Bertrand Russell concerning his 1920 meeting with Vladimir Lenin, in which he sensed a
“great impish cruelty”.
Lenin said, “You see there are poor peasants and rich peasants, and we stirred up the poor
peasants against the rich peasants, and they soon hanged them to the nearest tree, ah hah
hah HAH HAH”.
Russell’s reply: “I didn’t much like that.”
Bertrand Russell (1961)
….
“I met Lenin in 1920 when I was in Russia, I had an hours talk tête-à-tête with him. And, he
spoke English much better than you would have expected, the whole conversation was in
English. I expected it to have been in German, but I found that his English was quite good. I
was less impressed by Lenin than I expected to be.
He was of course a great man. He seemed to me a reincarnation of Cromwell, with exactly
the same limitations that Cromwell had. Absolute orthodoxy, he thought a proposition could
be proved by quoting a text in Marx, and he was quite incapable of supposing that there
could be anything in Marx that wasn’t right, and that struck me as rather limited.
I disliked one other thing about him which was his great readiness to stir up hatred. I put
certain questions to him to see what his answer would be, and one of them was “You profess
to be establishing socialism, but as far as the countryside is concerned you seem to me to be
establishing peasant proprietorship which is a very different thing from agricultural
socialism”.
And he said, “Oh dear me no, we’re not establishing peasant proprietorship”, he said “You
see there are poor peasants and rich peasants, and we stirred up the poor peasants against
the rich peasants, and they soon hanged them to the nearest tree, ah hah hah HAH HAH”. I
didn’t much like that.”
— Bertrand Russell, Speaking Personally: Bertrand Russell Interview with John Chandos (12
April 1961)
“When I visited Russia in 1920, I found there a philosophy very different from my own, a
philosophy based upon hatred and force and despotic power. In the Marxist philosophy, as interpreted in Moscow, I found, as I believe, two enormous errors, one of theory and one of
feeling. The error of theory consisted in believing that the only undesirable form of power
over other human beings is economic power, and that economic power is co-extensive with
ownership. In this theory other forms of power military, political and propagandist are
ignored, and it is forgotten that the power of a large economic organization is concentrated
in a small executive, and not diffused among all the nominal owners or shareholders.
It was therefore supposed that exploitation and oppression must disappear if the State
became the sole capitalist, and it was not realized that this would confer upon State officials
all, and more than all, the powers of oppression formerly possessed by individual capitalists.
The other error, which was concerned with feeling consisted in supposing that a good state
of affairs can be brought about by a movement of which the motive force is hate.
Those who had been inspired mainly by hatred of capitalists and landowners had acquired
the habit of hating, and after achieving victory were impelled to look for new objects of
detestation. Hence came, by a natural psychological mechanism, the purges, the massacre
of Kulaks, and the forced labor camps. I am persuaded that
… Lenin and his early colleagues were actuated by a wish to benefit mankind, but from errors in
psychology and political theory they created a hell instead of a heaven.
This was to me a profoundly important object lesson in the necessity of right thinking and
right feeling if any good result is to be achieved in the organization of human relations.”
— Bertrand Russell, Portraits from Memory and Other Essays(1950), Essay. VI : From Logic to
Politics, p. 35
• Background: In August 1920 Russell travelled to Russia as part of an official delegation sent
by the British government to investigate the effects of the Russian Revolution. Russell met
Vladimir Lenin and had an early morning long conversation with him. In his autobiography,
he mentions that he personally found Lenin more than disappointing, quickly sensing an
“impish cruelty” in his demeanor.
Russell’s experiences utterly destroyed his previous tentative support for the communist
revolution. Russell shortly thereafter wrote a book ‘The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism’
(1920) about his experiences. Russell considered this voyage “…. a disaster”. The voyage was
with a group of 24 others from Britain, all of whom came home thinking well of the régime,
despite Russell’s frantic attempts to change their minds. For example, he urged them that he
heard shots fired in the middle of the night and was certain these were clandestine
executions, but the others naively and blindly maintained that “it was only auto-mobiles
backfiring”.
The Russian famine of 1921–1922, also known as the Povolzhye Famine, which Russell alludes
to above, was a severe famine in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. It began
early in the spring of 1921 and lasted through 1922. The famine resulted from the combined effects of economic disturbance on account of the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil
Wars, and exacerbated by the worn-torn failed rail systems that could not distribute food
efficiently, but also by Lenin’s government policy of War Communism (Prodrazvyorstka). This
famine killed an estimated 5 million people, primarily affecting the Volga and Ural River
regions, with numerous reports of whole towns and villages resorting to cannibalism.
Before the famine began, Russia had suffered greatly for three and a half years under the
First World War in addition to the Russian Civil Wars of 1918–1920, the great majority of
these conflicts fought on the Russian Empire’s soil. The deaths are staggering, with an
estimated 7–12 million casualties during the Russian Civil War mostly innocent civilians,
perhaps even equaling or exceeding the death toll of the Holocaust during the Second World
War .
All sides in the Russian Civil Wars of 1918–1921—the Bolsheviks, the Whites, the Anarchists,
the seceding nationalities—had provisioned themselves by seizing food from those who
grew it, giving it to their armies and supporters, and denying it to their enemies. The
Bolshevik government had requisitioned supplies from the peasantry for little or nothing in
exchange. This harsh measure led peasants to drastically reduce their crop production. The
“rich peasants” (kulaks) withheld their “surplus grain” to sell on what the Soviet government
deemed a “black market” which angered Lenin immensely.
All aid from outside Soviet Russia was initially rejected. The American Relief Administration
(ARA), which soon to be United States President Herbert Hoover formed to help the victims
of starvation of World War One, offered humanitarian assistance to Lenin in 1919, but only
on condition that the US have full say over the Russian railway network and hand out food
impartially. Lenin believed this “Only more Hoover meddling” and flatly refused this as
interference in Russian internal affairs.
Lenin was eventually convinced by the horrible consequences of this famine to reverse his
failed policy at home and abroad, but only after millions of innocent civilians had needlessly
starved to death.
