LENIN

LENIN. – Pseudonym of Vladimir Il'ič Uljànov, founder and leader of the Russian Communist (Bolshevik) Party and of the Russian Revolution, founder of the Soviet Union and of the Communist International.

I. LIFE

The first years of L.’s organizational and propagandistic activity were devoted to the struggle against narodničestvo and to the creation in Russia of a workers’ movement on a Marxist basis. A series of writings was dedicated to this purpose: Čto takoe « druž'ja naroda » i kak oni vojnyut protiv socialdemokratov (“What are the ‘friends of the people’ and how do they fight against the social democrats”), in which L. maintained, against the “narodniki,” the necessity, also for Russia, of capitalist development; the article Ekonomičeskoe soderžanie narodničestva i kritika ego v knige g. Struve (“The economic content of populism and its criticism in Mr. Struve’s book”); and finally his work, begun in 1895 but completed three years later in Siberia, Razvitie kapitalizma v Rossii (“The development of capitalism in Russia”). In addition, L. was concerned with organizing revolutionary cells in Petersburg, which joined together in 1895 in the “Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class.”

In the spring of 1895 he undertook a journey abroad, lasting four months, to establish relations with the Russian Marxists residing in Switzerland (“Group ‘The Liberation of Labour’”: Plechanov, Aksel'rod, Zasulič) and with those in France, Germany, and Poland. Shortly after his return to Russia, on 21 December 1895, he was imprisoned, and on 10 February 1897 deported for three years to Siberia, to the village of Šukenskoe (Minussinsk). From exile L. continued the struggle against narodničestvo. At the same time he began to turn his attention to the problems of the party’s internal organization, in the pamphlet The Tasks of the Russian Social Democrats (1897). This theme acquired particular importance when the tendency of the “economists” arose among the Russian Marxists, a tendency that sought to limit the workers’ class struggle exclusively to the economic sphere (strikes as a means of achieving economic improvement) and to neglect the political struggle against absolutism. In 1899 L. convened in the village of Ermakovskoe a congress of 17 deported social democrats and took a very firm position against the programme (Credo) of the “economists.”

Released from deportation on 31 January 1900, he first settled in Pskov, where he could maintain contact with the workers’ movement in Petersburg; but in the summer he went once more to Western Europe, not only to remain safe from the police, but also to rid himself of the oppressive burden of amateurism and provincialism. His interest was now directed principally toward questions concerning the party’s internal structure and tactics. The periodical Iskra (“The Spark”), first issued on 21 December 1900 in Munich, transferred to London in 1902 and in 1903 to Geneva, was intended to resolve these questions and also to direct the workers’ movement in Russia. L. pursued the same purpose in his pamphlet Cto delat ? (“What is to be done?”), published in 1902, which, although small in size, represents one of his most important writings. The fundamental pillars of L.’s conception of the Party are strict, almost military discipline; centralized leadership; and command of the workers’ movement by a small number of possibly homogeneous groups of experts, professional revolutionaries. Another problem of his tactics was addressed by L. in the pamphlet Circa la povertà dei villaggi (1903): the Russian proletariat, extremely weak in numbers, should choose as allies in its political struggle not the liberal bourgeoisie, but rather the agricultural labourers and small peasants.

The actual foundation of the Party took place at the Second Congress in London in 1902. The Minsk Congress, which went down in history as the First Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and was held in 1898, during L.’s deportation, practically achieved nothing, since all the members of the Central Committee elected by the Congress itself were soon imprisoned. At that Congress, however, the well-known split between the Bolshevik and Menshevik currents immediately took place. The reason for the split lay precisely in the wording of the statutes, drafted by L. in collaboration with Plechanov. Although L. failed to have his conception of the Party approved against Martov’s more moderate conception, together with Plechanov he nevertheless obtained a majority on all the other points of the organization’s statutes. The Mensheviks were excluded from the leadership of Iskra, which passed into the hands of L. and Plechanov. Already in the autumn of that same year, however, Plechanov inclined toward Menshevism. L. then resigned from the leadership of Iskra, which became a purely Menshevik organ. L. therefore founded a new periodical in Geneva in 1904, Vpered (“Forward”), and later Proletarij (“The Proletarian”). In the following years the struggle against the Mensheviks absorbed most of L.’s activity. This struggle found literary expression principally in the writings Šag vpered, dva šaga nazad (“One Step Forward, Two Steps Back,” 1904) and Dve taktiki social-demokratij v demokratičeskoj revoljucii (“Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution,” 1905).

Also in the face of the 1905 revolution, L. adopted an attitude different from Plechanov’s. Whereas Plechanov rejected armed revolution, L. was one of its most ardent advocates. In November he returned to Petersburg to direct the insurrectionary movement at close quarters, but then had to move to Kiokalla in Finland, and toward the end of 1907 had once again to emigrate to Western Europe.

In the following years L.’s struggle concerned the question of participation in Parliament (the Duma). Against the Mensheviks, who, in view of the possibility of open party activity, denied the usefulness of illegal organizations (likvidatory), L. defended their continuation. Nevertheless, he also defended, against

an extremist current within his own faction, which opposed it, L. defended participation in Parliament as well, asserting that Parliament had to 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 against its penetration into the ranks of the Russian Marxists. Bogdanov (v.) and others, who wished to construct Marxism on the philosophical basis of empiriocriticism, L. defended in his book Materializm i empiriokriticizm (“Materialism and Empiriocriticism,” 1900) dialectical materialism as the philosophical foundation of Marxism. In the summer of 1911 L. organized political training courses for workers near Paris, as a counterweight to the Menshevik party school established in Capri in 1909. After the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks had occurred in 1912 at the Party conference in Prague, and after both parties, by then independent, had begun to follow their own paths, L. moved in the spring of that same year to Krakow, in order to be closer to the workers of Petersburg.

When the World War broke out, on 26 July 1914, L. was imprisoned, but shortly afterward he was able to leave Austria and go to Switzerland, where he immediately began a International (v.). First of all, at the conferences held at Zimmerwald (5–8 Sept. 1915) and Kienthal (24–30 Apr. 1916), he advocated the transformation of the “imperialist” war into civil war and urged the establishment of the III International in place of the “failed” II International (v. INTERNAZIONALE). These ideas of L. are reflected in his book Imperializm kak novejlij etap kapitalizma (“Imperialism as the Most Recent Stage of Capitalism,” 1916).

At the National Library in Bern he studied Hegel and collected material for a work on dialectics. These extracts from Hegel’s works and L.’s related notes (L. no longer found the necessary time to compose the projected work) were later published together with other philosophical notes under the title Filosofskie tetradi (“Philosophical Notebooks”) and represent one of the principal sources for the philosophy of Bolshevism.

When the February revolution broke out in Russia, while France refused permission for the émigré Bolsheviks to travel through its territory on their return from Switzerland to Russia, L. and his companions obtained from the German government permission to cross Germany in a sealed railway carriage, in order to go to Sweden, from where he reached Petersburg on 3 Apr. 1917. He immediately proposed at a Party meeting his famous “April Theses,” which contain 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; the nationalization of the land, the reform of the Party and the change of its name to Communist Party, as well as the establishment of a III International. With this program L. at that time remained almost alone. Kamenev published the theses in Pravda (“The Truth”) merely as L.’s personal ideas. He did not allow himself to be discouraged and never tired of speaking, persuading, and writing letters and articles. Shortly afterward, at the All-Russian Conference of the Bolshevik party, his theses became the programmatic line of the Party. Following the July insurrection, carried out under the Party’s leadership, an insurrection that made the Bolsheviks masters of Petrograd for three days, L. had to flee to Finland. There one of his most important writings, Gosudarstvo i revoljucija (“State and Revolution”), came into being; in it L. first of all constructed the Bolshevik theory of the State and likewise the doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat (v. BOLSCEVISMO).

The book, however, remained incomplete. The development of the situation in Russia offered possibilities that were too favorable for L. to remain away any longer. In the autumn L. returned illegally to Petrograd and zealously propagated there the idea of the necessity of an armed revolution. On 7 Nov. L. brought his dream to realization: a successful coup d’état by the numerically weak Bolshevik party enabled him to seize power.

As chairman 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 acquired, one of L.’s first concerns was to conclude a peace treaty. It cost him a great effort, however, to lead his comrades to ratify the peace of Brest-Litovsk, so humiliating for Russia (March 1918). L.’s capacity for nervous endurance was severely tested by the civil war during the following three years, in which the anti-Bolshevik armies temporarily reduced the extent of Bolshevik rule to the small territory around Moscow and Petrograd.

Nevertheless, immediately after the revolution L. turned toward the establishment of integral communism. These were the years of the first revolutionary excesses, the so-called “war communism”; at that time L. was seriously convinced, according to Trotskij’s account, that the transition to socialism should be a matter of a few months. But L. was also a politician, realistic enough to realize soon that in war communism the bow had been bent too far and that he had gone beyond the sphere of real possibilities. A terrible famine, the sailors’ uprising at Kronstadt (March 1921), and countless peasant revolts led him to introduce a kind of “State capitalism” and the so-called “new economic policy” (v. NEP), which was decided upon at the Tenth Party Congress.

A series of apoplectic attacks nevertheless tore him unexpectedly and inexorably away from his uninterrupted activity and increasingly forced him into painful inactivity. A first apoplectic attack, on 16 Apr. 1922, partially immobilized him. In December he spoke for the last time at a conference of metallurgical workers. In March 1923 he wrote his last article. During the final months, illness forced him to remain in bed: he was in the countryside, at Gorki, where on 21 Jan. a final stroke of paralysis ended his life.

II. DOCTRINE: LENINISM

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 represents something new, namely, something not only of Russian national importance but of universal importance: Leninism is the Marxism of the age of imperialism and the proletarian revolution (Questions of Leninism, Moscow 1946). Whereas Marx and Engels lived in the age of industrial capitalism, L. had to combat a new form of the same system, namely imperialist capitalism, which confronted him with 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 corporations, and various antagonisms between capitalists and the States that protected them, etc.

As the principal point of Leninism, Stalin emphasizes the following: “Leninism is the theory and tactics of the revolution of the proletariat in general, and the theory and tactics of the dictatorship of the proletariat in particular.” Indeed, the implementation of the Russian Revolution, the realization of the dictatorship of the proletariat through the system of councils and the organization of the Communist Party, and the founding of the Communist International—all this must be regarded as work wholly proper to L.

For Stalin, therefore, Leninism signifies a further development of Marxism, primarily historical materialism (v.). But this development was not possible without a simultaneous further development dialectical materialism (v.) as well. L. devoted himself occasionally to particular philosophical studies. Characteristic of him in these studies is his unconditional attachment to the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels, more in the vulgarized form given it by Engels than in that of the philosophical works of the young Marx; as well as his concern to defend it against the recent deviations of the revisionists and to adapt it to the questions raised by the most recent philosophical development. Thus, when toward the end of the 19th century the discovery of radioactivity revealed subatomic particles, and when, with the abandonment of the old concept of the atom as the ultimate indivisible element of the material world, it seemed to certain natural scientists that matter itself was disappearing, L. sought to meet this dialectical materialism (v.) by distinguishing between the scientific and philosophical concepts of matter. In the same way, the concentration of the philosophical interest of his age on epistemological questions led him to develop more fully the epistemology of dialectical materialism in the so-called “theory of reflection” (Abbildtheorie).

Other characteristic features of his conception include the great importance he assigned to theory, the heightened demand for a party spirit in theoretical work, and also a certain voluntaristic trait. In opposition to the “economists” and the other Marxists who, in a passive attitude, awaited the realization of socialism as the spontaneous result of the social process that must unfold by objective necessity (stichijnost'), L. emphasized the necessity of a conscious intervention in the unfolding of the historical process (soznatel'nost'). Precisely here lies the root of the Leninist conception of the Party as the vanguard of the proletariat, consciously achieving 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. Although L. knew how to “feel the pulse of the masses,” decipher the language of events, and come to an understanding of them, and, when necessary, even to retreat tactically (NEP), he was nevertheless always animated by an unshakable faith in a utopia: the possibility of transforming Russia instantaneously from one of the most backward countries into one of the most advanced, through the total electrification and motorization of the rural economy, etc. This unshakable faith and the great power of his personality procured for him within the Party that undisputed authority before which even personalities such as Trotskij bowed, and through which those insurmountable conflicts within the Party were overcome that, soon after his death, were to lead literally to a battle for life and death among the Communist leaders.

This synthesis between utopia and realistic politics also gave him that self-assurance, that energy and hardness with which he pursued his goals imperturbably. Nothing could divert him from decisions once they had been made. He had a warlike nature; his thought was effectively influenced not by the ideas of those who thought in the same way, but by ideas that challenged him to contradiction and battle. But in this battle with political opponents, he was relentless. “I know only one form of reconciliation with political opponents: écraser (schiacciare).”

But the strongest contrast enclosed within his being was that between East and West. From the West he took Marx’s “scientific” socialism, which, having discovered the “iron” laws of the development of society, announced the infallible approach of the future socialist paradise. But L. applied this doctrine with the typically Russian passion by which the “scientific” certainty of a social theory becomes the certainty of a pseudo-religious faith. In this way L. places himself in the line of the Russian revolutionary tradition, for example, of a Herzen, Belinskij, Bakunin, Tšačev, Nečev, etc., and impresses upon Bolshevism those characteristic features that sharply distinguish it from Western socialism.

Precisely because he accepted Marxism as a religious faith, L. had to reject and combat all other religions with the same passion with which he dealt with his political opponents. If he had a single word for all political opponents—écraser—his position toward religion can likewise be designated most effectively by the Voltairean écraser l'infâme. He adds nothing essentially new to the Marxist conception of religion. He merely put it into practice with that passionateness so characteristic of him. If Marx called religion “the opium of the people,” for L. it is a “bad liquor” (šivuška). He does not wish the phrase from the Erfurt Program, “religion is a private matter,” to be understood in the sense of tolerance, which regards religion as a matter of individual conscience.