Lenin, Vladimir Ilich

▪ prime minister of Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

Introduction

original name  Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov 

born April 10 [April 22, New Style], 1870, Simbirsk, Russia

died Jan. 21, 1924, Gorki [later Gorki Leninskiye], near Moscow

 founder of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), inspirer and leader of the Bolshevik Revolution (Russian Revolution of 1917) (1917), and the architect, builder, and first head (1917–24) of the Soviet state (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). He was the founder of the organization known as Comintern (Communist International) and the posthumous source of “Leninism,” the doctrine codified and conjoined with Marx's works by Lenin's successors to form Marxism-Leninism, which became the Communist (communism) worldview.

      If the Bolshevik Revolution is—as some people have called it—the most significant political event of the 20th century, then Lenin must for good or ill be regarded as the century's most significant political leader. Not only in the scholarly circles of the former Soviet Union but even among many non-Communist scholars, he has been regarded as both the greatest revolutionary leader and revolutionary statesman in history, as well as the greatest revolutionary thinker since Marx.

Early life

The making of a revolutionary

      It is difficult to identify any particular events in his childhood that might prefigure his turn onto the path of a professional revolutionary. Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov was born in Simbirsk, which was renamed Ulyanovsk in his honour. (He adopted the pseudonym Lenin in 1901 during his clandestine party work after exile in Siberia.) He was the third of six children born into a close-knit, happy family of highly educated and cultured parents. His mother was the daughter of a physician, while his father, though the son of a serf, became a schoolteacher and rose to the position of inspector of schools. Lenin, intellectually gifted, physically strong, and reared in a warm, loving home, early displayed a voracious passion for learning. He was graduated from high school ranking first in his class. He distinguished himself in Latin and Greek and seemed destined for the life of a classical scholar. When he was 16, nothing in Lenin indicated a future rebel, still less a professional revolutionary—except, perhaps, his turn to atheism. But, despite the comfortable circumstances of their upbringing, all five of the Ulyanov children who reached maturity joined the revolutionary movement. This was not an uncommon phenomenon in tsarist Russia, where even the highly educated and cultured intelligentsia were denied elementary civil and political rights.

      As an adolescent Lenin suffered two blows that unquestionably influenced his subsequent decision to take the path of revolution. First, his father was threatened shortly before his untimely death with premature retirement by a reactionary government that had grown fearful of the spread of public education. Second, in 1887 his beloved eldest brother, Aleksandr, a student at the University of St. Petersburg (later renamed Leningrad State University), was hanged for conspiring with a revolutionary terrorist group that plotted to assassinate Emperor Alexander III. Suddenly, at age 17, Lenin became the male head of the family, which was now stigmatized as having reared a “state criminal.”

      Fortunately the income from his mother's pension and inheritance kept the family in comfortable circumstances, although it could not prevent the frequent imprisonment or exile of her children. Moreover, Lenin's high school principal (the father of Aleksandr Kerensky, who was later to lead the Provisional government deposed by Lenin's Bolsheviks in November [October, O.S.] 1917) did not turn his back on the “criminal's” family. He courageously wrote a character reference that smoothed Lenin's admission to a university.

      In autumn 1887 Lenin enrolled in the faculty of law of the imperial Kazan University (later renamed Kazan [V.I. Lenin] State University), but within three months he was expelled from the school, having been accused of participating in an illegal student assembly. He was arrested and banished from Kazan to his grandfather's estate in the village of Kokushkino, where his older sister Anna had already been ordered by the police to reside. In the autumn of 1888, the authorities permitted him to return to Kazan but denied him readmission to the university. During this period of enforced idleness, he met exiled revolutionaries of the older generation and avidly read revolutionary political literature, especially Marx's Das Kapital. He became a Marxist in January 1889.

Formation of a revolutionary party

      In May 1889 the Ulyanov family moved to Samara (known as Kuybyshev from 1935 to 1991). After much petitioning, Lenin was granted permission to take his law examinations. In November 1891 he passed his examinations, taking a first in all subjects, and was graduated with a first-class degree. After the police finally waived their political objections, Lenin was admitted to the bar and practiced law in Samara in 1892–93, his clients being mainly poor peasants and artisans. In his experience practicing law, he acquired an intense loathing for the class bias of the legal system and a lifelong revulsion for lawyers, even those who claimed to be Social-Democrats.

      Law proved to be an extremely useful cover for a revolutionary activist. He moved to St. Petersburg (from 1914 to 1924 known as Petrograd; from 1924 to 1991 known as Leningrad) in August 1893 and, while working as a public defender, associated with revolutionary Marxist circles. In 1895 his comrades sent him abroad to make contact with Russian exiles in western Europe, especially with Russia's most commanding Marxist thinker, Georgy Plekhanov (Plekhanov, Georgy Valentinovich). Upon his return to Russia in 1895, Lenin and other Marxists, including L. Martov (Martov, L.), the future leader of the Mensheviks, succeeded in unifying the Marxist groups of the capital in an organization known as the Union for the Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class. The Union issued leaflets and proclamations on the workers' behalf, supported workers' strikes, and infiltrated workers' education classes to impart to them the rudiments of Marxism. In December 1895, the leaders of the Union were arrested. Lenin was jailed for 15 months and thereafter was sent into exile to Shushenskoye, in Siberia, for a term of three years. He was joined there in exile by his fiancée, Nadezhda Krupskaya (Krupskaya, Nadezhda Konstantinovna), a Union member, whom he had met in the capital. They were married in Siberia, and she became Lenin's indispensable secretary and comrade. In exile they conducted clandestine party correspondence and collaborated (legally) on a Russian translation of Sidney and Beatrice Webb's Industrial Democracy.

      Upon completing his term of Siberian exile in January 1900, Lenin left the country and was joined later by Krupskaya in Munich. His first major task abroad was to join Plekhanov, Martov, and three other editors in bringing out the newspaper Iskra (“The Spark”), which they hoped would unify the Russian Marxist groups that were scattered throughout Russia and western Europe into a cohesive Social-Democratic party.

      Up to the point at which Lenin began working on Iskra, his writings had taken as their focus three problems: first, he had written a number of leaflets that aimed to shake the workers' traditional veneration of the tsar by showing them that their harsh life was caused, in part, by the support tsarism rendered the capitalists; second, he attacked those self-styled Marxists who urged Social-Democrats and workers to concentrate on wage and hour issues, leaving the political struggle for the present to the bourgeoisie; third, and ultimately most important, he addressed himself to the peasant question.

      The principal obstacle to the acceptance of Marxism by many of the Russian intelligentsia was their adherence to the widespread belief of the Populists (Narodnik) (Russian pre-Marxist radicals) that Marxism was inapplicable to peasant Russia, in which a proletariat (an industrial working class) was almost nonexistent. Russia, they believed, was immune to capitalism, owing to the circumstances of joint ownership of peasant land by the village commune. This view had been first attacked by Plekhanov in the 1880s. Plekhanov had argued that Russia had already entered the capitalist stage, looking for evidence to the rapid growth of industry. Despite the denials of the Populists, he claimed, the man of the future in Russia was indeed the proletarian, not the peasant. While attempting to apply the Marxist scheme of social development to Russia, Plekhanov had come to the conclusion that the revolution in Russia would have to pass through two discrete stages: first, a bourgeois revolution that would establish a democratic republic and full-blown capitalism; and second, a proletarian revolution after mature capitalism had generated a numerous proletariat that had attained a high level of political organization, socialist consciousness, and culture, enabling them to usher in full Socialism.

      It was this set of principles that Lenin adhered to after he read Plekhanov's work in the late 1880s. But, almost immediately, Lenin went a step beyond his former mentor, especially with regard to the peasant question. In an attack on the Populists published in 1894, Lenin charged that, even if they realized their fondest dream and divided all the land among the peasant communes, the result would not be socialism but rather capitalism spawned by a free market in agricultural produce. The “Socialism” put forth by the Populists would in practice favour the development of small-scale capitalism; hence the Populists were not Socialists but “petty bourgeois democrats.” Lenin came to the conclusion that outside of Marxism, which aimed ultimately to abolish the market system as well as the private ownership of the means of production, there could be no Socialism.

      Even while in exile in Siberia, Lenin had begun research on his investigation of the peasant question, which culminated in his magisterial Development of Capitalism in Russia (published legally in 1899). In this work, a study of Russian economics, he argued that capitalism was rapidly destroying the peasant commune. The peasantry constituted for the Populists a homogeneous social class, but Lenin claimed that the peasantry was in actuality rapidly stratifying into a well-off rural bourgeoisie, a middling peasantry, and an impoverished rural “proletariat and semi-proletariat.” In this last group, which comprised half the peasant population, Lenin found an ally for the extremely small industrial proletariat in Russia.

      Iskra's success in recruiting Russian intellectuals to Marxism led Lenin and his comrades to believe that the time was ripe to found a revolutionary Marxist party that would weld together all the disparate Marxist groups at home and abroad. An abortive First Congress, held in 1898 in Minsk, had failed to achieve this objective, for most of the delegates were arrested shortly after the congress. The organizing committee of the Second Congress decided to convene the congress in Brussels in 1903, but police pressure forced it to transfer to London.

      The congressional sessions wore on for nearly three weeks, for no point appeared too trivial to debate. The main issues, nevertheless, quickly became plain: eligibility for membership and the character of party discipline; but, above all, the key questions centred around the relation between the party and the proletariat, for whom the party claimed to speak.

      In his What Is To Be Done? (1902), Lenin totally rejected the standpoint that the proletariat was being driven spontaneously to revolutionary Socialism by capitalism and that the party's role should be to merely coordinate the struggle of the proletariat's diverse sections on a national and international scale. Capitalism, he contended, predisposed the workers to the acceptance of Socialism but did not spontaneously make them conscious Socialists. The proletariat by its own efforts in the everyday struggle against the capitalist could go so far as to achieve “trade-union consciousness.” But the proletariat could not by its own efforts grasp that it would be possible to win complete emancipation only by overthrowing capitalism and building Socialism, unless the party from without infused it with Socialist consciousness.

      In his What Is To Be Done? and in his other works dealing with party organization, Lenin articulated one of his most momentous political innovations, his theory of the party as the “vanguard of the proletariat.” He conceived of the vanguard as a highly disciplined, centralized party that would work unremittingly to suffuse the proletariat with Socialist consciousness and serve as mentor, leader, and guide, constantly showing the proletariat where its true class interests lie.

      At the Second Congress the Iskra group split, and Lenin found himself in a minority of opinion on this very issue. Nevertheless, he continued to develop his view of “the party of a new type,” which was to be guided by “democratic centralism,” or absolute party discipline. According to Lenin the party had to be a highly centralized body organized around a small, ideologically homogeneous, hardened core of experienced professional revolutionaries, who would be elected to the central committee by the party congress and who would lead a ramified hierarchy of lower party organizations that would enjoy the support and sympathy of the proletariat and all groups opposed to tsarism. “Give us an organization of revolutionaries,” Lenin exclaimed, “and we will overturn Russia!”

      Lenin spared no effort to build just this kind of party over the next 20 years, despite fierce attacks on his position by some of his closest comrades of the Iskra days, Plekhanov, Martov (Martov, L.), and Leon Trotsky (Trotsky, Leon). They charged that his scheme of party organization and discipline tended toward “Jacobinism,” suppression of free intraparty discussion, a dictatorship over the proletariat, not of the proletariat, and, finally, establishment of a one-man dictatorship.

      Lenin found himself in the minority in the early sessions of the Second Congress of what was then proclaimed to be the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party (RSDWP). But a walkout by a disgruntled group of Jewish Social-Democrats, the Bund, left Lenin with a slight majority. Consequently, the members of Lenin's adventitious majority were called Bolsheviks (Bolshevik) (majoritarians), and Martov's group were dubbed Mensheviks (Menshevik) (minoritarians). The two groups fought each other ceaselessly within the same RSDWP and professed the same program until 1912, when Lenin made the split final at the Prague Conference of the Bolshevik Party.

Challenges of the Revolution of 1905 and World War I

      The differences between Lenin and the Mensheviks became sharper in the Revolution of 1905 (Russian Revolution of 1905) and its aftermath, when Lenin moved to a distinctly original view on two issues: class alignments in the revolution and the character of the post-revolutionary regime.

      The outbreak of the revolution, in January 1905, found Lenin abroad in Switzerland, and he did not return to Russia until November. Immediately Lenin set down a novel strategy. Both wings of the RSDWP, Bolshevik and Menshevik, adhered to Plekhanov's view of the revolution in two stages: first, a bourgeois revolution; second, a proletarian revolution (see above). But the Mensheviks argued that the bourgeois (bourgeoisie) revolution must be led by the bourgeoisie, with whom the proletariat must ally itself in order to make the democratic revolution. This would bring the liberal bourgeoisie to full power, whereupon the RSDWP would act as the party of opposition. Lenin defiantly rejected this kind of alliance and post-revolutionary regime. Hitherto he had spoken of the need for the proletariat to win “hegemony” in the democratic revolution. Now he flatly declared that the proletariat was the driving force of the revolution and that its only reliable ally was the peasantry. The bourgeoisie he branded as hopelessly counterrevolutionary and too cowardly to make its own revolution. Thus, unlike the Mensheviks, Lenin henceforth banked on an alliance that would establish a “revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.”

      Nor would the revolution necessarily stop at the first stage, the bourgeois revolution. If the Russian revolution should inspire the western European proletariat to make the Socialist revolution, for which industrial Europe was ripe, the Russian revolution might well pass over directly to the second stage, the Socialist revolution. Then, the Russian proletariat, supported by the rural proletariat and semi-proletariat at home and assisted by the triumphant industrial proletariat of the West, which had established its “dictatorship of the proletariat,” could cut short the life-span of Russian capitalism.

      After the defeat of the Revolution of 1905, the issue between Lenin and the Mensheviks was more clearly drawn than ever, despite efforts at reunion. But, forced again into exile from 1907 to 1917, Lenin found serious challenges to his policies not only from the Mensheviks but within his own faction as well. The combination of repression and modest reform effected by the tsarist regime led to a decline of party membership. Disillusionment and despair in the chances of successful revolution swept the dwindled party ranks, rent by controversies over tactics and philosophy. Attempts to unite the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions came to naught, all breaking on Lenin's intransigent insistence that his conditions for reunification be adopted. As one Menshevik opponent described Lenin: “There is no other man who is absorbed by the revolution twenty-four hours a day, who has no other thoughts but the thought of revolution, and who even when he sleeps, dreams of nothing but revolution.” Placing revolution above party unity, Lenin would accept no unity compromise if he thought it might delay, not accelerate, revolution.

      Desperately fighting to maintain the cohesion of the Bolsheviks against internal differences and the Mensheviks' growing strength at home, Lenin convened the Bolshevik Party Conference at Prague, in 1912, which split the Rsdwp forever. Lenin proclaimed that the Bolsheviks were the RSDWP and that the Mensheviks were schismatics. Thereafter, each faction maintained its separate central committee, party apparatus, and press.

      When war broke out, in August 1914, Socialist parties throughout Europe rallied behind their governments despite the resolutions of prewar congresses of the Second International (International, Second) obliging them to resist or even overthrow their respective governments if they plunged their countries into an imperialist war.

      After Lenin recovered from his initial disbelief in this “betrayal” of the International, he proclaimed a policy whose audacity stunned his own Bolshevik comrades. He denounced the pro-war Socialists as “social-chauvinists” who had betrayed the international working-class cause by support of a war that was imperialist on both sides. He pronounced the Second International as dead and appealed for the creation of a new, Third International (International, Third) composed of genuinely revolutionary Socialist parties. More immediately, revolutionary Socialists must work to “transform the imperialist war into civil war.” The real enemy of the worker was not the worker in the opposite trench but the capitalist at home. Workers and soldiers should therefore turn their guns on their rulers and destroy the system that had plunged them into imperialist carnage.

      Lenin's policy found few advocates in Russia or elsewhere in the first months of the war. Indeed, in the first flush of patriotic fervour, not a few Bolsheviks supported the war effort. Lenin and his closest comrades were left an isolated band swimming against the current.

      Lenin succeeded in reaching neutral Switzerland in September 1914, there joining a small group of anti-war Bolshevik and Menshevik émigrés. The war virtually cut them off from all contact with Russia and with like-minded Socialists in other countries. Nevertheless, in 1915 and 1916, anti-war Socialists in various countries managed to hold two anti-war conferences in Zimmerwald and Kienthal, Switzerland. Lenin failed at both meetings to persuade his comrades to adopt his slogan: “transform the imperialist war into civil war!” They adopted instead the more moderate formula: “An immediate peace without annexations or indemnities and the right of the peoples to self-determination.” Lenin consequently found his party a minority within the group of anti-war Socialists, who, in turn, constituted a small minority of the international Socialist movement compared with the pro-war Socialists.

      Undaunted, Lenin continued to hammer home his views on the war, confident that eventually he would win decisive support. In his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), he set out to explain, first, the real causes of the war; second, why Socialists had abandoned internationalism for patriotism and supported the war; and third, why revolution alone could bring about a just, democratic peace.

      War erupted, he wrote, because of the insatiable, expansionist character of imperialism, itself a product of monopoly finance capitalism. At the end of the 19th century, a handful of banks had come to dominate the advanced countries, which, by 1914, had in their respective empires brought the rest of the world under their direct or indirect controls. Amassing vast quantities of “surplus” capital, the giant banks found they could garner superprofits on investments in colonies and semi-colonies, and this intensified the race for empire among the great powers. By 1914, dissatisfied with the way the world had been shared out, rival coalitions of imperialists launched the war to bring about a redivision of the world at the expense of the other coalition. The war was therefore imperialist in its origins and aims and deserved the condemnation of genuine Socialists.

      Socialist Party and trade-union leaders had rallied to support their respective imperialist governments because they represented the “labour aristocracy,” the better paid workers who received a small share of the colonial “superprofits” the imperialists proffered them. “Bribed” by the imperialists, the “labour aristocracy” took the side of their paymasters in the imperialist war and betrayed the most exploited workers at home and the super-exploited in the colonies. The imperialists, Lenin contended, driven by an annexationist dynamic, could not conclude a just, lasting peace. Future wars were inevitable so long as imperialism existed; imperialism was inevitable so long as capitalism existed; only the overthrow of capitalism everywhere could end the imperialist war and prevent such wars in the future. First published in Russia in 1917, Imperialism to this day provides the instrument that Communists everywhere employ to evaluate major trends in the non-Communist world.

Leadership in the Russian Revolution

      By 1917 it seemed to Lenin that the war would never end and that the prospect of revolution was rapidly receding. But in the week of March 8–15, the starving, freezing, war-weary workers and soldiers of Petrograd (until 1914, St. Petersburg) succeeded in deposing the Tsar. Lenin and his closest lieutenants hastened home after the German authorities agreed to permit their passage through Germany to neutral Sweden. Berlin hoped that the return of anti-war Socialists to Russia would undermine the Russian war effort.

First return to Petrograd

      Lenin arrived in Petrograd on April 16, 1917, one month after the Tsar had been forced to abdicate. Out of the revolution was born the Provisional Government, formed by a group of leaders of the bourgeois liberal parties. This government's accession to power was made possible only by the assent of the Petrograd Soviet, a council of workers' deputies elected in the factories of the capital. Similar soviets of workers' deputies sprang up in all the major cities and towns throughout the country, as did soviets of soldiers' deputies and of peasants' deputies. Although the Petrograd Soviet had been the sole political power recognized by the revolutionary workers and soldiers in March 1917, its leaders had hastily turned full power over to the Provisional Government. The Petrograd Soviet was headed by a majority composed of Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary (Socialist Revolutionary Party) (SR), or peasant party, leaders who regarded the March (February, O.S.) Revolution as bourgeois; hence, they believed that the new regime should be headed by leaders of the bourgeois parties.

      On his return to Russia, Lenin electrified his own comrades, most of whom accepted the authority of the Provisional Government. Lenin called this government, despite its democratic pretensions, thoroughly imperialist and undeserving of support by Socialists. It was incapable of satisfying the most profound desires of the workers, soldiers, and peasants for immediate peace and division of landed estates among the peasants.

      Only a soviet government—that is, direct rule by workers, soldiers, and peasants—could fulfill these demands. Therefore, he raised the battle cry, “All power to the Soviets!”—although the Bolsheviks still constituted a minority within the soviets and despite the manifest unwillingness of the Menshevik–SR majority to exercise such power. This introduced what Lenin called the period of “dual power.” Under the leadership of “opportunist” Socialists, the soviets, the real power, had relinquished power to the Provisional Government, the nominal power in the land. The Bolsheviks, Lenin exhorted, must persuade the workers, peasants, and soldiers, temporarily deceived by the “opportunists,” to retrieve state power for the soviets from the Provisional Government. This would constitute a second revolution. But, so long as the government did not suppress the revolutionary parties, this revolution could be achieved peacefully, since the Provisional Government existed only by the sufferance of the soviets.

      Initially, Lenin's fellow Bolsheviks thought that he was temporarily disoriented by the complexity of the situation; moderate Socialists thought him mad. It required several weeks of sedulous persuasion by Lenin before he won the Bolshevik Party Central Committee to his view. The April Party Conference endorsed his program: the party must withhold support from the Provisional Government and win a majority in the soviets in favour of soviet power. A soviet government, once established, should begin immediate negotiations for a general peace on all fronts. The soviets should forthwith confiscate landlords' estates without compensation, nationalize all land, and divide it among the peasants. And the government should establish tight controls over privately owned industry to the benefit of labour.

      From March to September 1917, the Bolsheviks remained a minority in the soviets. By autumn, however, the Provisional Government (since July headed by the moderate Socialist Aleksandr Kerensky (Kerensky, Aleksandr Fyodorovich), who was supported by the moderate Socialist leadership of the soviets) had lost popular support. Increasing war-weariness and the breakdown of the economy overtaxed the patience of the workers, peasants, and soldiers, who demanded immediate and fundamental change. Lenin capitalized on the growing disillusionment of the people with Kerensky's ability and willingness to complete the revolution. Kerensky, in turn, claimed that only a freely elected constituent assembly would have the power to decide Russia's political future—but that must await the return of order. Meanwhile, Lenin and the party demanded peace, land, and bread—immediately, without further delay. The Bolshevik line won increasing support among the workers, soldiers, and peasants. By September they voted in a Bolshevik majority in the Petrograd Soviet and in the soviets of the major cities and towns throughout the country.

Decision to seize power

 Lenin, who had gone underground in July after he had been accused as a “German agent” by Kerensky's government, now decided that the time was ripe to seize power. The party must immediately begin preparations for an armed uprising to depose the Provisional Government and transfer state power to the soviets, now headed by a Bolshevik majority.

      Lenin's decision to establish soviet power derived from his belief that the proletarian revolution must smash the existing state machinery and introduce a “dictatorship of the proletariat”; that is, direct rule by the armed workers and peasants which would eventually “wither away” into a non-coercive, classless, stateless, Communist (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) society. He expounded this view most trenchantly in his brochure The State and Revolution, written while he was still in hiding. The brochure, though never completed and often dismissed as Lenin's most “Utopian” work, nevertheless served as Lenin's doctrinal springboard to power.

      Until 1917 all revolutionary Socialists rightly believed, Lenin wrote, that a parliamentary republic could serve a Socialist system as well as a capitalist. But the Russian Revolution had brought forth something new, the soviets (soviet). Created by workers, soldiers, and peasants and excluding the propertied classes, the soviets infinitely surpassed the most democratic of parliaments in democracy, because parliaments everywhere virtually excluded workers and peasants. The choice before Russia in early September 1917, as Lenin saw it, was either a soviet republic—a dictatorship of the propertyless majority—or a parliamentary republic—as he saw it, a dictatorship of the propertied minority.

      Lenin therefore raised the slogan, “All power to the Soviets!”, even though he had willingly conceded in the spring of 1917 that revolutionary Russia was the “freest of all the belligerent countries.” To Lenin, however, the Provisional Government was merely a “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” that kept Russia in the imperialist war. What is more, it had turned openly counterrevolutionary in the month of July when it accused the Bolshevik leaders of treason.

      From late September, Lenin, a fugitive in Finland, sent a stream of articles and letters to Petrograd feverishly exhorting the Party Central Committee to organize an armed uprising without delay. The opportune moment might be lost. But for nearly a month Lenin's forceful urgings from afar were unsuccessful. As in April, Lenin again found himself in the party minority. He resorted to a desperate stratagem.

      Around October 20, Lenin, in disguise and at considerable personal risk, slipped into Petrograd and attended a secret meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee held on the evening of October 23. Not until after a heated 10-hour debate did he finally win a majority in favour of preparing an armed takeover. Now steps to enlist the support of soldiers and sailors and to train the Red Guards, the Bolshevik-led workers' militia, for an armed takeover proceeded openly under the guise of self-defense of the Petrograd Soviet. But preparations moved haltingly, because serious opposition to the fateful decision persisted in the Central Committee. Enthusiastically in accord with Lenin on the timeliness of an armed uprising, Trotsky led its preparation from his strategic position as newly elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. Lenin, now hiding in Petrograd and fearful of further procrastination, desperately pressed the Central Committee to fix an early date for the uprising. On the evening of November 6, he wrote a letter to the members of the Central Committee exhorting them to proceed that very evening to arrest the members of the Provisional Government. To delay would be “fatal.” The Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, scheduled to convene the next evening, should be placed before a fait accompli.

      On November 7 and 8, the Bolshevik-led Red Guards and revolutionary soldiers and sailors, meeting only slight resistance, deposed the Provisional Government and proclaimed that state power had passed into the hands of the Soviets. By this time the Bolsheviks, with their allies among the Left SR's (dissidents who broke with the pro-Kerensky SR leaders), constituted an absolute majority of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets. The delegates therefore voted overwhelmingly to accept full power and elected Lenin as chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, the new Soviet Government, and approved his Peace Decree and Land Decree. Overnight, Lenin had vaulted from his hideout as a fugitive to head the Revolutionary government of the largest country in the world. Since his youth he had spent his life building a party that would win such a victory, and now at the age of 47 he and his party had triumphed. “It makes one's head spin,” he confessed. But power neither intoxicated nor frightened Lenin; it cleared his head. Soberly, he steered the Soviet government toward the consolidation of its power and negotiations for peace.

Saving the Revolution

      In both spheres, Lenin was plagued by breaks within the ranks of Bolshevik leaders. He reluctantly agreed with the right-wingers that it would be desirable to include the Menshevik and Right SR parties in a coalition government—but on Lenin's terms. They must above all accept the soviet form of government, not a parliamentary one; they refused. Only the Left SR's agreed, and several were included in the Soviet government. Likewise, when the freely elected Constituent Assembly met in January 1918, the Mensheviks and Right SR majority flatly rejected sovietism. Lenin without hesitation ordered the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly.

      The Allies refused to recognize the Soviet government; consequently it entered alone into peace negotiations with the Central Powers (Germany and her allies Austro-Hungary and Turkey) at the town of Brest-Litovsk (Brest-Litovsk, treaties of). They imposed ruinous conditions that would strip away from Soviet Russia the western tier of non-Russian nations of the old Russian Empire. Left Communists fanatically opposed acceptance and preached a revolutionary war, even if it imperilled the Soviet government. Lenin insisted that the terms, however ruinous and humiliating, must be accepted or he would resign from the government. He sensed that peace was the deepest yearning of the people; in any case, the shattered army could not raise effective resistance to the invader. Finally, in March 1918, after a still larger part had been carved out of old Russia by the enemy, Lenin succeeded in winning the Central Committee's acceptance of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. At last Russia was at peace.

      But Brest-Litovsk only intensified the determination of counterrevolutionary forces and the Allies who supported them to bring about the overthrow of the Soviet government. That determination hardened when, in 1918, Lenin's government repudiated repayments of all foreign loans obtained by the tsarist and Provisional governments and nationalized foreign properties in Russia without compensation. From 1918 to 1920 Russia was torn by a Civil War (Russian Civil War), which cost millions of lives and untold destruction. One of the earliest victims was Lenin himself. In August 1918 an assassin fired two bullets into Lenin as he left a factory in which he had just delivered a speech. Because of his robust constitution, he recovered rapidly.

      The Soviet government faced tremendous odds. The anti-Soviet forces, or Whites, headed mainly by former tsarist generals and admirals, fought desperately to overthrow the Red regime. Moreover, the Whites were lavishly supplied by the Allies with materiel, money, and support troops that secured White bases. Yet, the Whites failed.

      It was largely because of Lenin's inspired leadership that the Soviet government managed to survive against such military odds. He caused the formation and guided the strategy of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, commanded by Trotsky. Although the economy had collapsed, he managed to mobilize sufficient resources to sustain the Red Army and the industrial workers. But above all it was his political leadership that saved the day for the Soviets. By proclaiming the right of the peoples to self-determination, including the right to secession, he won the active sympathy, or at least the benevolent neutrality, of the non-Russian nationalities within Russia, because the Whites did not recognize that right. Indeed, his perceptive, skillful policy on the national question enabled Soviet Russia to avoid total disintegration and to remain a huge multinational state. By making the industrial workers the new privileged class, favoured in the distribution of rations, housing, and political power, he retained the loyalty of the proletariat. His championing of the peasants' demand that they take all the land from the gentry, church, and crown without compensation won over the peasants, without whose support the government could not survive.

      Because of the breakdown of the economy, however, Lenin adopted a policy toward the peasant that threatened to destroy the Soviet government. Lacking funds or goods to exchange against grain needed to feed the Red Army and the towns, Lenin instituted a system of requisitioning grain surpluses without compensation. Many peasants resisted—at least until they experienced White “liberation.” On the territories that the Whites won, they restored landed property to the previous owners and savagely punished the peasants who had dared seize the land. Despite the peasants' detestation of the Soviet's grain requisitioning, the peasants, when forced to choose between Reds and Whites, chose the Reds.

      After the defeat of the Whites, the peasants no longer had to make that choice. They now totally refused to surrender their grain to the government. Threatened by mass peasant rebellion, Lenin called a retreat. In March 1921 the government introduced the New Economic Policy, which ended the system of grain requisitioning and permitted the peasant to sell his harvest on an open market. This constituted a partial retreat to capitalism.

      From the moment Lenin came to power, his abiding aims in international relations were twofold: to prevent the formation of an imperialist united front against Soviet Russia; but, even more important, to stimulate proletarian revolutions abroad.

      In his first aim he largely succeeded. In 1924, shortly after his death, Soviet Russia had won de jure recognition of all the major world powers except the United States. But his greater hope of the formation of a world republic of soviets failed to materialize, and Soviet Russia was left isolated in hostile capitalist encirclement.

Formation of the Third International

      To break this encirclement, he had called on revolutionaries to form Communist parties that would emulate the example of the Bolshevik Revolution in all countries. Dramatizing his break with the reformist Second International, in 1918 he had changed the name of the RSDWP to the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), and in March 1919 he founded the Communist, or Third, International (International, Third). This International accepted the affiliation only of parties that accepted its decisions as binding, imposed iron discipline, and made a clean break with the Second International. In sum, Lenin now held up the Russian Communist Party, the only party that had made a successful revolution, as the model for Communist parties in all countries. One result of this policy was to engender a split in the world labour movement between the adherents of the two internationals.

      The Communist International scored its greatest success in the colonial world. By championing the rights of the peoples in the colonies and semi-colonies to self-determination and independence, the International won considerable sympathy for Communism. Lenin's policy in this question still reverberates through the world today. And it offers another example of Lenin's unique ability to find allies where revolutionaries had not found them before. By taking the side of the national liberation movements, Lenin could claim that the overwhelming majority of the world's population, then living under imperialist rule, as well as the European proletariat, were the natural allies of the Bolshevik Revolution.

      Thus Lenin's revolutionary genius was not confined to his ability to divide his enemies; more important was his skill in finding allies and friends for the exiguous proletariat of Russia. First, he won the Russian peasants to the side of the proletariat. Second, while he did not win the workers to make successful Communist revolutions in the West, they did compel their governments to curtail armed intervention against the Bolshevik Revolution. Third, while the Asian revolutions barely stirred in his lifetime, they did strengthen the Soviet Communists in the belief that they were not alone in a hostile world.

      By 1921 Lenin's government had crushed all opposition parties on the grounds that they had opposed or failed to support sufficiently the Soviet cause in the Civil War. Now that peace had come, Lenin believed that their opposition was more dangerous than ever, since the peasantry and even a large section of the working class had become disaffected with the Soviet regime. To repress opponents of Bolshevism, Lenin demanded the harshest measures, including “show” trials and frequent resort to the death penalty. Moreover, he insisted on even tighter control over dissent within the party. Lenin's insistence on merciless destruction of the opposition to the Bolshevik dictatorship subsequently led many observers to conclude that Lenin, though personally opposed to one-man rule, nevertheless unwittingly cleared the way for the rise of Joseph Stalin (Stalin, Joseph)'s dictatorship.

      By 1922 Lenin had become keenly aware that degeneration of the Soviet system and party was the greatest danger to the cause of Socialism in Russia. He found the party and Soviet state apparatus hopelessly entangled in red tape and incompetence. Even the agency headed by Stalin that was responsible for streamlining administration was, in fact, less efficient than the rest of the government. The Soviets of Workers' and Peasants' Deputies had been drained of all power, which had flowed to the centre. Most disturbing was the Great Russian chauvinism that leading Bolsheviks manifested toward the non-Russian nationalities in the reorganization of the state in which Stalin was playing a key role. Moreover, in April 1922 Stalin won appointment as general secretary of the party, in which post he was rapidly concentrating immense power in his hands. Soviet Russia in Lenin's last years could not have been more remote from the picture of Socialism he had portrayed in State and Revolution. Lenin strained every nerve to reverse these trends, which he regarded as antithetical to Socialism, and to replace Stalin.

Illness and death

      In the spring of 1922, however, Lenin fell seriously ill. In April his doctors extracted from his neck one of the bullets he had received from the assassin's gun in August 1918. He recovered rapidly from the operation, but a month later he fell ill, partially paralyzed and unable to speak. In June he made a partial recovery and threw himself into the formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the federal system of reorganization he favoured against Stalin's unitary scheme. However, in December he was again incapacitated by semiparalysis. Although no longer the active leader of the state and party, he did muster the strength to dictate several prescient articles and what is called his political “Testament,” dictated to his secretary between Dec. 23, 1922, and Jan. 4, 1923, in which he expressed a great fear for the stability of the party under the leadership of disparate, forceful personalities such as Stalin and Trotsky (Trotsky, Leon). On March 10, 1923, another stroke deprived him of speech. His political activity came to an end. He suffered yet another stroke on the morning of Jan. 21, 1924, and died that evening in the village of Gorki (now known as Gorki Leninskiye).

      The last year of Lenin's political life, when he fought to eradicate abuses of his Socialist ideals and the corruption of power, may well have been his greatest. Whether the history of the Soviet Union would have been fundamentally different had he survived beyond his 54th birthday, no one can say with certainty.

Albert Resis

Major Works

Books

Chto Takoye “Druzya Naroda,” kak oni voyuyut protiv Sotsial-Demokratov? (hectographic editions from 1894, printed from 1920; What the “Friends of the People” Are, and How They Fight the Social-Democrats, 1946); Razvitiye kapitalizma v Rossi (1899; augmented ed., 1908; The Development of Capitalism in Russia, 1956); Chto delat? (1902; What Is To Be Done?, 1929, 1933, 1950, 1963); Shag vperyod, dva shaga nazad (1904; One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, 1941); Dve taktiki Sotsial-Demokraty v demokraticheskoy revolyutsi (1905; Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, 1935, 1947); Agrarny vopros i “Kritiki Marksa” (1908, first chapters already published in periodicals from 1901); Agrarnaya programma Sotsial-Demokratyi v pervoy russkoy revolyutsi 1905–1907 godov (1908, 1917; The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1954); Imperializm, kak noveyshy etap kapitalizma (1917, later retitled Imperializm, kak vysshaya stadiya kapitalizma; Imperialism: The Latest Stage in the Development of Capitalism, 1924; and Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1933, 1939, 1947); Gosudarstvo i revolyutsiya (1917; The State and Revolution, 1919); Proletarskaya revolyutsiya i renegat Kautsky (1918; The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade, 1920); Detskaya bolezn “levizny” v kommunizme (1920; “Left Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, 1920, 1934, 1961).

Marxist periodicals edited or controlled by Lenin

Iskra, 51 numbers (1900–03); Zarya, 4 numbers (1901–02); Vperyod, weekly, 18 numbers (1905); Novaya Zhizn, daily, 28 numbers (1905); Proletary, weekly, 26 numbers (1905); Volna, daily, 25 numbers (1906); Vperyod, daily, 17 numbers (1906); Ekho, daily, 14 numbers (1906); Proletary, 50 numbers (1906–09); Sotsial-Demokrat, 58 numbers (1908–17; wholly Leninist from 1911); Zvezda, at first weekly, then more frequent, 69 numbers (1910–12); Rabochaya Gazeta, 9 numbers (1910–12); Prosveshcheniye, monthly, 31 numbers (1911–14; and 1 final number, 1917); Pravda, daily (1912–14 and from 1917 with numerous changes of name 1913–14 and July–October 1917); Kommunist, 1 double number (1915); Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata, 2 numbers (1916).

Journalism and Party theses:

“O zadachakh proletariata v dannoy revolyutsi” (The April Theses, 1951), “O dvoevlasti,” and “Uroki revolyutsi” (Lessons of the Revolution, 1918), all in Pravda, 1917; “Ocheredniye zadachi Sovietskoy vlasti,” Pravda (1918; The Soviets at Work, 1918; and The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government, 1951).

Additional Reading

The most complete collection of Lenin's works is Polnoe sobranie sochineniĭ, 5th ed., 55 vol. (1958–65), published in Moscow; it is supplemented by his Biograficheskaia khronika, 1870–1924, 13 vol. (1970–85), and Leninskiĭ sbornik, 40 vol. in 31 (1924–85). The Collected Works, 45 vol. (1960–70), is a Soviet English translation of the 4th Russian edition of Lenin's works, enriched by editorial notes from the 5th edition. Selected Works, 3 vol. (1970–71), includes most of the works mentioned in this article and many more. Western publications of Lenin's works in English include The Essentials of Lenin, 2 vol. (1947, reprinted 1973), which follows the Soviet edition; and Robert C. Tucker (ed.), The Lenin Anthology (1975), with interpretive comments.Biographical and critical studies include Robert D. Warth, Lenin (1973), an introductory study; Alfred G. Meyer, Leninism (1957, reprinted 1986), an analysis of Lenin's political philosophy; David Shub, Lenin, rev. ed. (1966, reprinted 1977), a readable and informative biography by a contemporary; Adam B. Ulam, The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia (1965, reissued 1973), a learned political biography; Bertram D. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical History, 4th rev. ed. (1964, reissued 1984), a pioneering combined biography of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, and The Bridge and the Abyss: The Troubled Friendship of Maxim Gorky and V.I. Lenin (1967, reprinted 1983); Nadezhda Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin (1959; originally published in Russian, 1924), reticent, impersonal recollections by Lenin's widow; Leon Trotsky, Lenin: Notes for a Biographer (1971; originally published in Russian, 1924), an appreciation of Lenin of the Iskra period and 1917–18, the periods of Trotsky's closest collaboration with Lenin, and The Young Lenin, trans. from Russian (1972); Nikolay Valentinov, Encounters with Lenin (1968; originally published in Russian, 1953), and The Early Years of Lenin, trans. from Russian (1969), revealing observations on Lenin's personality by a former associate; Dietrich Geyer, Lenin in der Russischen Sozialdemokratie (1962), a scholarly study of Lenin and the origins of the Bolshevik-Menshevik split; Leonard Schapiro and Peter Reddaway (eds.), Lenin: The Man, the Theorist, the Leader: A Reappraisal (1967, reissued 1987), a collection of essays; Angelica Balabanoff, Impressions of Lenin (1964), by the first secretary of the Communist International; and Robert Service, Lenin: A Political Life, 3 vol. (1985–95).Lenin is the subject of many historical studies, including Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (1990), and Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (1993), the latter partly based on new archival sources; Harold Shukman, Lenin and the Russian Revolution (1967, reissued 1977); Harold Shukman and George Katkov, Lenin's Path to Power: Bolshevism and the Destiny of Russia (1971); Helmut Gruber, International Communism in the Era of Lenin: A Documentary History (1967, reissued 1972), with interpretive essays; Branko Lazitch and Milorad M. Drachkovitch, Lenin and the Comintern (1972); Alfred Rosmer, Lenin's Moscow (1971, reissued 1987; also published as Moscow Under Lenin, 1972; originally published in French, 1953), an insider's account of the period 1920–24, exploring the role of the party in the international Communist movement; Michael Pearson, The Sealed Train (1975, reissued 1989), an account of Lenin's associations with Germany and of the Russian Revolution; T.H. Rigby, Lenin's Government: Sovnarkom, 1917–1922 (1979); and Hélène Carrère D'encausse, Lenin: Revolution and Power (1982; originally published in French, 1979), a study of economic, social, political, and ideological issues. Esther Kingston-Mann, Lenin and the Problem of Marxist Peasant Revolution (1983), emphasizes the role of the peasants in the Russian Revolution. Lenin's influence on the Bolsheviks as well as their differences are addressed in Robert C. Williams, The Other Bolsheviks: Lenin and His Critics, 1904–1914 (1986). R. Craig Nation, War on War: Lenin, the Zimmerwald Left, and the Origins of Communist Internationalism (1989), explores Lenin's part in the beginnings of Communism in the 20th century.Interpretive studies of Lenin and Leninism include Georg Lukács, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought (1971; originally published in German, 1924), an evaluation by a Hungarian Marxist philosopher; David Lane, Leninism: A Sociological Interpretation (1981); Alain Besançon, The Rise of the Gulag: Intellectual Origins of Leninism (1981; originally published in French, 1977); Neil Harding, Lenin's Political Thought, 2 vol. (1977–81); Stanley W. Page, The Geopolitics of Leninism (1982), a critical look at Lenin's politics; and A.J. Polan, Lenin and the End of Politics (1984), an analysis of Lenin's politics and influence. Official Soviet interpretation of Lenin's role is provided by Boris N. Ponomarev, Lenin and the Revolutionary Process, trans. from Russian (1980). Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!: The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (1983), explores the veneration of Lenin. Further references can be found in David R. Egan, Melinda A. Egan, and Julie Anne Genthner, V.I. Lenin: An Annotated Bibliography of English-Language Sources to 1980 (1982).

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