A Date To Celebrate

Vladimir Lenin died on this date one hundred years ago.  That was a good event but a shame he had not died a decade earlier, before he had the chance to inflict so much damage on so many people.  A man full of hate who, upon gaining power, reveled in being merciless to his perceived enemies.  In October 1917, he led the Bolshevik Revolution which overthrew the social democrats who had been governing Russia since the overthrow of the Czar in February.  In January 1918, he ordered the Bolsheviks to forcibly dissolve the Constituent Assembly, the first freely elected representative body in Russian history, and then consolidated the communist dictatorship.  In September 1918 he launched the Red Terror; mass shootings "inflicted without hesitation" in order to intimidate the populace.  As Krylenko, Lenin's Minister of Justice, stated, "execution of the guilty is not enough, execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more."

The extreme measures extended to those who supported the party but dissented from any of its actions.  In early 1921, sailors of the Russian fleet at Kronstadt, an island near St Petersburg, who had supported the Bolsheviks completed since the October revolution, demanded an end to the monopoly of Bolshevik power, economic freedom and restoration of civil rights for peasants.  This was not a democratic revolution, as the sailor demands were based on class differences.  The repression by Lenin's government was ruthless.  Military suppression in which thousands were killed in the fighting while those who survived were executed or imprisoned.  Lenin used the incident to complete suppression of any dissent within the party and to completely eliminate any competing parties.

Lenin was inserted into the revolutionary chaos of Russia by the Germans who hoped his presence would undermine the new government's efforts to continue its participation in the First World War (read The Sealed Train for details).  Though the German effort succeeded in the short-term, longer term it led to the rise of the Soviet Union, which proved much more deadly for Germany less than three decades later.

For decades, defenders of the Soviet Union and communism contended that it was Stalin that perverted Lenin's vision (and some have continued to do so even more recently - see the New York Times 2017 celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution; read Normalizing Mass Murder and Repression), Solzhenitsyn's works and the documentation that became available with the fall of the Evil Empire in 1991, ended any doubt it was Lenin who instituted Terror and the Gulag as a tools of governance.

Lenin's life and death raise questions.

Do the impersonal forces of history govern?  How much of a role do individuals play in determining the tides of history? 

Certainly, Marxism is based on the former.  But in the case of the Bolshevik Revolution it was Lenin's personality and fanaticism that determined the course of his party.  None of his colleagues exhibited the stridency; none had the charisma of Lenin.  He was, for the worse, the indispensable man.

Without the presence of Lenin, it is very unlikely the Bolshevik Party would have seized power later in 1917.  It was Lenin who unflinchingly insisted on the coup that, as historian Edward Crankshaw wrote in the October 1954 edition of The Atlantic:

The Bolshevik Party in crisis was nothing but Lenin's will and the men who were prepared to submit to it absolutely. If Lenin had resigned after his return to Russia in 1917 it would have lost its identity, swallowed up by the Mensheviks and the "Compromisers." Lenin would have formed another party, but too late to win for himself the government of Russia; there would have been no Soviet Union. On the other hand, had Lenin given in to the popular demand and allowed his most trusted colleagues to persuade him into compromise, he would have lost his own identity and Bolshevism would have lost its meaning; there would have been no Soviet Union.

When is extra-judicial violence justified to protect against those who would destroy any possibility of a freer and democratic society?

The social democrats who ruled Russia in the interim between the abdication and Lenin's coup, knew what he was plotting.  While they did try to arrest him at one point, their indecisiveness and ineffectivness allowed the Bolsheviks to ultimately succeed.  They lacked the will to do what needed to be done; arrange for the killing of Lenin.  Without Lenin, Russian history takes a different course.  We don't know what that course may have been, but we know the tragedy of the next 74 years and the toll it took on millions of lives and its long term impact politically.  The same question arises in the case of Hitler, like Lenin, a unique and irreplaceable personality.