January
22, 2024
Yesterday
marked the 100th anniversary of the death of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known as
Lenin. Lenin ranks among the most remarkable figures in world history. He was
the theoretical and political genius who founded the Bolshevik Party and led a
revolution that not only transformed Russia and created the Soviet Union, but
gave an immense impulse to all the revolutionary political struggles of the
20th century.
Lenin’s
untimely death on January 21, 1924, at the age of 53, came 10 months after he
suffered a devastating stroke, in March 1923. It was his third stroke in just
over a year, and it removed him from political activity. Though there were some
signs of recovery in the summer and early autumn of 1923, which gave rise to
hopes that he would be able to resume some level of political activity, these
were dashed by the fourth and fatal stroke.
Lenin’s
death was a political tragedy that had disastrous consequences for the fate of
the Soviet Union and the world revolution. It came at a critical point. After
the stroke in March, Trotsky came under escalating attack in the political
leadership of the Bolshevik Party. Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev formed an
unprincipled faction within the Politburo (the “Triumvirate”). Following the
establishment of the Left Opposition in October 1923, Stalin led an
increasingly ferocious campaign against Trotsky, which included efforts to
misrepresent and falsify the differences that had existed between Lenin and
Trotsky prior to 1917. These differences had been resolved in the course of the
revolution.
One
cannot state with certainty what would have happened if Lenin had not died in
early 1924. However, it is undeniable that the death of Lenin left Trotsky
isolated, depriving him of his most powerful ally in the struggle against the
bureaucratic reaction, personified by Stalin, to the revolutionary
internationalism of the October Revolution.
In
the final years of his life, even as his health deteriorated, Lenin had
initiated a struggle against the developing nationalist and bureaucratic
degeneration within the Soviet state apparatus and Bolshevik Party. In late
December 1922, Lenin began writing what would go down in history as his “Last
Testament.” This included an addendum, written on January 4, 1923, calling on
the leadership of the Bolshevik Party to remove Stalin from the post of general
secretary.
Lenin’s
Testament coincided with moves to establish a bloc with Trotsky on critical
questions related to Soviet policy: the defense of the state monopoly on
foreign trade, opposition to the growth of Great Russian chauvinism within the
party and the fight against bureaucratism. It was only the stroke he suffered
in March 1923 that prevented Lenin from launching an open struggle, alongside
Trotsky, at the Twelfth Congress of the Bolshevik Party, which took place a
month later.
Moreover,
Lenin’s influence and political leadership in the Communist International in
these critical years would have shifted the international situation in favor of
world revolution, profoundly undermining the nationalist reaction within the
Soviet Union itself. If Lenin had been alive and politically active, he would
have waged a pitched battle against the nationalist and anti-Marxist theory of
“socialism in one country,” advanced by Stalin and Bukharin in 1924.
In
the aftermath of Lenin’s death, the developing Stalinist apparatus would not
only mummify his corpse, but also his ideas. In their campaign against Trotsky,
Stalin and his allies treated Lenin’s thinking in the most formalistic manner,
tearing quotes out of context in a way that completely belied Lenin’s own
methodology.
Trotsky,
in an essay he was working on at the time of his assassination by a Stalinist
agent in August 1940, addressed the complex relationship between objective
developments, revolutionary leadership and individuals, drawing on Lenin’s own
role in the Russian Revolution. Opposing those who argued that without Lenin,
the October Revolution would have taken place “just the same,” Trotsky replied:
But that is not so. Lenin
represented one of the living elements of the historical process. He
personified the experience and the perspicacity of the most active section of
the proletariat. His timely appearance on the arena of the revolution was
necessary in order to mobilize the vanguard and provide it with an opportunity
to rally the working class and the peasant masses. Political leadership in the
crucial moments of historical turns can become just as decisive a factor as is
the role of the chief command during the critical moments of war. [“The Class,
the Party and the Leadership”]
Lenin’s
role was decisive in the spring of 1917 in reorienting the Bolshevik Party to
the conquest of power. With his “April Theses,” Lenin adopted Trotsky’s Theory
of Permanent Revolution and set the party on a new political course that led to
the October Revolution.
In
the aftermath of Lenin’s death, his political ideas and conceptions were
developed by Trotsky and the Left Opposition, while the Stalinist faction
represented the unfolding reaction against the program of world socialist
revolution upon which the Russian Revolution was based. Trotsky’s fight to
maintain the historical continuity of Bolshevism—that is, genuine revolutionary
internationalism and Marxism—culminated in the founding of the Fourth
International in 1938.
This
legacy now assumes immense significance in what is clearly a new period of
disintegration of the bourgeois order—of the normalization of genocide and
world war—and of the resurgence of class conflict throughout the world. In this
new revolutionary period, Lenin will again be seen as a monumental historical
figure.
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