Russian revolutionary, Lenin is one of the leaders of the Russian Revolution of 1917 which saw the victory of the Bolshevik Party and, in 1922, the creation of the USSR. An intransigent follower of Marxism and revolutionary action, he theorized during his exile the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat as an intermediate stage in reaching communism. Convinced that a revolution was possible in Russia then engaged in the First World War, he prepared and led the October 1917 revolution. At the head of the government, he imposed peace with Germany at the cost of immense concessions territories and work towards the establishment of a new totalitarian type state:the Soviet Union.
Lenin's youth
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known as Lenin, was born in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk) on April 22, 1870. From a middle-class family, he was the son of Simbirsk government school inspector. His brother, Alexander, who was part of the populist group Narodnaia Volia and participated in revolutionary plots, was to be hanged in 1887, following an assassination attempt on Alexander III. This family drama undoubtedly contributed to Lenin's revolutionary vocation. Having come to study law in Kazan, he too became an activist and was expelled from the university after a few months (Dec. 1887). It was in Saint Petersburg that he took his exams (1891). The era of populism was now over, and it was to Marxism, which Plekhanov had made himself the introducer in Russia, that the young Ulyanov immediately turned.
Settling in 1893 in Saint Petersburg, he studied in depth the doctrine of Karl Marx, to which he had to refer constantly throughout his life, seeking, in all circumstances, arguments and quotations likely to confirm his theses. His temperament led him towards the problems of revolutionary practice and tactics. Very early on he challenged the optimistic illusions in which so many Russian socialists of the 1890s delighted; he never considered that the revolution could emerge spontaneously from the masses through the virtues of propaganda alone.
He organized around 1895 one of the first social-democratic circles in the Russian capital, the Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class, but he was arrested (December 21, 1895 ), spent more than a year in prison and was deported to Siberia. It was there that he married a militant revolutionary, Nadezhda Krupskaya (July 22, 1898), and wrote one of his main works, The Development of Capitalism in Russia .
The exile of a revolutionary leader
Having finished his sentence in Siberia, he voluntarily went into exile in July 1900, stayed in Germany, in Pans, in London, but especially in Switzerland. In Munich, in December 1900, he published the first issue of his newspaper, Ylskra (The Spark), then he wrote his pamphlet, What to do? in 1902, in which he clarified his conception of revolutionary tactics:he called for a break with “primitivism”, that is to say with the practice of isolated circles, withdrawn into themselves. In opposition to the majority of the Social Democrats, he endeavored to show that a socialist revolution was possible without further delay in Russia provided that it was prepared and led by a restricted, centralized and disciplined party of "professional revolutionaries", and that, contrary to Marx's perspectives, the alliance of workers and peasant masses was achieved.
The Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, held in London from July 30 to August 23, 1903, was to mark a decisive turning point in the life of Lenin (he had adopted this pseudonym at the end of 1901) and in History of the revolutionary movement. Taking advantage of the fact that several of his opponents had already left the congress, Lenin imposed his views with accuracy:his supporters therefore took the name of Bolsheviks (“majority”, but they remained in fact a minority in the party), while his opponents , the Mensheviks ("minorities"), led by Axelrod and Martov, continued to maintain that the socialist revolution must inevitably be preceded by a bourgeois-democratic revolution. Lenin fought this thesis by emphasizing the role that the peasantry should play in the future Russian revolution.
Lenin's political project
This Leninist idea of the alliance of workers and peasants provided an important corrective to the perspectives put forward by Marx in the past:it allowed Russia to make its revolution before capitalism had reached, in this country, its full development; it also made it possible to exclude the support of the bourgeoisie. The revolutionaries were to exploit peasant aspirations to the division of land (Bolshevik Congress in London, April–May 1905) to establish a “revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry”. This term "dictatorship of the proletariat", which Marx and Engels had already used, but leaving it vague, Lenin was to give to it a concrete content, in the light of the failure of the 1905 revolution, in which, although that he had returned to Russia in November 1905, he himself did not take a significant share.
He hoped that the revolution would spread to the countryside and that the close alliance of the working proletariat and the peasantry would isolate the liberal bourgeoisie. But the peasants, still attached to tsarist power, remained passive. This failure immediately contradicted the views of Lenin, whom the Mensheviks accused of being a utopian.
Lenin had to agree to reunification with the Mensheviks (Stockholm Congress, April-May 1906), and, with the support of the Polish and Latvian socialists and the Jewish Bund, he obtained a small majority at the Fifth Social Democratic Congress (London, May-June 1907). During this period, Lenin fought both against "Otzovism", which wanted to renounce all possibilities of legal action, and against "liquidationism", which on the contrary claimed to completely abandon illegal and clandestine action. In December 1907, Lenin returned to exile, where he remained for ten years, until the revolution of 1917. It was again in Switzerland that he made his main stay. In 1912, at the Prague conference, he finally broke with the Mensheviks and organized his own party.
When the First World War began, he was deeply disappointed by the attitude of the various socialist parties, which, in their respective countries, rallied to the "Sacred Union". For his part, he called for revolution in the face of the enemy, and he analyzed the economic causes of the conflict in Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism . The war finished dividing the Russian socialists:while the tsarist government, in the name of national defence, attacked the Bolshevik party in Russia and arrested almost all the members of the central committee as well as the Bolshevik deputies in the Duma, Plekhanov joined the Sacred Union. Emigrants, Lenin and Zinoviev kept their freedom of action and led a fiery defeatist propaganda. They took part, with Trotsky, in the conferences of pacifist socialists organized in Zimmerwald (September 1915) and Kienthal (April 1916).
Lenin's return to Russia
It was in Switzerland, in Zurich, that Lenin heard the news of the revolution of February 1917. He addressed to his comrades in Russia, to encourage them, his Letters from afar and he sought the means of returning to Russia. Thanks to the steps taken by Swiss socialists, the German imperial government, which expected the collapse of its Russian adversary from the revolution, agreed to let the Bolsheviks — Lenin and his wife, Zinoviev, Radek — pass through its territory in a sealed wagon. Via Sweden and Finland, Lenin then reached Petrograd, where he made a triumphant arrival on April 16, 1917.
He published his "April Theses which disturbed the Bolsheviks themselves by their radicalism:Lenin refused to collaborate with the provisional government, he advocated immediate peace, fraternization with the German soldiers, the absolute exercise of power by the soviets, the taking hands of the factories by the workers, of the land by the peasants. After the troubles of July 1917, Kerensky, who had become Prime Minister in place of Prince Lvov, ordered the arrest of Lenin, who had to take refuge in hiding in Finland.
He then wrote The State and the Revolution, where, going beyond the immediate problems, he finished defining his "dictatorship of the proletariat":without renouncing the ultimate horizon of a classless society where all constraint would disappear, along with the state itself, he insisted on the need for a transitional phase which would consolidate the revolution by replacing the "bourgeois state" with the state of the "proletariat armed and organized as a class leader”. Like any state, the proletarian state, according to Lenin, is “a machine organized for the oppression of one class by another class”; its mission is to eliminate the old ruling classes.
October Revolution and founding of the USSR
Returning from Finland in October 1917, Lenin saw the failure of the bourgeois revolution. Russia no longer having the choice between the military dictatorship (Komilov sedition, September 1917) and that of the soviets, the Bolsheviks had to seize their chance without delay. Despite the reluctance of Trotsky and the opposition of Zinoniev and Kamenev, Lenin had the Central Committee decide on the immediate preparation of the insurrection. This broke out on November 7, 1917. During the hours of the battle, Lenin maintained an impressive calm, already fully focused on the problems of building the new regime. Appointed the day after the revolution as President of the Council of People's Commissars, he immediately issued four decrees, announcing immediate peace and the collectivization of the land, bringing industrial enterprises under workers' control and recognizing the nationalities of the Russian Empire the right to decide their fate.
Resolved to use force to maintain the "dictatorship of the proletariat", he smashed all legal opposition with a blow of state by dissolving, after a single session, the Constituent Assembly, where the Bolsheviks, despite the October Revolution, were a very small minority (January 1918). He applied terror to the counter-revolutionary elements and crushed the socialist-revolutionary movement.
In the economic field, he was forced by the facts to temporary compromises:"war communism", which, by carrying out a too hasty socialization, had finished ruining the Russia and provoked serious unrest (Kronstadt mutiny, February-March 1921), was replaced in March 1921 by a "new economic policy" (NEP). This, through a partial return to private property and capitalist modes of production, was to allow, from 1922, a recovery in production. He thus inaugurated the opportunism which his successor, Joseph Stalin, was to make the principle of his domestic and foreign policy.
A first stroke on May 25, 1922 forced him to considerably reduce his activity, while a second stroke on December 16 left him half paralyzed. However, he recovered a little and continued to work. It was in the small country house where he lived with his wife near Moscow, in Gorki, that a last attack struck him down on January 21, 1924, at the age of fifty-three. His embalmed body is still on display in a mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square, one of the few symbols of the Soviet era that has not yet been destroyed.
The posterity of Leninism
Leader of the USSR until his death, Lenin was the soul of the Bolshevik revolution. His responsibility for the future development of communism is the subject of debate:certainly Lenin would undoubtedly have condemned the Stalinist dictatorship, but he also contributed to preparing it by the intransigence he showed in his call for the class struggle, often in defiance of the universal values. Lenin was not a great philosopher but a brilliant thinker and revolutionary strategist whose clear-sighted realism enabled the Bolsheviks to seize power and keep it. Lucid, Lenin judged his work. He measured its scope and achievements, but he also saw the dangers to come, trying to mitigate them by repeatedly changing the course of his policy.
He offered no solution on how to build a workers state in a predominantly peasant society. Its interpreters and critics have divided judgments. According to some, there is a clear continuity between the early ideas of Lenin and those of Stalin, which quickly prevailed after the death of the father of the Soviet Union. Other analyzes emphasize the New Pluralist Political Economy, which he advocated at the end of his life. But many agree that Lenin was the most important revolutionary theorist in twentieth-century Europe. Deployed on all levels (international, national, economic and social), Lenin's revolutionary activity was indeed a veritable praxis of the socialist revolution.
Both thinker and actor of the first real experience of revolution inspired by the writings of Marx, pragmatic at the same time as faithful to the principles of historical materialism, Lenin reconciled theory and practice, ideological construction and empiricism. As the Hungarian Marxist philosopher György Lukács said in 1924, “Lenin took the step towards the concretization of Marxism, which had now become quite practical. This is why he is on a world historical scale the only theoretician on a par with Marx that the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat has produced up to today. A convinced internationalist, Lenin enriched Marxism with his analyzes of imperialism and the possibility of extending the revolution to Third World countries.
His system of thought gave rise to the Marxist-Leninist ideology which was adapted in many ways, whether by Stalin who impoverished it for the sole benefit of his personal power , of Mao Zedong who gave it a national and Asian version or of Albania by Enver Hoxha who made it a model of orthodoxy and proletarian dictatorship. But however important one considers the corpus and the potential drifts already latent in 1924 of Marxism-Leninism, Lenin did not make a system of it. The Soviet, Chinese, Cuban or even North Korean examples are never more than epigones, by-products of Lenin's action imagined by those who intended to continue his action.
Bibliography
- Lenin, The Inventor of Totalitarianism, by Stéphane Courtois. Perrin, 2017.
- Lenin:The Permanent Revolution, by Jean-Jacques Marie. Tallandier, 2018.
- Lenin, biography of Hélène Carrère d'Encausse. Plural, 2013.