Swinging the Sickle? More on Lenin in the one-century anniversary year of his death

I posted on January 1 about how 2024 was the 100th anniversary of Vladimir Lenin’s death and how we could expect to see various retrospectives on him. (1)

Those are happening, and I want to comment on at least some of them.

PBS Newshour offers a brief AP piece about how Lenin isn’t thought very highly of in Putin’s Russia these days.

The goateed face with its intense glare that once seemed unavoidable still stares out from statues, but many of those have been the targets of pranksters and vandals. The one at St. Petersburg’s Finland Station commemorating his return from exile was hit by a bomb that left a huge hole in his posterior. Many streets and localities that bore his name have been rechristened.

The ideology that Lenin championed and spread over a vast territory is something of a sideshow in modern Russia. The Communist Party, although the largest opposition grouping in parliament, holds only 16 percent of the seats, overwhelmed by President Vladimir Putin’s political power-base, United Russia. (2)

Since Putin’s government’s promotes a generally ultra-conservative, Orthodox Christian view that’s more Aleksandr Dugin and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (3) than Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, that’s not too surprising.

Some evaluations of Lenin’s legacy are, uh, more serious than others.

It would be hard to deny that When the Sickle Swings is a catchy title. (4) The subtitle is Stories of Catholics Who Survived Communist Oppression. I don’t know if Ms. Van Uden’s book deals with the attitudes of the Russian Orthodox Church toward Catholics over the last couple of centuries.

But I’m going to make a wild guess that this book probably is not the first place you wnat to go if you are looking for an analysis of the critiques Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Kautsky made during Lenin’s lifetime of his concept of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. In fact, she seems to think that present-day Western welfare states (eroded by years of neoliberalism) are just a variant of Communism. (5)

DW News gives this just-the-facts summary of Lenin’s legacy today:

Though he remains little more than a nostalgic touchstone for many in Russia, Lenin's influence is still vivid elsewhere today, most notably in China — a party-state system in which the Communist party embodies the vanguard of his ideology.

Lenin's anti-imperialist posture and his success in creating a socialist state made the former Soviet Union a great friend of those nations who sought to become independent from colonial powers or those seeking a different model from the capitalist West.

This was especially true during the Cold War and after Soviet leader Josef Stalin died in 1953. Russia, like China, paints itself as a partner to those nations who seek to rid themselves of the yoke of colonialism and imperialism today, most notably in Africa and South America.

Lenin has overwhelmingly been seen in the West as an imaginative builder of an alternative to the capitalist model but one who ruled with an iron fist, persecuting dissent in the most violent and fear-inducing manner. (6)

Groups with some kind of socialist orientation are understandably more interested in looking at the historical significance of Lenin than most others. Some of them may be more-or-less small and/or sectarian groups, like the Trotskyist-oriented International Marxist Tendency (IMT).

George Brinkley in 1998 provided an accessible and scholarly account of “Leninism: What lt Was and What lt Was Not.” (7) It’s also a very conventional description, which among other things means it misses a lot what Lenin’s historical contributions were. Here’s a sample:

Already convinced [in 1905] that the working people could not develop class consciousness on their own and would never become a reliable force for revolutionary purposes, Lenin developed the "vanguard" party concept.

But it’s not as though other Social Democratic parties at the time, and all political parties for that matter, didn’t recognize a need to educate their supporters about the party program and organize them to support it. That 1905 dispute was focused on how to organize the Russian Social Democratic party to deal with the specific challenges of organizing against the autocratic czarist regime, when the parties did not have the range of legal possibilities that existed in Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, and some other Western nations.

[T]o achieve the difficult task ahead [in Lenin’s view] an absolute dictatorship would be necessary, especially since fundamental change would have to be forced upon the masses virtually the same way it occurred under capitalism.

Here Brinkley seems to be reading specific developments from 1917 forward back into earlier years.

When Lenin studied conditions in the West to understand why socialist revolutions had not already occurred, he discovered that capitalism had reached a stage unforeseen by Marx, the stage of imperialism.

No, Lenin did not discover the concepts of monopoly capitalism and imperialism. As the controversies over the railroad trusts and the robber barons in the US during the later 19th century illustrated, this process was very obvious in Europe and the US. Nor was he the first to notice that “rivalries among the capitalist powers over colonial possessions would inevitably lead to war.” (Brinkley’s description)

As events like the Congress of Berlin (1878) illustrate, the European powers were already openly competing for colonies and making unstable agreements to divide up the non-colonized world. The Boer War/South African War (1899-1902), the Spanish-American War (1898) which extended into the Philippine-American War (1899-1902), and the European-American intervention in the Boxer Rebellion in China (1900) were distinct markers of the conflicts involved with imperialism of the time. The Moroccan Crisis of 1905-06 and the Second Moroccan Crisis (1911) could have sparked off the First World War even before the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand met his unfortunate end in Sarajevo in 1914.

The proverbial writing was on the wall even earlier:

As recently as 1894 the French and the Russian general staffs had linked the fates of their countries in a secret treaty of alliance, so worded as almost to ensure that there could be no further minor complication in European affairs that would not lead to wider hostilities among the great powers. It was in 1898 that there had been inaugurated, for the first time in earnest, the unnecessary and dreadfully misguided effort of Kaiser Wilhelm Il’s Germany to compete with Great Britain in the development of naval power. And throughout all of it the great powers were busy with other military preparations that, however defensively conceived, simply diminished whatever small possibility of avoiding a general conflagration might still have existed. (8) [my emphasis]

The gruesome Balkan Wars of 1912-13 were also a sign of a precariously balanced European imperial system coming unstuck. (9) The official beginning of the First World War was Austrian Kaiser Franz Joseph’s declaration of war on Russia's ally Serbia - made with heavy pressure from Germany.

Brinkley describes one of Lenin’s most important positions this way: “This war, World War I in the event, would provide the opportunity to ‘spark’ revolution in the West by shocking the Western proletariats out of their self-satisfied stupor.”

Uh, not exactly. (Self-satisfied stupor?) What Lenin argued was that the outbreak of the Great War would provide the opportunity and a strong impetus for popular revolution in the various imperial powers. It didn’t work out that way in most of them. But it did happen that way in Russia, a goal which Lenin stubbornly pursued in 1917 upon his return to Russia after the February Revolution.

Brinkley also argues that Lenin was just kidding in 1917 when he pursued a peace agreement with the Germans. “Thus in 1917 Lenin was not looking to make peace; he was merely proposing peace to spark revolution to destroy capitalism.”

Uh, no, he really was serious about pursuing a peace agreement with Imperial Germany and the Central Powers, and even accepted a distinctly ungenerous offer from Kaiser Bill’s government in the Brest-Litovsk Agreements of 1918. Of course, Lenin did want to destroy capitalism. It was the Bolshevik government’s explicit goal, scarcely a hidden agenda and certainly not a surprise to the other powers in the war!

The Entente Powers including the US actually intervened military in Russia to try to force the country to re-enter the war against Germany. So they seemed to take Russia’s desire to be out of the war pretty seriously.

Much later in the article, Brinkley argues:

By January 1918, however, it was clear to Lenin that the spark [of socialist revolutions in other imperials powers] had failed and Russia (at least the Bolshevik regime) was in mortal danger. Therefore, he now insisted, against the wishes of almost all of his fellow Bolshevik leaders, that Russia must actually make peace not just propaganda, and not just with Germany but with all of the capitalist powers.

To the extent this makes sense, Brinkley seems to think that Lenin assumed for two months after the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power that instantly socialist revolution would break out in the major capitalist countries. Or something. He’s really not very clear on this point.

Brinkley also offers up this word-salad:

By the time of the revolution in 1917, Lenin had thus succeeded in integrating his concepts of "vanguard," "state capitalism," "uninterrupted revolution," "spark," and "imperialism" into a comprehensive and universally applicable whole. He had rescued Marxism from oblivion and had shown how the whole world would now experience the triumph of socialism. Unfortunately for him, his predictions were mostly wrong.

The Spark (Iskra) was the name of the party paper Lenin founded. Brinkley’s comment there makes it sound like “spark” was some kind of key conceptual concepts in Lenin’s political theory.

In the same paragraph, he writes of Lenin’s erroneous assumptions, “There would, he felt confident, be another world war.” Dude, there was another world war. You know, Hitler invades Poland and so on?

The last half of the essay is devoted to showing that Lenin’s only real goal was always dictatorship, dictatorship, dictatorship. Which he contends was also what Marx and Engels wanted. No one would argue that Lenin established a Western-style liberal democracy in his years in power. But there is much more to the story than a supposed lifelong fixation of Lenin’s.

Someday, the world may recover from Cold War clichés. We can hope.

But counting in Brinkley’s favor is that he gets kind of testy about rightwinger Richard Pipes overhyping his own scholarship.

Notes: (1) Vladimir Lenin: A 100-year milestone coming. Bruce’s Contradicciones Newsletter 01/01/2024.

(2) Heintz, Jim (2024): 100 years after his death, Lenin seems to be an afterthought in modern Russia. AP/PBS Newshour 01/21/2024. (Accessed: 2024-05-02).

(3) Stegher, Marc (2022): Der Aufstand der Populisten. Die Krise des liberalen Westens und die nationalkonservative Wende Osteuropas, 283-333. Wiesbaden: Spring VS.

(4) Turley, K.V. (2024): ‘Millennial Socialism’: 100 Years After Lenin’s Death, Communism Wages War on Souls. National Catholic Register 01/21/2024. (Accessed: 2024-06-02).

(5) When the Sickle Swings with Kristen Van Uden. Lions of Liberty YouTube channel 11/21/2023. (Accessed: 2024-06-02).

(6) Russian communists mark 100 years since Lenin's death. DW News 01/21/2024. . (Accessed: 2024-06-02).

(7) Brinkley, George (1998): Leninism: What It Was and What It Was Not. The Review of Politics 60:1 151 - 164. (Accessed: 2024-06-02).

(8) Kennan, George (1993): The Balkan Crisis: 1913 and 1993. New York Review of Books 07/15/1993. (Accessed: 2014-17-01).

(9) International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars (1914): Report. Washington: The Endowment.

Vladimir Lenin: A 100-year milestone coming

“Freud and Lenin were the first two distinctively 20th century men.”

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.

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]

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.

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].

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)

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).

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. (Accessed: 2023-22-12).

(2) Resis, Albert (2023): Vladimir Lenin. Britannica Online 11/17/2023. Accessed: 12/22/2023.

(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. (Accessed: 2023-25-12).

(7) Ransome, Arthur (2017): Death of Lenin - archive, 1924. The Guardian 01/23/2017. (Accessed: 2023-23-12).

(8) Galbraith, op. cit., 147.

(9) Trotsky, Leon (1926): Leon Trotsky on Lenin. Britannica Online 11/22/2022. (Accessed: 2023-22-12).