01.31.10
More on Lenin
Two comments on Booknotes: Lenin bio
Jim Buck said,
January 31, 2010 at 2:55 pm ·
I’ve not read that book, but some of its reviewers describe the writer’s views as “slanted”. And, in any case, the ruthlessness–attributed to Lenin– is seen as a positive quality in some quarters.I’ve spent some time in Berlin, over the last few years; and I’ve found ostalgie to be very real. I Watched Lenin’s statue being craned out of position, in the “People’s Palace”. and boated down the Spree (to be broken up). Despite my antipathy towards the man, the occasion was redolent of Arthurian myth: the deposed, dead, king being ferried towards the land where the sun sets—to sleep for a hundred years, perhaps, before returning.
nemo said,
January 31, 2010 at 3:20 pm ·
I hold no brief whatever on this particular book on Lenin (which I got out of the library two days ago and read rather swiftly). The question of bias here depends on who is making the charge. Anyway, by all means, find another book. How about someone who grates on the left (and on me) with known bias, e.g. Richard Pipes, who will go out of his way to present ugly facts about the Bolsheviks and Lenin.
My point is merely to note the way that Lenin’s biography tends to suppress the facts of what really happened.
The point here is to understand the horrible betrayal of the left, e.g. the Socialist Revolutionaries, who attempted to produce a reasonable outcome, all of whom were simply wiped out as the Leninists took over and invented something absent in nineteenth century leftism, the Chekist one-party dictatorship plus gulags. We have forgotten what the left was, and the way that Leninists redefine the term, and then proceeded to discredit everything.
That some admire Lenin for his ruthlessness is precisely my point, and/or irrelevant. The left was, not suprisingly, frustrated in the nineteenth century by the failure to achieve revolutionary control. The 48-ers ended up slaughtered as Louis Napoleon swept up the spoils. The Commune was a tantalizing horror that ended in another slaughter. The French Revolution itself was an arrested transformation.
Especially the Commune experience made many leftists, like Lenin, determined to never let the opportunity slip again. The reason for his ruthless determination and murderous totalitarian obsession.
But that doesn’t really excuse the tactics adopted in the Russian Revolution by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. The February revolution (Lenin wasn’t even in Russia) was a grand moment, a true cusp of revolutionary potential in the best sense, poised on the possibility of creating a new Russia. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were not revolutionaries at all, but conspirators who seized the moment with a coup d’etat, enforced by mass murder. The protests of the left, forget the reactionaries, were those of outrage at what Lenin had done, but those SR’s (socialist revolutionaries, et al) were swiftly eliminated.
I am honest here, I think. I sympathise with the left, but I know I would have been killed in the Russian Revolution, for being a socialist, not a reactionary. Note the way the record has been disguised by revisionist propaganda.
It was an outrageous, the more so since those on the left who saw what happened were destroyed and the historical account altered into Bolshevik propaganda. The whole idea of the left became a justification of Lenin’s ruthlessnesss. That wasn’t the original game.
The simplest critique of this is that after murdering 20 million people this ruthless revolution failed, and was rolled back. Surely we have to learn that it was a failure and not repeat!
Lenin had an almost pathological hatred of liberalism. Why? The critique of liberalism in Marx is cogent enough, but the monumental hatred of freedom and rights in Lenin was the seed of catastrophe. His situation was not a liberal politics in failure, but centuries of Tsarist domination. To reject liberalism as one revolts against monarchy was an invitation to Communist monarchy. That simple, and an absurdly unintelligent politics.
Jim Buck said,
January 31, 2010 at 4:13 pm
I have no quarrel with any of that.