Russia: Lenin: He was praised and condemned

He seems to have been almost forgotten: Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known as Lenin. Almost all of his monuments in the former Soviet Union, in the old GDR and in Eastern Europe were razed. A good hundred years after the October Revolution, he is often disregarded as its unfortunate leader… In general, this Lenin and his revolution do not fit into the historical image of the leaders in Moscow today. They want to build on the strong Russian Empire so that the deposed tsar and the restorer of the great power of the Soviet Union, Stalin, get off far better than the radical destroyer Lenin. In this view, the social contradictions in war-torn Russia in 1917 are not significant and are too reminiscent of today’s conflicts. It was not the Reds or the Whites who won in the civil war, but ultimately a strong, united Russia, for which both fought in the end.

The times when leftists freely praised their theoretical, strategic, political minds are long gone. In the “Weltbühne”, the left-liberal combat pamphlet of the Weimar Republic, Henri Guilbeaux, a French communist, journalist and contemporary witness of the revolution, certified on the occasion of Lenin’s death: “through his invincible courage, through his wild energy, through the trust of the masses, through his wonderful sense of reality, combined with a rare ability to draw the right conclusions from confused and contradictory facts – Lenin freed the Russian people from the constraints of tsarism, capitalism and the imperialism of the Allies, for which Tsarist empire should be nothing more than a colony, an India or a Madagascar. He redeemed the Soviet Republic from the mercenary armies united with the counter-revolutionary troops. With his slogan: ‘The electrification of Russia’ he has finally expressed his will to turn this backward country, which was once tributary to foreigners, into an industrially autonomous and modern state.”

Numerous leftists, especially those in the post-communist parties, are having a hard time with Lenin today. This is surprising, because all reform and renewal movements had secured Lenin as a figurehead right up to the time of the “turning point” in 1989/91 with their anti-Stalinist revolutionary attempts in Eastern Europe, which were miserably taken over by the counter-revolution. Because he was not only the undisputed leader of the Russian October Revolution and founder of the Soviet Union. He was also self-critical and recognized early on the limits of his revolution, which was limited to Russia, and its results that were noticeable at the beginning of the 1920s. He was praised for his astute criticism of Stalin’s successor.

However, in the 1980s it may be true that many of these reformers longed for social democratic development paths based on Swedish or West German models. They hardly had anything in common with the political, power- and socialism-oriented militant Lenin. It only served as a fig leaf for a general path away from socialism.

But its reform approaches, especially in the form of the New Economic Policy (NÖP) and the “Cooperative Plan,” were repeatedly praised as groundbreaking for a renewal of real socialism. This was the case in 1956, when Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev reckoned with Stalin’s crimes and promised to restore Lenin’s norms. This was the case when, in the 1950s and 1960s, reform forces in some Eastern European communist parties initiated economic reforms from below and above, wanting to adapt the planned economy to new conditions with more or less developed market elements. This was the case in the 1980s, when Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev promised a comprehensive renewal of real socialism away from its administrative-centralist reductionism with perestroika. Lenin’s NÖP was intended to be a model for market-based economic reforms; he was praised for his ideas on the democratization of the party and state. In 1987, Gorbachev still portrayed himself as a loyal communist and Leninist: “Today we understand the meaning and purpose of Lenin’s last works more clearly, we understand better why he wrote them, which are essentially his political legacy…” Lip service remained and the real development did not renew socialism, but opened the door to capitalist restoration.

From the introduction by Stefan Bollinger to his book “Lenin – theorectist, strategist, Marxist real politician” (PapyRossa, 147 pp., br., 12 €), now published in its 2nd, expanded edition.