In the year of the centenary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, two trends emerged in relation to its leader, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. This is the hatred of him replicated in the media by the self-proclaimed “intellectual aristocracy” serving the oligarchic-bureaucratic power, and the need of everything that is honest and thinking in Russian society to protect the people's memory of the genius of the Russian revolution. The revolution that gave the world the prototype of its future - the Soviet Union. For every member of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the centenary of the Great October Revolution is an excellent occasion to turn to the personality of Lenin, so that, while remaining alone with him while studying his works, take lessons from him in cultivating a communist in oneself.

A very important thing in "Materialism and Empirio-criticism"

In Soviet literary Leninian literature there are many works created on the basis of the study of Lenin's sources. The authors of these works are not only famous writers (Valentin Kataev and Emmanuil Kazakevich), playwrights (Nikolai Pogodin and Mikhail Shatrov), publicists (Ernst Henry and Valentin Chikin), but also philosophers, from whose pens came popular works for young people: Evald Ilyenkov and Genrikh Volkov. Marietta Shaginyan occupies a special place in this series. In 1972, her tetralogy "The Ulyanov Family" was awarded the Lenin Prize.

In its final part - “Four Lessons from Lenin” - Shaginyan carried out, as we believe, an artistic and philosophical study, the purpose of which is to show the inextricable connection between Vladimir Ilyich’s materialistic worldview and his attitude towards people. According to Shaginyan, we will turn to Lenin’s lessons in our article.

Let's start by noting Marietta Shaginyan's harsh criticism of the vicious practice of studying Lenin's works, which, alas, was established in the Soviet era in the party education system. The study program covered many of Lenin's works, but they were not studied in their entirety, but in fragments, indicating the pages needed to be read on a particular issue: from such and such a page. “I consider myself fortunate,” writes Shaginyan, “that I avoided... this motley acquaintance with the book piece by piece and was able to read Lenin volume by volume, each work in its entirety. True, without having either a consultant or a senior comrade, who would "guide" me in this reading, I often "spread my thoughts" into secondary places, carried away by some detail, and missed the main thing. But these details were useful to me later. One of these details that stops attention on the very first pages of "Materialism" and empirio-criticism,” helps, it seems to me, to understand a very important thing: the connection between individualism in a person’s character and the tendency of his thinking towards theoretical idealism.” Further from Shaginyan we read: “Lenin, mocking the “naked” Ernst Mach, writes that if he does not recognize an objective reality that exists independently of us, “... he is left with one “naked abstract” I, certainly large and written in italics "I..."

The fragmentary study (if it can be called a study) of Lenin’s sources was one of the reasons for the formal, consumer-careerist attitude towards the ideological and theoretical heritage of V.I. Lenin. It was enough to memorize a set of quotes from Lenin to create the impression of ideological and theoretical erudition and thereby disguise the careerist, egoistic orientation of the individual, his pure individualism. In short, with the name of Lenin on your lips, act against the cause of Lenin - the cause of the working class, which, according to Marx and Lenin, should carry out its dictatorship, right up to the building of communism.

Of course, not everyone who takes the position of theoretical idealism is necessarily an individualist. History knows many examples of heroic self-sacrifice in the name of saving the Fatherland of believers, including those who tried to combine religion with science. The same Bogdanov, whom Lenin subjected to merciless criticism in “Materialism and Empirio-criticism,” sacrificed himself in the name of science: while exploring the capabilities of the human body in extreme situations, he deliberately performed a medical experiment on himself that led to death. But individualism, which has become the core of a person’s character, inevitably leads him to idealism, and often in forms that are dangerous for people (from abstract humanism, for which the masses pay in blood, to fascism).

For a communist, the transition to the position of idealism, covered with Marxist-Leninist phraseology, is always fraught with separation from the party, from the working class, from the people. It is fraught with ideological degeneration, and ultimately with betrayal of scientific ideas and living people.

What is M. Gorbachev’s “new thinking” if not pure idealism in politics: “We are sailing in the same boat”! In other words, the world of capitalism and the world of socialism, according to Gorbachev, are doomed to unity: the class struggle between them, the contradiction between labor and capital must be forgotten... And the CPSU forgot about it. The result is known throughout the world. For Gorbachev's abstract humanism in politics (namely, it was the basis of the “new thinking”) the people of Russia still pay a heavy tribute to the imperialist West.

What does it mean to take the position of an ordinary comrade?

But let’s return to the thoughts of Marietta Shaginyan in “Four Lessons from Lenin.” We read, as it seems to us, very instructive for us - modern communists: “It was precisely from the fullness of his materialist consciousness that Lenin very strongly felt the real existence of other people. And everyone to whom Lenin approached could not help but feel the reality of this approach of the man Lenin to another person , which means he could not help but reciprocally experience his human equality with him.”

Shaginyan defines the starting points of Lenin's real approach to another person: "his constant communication with the working class, the habit of first of all thinking about the simple worker, about his psychology, his attitude towards people, about his needs - and to develop his own judgment, take a position" ordinary comrades." Until the last days of his life, Ilyich retained this ability to never "keep his distance" from the people, to always feel among them, to take the position of an ordinary comrade."

Let us highlight “his constant communication with the working class.” We are talking about the inextricable connection between Lenin as a proletarian leader and a class called upon by history to play the role of gravedigger of the bourgeoisie. But in order to realize its historical mission, the working class needs to find its class materialist consciousness in the person of the most conscious, most thinking proletarians. Lenin devoted his entire life as an intellectual revolutionary, politician and scientist to bringing this consciousness into the working environment.

In "What to do?" - in this handbook for a communist, quoted more than once by Marietta Shaginyan, Vladimir Ilyich wrote: “The consciousness of the working masses cannot be truly class consciousness if the workers, using specific examples and certainly topical (current) political facts and events, do not learn to observe each of the others social classes in all manifestations of the mental, moral and political life of these classes; - will not learn to apply in practice materialist analysis and materialist assessment of all aspects of the activity and life of all classes, strata and groups of the population."

In our time - a time of general decline in mental culture, right down to clip-based thinking, it may well seem to the same “also Marxists” that Lenin’s maximalism is not realistic - to teach ordinary workers a comprehensive analysis of the life of each (?!) of the social classes. However, Lenin is talking about teaching materialist analysis, first of all, to advanced workers, that is, to worker-intellectuals, such as Babushkin, Shlyapnikov, Shotman and others. It was they, and not just the revolutionary intellectuals, who enlightened the class consciousness of the proletarians and enlightened themselves, being involved in Lenin’s ideological struggle with his many opponents.

And this struggle was fierce at the beginning of the twentieth century (1901 - 1903), as Marietta Shaginyan succinctly writes about, presenting us with a picture of that time: “It was intense, like a front-line fighter at the time of battle: attacking and repelling attacks on On all four sides, Ilyich passionately fought against the adherents of spontaneous practice - the "economists" ...; against the leftist phrases of those who would later receive the name of liquidators; against the Plekhanovites who were increasingly ruling the right, the future camp of the "Mensheviks"; and against the dangerous amateurism of the Socialist Revolutionaries, recklessly reviving populism and terrorism. Lenin's prose literally sparkles with sword and stiletto in these attacks." “He fights for the accuracy of the theory, for forging the basic theoretical principles.” More than once Shaginyan turns to “What should I do?” IN AND. Lenin, organically weaving extracts from this book into the fabric of his narrative, in which the theme of the simple worker is a cross-cutting theme.

For Lenin, “thinking about the simple worker, about his psychology, his attitude towards people, about his needs” meant not descending to his ordinary, everyday consciousness, but thinking about how to raise him a step higher “in terms of cultural, political”, that is how to bring it closer to materialistic (scientific) consciousness “with a minimum of friction.” “Taking the position of an ordinary comrade” meant for Lenin, first of all, respect for his ability for independent critical thinking, his self-esteem. In this regard, Lenin’s judgment expressed in “What is to be done?” has not lost its relevance.

“I am far from thinking,” wrote Lenin, “to deny the need for popular literature for workers and especially popular (only, of course, not farcical) literature for especially backward workers. But I am outraged by this constant entanglement of pedagogy with issues of politics, with issues of organization. After all, you, gentlemen, who are guardians of the "middle peasant", in essence, rather insult the workers with your desire to bend over before talking about labor politics and workers' organization. But you talk about serious things straight up and leave pedagogy to teachers, and not to politicians and organizers... Understand that the very questions about “politics”, about “organization” are so serious that they cannot be discussed except completely seriously.”

Not “how” and “who”, but “what”

But how can you learn to speak quite seriously so that you are understood? This question faces every communist propagandist and agitator. What can the experience of Lenin the orator teach us?

Marietta Shaginyan asks this question and gives her answer, focusing on the features of Vladimir Ilyich’s public speeches. To begin with, she reproduces the impression of the Leninist speeches of the Scottish communist Gallagher. In her opinion, he was able to accurately convey the main feature of Lenin the propagandist:

“I was at Lenin’s house twice and had a private conversation with him. What struck me most about him was that while I was with him, I did not have a single thought about Lenin, I could only think about what he was thinking about ..." (emphasized by M. Shaginyan). Here, finally, is a line,” concludes Marietta Shaginyan, “that thought can cling to. To see Lenin face to face, to hear his voice, perhaps to meet his eyes more than once and, despite this, all the time not to see or hear Lenin himself, not to think about him himself, but only about the subject of his thoughts, about that what Lenin thinks, how he lives now, that is, to perceive only the content of his speech not “how” and “who”, but “what”! Lenin was such a great speaker, and he was so able to completely renounce himself, pouring himself into the subject of his speech, that the whole depth of his conviction, the whole content of his thoughts was transmitted to the listener, making him forget about the speaker himself and not for a second thereby distracting attention from the essence his speeches or conversations."

An illustration of what Shaginyan said can be the memories of Clara Zetkin about Lenin the orator: “His report is a masterful example of his art of persuasion. There is not the slightest sign of rhetorical embellishment. He acts only with the power of his clear thought, the inexorable logic of argumentation and a consistently maintained line. He throws out his phrases , like uncouth blocks, and builds from them one complete whole. Lenin does not want to blind, captivate, he only wants to convince. He convinces and thereby captivates. Not with the help of ringing, beautiful words that intoxicate, but with the help of a transparent thought that comprehends without self-deception, the world of social phenomena in their reality and with merciless truth “reveals what is.”

Vladimir Mayakovsky said surprisingly simply and accurately about the transparency of thought in Lenin’s word:

I knew a worker

He was illiterate.

Didn't chew it

even the alphabet salt.

But he heard

as Lenin said,

knew everything.

Analyzing the peculiarity of Lenin’s public speech-making, Marietta Shaginyan identifies two forms of reaction to two types of speakers: “After his report, you approach one with admiration and congratulations: “How wonderful, how brilliantly you performed!” And you approach the other and say something other than how he spoke, and immediately about the subject of his speech, which captured, interested, captivated you. Having underlined with a red cross Gallagher’s deep and ingenuous words, I made the following conclusion for myself: if the audience begins to praise you and admire you after your report, then you are bad did your job, you failed it. And if the conversation immediately turns to the subject and content of your report, as if you weren’t here yourself, it means you performed well, did your job with an “A”.

“No one will ever give you anything if you can’t take it”

In order to cultivate a propagandist of the Leninist type, when your speech is perceived for its content (not “how” and “who”, but “what”), you must strive for its clarity and simplicity. And for this there is no other way than to constantly exercise your mind in comprehending new and new knowledge. I read with educational interest Shaginyan’s chapter “In the Library of the British Museum,” in which a portrait of Lenin the Reader is given. This is a system in the selection of scientific sources, their wide coverage, but most importantly - extreme attention to the internal dialectic of the content of the works of great authors: Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Engels, and many others. It was precisely this, this dialectic, that “entirely disappeared through the pages of school textbooks that were missed, like a fish through the too large meshes of a fish net” when studying Lenin’s works in the Soviet past. The name of Lenin was revered, but it was poorly read. Retribution did not take long to arrive: it came with Gorbachev’s perestroika.

As has already been said, the beginning of the twentieth century turned out to be especially tense for the young Lenin: the most crucial moment in the history of the young Russian Social Democracy was the creation of the program of its party. It was at this moment that Lenin’s book was published, which nominated him (along with Plekhanov and, as it turned out, to replace him) as a theoretician of the emerging RSDLP. “Like a rock among the oncoming breakers, his major work “What to do?” stands up, seemingly woven from the polemics of the “current moment.” But in fact, unshakable at all times, surprisingly topical for the present time.” These words of Marietta Shaginyan are worth repeating today due to their extreme relevance.

But let us follow her further: “Over eight articles in “Materials for the development of the RSDLP program.” A huge number of letters. Replies to letters, small articles in Iskra. “The Agrarian Question and “Critics of Marx”; "Agrarian program of Russian social democracy"; Lecture notes "Marxist views on the agrarian question in Europe and Russia."

Finally, the brochure “Towards the Rural Poor”. An explanation for the peasants of what the Social Democrats want" - about two hundred and thirty-five neat pages about only one agrarian question. Already from the titles we can guess how much Lenin read on the agrarian question... As is always the case with a true creator, the top of these huge knowledge, enormous reading with a pencil in hand (as Ilyich read), deep mastery of the topic, simplicity, sunny simplicity is born... - a brochure addressed to a simple illiterate and completely illiterate reader - the Russian peasant."

As Lenin was extremely attentive and sensitive to the backward workers and illiterate Russian peasants, so merciless was he in denouncing those Russian Social Democrats from the intelligentsia who were sent illegal literature from London, but they did not bother to master it, did not read into it, did not distributed and did not comment on it in workers' circles, but at the same time they demanded more and more brochures from Lenin and called what they were sent “junk.” Lenin furiously answered them: “This is old!” you scream. Yes. All parties that have good popular literature distribute old stuff: Guesde and Lafargue, Bebel, Brakke, Liebknecht, etc., by decade. Do you hear: by decade! And popular literature only that is good, only that is suitable, which serves for decades. For popular literature is a series of textbooks for the people, and textbooks set out the basics that do not change over half a century. That “popular” literature that “captivates” you and which “Freedom” ( "The publication of the Socialist-Revolutionaries - Yu.B.) and the Socialist-Revolutionaries publish tons of them every month, there is waste paper and charlatanism. Charlatans are always fussy and make more noise, and some naive people take this for energy."

In this Leninist letter to Lengnik (Bolshevik Iskraist) there is “not for publication” and the following words: “No one will ever give you anything if you cannot take it: remember this.” Shaginyan quite rightly characterizes this statement of Vladimir Ilyich as timeless, having an absolute character.

To be able to take from the classics what is eternally valuable and timeless - this is discussed between the lines in Lenin’s letter to Lengnik. Lastingly valuable is the art of mastering the dialectical-materialist method of analyzing and assessing social reality. You learn it all your life, because old contradictions manifest themselves in new conditions and new ones arise, not yet explored by anyone, or only partially explored.

Lenin's letter to Lengnik castigates charlatanism, superficiality, and disregard for scientific knowledge in the pursuit of fashionable, but in fact empty and alien to Marxism, “trends of thought.”

Is the Communist Party of the Russian Federation free from the craze of quackery? Unfortunately no. You can also hear a pretentious statement in the party environment: “Marx and Lenin are geniuses. But these are geniuses of the past. What they wrote is more than a hundred years old. This is the 21st century - the century of cosmic thinking. It is necessary to critically rethink the legacy of the classics through the prism of new thinking ". And they rethink... Then they question the historical mission of the proletariat (does it exist today?). Now, under the slogan of the creative development of Marxism-Leninism, they are going to revise it with a bias towards religion, covered either by Slavophilism or Eurasianism: from Marx and Lenin back to Danilevsky and Ilyin.

The Leninist lessons of Marietta Shaginyan allow, it seems to us, to raise in the Communist Party of the Russian Federation the question of the need to determine in the party education system the Marxist-Leninist minimum, mandatory for every communist, that is, knowledge of the individual works of K. Marx, F. Engels, V.I. Lenina, I.V. Stalin. This is our opinion, which, of course, can be challenged in a friendly discussion. But it is hardly possible to eradicate quackery from the party without communists knowing the fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism.

So that criticism is conducted on the merits and is creative

Another lesson taken from Lenin by Marietta Shaginyan. A lesson in irreconcilable, merciless criticism towards those communists who, in Lenin’s expression, lose “the feeling of solidarity with the party” and become disconnected from the working masses. Shaginyan gives an example of precisely this kind of criticism by Lenin of the young leader of the German Communist Party, Paul Levy. It would seem that there was no basis for it: Levi wrote a pamphlet about the spontaneous revolutionary movement (or its outbreak) in March 1923 in the German city of Mansfeld. In it, the criticism of the participants in the movement - the workers - was uncompromisingly harsh, although theoretically correct. The workers of Mansfeld and the proletarians of other cities who supported them opposed the intolerable oppression from the owners of factories and factories. They acted separately, in partisan detachments that were created spontaneously. But in clashes with the police they behaved with revolutionary courage and courage. The unpreparedness of the action of the Mansfeld workers (which, of course, was the fault of the communists), its lack of thought, low discipline, and weak connection with the proletarian masses doomed it to failure. Paul Levy wrote about all this. He wrote sharply, categorically and seemingly correctly, forgetting about one thing: to pay tribute to the revolutionary courage of the workers, their acquisition of albeit bitter, but valuable experience in the fight against capital.

Levi's criticism of the revolutionary action of the German proletarians caused a sharply negative attitude towards him in the Comintern. Clara Zetkin undertook to defend him as a “young, talented, promising” leader of the German communists. She turned to Lenin for help: “Paul Levy’s intentions were the purest, most selfless... do everything possible so that we don’t lose Levy!”

But Lenin did not heed the request of Klara, whom he extremely respected. This is what he told her: “Paul Levy, unfortunately, became a special issue... I believed that he was closely connected with the proletariat, although I detected in his relations with the workers a certain restraint, something like a desire to “keep at a distance.” From the time his pamphlet appeared, I had doubts about him. I fear that he has a great tendency towards self-examination, narcissism, that there is something of literary vanity in him. Criticism of the “March” speech was necessary. But what did Paul give? "Levi? He brutally cut up the party. He not only gives very one-sided criticism, exaggerated, even malicious, but he does nothing that would allow the party to find its bearings. He gives reason to suspect that he lacks a sense of solidarity with the party."

According to Lenin, one-sided, exaggerated, and even malicious criticism within the party, when the person being criticized is subjected to moral execution, is destructive criticism. This is exactly how it was in Khrushchev’s notorious report on the notorious “cult of Stalin’s personality.” This criticism served as the starting point for the destruction of the party, Soviet society and the USSR. Lenin's criticism could be murderous, but in polemics with a class enemy, and not in relation to party comrades. Internal party criticism of Lenin was always creative. Even being strictly principled and demanding, she relied on the best features of those criticized, and not on the worst. Respecting their human dignity, it gave the prospect of correcting the mistakes they had made.

Lenin especially demonstrated his caring attitude towards a person’s self-esteem in his criticism of the mistakes of his young comrades.

Instructive in this regard is Shaginyan’s recollection of V. Münzenberg, an organizer of Swiss youth, about his joint work with Lenin in the tenth years of the twentieth century: “His criticism never offended us, we never felt rejected, and even subjecting us to the most severe criticism , he always found something worthy of praise in our work."

When Lenin made a mistake in the tone and tact of his comradely criticism, he found the strength to admit it and apologize. When in June 1921, during the heated debate at the Third Congress of the Comintern on the tactics of the German Communist Party, Lenin came to the conclusion that he had been too harsh in his criticism, he wrote the following letter to the members of the German delegation: “I have received a copy of your letter to the Central Committee of our party "Thank you very much. I communicated my response orally yesterday. I take this opportunity to emphasize that I resolutely withdraw the rude and impolite language I used and hereby repeat in writing my verbal request to forgive me." Are there many similar examples in our internal party life?..

To whom Lenin was relentless in his harshness were those who encroached on the unity of the party - ideological, organizational, moral and political. During the period of crisis of the party, at the Tenth Congress of the RCP(b) in March 1921, he can be said to have defined the credo of internal party criticism: “Anyone who makes criticism must, in the form of criticism, take into account the position of the party among the enemies surrounding it”; “so that criticism is carried out on the merits, and does not at all take forms that can help the class enemies of the proletariat.”

Ethics of the proletarian leader

Marietta Shaginyan does not have a complete formulation of each of her four Leninist lessons. She examines the life of Vladimir Ilyich as an artist, painting images of his friends and enemies, the image of his existence as an ordinary person equal to us. From the dramatic stories she told, lessons in the life of a genius flow naturally. From Shaginyan’s narrative we can identify many Leninist lessons for us: lessons of dialectics, scientific analysis of social reality, lessons of truth and ethics of party criticism, lessons of courage, loyalty to revolutionary duty, lessons of oratory skills and others.

Lenin in the simplicity of his genius is revealed primarily in his writings. It would be disingenuous to say that they are all easy to read, without any difficulties in their perception. Is it easy to read State and Revolution, not to mention Materialism and Empirio-Criticism? And “What should I do?” You can't read it in one sitting. What makes Lenin’s lessons by Marietta Shaginyan valuable is, first of all, that they directly talk about serious preparation for mastering scientific texts, with a pencil in hand, as Lenin did when studying Marx, and not only.

These lessons are also valuable because Shaginyan, before turning to the analysis of a specific Leninist work, talks about the specific historical situation of its creation and highlights in it a specific historical meaning and a timeless, methodological meaning. She also talks about what Lenin was experiencing at that time, what and against whom he fought, who his friends and enemies were. All this allows us to perceive what he wrote in an emotional tone, to empathize with him the events he analyzes.

The history of the personality of a genius is extremely interesting and instructive. Much of it was said by Marietta Shaginyan. But in what she tells there are three moments in the life of Vladimir Ulyanov-Lenin, which, we think, most clearly represent his ethics as a revolutionary and politician. This is his moral sensitivity and self-detachment as a political fighter, puritan unpretentiousness in everyday life, everyday concern for ordinary people - ordinary comrades.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, already in his youth, went through the tempering school of political struggle. As they say, he knew how to take a blow and deliver devastating blows to the class enemy. He was a master of polemics in a fierce ideological battle.

“But,” writes Shaginyan, “personal attacks could not, nevertheless, intertwined with the ideological struggle ... not torment and torment him.” Vladimir Ilyich’s nerves were so bad that he fell ill with a severe nervous illness - “sacred fire”, which is that the tips of the thoracic and spinal nerves become inflamed,” wrote Nadezhda Konstantinovna at the end of the London period.”

This recollection of Krupskaya confirms a simple truth: Lenin did not spare himself. He knew that his chosen fate as a revolutionary would require readiness for anything, including premature death. He risked his life more than once. The officer sent to arrest Lenin by order of the Provisional Government in July 1917 was instructed to kill him, so to speak, “while attempting to escape.” Let's not forget about Kaplan's shot.

Lenin was unusually cheerful, but he subordinated everything personal to revolutionary activity and led a Puritan lifestyle and was distinguished by extreme modesty in everyday life. Shaginyan cites the recollection of one of his contemporaries:

"Everyone knows that Lenin led a very modest lifestyle both abroad and in Russia. He lived incredibly modestly."

The Italian communist F. Misiano, who knew Lenin in Zurich during the First World War, said: “I then often went to the restaurant of the People’s House. Lunch was served there in three categories: for 1 franc. 25 sant. - “aristocratic”, for 75 sant. - "bourgeois" and for 50 cents - "proletarian". The latter consisted of two dishes: soup, a piece of bread and potatoes. Lenin invariably used the third category lunch." His modesty and unpretentiousness in everyday life became a museum rarity in the late CPSU, for which it paid. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation should not forget about this.

Of all the dramatic stories from Lenin's life told by Marietta Shaginyan, one haunts us more than others... It was October 1923. It seemed that Vladimir Ilyich began to recover from the blow: he could walk, move his left hand and pronounce, although with difficulty and unclearly, individual words. The only word he spoke clearly was “about.” At the end of October, I.I. came to him. Skvortsov-Stepanov and O.Ya. Pyatnitsky. They began to talk about the elections to the Moscow Soviet. Vladimir Ilyich did not show much attention to their story. But as soon as the visitors started talking about amendments to the order of ordinary workers to the Moscow Party Committee, he became extremely attentive in listing these amendments: about lighting the settlements where workers and the urban poor live, about extending tram lines to the suburbs where workers and peasants live, about closing of pubs, etc.

According to Pyatnitsky, “Ilyich... with his only word, which he mastered well: “just about”, began to make comments during the story with such intonations that it became completely clear and understandable to us, just as it had happened before, before Ilyich’s illness, that the amendments to the order are practical, correct, and that all measures must be taken to implement them.” Lenin had less than three months to live...

Here we will give the floor to Marietta Shaginyan: “This is Lenin’s dying lesson, given by him to every communist. And let us hear his “just about” every time our conscience tells us the main thing that a communist needs to do, what to pay attention to in working with people ". Every time you hold this or that work of Lenin in your hands and your eyes run along the lines of his text, you are left alone with the genius and your contemporary. What a blessing it is that there is the Complete Works of Vladimir Ilyich, that, re-reading his works again, you see the revolutionary future of Russia and the world. According to Lenin, it cannot be anything else. In continuous revolutionary thinking and action is all Lenin, in his life and his immortality.

I doubted for a long time whether to return to a topic that had moved from site to site more than once. We are talking about an interview with the St. Petersburg historian Alexander Pavlovich Kutenev to the New Petersburg newspaper, which was called “What was Marietta Shaginyan silent about?” , where information was given about the illegitimate children of Alexander III. But after reading the post of our blogger Oksana Lyutova with materials about the genealogy of Ulyanov (Lenin), I decided to support my critical view of this article with an article by Vladimir Chizhik (the older generation probably remembers such a musician who emigrated to the USA in the mid-70s) in New York newspaper "Davidzon newspaper". To make it clear to the reader what we are talking about, I will cite both articles. So the article

What was Marietta Shaginyan silent about?

Marietta Shaginyan (1914)

NP: Alexander Pavlovich, can you tell us more about the illegitimate children of Alexander III?

AK: Alexander III, indeed, had many illegitimate children, since he was an unrestrained and passionate man.

Tsar Alexander III (1845 - 1894)

Among the children there were also historical celebrities. In particular, Alexander Ulyanov, the elder brother of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The fact is that Maria Alexandrovna, Lenin’s mother, was a maid of honor at the court of Alexander II. When Alexander III was simply a Grand Duke, he had an affair with Maria Alexandrovna, from whom she gave birth to a son, Alexander, as a girl. History knows many similar examples: in Russia, bastards were treated humanely - they were given a princely title and assigned to a guards regiment. It is known that Lomonosov was the son of Peter I, Prince Bobrinsky was the son of Potemkin and Catherine II, Razumovsky was the illegitimate son of Elizabeth. All of them, as you know, had wonderful careers and never felt like outcasts. The same fate was in store for Alexander, Lenin’s brother.

Ulyanov family -

From left to right: standing - Olga, Alexander, Anna; sitting - Maria Alexandrovna with her youngest daughter Maria, Dmitry, Ilya Nikolaevich, Vladimir.

But Maria Alexandrovna ruined everything: after Alexander, she gave birth to another child - a girl, and this girl no longer had anything to do with Alexander III. It was indecent to keep a maid of honor with two children at court. To hush up the scandal, they decided to transfer the case to the secret police. The secret police found an unfortunate man in St. Petersburg - homosexual Ilya Ulyanov. As a person with a non-traditional sexual orientation, he was on the hook of the secret police. As a dowry to Maria Alexandrovna, he was given a noble title, a place of bread in the province, and the newlyweds went to Simbirsk.

Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova

And all this backstory would have been hushed up if not for the passionate disposition of Maria Alexandrovna. She was not distinguished by strict behavior even in Simbirsk, and although her sexual life with Ilya Nikolaevich could not work out, she gave birth to four more children, it is unknown from which fathers.

You can imagine what it was like for the Ulyanov children in the gymnasium. In a small town, everything immediately becomes known, and the boys teased their Ulyanov peers: they remembered mommy, the tsar, and Ilya Nikolaevich. Ultimately, all this had a negative impact on Alexander: he grew up very embittered with a desire to spank his daddy at all costs. With these plans, he went to St. Petersburg to study. The rest was organized by the secret police. How in our time the secret services organized the Popular Front and other democratic organizations. There, in those distant times, the secret police helped Alexander Ulyanov enter the Narodnaya Volya revolutionary organization and take part in the assassination attempt on the Tsar.

As soon as Maria Alexandrovna found out that her son had been arrested for the assassination attempt on the Tsar, she immediately went to St. Petersburg and appeared before Alexander III. It’s an amazing thing: not a single source is amazed that an unknown poor Simbirsk noblewoman gets an appointment with the Tsar without any delay! (However, historians have never been surprised by the fact that the birth dates of the first two Ulyanov children precede the wedding date of Ilya and Maria.) And Alexander III accepted his old passion immediately and they visited Sasha together in the fortress. The tsar forgave the “regicide”, promising to give him a princely title and enlist him in the guard. But Sashenka turned out to have character; he said everything he thought about both of his parents. And he promised them that as soon as he was free, he would make their whole shameless story public and would definitely throw a bomb at daddy! Therefore, Alexander Ulyanov was never released, but was sent to a psychiatric hospital, where he died of natural causes in 1901. Historians do not agree on the methods of execution, but there was no execution.

So Maria Alexandrovna indirectly influenced the fate of her eldest son. Subsequent children were not very lucky in such a family. Since Ilya Nikolaevich knew that the children were not his, he treated them as potential objects of his love affection. He never touched Sashenka as the king’s son, but Volodya received all his ardent, unfatherly love. In his youth, Vladimir Ilyich was very attractive. No matter how the mother protested, she was powerless to defend her son: Ilya Nikolaevich reproached her with his own behavior.

NP: And what about Lenin?

AK: He remained a homosexual until the end of his days. By the way, this is known all over the world, only the Soviet people knew nothing and lived in reverent worship of the leader of the proletariat. Antonioni made a film about great homosexuals, and Lenin is given a special chapter in it. Several books have already been written about this.

We cannot say whether Lenin subsequently suffered from his orientation or not, but in childhood this was also not an easy test for him: he grew up embittered and hated the whole world. In the gymnasium, he took out his anger on his peers, fought, beat his adversaries, and for all that, he, of course, was a very talented person.

NP: Where did you get such stunning information?

AK: This is also a special and interesting story. At its origins is Marietta Shaginyan. In the 70s, this writer was writing a book about Lenin and gained access to the archives. Apparently, the keepers of the archives themselves did not know what was hidden in the papers behind seven seals. When Marietta Shaginyan got acquainted with the papers, she was shocked and wrote a memo to Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev personally. Brezhnev introduced this information to his circle. Suslov lay under pressure for three days and demanded that Shaginyan be shot for slander. But Brezhnev acted differently: he summoned Shaginyan to his place and, in exchange for silence, offered her a prize for a book about Lenin, an apartment, etc. and so on.

NP: And Shaginyan really received some kind of prize for her book about Lenin?

AK: Yes, she received the Lenin Prize for her book “Four Lessons from Lenin.” But the note was classified and it was in the archives of the Central Committee of the Party. When I read this note in the archive, I wanted to see the archival materials themselves. And I requested copies. That's exactly how it was...

Marietta Shaginyan (1980)

I present to the reader the second article by Vladimir Chizhik in the New York newspaper "Davidzon Newspaper".

SUCH SENSATIONS “PEOPLE DO NOT EAT”

An interview with St. Petersburg historian Alexander Pavlovich Kutenev published in “Davidzon Newspaper” No. 22 (72) based on materials from the newspaper “New Petersburg” was called “What was Marietta Shaginyan silent about?” Subtitle: “Sensational documents about the Ulyanov family.” My grandfather instilled in me a dislike for Vladimir Ilyich a long time ago. Like all of us (don’t deny it!) I fall for sensations.

In general, I started devouring the newspaper with this publication. But my pursuit of sensation lost its pace at the very beginning: my eye stumbled over an unusual combination of words: “Prince Bobrinsky is the son of Potemkin and Catherine II.” Any Kiev Jewish post-war boy has at least once heard his grandmother say ironically: “Who will do this for you? Count Bobrinsky? The prince and the count, of course, are both nobles - but still they are not the same thing. I went to the Internet for clarification. It turned out that Jewish grandmothers understand noble titles better than the St. Petersburg author of the sensation. Bobrinsky was indeed a count. Along the way, it turned out that the count-prince’s father was not Grigory Potemkin, as our learned historian believes, but also Grigory, also the favorite of the loving Catherine, but Orlov. Perhaps this is not so important for the secrets of the Ulyanov house, but the qualifications and scientific integrity of their whistleblower intrigued me.

Once again I went on a little excursion through the Internet. At the same time, in order to weed out, if possible, the falsifications of Soviet-era propaganda, I used materials (both Russian and English) not “younger” than 2000, fortunately there are plenty of them. It became obvious that following historical facts is not Alexander Pavlovich Kutenev’s favorite pastime. His high fantasy naturally soars above low and inconvenient facts.

Kutenev: “The fact is that Maria Alexandrovna, Lenin’s mother, was a maid of honor at the court of Alexander II. When Alexander III was simply a Grand Duke, he had an affair with Maria Alexandrovna, from whom she gave birth to a son, Alexander, as a girl.”

Facts: Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova (nee Blank) was born in 1835 in St. Petersburg. Her father is Israel (Srul) Moiseevich (Moishevich) Blank, a Jew from Zhitomir, baptized in July 1820 under the name Alexander Dmitrievich, graduated from the Medical-Surgical Academy. Practiced in different cities of Russia. In 1838 he was widowed and three years later he remarried. Then A.D. Blank worked as an inspector of hospitals at the arms factory in Zlatoust. In 1847, he retired and went to Kazan, where, 42 km from the city, he bought the Yansaly (Kokushkino) estate with an area of ​​more than 500 hectares and

39 souls of peasants. That year Mashenka Blank was twelve years old, and Grand Duke Alexander was seven. Maria Alexandrovna lived in Kokushkino with her large family in 1847-1863. In the fall of 1861, she came to Penza to visit her older sister Anna, where she met Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov, a physics and mathematics teacher at this institute. On September 6, 1863, 32-year-old I.N. Ulyanov and M.A. Blank, got married in the Kazan Mother of God Church in the village of Cheremyshevo (near Kokushkino), Laishevsky district, Kazan province. Maid of honor is a junior female court rank, which was given to representatives of noble noble families. Maria Alexandrovna’s father received a noble rank, rising to the rank of court councilor (roughly equivalent to

the rank of lieutenant colonel), that is, his family did not belong to a noble family. Moreover, as we already know, the family lived far from the royal court. Lenin's elder brother Alexander Ilyich Ulyanov was born in 1866, three years after the marriage of his official parents. That is, even if Maria Alexandrovna had been a “correspondence maid of honor,” by the time her son was born, the title of maid of honor, to which only unmarried girls were entitled, would have been removed from her.

Further, the historian Kutenev talks about the possible prosperous fate of the royal bastard (Alexander Ulyanov), which was ruined by his dissolute mother. “But Maria Alexandrovna ruined everything: after Alexander, she gave birth to another child - a girl... Keeping a maid of honor with two children at court was indecent... The secret police found an unfortunate man in St. Petersburg - homosexual Ilya Ulyanov... He was given a noble title and grain as a dowry to Maria Alexandrovna place in the province, and newlyweds

went to Simbirsk." This whole construction is the fruit of an inflamed imagination. The eldest child of the Ulyanov couple was not Alexander, but Anna Ilyinichna Ulyanova-Elizarova, born in August 1864 (11 months after the parents’ marriage),

two years before his brother, whose fate worried our scientist. Lenin's father, Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov, defended his dissertation for the degree of candidate of mathematical sciences at Kazan University in the fall of 1854. In 1855-1869, he taught at the Penza Noble Institute and the Nizhny Novgorod Men's Gymnasium, and did not roam around St. Petersburg with his vile harassment, as it seems

Alexander Kutenev. At the end of 1869, Ulyanov took the position of inspector, and from 1874 - director of public schools in the Simbirsk province. In 1877, he received the rank of full state councilor, which gave him the right to be considered a member of the hereditary nobility. I don’t know anything about his sexual orientation, so we’ll take this topic, which is most important for Mr. Kutenev, beyond the scope of our discussions, but the facts indicate that he received the title of nobility not as a dowry “for services to cover sin,” but after 14 (!) years after the wedding.

Kutenev also has some special information about the death of Alexander Ulyanov: “...<его>He was sent to a psychiatric hospital, where he died of natural causes in 1901. Historians do not agree on the methods of execution, but there was no execution.”

Facts: historians agree on the methods of execution: participants in the attempt on the life of the Tsar Shevyrev, Generalov, Osipanov, Andreyushkin and Ulyanov were sentenced to death and on May 8 were hanged in the courtyard of the Shlisselburg fortress. The next day, a message about this appeared in the Government Gazette newspaper. It is even known that Ulyanov before

execution kissed the cross, but Shevyrev refused. The historian Kutenev “saved” Alexander Ulyanov not only from execution, but also from the lustful attacks of his father.

I didn’t quite understand from the published interview whether all the Ulyanov children fell victim to the destructive passion of a homosexual pedophile, but the learned historian spoke categorically about Volodya Ulyanov: “.. Volodya received all his ardent non-fatherly love...

He (Lenin - V.Ch.) remained a homosexual until the end of his days.” Well, this is not the greatest sin of the leader of the world proletariat.

Mr. Kutepov gives an ironclad proof: “Antonioni made a film about great homosexuals, and Lenin is given a special chapter in it.” Everything would be fine, but in the filmography of the great director Michelangelo Antonioni there is a film about homosexuals

I couldn't find it. What a curiosity!

At the end of the interview, Alexander Pavlovich Kutenev reveals the source of his information. According to him, Marietta Shaginyan came across these sensational materials when she was working in the archives on a book about Lenin in 1970. That's right, she was working on such a book, but in 1965. The material that she found in the Zhitomir archive concerned not the moral character of Maria Alexandrovna or the sexual orientation of Vladimir Ilyich, but the nationality of his grandfather. The historian Kutenev’s passage about how Brezhnev offered Marrieta Shaginyan an apartment in exchange for silence cannot cause anything but a smile.

Every paragraph of the publication under discussion contains either an error, a fabrication, or an outright lie. If Soviet propaganda had not defaced the term “Falsifiers of History” in the middle of the last century, I would have known what to call these notes.

Vladimir Chizhik

Vladimir Chizhik (right)

I would not like to draw a line under this topic. I hope that readers will continue the discussion without being tied to dates and anniversaries.

Page 8 of 27

MARIETTA SHAGINYAN

LESSON FROM LENIN

From the first years of the revolution, Lenin was for me the knowledge and love that helped me move from Christianity to communism.

A guide in literary work and support in difficult moments were Lenin’s words that he really liked my things, conveyed to me in a letter from Voronsky: “Yes, you know: Comrade Lenin really likes your things...” (Voronsky’s letter was repeatedly published from his with and without a signature. - M. Sh.) We could talk about the first parts of “Change”, published in “Krasnaya Novi”, about the first book “Soviet Armenia”, published in the year of this letter, and about articles published in “Pravda” ", "Petrogradskaya Pravda" and "New Rossrot". He personally praised the latter to the editor of “New Russia”, Isai Grigorievich Lezhnev, and he conveyed his review to me.

The lesson I learned from Lenin is described below.

Don't waste a minute. Fig. thin N. Zhukova

1

I remember how I joined the party in the first days of the retreat of our troops in the fall of 1941. The whole atmosphere of those days was special, alarming and elated. The war engulfed people immediately, like a fire in a house, the state of mind of everyone seemed to be exposed and highlighted, the characters became immediately visible, like a skeleton on an x-ray, the difference between them became sharper and more distinct. Our leaders were very busy, and yet they gave us parting words. When I received my candidate’s book, I heard general phrases about war, patriotism, and the duty of a party member. The latter seemed to be understood by itself and was not explained specifically; in war conditions, it was similar to the duty of every honest person and son of his homeland in general. But when I went out into the street, hiding my precious book on my chest, life itself immediately began to concretize this duty, or rather, brought me face to face with a new responsibility.

I never learned what agitation is and how to agitate, even though I was a great debater in dealing with people when it was necessary to defend or refute something. And here the first task set before me, as a party candidate, was to become an agitator, to speak in front of people.

Moscow lay dotted, like the back of a deer, with protective stains of paint on the walls, lined with sandbags, striped with white paper ribbons along the glass windows. The sky above her was smoky, shrouded in a veil of explosions. Sirens howled, driving people into shelters. In the morning, at late dawn, like a piece of ice in the cold dusk of the sky, a spread out silver-blue balloon swayed over the squares. Everything everyday has gone somewhere, replaced by a huge bivouac, something temporary, fragile, disappearing. And we, some of the writers, had to immediately intervene in this unsteady world of instability, making people feel that things stand firmly on the ground, the usual forms of Soviet power were and remained granite-strong, and the spiritual life of a person should enter the shores of the unshakably solid, unshakably resistant peace - we were appointed agitators.

I had to perform very often: in the half-empty auditoriums of the Polytechnic, and in cinemas in front of the screen before the start of the show, and in the marble corridors and metro platforms packed to capacity after the siren howled... But when there was a respite between professional work - writing for newspapers , for the then Sovinformburo, for large circulations - and speeches with propaganda speeches - and such a respite most often happened during night alarms - I eagerly read the books that were at hand. These were books published in the thirties - memoirs of Comintern workers about Lenin and memories of Lenin by Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya. I passionately wanted to know and feel from these books what qualities of a communist made Lenin the leader of the international labor movement, why and why he became so loved by mankind, what qualities of his character one should learn to imitate - and in general, how a real communist differs from an ordinary person for minus his beliefs.

The secret of character is also the secret of behavior, the key to the complex that influences you in another person, inspires trust and respect for him, a desire to follow him; and this is not born by the mind, it is deeper than the mind, and it is somehow connected with what you yourself should now strive to be.

First of all, I wanted to learn from the books how Lenin spoke to people, what lesson the agitator could learn from his art of influencing and persuading. General phrases would not have helped here, general definitions scattered in many articles and books, the stories of eyewitnesses who listened to Lenin could not help much either, the thought had to cling to something very specific, to some captured feature. In this regard, a small book published on poor yellowish paper about the impressions of foreign communists during the difficult era of the collapse of the Second International and the first steps of the Third International turned out to be especially useful.

People who were accustomed to listening to many social democrats, and among them such “classics” of social democracy as the venerable August Bebel, suddenly became acquainted with Lenin, whom they knew only by hearsay. They had the old standard of comparison ready, they had experience of all types of eloquence from the platform, and they could not, having heard Lenin for the first time, not notice something new for themselves in his speeches.

It was very interesting to read, for example, how the communist Saint-Katayama, who came from Mexico to Soviet Russia in December 1921, described Lenin’s report at the Bolshoi Theater, at a meeting of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets. Saint-Katayama did not know Russian at all; he did not understand a single word in the report; but with his eyes instead of his ears he perceived both how Lenin spoke and how they listened to him. Apparently, this was both new and unusual for him to such an extent that Saint-Katayama, who did not understand the spoken words during the three hours of the report, nevertheless did not get tired or bored.

Here is his description: “Comrade Lenin spoke for approximately three hours, showing no signs of fatigue, hardly changing his intonation, steadily developing his thoughts, presenting argument after argument, and the entire audience seemed to catch, with bated breath, every word he said. Comrade Lenin did not resort to rhetorical pomposity or any gestures, but possessed extraordinary charm; when he began to speak, there was deathly silence, all eyes were fixed on him. Comrade Lenin looked around the entire audience, as if he was hypnotizing them. I observed a large crowd and did not see a single person move or cough during these long three hours. He captivated the entire audience. The time seemed very short to the listeners. Comrade Lenin is the greatest speaker I have ever heard in my life."

Everything here is also very general. But if Lenin's peculiarity as an orator was new to Saint-Katayama, something also seems unexpected to us in his visual perception. The image of Lenin - in the drawings of our artists, in the monuments of sculptors, in the reproductions of actors - came to us and remained visibly in front of millions of Soviet people - with a broad gesture. This gesture, the wave of his hand directed forward, became, as it were, integral to him. And at Saint-Katayama, Lenin “did not resort to any gestures,” he seemed to stand motionless in front of the listeners. And what’s more, his lack of gesture was combined with monotonous intonation: three hours - without a change in intonation! And further. The phrase that Lenin “seemed to hypnotize” the audience sounded somehow strange and unacceptable to our Soviet ears. This is not at all like the portrait that our sculptors and artists created.

But let’s try to think about what exactly struck Saint-Katayama in Lenin’s oratory. By his own admission, he did not know the Russian language and, therefore, did not understand a word from the report. Where did his confidence come from that Lenin “steadily developed his thought, presenting argument after argument”? Of course, without being able to hear the meaning of the words, Saint-Katayama could not help but hear and, moreover, feel the deepest power of conviction with which Lenin’s speech was imbued. This conviction did not weaken for a second, hence the impression of a steady development of thought; and it lasted, without weakening, without tiring the listeners, for three whole hours, which means that there were no tiring repetitions in it, but there was new and new evidence (arguments), following one after another. Having caught this main feature in Lenin’s speech, Saint-Katayama involuntarily translated his mental image from it into a visual image, perhaps through the association “a drop wears away a stone,” and from here a completely different Ilyich appeared in his description - a lively and always very excited Ilyich, suddenly turned at Saint-Katayama into a motionless statue without a gesture, with a monotonous intonation that remained unchanged for three whole hours.

But Saint-Katayama threw out one more definition, without giving any explanation to the reader: Lenin “possessed extraordinary charm.” In order to reveal the secret of Ilyich’s charm as an orator for the masses of listeners, which was left as a bare statement by Saint-Katayama, it is very useful to imagine which speakers from among the most authoritative leaders foreign communists were accustomed to at that time, that is, with whom Saint-Katayama could mentally compare Lenin.

In the memoirs of theorists and practitioners of the revolutionary movement it is difficult to find (and one cannot demand from them!) anything artistic that turns into the art of words. And yet, remembering Lenin at the Stuttgart Congress of the Second International in 1907. Felix Kohn, probably not intending to do this at all, left us an almost artistic portrait of Bebel. For me, who lived a lot in Germany and studied for a short time in Heidelberg, this portrait was simply a revelation, because I often had to encounter among the Germans a feature of honor for rank that is incomprehensible to a Russian person, some kind of special respect for officials, for the uniform. The “general of social democracy,” the deeply revered leader, August Bebel, came to the Stuttgart Congress. There was no idolatry in the German workers' party. Vladimir Ilyich himself wrote about this very eloquently: “The German workers’ party happened to correct the opportunist mistakes of even such great leaders as Bebel.” But the top of the Social Democracy in their party life had some external borrowings of forms accepted in the circles of bourgeois diplomacy. Thus, for the purpose of clarifying “points of view” and for friendly rapprochement, “receptions”, “cups of tea”, and round table meetings were organized. “Such a banquet was held outside the city in Stuttgart,” says Felix Kohn. “Beer, wine, and all kinds of food paved the way for “rapprochement”...

As the most authoritative leader of the Second International and the guardian of traditions, Bebel at the banquet made a solemn tour of all delegations, addressing everyone with the word “Kinder” (“children”), joking fatherly with some, chiding others, and instructing others on the path of truth. The retinue of admirers and admirers who surrounded Bebel enhanced the majesty of this circumambulation...”

The whole picture clearly appears before us: Bebel really was a “great leader” (that’s what Lenin called him, that’s how he was remembered by the students of my time, who sat on the “Agrarian Question”), and what I want to say next is no offense to his name said. But when personal greatness is realized as a position among his contemporaries and a person strives to combine it with democracy, as if to descend from top to bottom to the people and say a gracious word to everyone, this “democracy” only emphasizes the difference in the positions and “ranks” of the one who goes around those gathered to the “reception”, and those whom he bypasses. The formula “so as not to offend anyone” asserts, as a matter of course, the superiority of one person over another, and this has been absorbed into the traditions of the tops of Western social democracy. But is it possible for even a minute to imagine our Ilyich in Bebel’s position, mercifully bypassing the delegates like a general? It is physically impossible to imagine this. And one cannot imagine him “surrounded by a retinue of admirers and admirers.” There was some other quality in Ilyich’s “extraordinary charm” as an orator, noted by Saint-Katayama, in his enormous popularity among hundreds of people who listened with bated breath to his report. But which one?

Let's go back a little in time and from Stuttgart in 1907, let's look into 1902 - into the Munich memories of Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya. Ilyich’s faithful comrade-in-arms, like Ilyich himself, had great respect for Plekhanov; when in one of my works (“Thornton Factory”) I put the name of Plekhanov next to Takhtarev, Nadezhda Konstantinovna corrected me in a letter, pointing out that Plekhanov was one of the founders of our party, and Takhtarev was “a revolutionary for an hour.” But here’s what she remembers when they created Iskra:

“Workers often came to Iskra; everyone, of course, wanted to see Plekhanov. It was much more difficult to get to Plekhanov than to us or Martov, but even if a worker got to Plekhanov, he left him with mixed feelings. He was amazed by Plekhanov’s brilliant mind, his knowledge, his wit, but somehow it turned out that, leaving Plekhanov, the worker felt only the enormous distance(my italics - M. Sh.) between himself and this brilliant theorist, but he was never able to talk about his cherished things, about what he wanted to talk about, consult with him.

And if a worker did not agree with Plekhanov and tried to express his opinion, Plekhanov began to get irritated: “Your daddies and mommies were still walking under the table when I...”

Again a surprisingly specific character look! The brilliance of wit, high education - Plekhanov himself knew and saw all this very well in himself. He received personal pleasure and personal satisfaction from his great qualities, just as a talented actor enjoys when he manages to perform excellently. In Zurich, during a sharp dispute with the Rabocheye Dyelo group, which led to a break, the disputants were worried and worried; it got to the point that Martov “even tore off his tie.” But Plekhanov “shone with wit.” And Nadezhda Konstantinovna, remembering this, writes, involuntarily completing the portrait she had given earlier: “Plekhanov... was in an excellent mood, because the enemy with whom he had to fight so much was laid low. Plekhanov was cheerful and talkative." If in the character of August Bebel there was a German observance of tradition, naked even to a certain naivety, then in the character of personal satisfaction with oneself, in the trait that the Russian language defined as “he knows his own worth,” in Plekhanov it is no longer naive veneration for rank, but the individualism of great talent who sees first of all his own “how”, and not someone else’s “what”. And yet we are only getting closer to the answer to what Lenin’s “different quality” as an orator is, and again we need to travel from book to book, this time to the impression of one Scottish communist, in order to finally get to the bottom of the exact definition.

The Scots are a very stubborn people, with a surprisingly persistent national character that has preserved itself for several centuries without change. When we read the memoirs of V. Gallagher, a delegate from the Scottish Working Committee at the Second Congress of the Comintern, the hero of Smollett’s novels appears before us, although Smollett’s heroes lived in the middle of the 18th century, and Gallagher’s youth fell in the 20th century. The same directness and sharpness, the same conversation without beating around the bush and diplomacy - chopping in Scottish style - and the same intelligent observation combined with natural common sense. Without the slightest embarrassment, and even somehow proudly, Gallagher admits that at the meetings and commissions to develop theses, “which gave the Second Congress such enormous importance in the history of the Comintern,” he personally, Gallagher, “was not at all useful.” Why? Yes, because... But it’s better not to convey it in your own words, but to give the floor to the Scot himself:

“Having arrived in Moscow with the conviction that the rebel from Glasgow knew much more about the revolution than any of our Russian comrades, despite the fact that they had lived through the revolution, I immediately tried to put them on the “right” path in a number of ways. questions..."

There is not the slightest doubt that Ilyich liked Gallagher’s Scottish self-confidence; perhaps it evoked literary reminiscences in him, as in us, and awakened in him the natural Ilyich humor. With inimitable frankness, Gallagher goes on to say that he was extremely irritated “due to the unusual” “feeding conditions” for him and in this state became incredibly touchy. Having learned that in the book “The Infantile Disease of “Leftism” in Communism” Lenin portrayed him, Gallagher, in a bad light, he almost attacked Vladimir Ilyich:

“I persistently tried to assure him that I was not a child, but, as I said, “I got my hands on this business” (Gallagher said “game” - in this game. He meant the revolution. - M. Sh. ) . Many of my remarks were made in a language freer than ordinary English." This means that Gallagher attacked Lenin in Scots, with mustard and pepper, which is not characteristic of seasoned English speech. And now imagine an angry Scotsman showering Lenin with the vocabulary adopted “on the other side of the Clyde.” Lenin calmed him down with a short note: “When I wrote this little book, I did not know you.” But he did not forget either the Scot himself or his phrase: “in a language freer than ordinary English.” When, a few months later, another communist, William Pohl, came to the Soviet Union from Great Britain, Vladimir Ilyich described Gallacher’s trick to him and probably skillfully mimicked him, repeating the famous phrase exactly and with a Scottish accent: Gallacher said hewis an awl haun et the game ( “Gallagher,” he said, “has got his knack for this.” Reporting this from Paul, Gallagher ends his story: “Paul says he (Lenin) captured the Clydeside accent perfectly” (That is, the banks of the River Clyde, near Glasgow .- M. Sh.).

We should be warmly grateful to the Scottish communist even for this precious touch of Vladimir Ilyich’s infinitely dear humor to us. But we owe Gallagher incomparably more. It was Gallagher who was able to most keenly notice and most accurately convey the main feature of Lenin’s speeches and conversations:

“I was at Lenin’s house twice and had a private conversation with him . What struck me most about him was that while I was with him, I didn’t have a single thought about Lenin, I could only think about what he was thinking about, and he was always thinking about the world revolution.”(Italics are mine, - M. Sh.)

Here is finally a line that thought can cling to. To see Lenin face to face, to hear his voice, perhaps to meet his eyes more than once and, despite this, all the time not to see or hear Lenin himself, not to think about him himself, but only about the subject of his thoughts, about that what Lenin thinks, how he lives now, that is, to perceive only the content of his speech not “how” and “who”, but “what”! Lenin was such a great speaker and he was so able to completely renounce himself, pouring himself into the subject of his speech, that the whole depth of his convictions, the whole content of his thoughts were transmitted to the listener, making him forget about the speaker himself and not for a second thereby distracting attention from his essence speech or conversation.

I imagine two forms of reaction to two types of speakers. After his report, you approach one with admiration and congratulations: “How wonderful you were, how brilliantly you performed!” And you approach someone else and talk not about how he spoke, but immediately about the subject of his speech, which captured, interested, and captivated you. Having underlined Gallagher’s deep and simple-minded words with a red cross, I made the following conclusion for myself: if the audience begins to praise and admire you after your report, it means that you did your job poorly, you failed it. And if the conversation immediately turns to the subject and content of your report, as if you weren’t even there, it means you performed well and did your job with flying colors. This was the first lesson I learned from reading during the bombings, and since then, directing my internal efforts in the work of an agitator so that at the end of the report the listeners would immediately start talking about its contents, and not about me, I mentally always imagined the image Lenin the speaker. Even though it was not possible to achieve even a hundred thousandth part of the result, the very memory of the lesson learned was precious; By keeping it relentlessly, you develop a sober self-esteem of any external success.

2

Thus the first step was taken in understanding the characteristics of Lenin as an agitator. But the secret of the enormous love of the millions of masses for him, love not only with the mind, but also with the heart, still remained indefinable. True, the difference was already quite obvious in how, for example, the “retinue of his admirers and admirers” respectfully followed August Bebel, who certainly in their own way also loved Bebel and were devoted to him, and how - not at all respectfully - people rushed towards Lenin, just to look at him and be around him. Often observing such meetings in Moscow in 1921, Clara Zetkin talks about them in her memoirs:

“When Lenin came to see me, it was a real holiday for everyone in the house, from the Red Army soldiers who stood at the entrance, to the girl who served in the kitchen, to the delegates from the Middle and Far East, who, like me, lived in this huge dacha...

“Vladimir Ilyich has come!” This news was passed from one to another, everyone guarded him, ran into the large hallway or gathered at the gate to greet him. Their faces lit up with sincere joy when he passed by, greeting them and smiling with his kind smile, exchanging a few words with one or the other. There was not a shadow of coercion, not to mention servility, on the one hand, and not the slightest trace of condescension or the pursuit of effect, on the other. Red Army soldiers, workers, office workers, delegates to the congress... - they all loved Lenin as one of their own, and he felt like one of his own among them. A heartfelt, brotherly feeling brought them all together.”

There is nothing new in these words; everyone who has ever written about personal meetings with Lenin has invariably noted the same thing - the great simplicity, cordiality, and camaraderie of Ilyich in his communication with other people. There is only one thing in Zetkin’s story that the German communist added from herself. Without hearing this as a personal confession from Lenin himself, without quoting any Leninist statement in a letter or conversation, but as if unwittingly taking on the function of a psychologist or writer (who can speak for her imaginary heroes), she writes about Lenin: “. ..he felt like he belonged among them.” If the editor had demanded from her at this point a certificate of how she knows this, or a strict “coroner” in an American court had pointed out to her that a witness has no right to speak for others about what others feel, but only for himself, what he himself feels that Clara Zetkin would have to correct herself and clarify her speech in this way: “I felt” or: “I saw that Lenin felt like his own person among them.” Then it would be necessary to find out what exactly it was about Lenin’s attitude towards other people (after all, not only simplicity and cordiality!) that caused such recognition in Clara Zetkin.

Let's leave the book of memories for a while and turn to other sources.

When the first edition of Lenin's Works was published, we did not yet have an extensive network of political study circles with a widely developed reading program. Each question in these programs covered (and now covers) many titles of books by classics of Marxism, but not entirely, but indicating only the pages needed to read - from such and such to such and such. I consider myself lucky that at the end of the twenties I avoided this diversity of getting to know the book piece by piece and was able to read Lenin volume by volume, each work in its entirety. True, having neither a consultant nor an older comrade who would “guide” me in this reading, I often “spread my thoughts” into secondary places, carried away by some detail, and missed the main thing. But these details were very useful to me later. One of these details, which stops attention on the very first pages of “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism,” helps, it seems to me, to understand a very important thing: the connection between individualism in a person’s character and the tendency of his thinking towards theoretical idealism. Vladimir Ilyich really liked one expression from Diderot. Having begun his polemic with Ernst Mach, he cites the entire quotation where Diderot used this expression. Judging by the footnote, Lenin read the French encyclopedist in the original and translated the quoted passage himself. We are talking about Diderot's conversation with d'Alembert about the nature of materialism. Diderot invites his interlocutor to imagine that the piano is endowed with the ability of sensation and memory. And suddenly such a moment of madness comes... What follows is Diderot’s famous phrase: “There was a moment of madness when the feeling piano imagined that it was the only piano in existence in the world and that all the harmony of the universe occurs in it.” This image of a feeling piano, on the keys of which (organs of perception) the objective world, that is, materially existing nature, plays - and which suddenly went crazy, imagining that in it, the only one, lies the entire harmony of the universe - captured Lenin so strongly that that he not only quoted this passage, but also returned to it again, repeated it, developed it and brought it closer to us, giving it to the reader from a slightly different perspective. In Diderot, the emphasis is on the idea that the piano imagined that all the harmony of the universe occurs in him(italics mine. - M. Sh.). Lenin, mocking the “naked” Ernst Mach, writes that if he does not recognize an objective reality that exists independently of us, “then he is left with one “bare abstract” I, certainly a large and italic written I = “a crazy piano, imagining, that it alone exists in the world." It would seem that this is again the same quote from Diderot, but not quite the same! Ilyich equates “crazy piano” with the first person singular pronoun “I”. He seems to focus not on Diderot’s second thought (that the “crazy piano” imagined itself as the creator of the harmony of the universe, carrying the entire objective world within itself, like Hegel’s “World Mind” later); he simply throws out this second half of the phrase so that it does not double the reader’s attention, and emphasizes Diderot’s first statement that the “crazy piano” imagined itself alone in the world. And moreover, it turned into “I” with a capital letter. But when “I” with a capital “I” becomes the center of the world and it exists in the singular, what happens to the poor “you”, to all other cognizing subjects? Doesn’t each “I” really cease to feel the existence of each “you”, do these “you” become for him only the creation of his own ideas? Thus, from Berkeley’s extreme theoretical solipsism, a bridge is imperceptibly laid in the reader’s mind to extreme practical individualism in a person’s character, forcing him, as it were, not to feel the existence of another person next to you with the same convincing reality with which you feel the depth and reality of your own existence.

Of course, all these arguments are very subjective to the reader. But there is a grain of truth in them. It was precisely from the fullness of his materialist consciousness that Lenin very strongly felt the real existence of other people. And everyone to whom Lenin approached could not help but feel the reality of this approach of the man Lenin to another person, and therefore could not help but experience in response his human equality with him. In the materialistic experience of the existence of “you” with the same force as the existence of one’s “I”, there is a completely new quality of our time.

Have you ever, reader, experienced special happiness from communicating with a person who, you feel, has approached you with that expression of equality when his “I” feels the real existence of your “you”? This doesn't happen very often on earth. People are different in everything - not only in their external position in society, but also in talent, in intelligence, in character, in age, in the degree of external attractiveness. But in one thing they are absolutely equal. The fact is that they all really exist. And so, in the presence of the living Lenin and even in reading - just reading his books - each of us experienced the living happiness of affirming the reality of your own existence, no matter how small or insignificant it may seem to you. It seems to me that this is one of the very important reasons why people felt good with Lenin and Lenin felt good with people. One of the members of the British Socialist Party, who visited Moscow in 1919, D. Feinberg, defined this feeling as a special feeling of inner freedom: “...no matter how reverently and respectfully you treated him, you immediately felt free in his presence." This means that you showed the best sides of your character in your interactions with Lenin, that is, to put it simply, you became better with him.

3

A scientist, even a great scientist, can be a bad, useless psychologist, look past you without seeing you, listen and not answer, take black for white, and humanity will not ask him for this; Moreover, even with a complete lack of attention to you and understanding of you from such a scientist, you can study and grow with him every day, every hour, learn powerful concentration of the mind, admire the dedication of your whole life to the subject of your science. But a party member, a communist, especially if he is the leader of some collective, cannot formally relate to people. He is called upon to see and feel the people he leads. And to say about him that he is a bad psychologist is the same as admitting that he cannot cope with one of his tasks.

Of course, to be a psychologist like Ilyich, one must be born Ilyich, with his enormous reliance on materialist consciousness. It was as if the primary quality of his nature was the complete absence of vanity. He really felt the existence of another person, as real as his own existence. In this regard, you can strive to internally imitate him all your life, and even if you do not succeed in this to any extent, this will become your conscience, your truest criterion in assessing the characters - your own and those around you. But many of Lenin’s purely pedagogical techniques, and especially his method of constantly studying people, can be learned by every communist and, in any case, it is necessary to know about them.

The ability to approach a person, understand him, correctly agitate, teach or give a lesson grew in Vladimir Ilyich in the process of constant, tireless work with people, a passionate need to study people, be with them, feel them. He never showed indifference to a person or inattention to his direct needs. But, in addition to direct practice of working with people, Lenin always learned from books, from fiction, what the deep psychology of people is. We know from the words of Nadezhda Konstantinovna that he literally yearned for fiction in Krakow and “reread the scattered volume of Anna Karenina for the hundredth time.” I have read the novel a hundred times, where Tolstoy’s favorite hero, Levin, appears, with his peasant philosophy, where such a magnificent cross-section of Tolstoy’s contemporary society is given, where, without deliberateness, with the greatest truth of art, such characters as Karenin, terrible in his dry spiritual nakedness, are revealed! The characters of a different society, a different era... The great school of psychology, opened by the true art of words, gave Ilyich a lot in his understanding of people.

We writers are often reproached by our readers for the superficial psychological image of modern man. And critics often attack precisely those who honestly try to reflect in the new generation not what should be, but the given as it is now, or who catch dangerous symptoms of what should not be. This “beating” does a disservice to the most important task of fiction - to lead humanity to what it should be through a deep and truthful reflection of what is given. This also does a disservice to the huge army of communists, who from reading some Soviet books receive imaginary, rather than real, knowledge of their contemporaries, among whom they live and work.

Each people expresses itself with enormous expressive power in its language. Vladimir Ilyich understood this well. His work with people was greatly helped by the constant, ongoing study of the languages ​​that people speak. Our propagandists somehow think little about this. Meanwhile, communicating with workers of different nationalities through translators, traveling around foreign countries and staying in them without the opportunity to read even a poster on a pole, not to mention newspapers, is a difficult thing for a politician, the same as standing at a locked door without a key to it. Although Lenin himself wrote in his questionnaires that he did not know foreign languages ​​well, here is what witnesses say:

“Comrade Lenin understood English well (and spoke English)..." (D. Fainberg). Lenin “spoke English completely fluently” (Saint-Katayama). “In 1920, when the Second Congress of the Comintern took place, Vladimir Ilyich, in his speech, criticized the mistakes of the leadership of the Communist Party of Germany and the line of the Italian Serrati. While they were talking about the German Communist Party, Vladimir Ilyich spoke German, and then, when he started talking about Serrati’s mistakes, he immediately switched to French. I was at this meeting of the congress, which took place in the St. Andrew's Hall of the Kremlin Palace. I remember the roar that went through the hall. Foreign comrades could not imagine that a Russian, who had just spoken brilliantly in German, was also fluent in French” (E. D. Stasova).

But, freely delivering reports and conversations in German, English and French, Vladimir Ilyich also knew Italian well and read Italian newspapers. In the fall of 1914, in a passionate polemic with German and other socialists who sanctioned war loans, Lenin contrasted them with Italian communists in the article “European War and International Socialism.” He quotes several times from the Italian newspaper Avanti. On three and a half pages of his article, Lenin cites eleven Italian phrases, or more precisely, 109 Italian words. From the nature of these quotes it is clear that Ilyich enjoys the high revolutionary content, elevated by the musical beauty of the language. For him, this knowledge of foreign languages, their free use is by no means a simple baggage of education. Through language he comprehends the inner gesture of the people, the peculiarities of their reactions, their character, their humor; he is looking for better ways to reach it, for better mutual understanding. We have already seen how he subtly noticed and then used the Scottish features of Gallagher's English. But Lenin knew not only four European languages. Until the end of his days, he was interested in the languages ​​of the fraternal Slavic peoples and continued, to the best of his ability and time, to study them. Just as in the above cases, knowledge of languages ​​helped Ilyich immediately establish contact with the British, Germans and French, so familiarity with the Czech language and customs helped him. In the summer of 1920, Antonin Zapototsky arrived in Moscow. With excitement and confusion, he awaited his reception with Lenin: how and what should he decide to talk to him about? But his anxiety was soon relieved:

“First of all, it turned out that he (Lenin) understands Czech speech... He began the conversation with a question that probably would not have confused any Czech. He asked if dumplings with plums were still eaten in the Czech Republic. He remembered this favorite Czech dish from his time in Prague...”

The Bulgarian communist Chr. arrives in Moscow. Kabakchiev brings Lenin as a gift a whole bunch of brochures in Bulgarian, of which he is very proud: this is what mass political literature we have! In such cases, interest in the donated books usually fades at the sight of the unfamiliar language in which they are written. But we can immediately imagine a living Vladimir Ilyich, looking through the brochures with curiosity.

“Is it difficult to learn the Bulgarian language?” - he suddenly asks Kabakchiev. This is not an idle question. Lenin asks to send him a Bulgarian-Russian dictionary as soon as possible. And after some time, apparently despairing of getting it from Kabakchiev, Lenin writes a note to the librarian asking her to get him a Bulgarian-Russian dictionary.

From studying foreign languages ​​to studying people, and so on literally until the last days of life.

In the years when the direct influence of the living Ilyich had not yet been erased from memory, M. Sholokhov reflected the communist’s desire to master a foreign language. In “Virgin Soil Upturned” there is a remarkable image of a simple and illiterate party leader in a village, eagerly studying every free minute the English language he needs for the “world revolution.” In those years, our state also made great efforts to meet people's needs, establishing the so-called “FONs” for party and creative workers - individual training in foreign languages. Unfortunately, few people really took advantage of them.

Lenin paid great attention to youth. He taught never to be afraid of her, watched her most closely, knew how to treat her pride with care (N.K. Krupskaya tells how he corrected beginning and young authors completely unnoticed by them), and most importantly, he had a wonderful gift (or he himself raised have self-control) don’t get irritated by mistakes. When faced with something negative, he did not forget to remember or notice at the same time something positive in the same person. An organizer of Swiss youth in the tenth years of our century, W. Münzenberg writes after working together with Lenin: “His criticism never offended us, we never felt rejected, and even subjecting us to the most severe criticism, he always found in our work that something worthy of praise." Münzenberg calls Lenin’s attitude pedagogical, that is, aimed at training personnel: “Without his direct personal comradely assistance, which he provided with great pedagogical tact, the International Youth Bureau in Zurich would in no way have brought such benefit to the youth movement in 1914-1918 ." And he ends his memoirs: “During my fifteen years of work in the socialist youth movement, I received innumerable amounts from the most famous leaders of the labor movement, but I cannot remember a single one who, as a person and politician, stood closer to youth and politically influenced more proletarian youth than Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov-Lenin.”

It should be noted here that Lenin always noticed the best in a person, and this is one of the most important traits necessary for a teacher, and therefore for a communist working with personnel; because a communist can build his educational work with people only by relying on their best traits, and not on their worst. Nadezhda Konstantinovna says: “Vladimir Ilyich constantly had... streaks of passion for people. He will notice some valuable trait in a person and cling to him.” At the beginning of May 1918, a group of Finnish comrades, who had made many major mistakes and suffered complete defeat in the party struggle, went to Lenin with a guilty head, realizing with all seriousness their own mistake. People were sure that they would receive a severe reprimand. But Lenin hugged them and, instead of scolding them, began to encourage, console, turn their thoughts to the future, talk about what they had to do next.

There are a lot of similar examples, and when you read simple stories about this, you feel that the manifestation of such sensitivity is not just Ilyich’s kindness, because, when necessary, Ilyich knew how to be mercilessly harsh. But one of the most serious weapons of educational work with personnel was Lenin’s ability not only not to suppress a person’s sense of self-worth, but, on the contrary, to awaken and strengthen it. Vladimir Ilyich seemed to communicate with those who had this sense of self-esteem with special pleasure. As a rule, these were Russian workers who came to emigrate to him, peasants whom the “world” sent to him as walkers in the first years of the revolution, those scientists and creative workers who, like Mikhail Lomonosov, did not want to be lackeys of God himself, and not “just” from the powers that be. By the way, he greatly valued this inner human independence among the English workers, whom he studied literally with passion during his London emigration. The pages dedicated to this by Nadezhda Konstantinovna simply burn you when you read them. In English churches, after the service, peculiar discussions were held, at which ordinary workers spoke. And Vladimir Ilyich went to churches just to hear these speeches. He read avidly in the newspapers that here and there a workers' meeting was being announced, and he traveled through the most remote quarters to these meetings, went to workers' libraries and reading rooms, rode on the roofs of omnibuses, visited the "Social Democratic" church in London, where the priest was a social democrat. Visitors to London met only the top of the English working class, bribed by the bourgeoisie, but Lenin kept a close eye on the ordinary English worker, the son of a people who had carried out unique revolutions, gone through Chartism and created “habeas corpus act” - this commandment of personal human independence.

The class instinct of the worker, resting on a powerful sense of the collective, developed by daily joint work, is closely connected with a sense of self-esteem, incompatible with either servility, or ingratiation, or cowardice, or arrogant self-confidence. An immeasurable abyss separates this calm and firm consciousness of oneself as a human being from self-loving vanity, arrogance, self-confidence, arrogance, and selfishness. I believe that one must be able to subtly distinguish this difference. If communists must resist all types of vanity, trying to eradicate them, then people with a calm sense of self-esteem, people with an independent and fearless judgment should be cherished in the ranks of the party like the apple of their eye.

4

In the recent past, we had a method of influencing a comrade who had made a mistake, which received the gloomy name of “working through.” There are few creative workers among us who would not endure this elaboration hard, for themselves or for others. It consisted in the fact that the one who made a mistake was subjected entirely to a kind of moral execution. With such “working through” not only was no untouched corner of his inherent good qualities or work well done recognized, but no voices were allowed that would suddenly sound at the moment of working through not in unison with the voices of the accusers, but with a reminder of the quality in a person worthy of respect.

There was something gloomy and medieval about these studies, and few people actually benefited from them. Thinking about why we still resorted to them from time to time, I, for myself, came to a somewhat heretical conclusion: they seemed useful and leading to the strengthening of a new society. The one who made a mistake was considered as a symptom of an imminent general tendency towards error or an expression of a general impending discontent, and his complete moral defeat cleared the atmosphere, like a typhoon or a squall. And creative unions, on the “ruins” of one worked out, began to move forward again. I do not at all claim that my explanation is correct, but I only mention this as a personal attempt to explain the “method of elaboration” to myself. But if we delve into it deeper and deeper, are we not approaching something reminiscent of sacrifice, something inherent in various cults since ancient times? Whether this is true or not, we must admit with all the determination and fearlessness of the Bolsheviks that the method of elaboration, which makes a person a means, was never acceptable to Lenin in the slightest degree. This method was, by its very nature, deeply anti-Leninist. Absolutely principled in the party struggle, revealing party mistakes to their very bottom, never stopping at what we call “speaking the truth face to face,” Lenin never made an individual means(which excludes any possibility of pedagogical influence on him), but always treated the person as goals(taking into account his changes, upbringing, growth). That is why the humiliation of a person, in which he himself ceases to respect human dignity in himself, is the most negative thing that happened during the work. Such humiliation (the Russian language knows an even stronger word for it - “humiliation”), such humiliation breaks people, distorts their nervous system or produces lackeys, hypocrites, opportunists and sycophants.

I gave several examples of Lenin’s attitude towards people in those simple cases when people realized their guilt and it was necessary to carefully preserve their self-confidence and strength for tomorrow’s work. But here is a more complex example, when it seemed necessary to preserve for the party a talent considered brilliant, a person with a seemingly great literary and political future, and for this to save him from general condemnation by such an authoritative body as the Third Congress of the Comintern, especially since the above-described comrade and It’s as if he didn’t show any particular guilt - he wrote a brochure that was completely correct in content, but only went a little too far in it, went too far in tone, in criticism, in attacks... I mean the most interesting episode with the German communist Paul Lewy and Vladimir’s position in this matter Ilyich. It seems to me that anyone who wants to be psychologically and pedagogically savvy in their work should not only read, but directly study the pages dedicated to this episode in the memoirs of Clara Zetkin. Over forty years have passed since then. Objective historical analysis erased all the complexities and subtleties, all the specificity of the situation that existed in that year (1923), and, for example, in our TSB, as well as in the new party history textbooks, the episode with Levi was given a meager and concise interpretation, and Levi himself was simply thrown off the stage of history as a notorious renegade and opportunist. But forty years ago all this was not so obvious and understandable to everyone. Forty years ago, the facts were presented somewhat differently, and Levi himself was not yet an opportunist; he held a leading position in the young German Communist Party, and his position was not visible to everyone in all its duality. That is why the whole episode with Levi, especially during the war, made such a strong impression on me when it was interpreted in hot pursuit, immediately after the event, through the mouth of an old, experienced German communist.

The event that agitated all sections of the Comintern was the revolutionary labor movement (or outbreak) in March 1923 in the German city of Mansfeld. The outbreak was followed by the organization of partisan detachments in the area and a number of clashes with the police in other cities. This was caused by impossible harassment from the owners, the entry of police into factories and factories, searches, and arrests. Now, when over forty years have passed, it has become especially clear that the bourgeoisie itself provoked these outbreaks, wanting in advance, before the workers were fully organized, to break up their best forces piece by piece. At the same time, the second side of Mansfeld was especially visible: the lack of discipline of the movement, its lack of thoughtfulness, poor leadership, poor relations with the working masses, in a word, the doom of this movement to failure. And it drew sharp criticism from the majority of communists. At its height, Paul Levy came out against him with the sharpest criticism. It would seem that he said a lot of true things and was theoretically right. But... Let's move on to two interlocutors - Lenin and Clara Zetkin.

Clara Zetkin is worried, she is worried about Levi's fate. She knows that, despite the justice of his criticism, he aroused a negative attitude towards himself from the Comintern. Many sections condemn him, the Russian section condemns him especially strongly. They want to publicly reprimand him and expel him from the party. With what hot words she defends him before Lenin! “Paul Levy is not a vain, self-satisfied writer. He is not an ambitious political careerist... Paul Levy’s intentions were the purest, most disinterested... do everything possible so that we don’t lose Levy!” As if anticipating what the accusations will be, she immediately, even before they are presented, denies them. But Lenin does not lift up this “glove” at all, does not pick up those light accusations that she denies to him. He speaks about Levi (in Zetkin’s protocol story) as if he was thinking out loud - very seriously and with a very great desire to understand and analyze what happened to the end and in its entirety - not so much about Levi himself, but about party psychology in general:

“Paul Levy, unfortunately, became a special issue... I believed that he was closely connected with the proletariat, although I detected some restraint, something like desire "keep your distance". Since the appearance of his brochure, I have had problems doubts about him. I fear that there is a great tendency in him to self-examination, narcissism, that there is something of literary vanity in him. Criticism of the “March speech” was necessary. What did Paul Levy give? He brutally cut up the party. He not only gives very one-sided criticism, exaggerated, even malicious, but he does nothing that would allow the party to find its bearings. It gives reason to suspect that he lacks a sense of solidarity with the party.(Italics are mine. - M. Sh.) And this circumstance was the reason for the indignation of many ordinary comrades. This made them blind and deaf to much that was true in Levi's criticism. Thus, a mood was created - it was also transmitted to comrades from other sections - in which the dispute about the pamphlet, or rather about the personality of Paul Levy, became the exclusive subject of debate - instead of the question about the false theory and bad practice of the “offensive theorists” and the “lefts” .

How grateful we should be to Clara Zetkin for writing down these words of Ilyich in detail! And how I want to think and think about them, about what party politics is, what a person in the party is... The thoughtless and hasty action of the German workers cost dearly both the entire German Communist Party and the entire revolutionary movement in the West. It gave an easy victory to the bourgeoisie. Therefore, it was necessary (“necessary” - according to Ilyich) to condemn the tactics of the “left”, to make it an instructive lesson. And then Paul Levy got involved with his pamphlet and interfered with the work of the Comintern. Instead of a general problem, please tinker with the “Paul Levy problem.” But for that matter, in his seemingly correct position, in his seemingly correct remarks there is precisely that very “personal”, “subjective” that made this position and these remarks incorrect. Ilyich speaks of criticism that is one-sided, exaggerated, almost malicious, that does not provide any guidance for the future, as something that is not only wrong in itself, but also makes one suspect in Paula Levy “a lack of a sense of solidarity with the party.” His separation from the working masses (“the desire to keep his distance”) leads to his separation from the party. Thus, the personal, when mixed with politics, makes politics itself vicious.

The verdict on Levi has not yet been pronounced by the Comintern, Levi has not yet been condemned, but in this cautious reflection of Ilyich Levi himself stands before us in full stature, as a man dooming himself to exclusion from the party, because he himself has broken away from solidarity with it.

There is something more in Ilyich’s words than just relating to Levi himself. There is a hidden inner warmth for the workers who rebelled with weapons against the owners: unsuccessful, undisciplined, causing damage to the common cause, but still this is an uprising, a historical moment of struggle, the blood of those who made this mistake was shed, and it was precisely for them made mistakes, there is no and should not be condemnation in the grand scheme of the revolution, because without such mistakes there could not have been a victorious uprising. Levi did not understand this, but the “ordinary comrades” who did not “keep their distance” from the working masses understood this, and hence their indignation against Levi.

Levi's further fate showed with what amazing portrait accuracy this man was depicted in Lenin's terse phrases. To develop such a view and assessment, one must go through Ilyich’s practical life school - his constant communication with the working class, the habit of thinking first of all about the simple worker. To develop his own judgment, Lenin could take the position of “ordinary comrades.” Until the last days of his life, Ilyich retained this ability to never “keep his distance” from the people, to always feel among them, to take the position of an ordinary comrade,

At the very end of the little book that I took with me to the bomb shelter, there is a story...

At the end of October 1923, Lenin seemed to have already begun to recover from the blow. He could walk, move his left arm and pronounce, although with great difficulty and unclearly, individual words. But he didn’t have long to live - less than three months... The only word he firmly owned was “just about.” And with this word, introducing various intonations into it, he made his comments during the conversations with him. When I. I. Skvortsov-Stepanov and O. A. Pyatnitsky came to see him on Sunday at the end of the month, he came out to meet them, leaning his left hand on a stick. And then let O. A. Pyatnitsky continue:

“Comrade Skvortsov began to tell Ilyich about the progress of the elections to the Moscow Council. He listened inattentively. During Skvortsov’s story, he looked at the narrator with one eye, and with the other he looked at the titles of the books lying on the table around which we were sitting. But when Skvortsov began to list those amendments to the order of the Moscow Committee that were introduced by the workers of factories and factories - on the lighting of settlements where workers and the urban poor live, on the extension of tram lines to the suburbs where workers and peasants live, on the closure of pubs, etc., Ilyich began to listen carefully and with his only word, which he mastered well: “just about,” he began to make comments during the story, with such intonations that it became quite clear and understandable to us, just as it happened before, before Ilyich’s illness, that the amendments to the order businesslike, correct and that all measures must be taken to implement them"(Italics are mine. - M. Sh.)

Ilyich listens inattentively to the story about the elections as something already decided, and even with his gaze turned to the books on the table shows his inattention. But when it came to the voice of the working masses, about their needs, everything in Lenin perked up.

This is Lenin’s dying lesson, which he gave to every communist. And let us hear it “just about” every time our conscience tells us the main thing that a communist needs to do, what to pay attention to when working with people.

Pedagogy is the science of human growth, it is addressed to the becoming, developing, improving in man. No old concepts of kindness, of cordiality cover or constitute the entirety of that new thing with which Ilyich approached people and what made people turn to him with their best sides, to become better with him. Lenin's ethics goes back with all its roots to the depths of dialectical-materialist consciousness and sensation of the world, this is the new ethics of the materialist, for whom the existence of all other people exists as real as his own, and he believes in this alien existence, in its growth, in its living, viable sides. There's more than just plain old kindness here. And people’s reciprocal love for Lenin is immeasurably greater than simple reciprocal love for simple, ordinary kindness.

NP: Alexander Pavlovich, can you tell us more about the illegitimate children of Alexander III?

AK: Alexander III, indeed, had many illegitimate children, since he was an unrestrained and passionate man. Among the children there were also historical celebrities. In particular, Alexander Ulyanov, the elder brother of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The fact is that Maria Alexandrovna, Lenin’s mother, was a maid of honor at the court of Alexander II. When Alexander III was simply a Grand Duke, he had an affair with Maria Alexandrovna, from whom she gave birth to a son, Alexander, as a girl. History knows many similar examples: in Russia, bastards were treated humanely - they were given a princely title and assigned to a guards regiment. It is known that Lomonosov was the son of Peter I, Prince Bobrinsky was the son of Potemkin and Catherine II, Razumovsky was the illegitimate son of Elizabeth. All of them, as you know, had wonderful careers and never felt like outcasts. The same fate was in store for Alexander, Lenin’s brother.

But Maria Alexandrovna ruined everything: after Alexander, she gave birth to another child - a girl, and this girl no longer had anything to do with Alexander III. It was indecent to keep a maid of honor with two children at court. To hush up the scandal, they decided to transfer the case to the secret police. The secret police found an unfortunate man in St. Petersburg - homosexual Ilya Ulyanov. As a person with a non-traditional sexual orientation, he was on the hook of the secret police. As a dowry to Maria Alexandrovna, he was given a noble title, a place of bread in the province, and the newlyweds went to Simbirsk.

And all this backstory would have been hushed up if not for the passionate disposition of Maria Alexandrovna. She was not distinguished by strict behavior even in Simbirsk, and although her sexual life with Ilya Nikolaevich could not work out, she gave birth to four more children, it is unknown from which fathers.

You can imagine what it was like for the Ulyanov children in the gymnasium. In a small town, everything immediately becomes known, and the boys teased their Ulyanov peers: they remembered mommy, the tsar, and Ilya Nikolaevich. Ultimately, all this had a negative impact on Alexander: he grew up very embittered with a desire to spank his daddy at all costs. With these plans, he went to St. Petersburg to study. The rest was organized by the secret police. How in our time the secret services organized the Popular Front and other democratic organizations. There, in those distant times, the secret police helped Alexander Ulyanov enter the Narodnaya Volya revolutionary organization and take part in the assassination attempt on the Tsar.

As soon as Maria Alexandrovna found out that her son had been arrested for the assassination attempt on the Tsar, she immediately went to St. Petersburg and appeared before Alexander III. It’s an amazing thing: not a single source is amazed that an unknown poor Simbirsk noblewoman gets an appointment with the Tsar without any delay! (However, historians have never been surprised by the fact that the birth dates of the first two Ulyanov children precede the wedding date of Ilya and Maria.) And Alexander III accepted his old passion immediately and they visited Sasha together in the fortress. The tsar forgave the “regicide”, promising to give him a princely title and enlist him in the guard. But Sashenka turned out to have character; he said everything he thought about both of his parents. And he promised them that as soon as he was free, he would make their whole shameless story public and would definitely throw a bomb at daddy! Therefore, Alexander Ulyanov was never released, but was sent to a psychiatric hospital, where he died of natural causes in 1901. Historians do not agree on the methods of execution, but there was no execution.

So Maria Alexandrovna indirectly influenced the fate of her eldest son. Subsequent children were not very lucky in such a family. Since Ilya Nikolaevich knew that the children were not his, he treated them as potential objects of his love affection. He never touched Sashenka as the king’s son, but Volodya received all his ardent, unfatherly love. In his youth, Vladimir Ilyich was very attractive. No matter how the mother protested, she was powerless to defend her son: Ilya Nikolaevich reproached her with his own behavior.

NP: And what about Lenin?

AK: He remained a homosexual until the end of his days. By the way, this is known all over the world, only the Soviet people knew nothing and lived in reverent worship of the leader of the proletariat. Antonioni made a film about great homosexuals, and Lenin is given a special chapter in it. Several books have already been written about this.

We cannot say whether Lenin subsequently suffered from his orientation or not, but in childhood this was also not an easy test for him: he grew up embittered and hated the whole world. In the gymnasium, he took out his anger on his peers, fought, beat his adversaries, and for all that, he, of course, was a very talented person.

NP: Where did you get such stunning information?

AK: This is also a special and interesting story. At its origins is Marietta Shaginyan. In the 70s, this writer was writing a book about Lenin and gained access to the archives. Apparently, the keepers of the archives themselves did not know what was hidden in the papers behind seven seals. When Marietta Shaginyan got acquainted with the papers, she was shocked and wrote a memo to Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev personally. Brezhnev introduced this information to his circle. Suslov lay under pressure for three days and demanded that Shaginyan be shot for slander. But Brezhnev acted differently: he summoned Shaginyan to his place and, in exchange for silence, offered her a prize for a book about Lenin, an apartment, etc. and so on.

NP: And Shaginyan really received some kind of prize for her book about Lenin?

AK: Yes, she received the Lenin Prize for her book “Four Lessons from Lenin.” But the note was classified and it was in the archives of the Central Committee of the Party. When I read this note in the archive, I wanted to see the archival materials themselves. And I requested copies. That's exactly how it was...

Alexander Kutenev

Soviet writer Marietta Shaginyan is considered one of the first Russian science fiction writers of her time. A journalist and writer, poetess and publicist, this woman had the gift of a writer and enviable skill. It was Marietta Shaginyan, whose poems were very popular during her lifetime, who, according to critics, made her extraordinary contribution to Russian-Soviet poetry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

A person’s awareness of himself as a writer and artist comes from nature. And when one person amazingly combines talent and thirst for life, a thirst for knowledge and amazing performance, then this person occupies a special place in history. This is exactly what Marietta Shaginyan was.

Biography

The future writer was born in Moscow, into a family of Armenian intellectuals, on March twenty-first, 1888. Her father, Sergei Davydovich, was a private assistant professor at Moscow State University. Marietta Shaginyan received a full education. At first she studied at a private boarding school, and later at the Rzhev gymnasium. She began publishing in 1906. In 1912, Marietta graduated from the Faculty of History and Philosophy at the Higher Women's Courses of V. I. Guerrier. She is going to St. Petersburg. It was here, in the city on the Neva, that the future writer and publicist met and later became close to such luminaries as Z. N. Gippius and D. S. Merezhkovsky.

From 1912 to 1914, the girl studied philosophy as a science at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. The formation of her work was greatly influenced by Goethe's poetry. In 1913, the first collection was published, the author of which was Marietta Sergeevna Shaginyan, who was then unknown to anyone. The poems of Orientalia, in fact, made her famous.

From 1915 to 1919, Marietta Shaginyan lived in Rostov-on-Don. Here she works as a correspondent for several newspapers, such as “Trudovaya Speech”, “Azov Region”, “Craft Voice”, “Black Sea Coast”, etc. At the same time, the writer teaches aesthetics and art history at the Rostov Conservatory.

After 1918

Marietta Shaginyan enthusiastically embraced the revolution. She later said that for her it became an event that had a “Christian-mystical character.” In 1919, she works as an instructor at Donnaroobraz, and then she is appointed director of the weaving school. In 1920, Shaginyan moved to Petrograd, where she collaborated with the newspaper Izvestia of the Petrograd Soviet for three years, and until 1948 she was a special correspondent for the newspapers Pravda and Izvestia. In 1927, Marietta Shaginyan moved to her historical homeland - Armenia, but in 1931 she returned to Moscow.

In the thirties she graduated from the Planning Academy of the State Planning Committee. Shaginyan spends the war years in the Urals. From here she writes articles for the Pravda newspaper. In 1934, the First Congress of Soviet Writers took place, where Marietta Shaginyan was elected as a member of the board.

Creation

The literary interests of this talented woman covered a variety of areas of life. In her work, a special place is occupied by scientific monographs dedicated to Goethe, Taras Shevchenko, Joseph Myslivecek. It is Shaginyan who is the author of the very first detective Soviet novel “Mess Mend”. She was also an outstanding Soviet journalist. She is the author of many problematic articles and essays. At the same time, Shaginyan perceived journalism not so much and not only as a means of earning money, but as an opportunity to directly study life.

In her book entitled “Journey to Weimar,” the features of her prose style were clearly revealed for the first time. Critics believe that it is in this work that one can see the author’s amazing ability to reveal the personality of a person and his connection with time through the reality of everyday details. “Travel to Weimar” is the first work of this writer in the form of travel essays - in a genre to which Marietta Shaginyan will be faithful throughout her life.

Books

She began her first big novel in 1915 and finished it in 1918. “One's own destiny” is a philosophical book. Shahinyan was both a music connoisseur and a literary critic; she can safely be called both a fiction writer and a travel researcher. But first of all, Shaginyan was a writer and publicist. She left behind many literary works, such as “Hydrocentral”, “Diary of a Moscow Soviet Deputy”, “Ural in Defense”, “Travel to Armenia”, etc.

She also wrote four collections of poems, some of which were even included in the school curriculum. For many years, Marietta Sergeevna Shaginyan created literary portraits of those people with whom she was closely acquainted - N. Tikhonov, Khodasevich, Rachmaninov, and also described the life and work of authors dear to her - T. Shevchenko, I. Krylov, Goethe.

Family

Marietta Shaginyan's husband was philologist and translator from Armenian Yakov Samsonovich Khachatryan. They had a daughter, Mirel. The girl did not want to follow in her parents' footsteps. She was more interested in painting. Mirel Yakovlevna was a member of the Union of Artists. Shaginyan is survived by a grandson and granddaughter.

Marietta Sergeevna died in 1982 in Moscow. She was ninety-four years old. At the end of her life, she did not leave her small two-room apartment, located on the first floor of a completely ordinary residential Moscow building. The once popular writer did without luxury and frills. Her apartment had a standard Soviet set of furniture and ordinary household items. The only luxury in her house was old

The long life that Marietta Sergeevna Shaginyan lived was filled with small and large historical events, which the writer always spoke about with interest and passion. The Lenin theme occupies a special place in her vast work. Her chronicle novels “The Ulyanov Family” and “The First All-Russian” were not always perceived unambiguously. Marietta Shaginyan has been collecting biographical materials about the leader of the proletariat and his loved ones for many years.

The first edition of the chronicle book “The Ulyanov Family” was published in 1935 and immediately aroused Stalin’s sharp discontent. The anger of the “father of all nations” was caused by Shaginyan’s publication of the facts that Lenin had Kalmyk blood in his veins. Moreover, the novel was called a mistake and was discussed twice at the presidium of the USSR Writers' Union, where it was criticized for showing the leader's family as bourgeois.