One hundred years ago today the Russian revolutionary Lenin died at the age of 53. Few figures have sparked such revulsion and hatred from the ruling class, not just in his lifetime, but even a century on. James Connolly noted that “Apostles of freedom are forever crucified while living and sanctified when dead”, a fate that has somewhat befallen Connolly himself, with Labour Party and other establishment figures attempting to gut his memory of its revolutionary edge. But they have never attempted this for Lenin, such was the fear they had of Lenin and the revolutionary movements he was part of. Instead, even to this day, he is lambasted in school books, movies and the media as some brutal dictator and cartoonish villain.

On this centenary of his death, we at Rupture wanted to push back on this scaremongering, and encourage our readers to do something that will enrage and terrify all the right people: study Lenin and ‘Leninism’. With that in mind, we asked renowned historian and Lenin scholar Paul le Blanc for an extract from his latest book on the topic: Lenin - Responding to Catasrophe, Forging Revolution which we recently hosted a book launch for in Connolly Books, Dublin. Here we reprint an excerpt from the prologue and the epilogue, you can also listen to Paul read this and discuss it with Rupture author Diana O’Dwyer on our podcast Rupture Radio here: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ruptureradio/episodes/Talk-Exploring-Lenins-Legacy-with-Paul-Le-Blanc-e2bu5vp/a-aak21jd.

We are currently running a reading group of this book, if you are interested in joining please email us on ecosocialistquarterly [at] gmail.com

Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution

by Paul le Blanc

Many historians go out of their way in exposing Lenin’s supposedly abhorrent character. The conservative scholar Stefan Possony condemned him as:

Self-righteous, rude, demanding, ruthless, despotic, formalistic, bureaucratic, disciplined, cunning, intolerant, stubborn, one-sided, suspicious, distant, asocial, cold-blooded, ambitious, purposive, vindictive, spiteful, a grudge holder, a coward who was able to face danger only when he deemed it unavoidable—Lenin was a complete law unto himself, and he was entirely serene about it.

But the way Possony saw things was conditioned by the conservative conviction that some people, some classes, and some races are superior to others, as he argued in a book co-authored with Nathaniel Weyl, The Geography of Intellect. Possony despised revolutions driven by ideas of “equal rights” and “rule by the people.” From this standpoint, Lenin – committed to overturning the present social order to create a radically democratic society of the free and the equal – was a monster. Denouncing this radical democrat as an “architect of totalitarianism” has been a device employed to shoo people away from his ideas – but perhaps his personality and ideas are not so repellent after all.

The free-spirited Rosa Luxemburg, a humanistic and democratic revolutionary who would have wasted no time with the terrible person described by Possony, had a rather different impression of Lenin: “I enjoy talking with him, he's clever and well educated, and has such an ugly mug, the kind I like to look at.” An opponent within the Russian revolutionary movement, the Menshevik leader Raphael Abramovitch who was Lenin’s guest when he and Lenin were both living in Swiss exile in 1916, reported “it is difficult to conceive of a simpler, kinder and more unpretentious person than Lenin at home.”

Angelica Balabanoff, who had worked closely with Lenin, was able to specify – many years after she had broken from him – precisely the qualities a conservative such as Possony would have found so monstrous: “From his youth on, Lenin was convinced that most of human suffering and of moral, legal, and social deficiencies were caused by class distinctions.” She explained “he was also convinced that class struggle alone … could put an end to exploiters and exploited and create a society of the free and equal. He gave himself entirely to this end and he used every means in his power to achieve it.”

From a location on the right end of the political spectrum, Winston Churchill sought a balanced measure of his mortal enemy. He hated what Lenin represented no less than Possony, and even hailed Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship in Italy for its “triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.” Yet he wrote of Lenin: “His mind was a remarkable instrument. When its light shone it revealed the whole world, its history, its sorrows, its stupidities, its shams, and above all its wrongs. … It was capable of universal comprehension in a degree rarely reached among men.” It is worth adding an insight from sometime-sympathizer Max Eastman, who suggested that one of Lenin’s contributions in “the theory and practice of Marxism” was a rejection of “people who talk revolution, and like to think about it, but do not ‘mean business’ … the people who talked revolution but did not intend to produce it.”

The shrewd observations of the knowledgeable anti-Communist journalist Isaac Don Levine capture an additional quality. “His mentality … may have been extraordinarily agile and pliant as to methods, his erudition may have been vast and his capacity to back up his contentions brilliant, his character may have been such as to readily acknowledge tactical mistakes and defeats,” Levine commented shortly after Lenin’s death in 1924, “but these he never would have ascribed to the possible invalidity of his great idea … the Marxian theory of class struggle as the form of the transition of the capitalist society to a socialist one.” Levine himself judged the “great idea” to be invalid, but there were many in Russia and beyond who felt otherwise.

Animated by such convictions, Lenin helped build a powerful revolutionary movement in his native Russia, culminating in the Russian Revolution of 1917, which he and his comrades believed was the beginning of a global wave of socialist revolutions. He was a key architect of modern Communism, designed to bring about such an outcome.

Yet many who shared his ideals were critical. Among revolutionaries in Russia there were standpoints in contradiction to those of Lenin’s organization – for example, varieties of anarchists who joined with Lenin’s forces to make the 1917 revolution, but then came into conflict with the Communists afterward. An imprisoned anarchist in the United States, the soon-to-be-martyred fishmonger Bartolomeo Vanzetti, wrote in early 1924: “Lenin has passed away. I am convinced that unintentionally he has ruined the Russian Revolution. He has imprisoned and killed many of my comrades.” Vanzetti felt compelled to add: “And yet he has suffered much, toiled heroically for what he believed to be good and the truth, and I felt my eyes filled with tears in reading of his passing and his funeral.” But in the end, and for reasons worth reflecting over, Lenin remained for him “my great adversary.”

However, around the world, many revolutionaries adulated Lenin. Among the many in the funeral processions was a young Vietnamese revolutionary in Soviet Russia, going by the name Nguyễn Ái Quốc (born Nguyễn Sinh Cung, later known as Ho Chi Minh). “In his life he was our father, teacher, comrade, and advisor,” wrote the youthful Communist. “Now he is our guiding star that leads to social revolution.” Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes expressed a similar sentiment years later:

Lenin walks around the world.

Black, brown, and white receive him.

Language is no barrier.

The strangest tongues believe him.

These testimonies come from the twentieth century – an age of hopeful revolution, horrific civil war, often triumphant counter-revolution, and ongoing class struggles. But does Lenin’s project offer anything useful for us in our own time?

This book, in its subtext suggesting an affirmative answer to that question, dispenses with six historiographical myths: 1) Lenin favored dictatorship over democracy; 2) his so-called “Marxism” was a cover for his own totalitarian views; 3) he favored a super-centralized political party of “a special type” – with power concentrated at the top, himself as party dictator; 4) he favored rigid political controls over culture, art and literature; 5) he believed that through such authoritarian methods a socialist “utopia” could be imposed on backward Russia; and 6) flowing naturally from all this, he became one of history’s foremost mass murderers. This book rejects all such false negatives – at the same time seeking to identify actual negatives which, inevitably, can be found in Lenin and the tradition to which he was central.

Faced with the complex swirl of Lenin’s life and times and ideas, one can focus on matters, and select ideas, adding up to a “Leninism” from which decent people must turn away. This book’s approach is different. In her critique of the Russian Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg emphasized her determination to “distinguish the essential from the non-essential,” with her critique of the non-essential designed to help advance the triumph of what was essential in Lenin’s revolutionary Bolshevism. In this brief study, the focus will be on what seems to me to be those essential qualities.

Many adages from past movements and struggles continue to resonate: an injury to one is an injury to all, in unity there is strength, if we fail to hang together we may be hanged separately, and so on. There will be no inevitable triumph of human rights, freedom, creativity, community, and a better future. Such things must be fought for, and they must be fought for against oppressive and exploitative elites that are powerful and well-organized, with immense resources. They can only be overcome by the force of the majority, but only if that majority has the necessary consciousness and a high degree of organization.

Obviously, not every human being who is part of “the majority” has the same thoughts and values. Some are drawn to multiple forms of bigotry and/or fear and/or passivity and/or submissiveness, etc. Only a portion – a layer – of the working-class majority is at this moment inclined toward a revolutionary class-consciousness, commitment against all forms of oppression, and inclination to fight for a better world. Within this layer, there are some who have developed some skills in actually fighting back, in analyzing what’s what, and in waging effective struggles. Anarcho-syndicalists have referred to this as “the militant minority,” and such a minority has sometimes been able to provide leadership in sustained struggles that result in victories. Many among those inclined to read a book such as this might be part of the broad vanguard layer of the working class.

Based on what has been said so far, it seems clear that this vanguard layer or militant minority must not substitute itself for the majority (let alone arrogantly claim that it is the majority). Rather, it must seek to win more and more individuals, more and more of the majority, to forms of consciousness and activity through which they too will either become part of the vanguard layer or increasingly conscious and active supporters of what that layer is reaching for – against all forms of oppression, and for a world in which the free development of each will become the condition for the free development of all.

Just as the entire working class or the entire majority of the population is not telepathically connected, thinking the same thoughts and automatically inclined to carry out the same actions, so those who are part of the vanguard layer do not all have the same thoughts and understanding, including about pathways that make sense and what to do next. To be effective, individuals who are part of this layer must join together to pool their energies, their ideas, their resources, their insights, their commitments. Without the development of such a collaboration of thinking and activism, without a political collective (in fact, a network of collectives), there can be no effective plans of action that can be carried out to change the world.

Such collectives cannot be sustained, cannot grow, cannot carry out the broad array of educational, consciousness-raising, and practical political activities, without people who have developed the skills to make this so. The word cadre has been used as a tag for such people.

Such a person has developed the interactive blend of knowledge, understanding, experience, and skills to do the things that must be done.

How does one organize a meeting that is coherent and democratic and effective and has good practical results? How are those good practical results achieved, and how can various comrades be helped to make sure that they are achieved? How can one’s specific collective be sustained in order to ensure the development and effectiveness of its various comrades and the collective as a whole?
How does one size up an actual situation in the community or the workplace, figure out the kinds of things that need to be done, and figure out how they can be done in order to realize a specific goal? How does one organize an educational forum, a picket line, a strike, a rally, a mass demonstration, an election campaign, a struggle for a specific reform, etc.?
What can we learn from other struggles, at other times, from other places, that can help us be strong and effective in our own struggles? How can these be applied to our specific situations?

Not everyone can answer such questions – but a cadre is someone who can answer some of them, helping create collaboration in which further answers can be developed and tested in practical action. A cadre is someone who can help ensure that the collective can be what it must be, who can help others see the need to become part of the collective, and who can help members of the collective (and even people who are not members of the collective) to become cadres in the sense that is suggested here.

With the proliferation of cadres, with more and more and more activists developing as cadres, there could be the growth of a mass movement capable of being effective in the fight against all forms of oppression, forging pathways in the struggle for a better world of the free and the equal.

Lenin: 100 years on - a reflection by Paul le Blanc

Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution