An undergraduate professor of mine told me that decades ago. To this day, I don’t exactly what he meant by it. But presumably part of what he meant was they were very important figures for understanding the politics and intellectual history of the 20th century.
Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, better known as Vladimir Ilich Lenin (1870-1924), was the chief leader of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the most important leader of the new Russian Soviet Republic and the larger Soviet Union. He died in January 2024, and books and articles are starting to appear on the 100-year anniversary of his passing. Some of them will probably even be worth reading!
Of course, it is his role as the founding leader of the Soviet Union for which Lenin is remembered:
It’s not every society whose ideals are embodied by a corpse. But in the Soviet Union, the never-decaying body of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was meant to freeze his ideals in time: a promise to citizens that they were on the collective path to the bright communist future.Once the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 seized power in Moscow, everything in his life and political career began to be seen through the lens of that event. Or, given the course of events and the endless interpretations of them, a hall of mirrors is probably a better metaphor for how he is viewed.
Some believed, some did not, but by embalming his body (and against his wishes), his successors meant to cement his place both at the center of Moscow and in the hearts of Soviet citizens. Opened to visitors on August 1, 1924, his mausoleum became a key symbol of Soviet power, from the saint-like aura around Lenin’s remains to the Politburo’s tradition of standing atop the structure on holidays. Today, the unburied body remains a lingering element of the Soviet legacy, representing Russia’s inability or unwillingness to bury its Soviet past. (1) [my emphasis]
For a reliably “respectable” biography, Britannica Online is always a decent place to start. (2)
Lenin’s oldest brother Aleksandr was executed in 1887 for conspiring to assassinate Czar Alexander III. Lenin himself was later part of the Soviet government that would execute Czar Nicholas II and his family in July 1918. (3)
Lenin was active in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP) , which was part of the Socialist International, aka, the Second International. In the first decade of the 1900s, he became the principal leader of the majority (Bolshevik) faction of the RSDWP. He advocated for planning a seizure of power through an uprising, which the RSDWP’s minority faction (Mensheviks) criticized as “Jacobin” and to which they opposed a more gradual approach.
The Revolution of 1905 in Russia was the backdrop of the RSDWP’s politics from then until 1917. While that uprising didn’t unseat the czar, it did include a new phenomenon, the workers’ councils (soviets in Russian) that emerged to organize support for the revolutionary demands. The political thinking on the Russian left from then until 1917 was heavily focused on what lessons should be taken from that experience.
The Great War and the Russian Revolution(s)
By 1917, the home front in Russia was fed up with shortages and the losses the Czar’s army were racking up. In what became known as the February Revolution, the Czar’s government fell in face of the public protests and Alexander Kerensky (1881–1970) became he new head of the government. In the social-democratic terms of the time, that was considered a “bourgeois-democratic” revolution which dropped the royal form of government and set out to build a republic on something like Western lines.
But Kerensky decided to continue the war rather than sue for peace even though the Russians were ready to be done with the war. Lenin, who had been living in Switzerland during the war, returned to Russia to organize an immediate effort to make a socialist revolution. (They didn’t start using the term Communist to describe the new government until afterward.)
John Kenneth Galbraith devoted an episode of his 1977 PBS series “The Age of Uncertainty” to this series of events, “Lenin and the Great Ungluing.” (4)
As Galbraith summarized it:
Lenin's great achievement was in keeping and in consolidating power, in proceeding from anarchy and civil war to unresticted authority in the next five years [1917-1922].In the sea of books on Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution, there is a two-volume study by George Kennan, famous for his articulation of a “containment” policy toward the Soviet Union, that cover the early part of that period with an emphasis on foreign policy and how American policymakers perceived events in Russia: Russia Leaves the War (1956) and The Decision to Intervene (1958).
Lenin's failure was in not seeing how great would be the further task of building a socialist economy, how complex would be the problems of socialist planning and management. "Accounting and control- that is mainly what is needed for the' smooth working', for the proper functioning, of the first phase of communist society," he had written. End capitalism and what remained would be a job for clerks. (5)
A huge amount of documentation has since become available to researchers since then, of course. But Kennan’s two-volume history provides a look at the events from the intellectual architect of the US containment policy (who was already very critical of the militarized turn that it quickly took even in the Truman Administration after being adopted), including descriptions of the motley crew of opposition forces to the new Soviet government in various parts of the czarist empire and internal events like the Constituent Assembly of January 2018, which was later to become the subject of elaborate polemics over the “soviet” versus the “parliamentary” or “bourgeois” (capitalist) form of government. (6)
Lenin would fall ill in early 1922 and much of his political activity that year would be very restricted. His ability to participate in political leadership effectively ended in March 2023, when he suffered a stroke that left him unable to speak. He passed away after another stroke in January 1924.
The Manchester Guardian’s obituary for Lenin in 1924 said:
His long drawn–out fight against his illness has saved the country from the shock that would have been dealt by his death had that occurred with his first stroke, but even so his death has come at a moment when, during the recent party discussion, his absence has been particularly felt and at a moment when the party dispute is scarcely ended, and on the eve of the first Union Congress. His death is a blow not only to the Communist party but to all Russia. Even the irreconcilable enemies of the Revolution are unable to disguise their respect for one of the greatest figures in Russian history. (7)
The Civil War
Although the seizure of power in October 1917 was itself remarkably bloodless, military conflicts followed until 1923, although the Russian Civil War is conventionally dated from 1918-1920. Lenin was determined to get Russia out of the Great War (First World War). He didn’t intend to repeat Kerensky’s mistake on that count. It took until March 1918 to conclude a peace with Germany that involved ceding considerable parts of the former czarist empire. This greatly displeased Russia’s former allies Britain, France, and the United States. Woodrow Wilson even sent troops to supplement British and French forces into eastern Russia to assist the anti-Bolshevik White armies fighting in eastern Europe. Allied forces weren’t fully withdrawn from Russia until 1925.
As Vladimir Putin complained in justifying his 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Lenin recognized Ukraine as its own republic. Though Lenin’s government successfully fought the Ukrainians who did not want their new country to be a component part of the Soviet Union. Wartime grain requisitions also produced a serious famine in Ukraine in 1921-23.
Lenin mobilized the country on a centralized basis during the period known as “war communism,” demonstrating the ability of centralized economic direction. (Die-hard Western capitalist countries also discovered the virtues of more state direction of the economy during the war.) It was replaced in 1921 by what was called the New Economic Policy (NEP), which allowed a greater degree of market incentives to play out. Like nearly everything else about Lenin in that period, the NEP would become the subject of endless polemics in the decades that followed.
Leninism
The official Soviet-line political theory was called Marxism-Leninism. China still uses the term, so it’s hardly obsolete. Historically, the political theory identified as Leninism was addressing developments in capitalism like the rise of “monopoly capitalism” and “trusts” that economists generally recognize took place in the latter part of the 19th century and continued afterwards, along with a greater role for large financial institutions.
All this was considered part of what the title of one of Lenin’s books called Imperialism: The Final Stage of Capitalism (1917), which built on other social-democratic works like Rudolf Hilferding’s Finance Capital (1910) and those of the English socialist J. A. Hobson. (Galbraith commented on Lenin’s book, “Not even a committed disciple could think it an impressive document, although many have risen to the challenge.”) (8)
The success and survival of a socialist revolution in Russia standing on its own was something that Marxist and social-democratic thinkers and politicians had not expected. The standard model assumed by parties of the Second International was that when the working class (mostly then understood to be industrial workers) became a majority, their class consciousness and the efforts of their social-democratic parties would lead them to vote social-democratic parties into power.
But even though the urban working class (aka, “proletariat”) in Russia was heavily concentrated in large enterprises, they were a distinct minority. Russia was a predominantly peasant country, with many of the peasants being small landholders. Lenin and the new Bolshevik rulers took this very seriously, to the point that they seriously feared that without socialist revolutions in European countries like Germany or France that could help them economically, they wouldn’t be able to make a successful transition to socialism.
Through the Third International, which was also formed under Lenin as a worldwide alliance of Communist Parties, they strongly encouraged/directed an attempt at a Communist revolution in Germany in late 1923 lead by the German Communist Party (KPD), but it fizzled out. This ended any practical expectation that the USSR would be getting any major assistance from new Western socialist republics.
Which meant that it was going to be “socialism in one country” (the USSR) for a while, or no socialism at all. And that’s the course the USSR adopted.
History and Polemics
Britannica also has excerpts of a biographical article on Lenin from its 1926 edition by Leon Trostsky (9), Lenin’s sometimes rival and sometimes partner, and the founder and head of the Soviet Red Army. His own version of Marxism is known as Trotskyism, an anti-Stalin version of Marxism that was notoriously sectarian. There was a joke that Trotskyists support revolution everywhere except where one is actually going on, a reference to the dogmatic abstractions of which they were notoriously fond. No revolution ever seemed pure enough for them, in other words.
Trotsky became the leading opponent of Joseph Stalin (Ioseb Dzhugashvili) for the leadership of the Soviet Union in the 1920s. The “socialism in one country” policy became a symbol for the Trotskyists of how the Stalinists had betrayed the cause of the international socialist revolution. After losing out to Stalin in internal power struggles, Trotsky was exiled from Russia in 1929 and became a left opponent of the Communist parties and their defenses of the Soviet Union. He was assassinated by a Soviet agent, Ramón Mercader, in August 1940 in Mexico City. Many of the criticisms of Lenin and the Soviet Union, even many conservative ones, often rely on at least some of Trotsky’s.
A lot of the retrospectives on Lenin in 2024 will no doubt seek to interpret the significance of his life and politics not only by what happened during his lifetime, but also by the influence they were judged to have on subsequent events. That’s totally normal to do. But the results will be interesting to see. Some will surely be quite a bit more imaginative than others.
Those of some of the major themes the retrospectives will likely take up.
One of the major contributions already out is a book by the historians Verena Moritz and Hannes Leidinger, Lenin. Die Biographie (2023). I haven’t read it yet. But I did hear the authors give two presentations based on it this past November. The general view they gave in those presentations was that Lenin was bad, awful bad, and also bad and awful. And that if anyone tells you there was anything constructive or positive about him or anything he did, they’re failing to acknowledge his badness and awfulness.
It will be interesting to see what new research they discuss in it. But I’m not expecting carefully nuanced reflections, though maybe the book will surprise me.
Full post also available at: https://brucemillerca.substack.com/p/vladimir-lenin-a-100-year-milestone
(1) Underwood, Alice (2017): Why Lenin’s Corpse Lives On In Putin’s Russia. The Russian File (Kennan Institute blog) 08/17/2017.
(2) Resis, Albert (2023): Vladimir Lenin. Britannica Online 11/17/2023.
(3) The executed family would later be canonized as saints by the Russian Orthodox Church. Russia’s Supreme Court in 2008 declared the whole family officially rehabilitated.
(4) The Age of Uncertainty Episode 5 Lenin and The Great Ungluing. sveinbjornt YouTube channel 10/17/2011. (Accessed: 2023-22-12).
(5) Galbraith, John Kenneth (1977): The Age of Uncertainty, 154. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
(6) Wade, Rex (2017): The Russian Revolution, 1917 (3rd edition), 254-281. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lenin on the Constituent Assembly 12/24/1917 (Pravda No. 213, 26 (13) December 1917). In: Seventeen Moments in Soviet History. Michigan State University.
(7) Ransome, Arthur (2017): Death of Lenin - archive, 1924. The Guardian 01/23/2017.
(8) Galbraith, op. cit., 147.
(9) Trotsky, Leon (1926): Leon Trotsky on Lenin. Britannica Online 11/22/2022.
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