Some notes on Lenin

Lenin (to the left - where else)
at the age of three

Both friend and foe alike paint Lenin as a fanaticized Marxist dogmatic. He was the purest of the pure. The friends believe that his theories are eternal and worthy of constant study and contemplation. 

And then there´s the real Vladimir Ilyich, the Lenin who was so tactically flexible that most of his latter-day admirers (both Marxist-Leninist and Trotskyist) would probably jump from a bridge rather than hear the truth about it...

This was the Lenin who had no problem working with Orthodox Old Believers, Estonian nationalists and Protestant sects. The Lenin who took money from capitalists to arm revolutionary workers, who called for a vote for the liberal Cadet party, who wanted party unity with the Mensheviks, sent Stalin to rob banks, was willing to promote a peaceful transfer of power to the soviets, and stole the program of the SRs on the peasant question. He also recieved payments from the Germans, but you´re not supposed to say that. Anti-imperialist united fronts with Young Turks, slightly older Turks, and Iranian mullahs were also part of the deal. And, I believe, the KMT. Not to mention Zionists. 

Small wonder Nikolai Lenin called his slogan "for a workers´ and farmers´ government" algebraic! 

Don´t get me wrong. Lenin´s goal was absolutely a Bolshevik ("socialist" or "proletarian") revolution in Russia, and the establishment of a Communist regime with a planned economy, and so on. This in sharp contrast to many later "Stalinists". However, Lenin was willing to strike almost any deal to get to that goal. It was precisely this combination of hardline dogmatism and tactical flexibility that made the man so dangerous! Lenin was, to re-coin a phrase, a revolutionary realist. And no, he didn´t *really* have a "theory" about it. I suspect Lenin´s theories were worked out in the heat of the moment, as products of his praxis. The scholastic BS about "permanent revolution" (for or against) was alien to the mentality of Lenin. 

"Everyone" agrees that of course the Bolsheviks made various tactical adjustments and concessions *after* the revolution. What makes you think they didn´t maneouvre already *before* the revolution? Do you think the Bolshies were some kind of purist sect or a mutual admiration society? 

Lenin was the undisputed leader of the Bolsheviks, and a master of stick-bending. He didn´t respect the rules of democratic centralism, but flaunted them constantly. At several points, Lenin threteaned to resign in order to pressure his comrades to accept some unpopular proposal of his. This kind of move was later *expressly forbidden* in the Communist International (and therefore every CP in the world). Lenin was therefore an example of leadership by a star, a genius, a man of action standing taller than even his own selected leadership team. He was everything the Bergsonians and Sorelians dreamed of being, but never really accomplished.

The really interesting question is this: was Lenin an inevitable product of the material circumstances, a product of the inexorable course of History towards socialism and communism? That would be the Marxist understanding. Or was his appearance contingent? Would there have been a revolution in Russia even without Lenin? Of course. But would it have succeeded? That is much less clear. Maybe it wouldn´t have. And that thought is staggering. *What if all of world history would have been different if Lenin had died of pneumonia circa 1900?* 

Maybe. And then maybe not, since Russia constantly oscillates between periods of anarchy and periods of autocracy. The Communist regime was a product of the former that morphed into the latter. Perhaps that is a more "Chinese" thing than a Russian thing, but it´s not entirely off topic either. So perhaps some kind of "Lenin" (and some kind of "Stalin") would have appeared anyway. That the Messianic creed that temporarily caught the imagination of the Russian "dark masses" was a secular one, is perhaps more contingent. Had revolutionary Marxism not been available, I´m sure some kind of Slavic nationalism or Christian-sectarian millenarianism would have arosen to fill the vacuum. Or even anarchism. 

Sure wonder how the Western litarati would have responded to that one...