Conspirator: Lenin in Exile
by Helen Rappaport
Basic Books, 416 pp. ISBN: 978-0465013951

Late in his career, before he succumbed to a fatal illness, French poststructuralist historian and theorist Michel Foucault turned his scholarly attention to ethics. He found particularly interesting the idea, rooted in classical antiquity, of ascesis, a term related to today’s words ascetic and asceticism. This interest in ethics represents a surprising development in the general trajectory of Foucault’s previous inquiries. Foucault had long devoted himself to expelling humanistic biases from the theory and practice of writing history, even going so far as to declare, with Nietzsche-like flamboyance: “It is comforting … and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.” According to Foucault, “man” as a concept wandered onto the world-historical stage only late in the present act, and will likely at some future point disappear à la Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern in Shakespeare’s Hamlet — obscurely and with little fanfare, ado, or even remark. ¶ If Foucault proclaimed himself no fan of this arriviste concept “man,” what, then, could have possibly impelled his thought toward ethics, toward the particular issue of ascetic self-transformation? (Eric Paras takes up this very question in his 2006 book Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge, which, despite its regrettable title, offers ample — and refreshingly accessible — contextualization for Foucault’s Kehre) Indeed, Foucault’s ethical turn leads him to introduce some unwonted vocabulary into his writing: words like “spirituality” and “truth.” And to all appearances he uses them unironically.

Such a volte-face would surely discombobulate devotees of someone whose conception of history residual Frankfurt-Schoolman (and implacable critic of all things poststructuralist) Jürgen Habermas has characterized as a “chaotic multitude” and “an iceberg covered with the crystalline forms of arbitrary formations.” Foucault himself offered a clue as to what incited him to discourse on this unlikely later subject. “The idea of the bios [i.e., the human organism] as a material for an aesthetic piece of art is something that fascinates me,” he states in a 1983 interview:

The idea also that ethics can be a very strong structure of existence, without any relation with the juridical per se, with an authoritarian system, with a disciplinary structure. All that is very interesting.

Foucault fastened onto the possibility of aesthetic self-fashioning with one’s very own organismic life as the expressive medium, and ethics as the technique of this expression. The fact that to Foucault’s thinking ethics can instantiate themselves independently — or, indeed, in defiance of — juridical norms, as well as authoritarian system or disciplinary structure to enforce these norms, argues for ethics primacy, and thus also for its strength as a structure for existence.

Ethics’ signal virtue, according to Foucault, lies in its ability to reverse prevailing relations of force. For him, power gives impetus to history, not dialectic (whether that dialectic be Hegelian or Marxian) or teleology. With his extreme allergy to any historical view which even hints of a teleological orientation, Foucault shows himself a true son of Nietzsche. In an existence in which power pervades all, the best one can do in life is give as good as she gets. Ethics, therefore, offers a way of effecting a reversal the relations of force that presently inhibit the subject’s self-expression — an existential ace in the hole, one might say.

The path toward aesthetic self-fashioning lies through a host of practices known as an ascesis, which, Foucault writes, involves “the definition of the work that must be carried out on oneself” and “exercises of abstinence and control” that constitute the nature of that work.

The task of testing oneself, examining oneself, monitoring oneself in a series of clearly defined exercises, makes the question of truth — the truth concerning what one is, what one does, and what one is capable of doing — central to the formation of the ethical subject.

As Satan of Milton’s Paradise Lost said, “Long is the way / And hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.” Becoming an ethical subject requires dedication, austerity, self-scrutiny and supreme discipline — precisely those characteristics belonging accomplished artists. Through such self-mastery, the ethical subject places herself beyond conventional morality, beyond good and evil, thus giving consummate expression to what Nietzsche considers the primary fact of human existence — the will to power. “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity,” Nietzsche writes in Ecce Homo. “Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it … but love it.” The ethical subject must, however, find the resources for such an ascesis within herself; the conventional norms of her social milieu and the institutions in place to deploy them would have her quite otherwise.

Rappaport sets her subject up as a sort of Coriolanus; his proud resolve and immovable convictions frequently set him at odds with his fellow revolutionaries.

The would-be ethical subject would perhaps find no greater opportunity for self-mastery than in exile. This certainly holds true for Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov, the man who would become Lenin. Historian Helen Rappaport new book, Conspirator: Lenin in Exile (which, confusingly enough, bears the additional subtitle, The Making of a Revolutionary) is devoted to Lenin’s wilderness years, which numbered sixteen. In describing Lenin’s earliest term of exile, served in the Siberian town of Shushenkoe, Rappaport strikes the keynotes of what will become the leitmotiv of her discussion:

Continuing his work and study at a distance from libraries and borrowing books on a six-week turnaround … constantly frustrated Vladimir…. But he never let up on his demands: books on politics, economics, industrial history, agriculture, statistics, public commissions and government reports, book catalogues and ‘literary manifestations’ of every kind were his lifeblood, ensuring that he could keep in touch with all the new writing at home and abroad.

Lenin’s nearly superhuman devotion to the cause of Communist Revolution in Russia becomes a constant refrain in Conspirator, and truly lends itself to heightening the dramatic relish of a narrative that often bogs down in the details of Lenin’s many removals to various European cities. Rappaport sets her subject up as a sort of Coriolanus; his proud resolve and immovable convictions frequently set him at odds with his fellow revolutionaries. Generational as well as doctrinal tensions abound in Conspirator. Lenin frequently found himself at variance with no less a personage than the father of Russian Marxism, Georgy Plekhanov (a man for whom Lenin professed the deepest admiration, their markedly different casts of mind notwithstanding). Less estimable in Lenin’s view, however, were the Mensheviks of his own revolutionary cohort, whose desire for a more incremental implementation of communism, which they felt more in keeping with Marx’s own prescriptions, clashed with Lenin’s own program of what one could call today a sort of “shock-and-awe” approach to founding a workers’ paradise.

Man and superman: Lenin's uncommon devotion to revolution.

Of course, the tale of the tape shows that Lenin eventually carried the day, and Rappaport presents plenty of instances of Lenin’s demonstrating the very powers that allowed him to do so. When it came to the Mensheviks, he was inexorable. Rappaport offers this vivid depiction of Lenin’s oratorical gifts:

From the outset Lenin took centre stage in his inimitable, charismatic way, dominating the podium for hours on end, talking without notes, fighting, arguing and hectoring through every part of the agenda. He was in his element: tireless if not effervescent, he enjoyed a good quarrel, standing there stocky and pugnacious, his fingers poked up under his armpits, with a challenging, sardonic look in his eye, his voice unmistakable with its thick, guttural r’s that he couldn’t quite roll properly. The transformative power of Lenin’s arguments and his persuasiveness carried all before him during the fifteen sessions of the congress that he energetically chaired.

Swept into Lenin’s rhetorical train was one important supporter, the Russian socialist novelist Maxim Gorky, whose celebrity proved indispensable to Lenin’s cause. And it was a good thing, too. Lenin, Rappaport reports, “would simply not let go of his vision for the party and the future — not ever.” His intolerance of setbacks frequently led him into the excesses of tendentious dogmatism. “As far as he was concerned, Marxism, like the Bible for the Puritans, answered all questions.” This attitude disposed him to look upon “[a]nything that attempted to go beyond his own brand of orthodoxy” as “reactionary, ‘meaningless verbiage’, ‘ignorant chatter’, ‘claptrap.’”

Such tendencies often mark one’s passage from visionary to fanatic. Indeed, in the Lenin Rappaport presents one has difficulty telling the difference. One particularly chilling episode in Geneva in which Lenin and his wife, Nadezhda (or Nadya) Krupskaya, played host to Nadezhda’s old friend, Ariadna Tyrkova, offers a telling glimpse into the darker aspect of Lenin’s driven personality.

After supper on their last evening together, Nadya asked Lenin to accompany Ariadna to the tram stop as she didn’t know her way round Geneva. En route, Lenin berated her for her liberalism and for being a ‘bourgeois’. Ariadna gave as good as she got, attacking the Marxists for their lack of understanding of human nature and their desire to drive people like a military machine. Lenin lashed her with his sharp tongue, his words deeply sarcastic and his eyes glittering in a way that Ariadna found disturbing. Then, as the tram came into view, he turned and looked her straight in the eye: ‘Just you wait,’ he said with a smile as she boarded the tram. ‘Soon we will be hanging people like you from the lampposts.’

Such sanguinary touches, while certainly giving the narrative some zest, go to show the complexity of Lenin’s character, which managed to harmonize utopian ends with brutal means. Lenin eagerly supported the rampant bomb-tossing and other acts of terror going on in czarist Russia, even going so far as to encourage “’bloodshed on a colossal scale’” during the mass uprising of 1905 — an uprising that Lenin and other revolutionary leaders curiously sat out, choosing to remain abroad. But along with a eagerness for violence Lenin revealed a gentler side. Enamored of nature, enthusiastic about bicycling (a pastime that nearly crippled him), fond of children, gracious and quiet as a tenant — these are all traits one comes discover about Lenin through reading Conspirator, and they go some way toward dispelling whatever distortions, exaggerations or fabrications have come to settle on the man’s reputation since his ascension to world-historical prominence.

Lenin vastly preferred keeping the company of the working class, taking his meals in eateries that catered to them, and from time to time partaking of their entertainments.

Perhaps Lenin’s most endearing trait was his abhorrence of luxury and indulgence. Those occasions where Lenin felt himself obliged to hobnob with the well-heeled in order to drum up funds were instances where he was put off his game. After one such event, which proved fruitless financially, Lenin came away “angry and humiliated,” Rappaport writes, and “vowed he would never beg from capitalists again.” He vastly preferred keeping the company of the working class, taking his meals in eateries that catered to them, and from time to time partaking of their entertainments.

Upon finishing Conspirator one cannot help but feel a certain admiration for Lenin, even if his politics stand at the very antipodes of Lenin’s own. The unflagging discipline with which Lenin pursues his life in exile reminds one of the real transformative effect devotion to an idea can have, and of the undeniable aesthetic power to be felt from witnessing that transformation unfold. For Lenin, a democratic-socialist Russian state was more than simply an idle dream of bohemian dilettantes; it was an ascesis in precisely Foucault’s sense of the term.“Purity of the heart is to will one thing,” Kierkegaard once wrote. And the fact that Conspirator calls to mind Foucault, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard’s ideas more so than Marx’s attests to the fresh life Rappaport has breathed into the career of one of history’s most notorious figures.

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