Lenin and the Problem of Marxist Peasant Revolution. by Esther Kingston-MannReview by: Anita B. BakerSlavic Review, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Spring, 1985), p. 123Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2498264 .

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Reviews 123

LENIN AND THE PROBLEM OF MARXIST PEASANT REVOLUTION. By Esther Kingstoni-Manini. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. x, 237 pp. $27.50.

Esther Kingston-Mann has made a solid contribution to the field of Russian intellectual history by tracing the evolution between the late 1890s and 1917 of Lenin's attempts to include the Russian peasantry in the Marxist revolutionary framework. She is concerned, here and in past journal articles, with how and why Lenin argued--in contrast to his fellow Marxists-that the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party could ignore neither the need for peasant support nor the revolutionary potential of the peasantry. In party meetings and publications from the late 1890s forward. Lenin consistently worked to have the party include a plank in its platform that stipulated its commitment to rural areas.

The author lucidly develops her theme in twelve chronologically organized chapters. Each chapter begins with a Judicious and useful review of the major political developments in Russia at the time. This perspective supports her point that Lenin's views were re- sponses to current political realities. Kingston-Mann also recognizes, as Soviet scholarship cannot, the deficiencies of Lenin's economics and sociology. He overestimated the number of the virtually landless and underestimated the size and strength of the middle peasantry despite available evidence to the contrary. Lenin's failure to understand the structure of rural society hardly interfered with his short-term strategy of consolidating political power among the returning peasant soldiers during the revolutionary year 1917, however much it was to trouble his successors. The author acknowledges but dismisses charges of op- portunism against Lenin's peasant policy. Promises made in the Bolshevik Land Decree, for example, 'were not simply a cynical concession" but reflected Lenin's faith that the impoverished peasant masses would instinctively move to the Left. She demonstrates that Lenin consistently attempted to prove that his ideas were grounded in Marx's writings. Lenin's political response to the peasant question, she concludes, was "both healthy and rational from the point of view of a revolutionary activist." He responded to "the exigen- cies of circumstances while remaining committed to a set of principles which set some limits to both compromise and opportunism." She argues that the weakness of Lenin's analysis was essentially the weakness of the European Marxist tradition. Here, however, the author seems to contradict her general emphasis on the failure of European Marxism to recognize the revolutionary potential of the peasantry. The Russian populist vision of the peasantry, so important in Lenin's formative experience. may in any case provide a better clue to his later convictions.

The book is nonetheless a useful corrective to old Menshevik illusions that something like the Bolshevik seizure of power in the fall of 1917 could have been carried through successfully without Lenin's policy of including the active participation of the peasantry. Kingston-Mann repeatedly emphasizes the political sterility of Menshevik analysis, its dogmatism, economic determinism, anid fear of peasant activism. She states that in 1917 the Mensheviks were paralyzed by their intellectual consistency and shared with the So- cialist Revolutionaries "a fatal willingness to let other political groups define the limits of their own political behavior." In the long run, she suggests, the Mensheviks were more concerned with ensuring political stability and order than with popular initiatives.

ANITA B. BAKER University of Maryland

THE POLITICS OF SOVIET CULTURE: ANATOLII LUNACHARSKII. By Timilothy Edward O'Connor. Studies in the Fine Arts: The Avant-Garde, no. 42 (edited by Stephen C. Foster). Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1983. xiv, 193 pp. Pho- tographs. $39.95.

Anatolii Lunacharskii, Soviet commissar of education from the time of Lenin's revolution until Stalin's, exemplified the road not taken. A brilliantly disorganized representative of

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