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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
