v.i. lenin - c or d?

a bold stance

http://leninology.blogspot.com/

^^seriously, wot a wanker.

i'm more interested in the fact that our one-time resident Stalinist Bethune never discovered this thread ... o_O

Russia was so absolutely, completely and horribly fucked up that any direction it took was going to lead to disaster. V.I. Lenin just happened to be the most determined and ruthless of the candidates for leading Russia to disaster, so he was able to impose his own personal stamp on the course Russia took while going to hell.

Lenin's fingerprints and teeth marks are all over the deaths of several million people by violence, pestilence and famine. Have to say: dud.

i don't really agree with that, aimless -- had kerensky decided to pull the country out of WWI in 1917 i think there's a strong chance the provisional government would have survived, and that makes an enormous difference.

christopher hitchens wrote a notably stupid article once arguing that the bolsheviks were the best of all possible options because any other path for russia would have ended in fascism. of course, hitch also thinks lenin "a great man" and trotsky a "saintly" sort, so there you go.

The provisonal government would have had most of the same problems the tsarist government had, among them the power of the bolsheviks and the complacent idiocy of the aristocracy. There weren't enough liberals to run the country. Not nearly enough.

So, imo the Kerensky government would have been a paper tiger, passing laws it could not enforce and enunciating policies it could not implement, which is how it was during the time it existed.

when i saw him he was wearing a suit that looked very contemporary, like something you could get off the rack at men's wearhouse.

u sure that was lenin treesh

he was laying in the coffin at the lenin mausoleum. it better have been.

did he look 'dapper'

he just looked like a dead guy. had a dead expression on his face. nothing of the frankness and intensity you see in the photos and paintings.

seeing his body was very moving though, in a complicated way.

so jell treesh, #1 thing i want to see before either i die or they finally shut it down. certain members of the Committee for the Immortalization of the Memory of V.I. Ulyanov (leonid krasin, COMMISSAR OF ENLIGHTENMENT anatoly lunacharsky) were into a late-19c mystic futurist who preached the necessity of interstellar colonization to acquire living space for all the billions of history's dead whom science was shortly to unanimously resurrect (thus destroying the final and most tyrannical class division) and while i don't think the funeral committee was anticipating that particular eschaton anytime soon i do suspect they thought lenin'd be up and walking by now. instead he's only immortal like the pirates of the caribbean.

it is sad to me. i am torn between wanting him to find peace, cuz you know he hates it in there, and wanting this artifact to be there forever, because of the strangeness of seeing it.

i'm pretty jell of your knowledge of russian history, dll. i just googled leonid krasin... that is wild.

an interesting thing i found in moscow is that a bunch of people who had lived there their whole lives had never once visited lenin's tomb, which is open to the public nearly every day.

well yknow like the empire state building.

locals always too cool for the sights.

At least there are no wax rumours about the Stalin cadaver that overshadow Mao's so much. 100% embalmed husk of genocidal piece of shit.

sorry i meant Lenin

Lenin often committed accidental genocide, just by accidentally initialising a few thousand names.

when i saw him he was wearing a suit that looked very contemporary, like something you could get off the rack at men's wearhouse.

― Treeship

first line of your memoir

He looked pretty waxy to me when I saw him fwiw

what feelings did you guys have while gazing at his corpse?

Tumescence.

surely no one could quibble w/ v i lenin's corpse as a solid ws of shame

I was a teenager and found the whole thing bewildering

what feelings did you guys have while gazing at his corpse?

― ogmor, Monday, August 4, 2014 8:43 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

reading about lenin -- a guy with boundless intellectual energy and no personal vanity, who subordinated everything he had to the movement for something like thirty-five years before gaining power -- he sounds kind of mythical, more like socrates or something than any political figure i can think of. maybe intention doesn't matter, but i do think he felt that everything he did was "historically necessary" and in the long term interests of mankind. the fact that what was actually accomplished was a society that embodied the absolute opposite of all of his ideals is probably the great historical irony of all time.

i mean, it's his own fault. there were organic socialist developments at the time he took over -- going by chomsky via rosa luxemburg -- that he brutally crushed, due to his believe that the conditions weren't yet right for that kind of thing.

otoh there was one development he did believe in, the one opportunity he drove his party to take...which did result in, well, just the rest of the century.

when i saw him he was wearing a suit that looked very contemporary, like something you could get off the rack at men's wearhouse.

― Treeship

first line of your memoir

yup this is very good.

I once read that when McDonalds opened in Moscow (this was the eighties probably) it already attracted lots more visitors than Lenin's mausoleum.

thanks.

i'm thinking about my post yesterday and i'm not sure i even agree with it. was it possible to give "all power to the soviets" during an emerging civil war or would this have just ensured the defeat of the nascent revolution? i don't know much about the atrocities he is said to have committed during this period, but from what i know of the history things were going to be bad in russia no matter who was in charge. i guess to evaluate lenin you have to decide what things would have been like under the provisional government, or even if they would have been able to exist for too long without being overthrown by some other kind of coup, possibly a right wing anti-semitic one.

i would like to hear difficult listening hour's take.

reading lenin, it's easy to be disgusted with his ruthless pursuit of class warfare by any means necessary from our standpoint, but the class divisions in russia at that time were very extreme and i'm sure they seemed insurmountable except by radical means at that time, especially in the wake of the nightmare that was the eastern front of wwi.

Yes, I wonder if Kerensky would have held the dissolving autocracy together. I tend to think not.

main thing that impresses me abt lenin is his timing: until he takes power at least, he is always right, never wrong. his strategic calls during the climactic summer of 1917 especially, between the revolutions, come down to choices between wednesday and friday that are also choices between victory and setback; and no one around him, not even trotsky, is as perceptive. stalin later executes another impeccable rise, but it's through the cloistered ranks of an incumbent bureaucracy, and his strategy is mostly to sit quietly in the back while cleverer people outreach themselves; lenin is dealing with the chaos of a country simultaneously at war and in revolution, and his decisions, even if you think he is a self-serving psychopath, which he pretty clearly isn't, are by necessity driven by actual popular desires. (even of course as they reshape popular desire.) "mythical" is the right word because this man happened to embody and for a time apparently resolve the spooky marxist irreconcilability between the inevitable will of history and the free will of the free actor: it was impossible to tell the difference between his pushing and being pushed. his personality cult (especially after his death) was very different from stalin's. stalin was the father-genius-godhead-phallus; soviet folktales (an inseparable syncresis of "authenticity"+propaganda) talk about lenin almost like anansi. the trickster, the uncatchable, the god of the story. even his death is a trick, a tactic: "he is sleeping in red square, but he will awaken soon. what a joy that will be!" underneath this stuff is an unsayable uncertainty: even when you respect and love the trickster for his stories you won't know if they're true until it's too late.

so meanwhile: he recrafted his party into a ruthless hierarchical gang that was probably structurally incompatible with its own ideals even before the civil war taught it that when it came to getting control of people "political education" didn't work nearly as well as mercilessness. in doing so he opened the door, knowingly and slowly, to stalin and his ism. it is hard to tell what he thought would keep stalin from power after his death, unless the answer is just trotsky; but really all of lenin's last-years scrambling to install trotsky in some firmly counterbalancing position (like herding a single, suicidally arrogant cat), his much-ballyhooed too-little-too-late last testament where he calls stalin "crude" or whatever, his grappling with the growth of the bureaucracy blah blah: none of this ever had any chance of coming to anything, because the soul of bolshevism had been a stalinist soul at core since at least kronstadt if not the menshevik split. if he had killed stalin (which he wouldn't have done, because he never stopped needing him) another gangster would have found the ladder. (i actually don't know much about kirov, whom stalin probably killed and who otherwise might have had quite a career, but i bet he was an asshole.) so it is Lenin's Fault. stalin reveals either the falseness of the idea of lenin as historical avatar or something worse: that history is even crueller than you thought. that lenin really was taking us where we were going, and this is it. otm: i do think he felt that everything he did was "historically necessary" ... the fact that what was actually accomplished was a society that embodied the absolute opposite of all of his ideals is probably the great historical irony of all time. that is the magic thing about him for me, that he must have made terrible mistake after terrible mistake, but he is never a man whose reasons are not compelling. the choice always seems really to be between lenin's plan and autocracy: and then at the end of lenin's plan we find autocracy. if you are an orthodox marxist (like, more of one than marx) i guess his original sin is trying to leapfrog russia's bourgeois phase, to drag the whole feudal mass of russia into The Future behind the tiny specks of its industrialized cities--after that he is out of sync with the universe, doomed to mere tyranny--but that isn't it i think, or not all of it. nor is it just some liberal sanctimony about ruthlessness and coercion: listing deaths while a highminded disgust occludes all description of the place and time they happened. it's some deeper failure to do the most important thing he had promised to do: to cut the knot intrinsicate of power. a failure he sinks into slowly, eyes open, along with the rest of his hopeful country. it's very sad. "a people's tragedy" like the figes book i haven't read calls it.

rereading that everything looks like a vague cliche. (this is a problem for me in general these days.) idk. my thoughts are evolving or whatever.

that is a gorgeous post, dlh

his personality cult (especially after his death) was very different from stalin's. stalin was the father-genius-godhead-phallus; soviet folktales (an inseparable syncresis of "authenticity"+propaganda) talk about lenin almost like anansi. the trickster, the uncatchable, the god of the story. even his death is a trick, a tactic: "he is sleeping in red square, but he will awaken soon. what a joy that will be!" underneath this stuff is an unsayable uncertainty: even when you respect and love the trickster for his stories you won't know if they're true until it's too late.

goddamn, man. i would totally read an entire book by you about this. can we start a kickstarter for that?

srsly some of the more pynchonian prose i've read of late

daphne carr bought me a drink once xp

Lenin's mistake was dragging Russia into communism before it was historically ready. And that mistake made communism in the west nearly impossible to achive, seeing as communism was now an autocratic boogeyman to the east. And of course, since communism in Russia wasn't historically inevitable yet, when Lenin made it happen, we will have to blame the development on Lenin's reading of Marx. And it therefore follows that the worldwide failure of marxism is first and foremost atributable to Karl Marx writing his books way too early.

this consideration of idealism, moment and pragmatism is all very relevant to my interests - whether the british left is to have a moment in any way comparable to lenin's is highly doubtful but fostering a commonality of purpose is surely central to the mission

is any country historically ready for Communism? srs question

socialism however

that mistake made communism in the west nearly impossible to achive

If Marx is to be believed, the dictatorship of the proletariat is an historical necessity, and therefore not just possible to achieve, but inevitable. I tend to think he was a bit too presumptuous. Analysis of the past is easier than prophecy.

"he is sleeping in red square, but he will awaken soon. what a joy that will be!"

realized on checking my source for this that i omitted the key fucking word: it's "he will probably awaken soon." chills!

Yes I thought there was a book on this.

poll with following options: (1) "is any country historically ready for Communism?", (2) "is (x) African country/'failed state' ready for democracy?", (3) "none of your fucking business".

some ruthless quotes from a secret letter to the Politburo 19th March 1922, when Lenin was sensing the famine was a good opportunity to break the power of the Orthodox Church.

It is precisely now and only now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy.

... a very large number of local clergyman and bourgeois must be arrested and put on trail. The trail must end in no other way than execution by firing squad of the most influential and dangerous Black Hundreds in Shuya, and to the extent possible, not only in that city but also in Moscow and several other clerical centers.... the greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing for this reason, the better. We must teach these people a lesson right now, so that they will not dare even to think of any resistance for several decades.

I was thinking of that Giles Fraser piece in the Graun the other week and cheering every bit of Lenin's murderous intent here. I'm probably not right in the head, but that is what a Catholic upbringing does to one!

Jesus

I think it was in Richard Pipes' The Unknown Lenin, first published in 1996, that the quote above first appeared in English.

I quoted it (with my typo) from the excellent Sheila Fitzpatrick Russian Revolution book. I'm guessing it was probably added to it on the last couple of revisions.

neither does lenin by the way. there is ambiguity about whether he actually ordered a "massacre of sex workers" but, regardless, he did preside over a policy of terror.

It's not giving Kim any "benefit of a doubt" to query misinformation that could be used to build a case for any kind of action or increasing tensions xp

Is no-one going to stick up for Lenin in his own thread?

i mean, i have done that throughout this thread in a heavily, heavily qualified way.

there are amazing posts in here, way up, from difficult listening hour.

More classic as the world gets shittier to live in.

― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 27 November 2019 bookmarkflaglink

xp

Citoyens, vouliez-vous une révolution sans révolution?

China and NK not really comparable in a lot of important respects

I agree they're not! Which is why tankies who love both are so maddening.

I accept that we must be cautious regarding misinformation but really you'll find ppl who just systematically deny any bad news on N Korea whatsoever based on that, when there's plenty of evidence that it's a terrible regime that doesn't come from US media. Also these types inevitably bust out the "oh sure, but AMERICA isn't a threat to world peace??" line even in discussions amongst leftists where it's a given that yes, America is that. There's a lot of knee-jerk enemy-of-my-enemy reasoning.

Which is why tankies who love both are so maddening.

tanks don't really have a coherent ideology beyond "if Big Bad Empire says it's bad, it's probably good" iirc

I dunno, there's some smart tankies with well thought-out arguments etc who when it comes down to it are like "stalinism was cool and contemporary china rocks, yay communism". Domenico Losurdo a good example

tbf the only people I've chatted to who stan for china are chinese citizens. china seems v interesting from an economic & governance point of view

I don't know, I must get out more and meet all these pro-Chinese non-Chinese people and DPRK cheerleaders - or not, preferably.

Comparing China in 1920 to China in 2020, it's no cause for wonder if Chinese citizens are willing to accept many of the drawbacks and difficulties presented by their government.

Accepting the drawbacks doesn't seem like much of a choice for Chinese citizens.

Accepting the drawbacks of an Indian democratic capitalist system isn't much of a choice to a huge underclass there either, you could go on forever here!