Vladimir Lenin (1870 – 1924)
Leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution
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The Petrograd garrison did not wish to be transferred to the war front, and consequently they sided with the Bolsheviks against the provisional government. Thus the Red Guards were able to seize power for the Bolsheviks in a bloodless coup. Eventhough the revolution as a whole was bloody, the coup itself was bloodless.
Thus, in a period of less than nine months, Lenin was able to organize his party, create a network of party workers, transform the party from a small, underground organization to a legitimate power holder, and finally take control of Russia as a whole. Moreover the Communist revolution demonstrated that revolution was a battle of mind the guns came later. This small underground group was able to achieve ultimate power because Lenin outwitted his opponents in a battle of minds. He was, however, also favored by the poor judgment of his adversary, Aleksandr Kerensky (1881 – 1970), the head of the provisional government after the abdication of the czar, who made the same mistake the czar had made in continuing with the war. The failure of Russia in World War-1 provided Lenin with opportunity to put his ideas to work.
Interestingly, while Lenin spurred the Bolsheviks to take control of the Congress of Soviets, they had only 300 out of 650 delegates in it, though the Council of People’s Commissars was exclusively Bolshevik and headed by Lenin. Analogically, the first body was like the Parliament one member representing roughly twentyfive thousand voters, while the latter was like the Council of Ministers and more powerful as it controlled the government. The Bolsheviks were also a minority in the Constituent Assembly that was elected on 25 November 1917. Consequently, when it assembled in January 1918, the Red Guards dispersed it, maintaining Bolshevik power by force. This was quite in line with Lenin’s thinking, as he dismissed democracy as a creation of the bourgeoisie. He envisioned a communitarian socialist state that was centralized, run as a dictatorship of the proletariat. This dictatorship of the proletariat was to be a one party rule of the Bolsheviks under the leadership of Lenin.
Lenin proceeded to destroy czarist Russia’s class system, root and branch. The revolution did not go unchallenged, however; there was armed resistance from the dispossessed nobles and landed gentry, and also by those who opposed the Bolsheviks like other Socialists like the Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries etc.
In the ensuing civil war, thousands died and southern and eastern Russia was worst affected by it. The country’s industrial infrastructure was almost destroyed. Anyone who resisted the new regime was dubbed a counter-revolutionary and enemy of the people, and was punished. All other political parties were disbanded, only the Bolsheviks remained. Freedom of press was abolished, and a revolutionary tribunal was set up to suppress opposition of any kind.
As the Orthodox Church was, in Lenin’s mind, simply another powerful organization that oppressed the proletariat. Under Lenin’s leadership, the Communists did all they could to discourage religious beliefs. However, the actual systematic eradication of Church and worship of God as state policy commenced from the time of Stalin – but then even that was a failure. In the field of economy, Lenin initiated full-scale collectivization. From 1918 to 1921 Lenin instituted what was known as war Communism. The government seized property, nationalized industry, and prohibited private retail trade and the hiring of labor. The government instituted free transportation and replaced money wages with a commodity card. This extreme version of Communism meant no wages, no private trade, and food obtained for free, through rationing. The economy worsened dramatically, leading Lenin in 1921 to adopt what was known as the New Economic Policy. The New Economic Policy saw the reintroduction of some elements of a capitalist market system, rather as in a mixed economy in today’s world. Such economic pragmatism indicates that Lenin had a clear idea of how to make things work. Unfortunately, in 1922 Lenin fell seriously ill (he died two years later) and was no longer able to work. His New Economic Policy was rescinded by his successors.
Many of the atrocities of the years following Lenin’s rise to power were a consequence not solely of the Bolsheviks’ single-minded determination to remain in power but of the prevailing anarchy. Russia had taken a beating in World War-1, anarchy was rampant during the civil war, and the morale of the country was low, so radical measures were required to deal with the situation. As Lenin’s wife Nadezhda K. Krupskaya (1869 – 1939) wrote in Reminiscences of Lenin, “The people were tired of the imperialist carnage and wanted a bloodless revolution, but the enemies compelled them to fight. Engrossed completely in the problems of socialist reconstruction of the entire social system, Ilyich was compelled to turn his attention to the defence of the cause of the revolution” (Krupskaya)
Lenin was the leader who had the vision and the ideas to rescue Russia from the ravages of war and feudalism; he worked for Russia’s reconstruction and for a society free from man-made class distinctions. But he was limited by the strictures of his ideological thinking , by his tendency to make the ideology the absolute truth and the greatest good, a limitation and weakness shared by many visionary leaders.
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Further Reading
1) Krupskaya, N. K. Reminiscences of Lenin
2) Selected works in three volumes
3) Selected Works of V.I. Lenin
4) Selected works: A one-volume selection of Lenin’s most essential writings
5) The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923
6) Lenin, V. Lenin: Collected Works
7) Melograni, P. (1990). Lenin and the Myth of World Revolution: Ideology and Reasons of State, 1917-1920
8 ) Pospelov, P. N. (Ed.). (1965). Lenin, a biography.Moscow, Russia: Progress Publishers
9) Trotsky, L. (1957). The History of the Russian revolution. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. (Original work published c.1932)
10) Tucker, R. C. (1988).Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia: From Lenin to Gorbachev
11) Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical History
12) The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923 (History of Soviet Russia)
13) Encyclopedia of Leadership (Sage, 2004)
