Lenin, Vladimir Ilitch

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Lenin, Vladimir Ilitch 1870-1924

Vladimir Ulianov was born in 1870, and in the 1890s he chose Lenin as his revolutionary pseudonym. Lenin formed the Bolshevik Party in 1903 and used it to conduct a Communist revolution in November 1917. As the first leader of the Soviet Union, he consolidated power and introduced a socialist system.

At a time when Western Marxists rapidly were deciding that socialist goals could be achieved through parliamentary action, Lenin firmly rejected Western democracy as a way of improving the lot of the workers. Conceding that workers were attracted to short-term economic gains, Lenin insisted in What Is to Be Done? (1901–1902) that a revolution was still possible by use of a tightly organized, centralized party that adhered strictly to orthodox Marxist ideas. Lenin’s party proved very popular among the ethnic Russian workers and peasants in central Russia who worked part-time in the cities. After the overthrow of the tsar in March 1917, he won majority support in the elections of the soviets of central Russian cities. In an election in late November 1917 he won only 25 percent of the vote in the nation. He lost the truly peasant areas (both Russian and non-Russian), but won a strong plurality in the major cities and the peasant population surrounding the cities in the northwest region of the country.

When a military coup failed in September 1917, Lenin drove his reluctant lieutenants to seize power on November 7, and he became head of government (chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars). Yet, he had established the party as the major political instrument, and really ruled as chairman of the Central Committee and Politburo of the Communist Party.

Lenin had only five years to rule the Soviet Union before he was disabled by a stroke. The first three of these years were marked by civil war, and the next two by a desperate effort to restore the economy. These five years made it clear that Lenin was determined to establish a quite centralized political system. He banned other parties, strengthened central control over the Communist Party, and even created a Communist International (Comintern) to subordinate foreign Communist parties to Moscow.

The great mystery about Lenin concerns the type of socialist economic system he would have left in place if he had lived longer. He died at the age of 54, and he had only five years in power, three of them during a fierce civil war. His State and Revolution ([1918] 1993) combined an anarchic vision of the long-term future that embraced Marx’s “withering away of the state with a medium-range centralized view of an economy run by the state with the precision of a post office.”

But when the civil war ended, Lenin introduced a New Economic Policy (NEP) that legalized private agriculture and trade in an effort to restore the economy. The question is whether he eventually would have established a state-directed economy, as Josef Stalin did in 1929, or whether he would have accepted a more mixed economy. No one knows, of course, but he did leave in place a highly centralized political system that Stalin could use to consolidate power and do with as he wished.

The major theoretical—and practical—contribution of Lenin to Marxism was his insistence that a country could jump easily from feudalism to socialism where the bourgeoisie was weak and avoid the long capitalist stage of the West. In practice, this meant that such a revolution was possible in Russia. But in his Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin laid a broader theoretical base behind this theory. He argued that Western capitalism had postponed revolution by exploiting colonies and semi-colonies, and that this was so necessary to the survival of Western economies that the struggle for colonies led them to war. In this terrible war, the whole capitalist system would collapse around the world. This doctrine was called Marxism-Leninism, and Lenin’s anticolonial addition was a crucial element in making communism attractive in the Third World.

SEE ALSO Bolshevism; Bureaucracy; Capitalism; Communism; Imperialism; Leninism; Marxism; Oligarchy; Peasantry; Russian Revolution; Socialism; Stalin, Joseph; Trotsky, Leon; Union of Soviet Socialist Republics