Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924, originally named Ulyanov) was, like his younger revolutionary colleague Trotsky, a revolutionary before he was a Marxist, both chronologically and intellectually. Probably his lifelong passion for revolution, and his total dedication to politics and nothing else, stemmed from the execution of his brother for complicity in the assassination of Tsar Alexander III in 1886. In 1894 Lenin was imprisoned, and then exiled to Siberia until 1900. The following year he left Russia for Europe, and was to spend the years until 1917, except for a period from 1905–08, there, helping to organize, and then take over, the rather heterogeneous collection of émigré Russian left-wing movements that made up the All-Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). He rejected the view of many that Russia was too underdeveloped economically to undergo a full Marxist revolution that would lead to socialism, and finally managed to win a majority, the Bolshevik wing, of the RSDLP to his side, to form the Bolshevik party; those opposed to Lenin’s radical approach became known as the Mensheviks. Lenin, though accepting much of Marx’s philosophy, added two vital ingredients to make up what became the official doctrine of the Soviet Union, under the label of Marxist-Leninism.
The first point, which caused conflict not only with the Mensheviks but also with other equally radical Marxists, such as Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, was a very strong stress on the need for an organized, full-time professional revolutionary cadre. This was not just a tactical issue; Lenin never accepted that the Russian masses could be allowed much say in the revolution or its aftermath, and continually stressed the need for élite leadership and highly authoritarian control of the party central committee (see vanguard of the proletariat). This later became the official doctrine of democratic centralism, and is held by many to have paved the way for the totalitarian rule of Stalin and later periods. It is significant that Lenin was quite open in insisting that this leadership should come from the left-wing bourgeois intellectuals, and never allowed workers’ movements like trade unions any important role.
Left to themselves, he argued, the masses could not rise beyond a ‘trade union’ mentality, could never really throw off the chains of capitalism.
The second point, again contested by Trotsky, was that, knowing the Russian industrial proletariat was too small and too new to carry out a successful revolution itself, he advocated an alliance with the peasantry, despite their traditional conservatism. What he then expected to happen, and which did in fact start to happen under his rule after the October 1917 revolution, was that the Soviet state itself, denying democracy and industrial participation, would complete the process of industrialization until, at a later, perhaps much later, date, full communism would be possible. He expected, in other words, that the revolution would stop short of the full change of society. When, in October 1917, he staged a coup d’état against the moderate and moderate-left government that had taken power after the Abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, he lost little time in abolishing all other parties, even though it would have been possible to create a broadly based left-wing government with the participation of the Mensheviks. Because of the rigours of the last stages of the First World War, followed rapidly by the civil war between the ‘White’ and ‘Red’ armies, the Russian economy nearly collapsed and Lenin had to accept a considerable weakening of the early socialist economics, in the New Economic Policy.
Lenin died in 1924 and the ensuing in-fighting among the Soviet leaders led ultimately to Stalinism. Lenin, more than any other single man, could have changed the nature of Russian communism, but his real talents lay as a tactician, rather than as a strategist or ideologue. Nevertheless, at least two of his many writings continue to be of vital influence to communist intellectuals. The first, the essay What Is To Be Done? (1902), set the blueprint for democratic centralism. The second, Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism, offered an explanation of why Marx’s economic predictions that capitalism would collapse through its own internal contradictions had not held, and why, as a result, the revolution could not be a spontaneous rising of the real proletariat, but had to be managed and created by the vanguard party.
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