Although the world is becoming increasingly distracted with this year’s elections, there are several events that should not slip under the radar. This month marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the death of a man who left an indelible imprint upon the modern world and, in fact, all of human history. January 21st, is the anniversary of the death of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known to the world as Comrade Lenin.
Despite a century having passed since he died, his legacy is still very much up for debate. But those discussions are not closed to the former Soviet Union alone. Lenin impressed his name and ideas so deep into our modern political consciousness that it is only fair to acknowledge that the world would be entirely different had he not existed. It seems likely that history would have been far better without him; but, as is often the case in human history, it could also have been much worse.
To give the devil his due, Lenin was and remains a hero to many, portrayed as the great revolutionary who, with little but his indefatigable will, inspired his fellow countrymen to overthrow the Czarist order, one of the most oppressive and arbitrary rules in modern history. And, indeed, Lenin was a remarkable individual, possessing a ferocious intellect and political cunning. Like the other great men of the early 20th century who maximised the capacity of the new means of communication, Lenin was all-consuming in his oratory: captivating, eloquent, and forceful. Better still for his age, he possessed the much rarer gift of collecting esoteric ideas and condensing them into comprehensible doctrines capable of being understood and adopted by the working man.
The adulation must stop there, however, for his ferocious intellect still had its limitations. Upon meeting the man, Bertrand Russell noted that “[Lenin] seemed … a reincarnation of Cromwell: absolute orthodoxy. He thought a proposition could be proved by quoting a text in Marx, and he was quite incapable of supposing that there could be anything in Marx that wasn’t right.” Lenin never went much further than the doctrines of Marx and his followers. He wrote extensively throughout his life on Marx and revolution, rarely going beyond those subjects. He was, then, a pertinacious idealogue; one who, contrary to what many of his admirers both then and now believe, was undoubtedly responsible for creating one of—if not the—most brutal, destructive, and barbaric totalitarian regimes ever to have existed. He laid the ideological foundations in his exiled writings for decades and took the liberty of constructing them once he assumed total control of the Russian state.
Lenin was a despot in consolidating his and the Bolshevik’s grip on power. He established a strict revolutionary order, demanding, in his own words, the “merciless suppression of attempts at anarchy on the part of drunkards, hooligans, counterrevolutionaries and other persons.” This manifested in simply being shot through the temple or the eyes without a trial or, as he wrote in Sobrannye Sochineniya, “punishment at forced labour [camps] of the hardest kind.” He wasn’t squeamish in using brute force or the crack of pistol fire to cripple the same working man that he had supposedly dedicated his life to liberating. He managed these goals by abolishing the right to a fair trial in Russia—something that had existed in Czarist Russia. And much like the abolition of the right to a fair trial, the creation and implementation of the Gulag was down to Lenin, not Stalin.
The reinstitution of the death penalty was Lenin, too. Capital punishment had been abolished in 1917 with the collapse and abdication of the Romanovs. However, the decision was quickly reversed in 1918 out of political convenience. Lenin knew “that without capital punishment there would be no movement whatever in the direction of the new society,” as Alexander Solzhenitsyn observed in The Gulag Archipelago. Thus capital punishment reappeared with some vengeance, manifesting in the Red Terror, which saw around 100,000 people from all walks of life executed by firing squad (and not just opposition forces during the civil wars, as some dishonest scholars have dared to argue). Lenin argued that it was “necessary—secretly and urgently to prepare the terror.” He supported it and pushed for its unmerciful deployment even before the revolution, asserting that “no revolutionary government can do without the death penalty, and the essence of the question is only against what class will the weapon of the death penalty be directed.”
It was Lenin who began the cruel process of collectivisation as early as 1918. In February of that same year, every inch of Russia’s land was nationalised, representing the systematic and institutionalised theft of all private possessions for almost all of the peasantry and proletariat. By December 1920, famine was so ubiquitous that the Bolsheviks decreed a forced food levy whereby all grain surplus was confiscated under the threat of death. This then fed into the Tambov rebellion, which saw half-starved peasants courageously resist grain confiscations. Around 100,000 soldiers were deployed to the city of Tambov in southern Russia. Soldiers were instructed to kill all whom they suspected of rebelling against the government. According to recent research conducted by Ian Johnson, a fellow of the Clements Centre for National Security at the University of Texas (Austin), more than 240,000 men, women, and children were indiscriminately massacred. The soldiers even went so far as to deploy poison gas in order to catch any of the potential rebels who might attempt to flee certain death.
The cruelty of Lenin and the Soviet government was not merely manifest at Tambov. There were other revolts against the Bolsheviks that were led by the emaciated masses who had been left to starve while the Soviets pursued their ideological ends. The Kronstadt rebellion is one of the most notable. The event, occurring in a city that had been overwhelmingly in favour of Bolshevik rule as early as 1917, was occasioned by the violent suppression of thousands of soldiers and sailors, many of whom were to die as a result.
Let us also not forget the famous “New Economic Policy” of 1921, often lauded by many of Lenin’s admirers as an achievement. The policy offered a release from the relentless collectivisation implemented by the Soviet government. It also provided peasants with a profit and surplus of their labour after the initial 20% taxation. Whether or not this is to be considered progress for Lenin is largely irrelevant as the policy was not Lenin’s at all. It had been suggested by Leon Trotsky in 1920, when Lenin initially rejected it for ideological reasons, before deciding to implement it in the following year.
Notably, Lenin became depressed and despondent towards the end of his life. Perhaps this was because he possessed the wit to recognise the calamity of his revolution. Even if so, that recognition does not absolve him of guilt. In fact, the worst was yet to come when he was replaced by the even bloodier, more suspicious, death-dealing catastrophe that was Josef Stalin. And regardless of what one may believe, the responsibility of releasing Stalin onto the peoples of Eastern Europe can only rest at Lenin’s doorstep.
One may argue that I have been selective in my choice of examples. This is true, in much the same way that we remember Hitler for the Holocaust rather than the building of the autobahns across Germany. However, when we reach the 100th anniversary of Hitler’s death, there will not be many people celebrating and revering his memory. We are now at the threshold of the same anniversary for Lenin, and our attitude should be no different.
Lenin created the Soviet Union, an empire built upon the oppression of hundreds of millions of people for over seven decades, guaranteeing the intergenerational misery and suffering of most of Eastern Europe. For this, he does not deserve to be celebrated. On the contrary, he deserves to be condemned to history as a violent, murderous dictator who reduced his own people to their knees. Let that be his legacy.
