Abstract
Vladimir Il’ich Ul’yanov (Lenin), the founder of the Soviet state in 1917, was born in 1870 and died less than 54 years later, in 1924. His life's work has been the subject of a spate of publications over the past eight years – first to mark the centenary of the Russian revolution, then the 150th anniversary of his birth, and most recently the centenary of his death. Christopher Read's Lenin Lives?, from the third wave of these anniversary publications, is focused, appropriately, largely on his legacy and its lasting significance. Its title comes from the refrain in a famous valedictory poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky: Ленин – жил. Ленин – жив. Ленин – будет жить. (Lenin lived. Lenin lives. Lenin will live.) The question mark in Read's title sets the terms of his study: are Lenin's ideas of current, or purely of historical relevance?
Mayakovsky's almost religious presentation of Lenin's immortality might not have pleased the man himself; as Read repeatedly (and ruefully) observes, Lenin was ‘fanatically anti-religious’ (6). But his ideas and cause not only outlived him, but extended their reach and significance for at least five decades after his death, up to the late 1970s. Since then, ‘Leninism’ of all varieties has been in retreat. Nonetheless, it is not yet completely extinct, while the liberal capitalist order which triumphantly toppled it in Europe in 1989–1991 has lost a lot of its lustre.
Read's contribution to the discussion has two main sections. In the first half of the book, he surveys Lenin's life and career from his initial embrace of the revolutionary movement and Marxism, through the war and revolution, up to his final attempts to preserve and straighten out the Russian revolution. This period, when Lenin was still alive and active, is presented as ‘Lenin before Leninism’. Although Lenin was always deeply concerned with ideological questions, Read stresses Lenin's flexibility, his capacity to change direction as circumstances dictated, and observes that his Bolshevik party's route to power in 1917 owed more to improvisation rather than of any consistent plan: ‘the key feature of Bolshevism was following Lenin, not any particular doctrine or strategy’ (52). Read focuses on some of Lenin's key political and theoretical writings, not least The State and Revolution (1917/1918), and explores the evolution of his thinking on Russia's transition to socialism at different phases of the revolution and civil war. On the much-contested question of Lenin's views on the idea of building ‘socialism in one country’, Read contends that at various points from 1918 onwards, this was indeed Lenin's perspective (64–5; 94).
The second main section, ‘Lenin as Icon and Inspiration: Leninism after Lenin’, looks at the fate of Lenin's ideas after his death, arguing that ‘Leninism’ was something concocted, above all by Stalin in the first instance, from a selective reading of his writings (80–7). The doctrine was intended for both domestic Soviet and international consumption, and subsequently underwent significant evolution, particularly outside the USSR, where it retained an intellectual vitality which it rapidly lost in its homeland. Indeed, Read remarks that for all his many visits to the USSR from 1970 onwards, ‘it was the one country [where] I never met a Marxist’ (111). Elsewhere it had been taken up by diverse communist parties and thinkers particularly in the former colonial world, and refashioned into a bewildering array of different Leninisms, ranging from Latin American liberation theology to Cambodia's Pol Pot. Read looks at the paths to revolution in China, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, and Cuba, the different elements the revolutionary leaderships took from Lenin's ideas, and the ways in which they combined anti-imperialism, social and economic redistribution, and nationalism during and after their revolutionary struggles.
Looking at the post-1991 landscape, Read considers a diverse range of thinkers, organizations and movements, from the communists in Kerala, India, to sundry European and American academics, and even a vox pop of his own colleagues. He empathizes with their unwillingness ‘to completely jettison Lenin’ (162). But what is the ‘Lenin’ they are retaining? In the opening passage of The State and Revolution, Lenin warned that ‘great revolutionaries’, once safely dead, often become ‘harmless icons’. In relation to Lenin himself, that process can certainly be observed in Russia, particularly in the pageantry of the present-day Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Yet even those more radical socialist forces around the world which respect or even venerate Lenin's memory may be missing something vital about Lenin's legacy – his single-minded project to create a separate international communist movement to lead a world revolution along the lines pioneered in Russia in 1917.
Curiously, Read's account pays relatively little attention to the Communist International (CI), founded in Russia on Lenin's initiative in 1919. But this was surely where ‘Leninism’, as a distinct current in world socialism, was incubated. In the course of 1918 and 1919, Lenin and his party became increasingly convinced that only their ideas, experience, and organizational insights provided the key for the successful revolutionary overthrow of capitalist power. The prestige and apparent success of Lenin and Bolshevism attracted many revolutionaries around the world, not least in Europe, to form communist parties and affiliate to the CI. Leninism was being exported before it had even been named.
Many things have happened since that time, over a century ago. The international socialist revolution Lenin believed was imminent has not been one of them. As Read shows, Lenin's reputation as one of the greatest figures in the history of the world socialist movement lives on – and rightly so. However, few in that movement today would seriously attempt to apply his ideas. Lenin lives, for sure – but mostly as the sort of ‘harmless icon’ he so disdained.