Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (Image: Investopedia)

It was a roughly hundred years ago today that Vladimir Ilyich “Volodya” Lenin departed this world, having set the politics for the rest of the 20th century and possibly beyond. This time a century ago, Bolshevik leaders were already planning his embalmment and mausoleum, which remains a tourist attraction to this day (and which he did not want). In his end was our beginning. The century following was decisively shaped by the will and intellect of a man who had become the world’s most influential exponent of a political ideology that denied that such will and intellect were decisive. It’s a rollicking tale, we’re all still in it, but it relies on an excursion through events that happened a long time ago. 

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, born in provincial Russia in 1870 and the son of an upper-mid-level civil servant (a schools inspector), became first a populist revolutionary — his parents were liberals; his older brother was executed for trying to assassinate Tsar Alexander III — and then a Marxist in the 1890s, joining the sprawling Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, at a time when Marxism was far from a fully accepted viewpoint in Russian radical politics. 

Arrested for sedition and sent for three years to Siberia in 1897, he proposed to his comrade and girlfriend Krupskaya, so she could accompany him — what girl could resist? Actually, she herself had already been arrested and sentenced — to what was really a form of internal exile, in a wintry cottage, rather than an actual prison. There, for money, they translated English Fabian socialist books (not part of the official punishment) and — pondering the impasse of the Social Democrats in agitating the poor and beaten-down workers of a rapidly capitalising St Petersburg, and avoiding perpetual arrest — devised the first of the ideas that would come to be known as Leninism: that a Marxist party should not be a broad and open one but, in the circumstances of Tsarism, a party of professional revolutionaries. 

This party would have internal democracy but also a command structure, and a publication functioning in a dual role as “organiser”: as it organised the wider working class with propaganda and ideas, it would also organise the party into a functioning organic unit, not simply an assembly of those in agreement. By working together in the endless tedious production of the “flat ephemeral pamphlet”, such a party would become a smooth machine, capable of acting with an influence far beyond its numbers.

Lenin expounded these ideas at length in 1903, at the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party conference in London (its capacity to hold it, amid protests by the British establishment, was ensured by George Lansbury, future UK Labour Party leader and Malcolm Turnbull’s great-great-uncle — red Malcolm’s undercover mission has continued for decades). Though they were a minority of around a quarter of the members — the rest wanted a broader party — Lenin grabbed the one vote they won and self-named them the “Bolsheviki” or “majority”, leaving the larger mainstream party as the “Menshiviki” or “minority”. 

Lenin’s second big and related idea had been expounded the previous year in What Is To Be Done? when he argued that the working class themselves could not evolve a socialist consciousness from their struggles. That more abstract conception of a changed society would come from without. It would be taken up by workers as they encountered it, but one did not need to fetishise what the workers wanted. 

Lenin’s message and his leadership attracted a bevy of followers from the sprawling, multifactional Russian party, faced with an absolute monarchy that retained substantial public support. Thus began what the world would come to recognise as a certain new way of doing politics. The group, its leaders perhaps in exile, organising a drilled, committed but also patient group of activists, working at agitation and propaganda but also self-education in Marxist politics. Thus also began splits, expulsions and skullduggery: disguises, secret writing, bank robberies as fundraisers and the like. 

Retrospectivity has given the Bolsheviks a prominence they did not have at the time. It has also exaggerated Lenin’s capacity to actually lead the group from exile, its underground Russian members often operating autonomously. Thus, Lenin was caught off guard by the 1905 uprising in St Petersburg, sparked by a massacre when the Imperial Guard fired upon workers marching to the Winter Palace to petition Tsar Nicholas II, “the little father”, for relief from the economic depression caused by Russia’s loss in the Russo-Japanese War.

Soviets — workers’ councils — formed, probably organised by the mysterious Russian-German Marxist Alexander Parvus, who had rushed to St Petersburg as soon as unrest had become a revolutionary situation. There, Parvus also developed the theory of “permanent revolution”, from the nine months when workers had dual power within the city. Lenin was slow to get there, and the Bolsheviks did not star.

Things got worse for Russian socialists when the 1905 revolution was suppressed, and the Tsar, to create a release valve, offered an advisory parliament, a duma. Lenin urged the Bolsheviks to join and use it; they initially rejected it, then agreed, and then found they were right the first time: it divided left parties, drew away energy, and discredited them with radical workers.  

It led to the Bolshevik groups’ greatest crisis and also their transformation. Lenin’s insistence on staying in the Duma caused his leadership to come under challenge from a faction called the “Vperyod” (Forward) group, led by two freewheeling intellectuals, Alexander Bogdanov and Anatoly Lunacharsky. Bogdanov was a doctor, philosopher and sci-fi writer (the novel Red Star, about a Communist society on Mars), who conducted early research into blood transfusion, and later into organ transplants (less successful, as it involved swapping dogs’ heads between bodies). Lunacharsky was a theorist, critic, playwright and everything, who called himself a “Nietzschean Bolshevik”. The Vperyods took Lenin’s notion of externally supplying the socialist consciousness that the workers “should” have, to the logical extreme. Workers would never get these abstract ideas without a mythologising of such ideas: “God-building” they called it. At the sumptuous villa on the isle of Capri of writer Maxim Gorky — a pro-Bolshevik and very wealthy Russian (from desperately poor circumstances) — the Vperyodists developed the whole idea of a “proletkult”, which would cause a cultural and psychological revolution. Lenin eventually saw no other course but to expel the Vperyod group.

By that point, the Vperyodists had established a “working class” that was an idealised other to the present, not the actual mixed radical and conservative workers — militant but religious, demanding but monarchist and patriotic — they were trying to organise. In that respect, they were now only vestigially Marxists.

But that was the case with many revolutionaries in Europe. By around 1908, all across Europe, something went pffffft in the belief in a steady development to revolution. By then it had been 40 years since the Paris commune, the first fully socialist revolt in Europe — two generations of the time. Workers were endlessly striking and protesting, but it never went further. In France, the revolutionary Georges Sorel, would argue that Marxism’s claim to scientific status was a myth, Marx’s economics gibberish, but that the myth of its certainty was a weapon to use in fomenting revolution. In 1909 Parvus, turfed out of the socialist movement (he had produced a play by Gorky, to huge success, and spent the huge profits — intended for the German and Russian parties — on a failed scheme to create a Europe-wide socialist newsagency, and on a three-week holiday in Venice with a famous actress) had retreated to Istanbul, and, concluding that money would be the force that created revolt, became a client of either the British or the German governments or possibly both, and an influence on the “Young Turks” who had taken over, and were trying to modernise and preserve, the Ottoman empire. Obeisance to Marxism continued, but the intellectuals drawn to it had turned to the power of radical will to make it happen. 

Lenin was one of them. By 1910 he was interested in the motive power of nationalism as a radical force, and deputised a junior, whom he found useful but too much of a theoretical moderate, to write a short study. Joseph Stalin’s 1912 volume, Marxism and the National Question, which found a progressive nationalism linked to legitimate demands for “self-determination”, created a scandal with great and good European Marxists such as Rosa Luxemburg, who denounced it as a repudiation of class politics. Which it was. If you recognise this concept of “self-determination”, it’s because it was adopted by Woodrow Wilson as part of his 14 points for a one-world order after World War I, and thus became the centrepiece of human rights thinking for a century. Thanks, Joe.

Lenin’s interest in the radicalism of nationalism may have not been, er, purely theoretical. It seems possible that the Bolsheviks had already been willing clients of national forces from the get-go, possibly in receipt of Japanese money from 1906 onwards, as that nation battled Russia for control of the north Pacific and China. The Estonian nationalist Aleksander Kesküla would channel Baltic money to the Bolsheviks in WWI; elements of the local government of the Russian-controlled Finnish government allowed Lenin to operate from there.

But the greatest deal came in co-operation with Parvus, who, by the outbreak of WWI, was a rich and influential speculator in Istanbul, and had the ear of the imperial German government as hostilities began. He proposed to them that they give millions of marks to Russian-empire nationalist groups and the Bolsheviks, arguing that Germany could only win the war if Russia was consumed by the revolution, and the only man who could do it was a bloke named Lenin (all this is a matter of public record, discovered when German imperial archives fell into Allied hands after World War II). In 1915, Parvus arrived in Zurich where Lenin was in exile, and, with his entourage of tame revolutionary advisors, business executives, and a wife and two mistresses, took the top floor of the city’s best hotel, and tried to persuade Lenin to let him basically buy the Bolsheviks and run them as an internal Russian network of subversion.

Lenin wouldn’t sell, but he and Parvus made a secret deal for continued cooperation. Parvus flooded Petrograd/St Petersburg with agitators and strike funds which would help undermine the tsar through 1916. When Tsarism abdicated, Parvus organised the “sealed train” to get him back to Russia, and pumped money into the Bolshevik organisation. Lenin’s confidence when he returned to Russia in April 1917 — his famous “Finland Station” speech — has often been attributed to his reading of Hegel in 1916, and his sudden understanding that history was not linear but paradoxical and contradictory, and that great possibilities could emerge from disaster. That may be partly true, but it’s also the sort of story that appeals to intellectuals with a commissar’s baton in their laptop bag. More likely it was Lenin’s knowledge — which the other Bolsheviks did not have — that ample German funds were on the way, once they were established, that grounded his revolutionary audacity.

The rest is better-known history. As the post-Tsarist “provisional” government of Alexander Kerensky (the son, extraordinarily, of Lenin’s high school headmaster) recommitted to a war they had promised to end, they created a vacuum, in which the Bolsheviks, the most radical party — literally a few hundred people in Petrograd at the start of 1917 — swelled to tens of thousands, German funds making possible dozens of newspapers and organisers in other cities. They became the party whose seizure of power — occurring in a day and a night, with the trams still running and the opera still performing — much of the city would endorse. 

The Bolsheviks — they had by then renamed themselves the Communist Party — then set a pattern for the century: they abolished the Constituent Assembly, the genuine parliament established in the wake of the tsar’s abdication, suppressed free speech, and established both a vast repressive state agency, the Cheka, and a false-flag fake anti-Bolshevik conspiracy, the Directorate, which would draw much of their opposition into a fatal trap. These also would set the pattern of spycraft and “wilderness of mirrors” secret warfare from that day to this. The non-Marxist nationalism paid off. When the Bolsheviks needed to defend themselves against workers who wanted to preserve the liberal society they had won in February 1905, they turned to Russian empire nationalist regiments — in particular the Latvian Riflemen — to violently put down such protests. Since the Bolsheviks had promised (and given) freedom to their nations, these groups were happy to oblige. 

The Bolsheviks and Lenin had two more big innovations in ‘em after 1917. One, the Comintern, would be vastly, globally influential. The second, the New Economic Policy, would be a tragic dead end. In 1921, after giddy, disastrous and highly un-Marxist experiments with abolishing money and a rapid march to Communism, Lenin backed the re-introduction of a mixed economy. Through the 1920s, the USSR’s economy surged, disease and illiteracy were tackled, and investment was attracted to “special economic zones” — developed with the US oil tycoon Armand Hammer of Occidental Petroleum (founder of Occidental College, Barack Obama’s undergrad college — hmmmmm) who, incredibly, met every Soviet leader from Lenin to Gorbachev — where free market rules applied (the Bolsheviks invented neoliberalism; discuss). Had it continued — Lenin suggested that it would be required for “several decades” — the USSR would have leapt ahead through the 1930s as directed and efficient state capitalism, maximising both incentive and planning efficiencies*. History might well have been very different. It was the party’s left faction that opposed its extension, a campaign Stalin took up for political reasons, imposing full totalitarianism in 1928 and creating a socio-economic system that would hit insoluble contradictions by the 1970s. In the early 1980s, the Chinese simply reinstituted the New Economic Policy, and surged to global dominance in the space of 40 years.  

The Comintern — the Communist International — was more successful, though yet again paradoxically. A bureau designed to channel funds and organisation to a global Communist movement and established out of a revolution created by throwing every Marxist perception out the window, the Comintern went on to enforce a one-size-fits-all political approach, in which movements in open societies took on the same grim, tight, conspiratorial approach that Bolshevism had had to adopt, and the class-based approach they had precisely rejected in making revolution. This left many Western Communist parties isolated from their own communities — and left many Eastern Communist parties lethally exposed. The Chinese party was more or less established by Comintern drop-ins in 1921 — one man, Henk Sneevliet, pretty much established both the Chinese and Indonesian Communist parties; how’s your CV looking? — and the Comintern insisted that, in a peasant society, they should stay in alliance with “bourgeois” forces. When the latter massacred thousands of Communists in 1927, young cadres, including Mao Zedong, rejected their whole framework, turned fully to the peasantry, created a non-Marxist materialist Hegelianism, and marched into Beijing 20 years later. 

This illustrates the paradox — it’s all paradox — of the claims of Marxism and Leninism in the 20th century. Really, in one way, the sufferings of Russians and some Eastern European states under the USSR render any justification of the October Revolution invalid. It’s just too ghastly, too much of a vast horror. On the other hand, it’s the Comintern that laid the seeds everywhere for the organisations that would shatter the global imperialist system after WWII. It’s easy to see this as a fait accompli. But it only looks that way because imperialism was smashed by well-organised, highly conscious and dedicated revolutionary parties. The empires had every intention of running indefinitely and, with a system of global apartheid, never letting up. 

Had they not smashed that world, it and we would be wholly different. Look at China, look at India, look at Nigeria — the last of these never having even mildly extracted itself from the systemic underdevelopment and impoverishment of a global capitalist system. From that, there is a strong contrary argument: despite the horrors it would have brought forth, it would have been better for humanity had the world been entirely Communised in the 20th century, and that its failure is a trans-epochal tragedy, which may doom us as a species. 

If you want to see what the world would have looked like had the Comintern and the wider movement failed absolutely, or never occurred, look at Gaza, where the Zionists — who by the 1940s had become clients of imperial power — have turned the Palestinians into the inmates of a human zoo, for the purposes of testing new weapons systems for the global market.  

Imperialism’s lethality in holding on was and is unlimited in potential, and only well-organised and ruthless parties could have created the movement that defeated them — even if the beneficiaries were often more “moderate” groups. As Pankaj Mishra established in Age of Anger, Nietzsche and the politics of will motivated many of the key figures as much as any notion of class. Leninism was effectively the politics of will for intellectuals, projecting their ethical demands onto social classes who did not necessarily hold those values. It was a Lenin century. But it was also a Sorel century, the century of the myth of “science” to act. And looking at how many of these movements only succeeded by becoming clients of great powers, and the movement of capital itself, it was a Parvus century as well.  

By the time of his approaching death in 1924, Lenin’s final writings suggest that he was haunted by the possibility that what he had created was a vast bureaucratic enterprise — one that was increasingly drawing on a “great Russian” nationalism to fill the void of meaning in a “rationalised” social life, and that Marxists have never had a sufficiently robust theory and explanation of. In the 1920s, the Swedish social democrats took one look at Bolshevism in power and reconstructed their politics to draw in a notion of collective nationalism — the folkhemmets, or people’s home — thus creating, with no colonies to draw on, the closest we came in the 20th century to fully free material societies of universal flourishing. The fall away from this by neoliberalism and current Marxism’s complicit insistence on borderless globalism has created the vacuum in which the nativist right is succeeding everywhere, by offering an alternative to the left’s empty progressivism. 

In the USSR, without the social democratic turn, God-building thus came to pass, with the mausoleum, the embalming and the personality cult, Giordano Bruno’s city of the sun established in Moscow, and every cultish aspect of utopian socialism that Marx had railed against revived. As John Gray has noted, Russian Bolshevism was infused with the mad spirit of a movement called “biocosmism” — a mystical Hegelian push by a philosopher priest named Nikolai Fyodorov, for humanity to use science to conquer space and resurrect the dead so they too could enjoy a full life. Thus, Stalinist Bolshevism’s fusion with high-tech, as it left the actual proletariat and their lives far behind, is really at the root of our techno-promethean society, which took over with Sputnik in 1957, and now expresses itself through the current half-arsed Mars push and transhumanism cult of Silicon Valley (Elon Musk is the last Bolshevik; discuss.) Though that suggests a third interpretation: Communism’s victory would have created a permanent techno-Hell, binding humanity in denatured existence forever. Don’t say history didn’t offer you choices. 

Though Lenin had argued that a socialist revolution in Russia would be one in the “weak link” of the capitalist system, no revolutions in those places flowed. Instead, hybrid revolutions followed in the third world, and made it clear, retroactively, that the October Russian Revolution was the first of these — grand improvised gonzo tumults, not the orphan Western revolution whose successors somehow failed to materialise. Marxists have ample explanations for this, but Marxists — especially the current crop emerging in the wake of the 2008 crash and the Occupy movement — have convenient explanations for all their failures.  Since 1924, doctrinaire Marxism has been rather better at producing excuses for why Marxist revolutions didn’t happen than revolutions themselves. Georgi Plekhanov, the founder of Russian Marxism, sat out the 1905 revolution, saying he had a book to finish. He is perhaps the true Marxist, and Lenin, the audacious one, is honoured in the breach, rather than the observance. Funny old world, but not if you have to turn it into one in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. Happy centenary, Volodya!

* There is another explanation for this sudden reversal. In 1921, Lenin had an interview with Louis Theremin, and played his new hands-free electronic musical instrument (which had its most famous appearance on the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations”). It’s a common occurrence that on anyone’s first use of a theremin, they will get something like the “Good Vibrations” riff simply by moving their hand in and out of the theremin’s field. It’s possible that these two performances of the same “good vibration” opened up a wormhole in spacetime, which sucked in a copy of W.W. Rostow’s 1960s textbook on economic development, depositing it in the 1920s, and providing Lenin with a blueprint for an alternative path. If anyone wants to write a stupid steampunk novel on this theme, be my guest, and buy me a beer sometime. But I retain screen rights. 

Further reading: aside from the endless standard histories, the alternative take I’ve outlined here relies on, among others: Zeman and Scharlau, The Merchant of Revolution: The Life of Alexander Israel Helphand (Parvus) (available online); Parvus, Im Kampf in der Warhreit (Parvus’s own memoir); Zeman (ed), Germany and the Revolution in Russia, Documents 1915-1918; Georges Sorel, Reflections sur la violence; Possony, The Russian Revolution; Jon Medhust, No Less Than Mystic: A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st Century Left; Paul Mattick, Marxism — Last Refuge of the Bourgeosie?; Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger; Bernice Rosenthal, Nietzsche in Russia; John Gray, The Immortalisation Commission; Arthur Ransome, Swallows and Amazons (Ransome was a UK correspondent during the revolution and a Bolshevik sympathiser; the first volume of his famous series about two “tribes” of boating children, with long descriptions of sailing techniques, going against the wind, going about, etc is really a history of Bolshevik manoeuvres during 1917 leading up to the October Revolution — a neat explanation of dialectics in action); Monty Python’s Life of Brian — the film is really an account of the collapse of the British left and the consequent coming of Thatcherism as an inevitable logic (“what have the Romans done for us?”) in the 1970s. Marginal, but I wanted to get that in.