Communist Party. Recent scholarship has disproved the idea that it was Stalin who masterminded the idea of embalming Lenin, instead crediting such figures as Felix Dzerzhinsky, Leonid Krasin, Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, and Anatoly Lunacharsky. It has also been suggested that the cult grew out of popular Orthodox religious traditions and the philosophical belief of certain Bolshevik leaders in the deification of man and the resurrection of the dead through science. The archival sources underscore the contingency of the creation of the Lenin cult. They show that Dzerzhinsky and other Bolshevik leadSee also: CULT OF PERSONALITY; KREMLIN; KRUPSKAYA, NADEZHDA KONSTANTINOVNA; LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH; RED SQUARE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Tucker, Robert C. (1973). Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879-1929. New York: Norton. Tumarkin, Nina. (1983). Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
(1870-1924), revolutionary publicist, theoretician, and activist; founder of and leading figure in the Bolshevik Party (1903-1924); chairman of the Soviet of People’s Commissars of the RSFSR/USSR (1917-1924).
The reputation of Vladimir Ilich Lenin (pseudonym of V.I. Ulyanov) has suffered at the hands of both his supporters and his detractors. The former turned him into an idol; the latter into a demon. Lenin was neither. He was born on April 22, 1870, into the family of a successful school inspector from Simbirsk. For his first sixteen years, Lenin lived the life of a child of a conventional, moderately prosperous, middle-class, intellectual family. The ordinariness of Lenin’s upbringing was first disturbed by the death of his father, in January 1886 at the age of 54. This event haunted Lenin, who feared he might also die prematurely, and in fact died at almost exactly the same age as his father. Then, in March 1887, Lenin’s older brother was arrested for terrorism; he was executed the following May. The event aroused Lenin’s curiosity about what had led his brother to sacrifice his life. It also put obstacles in his path: As the brother of a convicted terrorist, Lenin was excluded from Kazan University. He eventually took a law degree,
LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH
Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin sitting alone at his desk. © BETTMANN/CORBIS with distinction, by correspondence from St Petersburg University in January 1892. However, his real interests had already turned to serving the oppressed through revolution rather than at the bar.
All the indications suggest that Lenin was initially attracted to populism, and only later came under the sway of Marxism. He joined a number of provincial Marxist study circles, but first began to attract attention when he moved to the capital, St. Petersburg, and engaged in illegal political activities among workers and intellectuals. In February 1894, he met fellow conspirator Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya, who became his lifelong companion. After his first visit to Western Europe, in 1895, to meet the exiled leaders of Russian Marxism, Lenin returned to St. Petersburg and helped set up the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. He was arrested in December 1896 and, after prison interrogation in St. Petersburg, was exiled to the village of Shushen-skoe, in Siberia. Krupskaya, who was exiled separately, offered to share banishment with him. The authorities agreed, providing they married, which they did in July 1898. Siberian exile, though rigorous in many respects, was an interlude of relative personal happiness in Lenin’s life. His lifelong love of nature asserted itself in long walks, observation of social and animal life of the area, and frequent hunting expeditions. He read a great deal, communicated widely by letter with other socialists, and undertook research and writing. Direct political activity was not possible, and Lenin played no part in the formation, in 1898, of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDLP), to which he at first adhered to but from which he later split. His term of exile ended in February, 1900. In July of that same year, he left Russia for five years.
Up until that point much of Lenin’s political writing, from his earliest known articles to his first major treatise, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, written while he was in Siberia, revolved around the dispute between Marxists and populists. The populists had proposed that Russia, given its commune-based peasant class and underdeveloped industry, could pass from its current condition of “backwardness” to socialism without having to first undergo the rigors of capitalist industrialization. Such a notion was an anathema to Lenin, who believed the Marxist axiom that socialist revolution could only follow from the overdevelopment of capitalism, which would bring about its own collapse. Lenin attacked the populist thesis in several articles and pamphlets. The main theme of his treatise on The Development of Capitalism in Russia was that, in fact, capitalism was already well-entrenched in Russia, and therefore the question of whether it could be avoided was meaningless. Nonetheless, it remained obvious that Russia had only a small working class, and much of the rest of Lenin’s life could be seen as an attempt to reconcile the actual weakness of proletarian forces in Russia with the country’s undoubted potential for some kind of popular revolution, and to ensure Marxist and proletarian dominance in any such revolution.
THE EMERGENCE OF BOLSHEVISM (1902-1914)
Lenin worked to develop theoretical and practical means to accomplish these closely related tasks. The core of Lenin’s activity revolved around the organization and production of a series of journals. He frequently described himself on official papers as a journalist, and he did, in fact, write a prodigious number of articles, as well as many longer works. In 1902, Lenin produced one of his most widely read and, arguably most misunderstood, pamphlets, What Is to Be Done?, which has been widely taken to be the founding text of a distinctive LeninLENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH
Lenin rallies the masses in this 1921 photo. ASSOCIATED PRESS. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION. ist understanding of how to construct a revolutionary party on the basis of what he called “professional revolutionaries.” When it was first published, however, it was read as a statement of Marxist orthodoxy. Lenin asserted the primacy of political struggle, opposing the ideas of the economists, who argued that trade union struggle would serve the workers’ cause better than political revolution.
It was only in the following year, 1903, that Lenin began to break with the majority of the social-democratic movement. Again, received opinion, which claims Lenin split the party at the 1903 social-democratic party congress, oversimplifies the nature of the break. Lenin’s key resolution at the congress, in which he attempted to narrow the definition of party membership, was voted down. Later, by means many have judged foul, he garnered a majority vote on the issue of electing members to the editorial board of the party journal, Iskra, on which Lenin and his supporters predominated. It was from this victory that the terms Bolshevik (majoritarians) and Menshevik (minoritarians) began to slowly come into vogue. However, the split of the party was only fully completed over the next few months, even years, of arid but fierce party controversies. Lenin’s bitter polemic One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: The Crisis in Our Party, published in Geneva in February 1904, marks a clearer division and catalog of contentious issues than did What Is to Be Done. It was criticized not only by its target, Yuli Osipovich Martov, but also by Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov, Pavel Axelrod, Vera Za-sulich, Karl Kautsky, and Rosa Luxemburg. Lenin’s remaining allies of the time included Alexander Bogdanov, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Grigory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev.
So much energy was involved in the dispute that the development of an actual revolutionary situation in Russia went almost unnoticed by the squabbling exiles. Even after Bloody Sunday (January 22, 1905) Lenin’s attention remained divided
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between the revolution and the task of splitting the social democrats. With the latter aim in view, he convened a Third Party Congress (London, April 25 to May 10) consisting entirely of Bolsheviks. Only in August did Lenin’s main pamphlet on revolutionary strategy, Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Russian Revolution, appear. Inevitably, the wrong tactic-the identification of the revolution as bourgeois-was attributed to the Mensheviks. The correct, Bolshevik, tactic, was the recognition of “a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry,” which put less reliance on Russia’s weak bourgeoisie. It also marked a significant effort by Lenin to incorporate the peasantry into the revolutionary equation. This was another way in which Lenin strove to compensate for the weakness of the working class itself, and the peasantry remained part of his strategy, in a variety of forms, for the rest of his life.
In the atmosphere of greater freedom prevailing after the issuing of the October Manifesto, which was
