By Prof. Paul Robinson, Canadian Dimension, 1/22/24
“Ленин жил. Ленин жив. Ленин будет жить.” “Lenin lived. Lenin lives. Lenin will keep on living.” This popular slogan reflected the central role in Soviet ideology of the Soviet Union’s first leader, Vladimir Lenin, who died one hundred years ago yesterday (January 21). As a Marxist, Lenin was committed to a theory that stressed the impersonal forces of history. Yet his own life proved how a single individual can redirect those forces in a new direction. Lenin did not cause the Russian Revolutions of 1917. But by the force of his own will, he turned them onto a new path, with enormous consequences both for Russia and the world.
Born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in 1870 in the town of Simbirsk on the Volga River, Lenin was the son of a mid-ranking educational official whose position gave him the status of minor nobility. A turning point in Lenin’s life came in 1886, when his brother Alexander was executed for his role in a plot to assassinate Tsar Alexander III. This possibly induced a hatred of the imperial authorities that drove Lenin’s later behaviour. Before long, he too was involved in revolutionary activities, and by the early 1900s he was a committed Marxist, joining the predecessor of the Communist Party, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP).
The primary revolutionary organization in Russia at this point was the Social Revolutionary Party (SRs), which looked to the peasantry (which made up 80 percent of the country’s population) to overthrow the Tsarist regime. The SRs were influenced by populist philosophy, which imagined that Russia could bypass the capitalist mode of development and build a stable socialist society on the model of the peasant commune.
By contrast, the RSDLP followed Marx in believing that capitalist industrial development was inevitable. This would create an urban working class (the proletariat), and it would be this proletariat, not the peasantry, that would lead the revolution, overthrow the Tsar, and establish a communist order in which the workers themselves would control the means of production.
It is here that we begin to confront the paradox of Lenin’s life. In principle, since the proletarian revolution is inevitable, one doesn’t have to do anything. It will happen of its own accord. Russian revolutionaries were never content to wait, however. As one of the first Russian Marxists, Georgy Plekhanov, argued, it was precisely the knowledge of where history was heading that made it possible for revolutionaries to accelerate change in that direction. “I am a worm, says the idealist. I am a worm when I am ignorant, retorts the dialectical materialist; but I am a God when I know,” wrote Plekhanov.
Lenin and his fellow Marxist revolutionaries knew with absolute certainty where history was heading and took upon themselves the role of God in bringing the end of history into being. At the heart of Lenin’s worldview, therefore, was a rigid ideological dogmatism that brooked no opposition. At the same time, he differed from many of his colleagues in being tactically flexible to the point that it could appear that he had no principles at all apart from a relentless desire to seize power. The ends so justified the means, that almost any tactics were permissible, even if they appeared to contradict Marxist theory and even if they were diametrically opposed to whatever Lenin had been proposing earlier.
This can be seen in Lenin’s 1917 book The State and Revolution. The first half was written between April and July 1917, when Lenin was hoping to take power by taking control of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils (Soviets). The second half was written after an abortive coup in July 1917, at a time when Lenin was on the run and his party’s prospects of gaining control of the Soviets briefly seemed quite weak. The book reflects these twists and turns. The first half talks of “All power to the Soviets.” The second half abandons that talk, and instead talks of “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” In short, slogans such as “All power to the Soviets” were just tactical ploys, to be promoted or discarded according to their temporary usefulness. What Lenin really wanted was all power to his own party.
This was a product of his unique way of thinking about the revolution. According to orthodox Marxist theory, the revolution takes place after the contradictions of capitalism have become acute and a large working class has come into existence. But capitalism was still quite young in Russia and the working class was very small. According to Marxist theory, therefore, Russia wasn’t ripe for revolution.
This fact helped cause a split in the RSDLP between two factions—the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks—the latter of which was led by Lenin. The Mensheviks believed that communism would have to wait until Russia had passed through a long period of capitalism, and that in the meantime communists needed to build up support by means of a mass party open to all sympathizers. Lenin, in contrast, argued that Russia could have a communist revolution immediately, but in the absence of a large proletariat it would need a highly disciplined elite organization to lead the revolutionary movement. And thus was born the idea of the party as the centre of loyalty, and with that the idea that the interests of the party took precedence over all else. This had very little, if anything, to do with Marxism, but became the core of Marxism-Leninism.
In 1917, Lenin got his chance to put his ideas into action. The legitimacy of the Russian state was so connected to the person of the Tsar that once Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917, Russia began to fall apart. The question remained of who would pick up the pieces.
Lenin was determined that it should be the Bolsheviks, but on returning to Russia in April 1917 from exile in Switzerland, he found that most of his party disagreed. Bolshevik leaders in Russia were more in line with the Mensheviks. They felt that Russia would have to pass through the bourgeois revolution before it would be ready for communism. In the meantime, communists would have to support the bourgeois Provisional Government and protect the revolution by continuing the war against Germany. Lenin disagreed and made his case in his famous “April Theses.” The war was a “predatory imperialist” war, he said, and must be ended. Meanwhile, communists should not support the bourgeois revolution, but seek its immediate overthrow. Lenin’s fellow Bolsheviks were aghast. Lenin, they felt, had spent too long in exile abroad. He didn’t understand the reality of life in Russia. The April Theses were a mistake, they thought.
But such was Lenin’s personal authority within the tightly knit party he had built that before long he had won the doubters round to his point of view. It was at this point that one sees the importance of individuals in human history. Lenin didn’t create the conditions that led to growing chaos in Russia in 1917. These were indeed largely the product of impersonal forces. But Lenin moved these forces in a direction that another individual would not have. Had the Germans not given him the means to return to Russia from his exile in Switzerland, somebody else would have directed Bolshevik party policy in Russia, and history would have moved in a very different direction.
Lenin was interested in more than just overthrowing the Provisional Government. He wanted to ensure that the Bolsheviks dominated whatever system was created to replace it. And here once again, he ran into opposition from his colleagues. By late October 1917, it was clear power was falling from the Provisional Government’s grasp. It was just a matter of who picked it up. The majority of Lenin’s colleagues supported the idea of an armed insurrection, but argued that to give it legitimacy the overthrow of the government and the transfer of power to the Soviets should be announced by the forthcoming All-Russian Congress of Soviets. Once that announcement had taken place, the Soviet forces could then seize control.
Lenin disagreed. If the revolution followed that model, power would belong to the organization that declared the revolution, meaning the All-Russian Congress of Soviets. The result would be a coalition government appointed by the Congress, of which the Bolsheviks would be just one small part. That was unacceptable.
Lenin insisted on a different model. First, the Bolshevik-controlled Military Revolutionary Committee should forcibly overthrow the existing authorities and announce the formation of a new government, led by the Bolsheviks. The Committee would then present this to the Congress of Soviets as a fait accompli. This would ensure that the Bolsheviks would be in charge.
Once again, many of Lenin’s Bolshevik colleagues protested. Cutting the SRs and Mensheviks out of power would be bound to cause a reaction, they argued, and probably result in civil war. Lenin, though, was unconcerned. His plan would have the effect of making people choose sides—for the revolution or against—and identifying the revolution with the Bolsheviks would mean that anybody opposing the Bolsheviks would de facto be against revolution.
Lenin won the day. The Military Revolutionary Committee seized power and transferred it to the Bolshevik party. The SRs and Mensheviks protested, but to no avail. And so began 70 years of communist domination of Russia. This was not inevitable. Even many of Lenin’s Bolshevik colleagues at first didn’t want to go down that path. That they did was largely due to Lenin himself.
In this sense, the cult of personality that the Soviet authorities built around Lenin after his death was fully justified. The revolution of November 1917 really was Lenin’s revolution, and the communist system that ruled the Soviet Union for the next 70 years really was Lenin’s creation. Great impersonal forces matter. But so too does individual agency. The life of Vladimir Lenin proves the point. For good or evil, he changed the path of history.
Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. He is the author of numerous works on Russian and Soviet history, including Russian Conservatism, published by Northern Illinois University Press in 2019.