LEMOS, TOMMASO de. - Dominican theologian, born in Rivadavia (Galicia) around 1546, died in Rome on 23 August 1629. He entered the Order in his native city. Regent of the Studium at Valladolid in 1590, he was teaching there in 1594 when the Molinist controversy flared up between the Jesuits and the Dominicans. He was chosen, together with his confrere Diego Alvares, to represent the Order officially in the discussions when Clement VIII took the matter in hand. In the 47 disputes held over four years (1602-1606) before Clement VIII and Paul V, he eloquently demonstrated the strength of his intellect and his oratorical gifts. Once the discussions were concluded, he refused the post of inquisitor offered to him by the King of Spain and retired to the Minerva convent in Rome.
He himself collected the acts of the 47 disputes, which were published only in 1702: *Acta omnia congregationum adspirationum* (Louvain 1702). He also wrote extensively on the debated topic; his *Panoplia gratiae* (4 vols., Liège 1676) is particularly famous and is certainly one of the best works of the Thomist school on grace. The Order vigorously defended Lemos when this work was attacked by the inquisitor Knippenberg.
LEMOS, TOMMASO de. - Poet, born in Galicia around 1775, died in Vienna in 1845. His poems, written throughout his life (*Gedichte*, 1832; *Neue Gedichte*, 1838 and 1844), soon became famous. He attempted the subject of Faust (1836) in a kind of dramatic rhapsody, a work of doubt and gnawing dissatisfaction, clearly influenced by Spinozist doctrines, but oscillating between acceptance and condemnation of pantheism, and concluding with the death of the hero. He then turned to the epic-dramatic poem with religious themes and wrote: *Savonarola* (1837) and *Die Albinger* (1842), in which L. believes that religious sentiment can be freed from dogma and freedom can be freed from every moral and political limit. His last work, the dialogued poem *Don Juan* (1844), remained unfinished because the outbreak of latent madness made his confinement to a mental asylum necessary in 1844.
His lyric poetry is of high artistic value, revealing a very strong musical sensitivity. They are mostly descriptions of nature, a nature animated by elemental and demonic spirits; it is always a landscape of mood, reflecting inner desolation, the shadow of an ego in which the light slowly fades.
L. does not belong to the Romantics but is freer and more modern, closer to Schopenhauerian and Leopardi pessimism. A Catholic in his youth, he later strayed from the faith and, through Christianity conceived as a religion of suffering, thought he could attain that spiritual freedom which he identified with his god. *Die Abigenser* was placed on the Index (decree of 30 September 1845).
L. does not belong to the Romantics but is freer and more modern, closer to the pessimism of Schopenhauer and Leopardi. A Catholic in his youth, he later abandoned the faith and, through Christianity conceived as a religion of suffering, believed he could attain that spiritual freedom which he identified with his god. The Albigensians are on the Index (decree of 30 Sept. 1845).
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L. does not belong to the Romantics but is freer and more modern, closer to the pessimism of Schopenhauer and Leopardi. A Catholic in his youth, he later abandoned the faith and, through Christianity conceived as a religion of suffering, believed he could attain that spiritual freedom which he identified with his god. The Albigensians are on the Index (decree of 30 Sept. 1845).
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L. does not belong to the Romantics but is freer and more modern, closer to the pessimism of Schopenhauer and Leopardi. A Catholic in his youth, he later abandoned the faith and, through Christianity conceived as a religion of suffering, believed he could attain that spiritual freedom which he identified with his god. The Albigensians are on the Index (decree of 30 Sept. 1845).
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The Party was not properly founded until the Second Congress in London in 1902. The Congress of Minsk, which went down in history as the Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party and was held in 1898—i.e., at the time of L.’s deportation—remained practically without results, since all the members of the Central Committee elected by the Congress were soon imprisoned. At that Congress, however, the well-known split between the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions occurred immediately. The reason for the split was precisely the formulation of the Party’s statutes, which L. had drawn up in collaboration with Plekhanov. Although L. failed to get his conception of the Party approved against Martov’s more moderate conception, he and Plekhanov nevertheless obtained a majority on all the other points of the organizational statutes. The Mensheviks were excluded from the direction of *Iskra*, which passed into the hands of L. and Plekhanov. Yet by the autumn of the same year Plekhanov inclined toward Menshevism. I. resigned from the direction of *Iskra*, which became an organ of purely Menshevik tendency. Hence in 1904 L. founded a new periodical in Geneva, *Vpered* (“Forward”), and later *Proletari* (“The Proletarian”). In the following years the struggle against the Mensheviks absorbed most of L.’s activity. This struggle found literary expression chiefly in the writings: *Shag vpered, dva shaga nazad* (“One Step Forward, Two Steps Back,” 1904) and *Dve taktiki sotsial-demokratii v demokraticheskoi revoliutsii* (“Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution,” 1905).
Even in the face of the 1905 Revolution, L. took an attitude different from Plekhanov’s. While Plekhanov rejected armed revolution, L. was one of its most ardent propagandists. In November he returned to St. Petersburg to direct the insurrectionary movement at close quarters, but then had to move to Kuokkala in Finland, and toward the end of 1907 he again emigrated to Western Europe.
In the following years L.’s struggle centered on the question of participation in the Duma. Against the Mensheviks, who, faced with the possibility of open party action, denied the usefulness of illegal organizations (liquidators), L. maintained their continuation. Nevertheless, he also defended participation in Parliament against an extremist current within his own faction that opposed it, affirming that Parliament should be exploited as a platform for the propaganda of Bolshevik ideas. At the same time L. fought against the revisionism of German Social Democracy and its penetration into the ranks of Russian Marxists. Against Bogdanov (q.v.) and others, who wished to build Marxism on the philosophical basis of empiriocriticism, L. defended in his book *Materializm i empiriokriticizm* (“Materialism and Empiriocriticism,” 1909) dialectical materialism as the philosophical basis of Marxism. In the summer of 1911 L. organized near Paris political training courses for workers, as a counterbalance to the party school of the Mensheviks, established in 1909 at Capri. After the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks had been confirmed at the Party Conference in Prague in 1912, and after both parties, now independent, had gone their separate ways, L. moved in the spring of the same year to Cracow, in order to be nearer to the workers of St. Petersburg.
With the outbreak of the World War, on July 26, 1914, L. was imprisoned, but shortly afterward was able to leave Austria and go to Switzerland, where he immediately began a vehement struggle against the Second International (q.v.). First of all, at the conferences held at Zimmerwald (Sept. 5–8, 1915) and Kienthal (Apr. 24–30, 1916), he advocated the idea of transforming the “imperialist” war into civil war and urged the foundation of a Third International to replace the “bankrupt” Second (q.V. INTERNATIONAL). These ideas of L.’s are reflected in his book *Imperializm kak novyi etap kapitalizma* (“Imperialism as the Latest Stage of Capitalism,” 1916).
In the National Library at Berne he studied Hegel and collected material for a work on dialectics. These excerpts from Hegel’s works and L.’s related notes (he no longer found time to compose the projected work) were later published, together with other philosophical notes, under the title *Filosofskie tetradi* (“Philosophical Notebooks”) and constitute one of the principal sources for the philosophy of Bolshevism.
With the February Revolution in Russia, while France refused transit permits to the Bolshevik émigrés for their return from Switzerland to Russia, L. and his companions obtained permission from the German government to cross Germany in a sealed train, proceeding thence to Sweden, from which he reached St. Petersburg on Apr. 3, 1917. Immediately he proposed at a Party meeting his famous “April Theses,” which contained the fundamental principles of his political action: no collaboration with the Provisional Government; all power must pass to the councils of workers, soldiers, and peasants; nationalization of the land, reform of the Party, and change of its name to Communist Party, as well as the foundation of a Third International. With this program L. was almost alone at the time. Kamenev published the theses in *Pravda* (“Truth”) only as L.’s personal ideas. Undeterred, L. did not tire of speaking, persuading, writing letters and articles. Soon afterward, at the April Conference of the Bolshevik Party, his theses became the Party’s programmatic line. After the July insurrection, led by the Party and which made the Bolsheviks masters of St. Petersburg for three days, L. had to flee to Finland. There he wrote one of his most important works, *Gosudarstvo i revoliutsiia* (“State and Revolution”), in which he first constructs the Bolshevik theory of the State and likewise the doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat (q.V. BOLSHEVISM).
The book, however, remained unfinished. The evolution of the situation in Russia offered too good an opportunity for L. to remain away any longer. In the autumn he returned illegally to St. Petersburg and there zealously propagated the idea of the necessity of an armed revolution. On Nov. 7 he realized his dream: a successful coup d’état by the numerically weak Bolshevik Party enabled him to seize power.
As President of the Council of People’s Commissars, L. had to shoulder an enormous amount of work, facing extremely difficult and critical situations. To consolidate the power he had gained, one of his first concerns was to conclude the peace treaty. This cost him a great effort, risking the displeasure of his companions in ratifying the peace of Brest-Litovsk, so ignominious for Russia (March 1918). The strain on L.’s nerves was severely tested by the civil war in the following three years, during which anti-Bolshevik forces temporarily restricted the Bolshevik domain to the small territory around Moscow and Petrograd.
Nonetheless, L. immediately after the revolution turned toward the establishment of integral communism. These were the years of the first revolutionary excesses, the so-called “war communism”; during this period L., according to Trotsky, was seriously convinced that the transition to socialism should be prohibited within a few months. But on the other hand L. was also a politician, realistic enough to realize soon that in war communism the bow had been too far drawn and he had exceeded the orbit of real possibilities. A terrible famine, the sailors’ revolt at Kronstadt (March 1921), and countless peasant uprisings induced him to introduce a kind of “State capitalism” and the so-called “New Economic Policy” (v. NEP), which was decided at the 10th Party Congress.
A series of apoplectic attacks, however, unexpectedly and inexorably tore him away from his unceasing activity and increasingly forced him into painful inactivity. A first apoplectic attack on 16 April 1922 partially immobilized him. In December he spoke for the last time at a conference of metallurgists. In March 1923 he wrote his final article. During his last months he was obliged by illness to remain in bed: he was in the country, at Gorki, where on 21 January a final stroke ended his life.
II. DOCTRINE: LENINISM
Various attempts have been made to define L.’s contribution to Marxism. Some have seen in him a return to pure Marxism after the “deviations” of the Second International; others have seen the difference between Marxism and Leninism in the fact that the former represented theory, the latter practice (Ryazanov); still others see in Leninism the application of Marxism according to Russian conditions: Zinoviev sees the characteristic of Leninism in the way it approached the peasant question.Stalin rejects all these representations of Leninism and proposes a concept of “Leninism” according to which it appears on the one hand as genuine Marxism, but on the other as something new, namely not only of Russian national importance but universal: Leninism is Marxism of the era of imperialism and of the proletarian revolution (Questions of Leninism, Moscow 1940). While Marx and Engels lived in the era of industrial capitalism, L. had to fight a new form of the same, namely imperialist capitalism, which presented a multitude of new problems and situations that had to be studied theoretically and resolved: an intensification of the struggle among capitalists, who united in societies, and various antagonisms between capitalists and the States that protected them, etc.
As the main point of Leninism, Stalin emphasizes the following: “Leninism is the theory and tactics of the proletarian revolution in general and the theory and tactics of the dictatorship of the proletariat in particular.” Indeed, the accomplishment of the Russian Revolution, the realization of the dictatorship of the proletariat through the system of soviets and the organization of the Communist Party, the foundation of the Communist International—all this must be regarded as L.’s absolutely personal achievement.
For Stalin, then, Leninism signifies a further development of Marxism, and namely above all in the field of historical materialism (v.). But this development was not possible without a simultaneous further development also in the field of dialectical materialism (v.). L. occasionally devoted himself to particular philosophical studies. Characteristic of these is his unconditional adherence to the dialectical materialism of Marx-Engels, rather in the vulgarized form given it by Engels than in that of the philosophical works of the young Marx; as also his care to defend it against recent deviations by revisionists and to adapt it to the questions agitated by the most recent philosophical development. When, therefore, toward the end of the 19th century the discovery of radioactivity revealed infra-atomic particles and when, with the disappearance of the old concept of the atom as the ultimate indivisible element of material reality, it seemed to some naturalists that matter itself was disappearing, then L. sought to meet this difficulty and to save dialectical materialism (v.) by distinguishing between the scientific and the philosophical concept of matter. In the same way the concentration of the philosophical interest of his age on epistemological questions led him to elaborate further the epistemology of dialectical materialism in the so-called “theory of reflection” (Abbildtheorie).
Other characteristic traits of his conception are the great importance he gave to theory, the increased demand for party spirit in theoretical work, as well as a certain voluntaristic streak. In opposition to the “economists” and other Marxists, who in passive attitude awaited the realization of socialism as the spontaneous result of the social process that must unfold by objective necessity (stikhinost’), L. emphasized the necessity of a conscious intervention in the unfolding of the historical process (soznatel’nost’). Precisely here is found the root of the Leninist conception of the Party as the vanguard of the proletariat, consciously conquering its own emancipation; and this constitutes the central point of the entire Leninist theory.
Characteristic of L.’s spiritual physiognomy is the synthesis between utopia and realistic politics. If L. knew how to feel the pulse of the masses, decipher the language of events, understand them, and if necessary retreat tactically (NEP), nonetheless he was always animated by an unshakable faith in an utopia, the possibility of an instantaneous transformation of Russia from one of the most backward countries into one of the most advanced through total electrification and motorization of the rural economy, etc. This unshakable faith and the great power of his personality procured him in the Party that unchallenged authority by which even personalities like Trotsky were bent to his will, and by which those insurmountable contrasts within the Party were overcome which were soon, after his death, to lead literally to a life-and-death struggle among the Communist leaders.
This synthesis between utopia and realistic politics also gave him that self-assurance, that energy and hardness in pursuing his goals unperturbedly. Nothing could divert him from decisions once taken. He had a bellicose nature; in his thinking he was effectively influenced not by the ideas of those who thought in the same way, but by ideas that challenged contradiction and battle. But in this battle with political adversaries he was inexorable. “I know only one form of reconciliation with political adversaries: écraser [crush].”
But the strongest contrast enclosed in his being was that between East and West. From the West he took the “scientific” socialism of Marx, which, discovering the “iron” laws of social development, announced the infallible approach of the future socialist paradise. But L.