v.i. lenin - c or d?

http://snow.prohosting.com/~batgrrl/LeninGorki1957.jpg

My Russian at this time was halting, but Lenin declared that though he had lived in Europe for many years he had not learned to speak foreign languages: the conversation would therefore have to be carried on in Russian. At once he launched into a eulogy of our speeches in court. "What a splendid opportunity for propaganda," he said; "it is worth going to prison, if the courts can so successfully be turned into a forum." I felt his steady cold gaze upon me, penetrating my very being, as if he were reflecting upon the use I might be put to. Presently he asked what I would want to do. I told him I would like to repay America what it had done for Russia. I spoke of the Society of the Friends of Russian Freedom, organized thirty years ago by George Kennan and later reorganized by Alice Stone Blackwell and other liberal Americans. I briefly sketched the splendid work they had done to arouse interest in the struggle for Russian freedom, and the great moral and financial aid the Society had given through all those years. To organize a Russian society for American freedom was my plan. Lenin appeared enthusiastic. "That is a great idea, and you shall have all the help you want. But, of course, it will be under the auspices of the Third International. Prepare your plan in writing and send it to me."

I broached the subject of the Anarchists in Russia. I showed him a letter I had received from Martens, the Soviet representative in America, shortly before my deportation. Martens asserted that the Anarchists in Russia enjoyed full freedom of speech and Press. Since my arrival I found scores of Anarchists in prison and their Press suppressed. I explained that I could not think of working with the Soviet Government so long as my comrades were in prison for opinion's sake. I also told him of the resolutions of the Moscow Anarchist Conference. He listened patiently and promised to bring the matter to the attention of his party. "But as to free speech," he remarked, "that is, of course, a bourgeois notion. There can be no free speech in a revolutionary period. We have the peasantry against us because we can give them nothing in return for their bread. We will have them on our side when we have something to exchange. Then you can have all the free speech you want--but not now. Recently we needed peasants to cart some wood into the city. They demanded salt. We thought we had no salt, but then we discovered seventy poods in Moscow in one of our warehouses. At once the peasants were willing to cart the wood. Your comrades must wait until we can meet the needs of the peasants. Meanwhile, they should work with us. Look at William Shatov, for instance, who has helped save Petrograd from Yudenitch. He works with us and we appreciate his services. Shatov was among the first to receive the order of the Red Banner."

Free speech, free Press, the spiritual achievements of centuries, what were they to this man? A Puritan, he was sure his scheme alone could redeem Russia. Those who served his plans were right, the others could not be tolerated.

A shrewd Asiatic, this Lenin. He knows how to play on the weak sides of men by flattery, rewards, medals. I left convinced that his approach to people was purely utilitarian, for the use he could get out of them for his scheme. And his scheme--was it the Revolution?

And here she is on him in 1925 (in an essay on Samuel Gompers):

The last fifteen years are replete with examples of what the leaders of men have done to the peoples of the world. The Lenins, Clemenceaus, the Lloyd Georges and Wilson, have all posed as great leaders. Yet they have brought misery, destruction and death. They have led the masses away from the promised goal.

Pious Communists will no doubt consider it heresy to speak of Lenin in the same breath with the other statesmen, diplomats and generals who have led the people to slaughter and half of the world to ruin. To be sure, Lenin was the greatest of them all. He at least had a new vision, he had daring, he faced fire and death, which is more than can be said for the others. Yet it remains a tragic fact that even Lenin brought havoc to Russia. It was his leadership which emasculated the Russian revolution and stifled the aspirations of the Russian people.

The USSR was relevant, and important - as an utterly ruinous failure. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Fabian (not Utopian, alas) Socialists, published the second edition of "Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?" in 1937, choosing to make the book even more of a Stalinist blowjob by dropping the question mark. 1937, as you may say with perfect accuracy, was a very exciting time for Soviet Russia. Historians don't blame them for thinking the USSR was interesting, they blame them for idealizing it beyond all reasonable bounds.

The Webbs weren't wrong about the relevance of Russia, just the relevance of communism to the construction of "a new civilization." The only thing new about the USSR was the level of physical harm and less noticeable but equally horrible social upheavals brought about for the amoral purpose of reshaping "human material" into the "new Soviet man."

Blame them? That was just the mood of the times. It must have seemed, at the time, like a beacon for the way forward for humanity. People were joining the CP in droves. A perfectly natural response following the extraordinary waste of life in WW1, economic crises/mass unemployment in the 1920s-30s, and the gloom over the rise of fascism. Who at that time was really lifting the lid on what was really going on in the Soviet Union? I don't think it was at all visible, was it?

As any good communist leader, Lenin saw history as more important than the fate of thousands, or millions of people. There was no question in his mind that sacrifices would have to be made. Lenin's legacy was to leave in place a system for Stalin to exploit. It was nowhere near as brutal and all-encompassing as Stalin's, but the basic ingridients were there: a doctrine arbitrarily defined and redefined by an infallible leader; an overwhelming tradition of conforming to dictates from the top; a hapless quest to build a classless society (hampered by the peasantry and bourgeoisie, which refused to fulfill their historical roles of dying off); little or no hesitation in using brutal measures to preserve Bolshevik authority; failure to provide for orderly succession of leaders (Lenin's "testamnet" warned not only of Stalin's ambition but took potshots at every other prominent Bolshevik. It's basically "nobody does it better" rather than "hey, watch out for this guy!")

There were many people lifting the lid on what was going on in the Soviet Union, and not all of them were right-wing nuts. Anarchists like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman documented the slaughter of dissident sailors in the Kronstadt fortress as early as 1921, and after Trotsky was exiled he turned at least partially on the USSR. The show trials were blatantly transparent even to observers at the time. Western reporters were left with the choice of supressing the truth in order to propagate the dream of a just communist society, or, you know, writing what happened. Very few of them did. Maxim Gorky visited one of the first Gulag camps and was in tears by the end of his tour. He wrote about seeing happy workers being rehabilitated into new Soviet men.

These are the problems that communism has left for people to deal with to this day: the enduring myth of a "good Lenin" who warned of Stalin's lust for power, the trickle of anti-Soviet evidence that became a flood after World War Two but was ignored by "true believers" who thought that it was either false or that a few sacrifices in the name of "a new civilization" were nothing to cry about.

no, the shortcut does work, and the standard setup does not. someone communicated this badly.

As an example, Chernyshevski would encourage the killing of efficient and popular tsarist bureaucrats instead of corrupt and greedy ones. The reason for this was that the sooner the country was run by greedy morons, the sooner it would rise up against them. Lenin used similar reasoning when, during an 1890s famine, he actually demanded that the peasants on his estate provide him with the usual amount of taxes and grain, in effect starving them.

This was ok with Lenin because, as every good Marxist knows, increased "immiseration of the proletariat" will only make the inevitable socialist revolution come faster. Quite a humanitarian, our Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov.

As a dictator who paved the way for an utter monster and founded a party that helped keep much of Asia and half of Europe in poverty for much of the 20th century? Classic.

:-)

YOU MOTHERFUCKERS SHOULD THANK ME THAT ALL Y'ALL AIN'T SPEAKIN' RUSSIAN AND POSTIN' FROM SOME STALINIST GULAG SHITHOLE RIGHT NOW.

I don't know, I'd like to see some of those threads:

"Tattoo connections: they take me to the Motherland!"

"The all new 'how emaciated do you look NOW?' thread 2004!"

"Misha stealink my balalaika and drinking my vodka AGAIN, classic or dud?"

you have heard of the polish-russian war of 1919-1920, yes? the red army's plan (under trotsky) was to cross poland and hook up w/ the german communists thereby fomenting more communist revolutions throughout europe. at least that was the plan ... whether it would've worked is an open question. at any rate, pilsudski and the poles stopped the red army and turned them back -- it was seen at the time as leaving a lot of egg on the faces of trotsky (understandably enough) and lenin himself (who signed off on the idea).

But yeah, the Poles stopped Trotsky in '20 and that's great. Lenin and Stalin make Pilsudski look like Mother Teresa.

(its the 'notebook' part that made me think otherwise)

d, fuck this guy and his tomb imo.

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.

happy 150th, old fellow

"Communism and no malarkey" -- Uncle "Joe" Biden

this guy killed the revolution, leftists need to stop copying his shit theory and his pompous pedantic writing style

there are weeks where decades happen, and also weeks where it's your birthday!

there would be no tankies or trots without this man

saved capitalism & turned anti capitalism into a joke, what a legacy

Tankies or trots are things to troll ilx libs, nothing else.

Today we celebrate 150 years since the birth of revolutionary and theorist, Lenin. His legacy and the legacy of the Russian revolution still inspires millions around the world to fight. For peace and socialism! pic.twitter.com/6YEArZ13U1

— London Young Labour (@LDNYoungLabour) April 22, 2020

Lol hope us where you find it

lol

You don't need to be a Communist or even a Socialist to recognise the positives as well as the evils in Lenin's rule. Not least, his New Economic Policy established pragmatic market socialism which eventually succeeded in Deng's #China https://t.co/p5ue5pIca8

— Vince Cable (@vincecable) April 22, 2020

fuck me

tankies & trots are still a real problem in some circles even if liberals tend to identify anyone left of gordon brown as one

many twitter "marxist leninist maoists" agree with comrade vince here including the deng bit

Russia was such a dire mess by late 1916 that a collapse into some form of chaotic violence was more or less inevitable. It was a "failed state" as we now use the term. Lenin happened to be the head of the best organized and most ruthless faction and was able to seize the reins of power. The fanatically ideological basis of the new government was of huge value, not just in creating the cadres who drove the revolution, but in acquiring the consent of the governed and restabilizing society. China's revolution also arose out of a failed state collapsing during a World War. It's harder to fault Lenin and Mao when you grasp out of what chaotic conditions they forcibly created governance.

I'm a bit of a melt when it comes to NEP (not that I agree with Laying Cable). It was a new state and frail from the ravages of civil war and rife with starvation, cannibalism etc.. I think Lenin wanted it to run for much longer than he managed to live, but I think you had to be there or something!

he's no V.I. Warshawski

it’s easy to fault lenin & co for not abolishing capitalism

An open goal, how could they miss.

i know no human is singularly responsible for all the bullshit but he comes across as such a dickhead in his writings & actions I blame him anyway

the bolshevik revolution could be more fairly described as a coup. the majority of the toiling masses of the Russian empire were peasants, they supported the SRs. the bolsheviks had their support in the cities, and that won them the day. Lenin (and Trotsky's) response to the anarchists, the SRs, the worker's opposition, the Kronstadt sailors etc. give you the absolute measure of them both.

all power to the soviets just kidding lol

it’s easy to fault lenin & co for not abolishing capitalism

tbf Lenin & co were pretty busy abolishing people

he didn't really care about the proletariat except as an "agent of historical change." that is, he cared about them as a class; not about the lives of individual workers. and if anything he was negatively disposed toward russia, calling it a backwards peasant country and things like that. there is no way to see the world that is more alienating than how lenin saw it.

there is still something fascinating about the bolsheviks though, and the way they bent theory self-survingly while still being pedantic dogmatists. the debates they had, read today, seem like those of medieval theologians. so deep in an insular discourse.

Whomst among us has not referred to Russia as a backward peasant country, tbf

Seems like fair comment in 1917, no?

Trotsky's attention to and love for literature helped him position theoretically how Bolshevism was intrinsic and inevitable in the nation of Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoyevsky. It didn't make him any less dogmatic or malevolent.

it's too bad orwell has been appropriated by conservatives because he essentially had it right. the icy, inhuman way people like lenin wrote about the world wasn't just a quirk, it was a hint at the underlying brutality, or capacity for brutality. bertrand russell saw the same thing when he went over to the ussr in 1920 or thereabouts.

however, if i was a russian factory worker when lenin swung into town in 1915, i would likely have joined the bolsheviks. by that point, the soviets were de facto controlling petersburg anyway. kerensky's government had no real authority except through the soviets and they were threatened all the time by deeply reactionary forces such as the black hundreds. "all power to the soviets," in that moment wasn't really an abstract experiment. it was already happening, why not formalize it?

but then, yeah, the soviets didn't end up actually being allowed to govern.

treeship, you write so crisply here. I could keep reading you in this and the Shelley threads. Please follow this lead in the politics threads!

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 trial. The trial 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.

we've all fired off ruthless and bloodthirsty emails to the politburo after that 2nd bottle of vodka - don't judge!

xpost
lol that is the most professorial post I've ever seen on this site!

I didn’t know about the sex worker genocide thing. Amazing what they don’t teach us in school.

— Don Hughes 🦌 (@getfiscal) April 22, 2020

tankies totally a real issue on the left ftr, baffling how many otherwise right on ppl will go to bat for North Korea and, more bafflingly to me as it clearly bears almost no traces of a communist nation in 2020, China as well

I don't know where you come across all these people.

lol I know some IRL, I was at lunch last year where one friend suggested North Korea was up to some shit and my tankie friend rolled his eyes and really condescendingly said "oh, that's not true" about whatever shit Kim was up to that week

Who knows what is Kim up to on a week -by-week basis though? I'd be up for querying the sources of the suggestions (depending on what they were).

i don't think he gets the benefit of the doubt

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!