18 December 2006: who was Vladimir Lenin?

Vladimir Lenin made the idea of socialism a reality. Born in Russia in 1870, Lenin's youth was dominated by the fate of his older brother Alexander Ulyanov. A radical student, Alexander took part in an attempt to kill the Russian ruler, the Tsar. He was captured by the police and executed. Lenin took from his brother a sense that the system had to be changed, but he learned also from his brother's defeat the limitations of terrorism.

By the early 1890s, Lenin had become a Marxist. This compelled him to criticise the populist ideas that his brother had argued. Alexander had seen Russia as a rural, peasant society. Such it was, and such it would remain. He looked to the traditions of self-help to found in the Russian villages and found there the essence of socialism.

Lenin's first book, What the Friends of the People Are, criticised the populist and anarchist ideas that had influenced radicals such as his brother. He could see that the majority of Russians lived on the land. But what he learned from Marx was that the future belonged to cities and to industry. The best hope for the peasants was an alliance with workers.

By his early thirties, Lenin was a leader of the Russian socialist party, the RSDLP. The party was illegal. Newspapers were published by exiled socialists, and then smuggled back into Russia. Many activists were jailed or killed. Around this time, some socialists began to argue that if the working-class was already revolutionary, then why did you need a party? Surely all that mattered were the organisations of the workers and their activity: trade unions and strikes? Lenin responded with a pamphlet, What is to Be Done? 

Here Lenin argued that the way to achieve socialism was by raising instead the grievances of all oppressed groups. This task often meant challenging the ideas that existed in many workers' heads. Marxists should see themselves as the 'tribunes of the people'. They should 'react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects'.

Lenin's book became famous following the arguments that broke out at the second Congress of the RSDLP, in London in 1903. A sharp debate over who should be allowed to join the young party led to a split between two main factions, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. The row concerned the definition of a party member, and whether such a person should be required not merely to believe in socialism, but also to campaign for it, under the direction of the leadership. The Bolsheviks argued for the stricter definition. 

After 1903, Lenin emerged as the chief spokesman of the Bolshevik faction. His opponents accused him of planning the split, and quoted What is to be Done? For his supporters, Lenin had simply shown that any revolutionary party must be an alliance of the most determined and resolute activists. If the Mensheviks wanted a looser party, this was a sign of their loose commitment to Marxism and to the revolution.

In February 1904, war broke out between Russian and Japan. The victories of the Japanese navy encouraged Russian workers to raise demands of their own. On 9 January 1905, a delegation of 200,000 Petersburg workers marched to present a humble petition to the Tsar, led on their way by a police-spy Father Gapon. When troops fired on the workers, the 1905 revolution began. 

Hundreds of thousands took part in strikes. In the capital, the first soviet was formed, made up of workers engaged in strike activity, who needed to meet, to plan their protests, and to discuss how to feed their families when all the factories were on strike. Lenin insisted that the Bolsheviks needed to become a mass party and needed to plan for insurrection.

The years following the defeat of the 1905 revolution were a time then of exile and despair. But on 4 April 1912, the police massacred 500 strikers at Lena, and their action led to a new wave of protests. Strikes continued apace through 1913 and spring 1914. This second phase of the movement was brought to an end only by the outbreak of war.

As elsewhere in Europe, Russian socialism was traumatized by the outbreak of war. When presented with the news that German socialists in their parliament had voted to support the war, Lenin simply refused to believe the evidence. He insisted that the newspaper reporting the vote must be a forgery. 

From the fact of the war, Lenin drew several conclusions. He decided that socialists should campaign against the war, even if it meant the defeat of their own country. He decided also that the old Socialist International needed to be overthrown, and a new and genuine international movement of the workers built in its place.

The return of mass protest to Russia, and especially the fall of the Tsar in February 1917, gave Lenin an opportunity to test his ideas in practice. A limited democracy was established, but Russia was still ruled by the rich.

Lenin's next pamphlet, The State and Revolution showed that the workers could not capture the existing state machinery, but had to smash it, if a new democracy was to be created. 

In October 1917, Lenin's Bolsheviks took power, initially in coalition with left-wing Socialist Revolutionaries. Russia abolished the death penalty, and given women the vote. The peasants were encouraged to take their own land. The factories were nationalised and given over to the workers.

For three years, Soviet Russia had to fight a bitter civil war to get rid of the last elements of the old order. Lenin survived one assassination attempt, but was left weakened, ill and prematurely old. When peace came to Russia, he was in no condition to enjoy it.

Lenin's last work was a the struggle against bureaucratisation. 'Comrade Stalin', he warned, 'having become general secretary, has concentrated enormous power in his hands, and I am not sure he always knows how to use that power with sufficient caution. I propose to the comrades to find a way to remove Stalin from that position.' 

Lenin died in January 1924. He had helped to found a workers' state: but others betrayed it, so that the Russia of the 1930s was nothing like its revolutionary beginning.