at ironic variance with the image, a human being whose traits of character, as Gary Kern stated in an excellent analysis, were historically documented in Roy Medvedev's Let History Judge. In his portrait of Lenin Solzhenitsyn is concerned with destroying the Stalinist myth of Lenin as an all-wise god-like person incapable of making mistakes like ordinary men, a myth Stalin manufactured in order that he might proclaim himself the equally infallible successor of this god. But in dealing with a man further away in time Solzhenitsyn permitted his hatred of Bolshevism to cause him to draw a portrait that flies in the face of the consensus of scholarly opinion, of the historical record, and of the testimony of those who knew him well, including his enemies.

Leonard Schapiro's statement of the three character traits of Lenin "so generally accepted" by scholars who have gone through the literature on Lenin "that it is unlikely that they will ever be seriously challenged" furnishes an excellent means of judging Solzhenitsyn's portrait, in which each of these traits is replaced by another opposed to it. Schapiro was a leading historian well-known for his hostility to Bolshevism; his essay appeared in a book published in association with the right-wing Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace; the publisher of the book was Praeger, which at that time was receiving secret subsidies from the CIA to publish scholarly anti-Communist books. His appraisal of Lenin is not, therefore, at all sympathetic, but, since Schapiro was a responsible scholar, in giving the irreducible minimum on Lenin on which scholars agree, he is accurate.

The first of these traits, says Schapiro, is "Lenin's complete dedication to revolution, and the consequent subordination by him of his personal life to the cause for which he was prepared to sacrifice everything or any one. … The second generally accepted characteristic follows from the first: his kindliness on many occasions to individuals, coupled with ruthlessness on other occasions, to the same or different individuals. It simply depended on whether the 'cause' was involved or not. … The third characteristic of Lenin which all scholars would now accept was his complete lack of personal vanity or ambition."

This utter lack of vanity and ambition—attested to among others by Arthur Ransome, the Manchester Guardian correspondent who had ready access to Lenin, by Pavel Axelrod and Angelica Balabanoff, close associates who became antagonists of his, and by Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Bolshevik leader whose Revolutionary Silhouettes objectively presented the strengths and weakness of the major figures of Bolshevism—is at sharp variance with Solzhenitsyn's Lenin, with the constant preening of himself on his ability and the constant looking down with scorn upon others. When, for instance, he is in despair, he ruminates: "All his incomparable abilities (appreciated now by everyone in the party, but he set a truer and still higher value on them), all his quickwittedness, his penetration, his grasp, his uselessly clear understanding of world events, had failed to bring him not only political victory but even the position of a member of Parliament in toyland, like Grimn [a swiss Social-Democratic leader]. Or that of a successful lawyer (though he would hate to be a lawyer—he had lost every case in Samara). Or even that of a journalist. Just because he had been born in accursed Russia." The self-satisfaction over the recognition he has achieved but the hunger for a still greater recognition, the loving elaboration of his self-proclaimed "incomparable abilities," the secret envy of the bourgeois careerists he outwardly despises, the blaming of his own failures upon his country—this is effective self-revelation, but not the self-revelation of one bearing any semblance to the Lenin who scholars agree was lacking in vanity and ambition.

When Alexander Parvus, the Russo-German Social-Democrat who supported Germany during the war, whom Solzhenitsyn presents as the real leader of the 1905 revolution and a corrupt genius whose superiority to himself as a theoretician and a man of action Lenin enviously recognizes in the inner recesses of his being, proposes that they form an alliance to make a Russian revolution with German money, Lenin rejects the idea because he does not want to be superseded. "Oh yes," he thinks, "I understand your Plan! You will emerge as the unifier of all the party groups. Add to that your financial power and your theoretical talent, and there you are—leader of a unified party and of the Second Revolution? Not again?!" Thus the revolution to which Lenin has dedicated his life is seen to be really a projection of his own ego, something which he will not sacrifice his own leadership role to attain. This is not the Lenin who scholars agree would have sacrificed everything for the revolution.

Looking with scorn at those about him, not only at his opponents but at his associates, whom Solzhenitsyn portrays as rogues Lenin despises but cynically uses, Lenin gives loose in his speech and in his thoughts to a constant stream of vituperation. The historical Lenin, it is well known, did not adhere to the "my respected opponent" manner of parliamentary debate in his polemics and made use of invectives such as "philistine," "renegade," and "servant of the bourgeoisie" in demolishing his opponents. Solzhenitsyn uses some of the epithets Lenin did and adds some choice ones of his own ("piss-poor slobbering pseudo-socialists," "little shit," "snot-nosed guttersnipes"). The unremitting flow of vituperation without a single kind word for anyone is indicative of both venomousness and coarseness. Although the correspondence of the real Lenin, as Scha-piro observes, "shows his concern for the personal welfare of bolsheviks and their families even at his busiest time," there is no hint of this in Solzhenitsyn.

Lenin, says Solzhenitsyn in an authorial comment, "never forgave a mistake. No matter who made it, he would remember as long as he lived." But Bukharin, in his letter "To a Future Generation of Party Leaders" which he had his wife memorize shortly before he was arrested by Stalin, spoke of Lenin's magnanimity toward those who had been mistaken: "If, more than once, I was mistaken about the methods of building socialism, let posterity judge me no more harshly than Vladimir Il'ich." Gorky, reminiscing on Lenin, exclaimed, "But how many times, in his judgment of people, whom he had yesterday criticized and 'pulled to bits,' did I clearly hear the note of genuine wonder before the talents and moral steadfastness of these people. …"

The historical Lenin, moreover, continued to recognize and pay tribute to the past accomplishments of those who became and remained his greatest political enemies. He insisted that Plekhanov, toward whom Solzhenitsyn's Lenin is full of bitter hatred, and Kautsky, whose picture Solzhenitsyn's Lenin states he cannot look at without retching as though he were swallowing a frog, be published in full and studied. He wrote an obituary for the Left Social-Revolutionist P. P. Prosh'ian, who had participated in the S-R insurrection against the Soviet government, in which he said, "Comrade Prosh'ian did more before July, 1918, to strengthen the Soviet regime than he did in July, 1918, to damage it." Lenin's wife Krupskaya tells of how, after he broke with his intimate associate Martov, he eagerly welcomed every position Martov took which he considered worthy of a revolutionist, and of how when he was struggling with his fatal illness he remarked sadly, "They say Martov is dying too." None of this is compatible with the Lenin of Solzhenitsyn's portrait.

Solzhenitsyn's Lenin not only regards both his political enemies and his associates with hatred and contempt; he regards everyone with hatred and contempt: peasants ("as obtuse as peasants the world over"), workers ("the workers had swarmed like ants out of their holes and into legal bodies," disregarding the Bolsheviks), women ("silly bitches"), young people ("these little piglets… were… so very sure of themselves, so ready to take over the leadership at any moment"). Above all, he despises the Russian people. "Why was he born in that uncouth country?" he asks himself. "Just because a quarter of his blood was Russian [Solzhenitsyn refers to Lenin throughout as an 'Asiatic'], fate had hitched him to the ramshackle Russian rattletrap. A quarter of his blood, but nothing in his character, his will, his inclinations made him kin to that slovenly, slapdash, eternally drunken country."

The real Lenin, however, was not at all contemptuous of ordinary people, talking easily with them and learning from what they had to say. This is attested to not only by Trotsky and Gorky, but by Balabanoff, who writes, "The desire to learn from others was characteristic of him. … He would ask peasants about agricultural matters. … He did not do it to attract attention or cause sensation, but rather unobtrusively." A number of accounts tell of Lenin visiting a Soviet art school, where he got into an animated exchange with two dozen students, who defended the futurist movement in art and literature against him. Lenin was delighted by the spirit of the youngsters and at the conclusion of the controversy good-naturedly joked that he would go home, read up on the subject, and then come back to defeat them in debate.

The historical Lenin was opposed to the party leadership granting itself special favors. Solzhenitsyn, however, has him make cavalier use of party funds, disbursing them freely to his favorites and stingily to others. "Find somebody to look after the children, we'll pay the expenses out of party funds," he tells Inessa Armand, urging her to attend an international congress, and in the next moment he thinks of how his associate Hanecki is not going because of his demand for expenses at a time when "party funds must be used carefully." But the real Lenin did not have such control of the money for functionaries' living expenses, and he himself was at times in dire need in his exile. "Lenin's personal finances were stretched," says Robert H. McNeal in his biography of Krupskaya, "and he implored the editors of Pravda to pay for Nadezhda's [Krupskaya's] operation. … but they must have let him down, for the request was repeated soon afterwards. …"

Tamara Deutscher in her Not by Politics Alone… The Other Lenin has a letter from Lenin to the office manager of the Council of People's Commissars officially reprimanding him for having raised Lenin's salary from 500 rubles a month to 800 rubles a month contrary to the decision of the Council, of which Lenin was chairperson. In a letter to the Library of the Rumyantsev Museum requesting permission to borrow certain books, Lenin wrote in 1920: "If, according to the rules, reference publications are not issued for home use, could not one get them for an evening, for the night, when the Library is closed. / will return them by the morning'' (Lenin's emphasis).

Lenin's unbending dedication to the revolution and to revolutionary principles was a source of strength to him as a leader. Another source of strength, says Schapiro, was the combination of his lack of vanity and his "unwavering conviction" that "in any matter in dispute, he alone had the right answer." Solzhenitsyn's Lenin, however, despite his overweening vanity, is haunted by inner doubts. "His self-confidence had failed him [in 1905], and Lenin had skulked through the revolution in a daze. … It took years for the ribs dented by Parvus to straighten out again, for Lenin to regain his assurance that he, too, was of some use to the world." But the ribs dented by Parvus were not really straightened out. In 1916, when Parvus boasts to him of having sunk a battleship in 1905, Lenin thinks of himself that he can write, give lectures, influence young leftists, polemicize, but "there was only one thing he was incapable of—action"

His very insecurity makes Solzhenitsyn's Lenin incapable of admitting any error of judgment. "Yes, I made a mistake," he thinks to himself. "I was shortsighted, I wasn't bold enough. (But you must not talk like that even to your closest supporter, or you may rob him of his faith in his leader.)" The real Lenin, however, who believed that theory can never keep pace with changing reality, not infrequently admitted in retrospect to having erred. Especially was this true at the end of his life when he saw the growth of bureaucracy and of indifference to the rights and needs of the national minorities, to which he felt he had not paid sufficient attention. "In his statements, speeches, and notes made in the last period of his activity expressions such as 'the fault is mine,' 'I must correct another mistake of mine,' 'I am to blame,' are repeated several times," says Deutscher, quoting from documents in her book.

Beset by secret doubts he cannot voice, made irritable by people, exhausting himself in feverish activity, whose value he often questions to himself, Solzhenitsyn's Lenin is a jangle of nerves. Calmed for a moment as he walks along the bank of a Swiss lake, "he realized how hard-pressed and harassed he normally was." But Lunacharsky says of the Lenin he knew that, although at times he drove himself to exhaustion, he knew how to relax so that he emerged from his rest "freshened and ready for the fray again." "In the worst moments that he and I lived through together, Lenin was unshakeably calm and as ready as ever to break into cheerful laughter." The aged Boris Souvarine, one of the founders of the French Communist party, who knew Lenin well and came to be a strong anti-Bolshevik, is astounded at the feverishness of Solzhenitsyn's Lenin. "Day and night, even in response to the smallest thing, Lenin seems to be whirling. In all this we do not recognize the real Lenin and his habitual self-control."

The readiness to break into cheerful laughter of which Lunacharsky speaks is alien to Solzhenitsyn's Lenin. "Lenin often wore a mocking look," says Solzhenitsyn, "but very rarely smiled." On the occasions he does smile it is a "crooked little grin—suspicious, shrewd, derisory." When it occurs to Hanecki that Lenin's appearance is such that he might readily be taken for a Russian spy, he "wanted to tease him about it, but he knew that Lenin couldn't take a joke, and refrained."

But one of the distinctive characteristics of the real-life Lenin was his gaiety of disposition, which did not permit him to stand on false dignity. Arthur Ransome said of him, "I tried to think of any other man of his caliber who had a similar joyous temperament. I could think of none." Gorky said, "I have never met a man who could laugh so infectiously as Lenin." Trotsky described Lenin as "always… even-tempered and gay" and spoke of his "famous laughter." He told of how Lenin, in presiding over small committees, conducted the meetings in an efficient manner but sometimes, especially towards the end of a long, hard session, would be provoked to laughter by something that had amused him. "He tried to control himself as long as he could, but finally he would burst out with a peal of laughter which infected all the others."

Far from being unduly sensitive, he was ready to laugh at himself. N. Valentinov, an associate of Lenin's early in the century who later broke with him politically, related how on a picnic he observed that Lenin, instead of making a sandwich for himself, rapidly cut off pieces of bread, egg, and sausage and, with the nimble dexterity characteristic of him, popped them successively into his mouth. Valentinov commented on this, comparing Lenin's dexterity with the dexterity with which a character in Tolstoy's War and Peace put on his leggings. Instead of taking offense, Lenin found the comparison amusing. "His laughter was so infectious that Krupskaya also started to laugh at the sight of him; then I joined in too." There is no thin-skinned sensitivity here.

Solzhenitsyn's egocentric, dour Lenin, incapable of human warmth and geniality and hating every one, is utterly indifferent to others' suffering. He gleefully reads the figures on Russia's enormous war casualties, seeing them as evidence of the doom of the Tsarist regime. The climactic presentation of his indifference to suffering comes at the end of the first chapter of Lenin in Zurich, Chapter 22 in August 1914 Lenin is at a parapet in a railroad station when a hospital train comes in. The dying are fearfully regarded by a crowd of people come to see if their dear ones are on the train, and the wounded are joyfully embraced. As Lenin surveys the scene, he has no thought for the emotions of the crowd: in a kind of demonic frenzy, he has been seized by the inspiration for his slogan "Convert the war into civil war!" a civil war "without quarter" that "will bring all the governments of Europe down in ruins!!!" "Daily, hourly, wherever you may be—protest angrily and un-compromisingly against this war! But… ! (The dialectic essence of the situation.) But… will it to continue! See that it does not stop short! That it drags on and is transformed! A war like this one must not be fumbled, must not be wasted. Such a war is a gift from history!"

Remarkably, Lenin is made responsible for the continuation of the war. He will "will it to continue." How can he, however great his will power, achieve this extraordinary feat? Earlier he had thought to himself, "You must find channels for negotiations, covertly reassure yourself that if difficulties arise in Russia and she starts suing for peace, Germany will not agree to peace talks, will not abandon the Russian revolutionaries to the whim of fate." The unknown emigré will somehow influence the German government not to free itself from one front in a two-front war in order not to "abandon the Russian revolutionaries." This simply does not make sense.

Not only is the responsibility for the war foisted from the warring governments upon Lenin, but the bloodiness of the Russian civil war is attributed to the bloodthirstiness of Lenin. The White forces and the allied governments who supported them are absolved of all responsibility. Lenin's denunciations of the war are dismissed as mere verbiage to mask his sinister design. He is incapable of genuine moral indignation.

Lenin undoubtedly was, as Schapiro says, ruthless in the defense of the revolution. The question is, however, whether Lenin was like a humane surgeon who cuts off a limb to save a life or like the Nazi doctors who engaged in cruel experimentation without any regard for their concentration-camp victims. How one judges his acts will depend in good part upon one's own politics. Many who condemn such measures as holding hostages subject to execution to break the opposing side's will or executing the Tsar's children to deprive the monarchists of a rallying-point do not feel the same way about the fire-bombing of Dresden or the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, which killed innumerably more innocent people. But however one regards his actions, serious scholars do not find Lenin to have been the totally unfeeling person Solzhenitsyn makes him out to be.

Thus Bertram D. Wolfe, an ex-leader of the American Communist party who became Chief of the Ideological Advisory Staff of the Voice of America, said of Gorky's Lenin that it revealed his "faithfulness to himself as artist and observer of his subject." But Gorky, a long-time friend of Lenin's who attacked him sharply for the severity of his measures during the Civil War but who came to feel that they were necessary, depicted Lenin as keenly sympathetic toward the oppressed. "In a country where the inevitability of suffering is recommended as the universal road to the 'salvation of the soul,'" wrote the author of The Lower Depths, himself so sensitive to human misery, "I never met, I do not know a man who hated, loathed and despised human unhappiness, grief, and suffering as strongly and deeply as Lenin did."

Thus too Peter Reddaway, co-editor with Leonard Schapiro of Lenin: The Man, The Theorist, The Leader, while speaking of the "fanaticism" of Lenin's "revolutionary morality," speaks also of "the human side of Lenin, which he had to keep so rigidly under control. This is the Lenin of whom Lepeshinsky said: 'He possesses a remarkably tender soul, not lacking, I would say, even a certain sentimentality' who rebuked Bogdanov with the words: 'Marxism does not deny, but, on the contrary, affirms the healthy enjoyment of life given by nature, love and so on' who, as a youth, suddenly saw he must not become a farmer because 'my relations with the peasants are becoming abnormal' who could not shoot a fox because 'really she was so beautiful' who told Gorky: 'It is high time for you to realize that politics are a dirty business' and who said in E. Zozulya's presence: 'O happy time, when there will be less politics.'"

The traits which Solzhenitsyn gives Lenin—vanity, ambition, envy, coarseness, unforgivingness, a sense of inferiority (at least, with regard to Parvus), readiness to use and dispense special privileges, readiness to take personal offense, unwillingness to admit mistakes, indifference to others' suffering—are, interestingly enough, those that he gives to Stalin in The First Circle and that were indeed part of Stalin's character. Solzhenitsyn regards Stalin as the legitimate political heir of Lenin, and this opinion is reflected in his projecting the personal traits of the heir upon his predecessor.

There is another person besides Stalin who, without Solzhenitsyn being aware of it, acted as a model for Solzhenitsyn's portrait of Lenin, a surprising one—Solzhenitsyn himself. Working in the very Zurich in which Lenin had worked, with the same object of undermining the Russian government, Solzhenitsyn unconsciously identified Lenin with himself. Just as his Lenin believes himself to be "the infallible interpreter" of a "compelling power which manifested itself through him," so Solzhenitsyn in his self-revelatory The Oak and the Calf marvels at his own ability to "hold out single-handed, yes, and fork over mountains of work" and exclaims: "Where do I get the strength? From what miraculous source?" He answers himself some pages later: "How wise and powerful is thy guiding hand, O Lord!" Even the style of Lenin's interior monologues is similar to that of Solzhenitsyn's memoir, making free use of parenthetical interjections, italics, and exclamation points to convey febrile excitement. Lenin's confrontation with Parvus, in which each of them seeks to penetrate the mask of the other, resembles Solzhenitsyn's confrontation with his former wife, who he is convinced is now a KGB agent.

Solzhenitsyn regards himself as alone in knowing how to combat the present Russian regime. Of the efforts of other dissidents he is scornful. He regards the "soft" Tvardovsky, the editor through whom he had been published, in much the same way that his Lenin regards the Mensheviks. He attacks the Medvedev brothers harshly as agents of the regime.

Just as Solzhenitsyn's Lenin is contemptuous of the Russian people, so Solzhenitsyn in one passage is contemptuous of them: "We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure!… We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward." Just as Lenin rejoices in World War I as an opportunity for revolution, so Solzhenitsyn relates how he longed in prison camp for the United States to use its monopoly of the atomic bomb to start a new war against the Soviet Union: "World war might bring us a speedier death… or it just might bring freedom. In either case, deliverance would be much nearer than the end of a twenty-five year sentence." Just as his Lenin was ready to serve the Kaiser against Russia, so Solzhenitsyn praises and justifies the Red Army soldiers who turned traitor and fought in the ranks of Hitler's army, himself making the explicit comparison: "Came the time when weapons were put in the hands of these people, should they have… allowed Bolshevism to outlive itself… ? … No, the natural thing was to copy the methods of Bolshevism itself: it had eaten into the body of a Russia sapped by the First World War, and it must be defeated at a similar moment in the Second."

Solzhenitsyn's portrait of Lenin, then, has many of the traits of Stalin and is also in part an unconscious mirror image of Solzhenitsyn himself. It bears little resemblance to the historical Lenin.