Philip Pomper > Quotes

“Lenin's difficulty with Marxian revisionism and those who accorded an important role to liberals is symptomatic of a doctrinal and psychological problem peculiar to Marxism and absent in the old narodnik creed. Marx had revealed the systematic necessity of class exploitation. Capitalism was by its very nature savagely unjust. Since most revolutionaries were not simply thinking machines looking for the most rational foundation for production and distribution but possessed of "religious" attitudes, or, in any case, of a sense of mission, they found in Marx and Engels the description of a morally intolerable system in which the wealth of the few could only be gotten at the expense of the poverty of the many. On the other hand, Marx posited the necessary contribution of each historical phase to economic and social progress. The bourgeoisie and their liberal institutions could not disappear from history until they had developed the forces of production as far as they could, when the onset of the inevitable and fatal crisis of capitalism would occur. Capitalism was a necessary evil on the way to socialism. But Marx had no blueprint for its many historical variations, only his laws of capitalism and their consequences. Neither he nor Engels had a revolutionary timetable either, and it was possible for their followers to lapse into a purely "scientific" and morally slothful type of Marxism, an academic Marxism without a sense of urgency about revolutionary tasks to be performed. On the other hand, the most morally mobilized would find ways to hasten capitalism's final hour, even while separating themselves from the narodniki, whose revolutionism was "unscientific." Thus, during a period of mainly doctrinal debates and sectarianism, revolutionaries who were temperamentally quite close to each other engaged in combat; but when the real revolutionary moment arrived, they often found themselves working together.”
― Philip Pomper, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin: The Intelligentsia and Power

“The revolutionary despises any kind of doctrinarism and has rejected peaceful science, leaving it to future generations. He knows only one science—the science of destruction. For this and only for this he now studies mechanics, physics, chemistry, perhaps medicine. For this he studies day and night the living science of people, of the personalities and positions, and all the conditions of the present social structure in every possible stratum.”
― Philip Pomper, Lenin's Brother: The Origins of the October Revolution

“It’s impossible to frighten such people….”
― Philip Pomper, Lenin's Brother: The Origins of the October Revolution

“During his gymnasium years he read Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?, which gave him a fictional model of ascetic heroism. Osipanov claimed to have imitated Rakhmetov’s painful regime—designed to harden him for torture—of sleeping on a board with nails sticking through it.25 Osipanov refused to carry poison with him to commit suicide in case of capture. At Kazan, the same university from which Vladimir Ulyanov was expelled in 1888, Osipanov started as a student of medicine and then transferred to law. He missed almost”
― Philip Pomper, Lenin's Brother: The Origins of the October Revolution

“That may sound contradictory, but I don’t think that we can do without an idea of truth, even if we know that we are generating hypotheses and interpretations. The idea is to inspire the quest, not insist upon an answer or promise an assured outcome. It’s a utopian project. The subject is not that important. It’s just a pathway into the problems.”
― Philip Pomper

“Unfortunately, Stalin's collected works contain very little mention of his early comrades. Ketskhoveli's relationship with Stalin must be inferred from the accounts of third parties. Official biographers evidently thought it unseemly to dwell too much on the connection between the leader of the Soviet Union and a tertiary figure, who figured only in the history of Georgian Social Democracy for about a decade and then died in prison in a quixotic gesture in 1903. The historical literature about Stalin is patently designed to create parallels between him and Lenin and, whenever possible, links. Thus, Stalin had to be no less a leader in Tbilisi than Lenin had been in St. Petersburg. In the official version Stalin is already first among equals in his relationship with the central figures of Brzdola (The Struggle), the underground Georgian Marxist organ. But by his own admission, in 1898 he was still an apprentice seeking sponsorship and advice from the leaders of Georgian Marxism.”
― Philip Pomper, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin: The Intelligentsia and Power

“One of the major weaknesses in Marxism as a doctrine resided in its failure to examine closely the moral characteristics of an immiserated proletariat. The notion that the miserable and oppressed will proceed to create a better world is, of course, inherently problematic.”
― Philip Pomper, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin: The Intelligentsia and Power

“Ambivalence, I think, is the chief characteristic of my nation. There isn’t a Russian executioner who isn’t scared of turning victim one day, nor is there the sorriest victim who would not acknowledge (if only to himself) a mental ability to become an executioner. JOSEPH BRODSKY”
― Philip Pomper, Lenin's Brother: The Origins of the October Revolution

“In Russia there will always be small groups of people, so dedicated to their ideas and so passionately feeling the misery of their homeland, that they will not think it a sacrifice to die for their cause.”
― Philip Pomper, Lenin's Brother: The Origins of the October Revolution

“Everything in him is absorbed by a single, exclusive interest, by a total concept, a total passion—revolution. In the depths of his being not only in words but in action he has sundered any connection with the civil order and with the entire educated world and with all the laws, proprieties, conventions, and morality of this world. He is—its merciless enemy, and if he continues to live in it, then it is only in order the more certainly to destroy it.”
― Philip Pomper, Lenin's Brother: The Origins of the October Revolution

“There was more than a little truth in Trotsky's angry accusation of April 1912, after he had suffered the theft of the title of his journal [Pravda], that Lenin nourished himself on discord and chaos. But so did all revolutionary politicians, for revolutionary changes issue from profound crises. The bloody trenches of World War I created an enormous new revolutionary constituency, and only those leaders who knew how to exploit it would be prepared for the struggles that lay ahead.”
― Philip Pomper, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin: The Intelligentsia and Power

“The first three rules of The Catechism eloquently summarize this credo. The revolutionary—is a doomed man. He has neither his own interests, nor affairs, nor feelings, nor attachments, nor property, nor even name.”
― Philip Pomper, Lenin's Brother: The Origins of the October Revolution

“The nationalities question fit ill with Marxism. It was perhaps even more puzzling than the peasant problem. One could at least delude oneself into believing that the peasant problem was soluble in Marxian terms by extrapolating from economic data, constructing Procrustean sociologies, and predicting the inevitable splitting of the peasants along class lines. But how did one fit nationality into the Marxist scheme? Of course, according to Marxian theory national boundaries created superficial divisions compared to economic forces and the relations of production, but nationalist passion seemed to inflame people and mobilize them even more than their class interests. World War I would show how ready people were to make sacrifices for the sake of the national or imperial dignity or, in the case of the Slavs of the Russian Empire, for related ethnic groups and coreligionists. Even the discredited Romanov dynasty would be able to rally its people around the war effort—at least at the outset. This was a complication—indeed, as history has showed, a fatal one—for a Marxian socialist with a genuinely internationalist orientation.”
― Philip Pomper, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin: The Intelligentsia and Power

“Lenin's analysis in The Development of Capitalism in Russia is a kind of profession de foi in a new and powerful idiom. To appeal to the intelligentsia, modern doctrines must combine faith and realism, or science, and Lenin's faith in the correctness of his "science" sustained him through lean years. The notion of faith raises the vexing issue of resemblances between Marxism and earlier Judeo-Christian traditions.

A rough human sense that there will be justice, that wrongs will be righted, that sufferings and humiliations will be revenged, that the rich will not enter either a heavenly kingdom or earthly socialist paradise, underlies a great many religious and secular doctrines, expressed in a variety of "sacred" and "scientific" idioms. Another common denominator of such doctrines is their identification of victims who are chosen to be saved and oppressors who are doomed, whether by God's love and justice or history's dialectic. Needless to say, this kind of hopeful and militant vision, when sustained over a long period of time, yields a history of struggle, frustration, adaptation, sectarianism, and defection. Like their religious predecessors, the new secular movements spread out over a spectrum of positions reflecting defeated expectations, changed historical conditions, and the psychologies of individuals creating the movements' doctrines and strategies.”
― Philip Pomper, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin: The Intelligentsia and Power

“The goal is the same—the quickest and surest destruction of this foul structure.1 In 1869 Nechaev murdered a member of his own revolutionary cell who tried to defect. He”
― Philip Pomper, Lenin's Brother: The Origins of the October Revolution