IN'S YOUTH LEN

'THE YOUNG LENIN' by Leon Trotsky, translated by Max Eastman. Published by David and Charles. £2.95. PP 224.

The future leader of the Russian Revolution was born in 1870 as Vladimir Ulyanov. He was one ol seven children of a schools' inspector in the rural area of Simbirsk.

His mother - Maria Alexandrovna — was half-German and the daughter of an estate owner on Kazan. Family life, in the early years, was close and comfortable.

But the fate of the Ulyanov family was bound up with the revolutionary movement of the Russian intelligentsia. Russian feudal society decomposed at a faster pace than the formation of the bourgeoisie. This meant that the intelligentsia increasingly found neither a sufficient demand for its skills nor a real sphere of political influence.

The state needed an intelligentsia, yet strangled it in the grip of Tsarism. In these circumstances, the most advanced intellectuals broke with the nobility, the clergy and the Tsarist bureaucracy, but they could not ally themselves with the bourgeoisie, which had developed too late to be a revolutionary class.

Thus, after the end of serfdom, the vehicle for revolutionary ideas became the younger generation of the intelligentsia. That is, politica life took the form of a conflict between them and the Tsarist police-with the basic class forces largely passive.

Trotsky explains how, as a socially weak strata, the intelligentsia's attempt to play a role was a combination of opposites. On the one hand it saw itself as the sole vehicle of critical thought and on the other tried to merge with the 'people'-that is, the peasant masses. Disappointed in their hopes of a spontaneous peasant uprising, the intelligentsia turned to propaganda and agitation in the countryside and - when that failed - to individual terror.

The turn of the intelligentsia to the peasants, with all the personal sacrifice that it involved, could not be successful. Since the end of serfdom the slave-like dependence upon the nobles had been lessened. And favourable economic conditions enabled the upper and more influential levels of the peasantry to advance. They therefore did not regard Tsarism as their enemy but blamed their sufferings on the nobles and officials whom they thought were frustrating the Tsar's wishes.

Accordingly they considered the Tsar's enemies to be their enemies — and rejected the self-sacrificing young intellectuals who came to live among them calling for Tsarism's downfall.

It was an ironic contradiction that the early 'Populist' preachers of socialist ideas denied any future to Russian capitalism and therefore granted the working class no important role — but their socialist propaganda found no root in the countryside, gaining instead a response in the cities.

Yet these revolutionaries had a part in the historical development of the Russian revolution. There was, indeed, a direct link. In 1878 a young girl terrorist shot the Petersburg chief of police. Her name was Vera Zasulich - and 20 years later she was to work with Lenin on the editorial board of 'Iskra'.

In 1879 the People's Will group was formed — propaganda in the countryside was being abandoned for organized Party terrorism.

Earlier individual acts of revenge for executed comrades had now turned into a developed system of political These people were the flower of their generation. They subordinated themselves completely to the goal that they had chosen, yet, in 1881, at the time of the assassination of Alexander II, the entire People's Will organization consisted of 37 persons.

The death of Alexander II unleashed a wave of counterrevolutionary terror which soon burned up this heroic but tiny group.

In the 1880s its revolutionary implacability died out, replaced by a programme of constitutional reform in the interests of the small proprietor-and dependent on the goodwill of the ruling class.

The broad circles of the intelligentsia degenerated even further. The self-sacrificing and revolutionary heritage of the 1860s and 1870s was replaced by the slogan Life for Ourselves'.

The collapse of People's Will opened the way to a turn to religion among the intelligentsia and to the influence of Tolstoy — 'Every struggle against Evil only increases it.' The road to bourgeois individualism was opened.

Lenin's elder brother Alexander Ulyanov, came into political activity in this period. A student in St Petersburg, he joined in minor sudenti protests and, these were suppressed, turned to terrorism — although the heroic period of People's Will was over. The plan was to murder Alexander III on March 1, 1887.

Trotsky describes this attempt as the 'belated and declining echo' of the great movement of the intelligentsia.

The attempt was unsuccessful and Ulyanov was hanged. It was a portent for the future, however, that of the six youth who drew up the programme of their group, three (including Ulyanov) considered themselves adherants of People's Will, but three called themselves Social Democrats--that is, they recognized that Marxism was valid not only for the west but for Russia also. declared that revolutionary activity by the masses was impossible until the intelligentsia had overthrown the autocracy by terror.

The execution of Alexander Ulyanov had an enormous effect on Lenin, who had already become critical of the high-school authorities and of religion. The family of a full state councillor became overnight the family of an executed state criminal. Friends and acquaintances, without exception, avoided their house.

(Lenin was also affected by the suffering of his mother and the desperate yet determined efforts to save her son's life. Trotsky points out how women like this were reeducated by their experience of the repressive state machine. From perfectly conventional backgrounds, they found themselves spending hours in police stations, courtrooms and in prosecutors' offices. They did not become revolutionaries, but they helped to make the regime hated by their outcry against its tyrannies.)

Apart from his break with religion, Lenin had a conventional and successful school career receiving a glowing report from his principal, Fyodor Kerensky (father of the future head of the Provisional Government). At Kazan University, however, he was