“Nietzschean criticism of man and appeals to overcome him were extremely congenial to Lenin’s contempt for the Russian national character. Inheriting his views from Russian radicalism via Chernychevsky and Tkachev, Lenin saw the typical Russian as a passive, inert creature with an inherent slave morality, the most sinister manifestation of which was Oblomov; he was especially critical of the Russian peasantry. Lenin dreamed of creating a Russian homo novus: his idea of social revolution was inseparable from his idea of a cultural revolution which would purge the new, perfect society of old human types that were unfit for the future. Not man as such should be overcome, according to Lenin, but specifically Russian man. The contemporary Russian people was merely raw material for the future, a Nietzschean bridge for the process of national reconstruction for which no moral criteria were needed. To Lenin, the remaking of Russia was more a problem of cultural anthropology than a problem of class struggle in the Marxist sense.”