‘We have not only cut off heads, as the Mensheviks and the Kautskys in all countries accuse us of doing; we have also enlightened heads. Many heads.’ This is Lenin, in the early 1920s, talking about the importance of ‘culture’ and education in the creation of a socialist society. It’s an example of Lenin’s brusque honesty about the violence of the early Soviet state, but also of what he considered one of the central roles of any socialist movement — the raising of the general cultural level, a collective ‘cultivation’. It comes from Not By Politics Alone: The Other Lenin, a 1973 anthology edited by Tamara Deutscher, a book which is the great rediscovery in a Verso series of books on the centenary of Lenin’s death.

Tamara Deutscher was born Tamara Lebenhaft in Lodz in 1913 and died in 1990 in Camden. She was one of a generation of Central European exiles who came to Britain during the 1930s and did a great deal to shake up the rather hidebound culture of this island. People like Tamara and her husband, Isaac Deutscher, self-described ‘non-Jewish Jews’, had a universalistic conception of political life, in which politics expanded way beyond activism into a wider way of living. Lenin was a counterintuitive choice of a figure to encapsulate this idea, as few revolutionaries have ever been so utterly single-minded. One friend here recalls climbing the Swiss Alps with Lenin, only to find him surveying one of the finest views, then ‘sitting down, deep in thought’. Suddenly, Lenin burst out, ‘Hm, a fine mess the Mensheviks are making for us.’ The friend, furious, obtained from Lenin an assurance that he wouldn’t mention the Mensheviks for the rest of the hike.

Not By Politics Alone is a vivid, unusual book, a collage of letters, memoirs, and fragments. Here, we find a fellow prisoner recalling the deliveries of books that would arrive for Lenin in a Tsarist jail; Lenin singing the praises of the New York Public Library system; Lenin mocking Kropotkin for his enthusiasm for English co-ops; Lenin in power demanding a reduction in his salary.

On art, Lenin confessed to a total lack of knowledge. Staying at a comrade’s house one night, he found a book on the history of art, and was so fascinated that he stayed up all night reading it; he realised that he would have to devote years to understanding art — years that he did not have — so he left art alone. On public sculpture, though, Lenin had a definite position. He was a dedicated statue-toppler, insisting that the likenesses of tsars, kings, and generals in Moscow be replaced with those of the great revolutionaries, producing an ecumenical list that ranged from Marx to Bakunin to Shevchenko. But Lenin would have acquitted himself on both sides in today’s culture wars. He was a lover of nineteenth-century literature, including works that he found most politically repugnant, like that of Dostoevsky. He insisted that revolutionaries read the classics, no matter how ‘problematic’; within them was a depth and sophistication that he believed couldn’t be found in the pro-communist literature of the ‘Proletkult’. Nonetheless, Lenin could be hilarious on the flaws of precisely those classical writers, as in his description of Tolstoy’s worldview: ‘I am a bad, wicked man, but I am practising moral self-perfection; I don’t eat meat anymore, I now eat rice cutlets.’

One of the most interesting chapters here is on feminism and sexuality. Lenin mandated legal gender equality (and it is worth remembering here that his government was one of the first in the world to legalise homosexuality), and he had an awareness of the way economics reinforces inequality — hence, his insistence on crèches and communal kitchens as a way of making sure women with children could participate properly in political life. But he was suspicious of women’s sections in the Communist Party, viewing young communists’ advocacy of ‘free love’ as ‘bourgeois’. Unpacking that term via the conversation with Klara Zetkin included here, we find that Lenin meant that the life of a free-loving revolutionary would be messy and dissolute, dedicated to pleasure; they would be late for meetings. This has some logic, especially given that if there’s anything the Left today lacks, it’s Lenin’s patience and discipline; but it can lead to a certain joylessness. One can imagine Lenin in 2024 supporting legal equality for transgender people, but you would be highly unlikely to see him at a drag night.

What is particularly contemporary in these fragments is Lenin’s awareness of the dangers of Russian nationalism, which he despised with all his being. Unlike in his writings on women, he was here astute enough to realise that in positions of existing inequality, power structures needed to be bent in the other direction, with the Georgians or Ukrainians, say, necessarily needing to receive more relative power in the Soviet Union than the numerically and historically dominant Russians. In the late writings excerpted here, Lenin is constantly apologising — for the growth of bureaucracy, for the Communist Party’s lack of culture, and for failing to come down hard enough or quickly enough on the growth of Russian nationalism. The state he built would turn him into a lifeless doll of stone and bronze, which is now ritually toppled every few years in an endless repetition of 1989. The real Lenin, warts and all, was much more interesting, and for those today who want to discover him, Not By Politics Alone remains a terrific place to start.