Vladimir Ilich Lenin
Vladimir Ilich Lenin
prime minister of Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
original name Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov
born April 10 [April 22, New Style], 1870, Simbirsk, Russia
died Jan. 21, 1924, Gorki [later Gorki Leninskiye], near Moscow
Overview
Founder of the Russian Communist Party, leader of the Russian Revolution
of 1917, and architect and builder of the Soviet state.
Born to a middle-class family, he was strongly influenced by his
eldest brother, Aleksandr, who was hanged in 1887 for conspiring to
assassinate the tsar. He studied law and became a Marxist in 1889 while
practicing law. He was arrested as a subversive in 1895 and exiled to
Siberia, where he married Nadezhda Krupskaya. They lived in western
Europe after 1900. At the 1903 meeting in London of the Russian
Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, he emerged as the leader of the
Bolshevik faction. In several revolutionary newspapers that he founded
and edited, he put forth his theory of the party as the vanguard of the
proletariat, a centralized body organized around a core of professional
revolutionaries; his ideas, later known as Leninism, would be joined
with Karl Marx’s theories to form Marxism-Leninism, which became the
communist worldview. With the outbreak of the Russian Revolution of
1905, he returned to Russia, but he resumed his exile in 1907 and
continued his energetic agitation for the next 10 years. He saw World
War I as an opportunity to turn a war of nations into a war of classes,
and he returned to Russia with the Russian Revolution of 1917 to lead
the Bolshevik coup that overthrew the provisional government of
Aleksandr Kerensky. As revolutionary leader of the Soviet state, he
signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany (1918) and repulsed
counterrevolutionary threats in the Russian Civil War. He founded the
Comintern in 1919. His policy of War Communism prevailed until 1921, and
to forestall economic disaster he launched the New Economic Policy. In
ill health from 1922, he died of a stroke in 1924.
Main
founder of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), inspirer and leader
of the Bolshevik Revolution (1917), and the architect, builder, and
first head (1917–24) of the Soviet state. He was the founder of the
organization known as Comintern (Communist International) and the
posthumous source of “Leninism,” the doctrine codified and conjoined
with Marx’s works by Lenin’s successors to form Marxism-Leninism, which
became the Communist worldview.
If the Bolshevik Revolution is—as some people have called it—the most
significant political event of the 20th century, then Lenin must for
good or ill be regarded as the century’s most significant political
leader. Not only in the scholarly circles of the former Soviet Union but
even among many non-Communist scholars, he has been regarded as both the
greatest revolutionary leader and revolutionary statesman in history, as
well as the greatest revolutionary thinker since Marx.
Early life » The making of a revolutionary
It is difficult to identify any particular events in his childhood that
might prefigure his turn onto the path of a professional revolutionary.
Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov was born in Simbirsk, which was renamed Ulyanovsk
in his honour. (He adopted the pseudonym Lenin in 1901 during his
clandestine party work after exile in Siberia.) He was the third of six
children born into a close-knit, happy family of highly educated and
cultured parents. His mother was the daughter of a physician, while his
father, though the son of a serf, became a schoolteacher and rose to the
position of inspector of schools. Lenin, intellectually gifted,
physically strong, and reared in a warm, loving home, early displayed a
voracious passion for learning. He was graduated from high school
ranking first in his class. He distinguished himself in Latin and Greek
and seemed destined for the life of a classical scholar. When he was 16,
nothing in Lenin indicated a future rebel, still less a professional
revolutionary—except, perhaps, his turn to atheism. But, despite the
comfortable circumstances of their upbringing, all five of the Ulyanov
children who reached maturity joined the revolutionary movement. This
was not an uncommon phenomenon in tsarist Russia, where even the highly
educated and cultured intelligentsia were denied elementary civil and
political rights.
As an adolescent Lenin suffered two blows that unquestionably
influenced his subsequent decision to take the path of revolution.
First, his father was threatened shortly before his untimely death with
premature retirement by a reactionary government that had grown fearful
of the spread of public education. Second, in 1887 his beloved eldest
brother, Aleksandr, a student at the University of St. Petersburg (later
renamed Leningrad State University), was hanged for conspiring with a
revolutionary terrorist group that plotted to assassinate Emperor
Alexander III. Suddenly, at age 17, Lenin became the male head of the
family, which was now stigmatized as having reared a “state criminal.”
Fortunately the income from his mother’s pension and inheritance kept
the family in comfortable circumstances, although it could not prevent
the frequent imprisonment or exile of her children. Moreover, Lenin’s
high school principal (the father of Aleksandr Kerensky, who was later
to lead the Provisional government deposed by Lenin’s Bolsheviks in
November [October, O.S.] 1917) did not turn his back on the “criminal’s”
family. He courageously wrote a character reference that smoothed
Lenin’s admission to a university.
In autumn 1887 Lenin enrolled in the faculty of law of the imperial
Kazan University (later renamed Kazan [V.I. Lenin] State University),
but within three months he was expelled from the school, having been
accused of participating in an illegal student assembly. He was arrested
and banished from Kazan to his grandfather’s estate in the village of
Kokushkino, where his older sister Anna had already been ordered by the
police to reside. In the autumn of 1888, the authorities permitted him
to return to Kazan but denied him readmission to the university. During
this period of enforced idleness, he met exiled revolutionaries of the
older generation and avidly read revolutionary political literature,
especially Marx’s Das Kapital. He became a Marxist in January 1889.
Vladimir Ilich Lenin
Early life » Formation of a revolutionary party
In May 1889 the Ulyanov family moved to Samara (known as Kuybyshev from
1935 to 1991). After much petitioning, Lenin was granted permission to
take his law examinations. In November 1891 he passed his examinations,
taking a first in all subjects, and was graduated with a first-class
degree. After the police finally waived their political objections,
Lenin was admitted to the bar and practiced law in Samara in 1892–93,
his clients being mainly poor peasants and artisans. In his experience
practicing law, he acquired an intense loathing for the class bias of
the legal system and a lifelong revulsion for lawyers, even those who
claimed to be Social-Democrats.
Law proved to be an extremely useful cover for a revolutionary
activist. He moved to St. Petersburg (from 1914 to 1924 known as
Petrograd; from 1924 to 1991 known as Leningrad) in August 1893 and,
while working as a public defender, associated with revolutionary
Marxist circles. In 1895 his comrades sent him abroad to make contact
with Russian exiles in western Europe, especially with Russia’s most
commanding Marxist thinker, Georgy Plekhanov. Upon his return to Russia
in 1895, Lenin and other Marxists, including L. Martov, the future
leader of the Mensheviks, succeeded in unifying the Marxist groups of
the capital in an organization known as the Union for the Struggle for
the Liberation of the Working Class. The Union issued leaflets and
proclamations on the workers’ behalf, supported workers’ strikes, and
infiltrated workers’ education classes to impart to them the rudiments
of Marxism. In December 1895, the leaders of the Union were arrested.
Lenin was jailed for 15 months and thereafter was sent into exile to
Shushenskoye, in Siberia, for a term of three years. He was joined there
in exile by his fiancée, Nadezhda Krupskaya, a Union member, whom he had
met in the capital. They were married in Siberia, and she became Lenin’s
indispensable secretary and comrade. In exile they conducted clandestine
party correspondence and collaborated (legally) on a Russian translation
of Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s Industrial Democracy.
Upon completing his term of Siberian exile in January 1900, Lenin
left the country and was joined later by Krupskaya in Munich. His first
major task abroad was to join Plekhanov, Martov, and three other editors
in bringing out the newspaper Iskra (“The Spark”), which they hoped
would unify the Russian Marxist groups that were scattered throughout
Russia and western Europe into a cohesive Social-Democratic party.
Up to the point at which Lenin began working on Iskra, his writings
had taken as their focus three problems: first, he had written a number
of leaflets that aimed to shake the workers’ traditional veneration of
the tsar by showing them that their harsh life was caused, in part, by
the support tsarism rendered the capitalists; second, he attacked those
self-styled Marxists who urged Social-Democrats and workers to
concentrate on wage and hour issues, leaving the political struggle for
the present to the bourgeoisie; third, and ultimately most important, he
addressed himself to the peasant question.
The principal obstacle to the acceptance of Marxism by many of the
Russian intelligentsia was their adherence to the widespread belief of
the Populists (Russian pre-Marxist radicals) that Marxism was
inapplicable to peasant Russia, in which a proletariat (an industrial
working class) was almost nonexistent. Russia, they believed, was immune
to capitalism, owing to the circumstances of joint ownership of peasant
land by the village commune. This view had been first attacked by
Plekhanov in the 1880s. Plekhanov had argued that Russia had already
entered the capitalist stage, looking for evidence to the rapid growth
of industry. Despite the denials of the Populists, he claimed, the man
of the future in Russia was indeed the proletarian, not the peasant.
While attempting to apply the Marxist scheme of social development to
Russia, Plekhanov had come to the conclusion that the revolution in
Russia would have to pass through two discrete stages: first, a
bourgeois revolution that would establish a democratic republic and
full-blown capitalism; and second, a proletarian revolution after mature
capitalism had generated a numerous proletariat that had attained a high
level of political organization, socialist consciousness, and culture,
enabling them to usher in full Socialism.
It was this set of principles that Lenin adhered to after he read
Plekhanov’s work in the late 1880s. But, almost immediately, Lenin went
a step beyond his former mentor, especially with regard to the peasant
question. In an attack on the Populists published in 1894, Lenin charged
that, even if they realized their fondest dream and divided all the land
among the peasant communes, the result would not be Socialism but rather
capitalism spawned by a free market in agricultural produce. The
“Socialism” put forth by the Populists would in practice favour the
development of small-scale capitalism; hence the Populists were not
Socialists but “petty bourgeois democrats.” Lenin came to the conclusion
that outside of Marxism, which aimed ultimately to abolish the market
system as well as the private ownership of the means of production,
there could be no Socialism.
Even while in exile in Siberia, Lenin had begun research on his
investigation of the peasant question, which culminated in his
magisterial Development of Capitalism in Russia (published legally in
1899). In this work, a study of Russian economics, he argued that
capitalism was rapidly destroying the peasant commune. The peasantry
constituted for the Populists a homogeneous social class, but Lenin
claimed that the peasantry was in actuality rapidly stratifying into a
well-off rural bourgeoisie, a middling peasantry, and an impoverished
rural “proletariat and semi-proletariat.” In this last group, which
comprised half the peasant population, Lenin found an ally for the
extremely small industrial proletariat in Russia.
Iskra’s success in recruiting Russian intellectuals to Marxism led
Lenin and his comrades to believe that the time was ripe to found a
revolutionary Marxist party that would weld together all the disparate
Marxist groups at home and abroad. An abortive First Congress, held in
1898 in Minsk, had failed to achieve this objective, for most of the
delegates were arrested shortly after the congress. The organizing
committee of the Second Congress decided to convene the congress in
Brussels in 1903, but police pressure forced it to transfer to London.
The congressional sessions wore on for nearly three weeks, for no
point appeared too trivial to debate. The main issues, nevertheless,
quickly became plain: eligibility for membership and the character of
party discipline; but, above all, the key questions centred around the
relation between the party and the proletariat, for whom the party
claimed to speak.
In his What Is To Be Done? (1902), Lenin totally rejected the
standpoint that the proletariat was being driven spontaneously to
revolutionary Socialism by capitalism and that the party’s role should
be to merely coordinate the struggle of the proletariat’s diverse
sections on a national and international scale. Capitalism, he
contended, predisposed the workers to the acceptance of Socialism but
did not spontaneously make them conscious Socialists. The proletariat by
its own efforts in the everyday struggle against the capitalist could go
so far as to achieve “trade-union consciousness.” But the proletariat
could not by its own efforts grasp that it would be possible to win
complete emancipation only by overthrowing capitalism and building
Socialism, unless the party from without infused it with Socialist
consciousness.
In his What Is To Be Done? and in his other works dealing with party
organization, Lenin articulated one of his most momentous political
innovations, his theory of the party as the “vanguard of the
proletariat.” He conceived of the vanguard as a highly disciplined,
centralized party that would work unremittingly to suffuse the
proletariat with Socialist consciousness and serve as mentor, leader,
and guide, constantly showing the proletariat where its true class
interests lie.
At the Second Congress the Iskra group split, and Lenin found himself
in a minority of opinion on this very issue. Nevertheless, he continued
to develop his view of “the party of a new type,” which was to be guided
by “democratic centralism,” or absolute party discipline. According to
Lenin the party had to be a highly centralized body organized around a
small, ideologically homogeneous, hardened core of experienced
professional revolutionaries, who would be elected to the central
committee by the party congress and who would lead a ramified hierarchy
of lower party organizations that would enjoy the support and sympathy
of the proletariat and all groups opposed to tsarism. “Give us an
organization of revolutionaries,” Lenin exclaimed, “and we will overturn
Russia!”
Lenin spared no effort to build just this kind of party over the next
20 years, despite fierce attacks on his position by some of his closest
comrades of the Iskra days, Plekhanov, Martov, and Leon Trotsky. They
charged that his scheme of party organization and discipline tended
toward “Jacobinism,” suppression of free intraparty discussion, a
dictatorship over the proletariat, not of the proletariat, and, finally,
establishment of a one-man dictatorship.
Lenin found himself in the minority in the early sessions of the
Second Congress of what was then proclaimed to be the Russian
Social-Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP). But a walkout by a disgruntled
group of Jewish Social-Democrats, the Bund, left Lenin with a slight
majority. Consequently, the members of Lenin’s adventitious majority
were called Bolsheviks (majoritarians), and Martov’s group were dubbed
Mensheviks (minoritarians). The two groups fought each other ceaselessly
within the same RSDWP and professed the same program until 1912, when
Lenin made the split final at the Prague Conference of the Bolshevik
Party.
V. I. Ulyanov among the members of the Petersburg
"League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class".
In group from left to right: standing — A.L. Malchenko, P. K.
Zaporozhets, A. A. Vaneyev;
sitting — V. V. Starkov, G. M. Krzhizhanovsky, V. I. Ulyanov, Y. O.
Martov - Tsederbaum.
1896
Challenges of the Revolution of 1905 and World War I
The differences between Lenin and the Mensheviks became sharper in the
Revolution of 1905 and its aftermath, when Lenin moved to a distinctly
original view on two issues: class alignments in the revolution and the
character of the post-revolutionary regime.
The outbreak of the revolution, in January 1905, found Lenin abroad
in Switzerland, and he did not return to Russia until November.
Immediately Lenin set down a novel strategy. Both wings of the RSDWP,
Bolshevik and Menshevik, adhered to Plekhanov’s view of the revolution
in two stages: first, a bourgeois revolution; second, a proletarian
revolution (see above). But the Mensheviks argued that the bourgeois
revolution must be led by the bourgeoisie, with whom the proletariat
must ally itself in order to make the democratic revolution. This would
bring the liberal bourgeoisie to full power, whereupon the RSDWP would
act as the party of opposition. Lenin defiantly rejected this kind of
alliance and post-revolutionary regime. Hitherto he had spoken of the
need for the proletariat to win “hegemony” in the democratic revolution.
Now he flatly declared that the proletariat was the driving force of the
revolution and that its only reliable ally was the peasantry. The
bourgeoisie he branded as hopelessly counterrevolutionary and too
cowardly to make its own revolution. Thus, unlike the Mensheviks, Lenin
henceforth banked on an alliance that would establish a “revolutionary
democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.”
Nor would the revolution necessarily stop at the first stage, the
bourgeois revolution. If the Russian revolution should inspire the
western European proletariat to make the Socialist revolution, for which
industrial Europe was ripe, the Russian revolution might well pass over
directly to the second stage, the Socialist revolution. Then, the
Russian proletariat, supported by the rural proletariat and
semi-proletariat at home and assisted by the triumphant industrial
proletariat of the West, which had established its “dictatorship of the
proletariat,” could cut short the life-span of Russian capitalism.
After the defeat of the Revolution of 1905, the issue between Lenin
and the Mensheviks was more clearly drawn than ever, despite efforts at
reunion. But, forced again into exile from 1907 to 1917, Lenin found
serious challenges to his policies not only from the Mensheviks but
within his own faction as well. The combination of repression and modest
reform effected by the tsarist regime led to a decline of party
membership. Disillusionment and despair in the chances of successful
revolution swept the dwindled party ranks, rent by controversies over
tactics and philosophy. Attempts to unite the Bolshevik and Menshevik
factions came to naught, all breaking on Lenin’s intransigent insistence
that his conditions for reunification be adopted. As one Menshevik
opponent described Lenin: “There is no other man who is absorbed by the
revolution twenty-four hours a day, who has no other thoughts but the
thought of revolution, and who even when he sleeps, dreams of nothing
but revolution.” Placing revolution above party unity, Lenin would
accept no unity compromise if he thought it might delay, not accelerate,
revolution.
Desperately fighting to maintain the cohesion of the Bolsheviks
against internal differences and the Mensheviks’ growing strength at
home, Lenin convened the Bolshevik Party Conference at Prague, in 1912,
which split the Rsdwp forever. Lenin proclaimed that the Bolsheviks were
the RSDWP and that the Mensheviks were schismatics. Thereafter, each
faction maintained its separate central committee, party apparatus, and
press.
When war broke out, in August 1914, Socialist parties throughout
Europe rallied behind their governments despite the resolutions of
prewar congresses of the Second International obliging them to resist or
even overthrow their respective governments if they plunged their
countries into an imperialist war.
After Lenin recovered from his initial disbelief in this “betrayal”
of the International, he proclaimed a policy whose audacity stunned his
own Bolshevik comrades. He denounced the pro-war Socialists as
“social-chauvinists” who had betrayed the international working-class
cause by support of a war that was imperialist on both sides. He
pronounced the Second International as dead and appealed for the
creation of a new, Third International composed of genuinely
revolutionary Socialist parties. More immediately, revolutionary
Socialists must work to “transform the imperialist war into civil war.”
The real enemy of the worker was not the worker in the opposite trench
but the capitalist at home. Workers and soldiers should therefore turn
their guns on their rulers and destroy the system that had plunged them
into imperialist carnage.
Lenin’s policy found few advocates in Russia or elsewhere in the
first months of the war. Indeed, in the first flush of patriotic
fervour, not a few Bolsheviks supported the war effort. Lenin and his
closest comrades were left an isolated band swimming against the
current.
Lenin succeeded in reaching neutral Switzerland in September 1914,
there joining a small group of anti-war Bolshevik and Menshevik émigrés.
The war virtually cut them off from all contact with Russia and with
like-minded Socialists in other countries. Nevertheless, in 1915 and
1916, anti-war Socialists in various countries managed to hold two
anti-war conferences in Zimmerwald and Kienthal, Switzerland. Lenin
failed at both meetings to persuade his comrades to adopt his slogan:
“transform the imperialist war into civil war!” They adopted instead the
more moderate formula: “An immediate peace without annexations or
indemnities and the right of the peoples to self-determination.” Lenin
consequently found his party a minority within the group of anti-war
Socialists, who, in turn, constituted a small minority of the
international Socialist movement compared with the pro-war Socialists.
Undaunted, Lenin continued to hammer home his views on the war,
confident that eventually he would win decisive support. In his
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), he set out to
explain, first, the real causes of the war; second, why Socialists had
abandoned internationalism for patriotism and supported the war; and
third, why revolution alone could bring about a just, democratic peace.
War erupted, he wrote, because of the insatiable, expansionist
character of imperialism, itself a product of monopoly finance
capitalism. At the end of the 19th century, a handful of banks had come
to dominate the advanced countries, which, by 1914, had in their
respective empires brought the rest of the world under their direct or
indirect controls. Amassing vast quantities of “surplus” capital, the
giant banks found they could garner superprofits on investments in
colonies and semi-colonies, and this intensified the race for empire
among the great powers. By 1914, dissatisfied with the way the world had
been shared out, rival coalitions of imperialists launched the war to
bring about a redivision of the world at the expense of the other
coalition. The war was therefore imperialist in its origins and aims and
deserved the condemnation of genuine Socialists.
Socialist Party and trade-union leaders had rallied to support their
respective imperialist governments because they represented the “labour
aristocracy,” the better paid workers who received a small share of the
colonial “superprofits” the imperialists proffered them. “Bribed” by the
imperialists, the “labour aristocracy” took the side of their paymasters
in the imperialist war and betrayed the most exploited workers at home
and the super-exploited in the colonies. The imperialists, Lenin
contended, driven by an annexationist dynamic, could not conclude a
just, lasting peace. Future wars were inevitable so long as imperialism
existed; imperialism was inevitable so long as capitalism existed; only
the overthrow of capitalism everywhere could end the imperialist war and
prevent such wars in the future. First published in Russia in 1917,
Imperialism to this day provides the instrument that Communists
everywhere employ to evaluate major trends in the non-Communist world.
Vladimir Ilich Lenin, 1918
Leadership in the Russian Revolution
By 1917 it seemed to Lenin that the war would never end and that the
prospect of revolution was rapidly receding. But in the week of March
8–15, the starving, freezing, war-weary workers and soldiers of
Petrograd (until 1914, St. Petersburg) succeeded in deposing the Tsar.
Lenin and his closest lieutenants hastened home after the German
authorities agreed to permit their passage through Germany to neutral
Sweden. Berlin hoped that the return of anti-war Socialists to Russia
would undermine the Russian war effort.
Leadership in the Russian Revolution » First return to Petrograd
Lenin arrived in Petrograd on April 16, 1917, one month after the Tsar
had been forced to abdicate. Out of the revolution was born the
Provisional Government, formed by a group of leaders of the bourgeois
liberal parties. This government’s accession to power was made possible
only by the assent of the Petrograd Soviet, a council of workers’
deputies elected in the factories of the capital. Similar soviets of
workers’ deputies sprang up in all the major cities and towns throughout
the country, as did soviets of soldiers’ deputies and of peasants’
deputies. Although the Petrograd Soviet had been the sole political
power recognized by the revolutionary workers and soldiers in March
1917, its leaders had hastily turned full power over to the Provisional
Government. The Petrograd Soviet was headed by a majority composed of
Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary (SR), or peasant party, leaders
who regarded the March (February, O.S.) Revolution as bourgeois; hence,
they believed that the new regime should be headed by leaders of the
bourgeois parties.
On his return to Russia, Lenin electrified his own comrades, most of
whom accepted the authority of the Provisional Government. Lenin called
this government, despite its democratic pretensions, thoroughly
imperialist and undeserving of support by Socialists. It was incapable
of satisfying the most profound desires of the workers, soldiers, and
peasants for immediate peace and division of landed estates among the
peasants.
Only a soviet government—that is, direct rule by workers, soldiers,
and peasants—could fulfill these demands. Therefore, he raised the
battle cry, “All power to the Soviets!”—although the Bolsheviks still
constituted a minority within the soviets and despite the manifest
unwillingness of the Menshevik–SR majority to exercise such power. This
introduced what Lenin called the period of “dual power.” Under the
leadership of “opportunist” Socialists, the soviets, the real power, had
relinquished power to the Provisional Government, the nominal power in
the land. The Bolsheviks, Lenin exhorted, must persuade the workers,
peasants, and soldiers, temporarily deceived by the “opportunists,” to
retrieve state power for the soviets from the Provisional Government.
This would constitute a second revolution. But, so long as the
government did not suppress the revolutionary parties, this revolution
could be achieved peacefully, since the Provisional Government existed
only by the sufferance of the soviets.
Initially, Lenin’s fellow Bolsheviks thought that he was temporarily
disoriented by the complexity of the situation; moderate Socialists
thought him mad. It required several weeks of sedulous persuasion by
Lenin before he won the Bolshevik Party Central Committee to his view.
The April Party Conference endorsed his program: the party must withhold
support from the Provisional Government and win a majority in the
soviets in favour of soviet power. A soviet government, once
established, should begin immediate negotiations for a general peace on
all fronts. The soviets should forthwith confiscate landlords’ estates
without compensation, nationalize all land, and divide it among the
peasants. And the government should establish tight controls over
privately owned industry to the benefit of labour.
From March to September 1917, the Bolsheviks remained a minority in
the soviets. By autumn, however, the Provisional Government (since July
headed by the moderate Socialist Aleksandr Kerensky, who was supported
by the moderate Socialist leadership of the soviets) had lost popular
support. Increasing war-weariness and the breakdown of the economy
overtaxed the patience of the workers, peasants, and soldiers, who
demanded immediate and fundamental change. Lenin capitalized on the
growing disillusionment of the people with Kerensky’s ability and
willingness to complete the revolution. Kerensky, in turn, claimed that
only a freely elected constituent assembly would have the power to
decide Russia’s political future—but that must await the return of
order. Meanwhile, Lenin and the party demanded peace, land, and
bread—immediately, without further delay. The Bolshevik line won
increasing support among the workers, soldiers, and peasants. By
September they voted in a Bolshevik majority in the Petrograd Soviet and
in the soviets of the major cities and towns throughout the country.
Vladimir Ilich Lenin, 1919
Leadership in the Russian Revolution » Decision to seize power
Lenin, who had gone underground in July after he had been accused as a
“German agent” by Kerensky’s government, now decided that the time was
ripe to seize power. The party must immediately begin preparations for
an armed uprising to depose the Provisional Government and transfer
state power to the soviets, now headed by a Bolshevik majority.
Lenin’s decision to establish soviet power derived from his belief
that the proletarian revolution must smash the existing state machinery
and introduce a “dictatorship of the proletariat”; that is, direct rule
by the armed workers and peasants which would eventually “wither away”
into a non-coercive, classless, stateless, Communist society. He
expounded this view most trenchantly in his brochure The State and
Revolution, written while he was still in hiding. The brochure, though
never completed and often dismissed as Lenin’s most “Utopian” work,
nevertheless served as Lenin’s doctrinal springboard to power.
Until 1917 all revolutionary Socialists rightly believed, Lenin
wrote, that a parliamentary republic could serve a Socialist system as
well as a capitalist. But the Russian Revolution had brought forth
something new, the soviets. Created by workers, soldiers, and peasants
and excluding the propertied classes, the soviets infinitely surpassed
the most democratic of parliaments in democracy, because parliaments
everywhere virtually excluded workers and peasants. The choice before
Russia in early September 1917, as Lenin saw it, was either a soviet
republic—a dictatorship of the propertyless majority—or a parliamentary
republic—as he saw it, a dictatorship of the propertied minority.
Lenin therefore raised the slogan, “All power to the Soviets!”, even
though he had willingly conceded in the spring of 1917 that
revolutionary Russia was the “freest of all the belligerent countries.”
To Lenin, however, the Provisional Government was merely a “dictatorship
of the bourgeoisie” that kept Russia in the imperialist war. What is
more, it had turned openly counterrevolutionary in the month of July
when it accused the Bolshevik leaders of treason.
From late September, Lenin, a fugitive in Finland, sent a stream of
articles and letters to Petrograd feverishly exhorting the Party Central
Committee to organize an armed uprising without delay. The opportune
moment might be lost. But for nearly a month Lenin’s forceful urgings
from afar were unsuccessful. As in April, Lenin again found himself in
the party minority. He resorted to a desperate stratagem.
Around October 20, Lenin, in disguise and at considerable personal
risk, slipped into Petrograd and attended a secret meeting of the
Bolshevik Central Committee held on the evening of October 23. Not until
after a heated 10-hour debate did he finally win a majority in favour of
preparing an armed takeover. Now steps to enlist the support of soldiers
and sailors and to train the Red Guards, the Bolshevik-led workers’
militia, for an armed takeover proceeded openly under the guise of
self-defense of the Petrograd Soviet. But preparations moved haltingly,
because serious opposition to the fateful decision persisted in the
Central Committee. Enthusiastically in accord with Lenin on the
timeliness of an armed uprising, Trotsky led its preparation from his
strategic position as newly elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet.
Lenin, now hiding in Petrograd and fearful of further procrastination,
desperately pressed the Central Committee to fix an early date for the
uprising. On the evening of November 6, he wrote a letter to the members
of the Central Committee exhorting them to proceed that very evening to
arrest the members of the Provisional Government. To delay would be
“fatal.” The Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, scheduled to
convene the next evening, should be placed before a fait accompli.
On November 7 and 8, the Bolshevik-led Red Guards and revolutionary
soldiers and sailors, meeting only slight resistance, deposed the
Provisional Government and proclaimed that state power had passed into
the hands of the Soviets. By this time the Bolsheviks, with their allies
among the Left SR’s (dissidents who broke with the pro-Kerensky SR
leaders), constituted an absolute majority of the Second All-Russian
Congress of Soviets. The delegates therefore voted overwhelmingly to
accept full power and elected Lenin as chairman of the Council of
People’s Commissars, the new Soviet Government, and approved his Peace
Decree and Land Decree. Overnight, Lenin had vaulted from his hideout as
a fugitive to head the Revolutionary government of the largest country
in the world. Since his youth he had spent his life building a party
that would win such a victory, and now at the age of 47 he and his party
had triumphed. “It makes one’s head spin,” he confessed. But power
neither intoxicated nor frightened Lenin; it cleared his head. Soberly,
he steered the Soviet government toward the consolidation of its power
and negotiations for peace.
Vladimir Ilich Lenin, 1920
Leadership in the Russian Revolution » Saving the Revolution
In both spheres, Lenin was plagued by breaks within the ranks of
Bolshevik leaders. He reluctantly agreed with the right-wingers that it
would be desirable to include the Menshevik and Right SR parties in a
coalition government—but on Lenin’s terms. They must above all accept
the soviet form of government, not a parliamentary one; they refused.
Only the Left SR’s agreed, and several were included in the Soviet
government. Likewise, when the freely elected Constituent Assembly met
in January 1918, the Mensheviks and Right SR majority flatly rejected
sovietism. Lenin without hesitation ordered the dispersal of the
Constituent Assembly.
The Allies refused to recognize the Soviet government; consequently
it entered alone into peace negotiations with the Central Powers
(Germany and her allies Austro-Hungary and Turkey) at the town of
Brest-Litovsk. They imposed ruinous conditions that would strip away
from Soviet Russia the western tier of non-Russian nations of the old
Russian Empire. Left Communists fanatically opposed acceptance and
preached a revolutionary war, even if it imperilled the Soviet
government. Lenin insisted that the terms, however ruinous and
humiliating, must be accepted or he would resign from the government. He
sensed that peace was the deepest yearning of the people; in any case,
the shattered army could not raise effective resistance to the invader.
Finally, in March 1918, after a still larger part had been carved out of
old Russia by the enemy, Lenin succeeded in winning the Central
Committee’s acceptance of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. At last Russia
was at peace.
But Brest-Litovsk only intensified the determination of
counterrevolutionary forces and the Allies who supported them to bring
about the overthrow of the Soviet government. That determination
hardened when, in 1918, Lenin’s government repudiated repayments of all
foreign loans obtained by the tsarist and Provisional governments and
nationalized foreign properties in Russia without compensation. From
1918 to 1920 Russia was torn by a Civil War, which cost millions of
lives and untold destruction. One of the earliest victims was Lenin
himself. In August 1918 an assassin fired two bullets into Lenin as he
left a factory in which he had just delivered a speech. Because of his
robust constitution, he recovered rapidly.
The Soviet government faced tremendous odds. The anti-Soviet forces,
or Whites, headed mainly by former tsarist generals and admirals, fought
desperately to overthrow the Red regime. Moreover, the Whites were
lavishly supplied by the Allies with materiel, money, and support troops
that secured White bases. Yet, the Whites failed.
Lenin and wife Nadezhda Krupskaya (1869 - 1939)
It was largely because of Lenin’s inspired leadership that the Soviet
government managed to survive against such military odds. He caused the
formation and guided the strategy of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red
Army, commanded by Trotsky. Although the economy had collapsed, he
managed to mobilize sufficient resources to sustain the Red Army and the
industrial workers. But above all it was his political leadership that
saved the day for the Soviets. By proclaiming the right of the peoples
to self-determination, including the right to secession, he won the
active sympathy, or at least the benevolent neutrality, of the
non-Russian nationalities within Russia, because the Whites did not
recognize that right. Indeed, his perceptive, skillful policy on the
national question enabled Soviet Russia to avoid total disintegration
and to remain a huge multinational state. By making the industrial
workers the new privileged class, favoured in the distribution of
rations, housing, and political power, he retained the loyalty of the
proletariat. His championing of the peasants’ demand that they take all
the land from the gentry, church, and crown without compensation won
over the peasants, without whose support the government could not
survive.
Because of the breakdown of the economy, however, Lenin adopted a
policy toward the peasant that threatened to destroy the Soviet
government. Lacking funds or goods to exchange against grain needed to
feed the Red Army and the towns, Lenin instituted a system of
requisitioning grain surpluses without compensation. Many peasants
resisted—at least until they experienced White “liberation.” On the
territories that the Whites won, they restored landed property to the
previous owners and savagely punished the peasants who had dared seize
the land. Despite the peasants’ detestation of the Soviet’s grain
requisitioning, the peasants, when forced to choose between Reds and
Whites, chose the Reds.
After the defeat of the Whites, the peasants no longer had to make
that choice. They now totally refused to surrender their grain to the
government. Threatened by mass peasant rebellion, Lenin called a
retreat. In March 1921 the government introduced the New Economic
Policy, which ended the system of grain requisitioning and permitted the
peasant to sell his harvest on an open market. This constituted a
partial retreat to capitalism.
From the moment Lenin came to power, his abiding aims in
international relations were twofold: to prevent the formation of an
imperialist united front against Soviet Russia; but, even more
important, to stimulate proletarian revolutions abroad.
In his first aim he largely succeeded. In 1924, shortly after his
death, Soviet Russia had won de jure recognition of all the major world
powers except the United States. But his greater hope of the formation
of a world republic of soviets failed to materialize, and Soviet Russia
was left isolated in hostile capitalist encirclement.
Vladimir Ilich Lenin, 1921
Leadership in the Russian Revolution » Formation of the Third
International
To break this encirclement, he had called on revolutionaries to form
Communist parties that would emulate the example of the Bolshevik
Revolution in all countries. Dramatizing his break with the reformist
Second International, in 1918 he had changed the name of the RSDWP to
the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), and in March 1919 he founded
the Communist, or Third, International. This International accepted the
affiliation only of parties that accepted its decisions as binding,
imposed iron discipline, and made a clean break with the Second
International. In sum, Lenin now held up the Russian Communist Party,
the only party that had made a successful revolution, as the model for
Communist parties in all countries. One result of this policy was to
engender a split in the world labour movement between the adherents of
the two internationals.
The Communist International scored its greatest success in the
colonial world. By championing the rights of the peoples in the colonies
and semi-colonies to self-determination and independence, the
International won considerable sympathy for Communism. Lenin’s policy in
this question still reverberates through the world today. And it offers
another example of Lenin’s unique ability to find allies where
revolutionaries had not found them before. By taking the side of the
national liberation movements, Lenin could claim that the overwhelming
majority of the world’s population, then living under imperialist rule,
as well as the European proletariat, were the natural allies of the
Bolshevik Revolution.
Thus Lenin’s revolutionary genius was not confined to his ability to
divide his enemies; more important was his skill in finding allies and
friends for the exiguous proletariat of Russia. First, he won the
Russian peasants to the side of the proletariat. Second, while he did
not win the workers to make successful Communist revolutions in the
West, they did compel their governments to curtail armed intervention
against the Bolshevik Revolution. Third, while the Asian revolutions
barely stirred in his lifetime, they did strengthen the Soviet
Communists in the belief that they were not alone in a hostile world.
Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin
By 1921 Lenin’s government had crushed all opposition parties on the
grounds that they had opposed or failed to support sufficiently the
Soviet cause in the Civil War. Now that peace had come, Lenin believed
that their opposition was more dangerous than ever, since the peasantry
and even a large section of the working class had become disaffected
with the Soviet regime. To repress opponents of Bolshevism, Lenin
demanded the harshest measures, including “show” trials and frequent
resort to the death penalty. Moreover, he insisted on even tighter
control over dissent within the party. Lenin’s insistence on merciless
destruction of the opposition to the Bolshevik dictatorship subsequently
led many observers to conclude that Lenin, though personally opposed to
one-man rule, nevertheless unwittingly cleared the way for the rise of
Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship.
By 1922 Lenin had become keenly aware that degeneration of the Soviet
system and party was the greatest danger to the cause of Socialism in
Russia. He found the party and Soviet state apparatus hopelessly
entangled in red tape and incompetence. Even the agency headed by Stalin
that was responsible for streamlining administration was, in fact, less
efficient than the rest of the government. The Soviets of Workers’ and
Peasants’ Deputies had been drained of all power, which had flowed to
the centre. Most disturbing was the Great Russian chauvinism that
leading Bolsheviks manifested toward the non-Russian nationalities in
the reorganization of the state in which Stalin was playing a key role.
Moreover, in April 1922 Stalin won appointment as general secretary of
the party, in which post he was rapidly concentrating immense power in
his hands. Soviet Russia in Lenin’s last years could not have been more
remote from the picture of Socialism he had portrayed in State and
Revolution. Lenin strained every nerve to reverse these trends, which he
regarded as antithetical to Socialism, and to replace Stalin.
V. I. Lenin and Joseph I. Stalin, 1922
Leadership in the Russian Revolution » Illness and death
In the spring of 1922, however, Lenin fell seriously ill. In April his
doctors extracted from his neck one of the bullets he had received from
the assassin’s gun in August 1918. He recovered rapidly from the
operation, but a month later he fell ill, partially paralyzed and unable
to speak. In June he made a partial recovery and threw himself into the
formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the federal system
of reorganization he favoured against Stalin’s unitary scheme. However,
in December he was again incapacitated by semiparalysis. Although no
longer the active leader of the state and party, he did muster the
strength to dictate several prescient articles and what is called his
political “Testament,” dictated to his secretary between Dec. 23, 1922,
and Jan. 4, 1923, in which he expressed a great fear for the stability
of the party under the leadership of disparate, forceful personalities
such as Stalin and Trotsky. On March 10, 1923, another stroke deprived
him of speech. His political activity came to an end. He suffered yet
another stroke on the morning of Jan. 21, 1924, and died that evening in
the village of Gorki (now known as Gorki Leninskiye).
The last year of Lenin’s political life, when he fought to eradicate
abuses of his Socialist ideals and the corruption of power, may well
have been his greatest. Whether the history of the Soviet Union would
have been fundamentally different had he survived beyond his 54th
birthday, no one can say with certainty.
Albert Resis
Encyclopaedia Britannica
