LENIN AS PHILOSOPHER
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to the socialist Duma deputies which would force them to resign
either from the Duma or the Party. Not till the middle of 1908 did
Lenin win a slender majority on tactical questions in Moscow, and
not until 1909 in Petersburg.
The group which thwarted him on tactical reconversion from
the period of storm to the period of calm were men who had originally
been attracted to him by his call for armed uprising and seizure of
power. Those formerly big issues had become remote .and marginal
for Lenin now, while the questions of Duma elections, and practical
trade union work, had become urgent a,nd central. His associates
were poets like Lunacharsky, philosophers and scientists like Bogda–
nov and Bazarov, historians like Pokrovsky, novelists like Gorky, ro–
mantic revolutionists in politics for whom Lenin's extremism was at–
tractive, "softs" for whom a "hard line" possessed irresistible fascina–
tion. When they came to Lenin, he appeared to occupy the extreme
red end of the Social Democratic spectrum. Now that, from more
somber circumstances, he deduced soberer slogans and devices, shift–
ing his place in the tactical spectrum to match the blue realities of
the period, he lost much of his attractiveness and seemed to them un–
faithful to "true Bolshevism or Leninism." But Lenin knew that to
repeat the same slogans of armed uprising and seizure of power now
would be to lose contact with the masses and with reality. Their
"true Bolshevism" was to him but a caricature. In this Lenin was
wiser than any philosopher, more attuned to social moods than any
novelist, poet, or historian in his faction. The time had come, he con–
cluded, to bring his old associates to their senses, or to sweep them
aside, lest his group perish from neglect of the real possibilities and
the actual tasks immediately before it. Since the independent and self–
confident Bogdanov was the leader of the heterogeneous bloc that stood
in his way, Bogdanov must be discredited. Perhaps the faction would
listen to
him
on tactics after he had discredited his opponents on the
ground of philosophy. He could get off his chest the long suppressed
disagreements on philosophical matters; he could strike a blow, albeit
a trifle late, for orthodox Marxism against this heterodoxy, and con–
tribute to the counteroffensive against ideological decay and reaction.
While he was turning this over in his mind, new aberrations, not
of the
profession~
philosophers, Bogdanov .and Bazarov, but of the
poetic amateurs, Lunacharsky and Gorky, suddenly put into his hand
an excellent stick with which to beat the lot of them and arouse
the indignation of the rank and file against them all. Lunacharsky
and Gorky were prone to talk in the language of metaphor. Return
