Vladimir Lenin
I | INTRODUCTION |
Vladimir
Lenin (1870-1924), Russian revolutionary leader and theorist, who
presided over the first government of Soviet Russia and then that of the Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Lenin was the leader of the radical
socialist Bolshevik Party (later renamed the Communist Party), which seized
power in the October phase of the Russian Revolution of 1917. After the
revolution, Lenin headed the new Soviet government that formed in Russia. He
became the leader of the USSR upon its founding in 1922. Lenin held the highest
post in the Soviet government until his death in 1924, when Joseph Stalin
assumed power.
II | EARLY YEARS |
Lenin was born Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov in the
city of Simbirsk ( now Ul’yanovsk) in central European Russia. (He adopted the
pseudonym Lenin, probably derived from the river Lena in Siberia, while doing
secret work as a revolutionary.) He was the third of six children born to Ilya
Nikolayevich Ulyanov and Maria Alexandrovna Blank. Ilya Ulyanov was the director
of public education for the province of Simbirsk during Lenin’s childhood, and
his service to the state earned him the title of hereditary nobleman. While
Lenin was finishing school in Simbirsk in 1887, his older brother, Aleksandr,
was arrested and executed in Saint Petersburg (then the capital of Russia) for
his involvement in a conspiracy to assassinate Russian emperor Alexander III.
Later that year Lenin entered Kazan’ University (now Kazan’ State University),
where he intended to study law. Before completing his first term at the
university, however, Lenin was expelled for his involvement in a student
demonstration. He settled on his mother’s estate in the village of Kokushkino
and pursued his study of law as an external student of Saint Petersburg
University (now Saint Petersburg State University).
While living on the estate, Lenin began to
immerse himself in the radical political literature of the time. A particular
favorite was the novel What Is To Be Done? (1863), by Russian writer
Nikolay Chernyshevsky. One of the novel’s main characters, a man named
Rakhmetev, lived a life of extreme self-discipline and single-minded focus on
revolutionary politics. Rakhmetev served as a model for Lenin, and it was
largely these ideals of the Russian revolutionary tradition—which glorified
political action and a life fully committed to the cause of revolutionary
political change—that shaped Lenin’s political personality. Also about this
time, Lenin became acquainted with the revolutionary ideas of German philosopher
Karl Marx through Marx’s greatest work, Das Kapital (published in
three volumes from 1867 to 1895). Marx’s ideas had a profound impact on Lenin,
and he soon came to consider himself a Marxist.
Lenin received his law degree in 1892. He
moved to the city of Samara and took a position as a lawyer’s assistant. Lenin’s
earlier brush with the authorities limited his prospects as a lawyer, however,
and he soon began channeling his ambitions into revolutionary politics. In the
mid-1890s Lenin quit his law practice in Samara and settled in Saint Petersburg.
There he became associated with a group of radicals who were similarly impressed
by the ideas of Marx and the influential Russian Marxist Georgy Plekhanov.
III | ORGANIZER |
The Marxist activists of Saint Petersburg,
with Lenin prominent among them, began working with the industrial workers of
the city to increase the workers’ awareness of their political and economic
power. Although labor unions were outlawed in Russia at the time, the Marxists
agitated and distributed political literature in the industrial districts of the
city. They also attempted to help organize strikes to improve working conditions
in the factories. In 1895 the Saint Petersburg Marxists formed an organization
called the Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class to
continue these efforts. The union’s central organizers included Lenin and Yuly
Martov, a young Marxist who would later become one of Lenin’s great rivals. The
small group of intellectuals that formed the union also included Nadezhda
Krupskaya, Lenin’s future wife and lifelong companion. Lenin and Krupskaya did
not have any children.
The Saint Petersburg union was short-lived.
Lenin and Martov were arrested by the state police shortly after the union’s
formation, and further arrests eventually drew in more than 50 of the Saint
Petersburg Marxists. After serving 15 months in prison, Lenin was sentenced in
1897 to three years of exile, which he spent in the southern Siberian region of
Minusinsk, in the village of Shushenskoye. Krupskaya was sentenced to exile for
a later incident; in order to be together the couple decided to marry, which
they did in 1898. The period of exile was not a difficult one for Lenin and
Krupskaya. Much of their time was spent reading and writing, and they were also
able to earn some money by translating English and German works into Russian. It
was during this period in Siberia that Lenin produced his first major work,
The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), in which he attempted to
apply the lessons of Marx to the circumstances characterizing Russian society.
In the book, Lenin argued that despite its economic backwardness relative to
many Western European nations, Russia fit the Marxist model of a capitalist
society. While Marx saw the basis for revolution in the struggle between
industrial capitalists and workers, Lenin saw a parallel struggle within the
Russian peasantry, which he saw as divided into a small wealthy class and a
larger impoverished class. For this reason, Lenin believed that Russia was ready
for a revolution led by the lower classes—a revolution that would result in the
overthrow of the imperial regime and the establishment of a socialist economy
and state.
Lenin’s term of exile ended in 1900 and he
made his way abroad, first going to Switzerland and then settling in Munich,
Germany, where he was joined one year later by Krupskaya. Together with other
like-minded Marxists, including Martov and Plekhanov, Lenin became one of the
principal editors of the newspaper Iskra (The Spark), first published in
Munich in December 1900. The newspaper’s aim was to bring together the Marxist
groups scattered throughout Europe, particularly Russia, and to focus them on
preparing for the overthrow of the imperial government rather than spending most
of their time working for incremental reforms.
While many Marxists in Western
Europe—primarily in Germany—had come to favor the strategy of pursuing socialist
goals as a legal political party, the Iskra editors considered such an
approach a betrayal of the ultimate commitment to socialist revolution. In his
Iskra articles, Lenin repeatedly emphasized the need for radical thinking
and political activism. He also developed strong views about how an underground
Russian revolutionary party should be organized. In 1902 Lenin published a
pamphlet in which he argued that the revolution should be led by a party of
professional revolutionaries, organized in a disciplined, military-style
fashion, who would lead the working masses to an inevitable victory over
imperial rule. Lenin titled his pamphlet What Is To Be Done?, echoing the
title of Chernyshevsky’s influential novel.
The implications of Lenin’s vision for the
Russian Marxists became evident at the Second Congress of the Russian Social
Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), held in 1903. (The First Congress, held in 1898,
ended shortly after it convened when most of the delegates were arrested). At
this meeting, Lenin and his colleagues debated the issue of party organization
and membership. Lenin argued for a tightly organized party, limited in number,
with its members actively engaged in organizational work. Other party members,
including Martov, opposed this view, arguing that the party should be organized
more loosely and should extend membership to anyone who accepted its program. A
vote was held on the issue, and Lenin’s side narrowly won. As a result, two
factions emerged within the RSDLP: the Bolsheviks (from the Russian word for
“majority”), led by Lenin, and the Mensheviks (from the word for “minority”),
led by Martov. Lenin would spend much of the next few years attacking the
Mensheviks and defining his vision of the modern revolutionary party.
IV | REVOLUTIONARY LEADER |
During the period of his work on
Iskra (1900-1903) and a second newspaper, Vperyod (Forward), begun
in 1904, Lenin established himself as the unofficial leader of the RSDLP.
However, he was still living abroad and thus was dependent upon intermediaries
for information about developments in Russia. In 1904 Russia went to war with
Japan (see Russo-Japanese War). A string of military defeats and the
strains placed on society by the war made for a tense atmosphere in Saint
Petersburg, and by the beginning of 1905 various segments of Russian society,
including students and liberal members of the nobility, were calling for
political reform. When an unarmed crowd of workers marched to the city’s Winter
Palace on January 9 (or January 22, in the Western, or New Style, calendar) to
submit a petition to Emperor Nicholas II, security forces fired on the crowd,
killing or wounding several hundred marchers (see Bloody Sunday). The
crackdown resulted in further strikes and demonstrations throughout the country,
beginning the crisis that would become known as the Russian Revolution of
1905.
In October 1905 the emperor issued his
October Manifesto, in which he made a number of political concessions, including
a commitment to establish a popularly elected legislative assembly called the
Duma. Lenin did not return to Russia until November—when the emperor proclaimed
an amnesty for all political exiles living abroad—and did not play a significant
role in the events of the revolution. By the end of 1905 the imperial government
had restored order in Saint Petersburg, and by mid-1906 the government had
reasserted complete control over the country. In April 1906 the numerous
factions of the RSDLP (not only the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks but various ethnic
and national affiliates as well) met in Stockholm, Sweden, for the Fourth Party
Congress (the so-called Unity Congress). At the meeting, the RSDLP resolved to
support elections to the new Duma, despite the party’s commitment to the
objective of revolution. Lenin opposed this resolution, demanding no less than
the complete overthrow of the monarchy.
In December 1907 Lenin began his second
extended stay in Western Europe, settling first in Geneva, Switzerland, and then
in Paris. While the disagreements that divided his Bolsheviks from the Menshevik
faction continued, both sides were also experiencing internal turmoil resulting
from a decline in membership. In 1912 Lenin and his supporters organized a party
conference in Prague. At this conference, Lenin formally broke from his
Menshevik opponents and the rest of the RSDLP to form an independent Bolshevik
Party.
Lenin settled again in Switzerland, where he
spent the initial years of World War I (1914-1918). The war inspired one of
Lenin’s most influential works, titled Imperialism, The Highest Stage of
Capitalism (1916). In this book, Lenin argued that the world war was an
inevitable outcome of Western capitalism and imperialism, whereby the capitalist
states of Europe had come to rely upon aggressive foreign expansion in order to
maintain economic profits. Lenin was convinced that the war signaled the final
decline of the worldwide capitalist economy and thus was bringing nearer the
socialist revolution. He declared himself a “defeatist,” arguing that imperial
Russia’s defeat in the war would be the surest means of bringing about
revolution in Russia. In advocating Russia’s defeat in World War I, Lenin found
himself very much alone among his fellow Russian Marxists, for whom the war had
aroused a fair measure of patriotism.
The pressures that the war inflicted on the
Russian state eventually produced a second crisis for the imperial government.
In late February 1917 (March, New Style), riots broke out in Saint Petersburg
(which had been renamed Petrograd in 1914). The riots intensified rapidly,
prompting the formation of an emergency committee of the Duma. The committee,
composed of liberal politicians, assumed formal governmental powers and declared
itself the Provisional Government of Russia on March 1. The other important
political body that surfaced at this time was the Petrograd Soviet (Council) of
Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, an organization composed of elected deputies
representing the city’s workers and soldiers. (The soviet had formed during the
1905 revolution but then had been outlawed by the imperial government.) On March
2 the emperor abdicated and the Russian monarchy effectively collapsed.
Meanwhile, the revolution spread throughout Russia, resulting in the formation
of numerous other soviets.
At this time, Lenin was in Zurich,
Switzerland, separated from Russia by the front lines of the war. Lenin was
convinced that the revolution must not stop with the assumption of power by the
liberal Provisional Government. Instead, he believed it must proceed directly to
the final stage of revolution according to Marxist theory: the creation of a
“dictatorship of the proletariat”—that is, a government ruling on behalf of
Russia’s industrial workers and peasants. Lenin was determined to return to
Russia to incite further developments in the revolutionary movement and his own
Bolshevik Party. His efforts to return home were thwarted by the French and
Italian governments, which refused to let him pass through their countries
because they feared that his presence in Russia would threaten the Allied war
effort. However, Lenin received assistance from the German authorities, who
hoped that his return would promote further political unrest in Russia and
thereby help Germany win the war. The Germans sent Lenin to Petrograd in a
famous sealed train that ensured his safety as he crossed through Germany,
Sweden, and Finland. He arrived in his country’s capital in early April.
Almost immediately after arriving in
Petrograd, Lenin issued his famous “April Theses,” in which he argued that the
Bolshevik Party must struggle relentlessly to subvert the Provisional Government
and must make preparations for an eventual assumption of power by the soviets.
In July Lenin was implicated in an abortive armed uprising in Petrograd and was
forced to leave the Russian capital for Finland. The objective of seizing power
by force remained primary in Lenin’s mind, however, and from his exiled post he
agitated ceaselessly for an armed uprising. During his exile in Finland, Lenin
also formulated his ideas about socialist government in the famous pamphlet
State and Revolution (1918).
Lenin returned to Petrograd in October and
continued his demands for an armed uprising. By the end of the month, he finally
succeeded in convincing a majority of the Bolshevik Party to favor a seizure of
power in the name of—but not by—the soviets. In late October (November, New
Style), armed workers, soldiers, and sailors stormed Petrograd’s Winter Palace,
the headquarters of the Provisional Government, and arrested members of the
government. The second Congress of Soviets, which convened the same day,
proclaimed Soviet power.
V | SOVIET LEADER |
With the support of another radical party,
the Left Socialist Revolutionaries (Left SRs; a splinter group of the more
moderate Socialist Revolutionaries), Lenin’s Bolsheviks formed a coalition
government headed by the Council of People’s Commissars, of which Lenin was the
chairman. The first act of the new government was to issue two decrees: The
first decree called for an immediate end to the war in Europe, and the second
called for the nationalization of Russian land and authorized the Russian
peasantry to forcibly confiscate privately owned lands. The new Soviet
government had little popular authority, and few observers believed that it
would last, especially given the chaotic atmosphere created by the ongoing world
war. Desperate to make conditions more favorable for the new government, Lenin
began pushing for peace negotiations with the Germans. On March 3, 1918, the
German and Soviet governments signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, in which the
Soviet government ceded to Germany a vast amount of Russian territory,
containing about one-third of Russia’s population, one-third of its cultivated
land, and one-half of its industry. Although Lenin was convinced that these
harsh terms must be accepted in order to end Russia’s involvement in the war,
the treaty was widely unpopular, even within the Soviet government. It
contributed to a split between the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs in 1918, which
left Lenin and the Bolsheviks in sole control of the Soviet government. World
War I continued until November of that year.
In March 1918 the Bolsheviks renamed
themselves the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik). That summer, former officers
of the imperial military, as well as political figures who had been deposed in
the Bolshevik seizure of power, began to form anti-Bolshevik armies in southern
Russia and Siberia. Called the White armies, these groups strongly opposed the
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and the antidemocratic seizure of power by the Bolshevik
Party (see White Russians). The Whites were supported by the World War I
Allies, who believed that their victory over Germany depended on Russia
rejoining the Allied cause. Meanwhile, the Soviet government began to organize
its own military force, the Red Army, under the direction of Lenin’s longtime
associate Leon Trotsky. In August 1918 Lenin was seriously wounded by two
bullets in an assassination attempt carried out by a political opponent. His
strong recovery from the wounds, and his quick return to work, did much to
contribute to the “cult” of Lenin as a Christlike figure who could perform
miracles.
From 1918 to 1921 Russia was torn by a civil
war between the White armies and the Red Army of the Soviet government (see
Russian Civil War). In the summer of 1918 the Soviet government, under
Lenin’s leadership, launched the Red Terror, a brutal campaign aimed at
eliminating political opponents among the civilian population. The government
also introduced a series of economic policies in an effort to put socialist
principles into practice and to respond to Russia’s pressing economic needs. As
part of this program, which came to be known as War Communism, the government
began forcibly seizing grain and other food products from the peasantry in order
to increase the supply of food to army troops and workers in the cities. In
urban areas, factories were nationalized and workers were subject to strict
discipline.
While contending with civil war and economic
upheaval at home, Lenin also turned his attention to the international arena. In
March 1919 he organized the Third International, popularly known as the
Communist International, or Comintern, to promote world revolution according to
the Russian Communist model. The Comintern initially focused on Europe as the
center for the future revolution. However, when a European upheaval failed to
materialize, the Comintern shifted its attention to Asia, where it supported the
cause of colonial peoples struggling against European imperialism.
The policies of War Communism led to
significant declines in Russia’s agricultural and industrial output. Widespread
strikes and uprisings broke out in cities and rural areas, and by early 1921
mass unrest was threatening the stability of the Soviet government. At the Tenth
Congress of the Russian Communist Party, held in March, Lenin introduced a
policy of economic liberalization known as the New Economic Policy (NEP). The
policy signified a temporary retreat from Lenin’s goal of transforming the
Soviet economy into a fully Communist one.
In May 1922 Lenin suffered a stroke. He
recovered and resumed work three months later, but then in December he suffered
a second stroke and it became apparent that his health was in serious decline.
That month the Soviet government declared the establishment of the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), a federal union consisting of Soviet Russia
and neighboring areas that were under Russian military occupation or ruled by
branches of the Communist movement. Lenin became preoccupied with how the new
USSR would be governed after his death. He favored a collective leadership to
succeed him and was particularly concerned about the political infighting that
had come to divide the party leadership and the Soviet government. In late 1922
and early 1923 Lenin dictated what became known as his “testament,” in which he
expressed regret at the direction the Soviet government had taken, with
particular emphasis on its dictatorial manner and its complex bureaucracy. He
singled out Joseph Stalin, then general secretary of the Communist Party, as the
main culprit in many of these trends. Stalin’s aggressive behavior had brought
him into conflict with the ailing Lenin.
In March 1923 Lenin suffered a third stroke
that deprived him of his ability to speak. A fourth and fatal stroke occurred in
January 1924, while Lenin was attempting to recuperate at his villa outside
Moscow. Lenin’s death occasioned a bitter struggle for power among members of
the Soviet leadership, principally between Stalin and Trotsky. Ultimately,
Stalin emerged as the supreme leader of the Communist Party and the USSR.
Although Lenin had wished to be buried
alongside his mother in Petrograd, Stalin insisted that Lenin’s body be
preserved in a mausoleum for public display. Lenin’s body was embalmed, and in
August 1924 the V. I. Lenin Mausoleum opened in Moscow’s Red Square (it was
subsequently rebuilt in 1930). After Lenin’s death, Petrograd was renamed
Leningrad in his honor. It kept that name until 1991, when the Soviet Communist
government collapsed and the city was renamed Saint Petersburg.
VI | EVALUATION |
Lenin was one of the foremost revolutionary
leaders of the 20th century. As a politician, he was characterized by remarkable
determination, ruthlessness, and sometimes cruelty. Although it was Lenin’s
clarity of vision that ultimately guided the Bolsheviks to power, his vision for
the future of Russia and the USSR was less clear. Lenin was more successful as a
revolutionary leader than as a statesman, and his legacy would contribute to the
political and ideological divisions that characterized the Soviet leadership in
the 1920s. Lenin’s greatest achievements were those attained in struggle—such as
in the Bolsheviks’ bid for power in 1917 and their effort to preserve their
authority during the civil war. His leadership, and his conception of the
revolutionary party as a disciplined, military-style organization, served as an
important model for later revolutionary leaders of the 20th century, such as Mao
Zedong of China and Fidel Castro of Cuba. Lenin was also one of the leading
Russian writers and thinkers of the period, and his works made important
contributions to the development of revolutionary socialist theory.
No comments:
Post a Comment