In the 100 years following Vladimir Lenin’s death, numerous books have been published which seek to distort his political legacy. One such book is Lenin: A Revolutionary Life, written by British historian Christopher Read in 2005. The book is a 300-page scholarly biography of Lenin examining his personal life and political career, as well as the growth of Leninism. It uses post-Soviet and Glasnost-era archival materials alongside traditional sources to offer a humanized portrait of the Soviet leader. Key themes are Lenin’s monastic lifestyle, propaganda methods, his relationship to Marxism, and his reaction to war and imperialism. However although it is more sympathetic than most biographies of Lenin, the book distorts the real lessons of his life in several ways.
The work is peppered with descriptions of Lenin as ‘brutal’ and ‘a dictator’, ignoring the fact that there was a civil war going on for most of his tenure as leader of the Soviet Union. The author incorrectly depicts Lenin as a hair-splitter who reserved his most vicious criticism for those whose position was closest to his own. Meanwhile Leon Trotsky, Lenin’s long-time revolutionary comrade and collaborator, barely gets a mention. Lenin’s theory of socialism emanating from socialist intellectuals in his 1905 work What is to be done? is adduced as an indication of his ‘elitism’. In my view, this is a misrepresentation of what Lenin actually argued. I think what Lenin really meant was that socialist consciousness must be brought to the working class by a dedicated party of professional revolutionaries.
Lenin was a vocal proponent of ‘democratic centralism’: the organizational and decision-making principle that combines free, open internal debate with strict, uniform action once a decision is made. This approach was vindicated by the success of the 1917 Russian revolution. Nobody else has led a successful socialist revolution either before or since (I consider the subsequent ‘socialist’ revolutions of the 20th century to be Stalinist rather than socialist.) Read does not mention that Lenin vehemently denounced those of his followers who tried to use the principle of democratic centralism to exclude workers from the management of the party. Instead, he cherry-picks quotes from Lenin’s writings to accuse Lenin of adopting a ‘top-down’ approach.
Read has nothing to say about Trotsky’s theory of ‘permanent revolution’, which says that a socialist revolution cannot stop at democratic or national reforms and must continue until class distinctions are eliminated on an international scale. He also has little to say about Lenin’s theory of the ‘democratic dictatorship of the working class and the peasantry’, which says that in an agrarian semi-feudal society like early 20th century Russia, only an alliance between workers and peasants can carry out a successful revolution. Trotsky in turn argued that only the working class could wield power in this alliance as the peasantry was too heterogeneous. Lenin himself came to the same conclusion as Trotsky in his 1917 April Theses.
Lenin set out a number of democratic principles in his 1917 work The State and Revolution; but Read declares that these principles were never implemented in the Soviet Union, and concludes that the Russian revolution was a ‘coup’. In reality, the Bolsheviks had widespread support among the masses, who generally supported revolution and correctly concluded that only the Bolsheviks could successfully bring one about and take power on behalf of the working class. Read does highlight Lenin’s asceticism, which applied to all the leaders of the Bolsheviks and to the party as a whole, pointing out that salaries of party leaders were limited by Lenin to no more than four times the average wage of a worker. Does this really sound like a leader and party who were only interested in taking power for themselves?
None of the parties who professed to accept democracy were outlawed when the Bolsheviks came to power. However Read points to Lenin’s 1918 dissolution of the Russian constituent assembly as evidence of a ‘democratic deficit’, arguing that Lenin did this because the Bolsheviks lost the 1917 election and viewed the body as a threat to his newly established Soviet regime. The truth is that the results of the election were invalid because the voter lists did not account for a major split within the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Read correctly points out that at one stage in 1919, the Bolsheviks controlled just one tenth of Russian territory. Yet despite this the working class was eventually able to defeat the counterrevolutionary forces and consolidate the revolution.
The latter part of the book analyses the situation following the international isolation of socialist Russia. One of the key themes here is that Lenin remained fundamentally detached from the working class. In fact, as Trotsky later remarked, Lenin had developed an ability to tune in to the mood of working class through some chance remark or comment. It is important to note that the regime of Lenin and Trotsky was a million miles from the regime that would later emerge under Stalin. And in fairness to Read, he does not attempt to link Lenin’s actions after the revolution to Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, as many historians have done. But Read does not seem to have understood either the process of revolution or the nature of the bureaucratic counter-revolution launched by Stalin.
Forced collectivization by Stalin was a monstrous mistake which resulted in civil war in the countryside against the richer peasants, or kulaks. But there is nothing to suggest that this policy was a natural continuation of anything Lenin or the Bolsheviks did. Indeed, in order to consolidate his power, Stalin was forced to murder the last remnants of the Bolshevik party (including Trotsky). The purges of the late 1920s and 1930s created a river of blood between Leninism and Stalinism, and Stalin’s subsequent rule represented a gross perversion of genuine socialist ideas.
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