Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870-1924)
2012
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was drawn to revolutionary socialist activity in Tsarist Russia in the 1890s. While he was in his early teens he was powerfully affected by the arrest and execution of his older brother for revolutionary activity.
Not long after, while still a student, he was arrested for participating in illegal protests. He joined the revolutionary underground.
The young activist was drawn to the ideas of Karl Marx, but also to ideas and experiences of the insurgent working class and the revolutionary socialist movement.
The struggle for socialism – a decent life for all – was an inspiring and deep-rooted commitment.
Marx’s strategic perspective became central for young Ulyanov: 1) There must be a coming-together of socialism and the working class if either is to have a positive future. 2) Those of us who think like that need to work together hard and effectively – which means we need to be part of a serious organization. 3) Socialist organizations must be a democratic and disciplined force in actual workers’ struggles – that is the path to socialism.
Mural by Mike Alewitz
Despite his own personal drive and brilliance, his effectiveness as a revolutionary was inseparable from his connection with a growing number of comrades – including one he married, Nadezhda Krupskaya. (She played a key organizational role.)
Taking on the revolutionary pseudonym of “Lenin”, he labored to apply Marx’s orientation to the specifics of the Russian reality in which he lived.
Russia was dominated by an oppressive absolute monarch, the Tsar, whose authority was rooted in the powerful and privileged landed nobility.
The upper classes were enriched by exploiting the vast Russian peasantry
The Tsarist elite encouraged the development of industrial capitalism into Russia in order to further enhance their wealth and power in the global context.
This generated a growing, dynamic, increasingly militant Russian working class.
Russian Marxists like Lenin were committed to organizing a powerful working-class movement that could help to overthrow Tsarism and pave the way – sooner or later – for a socialist society. In 1905 there was an uprising in which workers played a central role. Despite defeat it seemed a “dress rehearsal” for the future.
Serious differences, however, caused a split among the Marxists of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. The “Menshevik” (minority) faction led by Lenin’s friend Julius Martov, favored a looser organization and also called for a worker-capitalist alliance to lead the revolutionary overthrow of the Tsarist order.
Lenin led the “Bolshevik” (majority) faction, which favored a more disciplined organization and – distrusting the capitalists – called for a worker-peasant alliance to carry out the democratic revolution.
Yet both looked to the Socialist International, a world-wide federation of socialist parties with which the Russian Marxists were affiliated, and which they viewed as a force that would ensure solidarity among workers of all lands and the forward march to a socialist future.
At international congresses of the Socialist International, Lenin and Martov joined with Rosa Luxemburg and others to call for revolutionary resistance against the growth of militarism and the increasing threat of a global war. This was the official position of the world socialist movement.
When the World War erupted, however, socialist agitation against war gave way to “patriotic� support for the war among majorities in most of the parties of the Socialist International.
Militaristic nationalism triumphed over socialist principles.
The workers of all countries were not uniting to end capitalism – they were killing each other on behalf of their various capitalist governments.
Along with other revolutionary Marxists, Lenin broke with the pro-war socialists and called for a new international that would struggle for a socialist world. But he also sought to explain the economic basis for the horrific conflict.
The nature of capitalism compelled it to expand throughout the world, seeking markets, raw materials, and investment opportunities – at the expense of the great majority of people in the world.
The necessities of the capitalism accumulation process inexorably generated economic expansionism throughout the world, with an oppressiveness and extreme violence engulfing all of the world’s peoples.
The “game� of imperialism shaped global politics, with alliances and counter-alliances that would become explosive.
Militarism and the threat of global war were a natural consequence.
The results were devastating.
Lenin understood that the masses of working people who had been persuaded to support the war effort would, in great numbers, become disillusioned and radicalized by the terrible impact of the war.
Determined to “turn the imperialist war into a civil war� between the working-classes and their capitalist oppressors, Lenin worked feverishly with his comrades to organize and mobilize for socialist revolution.
Lenin had worked hard and creatively in Russia, developing Marx’s thought to advance the cause of the working class and to bring about a radical democracy, workers’ power, and socialism. He gave special attention to building an organization of revolutionaries.
Lenin’s conception of organization involved drawing revolutionary activists together around a Marxist program explained in a revolutionary newspaper and other literature – dedicated to permeating the workers’ struggles with ideas of democratic and socialist revolution. He insisted that it be both democratic and cohesive, effectively combining local initiative and national coordination.
From his early days in the revolutionary movement, Lenin used Marxist theory to understand reality, and practical organization to change that reality – favoring “freedom of discussion,
unity in action.”
He did not invent the conception of democratic centralism – it was shared by most Russian revolutionaries – but Lenin took it more seriously than many.
Democratic 1.
Free, critical-minded discussion before decisions are made
2.
Decisions democratically made
3.
Leadership democratically chosen and answerable to membership
4. 5.
Centralist 1.
Once decisions are made, they are implemented (discussion then subordinated to action)
2.
A significant degree of local autonomy in the way decisions are implemented
Those in disagreement with decisions do not block or undermine implementation
3.
Decisions critically and democratically evaluated at appropriate time after implementation
Authority of democratically elected leadership respected
4.
Coordinated implementation of decisions throughout organization
5.
Entire organization evaluates prior decisions, helping determine future decisions
The highest decision-making body of the National Convention, whose delegates are elected by the branches after a pre-convention discussion (and sometimes debate) of issues. A leadership elected by the National Convention (national committee & political committee) oversees implementation of decisions and coordinates organizational functioning between conventions.
branch branch branch branch
branch branch
THE ORGANIZATION WOULD REACH OUT TO MORE AND MORE OF RUSSIA’S LABORING PEOPLE – TO MOBILIZE THEM AGAINST THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY (TSARISM) AND CAPITALISM. The ideas of Lenin and his comrades made sense to the growing number of militant young workers.
Women workers rallied on International Women’s Day in 1917 – sparking the overthrow of the Tsar.
Masses of workers and peasants were to be drawn into the freedom struggle. Meeting of factory workers
Meeting of peasants
The party would work to build and mobilize a mass workers movement capable of effectively challenging the existing order of oppression and exploitation.
Hope was stirred in Russia when Lenin and his comrades (including Leon Trotsky, on the steps of the speakers’ platform) rallied a majority of the workers and peasants to carry out a triumphant revolution in 1917.
“Comrades workers . . . all toilers: Take immediately all local power into your hands. . . . Little by little, with the consent of the peasants, we shall march firmly and unhesitatingly toward the victory of socialism, which will fortify the advance-guards of the working class of the most civilized countries, and give to the peoples an enduring peace, and free them from every slavery and every exploitation.�
U.S. journalist John Reed was on the scene and described it all in Ten Days That Shook the World. “The only reason for Bolshevik success lay in their accomplishing the vast and simple desires of the most profound strata of the people, calling them to the work of tearing down and destroying the old, and afterward, in the smoke of falling ruins, cooperating with them to erect the framework of the new. . . .”
The Russian Revolution sought a workers’ democracy buttressed by a global wave of working-class revolutions that would make socialism possible.
SOVIETS (DEMOCRATICALLY-ELECTED COUNCILS OF WORKERS’ REPRESENTATIVES) WERE TO BE THE HEART AND SOUL OF THE NEW REVOLUTIONARY REGIME. PETROGRAD SOVIET OF 1917
SECOND NATIONAL CONGRESS OF SOVIETS
Lenin and his comrades drew together revolutionaries from around the world to form Communist parties to struggle to overturn capitalism throughout the world.
The Communist International embraced all cultures in the struggle to overturn oppression, capitalist exploitation, imperialism, and racism. Delegates to Baku Conference organized by Communist International 1920
Claude McKay giving “Report on the Negro Question,� Fourth Congress of Communist International, 1922
Brutal repression blocked insurgencies in a number of countries. Germany experienced the slaughter of many working-class militants and such leaders as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
Right-wing paramilitary forces – known as the Freikorps – do battle with revolutionary workers.
Artist Käthe Kollwitz memorialized the murder of Liebknecht.
The murderous brutality in Germany against radical workers would help pave the way for the rise of Hitler’s Nazis.
Military invasions of the new Soviet Republic, a global capitalist effort to strangle the economy, and a brutalizing civil war resulted in emergency measures by Lenin’s new government – soon adding up to a dictatorship by the Russian Communist Party.
Russia’s Revolution was overwhelmed by calamities --
• assaults from many hostile capitalist powers, • civil war launched by hostile internal forces, • economic devastation due to war & inexperience, • emergency dictatorial measures, • defeated revolutions leading to isolation & despair, • mistakes, brutalization, bureaucracy & corruption among the revolutionaries
-- which blocked democracy & socialism.
The growth of bureaucracy increasingly dominated the new Soviet Republic.
LENIN BOTH WARNED AND STRUGGLED AGAINST THE DANGERS OF BUREAUCRACY.
Before his death, Lenin warned that Stalin – who played a key role in the growing bureaucracy – should not be permitted to concentrate power in his hands.
At the same time, he believed that Russia’s Revolution might still triumph.
Much of value was accomplished in the wake of the revolution. Land to the peasants.
Advances in women’s rights.
Despite problems, a majority of the workers had reasons to identify with the new regime. Workers and family members upon
The 8-hour workday and other advances in workers’ rights
graduating from a literacy course.
Lenin remained convinced that these gains could be secured and deepened if the Communist International was able to help workers and oppressed people to spread the revolution throughout the world.
Unveiling a memorial to such revolutionary martyrs as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht highlighted Lenin’s ongoing commitment to revolutionary internationalism.
Lenin and his comrades mobilized masses of workers and peasants to struggle for a socialist future.
Up to the time of his physical collapse he labored tirelessly to push back the bureaucratic erosion of workers’ power, to enhance the authority of workers and oppressed peoples, and to help strengthen the forces of world revolution.
In her classic Origins of Totalitarianism, political theorist Hannah Arendt has noted: “There is no doubt that Lenin suffered his
greatest defeat when, at the outbreak of the civil war, the supreme power that he originally planned to concentrate in the Soviets definitely passed into the hands of the party bureaucracy.” .
But this tragic development, she argued, did not make totalitarianism inevitable. At the time of Lenin’s death, “the roads were still open” to different possibilities – a “socialist, state-capitalist, or free enterprise pattern.”
Lenin suffered through the impact of wounds from an assassination attempt (1918), followed by a series of devastating strokes starting in 1922. At first he was able to carry out some work – including, as death loomed, efforts to push back the bureaucratic-authoritarian dangers represented by Stalin and those around him. Through most of 1923 he was incapacitated – and in early 1924 he died.
After Lenin’s death, Josef Stalin patiently, shrewdly, relentlessly, and successfully waged a series of power struggles to smash all rivals in the Communist Party.
Stalin was committed to modernizing Soviet Russia (he called this building “socialism in one country”) with rapid industrialization and forced collectivization of land.
Stalin’s version of “socialism” made ample use of repression, purges, executions, forced labor camps. He would use the world Communist movement and reformulate Marxism to advance his own ends.
Most of Lenin’s closest comrades, and thousands of Communist veterans of the revolutionary struggle, were seen as enemies by Stalin – and were destroyed.
By 1932 one former leading Communist, M. N. Riutin, observed:
“The main cohort of Lenin’s comrades has been removed from leading positions, and some are in prisons and exile; others have capitulated, still others, demoralized and humiliated, carry on a miserable existence, and finally, some, those who have degenerated completely, have turned into loyal servants of the dictator. . . .” .
Riutin One of many SENT TO LABOR CAMPS – EXECUTED DURING PURGES
The workers who had mourned his death saw Lenin as “theirs� because he symbolized to them the struggle for liberation, not repression.
“Lenin walks around the world, Black, brown and white receive him. Language is no barrier. The strangest tongues believe him.� -- Langston Hughes
The ideas and commitments of Lenin, rooted in a perceptive utilization of Marxist theory and a rich body of practical experience, are worthy of consideration by those who are drawn to the goals of democracy and socialism.