In Honor Of Russian Revolutionary Vladimir Lenin’s Birthday (April 1870-January 1924)-The Struggle Continues
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
For a number of years I have been honoring various revolutionary forbears, including the subject of this birthday tribute, the Russian Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin architect (along with fellow revolutionary Leon Trotsky) of the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 in each January under the headline-Honor The Three L’s –Lenin, Luxemburg , Liebknecht. My purpose then was (and still is) to continue the traditions established by the Communist International in the early post-World War I period in honoring revolutionary forbears. That month has special significance since every January
Leftists honor those three leading revolutionaries who died in that month, V.I. Lenin of Russia in his sleep after a long illness in 1924, and Karl Liebknecht of Germany and Rosa Luxemburg of Poland in 1919 murdered in separate incidents after leading the defeated Spartacist uprising in Berlin.
I have made my political points about the heroic Karl Liebknecht and his parliamentary fight against the German war budget in World War I in which he eventually wound up in prison only to be released when the Kaiser abdicated (correctly went to jail when it came down to it once the government pulled the hammer down on his opposition), on some previous occasions. The key point to be taken away today, still applicable today as in America we are in the age of endless war, endless war appropriations and seemingly endless desires to racket up another war out of whole cloth every change some ill-begotten administration decides it needs to “show the colors”, one hundred years later in that still lonely and frustrating struggle to get politicians to oppose war budgets, to risk prison to choke off the flow of war materials.
I have also made some special point in previous years about the life of Rosa Luxemburg, the “rose of the revolution.” About her always opposing the tendencies in her adopted party, the German Social-Democracy, toward reform and accommodation, her struggle to make her Polish party ready for revolutionary opportunities, her important contributions to Marxist theory and her willing to face and go to jail when she opposed the first World War. This month, the month of his birth, it is appropriate, at a time when the young needs to find, and are in desperate need of a few good heroes, a few revolutionaries who contributed to both our theoretical understandings about the tasks of the international working class in the age of imperialism (the age, unfortunately, that we are still mired in) and to the importance of the organization question in the struggle for revolutionary power, to highlight the early struggles of Vladimir Lenin, the third L, in order to define himself politically. It is rather a truism that nobody is born a revolutionary and that was the case with Lenin as well although the hagiography surrounding his name by the Stalinists later would attempt to make one believe that was the case. But, Lenin, not unlike many of us who took part in the 1960s political upheavals and had gone pillar to post from one political perspective to another before understanding that Marxism held some promise about creating that “world turned upside down,” that search for the newer world” that animated many of us, also when through various strategies before coming to that same conclusion. Probably the best way to see that process is to look at Lenin’s experiences through the prism of his fellow revolutionary, early political opponent, and eventual co-leader of the Bolshevik Revolution Leon Trotsky. Although Trotsky was some ten years Lenin’s junior he had been just as caught up in the revolutionary times of pre-World War I Russia and he too had gone through some transitions before coming to his life-long adherence to the spirit of Marxist doctrine.
A Look At The Young Lenin By A Fellow Revolutionary
The Young Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Doubleday and Co., New York, 1972
The now slightly receding figure of the 20th century Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, founder and leader of the Bolshevik Party and guiding light of the October 1917 Russian Revolution and the first attempt at creating a socialist society, has been the subject of many biographies (maybe more than slightly receding in some quarters in the West although still actively and vociferously anathema among the so-called liberal political intelligentsia as if the past twenty-five years after the demise of the Soviet Union had not buried the idea of that style of communism in the popular imagination). Some of those efforts undertaken during the time of the Soviet government which was dismantled in 1991-92, especially under the Stalin regime, bordered on or were merely the hagiographic. Others, reflecting the ups and downs of the post-World War II Cold War, painted an obscene diabolical picture, excluding only Lenin’s horns, and in some cases not even attempting to exclude those. In virtually all cases these effort centered on Lenin’s life from the period of the rise of the Bolshevik Social Democratic faction in 1903 until his early death in 1924. In short, the early formative period of his life in the backwaters of provincial Russia rate a gloss over. Lenin’s fellow revolutionary Leon Trotsky, although some ten years younger than him, tries to trace that earlier stage of his life in order to draw certain lessons. It is in that context that Trotsky’s work contains some important insights about the development of revolutionary figures and their common beginnings.
Although Trotsky’s little work, originally intended to be part of a full biography of Lenin, never served its purpose of educating the youth during his lifetime, a politically active anti-Stalinist life cut short by a Stalinist axe, and the story of its subsequent discovery is rather interesting one should note that this is neither a scholarly work in the traditional sense nor is it completely free from certain fawning over Lenin by Trotsky. Part of that fawning may have been a hang-over from certain past disputes before World War I in which generally Trotsky had been wrong. Part also, as always, determined by the vicissitudes of the furious Trotsky-Stalin fights in the 1920s and 1930s for the soul of the Russian Revolution as Trotsky tried to uncover the layers of misinformation about Lenin’s early life. Part of it resulted from Trotsky’s status as junior partner to Lenin and also to his late coming over to Bolshevism. And part of it is, frankly, to indirectly contrast Lenin’s and his own road to Marxism.
That said, this partial biography stands up very well as an analysis of the times that the young Lenin lived in, the events that affected his political development, and the idiosyncrasies of his own personality that drove Lenin toward revolutionary conclusions. In short, Trotsky’s work is a case study in the proposition that revolutionaries are made not born.
To a greater extent than would be true today in a celebrity-conscious world with a media explosion ready to delve into every part of a person’s pre-celebrity life many parts of Lenin’s early life are just not verifiable. Partially that is due to the nature of record keeping in the Russia of the 19th century. Partially it is because of the necessity to rely on not always reliable Tsarist police records. Another part is that the average youth, and here Lenin was in some ways no exception, really have a limited noteworthy record to present for public inspection. That despite the best efforts of Stalinist hagiography to make it otherwise.
Nevertheless Trotsky does an admirable job of detailing the high and low lights of agrarian Russian society and the vagaries of the land question in the second half of the 19thcentury. One should note that Trotsky grew up on a Ukrainian farm (what would later be called derogatorily a “kulak” farm) and therefore was no stranger to many of the same kind of problems that Lenin had to work through concerning the solution to the agrarian crisis, the peasant question. Most notably, is that the fight for the Russian revolution that everyone knew was coming could only be worked out through the fight for influence over the small industrial working class and in the name of some socialist construct of the new society.
I note that for the modern young reader that two things Trotsky analyzes are relevant. The first is the relationship between Lenin and his older brother Alexander who, when he became politicized, joined a remnant of the populist People’s Will terrorist organization and attempted to assassinate the sitting Tsar in the late 1800s. For his efforts Alexander and his co-conspirators were hanged. I have always been intrigued by the effect that this event had on Lenin’s development.
On the one hand, as a budding young intellectual, would Lenin have attempted to avenge his brother’s fate with his same revolutionary intellectual political program? Or would Lenin go another way to intersect the coming revolutionary wave that everybody knew was coming (except maybe the person of the Czar himself as Trotsky famously told it in an early chapter in his seminal History of the Russian Revolution) either through its agrarian component or the budding Marxist Social Democratic element? We know the answer but Trotsky provides a nicely reasoned analysis of the various influences that were at work in the young Lenin. That alone is worth the price of admission here.
The other point I have already alluded to above. Revolutionaries are made not born, although particular life circumstances may create certain more favorable conditions. Soviet historians in their fawning heyday tried to make of Lenin a superhuman phenomenon- a fully formed Marxist intellectual from his early youth. Trotsky once again distills the essence of Lenin’s struggle to make sense of the world, the Russian world in the first instance, as he tries to find a way out the Russian political impasse. Trotsky’s work only goes up to 1892-93, the Samara period, the period before Lenin took off for Petersburg and greener pastures. He left Samara a fully committed Marxist but it would be many years, with many polemics and by using many political techniques before he himself became a Bolshevik, as we know it. And that, young friends, is a cautionary tale that can be taken into the 21st century. Read on.
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