By Raju Prabath Lankaloka
On 21st January 1924, Vladimir Illyich Ulyanov, the leader of the Russian Soviet state and Communist International died after a prolonged illness. He was fifty-three years of age. His life covers years of profound upheaval, crisis and transformation – the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth century – crowned by the First World War and the Russian Revolution of 1917. He was without doubt the greatest revolutionary of his time, a giant of a man, whose actions changed the course of history in the 20th Century.
Born on the 10th April 1870, at Simbirsk on the Volga, Lenin, without doubt, was a political giant of a man. He was the most outstanding revolutionary of the twentieth century. Imbued with confidence in the final victory of the working class, he was a revolutionary and Marxist to his very being. However, Lenin was not born with these qualities, but made himself through a combination of learning and experience, of theory and practise. By the age of 23, all the fundamental features of Lenin’s personality, his outlook on life, and his mode of action were already formed. He lived and breathed the revolution. Through this greatest of historical tasks and singleness of purpose, he fulfilled himself completely and absolutely. Through years of study in the fundamental ideas of Marxism combined with hard practise, he became Lenin, the great man and teacher we know.
In the broad sense, after the death of Marx and Engels, the defence of genuine Marxism fell to Ilyich Lenin. Through his boundless work and confidence, he prepared the way for the first successful socialist revolution, and changed the course of world history.
“Only the proletarian socialist revolution can lead humanity out of the blind alley created by imperialism and imperialist wars”, wrote Lenin. “Whatever difficulties, possible temporary reverses, and waves of counter-revolution the revolution may encounter, the final victory of the proletariat is certain.”
Individuals of Lenin’s standing are rare in the revolutionary movement. This article does not challenge each of us to become a Lenin or a Marx. We must be ourselves. However, it is nevertheless a challenge to change ourselves, to develop ourselves theoretically and politically for the role we will play in the future. We are proud to stand on the shoulders of the great Marxists that went before us. We, like them, must imbue ourselves with a sense of history and a faith in the classless future of mankind.
In reference to Marx, Lenin warned against those who, after his death, would blunt his revolutionary message:
“During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes have invariably meted out to them relentless persecution, and received their teaching with the most savage hostility, most furious hatred, and a ruthless campaign of lies and slanders. After their death, however, attempts are usually made to turn them into harmless saints, canonising them, as it were, and investing their name with a certain halo by the way of ‘consolation’to the oppressed classes, and with the object of duping them; while at the same time emasculating and vulgarising the real essence of their revolutionary theories and blunting their revolutionary edge.” (Lenin, The State and Revolution).
This was certainly the case with Lenin, whose ideas in the hands of the Stalinist reaction were cynically twisted to justify every counter-revolutionary policy of the Soviet bureaucracy. Much to the delight of the world bourgeoisie, the apologists of Stalinism shamefully mutilated the revolutionary essence of Lenin, turning it into its very opposite, in order to cover up their crimes against the working class. Thus bourgeois historians have always tried to falsely equate Stalinism with Leninism or Communism, in order to blacken the name of Lenin.
Lenin’s last active days were spent organising his fight against the Stalin faction at the Congress. He wrote a letter to Trotsky asking him to take up the defence of the Georgian comrades, and to the Georgian leaders warmly committing himself to their cause. It should be noted that such emphatic expressions as “with all my heart” and “with very best comradely greetings” are very rarely met in the letters of Lenin, who preferred a more restrained style of writing. It was a measure of his commitment to the struggle. It should also be pointed out that Lenin’s bloc constituted a political faction – what was later known by the Stalinists as an “anti-party bloc”. The Stalinists had already organised their faction which controlled the party machine.
Fotieva, Lenin’s secretary, took down Lenin’s last notes on the Georgian question, evidently preparation for a speech at the Congress:
“Vladimir Ilyich’s instructions that a hint be given to Stoltz that he [Lenin] was on the side of the injured party. Someone or other of the injured party to be given to understand that he was on their side. Three moments: 1) One should not fight. 2) Concessions should be made. 3) One cannot compare a large state with a small one. Did Stalin know? Why didn’t he react? The name ‘deviationist’ for a deviation towards chauvinism and Menshevism proves the same deviation with the dominant nation chauvinists. Collected printed matter for Vladimir Ilyich.”
On 9 March, Lenin suffered his third stroke which left him paralysed and helpless. The struggle against bureaucratic degeneration passed to Trotsky and the Left Opposition. But Lenin laid the foundation of the programme of the Opposition, against bureaucracy, against the Kulak menace, for industrialisation and Socialist planning, for Socialist Internationalism and workers’ democracy.
With Lenin’s death, the defence and continuity of Marxism fell on the shoulders of Leon Trotsky who fought against the Stalinist epigones. Today, that continuity falls on the present generation of Marxists, in conditions of deepening world crisis and instability, to carry forward this fight for a new era of humanity, to the final victory, which it was Lenin’s triumph to inaugurate, but which he could not live to complete.
