Lenin
Lenin
Vladimir Il’ich Ul’ianov (who in 1901 began to call himself Lenin) was born on April 22, 1870, in Simbirsk, now Ul’ianovsk, a provincial town on the Volga, one of six children in an educated middle-class family. When he died on January 21, 1924, near Moscow, he was acclaimed as “the greatest genius of mankind, creator of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, founder of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the leader and teacher of the peoples of the whole world.” In different measure the events of his personal life, his intellectual life, and his active political life contributed to this metamorphosis.
His father, of lower middle-class origin, was a graduate of the university in Kazan and for many years taught mathematics and physics in secondary schools in the Volga region. In 1869 he was appointed a school inspector and, shortly afterward, director of the “people’s schools” in Simbirsk province, thus earning the rank of nobleman. Ul’ianov’s mother was a woman of indomitable character. Daughter of a country doctor with little money and a large family, she had received her schooling at home. The boy Vladimir, the second son, was an intelligent and conscientious student, and a good swimmer, skater, and chess player. He was much impressed by his father’s talk of the “darkness” of life in the villages and of the arbitrary treatment of peasants by officials. A voracious reader, Ul’ianov became well acquainted at an early age with the writings of the great Russian authors, from Pushkin through Turgenev to Tolstoi, and was especially interested in the works of Nekrasov; he was also aware of such protorevolutionary writers as Belinskii, Herzen, Chernyshevskii, Pisarev, and Dobroliubov. But there was no hint in these early intellectual activities that he would become a revolutionary.
The first blow to young Ul’ianov’s happy existence was the death of his father in 1886. An even worse shock was the arrest, in March 1887, of his elder brother, Alexander, whose brilliant research on worms at the university in St. Petersburg had promised a bright future but who, unknown to his family, had been active in terrorist revolutionary circles. Alexander was executed for having plotted the assassination of the tsar. The Ul’ianov family, shunned by local society, moved to a village not far from Kazan. Ul’ianov was admitted to the university in Kazan, though only on the strength of a character reference from the director of the Simbirsk Gymnasium, father of Alexander Kerenskii, the man Lenin was later to overthrow.
Ul’ianov was arrested in December 1887 for his part in a student demonstration against a university rule that enjoined students from forming organizations. Expelled from the university and forbidden to go abroad for study, he threw himself into preparation for external examinations and was finally permitted to take these in the spring of 1891, thus winning a first-degree diploma from the law faculty of the university in St. Petersburg. For two years he held a job in a Samara law office; at the same time he was studying Marxism and engaging in open criticism of the narodniki, activities which he continued in St. Petersburg, where he went in 1893 “in quest of the proletariat.” By the spring of 1895 he had become well enough known to be sent by his comrades to visit Georgii Plekhanov, the “grandfather of Russian Marxism,” in Geneva. Before his return he met Paul Lafargue, son-in-law of Karl Marx, and the veteran German Marxist Wilhelm Liebknecht but was unable to see the dying Friedrich Engels.
That fall young Ul’ianov joined with L. Martov (pseudonym of lulii O. Tsederbaum) and a handful of other intellectuals to form the so-called Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, which planned to publish an illegal newspaper, Rabochee delo (“The Workers’ Cause”). The first issue was confiscated, and UFianov was among those arrested. Imprisonment prevented him from participating in the vigorous strike movement of 1896, but with the aid of books borrowed from the leading libraries of the capital he was able to continue his study and writing. In February 1897 he was released to make his arrangements for a three-year period of exile at the Siberian village of Shushenskoe in Yenisei province, near the modern coal basin of Kuznetsk. There he lived in a peasant hut, his main source of income being the government allowance of 8 rubles a month. A year later Nadezhda Krupskaia, whom he had met in St. Petersburg in 1894, arrived with her mother for a visit and was permitted to remain in Siberia on the condition that she and Ul’ianov be formally married.
In Siberia, he continued his feverish literary activity, in particular pursuing his study of the spread of capitalist relations in the peasant villages. Aware of serious gaps in his education, he under-took a systematic study of quite diverse philosophical views, while also broadening his knowledge of the writings of Marx and Engels. He completed his first major work, The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899a), published under the pseudonym Vladimir Il’in. It was at this time also that he read Eduard Bernstein’s Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie (“The Prerequisites of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy”). Bernstein’s thesis, revising some basic tenets of Marxism, shocked Ul’ianov profoundly, and he was no less outraged by the Credo of the “Economists.” He issued his own Protest (1899&) against this penetration of Russia by the revisionist heresy, and it was adopted by a conference of exiles in Siberia (meeting ostensibly to celebrate a child’s birthday).
Political achievements
From this time on, Ul’ianov’s consuming passion was the organization of a disciplined Russian Marxist party capable of effectively combating all revisionist tendencies. To this end, he felt, it was necessary to found an all-Russian Marxist newspaper. Released from exile at the beginning of 1900 but forbidden to reside in either of the two capitals or in university or major industrial towns, he promptly applied for permission to go abroad and in July was able to leave for Switzerland. In Geneva, Plekhanov’s insistence on controlling the proposed newspaper so offended Ul’ianov that the project almost fell through. However, a compromise was reached whereby Ul’ianov was permitted to arrange for the publication of Iskra (“The Spark”) in Munich; there Krupskaia joined him in April 1901. The first number was printed (in Leipzig) in January 1901, and a monthly periodical, Zar’ia (“Dawn”), followed in December. It was in the course of this year that he began to sign his articles “Lenin.”
It was in 1901 also that Lenin began to write his second—and most significant—major work, What Is to Be Done?, published at Stuttgart in March 1902. Meanwhile, disagreements between Lenin and his editorial colleagues in Switzerland multiplied; in particular, Lenin’s insistence on emphasizing the “dictatorship of the proletariat” in connection with the formulation of an agrarian program irritated Plekhanov, who opposed Lenin’s “polemics.”
Mainly at Lenin’s insistence it was decided to call the Second Party Congress to create an all-Russian party, a task at which the Minsk Congress of 1898 had failed. Lenin himself devoted immense effort, by voluminous correspondence with Iskra agents in Russia, to guarantee a workable majority of reliable delegates. The congress met in Brussels in the summer of 1903 but found it expedient to move to London. It was attended by 43 delegates, assigned 51 votes; of these, 44 could be counted on to support the Iskra position. With the support of his colleagues on the Iskra editorial board Lenin won adoption of his draft program, though two Economist delegates fought hard to include a reference to class consciousness as a precondition to establishment of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” However, a split developed among Iskra supporters over Lenin’s effort to secure adoption of his version of the first paragraph of a party statute, embodying his conception of the dominance of a revolutionary elite. Despite the somewhat unexpected support of Plekhanov, Lenin’s formulation was defeated; Martov’s broader definition of party membership was adopted by a vote of 28-22, with one abstention. The subsequent withdrawal from the congress, over other issues, of the five delegates of the Jewish Bund and of two Economists changed the balance of strength. By vigorous caucusing Lenin was able to whip together a fairly solid bloc of 24 votes, which enabled him to carry the election of his candidates to the new editorial board of Iskra (now confirmed as the new party’s “central organ”) and to the new central committee. It was by virtue of these votes, not of the statistics of later party allegiance, that Lenin’s followers for decades boasted the name bol’sheviki (“majority men”).
Lenin’s triumph was brief. Plekhanov soon abandoned Lenin’s “hard” Iskra line, and control of the party and of its central committee passed to the men’sheviki (“minority men”). Lenin found himself doomed to years of bitter wrangling with his former colleagues. In the revolution of 1905 he was able to exercise almost no influence. He did not return to Russia until, with the October Manifesto, the autocracy had apparently surrendered. In Russia, he continued to denounce all socialists who would not follow him, and all liberals. After some wavering he supported boycott of the elections to the Duma, and he gave his blessing to, though he did not participate in, an abortive armed uprising in Moscow. After a few months of underground existence, of shifting from one hiding place to another, Lenin withdrew to the relative security of Finland. Pained by his failure to dominate the Fourth (“Unity”) Congress of the Russian Social Democrats, in Stockholm (April-May 1906), he took some comfort from his successes at the Bolshevik-organized Fifth Congress in London (May 1907) and was considerably heartened by participation in the Stuttgart Congress of the Second International (August 1907), the first international congress he had ever attended. At the end of 1907 he abandoned his base in Finland and slipped back to Switzerland.
The next ten years were the bitterest and most difficult of Lenin’s life. He became wholly occupied not with the direct struggle to combat capitalism and tsarism but with a preliminary, many-faceted battle to destroy the influence of all those who professed devotion to the cause of the proletariat, as he did, but who formulated its task in ways he considered unacceptable. Although Lenin was always ready to score a point at the expense of his rivals, he loudly and insistently denounced “opportunism” as the greatest brake on the progress of the socialist revolution. Thus, he worked himself into a position of almost total isolation within the revolutionary movement. This position, however, was ultimately to prove most advantageous to him. His name became one of the best known among the revolutionaries; but he was dissociated from all the failures of the other leading figures and thus was able, at a crucial moment, to offer fresh hope to the despairing.
In 1912, Lenin’s Bolshevik adherents in Russia secured permission from the tsarist government to publish a newspaper called Pravda (“Truth”). Lenin at once moved from Switzerland to Cracow and then to Poronino, near the Austrian-Russian border. Here he could hope to keep in maximum contact with, and direct the policy of, the new organ. He could also supervise the activities of the “Bolshevik six” in the newly elected Fourth Duma. Lenin selected Roman Malinovskii to be their spokesman, unaware that he was on the police payroll. Although Bolsheviks from abroad were regularly arrested on their arrival in Russia, Lenin long remained obdurately blind to this circumstance, despite repeated protests from more sensitive friends.
On the outbreak of war in 1914 Lenin was arrested by the Austrian police on suspicion of espionage. The absurdity of the charge facilitated his release on condition that he return to Switzerland. There he remained, in devastating impotence, attending international socialist conferences at Zimmerwald and Kienthal, only to see the meager fruits of his vigorous efforts ruined by the subsequent defection of his allies. It is to this period that belongs the work of which Bolsheviks have remained most proud, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, completed in the summer of 1916.
At the end of January 1917, Lenin consoled himself—and all who would still heed him—with the thought that the tsar, fearing the outbreak of a bourgeois revolution in Russia, would not dare make a separate peace with Germany. Therefore, the war would continue, enormously enhancing the chances that Europe (not Russia) would begin the socialist revolution. Six weeks later, on March 15, 1917, to his surprise and delight Lenin learned from the Swiss newspapers that the Russian autocracy had collapsed and that a “Provisional Government” had been set up. A new danger loomed— the possibility that all elements in Russia might rally to the new regime. Lenin felt it was an urgent necessity that he reach Russia and prevent the Bolsheviks from making fools of themselves. The German government was likewise persuaded that Lenin’s presence in Russia was an urgent need, though not for the same reasons. It was arranged, through Swiss intermediaries, that Lenin and other Russian exiles in Switzerland, whatever their political complexion, be permitted to travel incommunicado (on the “sealed train”) across Germany. Via Sweden and Finland, Lenin reached Petrograd on the evening of April 16, 1917. From that moment, one might say, Lenin had no personal life, for his biography and the further history of the Russian Revolution became inextricably intertwined.
Lenin acknowledged that “Russia is now the freest country in the world”; yet he refused to take any part in enabling the new regime to establish itself. Instead he watched for every opportunity to overthrow it in the name of a new absolutism, “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” He did seize power successfully on November 7, 1917, and thereafter, notwithstanding frequent vigorous opposition from tried associates, Lenin was in fact able to guide the ever-shifting policies of the new “Soviet” regime until he was incapacitated in May 1922 by a paralytic stroke. Sufficiently recovered to partially resume his duties, he was rendered wholly impotent by a second stroke and remained so for almost a year before his final, fatal stroke.
Major writings
The explanation of Lenin’s political success cannot be found in his intellectual achievements, for he was of no significance as an abstract thinker. His most scholarly work, The Development of Capitalism in Russia ( 1899a), was simply a tract to prove definitively the folly of the narodnik concept of the role of the peasantry in Russia. He showed that the peasantry was ceasing to be a uniform mass and was splitting into capitalist and proletarian sectors (a development of which Witte and Stolypin became aware independently). In Lenin’s view this process should be encouraged by the abolition of landlordism, which was slowing the development of capitalist relations in the village. Thus, the proletarian, “depeasantized,” element in the country-side would strengthen the urban proletariat, whose lack of numbers was compensated for by its concentration, fitting it to lead a mass movement of the village poor to overthrow tsarism and capitalism together.
In What Is to Be Done? —directed against the narodniki, and against the Economists as well— Lenin developed the thought that the working class, left to its own spontaneous strivings, would never become socialist. Only the conscious effort of “educated representatives of the propertied classes,” i.e., the Marxists, would be able to “divert the labor movement, with its spontaneous trade-unionist striving, from under the wing of the bourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social-Democracy.” This viewpoint was embodied in the program adopted by the Second Congress, in preparation for which What Is to Be Done? had been published. It continued to dominate all Lenin’s thinking and actions and is perhaps the very essence of “Leninism” as distinct from Marxism.
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalismhas been hailed as “the most outstanding contribution to the treasury of creative Marxism” and as evidence of Lenin’s stature as “a scholar of genius, a most conscientious researcher, and the greatest fighter for revolution” (Moscow [1960] 1963,
p. 274). It did indeed assert as a scientific prediction that imperialism spells the doom of capitalism and, because it creates the objective conditions for world revolution, also represents the eve of socialist revolution. In other writings at this time, however, Lenin suggested that the “law of uneven development” might make possible the victory of socialism in a single country.
Even less original than Imperialism was his other famous tract, State and Revolution (1917a), written after the failure of the July uprising as a blueprint for the immediate future. He argued that the existing “hypocritically democratic” regime was merely a “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” and must be replaced by a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” a term that Lenin never ceased to think of as meaning dictatorship of the Bolsheviks. He was careful to emphasize the distinction between the two stages, “socialism” (“from each according to his abilities, to each according to his labor”) and “communism” (“from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”), a distinction that Stalin was later to cause to be written into the 1936 constitution. Lenin believed that although social inequalities would persist under “socialism,” it was impossible to attain to “communism” without an indefinitely prolonged period of “socialism.”
Political realism
Lenin’s forte was an extraordinary ability, found also in men such as Bismarck, to analyze a given practical situation and to give things an unexpected push in the general direction in which he wished them to move. He did not rely on abstract ideas as guides to policy; he attacked Trotsky for using “abstract (and therefore empty) words.” Although, like many other Russian middle-class youths of his generation, he was impressed by the grandiose aspects of Marxism, he never fully committed himself to their implications as worked out in western Europe. On the morrow of his return to Russia in 1917 he denounced “’Bolshevik’ prerevolutionary antiques” on the grounds that they failed to grasp the “incontestable truth that a Marxist must take cognizance of real life, of the true facts of reality, and not cling to a theory of yesterday, … which like all theories … only comes near to embracing life in all its complexity. Theory … is grey, but green is the eternal tree of life” ([1917b] 1964, p. 45).
His leadership of the Bolsheviks during the revolution and in the still more chaotic years that ensued involved a shrewd following of events rather than a genuinely creative initiative. With the definite goal of seizure—and retention—of power in mind, he showed true realism, even adopting positions that to many seemed at the moment completely unrealistic.
His initial demand, in the “April Theses” (announced to his party colleagues the day after his arrival in Petrograd: see 1917c), for “all power to the Soviet” surely seemed ridiculous, for the Bolsheviks were only a small minority in the Petrograd Soviet. Yet it turned out to be the only way to save the Bolsheviks from joining the Soviet majority in support of the Provisional Government and thus to absolve them from responsibility in the eyes of the masses later when discontents and disappointments had accumulated. (To be sure, this demand involved the Bolsheviks in the premature July uprising, from whose consequences they were rescued, however, by the Kornilov affair.)
It was realism, too, that prompted Lenin to insist on an armed uprising in November rather than wait for the “uncertain voting” at the Second Congress of Soviets. He was aware, as some of his associates were not, that the masses were not swinging to active support of the Bolsheviks, that disappointments and weariness had bred tremendous apathy, and that there was no likelihood of serious opposition to any group that would act with vigor, particularly if it could wrap itself in the cloak of the Soviets and would promise speedy convocation of the long-dreamt-of Constituent Assembly.
His extrication of Russia from the war, similarly, was not the realization of a plan thought out in advance; it was the result of realistic yielding to facts as they gradually became obvious to him. The initial “Appeal to the Peoples and Governments of All Warring Countries” (1917d) simply called for a general armistice (Lenin then rejected a separate one) and conclusion of the “democratic peace” that had been proposed by the Provisional Government. Only after weeks of silence on the part of the Allies did Lenin approve of separate negotiations with the Central Powers, and only on the same “democratic” terms. When it became clear that the Central Powers would not make a separate peace on the basis of no annexations and no indemnities, Lenin addressed pointed questions to a congress of army representatives: If negotiations were broken off, would the Germans, despite the winter weather, launch an offensive? If they did, could the army fight or would it flee in panic? Lenin was tempted by Wilson’s Fourteen Points address, of January 8, 1918, to contemplate renewal of the war with practical assistance from the Allies. Even in the face of a German ultimatum, Lenin advised dragging out the negotiations in the hope that the expected German revolution would break out and save Russia. Only when Trotsky’s defiant “no war, no peace” declaration precipitated the final rupture of the negotiations did Lenin begin to insist on immediate acceptance of the German terms, arguing that, no matter how onerous the Brest-Litovsk terms were, they would leave the Bolsheviks in control of an amputated Russia, with a “breathing spell” to consolidate their power in preparation for the inevitable “revolutionary war” against the whole capitalist world.
This same realism showed in his handling of the peasant question. Rejecting as irrelevant the criticism that the original Bolshevik decree on the land problem meant scrapping the established Bolshevik program in favor of the policy advocated by the Socialist Revolutionaries, Lenin had exclaimed, “We must follow life.” If the Bolsheviks were to remain in power, the peasant masses must be acquiescent; otherwise there would be no food for the towns. When, however, the peasants had clearly tired of accepting worthless Bolshevik paper in exchange for their surplus grain, Lenin promptly abandoned his principle that “the general and basic source of any right to the use of agricultural land is individual labor.” He called for a crusade—not, of course, against the peasantry but against the “village bourgeoisie”—to “carry the class war into the countryside” with the aid of the “village poor” (Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 36, pp. 368-369).
His attitude toward the Constituent Assembly also reflected keen appraisal of the realities of the moment rather than any previously elaborated ideological position. At the moment of the seizure of power, when the Bolsheviks still needed the semblance of democracy and there was at least some hope that the Bolsheviks and their Left Socialist Revolutionary allies might win a slender majority, Lenin had been willing to gamble on permitting the election of a Constituent Assembly. When, however, despite Bolshevik control of the power centers, the elections went overwhelmingly against the Bolsheviks and their allies, he flatly declared, “The Soviets are superior to any parliament, to any Constituent Assembly” (ibid., vol. 35,
p. 140). After it had met for one night, Lenin announced, “We will not give up Soviet power for anything in the world,” and the assembly was dissolved (ibid., vol. 36, p. 242).
Wherever one turns in examining the various policies for which at various times he fought so vigorously, the same theme recurs. Never did Lenin argue for action on the basis of ideas he had advanced in his major theoretical works. In combating the “Left Communists” (April 1920), he wrote them off as “doctrinaires of revolution,” adding that “God himself has ordained that for a time the young should talk such nonsense.” In advocating the abandonment of the policy of confiscating all surplus grain, the basic step in the introduction of the New Economic Policy, he argued: “We know that only agreement with the peasantry can save the socialist revolution in Russia, unless revolution begins in other countries… [The] peasantry is not content with the form of relations we have established with it … and will not go on living this way … [We] are sober enough politicians to say right out: ’Let’s reconsider our policy in relation to the peasantry’” (ibid., vol. 43, p. 59). In demanding at the Third Congress of the Third International that that body switch from the aggressive position he had urged on it a year earlier, he acknowledged:
When we began the international revolution … [it] seemed clear to us that without the support of international world revolution the victory of a proletarian revolution was impossible … In other large, capitalistically more developed countries the revolution has not broken out even yet….
What must we do now? We need fundamental preparation of the revolution and deep study of its concrete development in advanced capitalist countries.… As for our Russian Republic, we must take advantage of this brief breathing spell to adapt our tactics to the zigzag line of history, (ibid., vol. 44, pp.36-37)
In celebrating the fourth anniversary of the seizure of power, Lenin admitted:
We thought—or, it would be more accurate to say, we assumed without adequate consideration—that by direct orders of the proletarian state we could get state production and state distribution of products going on a communistic basis in a land of petty peasants. Life showed us our mistake… . Not directly on the basis of enthusiasm, but … on the basis of personal interest, on the basis of individual [or personal; in Russian, lichnyi] incentive, on the basis of economic calculation, will you labor to construct the first solid footbridge leading in a land of petty peasants by way of state capitalism to socialism; you will not otherwise attain to communism …. This is what life has told us. This is what the objective course of development of the revolution has told us. (ibid., vol. 44, p. 151, italics added)
…It is individual incentive that raises production; we need increase in production above all and no matter what. (ibid., vol. 44, p. 152)
This “lesson in tactics,” far more than his so-called testament penned in the interval between his first and second strokes, was the real guideline Lenin left to his successors.
Jesse D. Clarkson
[For the historical context of Lenin’s work, seeMarxismand Socialism; and the biographies ofMarxandTrotsky. For discussion of the subsequent development of Lenin’s ideas, seeCommunismandImperialism.]
WORKS BY LENIN
The writings of Lenin listed below were first published in Russian.
(1899a) 1960 The Development of Capitalism in Russia: The Process of the Formation of a Home Market for Large-scale Industry. Volume 3, pages 23–607 in Vladimir I. Lenin, Collected Works. 4th ed. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.
(1899b) 1960 A Protest by Russian Social-Democrats. Volume 4, pages 167–182 in Vladimir I. Lenin, Collected Works. 4th ed. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.
(1902) 1961 What Is to Be Done? Volume 5, pages 347–529 in Vladimir I. Lenin, Collected Works. 4th ed. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.
(1916) 1964 Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline. Volume 22, pages 185–304 in Vladimir I. Lenin, Collected Works. 4th ed. Moscow: Progress.
(1917a) 1964 The State and Revolution: The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution. Volume 25, pages 381–492 in Vladimir I. Lenin, Collected Works. 4th ed. Moscow: Progress.
(1917b) 1964 Letters on Tactics. Volume 24, pages 42–54 in Vladimir I. Lenin, Collected Works. 4th ed. Moscow: Progress.
(1917c) 1964 The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution. Volume 24, pages 20–91 in Vladimir I. Lenin, Collected Works. 4th ed. Moscow: Progress. ? This article contains Lenin’s famous “April Theses.”
(1917d) 1964 Report on Peace, October 26 (November 8). Volume 26, pages 249–253 in Vladimir I. Lenin, Collected Works. 4th ed. Moscow: Progress.
(1920) 1952 “Left-wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.
Collected Works. 4th ed. Vols. 1—. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House; Progress, 1960—.
Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Complete Works). 5th ed.
Vols. 1-55. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1958-1965. ? Translations in the text provided by Jesse D. Clarkson.
Selected Works. 12 vols. New York: International Publishers, 1935-1938.
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Balabanov, Angelica 1961 Lenin. Hanover (Germany): Literatur und Zeitgeschichte.
Bukharin, Nikolai I. 1925 Lenin as a Marxist. London: Communist Party of Great Britain.
Haimson, Leopold H. 1955 The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.
Krupskaia, Nadezhda K. (1924) 1942 Memories of Lenin (1893-1917). London: Lawrence & Wishart. ? First published in Russian.
Lefebvhe, Henri 1957 La pensee de Lenine. Paris: Bordas.
LukÁcs, GyÖrgy 1924 Lenin: Studie ilber den Zusammenhang seiner Gedanken. Vienna: Malik.
Moscow, Institut Marksizma-Leninizma (1960) 1963 Vladimir IVich Lenin: Biografiia. 2d ed. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoi Literatury.
Trotsky, Leon (1924) 1925 Lenin. New York: Blue Ribbon Books.