Lenin

LENIN. - Pseudonym of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, founder and leader of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik), and of the Russian Revolution, founder of the Soviet Union and of the Communist International.

I. LIFE

Born on April 22 (= 10), 1870 in Simbirsk, in the autumn of 1887 he began his legal studies at the University of Kazan. A decisive influence on him was the execution of his brother Alexander, who, after an unsuccessful attempt against Tsar Alexander III, was condemned to death. Il'ič continued his work: after a few months he was expelled from the University for his revolutionary activity and confined to the village of Kokushkino, 40 km from Kazan. In the autumn of 1888 he was able to return to Kazan, but in May of the following year he moved to Samara. While he continued the study of law, he also devoted himself to the study of social doctrines. The failure of his brother, a member of the Narodnaya Volya organization ("People's Will"), convinced him of the ineffectiveness of the method of struggle of the narodnichestvo, that is, of populism, according to which the liberation of the working people could be brought about through terrorism against high-ranking figures. Therefore L. devoted himself to the study of the "scientific" socialism of Marx, studied the works of Marx, of Engels, of German social democracy and also the writings of the Russian Marxists of the time, above all of Plekhanov. In the autumn of 1891 he passed the state examinations (after having completed his studies privately) at the University of Petersburg and in the spring of the following year he obtained employment in Samara. But rather than practicing his profession, he devoted himself fervently to the propaganda activity of socialism and founded the first Marxist circle in Samara. Already in Sept. 1893 he moved to Petersburg for a more effective exercise of revolutionary activity and from this moment he became that "revolutionary by profession," whose type he defined so incisively in his writings.

The first years of L.'s organizational and propaganda activity were devoted to the struggle against the narodnichestvo and to the creation in Russia of a workers' movement on a Marxist basis. A series of writings is devoted to this purpose: Čto takoe « druž'ja naroda » i kak oni vojnyut protiv socialdemokratov ("What the 'friends of the people' are and how 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 critique in Mr. Struve's book"); finally his work begun in 1895, but finished three years later in Siberia, Razvitie kapitalizma v Rossii ("The development of capitalism in Russia"). In addition to this L. thought of the organization of revolutionary cells in Petersburg, which united in 1895 in the "Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class."

In the spring of 1895 he undertook a journey abroad, which lasted 4 months, to establish relations with the Russian Marxists residing in Switzerland ("Group 'The Emancipation of Labor'"; Plekhanov, Aksel'rod, Zasulich) and with the French, German and Polish ones. Shortly after his return to Russia, on Dec. 21, 1895, he was imprisoned and on Febr. 10, 1897, deported for 3 years to Siberia in the village of Shushenskoe (Minusinsk). From exile L. continued the struggle against the narodnichestvo. At the same time he began to turn his attention to the problems of the internal organization of the party with the pamphlet I compiti dei socialdemocratici russi (1897). This theme acquired a particular relevance when within Russian Marxism the tendency of the "economists" arose, which wanted to limit the class struggle of the workers exclusively to the economic plane (strikes as a means of struggle for economic improvement) and to neglect the political struggle against absolutism. L. gathered in 1899 in the village of Ermakovskoe a congress of 17 deported social democrats and took a very clear position against the program (Credo) of the "economists."

Freed from deportation on Jan. 31, 1900, he first settled in Pskov, where he could keep in contact with the workers' movement of Petersburg; but in the summer he went again to Western Europe, not only to be safe from the police, but also to rid himself of the oppressive complex of dilettantism and provincialism; his interest is now mainly directed to the questions of the internal structure and the tactics of the party. The periodical Iskra ("The Spark"), which came out for the first time on Dec. 21, 1900 in Munich, transferred to London in 1902 and in 1903 to Geneva, was to serve the solution of these questions and also the direction of the workers' movement in Russia. L. pursued the same aim in his pamphlet Cto delat? ("What Is to Be Done?"), which came out in 1902, which, although of small size, represents one of his most important writings. The fundamental pillars of L.'s conception of the Party are: strict, almost military discipline, centralized direction, the command of the workers' movement by means of a restricted number of groups, possibly homogeneous, of experts, revolutionaries by profession. Another problem of his tactics is treated by L. in the pamphlet Circa la povertà dei villaggi (1903): the Russian proletariat, extremely weak as to number, should choose as allies in its political struggle not the liberal bourgeoisie, but rather the farm laborers and the small peasants.

The actual founding of the Party took place at the II Congress in London in 1902. The Congress of Minsk, which passed into history as the I Congress of the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Russia, held in 1898, that is, at the time of L.'s deportation, remained practically without results 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 current immediately occurred. The reason for the split was given precisely by the very formulation of the statute, made by L. in collaboration with Plekhanov. Although L. did not succeed in having his conception of the Party approved against the milder conception of Martov, he nevertheless obtained together with Plekhanov the majority on all the other points of the statute of the organization. The Mensheviks were excluded from the direction of Iskra, which passed into the hands of L. and Plekhanov. However, already in the autumn of the same year Plekhanov inclined toward Menshevism. L. then resigned from the direction of Iskra, which became an organ of purely Menshevik tendency. Therefore L. in 1904 founded a new periodical in Geneva Vpered ("Forward") and later Proletarij ("The Proletarian"). In the following years the struggle against the Mensheviks absorbed the greater part of L.'s activity. This struggle found literary resonance mainly 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 revolution of 1905, L. took an attitude different from that of Plekhanov. While Plekhanov rejected armed revolution, L. was one of its most stubborn proponents. In Nov. he returned to Petersburg to lead the revolt movement closely, but then he had to move to Kiokalla in Finland and toward the end of 1907 he had to emigrate again to Western Europe.

In the following years L.'s struggle had as its object the question of participation in Parliament (Duma). Against the Mensheviks, who in the face of the possibility of an open action of the party denied the usefulness of illegal organizations (likvidatory), L. maintained their continuation. Nevertheless he also defended against an extremist current within his own faction that opposed it, participation in Parliament, affirming that Parliament had to be exploited as a tribune 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. Against Bogdanov (v.) and others, who wanted to construct Marxism on the philosophical basis of empiriocriticism, L. defends in his book Materializm i empiriokriticizm ("Materialism and Empirio-criticism", 1900) dialectical materialism as the philosophical basis of Marxism. In the summer of 1911 L. organized near Paris courses of political training for workers, as a counterweight to the school of the Menshevik party, set up in 1909 at Capri. Once the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks had come about, in 1912 at the Party conference in Prague, and after both parties, by then independent, had begun to walk their own road, L. moved, in the spring of the same year, to Kraków, in order to be closer to the workers of St. Petersburg.

When the world war broke out, on 26 July 1914, L. was imprisoned, but shortly afterwards he was able to leave Austria and go to Switzerland, where he immediately began a vehement struggle against the Second International (v.). First of all, in the conferences held at Zimmerwald (5-8 Sept. 1915) and at Kienthal (24-30 Apr. 1916) he advocated the ideas of transforming the "imperialist" war into civil war and urged the founding of the Third International in place of the "failed" Second (v. INTERNATIONALE). These ideas of L. are reflected in his book Imperializm kak novejlij etap kapitalizma ("Imperialism as the Most Recent Stage of Capitalism", 1916).

In the National Library of Bern he studied Hegel and gathered material for a work on dialectics. These extracts from Hegel's works and the related notes of L. (for the composition of the projected work L. no longer found the necessary time) were published later 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 of transit to the Bolshevik émigrés for their return from Switzerland to Russia, L. and his companions obtained from the German government permission to cross Germany in a sealed carriage, in order to go to Sweden, whence he reached St. Petersburg on 3 Apr. 1917. Immediately he proposed at a Party meeting his famous "April theses", in which are 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; the nationalization of the land, the reform of the Party and the change of its name to Communist Party as well as the founding of a Third International. With this program L. remained at that time almost alone. Kamenev published the theses in Pravda ("The Truth") only as personal ideas of L. The latter did not let himself be discouraged and did not tire of speaking, persuading, writing letters and articles. Shortly afterwards, 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 guidance of the Party, an insurrection that made the Bolsheviks masters of Petrograd for three days, L. had to flee to Finland. There was born one of his most important writings, Gosudarstvo i revoljucija ("State and Revolution"), in which L. first of all constructs the Bolshevik theory of the State and likewise the doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat (v. BOLSHEVISM).

The book, however, remained incomplete. The evolution of the situation in Russia offered too good possibilities for L. to be able to remain still far away. In the autumn L. returned illegally to Petrograd and there propagated with great zeal the idea of the necessity of an armed revolution. On 7 Nov. L. brought about the realization of his dream: a fully successful coup d'état by the numerically weak Bolshevik party allowed him the conquest of power.

As president of the Council of People's Commissars L. had to shoulder an enormous quantity of work, facing extremely difficult and critical situations. For the consolidation of the power acquired, one of the first concerns of L. was to conclude the peace treaty. It cost him a great effort, however, to drag his companions to the ratification of the peace of Brest-Litovsk, so ignominious for Russia (March 1918). The capacity of resistance of L.'s nerves was put to a hard test by the civil war in the three following years, in which the anti-Bolshevik armies temporarily restricted the extent of the Bolsheviks' dominion to the small territory around Moscow and Petrograd.

Nevertheless L. directed himself, immediately after the revolution, toward the establishment of an integral communism. These are the years of the first revolutionary excesses, the so-called "war communism"; when L. was seriously persuaded, according to what Trotsky reports, that the transition to socialism had to be a matter of a few months. But on the other hand L. was also a politician, realistic enough to persuade himself early that in war communism the bow had been drawn too tight and he had gone beyond the orbit of real possibilities. A terrible famine, the insurrection of the sailors at Kronstadt (March 1921) and innumerable revolts of the peasants induced him to introduce a kind of "state capitalism" and the so-called "new economic policy" (v. NEP), which was decided at the Tenth Congress of the Party.

A series of apoplectic attacks, however, unexpectedly and inexorably tore him from his uninterrupted activity and forced him more and more each day into painful inactivity. A first apoplectic attack, on 16 Apr. 1922, partially immobilized him. In Dec. he spoke for the last time at a conference of metallurgists. In March 1923 he wrote his last article. During the last months he was obliged by illness not to leave his bed: he stayed in the countryside, at Gorki, where on 21 Jan. a final stroke of paralysis put an end to his life.

II. DOCTRINE: LENINISM

Various attempts have been made to define the contribution made by L. to Marxism. Some have seen in L. the return toward a 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); others instead see in Leninism the application of Marxism according to Russian conditions: Zinoviev sees the characteristic of Leninism in the way of considering the agrarian question.

Stalin repudiates all these representations of Leninism and proposes a concept of "Leninism" according to which this appears on the one hand as genuine Marxism, but on the other represents something new, namely not only of Russian national importance, but universal: Leninism is the Marxism of the epoch of imperialism and of the revolution of the proletariat (Questions of Leninism, Moscow 1946). While Marx and Engels lived in the epoch of industrial capitalism, L. had to combat a new form of the same, that is, imperialist capitalism, which placed before him a multitude of new problems and situations, which had to be studied theoretically and resolved: an intensification of the struggle among capitalists, who united into companies, and various antagonisms between capitalists and States, which protected them, etc.

As the principal 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." In fact, the carrying out 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 founding of the Communist International — all this must be regarded as absolutely Lenin's own work.

For Stalin, therefore, Leninism means a further development of Marxism, namely in the first place 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.). Lenin devoted himself occasionally to particular philosophical studies. In these studies, what is characteristic in him is his unconditional attachment to the dialectical materialism of Marx-Engels, rather in the form vulgarized by Engels than in that of the philosophical works of the young Marx; as well as his care to defend it against the recent deviations on the part of the revisionists and to adapt it to the questions raised 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 ceasing of the old concept of the atom in the sense of a final indivisible element of the material world, it seemed to some naturalists that matter itself was disappearing, Lenin then sought to meet this difficulty and to save dialectical materialism (v.) by means of the distinction between the scientific and the philosophical concept of matter. In the same way, the concentration of the philosophical interest of his age on gnoseological questions led him to construct better the gnoseology of dialectical materialism in the so-called "theory of reflection" (Abbildtheorie).

Other characteristic traits of his conception are also the great importance he gave to theory, the increased demand for party spirit in theoretical work, as well as a certain voluntaristic trait. In opposition to the "economists" and the other Marxists, who in a passive attitude awaited the realization of socialism as a spontaneous result of the social process that must unfold by objective necessity (stichijnost'), Lenin 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 Lenin's spiritual physiognomy is the synthesis between utopia and realistic politics. If Lenin knew how to "feel the pulse of the masses," to decipher the language of events, to realize their significance, and, if need be, even to retreat tactically (NEP), nonetheless he was always animated by an unshakable faith in a utopia, the possibility of an instantaneous transformation of Russia from one of the most backward countries into one of the most advanced, with the total electrification and motorization of the rural economy, etc. This unshakable faith and the great power of his personality procured for him in the party that uncontested authority, before which even personalities such as Trotsky bowed, and thanks to which those insurmountable contrasts in the party were overcome, contrasts which were soon, after his death, 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 in imperturbably pursuing his goals. Nothing could divert him from decisions once taken. He had a bellicose nature; his thought was effectively influenced not by the ideas of those who thought in the same way, but by the ideas that challenged him to contradiction and battle. But in this battle with political adversaries, he was inexorable. "I know only one form of reconciliation with political adversaries: écraser (to crush)."

But the strongest contrast that was enclosed within his being was that between East and West. From the West he took the "scientific" socialism of Marx, which, by discovering the "iron" laws of the development of society, announced the infallible approach of the future socialist paradise. But Lenin applied this doctrine with the typical Russian passion, whereby the "scientific" certainty of a social theory becomes the certainty of a pseudo-religious faith. With this Lenin places himself in the line of the Russian revolutionary tradition, e.g., of a Herzen, Belinsky, Bakunin, Tkachev, Nechayev, etc., and impresses upon Bolshevism those characteristic traits that strongly distinguish it from Western socialism.

Precisely because he accepted Marxism as a religious faith, Lenin had to reject and combat all other religions with the same passion with which he behaved toward his political adversaries. If for all political adversaries he had a single word: écraser, so too his position against religion can be most effectively designated by the Voltairian écraser l'infâme. To the Marxist conception of religion he adds nothing essentially new. He only carried it out with that passionateness that is so characteristic in him. If Marx called religion "the opium of the people," for Lenin it is a "bad vodka" (šivuška). The phrase of the Erfurt program, "religion is a private affair," he does not want it understood in the sense of tolerance that considers religion an affair of the conscience of individuals.

Gustavo A. Wetter