The following text is a revised and expanded version of the author’s keynote of the same title delivered on 2 March 2024 as part of the international series of events Leninist days / Jornadas leninistas (27 January to 25 to May 2024), organized in commemoration of the centenary of the death of Vladimir I. Lenin.

Some people write about Lenin, even when doing so from an academic perspective, in order to bring him down, to destroy communism as a movement and aspiration. They might be fans of a villain, usually the most interesting character in a drama. And they may be attached to their own cause, whether cautious, conserving, or reactionary. Likewise, the organizer’s perspective can be pulled to and informed by both the academic and the Fan Girl perspectives: who hasn’t witnessed organizers invoking the names of their heroes to buttress their own authority? My point, then, is not that one perspective is better than the others. It’s that attention to the Fan Girl perspective, that is, to Lenin as the name for a subjectifying event and subjective process, makes the horizon of the discussion clear: communism. – Jodi Dean

 

Lenin and Women

Since I am talking about desire, I begin with a confession. I had a hard time figuring out how to say what I want to say. Or maybe the difficulty was in the wanting, in the desiring itself, not just what do I want to say but what do I want or what is the I that wants? This is a matter of the perspective I take.

Three perspectives

An academic perspective on Lenin, women, and desire would immerse itself in rich historical details about nuanced points of disagreement. Wanting recognition for her erudition and mastery, the academic would likely attend to central aspects of the context in which Lenin articulated certain ideas or made certain decisions. Who was the real Lenin and why did he do the things he did? What did Lenin want? An expert with impressive degrees and institutional affiliations can tell us. She knows. The academic perspective tends to be critical (though rarely self-critical), proving itself by exposing and correcting others’ errors. It girds itself in expertise and embeds itself in the archive, ferreting out obscure receipts and letters in order to set them up as landmines and demolish alternative points of view.

Or I could adopt the perspective of a comrade, organizer, militant, and party member. Rather than seeking Lenin in the archive, the organizer reveals and displays how Lenin lives on in the practice of the Leninist party. Lenin remains a guide to action, a resource for formulating a political line between, say, liberals and anarchists, without falling into the marsh. For the organizer, Lenin isn’t the name for dogma, but it’s not non-dogmatic either. There are correct ways to do things. There are errors that can be predicted and avoided. Lenin has a lot to teach us. As an organizer, I desire to be a better Leninist.

I think and write from both perspectives, not always at the same time. But for this series, neither fits. Everyone who is participating is in some sense an expert on Lenin. I couldn’t quite imagine getting into an exchange on interpretative matters that hinge on historical details with such renowned and accomplished scholarly authorities. Admittedly, the “quite” is deliberate. In what follows, I get into some tall and mesmerizing weeds around Lenin and Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done? Just as the academic perspective wasn’t the one I wanted to take, neither does it make sense to speak or write here as an organizer. We aren’t a party. We’re not organizing together to build political power, even as we are participating in the project of keeping Lenin’s legacy alive.

One place where the academic and organizer perspectives overlap is in the desire to be correct. There are right answers, better arguments. This overlap is a site of friction: what it means to be correct, or the measure of correctness, isn’t the same from both perspectives. For the academic, correctness is determined by the conventions of the academy – scholarly discourse, exchange of reasons, and the assent of an academic community. For the organizer, correctness is determined by the people: did they come out or did they stay home? Did they rise up or did they stand down? Were they killed, arrested, demoralized or are they gaining in capacity, commitment, and reach? The series is a different sort of project, one conditioned neither by academic nor party discipline.

This left me with a third possibility – Fan Girl. Lenin won! He fought against the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, the imperialists and the reactionaries, and he won. His commitment, follow-through, ability to fail well, to learn from defeat, to be both flexible and principled make him the greatest of all time. He built a party and changed the world!

Although culturally influential, the Fan Girl does not appear as intellectually serious. She seems undisciplined, non-critical, likely delusional in her infatuation with a distant idol. There is something childish in the fan’s desire as it hinges on impossibility more than balanced assessment. Attached to an impossible object, erotic intensity becomes safe and unthreatening. The desire can be expressed because it can’t be fulfilled. What fulfillment might entail is impossible to imagine – as we see in the screams of crowds lining a red carpet while celebrities walk by or in our experiences of speechlessness when we encounter our idols face-to-face.

These drawbacks aside, the Fan Girl perspective owns and names something the academic and the organizer fight against, deny, or repress: jouissance, enjoyment. The fan fervently, too fervently, enjoys. This excessive quality of the fan’s relation to its object is often what makes us uncomfortable. The posters all over the teenager’s room, their lack of self-consciousness in their enthusiasm, it’s so extra. And when it comes to Lenin, it might even be dangerous – what is it an enthusiasm for? Revolution? Absolute power? Communism – an end so great that it justifies any means necessary to its achievement? At any rate, one advantage of the Fan Girl perspective is its attention to enthusiasm and enjoyment.

Another advantage is that the perspective isn’t anchored in knowledge. It’s non-critical because fandom isn’t about being correct or incorrect. It’s about truth, the subjectivizing effect that gives desire its form (the distinction between truth and knowledge that I’m using here comes from Lacan by way of Žižek).[1] For the Fan Girl, even if X or Y is well-documented, Lenin is wonderful and the name Lenin gives form to aspirations for organizing revolutionary struggle. Or, sure, X or Y might have been a mistake or an unappealing personality feature, but Lenin ushered in world communism! The perspective that I’m calling “Fan Girl,” then is the perspective of the subject of the Lenin event.

These three perspectives generally intertwine, albeit unevenly and with varying degrees of acknowledgement and disavowal. The academic perspective, for example, may involve a little falling in love with its object, but it might just as well be driven by something else, perhaps an intense effort to displace or demolish its object of study. Some people write about Lenin in order to bring him down, to destroy communism as a movement and aspiration. They might be fans of a villain, usually the most interesting character in a drama. And they may be attached to their own cause, whether cautious, conserving, or reactionary. Likewise, the organizer’s perspective can be pulled to and informed by both the academic and the Fan Girl perspectives: who hasn’t witnessed organizers invoking the names of their heroes to buttress their own authority? My point, then, is not that one perspective is better than the others. It’s that attention to the Fan Girl perspective, that is, to Lenin as the name for a subjectifying event and subjective process, makes the horizon of the discussion clear: communism.

The Woman Question

How do these different perspectives play out with respect to Lenin and women?

The academic starts with important facts about Lenin’s position on the woman question. From his early writing on the development of capitalism in Russia through his later concerns with building socialism in the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Lenin took great interest in the conditions facing women. According to his analysis, along with national oppression and religious privilege, women’s inferior status was a feudal holdover, one that few bourgeois revolutions actually addressed.[2] Lenin frequently noted how on this basic democratic measure of women’s equality, the Bolshevik revolution easily outshone the bourgeois democratic republics (anyone who is not prepared to answer the woman question should not talk about the dissolution of the constituent assembly, we might – or he might – say). Lenin – and the Bolsheviks more generally – not only supported equal political rights for women and men but recognized the right to divorce and abolished the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate birth. The right to divorce is particularly interesting as it overlaps with the national question: together with freedom and self-determination, it depends on the equal to decide whether to unite and combine. Rather than a formula for fragmentation, it’s the premise for the political equality of oppressed or formerly oppressed people.

Lenin never stopped emphasizing that rights are not enough for women’s emancipation; they are just the beginning. In a speech from September 1919 on “The Tasks of the Working Women’s Movement in the Soviet Republic,” he stated:

You all know that even when women have full rights, they still remain downtrodden because all housework is left to them. In most cases housework is the most unproductive, the most savage and the most arduous work a woman can do. It is exceptionally petty and does not include anything that would in any way promote the development of the woman.[3]

To solve this problem, the new Soviet government endeavored to establish nurseries and rooms for nursing mothers at workplaces employing women, maternity centers, and educational programs. Socializing labor like cooking, laundry, and childcare would free women from the yoke of tradition and let them engage fully in the project of building socialism. “The chief thing is to get women to take part in socially productive labor, to liberate them from ‘domestic slavery,’ to free them from their stupefying and humiliating to the eternal drudgery of the kitchen and the nursery,” Lenin said.[4]

Lenin’s approach to the woman question was tied to the agrarian question: collectivization was the resolution of both, and only with the elimination of small peasant farms would women be completely emancipated.[5] This collectivization wasn’t a romantic throwback to the Russian peasant commune. For Lenin, the error of the Left Narodnik view was clear, and the condition of women helped prove his point: “Left Narodniks will be backed by dotards, who, in addition to defending restrictions to the freedom of mobilization, defend belief in the devil, servility, flogging, cohabitation with daughters-in-law, and “instructing” the womenfolk with a cudgel.”[6] Lenin recognized the harshness of capitalism and industrialization, but saw them as ultimately progressive. Not only did they increase productivity and development, but they broadened mentalities, expanding people’s consciousness and breaking down the slavishness that kept them down. Participation in social production enables women to escape patriarchal isolation.[7]

 

Sex and Joy

Despite the intrinsically fascinating nature of the complex class structure of the Russian peasantry in the late nineteenth century, especially as Lenin’s approach to it overlaps with his analysis of the woman question, it can seem as if something is missing – sex. What about sex? I’m tempted to dismiss interest in sexual questions as bourgeois feminist, but that’s incorrect. Lenin viewed sex as a social matter, not as an issue of individual choice or preference, at the very least because of sex’s link to reproduction and the possible creation of new life. Lenin also recognized a revolution in sex and marriage occurring together with the proletarian revolution.[8] How people will relate to each other as the old norms – with all their accompanying hypocrisy, filth, and inequality for women – decay is a communist question.

Lenin noted with some dismay that it was also a question that greatly engaged the youth at a time when they should have been concentrating their energies on the revolution. Sex raises organizational issues. Lenin explained to Clara Zetkin:

The revolution calls for concentration and rallying of every nerve by the masses and by the individual. It does not tolerate orgiastic conditions so common among D’Annunzio’s decadent heroes and heroines. Promiscuity in sexual matters is bourgeois. It is a sign of degeneration. The proletariat is a rising class. It does not need an intoxicant to stupefy or stimulate it, neither the intoxicant of sexual laxity nor of alcohol. It should and will not forget the vileness, the filth and the barbarity of capitalism. It derives its strongest inspiration to fight from its class position, from the communist ideal. What it needs is clarity, clarity, and more clarity. Therefore, I repeat, there must be no weakening, no waste and no dissipation of energy. Self-control and self-discipline are not slavery; not in matters of love either.”[9]

Who could disagree that the communist revolution requires everything? Revolutionaries need to know when to focus on what. Alexandra Kollontai had clarity on this score. It would be inexpedient “to waste the inner strength of the members of the collective on experiences that did not directly serve the revolution.”[10] For Lenin and Kollontai, sex depends on timing.

Kollontai’s and Lenin’s views overlap significantly: both rejected the “glass of water theory” (which said sex should be as inconsequential as getting a glass of water). Nevertheless, they are often presented as opponents. She was sex positive; he was uptight and repressed. She embraces eros, while he is the self-proclaimed “gloomy ascetic.” This is where the Fan Girl has something to contribute: Lenin wasn’t really ascetic. He had a kitten and trained his dog to do tricks! He liked going for hikes in the mountains and walks in the woods. He had a zest for life. Nadezhda Krupskaya recounts, “Vladimir Ilyich was always being enthusiastic over somebody or other.”[11] When he called himself a “gloomy ascetic,” Lenin was joking in a charmingly self-effacing manner, exaggerating for comic effect. In that same conversation with Zetkin, Lenin said: “Communism should not bring asceticism, but joy and strength, stemming, among other things, from a consummate love life.” He added that “the obtaining plethora of sex life yields neither joy nor strength. On the contrary, it impairs them. That is bad, very bad indeed, in the epoch of revolution.”[12] Communism is about joy and the goal of the revolution is to bring about new conditions for collective joy. Like a communist Marie Kondo, the Fan Girl’s Lenin sparks joy.

The Lenin of enthusiasm and joy doesn’t fit with the more common presentation of Lenin as an austere and dogmatic revolutionary. Where does this image come from? Various academics and biographers blame Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel What Is To Be Done?, a very long and not very good novel, written and published while Chernyshevsky was in prison. It was especially popular in Russian revolutionary circles. Lenin uses the title in his influential text on party organization and tactics. Various academics and biographers claim that Lenin likely modeled himself after “the protagonist of the book,” Rakhmetov.[13] To refute this idea, I venture deep into the weeds mentioned earlier.

 

Into the Weeds

 I should first establish that various academics and biographers do in fact make these claims about Chernyshevsky, Rakhmetov and Lenin. Leszek Kolakowski, in Main Currents of Marxism, published in 1978, writes that What Is To Be Done? “did much to popularize the moral ‘style’ of radical circles, marked by doctrinarism, fanaticism, sincerity and self-sacrifice, the cult of science, and the lack of a sense of humor.”[14] Kolakowski describes Lenin as “an ideal specimen of the type which Chernyshevsky portrayed.” Robert Service goes further, explaining that “the main character of the novel was pure of spirit and endowed with the aura of an unchallenged leader. It is a good bet that Vladimir Ulyanov identified closely with him.”[15] In the same vein, Orlando Figes observes that Lenin’s “own ascetic lifestyle bore a disturbing resemblance to Rakhmet[o]v’s . . . Rakhmet[o]v, with his superhuman will and selfless dedication to the cause, was the perfect model of the Bolshevik.”[16] Even Tariq Ali describes the hero of What Is To Be Done? as a “dedicated and ascetic revolutionary … who sacrifices all for the cause.”[17]

What’s the problem here? The problem is that Rakhmetov isn’t the protagonist, hero, or main character of What Is To Be Done? The main character of the novel – which one would never know from reading these guys – is a woman, Vera Pavlovna. She is able to avoid the loveless marriage that her base and conniving mother tries to force her into by marrying a progressive man, Lopukhov. They reject traditional marriage, respecting each other’s separate spaces and treating each other with equal respect. Vera Pavlovna sets up a dress-making operation, employing seamstresses, paying them high wages, and redistributing the profits back to them. She engages the seamstresses in management and planning. Over time, the operation expands into a consumer collective, bank, and communal household. Vera Pavlovna isn’t completely fulfilled, however, and falls in loves with Lopukhov’s friend Kirsanov. Wanting to ensure Vera Pavlovna’s happiness, Lopukhov fakes his own death and thereby frees to marry his friend. With her emotional needs now met and the dress-making operation successfully employing and housing seamstresses and their families in a prospering commune, Vera Pavlovna realizes that what she really wants is to be a doctor, so she begins studying medicine. Lopukhov, who had gone to the United States, joined the Abolitionist Party, and gotten involved in business, returns to Petersburg as Charles Beaumont. He marries a friend of Vera Pavlovna’s and Kirsanov’s. The two couples take adjoining apartments, receiving guests, having parties, and going on picnics with their large circle of friends. The novel also includes four extended dream sequences where a goddess that sometimes goes by the name Love of Humanity appears to Vera Pavlovna. As if that’s not enough, the author periodically inserts himself into the text, addressing the “perspicacious reader” and telling him what to expect. Rakhmetov – the character that the aforementioned academics and biographers claim is the novel’s protagonist – appears primarily in a section of about thirty pages in the middle of the book, with a couple of brief references elsewhere. Rakhmetov shows up following Lopukhov’s fake suicide to let Vera Pavlovna see a letter explaining Lopukhov’s analysis of the whole love situation involving Kirsanov and to give her his own lecture about what should have happened.

 

Chernyshevsky presents Rakhmetov as an “extraordinary man,” the name of the section in which Rakhmetov is featured. From a noble background, Rakhmetov traveled around Russia, working on barges, forging iron, chopping wood, and so on. His nickname is Nikitushka Lomov, after a Russian folk hero. To develop his strength, Rakhmetov dedicated himself to gymnastics and limits his diet largely to meat, a point emphasized by the various academics and Lenin biographers who generally omit the scene where Rakhmetov consumes a lot of cakes and tea with cream. For the most part, though, Rakhmetov lives an austere life, denying himself wine and women (following an affair he had with his father’s mistress when he was fifteen). He sleeps on a strip of felt and once on a bed of nails to improve his ability to withstand imprisonment. His only vice is cigars. He smokes cigars all the time, almost as if to remind us of his virility despite his sexual abstinence. Vera Pavlovna “found him boring.”[18] In one of his intrusions into the text, Chernyshevsky scolds the “perspicacious reader” for thinking that Rakhmetov would become the main character as he outshined Lopukhov and Kirsanov and Vera Pavlovna fell in love with him. “Nothing of the kind” occurs, as the intrusive author announces.[19] “He’ll play neither a principal role nor a secondary one, nor any role at all in the rest of my novel.”[20]

Lenin was a huge fan of Chernyshevsky. He read What Is To Be Done? five times. He kept two photos of Chernyshevsky in his scrapbook. He even wrote to him once but didn’t get a response. In his memoirs of getting to know Lenin while exiled in Geneva in 1904, the former Menshevik Nikolai Valentinov recounts a conversation he had with Lenin about the novel. Valentinov expresses amazement that anyone could enjoy What Is To Be Done? “It would be difficult to imagine anything more untalented, crude, and, at the same time, pretentious.”[21] Lenin, getting flushed and angry, retorts: “How could such a monstrous and absurd idea come into your mind – to describe as crude and untalented a work of Chernyshevsky, the greatest and most talented representative of socialism before Marx!” Lenin rants on that Chernyshevsky “completely transformed” his outlook and that the novel “provides inspiration for a lifetime.”[22] Lenin loved Chernyshevsky, there’s no doubt about that. This doesn’t mean, though, that he identified with Rakhmetov. Such an identification is unlikely given how in his own What Is To Be Done? Lenin describes the second period of the development of Russian Social-Democracy as the youth breaking with the heroic revolutionary tradition of Narodnaya Volya and abandoning their prior worship of terrorist heroes. Incidentally, unlike the various academics and biographers who cite him, Valentinov doesn’t imply that Lenin identified with Rakhmetov. Valentinov doesn’t even mention Rakhmetov.

Claudia Verhoeven’s brilliant study of the birth of the image of the Russian terrorist provides crucial context here. She argues that Chernyshevsky’s Rakhmetov was not the source for this image at all.[23] The original figure was Dmitry Karakozov, who, on April 4, 1866 shot at Tsar Alexander II but missed. Karakozov was sickly and suicidal, but he gets mapped back onto the “exceptional man” Rakhmetov in the effort to construct political meaning around the attack on the tsar. Verhoeven emphasizes how the mapping of the depressed Karakozov onto Rakhmetov distorts readings of Chernyshevsky’s novel. Not only is the fact that Rakhmetov is frequently described as funny left out, but so is the way that the novel is a “joyful book.”[24] What Is To Be Done?, Verhoeven writes, “teaches readers how to live while waiting for the possible to become real.”[25] No wonder Lenin loved it. It’s not about asceticism; it’s about joy.

Verhoeven notes that readers viewed What Is To Be Done? as a guide to life.[26] Presumably someone reading the book five times has a more complex relationship with the text than a reductive identification with a single character occupying minimal space in the book. Most likely such a reader moves in and out of multiple identifications and is enamored of different aspects of the book at different times. They fall in love with a milieu, feeling, and vision of the possible. But if one is committed to the view that enjoyment of a novel depends on identification with a single character, why not conclude that Lenin identified with Vera Pavlovna? We know from Lenin’s conversation with Clara Zetkin that he is perfectly comfortable identifying with a woman, maybe even joyful. Zetkin describes how their conversation ran late and Lenin turns to her “with a smile,” making a “jocular remark”: “You know, Clara, I am going to take advantage of the fact that I was conversing with a woman and will name the notorious female loquacity as the excuse for being late. Although this time it was the man and not the woman who did most of the talking.”[27] Lenin playfully made himself the woman. So why not expect an identification with Vera Pavlovna to be at least part of his infatuation with What Is To Be Done? She’s the main character. She’s an organizer. She dreams of a better world. Her fourth dream culminates in a vision of a new Russia where people can “enjoy themselves completely and know the full ecstasy of pleasure.”[28] They “burst with health and strength” and lead free lives of “work and enjoyment.” The dream goddess tells Vera Pavlovna that she herself has proven that people can live free lives: “One has only to be rational, to know how to organize, and to learn how to use resources most advantageously.”[29] That sounds pretty Leninist to me.

Vera Pavlovna expresses a desire associated with women but found in anyone in the throes of romantic longing: a desire not to be tormented by love. She talks to Kirsanov about that time in their relationship when she was still married to Lopukhov but unable to be without Kirsanov. Kirsanov assures her that he was feeling the same way, but Vera Pavlovna says, no, there was a difference. He had work that could “be neither neglected nor postponed.”[30] She did not. Of course, she had the dress-making enterprise. But that wasn’t the same as work that was utterly necessary. A person with that kind of work, she says, “is incomparably stronger.”[31] Vera Pavlovna cries:

Can we really be occupied by convictions when we’re being tormented by feelings? No, we need a personal cause, one our life depends on, a cause that for me personally, for my way of life, for my own means, for my whole position, for my entire fate would be more important than all the impulses of my passion. Only such a cause could serve as support in the struggle against passion; only such a cause would not be forced out of life by passion, but would itself suppress all passion. Only such a cause would provide both strength and rest. I want such a cause.[32]

Freedom through a cause that provides strength and rest – this isn’t asceticism but fulfillment of life. We can be equal when we experience ourselves and each other as equally indispensable, equally necessary for building a better common world.

I imagine Lenin as attached less to any specific character in What Is To Be Done? than to the dream that we can organize ourselves and make a world where we experience each other as equals. It’s a dream of collectivity and collective desire. Kollontai uses the term “love-comradeship” to describe such a dream. In “Make Way for Winged Eros,” where she also refers to Chernyshevsky’s novel, Kollontai notes love’s “organizing character,” its importance in the “development of collective solidarity.” She attends to love for one’s work, for a cause, and for the collective, pointing out how bourgeois possessive love puts these in conflict with the pull of the couple and the family. “Only the ideology and the lifestyle of the new, laboring humanity can unravel this complex problem of emotion,” she writes. Chernyshevsky’s new people in What Is To Be Done? have done precisely this. The novel concludes with happy, lyrical descriptions of picnics, discussions, mutuality, of people interconnected with each other through bonds of care and respect. Kollontai captures the change in love that comes about when collective love replaces couple love:

The blind, all-embracing, demanding passions will weaken; the sense of property, the egoistical desire to bind the partner to one “forever,” the complacency of the man and the self-renunciation of the woman will disappear. At the same time, the valuable aspects and elements of love will develop. Respect for the right of the other’s personality will increase, and a mutual sensitivity will be learned; men and women will strive to express their love not only in kisses and embraces but in joint creativity and activity. The task of proletarian ideology is not to drive Eros from social life but to rearm him according to the new social formation, and to educate sexual relationships in the spirit of the great new psychological force of comradely solidarity.[33]

Hope for and attachment to such a vision make much more sense for a fan of Chernyshevsky, someone who will read his massive tome five times, than identification with a lone folk hero showing up for a mere thirty pages. How do we organize, how do we organize desire, how do we organize so that our desires can change and evolve and be better and make us better than before? What Is To Be Done? – Lenin’s and Chernyshevsky’s – is about organizing desire, not the political efficacy of the lone terrorist revolutionary.

 

Organizing Desire

What might explain the bad reading that associates Lenin with Rakhmetov? Verhoeven spotlights the failed attempt on Tsar Alexander II and the emergence of a certain image of the revolutionary. That’s important. The Fan Girl perspective can add something else: the various academics and biographers have a reductive understanding of sex. In his contribution to Lenin: The Heritage We (Don’t) Renounce, edited by Hjalmar Joffre-Eichhorn and Patrick Anderson, David Pavón-Cuéllar reminds us that “sexual links cannot be reduced only to genital intercourse but are what internally animates what is alive in society, culture, and history. They are what unfolds in comradeship, revolutionary struggle and the various prefigurations of communism.”[34] Likely misogynous in their failure to recognize Vera Pavlovna as the main character of the book, and perhaps unable to escape their own fantasies of a strong man with a big cigar, the various academics and biographers can’t see the joy of love-comradeship that must have attracted Lenin.

Their short-sightedness lets them position Lenin in a double-bind: he is either dour and unappealing because he is an ascetic like Rakhmetov or he is a hypocrite who wanted to be like Rakhmetov but failed because of his intimate friendship with Inessa Armand, a woman not his wife. Both sides of this double bind depend on a truncated, possessive, genital, bourgeois version of love. This appears in the academics’ and biographers’ regressive characterizations of the comparative physical attractions of Krupskaya and Armand. But Lenin was not an ascetic; inspired by Chernyshevsky and like Kollontai, Lenin had an expanded vision of love as love for work, for a cause, and for the collective. His deep relationship with Armand – which was intertwined with their revolutionary work and included the close friendship between Armand and Krupskaya – can’t be evaluated according to the standards of possessive bourgeoise couple love. Whatever sex someone is having is just one connection among many intense and extended bonds of collectivity.

Like Bolshevik notions of revolution and the party, the extended erotics of love-comradeship may seem outmoded today. In some organizations and movement spaces, there is a great deal of anxiety around sex. People are viewed as predators and victims rather than comrades. Nuanced calculations of privilege and hierarchy replace suppositions of equality. Desire is policed in the interest of maintaining safety and security. Suspicion supplies its own erotics of paranoia and punishment. Rather than strengthening solidarity and comradeship, “barbed eros” divides groups, sometimes from within but also from without as self-designated internet sex cops spread accusations and lies, getting off by feeling that they have the power to destroy. In a communicative capitalist context where intense images of sex and violence swirl around economically vulnerable and often socially insecure and isolated people, it’s no wonder that we aren’t sure how to act, how to make each other feel appreciated as comrades and not have our intentions misinterpreted. The lonely and confused treat movement spaces as dating apps, face-to-face communist Tinder. They come into politics in pursuit of individual pleasure rather than collective power. Because we lack the “background of joyful unity and comradeship” that could enable us to guide one another into better behaviors, we too often remain trapped in carceral and individualistic mindsets. As Kollontai writes, “Modern love always sins.”

This is where the organizer comes in, perhaps with a slogan one of my comrades picked up in Cuba: high discipline, high morale! With proper organization, love for the collective, the struggle, and the revolution replace self-preoccupation. Our ideal becomes “not the unadorned sexual instinct but the many-faceted love experience of love-comradeship.” Kollontai rightly notes that this puts some constraints on sexual behavior. The revolution is worth it. Abolishing capitalism and imperialism are worth it. The building of new kinds of relationships in a new egalitarian society is worth it. Just like the party comes into the workers struggle from the outside, so does it come into the problem posed by the couple from the outside, where outside means a location strengthened by the focus on the primary thing, revolution. Of course, this is all the more difficult the greater our distance from revolution. Perversely, we can distort our understanding of the party perspective by assigning to it responsibility for intervening into personal matters, as if it were some sort of cop or counselor. This drags the party into the marsh. The party’s actual responsibility is keeping the focus on revolution. That’s why we join and that’s what we have to cultivate.

The heart of the desire question, the woman question, was never “free love.” It’s revolution. Some people like looking back to Lenin’s correspondence with Armand on free love. A couple of the surviving letters include Lenin’s critical commentary on a pamphlet Armand was writing on the demand for free love. She never published it, and so far no copies of the draft have appeared. Lenin’s letters might seem to give clues to their relationship, perhaps exhibiting symptoms of repressed desire. I prefer to read them more straightforwardly. Lenin emphasizes the political and organizational importance of bringing out the contrast between proletarian and bourgeois approaches to love. For “bourgeois ladies,” free love means freedom from childbirth and freedom to commit adultery. For proletarian women, free love is so much more – freedom from material cares and considerations, from patriarchal religious and social norms, from the shackles of law, courts, and police. Even calling this free love obscures the extent of the transformation necessary to realize the proletarian demand. Lenin criticizes Armand for failing to make this distinction clear and thereby opening up possibilities for misrepresentation. He makes a related political point in a later letter: “One should know how to combine the struggle for democracy and the struggle for the socialist revolution, subordinating the first to the second. In this lies the whole difficulty; in this is the whole essence.”[35] In that letter, Lenin criticizes Rosa Luxemburg and other comrades for failures of political analysis: they lose sight of the main thing, the socialist revolution. The main thing has to provide the orientation for everything else.

Michael Neocosmos writes, “Emancipatory politics for Lenin then consist in addressing current struggles in such a way that they are subordinated in thought and practice to a communist vision of the future.”[36] Neocosmos correctly emphasizes how Lenin devised a politics that was irreducible to “economic trends however progressive they may be.” Consideration of the desire question lets us see that the same holds for trends around sex and gender. What matters is organizing for revolution, that’s the main thing that subordinates everything else, however progressive it may be. As the Fan Girl joyfully insists, Lenin got it right.

Notes

[1] Slavoj Žižek, “Desire: Drive = Truth: Knowledge,” https://www.lacan.com/zizek-desire.htm.

[2] V. I. Lenin, “From the Fourth Anniversary of the October Revolution,” October 14, 1921, in The Emancipation of Women: From the Writings of V. I. Lenin, International Publishers, 2011 [1934], 87.

[3] V. I. Lenin, “The Tasks of the Working Women’s Movement in the Soviet Republic,” September 23, 1919, Emancipation of Women, 69.

[4] V. I. Lenin, “On International Working Women’s Day,” March 4, 1920, Emancipation of Women, 81.

[5] V. I. Lenin, “Speech at the First All-Russia Congress of Working Women,” November 19, 1918, Emancipation of Women, 60.

[6] V. I. Lenin, “The Left Narodniks,” May 14, 1914. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/may/14.htm.

[7] Excerpt from V. I. Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, in Emancipation of Women, 15.

[8] Clara Zetkin, “My Recollections of Lenin,” in Emancipation of Women, 105.

[9] Zetkin, “Recollections,” 108.

[10] Alexandra Kollontai, “Make Way for Winged Eros: A Letter to Working-Class Youth,” 1923, trans. Alix Holt. https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1923/winged-eros.htm

[11] Nadezhda Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin, trans. Bernard Isaacs, Haymarket Books, 2018, 83.

[12] Zetkin, “Recollections,” 107.

[13] Tamás Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin, Monthly Review Press, 2015, 31.

[14] Leszek Kowlakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. 2, Oxford University Press, 1978, 314.

[15] Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography, Belknap Press, 2000, 65.

[16] Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution, 1996, 142.

[17] Tariq Ali, The Dilemmas of Lenin, Verso, 2017, 51.

[18] Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What Is To Be Done?, trans. Michael B. Katz, Cornell University Press, 1989, 272.

[19] Chernyshevsky, 293.

[20] Chernyshevsky, 293.

[21] Nikolai Valentinov, Encounters with Lenin, Oxford University Press, 1968, 63.

[22] Valentinov, 64.

[23] Claudia Verhoeven, The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism,

Cornell University Press, 2009.

[24] Verhoeven, 42.

[25] Verhoeven, 42.

[26] Verhoeven, 56.

[27] Zetkin, “Recollections,” 117.

[28] Chernyshevsky, 378.

[29] Chernyshevsky, 376.

[30] Chernyshevsky, 342.

[31] Chernyshevsky, 342.

[32] Chernyshevsky, 342.

[33] Kollontai.

[34] David Pavón-Cuéllar, “Lenin, Psychoanalysis and Free Love,” Lenin: The Heritage We (Don’t) Renounce, edited by Hjalmar Joffre-Eichhorn and Patrick Anderson, Daraja Press, 2024, 90.

[35] V. I. Lenin to Inessa Armand, December 25, 1916, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/dec/25ia.htm.

 [36]Michael Neocosmos, “Lenin and the Invention of Politics,” Lenin the Heritage We (Don’t) Renounce, 212.

Jodi Dean