For most people, Vladimir Lenin isn’t the first historical figure who comes to mind when the word “liberty” is mentioned. More often associated with political invectives like “dictator”, “oppression”, and “anti-democratic”, there is no shortage of vitriolic descriptors applied to his personality, either. The most common image in Western histories and biographies of Lenin is of a vindictive and unlikeable man, hell-bent on attaining power through unscrupulous means, and giving little — if any — thought to the human cost of his self-serving ambitions. The crimes of Lenin’s successor Stalin are often thrown at his feet, as well. “He built a system based on the idea that political terror against opponents was justified for a greater end,” wrote Victor Sebestyen in 2017, concluding “It was perfected by Stalin, but the ideas were Lenin’s.”^[1] “Stalin intensified the insanity inherent in Leninism,” concurs Stalin’s recent biographer Stephen Kotkin.^[2] For many scholars, so-called “Leninism” as a political ideology is synonymous with totalitarianism, autocracy, and terror. It could even be said that for many, Lenin and the various iterations of “Leninisms” that have emerged after his death represent the dialectical antithesis of the very concept of “liberty”. But in spite of the general Western historical consensus regarding Lenin’s anti-democratic and dictatorial propensities, much of this consensus relies on selective evidence, presentism, and noncontextual analyses. Attempts made by modern scholars to recontextualize Lenin’s writings reveal a man with rather different views on political liberties and democracy than one might expect.

In Lenin’s Own Words

Lenin produced volumes upon volumes of writings about political theory; his capacity for study and work is well-documented, and it is worth briefly exploring what informed his outlook. Like Marx, Lenin was a careful and diligent student of the French Revolution, as well as the wave of struggles for liberté, égalité, et fraternité that pepper the 19th-century European timeline.^[3] And of course, liberty was a common theme for Russian writers like Tolstoy, Gogol, and Pushkin, all of whom had helped shape the 19th-century Russian political zeitgeist.^[4] Hence, Lenin first became politically active at a time when most radicals in Russia were not pining for a socialist revolution, but for a bourgeois democratic revolution. At the turn of the 20th century, Tsarist Russia was the last great absolutist imperial power in Europe to have resisted major democratic reforms, and notably, the last to lack a written constitution.^[5] Its laws were still enacted by decree and at the whim of the dynastic Tsar, whose arbitrarily appointed Ministers only enjoyed advisory influence unless otherwise explicitly empowered by his Majesty — as long as they could remain in his personal good graces, which frequently proved difficult. Perhaps predictably, attempts against the Tsar’s life were frequent in the 19th century; even Alexander II, known to Russia as “Tsar Liberator” for his emancipation of Russia’s serfs, was cut down by an assassin’s bomb after no less than five attempts on his life.^[6]Instead of enacting liberal political reforms, the successor Tsars responded with greater and greater repression. As a result of which, Lenin’s older — but still quite young, at just 21 — brother Alexander, a populist, was hanged for his participation in yet another abortive assassination plot.^[7] Much historical hay has been made over the psychological impact his brother’s execution had on Lenin, in spite of widespread skepticism regarding the potential for retrospective psychoanalysis to yield any objective insights.^[8] Regardless, Lenin would indeed follow in his brother’s radical footsteps, albeit as a Marxist and not a populist of the Narodnaya Volya movement.

So, considering that the revolutionary activity endemic to 19th-century Russia was primarily democratic and liberal in its objectives, what did Lenin write about liberty, freedom, and democracy? Uninitiated readers might be surprised to see the arch-revolutionary insurrectionist Lenin declare, “Whoever wants to reach socialism by any other path than that of political democracy, will inevitably arrive at conclusions that are absurd and reactionary both in economic and political sense.”^[9] Or perhaps similarly unexpected is his assertion that “the winning of political liberty, essential in the interests of the entire social development, is, therefore, the most urgent political task of the Party”.^[10] Going even further, Lenin reasoned that “the achievement of political freedom becomes the ‘vital task of the workers’ because without it the workers do not and cannot have any influence over the affairs of the state, and thus inevitably remain a rightless, humiliated and inarticulate class [emphasis in original].”^[11] These are curiously liberal statements for a man who is regularly described as one of the most notorious dictators of the 20th century. If we are to take his words as genuine, it appears that Lenin saw the attainment of political freedom as not merely a prudent strategic aim for revolutionary socialists, but a necessary precondition for the general empowerment of the working class. To this point, Lenin even argued that the wage-earning class was inherently the most democratic of social classes, positing that “The very position the proletariat occupies as a class compels it to be consistently democratic. The bourgeoisie looks backward, fearing democratic progress, which threatens to strengthen the proletariat. The proletariat has nothing to lose but its chains, but with the aid of democracy it has the whole world to gain.”^[12] With this very last sentence, Lenin even goes out of his way to put a more democratic spin on the famous closing line of Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Lastly, concerning how Lenin intended for these ideals to be implemented, points contained in the Programme of the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party adopted in 1903, which he helped pen, were even more democratic than any Western democracy at the time:

1. Sovereignty of the people—that is, concentration of supreme state power wholly in the hands of a legislative assembly consisting of representatives of the people and forming a single chamber.
2. Universal, equal and direct suffrage, in elections both to the legislative assembly and to all local organs of self-government, for all citizens and citizenesses who have attained the age of 20; secret ballot at elections; the right of every voter to be elected to any representative body; biennial parliaments; payment of the people’s representatives.^[13]

While these quotes from Lenin may strike many as unexpected, readers who are even casually familiar with the written output of revolutionary Marxists will know that quotes like these are a dime a dozen. One can hardly pick up an article, manifesto, or polemic written by a 19th-century socialist without encountering the words, “liberation”, “emancipation”, “freedom”, or some other iteration of the concept of “liberty” in every other paragraph. For those who are not familiar with the Marxist revolutionary canon, I will attempt — against all good counsel — to sum up the wildly varying traditions of revolutionary Marxism in a single, pithy sentence: Marxists believed —and believe — that the ruling capitalist class had enslaved the working class in all but name, and that the only way to truly free them of those social bonds would be through a revolutionary transformation of society that instituted equitable control of its means of production and its output. How Marx intended for that to happen was never really made clear in his writings; but considering that his predecessors in political economy were invoking the ephemeral guidance of “invisible hands”, perhaps Marx can be somewhat forgiven for this oversight.

Regardless, of paramount importance to many Marxist revolutionaries were political freedoms: the freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of criticism, etc. Many Marxists at the time considered these political liberties to be fundamental to the revolutionary effort — as do many today. European socialists like Karl Kautsky, much of whose work Lenin greatly admired, even went so far as to refer to these political liberties as the “light and air” of socialists; without political freedoms, the socialist movement could not see or breathe.^[14] This is what allowed Lenin, in “A Letter to American Workers” that he penned nearly a year after the Bolshevik revolution, to declare that “America opened with one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few … That was the war the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed America and held her in colonial slavery,” and adding for good measure, “in the same way as these ‘civilised’ bloodsuckers [the British] are still oppressing and holding in colonial slavery hundreds of millions of people in India, Egypt, and all parts of the world.” Again, he makes an exhortation to a concept of liberty in the Marxist tradition at the end of the letter, proclaiming, “We are free from imperialist dependence, we have raised the banner of struggle for the complete overthrow of imperialism for the whole world to see [emphasis in original].”^[15]

There are many, many more quotes of this nature. And while they are not a historical smoking gun, the image of Lenin as a scheming, liberty-hating autocrat becomes a bit more complicated when quotes like these—and their historical context—are taken into account. Yet curiously, Lenin’s extensive writings on democracy and political freedom are typically ignored by Western scholars. And on the rare occasion that they are acknowledged, his democratic ideals are typically brushed off as evidence that he was a duplicitous and manipulative charlatan who was only outwardly demonstrating a commitment to political freedom in order to win popular support. For example, in one of the very few instances where a piece of writing that champions democracy is actually addressed in Sebestyen’s biography of Lenin, Sebestyen writes, “It is unlikely that he meant any of this: there would be no ‘democratic institutions’ in the state Lenin built and little talk about democracy.”^[16] In other words, because the state that emerged from the Bolshevik revolution failed to live up to these democratic ideals, the revolutionaries who produced that state must have been lying through their teeth whenever they spoke positively of freedom and democracy — no matter how frequently or fervently they did so. Sebestyen is just one of the latest in a century-long tradition of academics who flippantly dismiss Lenin’s pro-democratic arguments as nothing more than the deceitful politicking of a self-interested conspirator seeking power and influence. Apparently, this critical position is to be so taken for granted that Lenin’s extensive writings on democracy, freedom, and political liberty need not even be examined.

Lasting First Impressions

So where did this widespread consensus of skepticism toward Lenin’s personal dedication to political liberties originate? One might think it must be a product of decades of historical analysis, but it can actually be traced back to the earliest years of Lenin’s presence on the world stage. In the West, the question as to who the revolutionary political parvenu named Lenin was — and what exactly constituted his political philosophy — arose immediately after the Bolshevik revolution. In late 1917, just as the major European powers were coming to terms with the wartime abdication of the Tsarist ancien régime and its replacement with a precariously positioned Provisional Government, matters were further confounded by Lenin and the Bolsheviks’ unexpected coup d’état in the name of the working class. Lenin and his comrades were anything but well-known entities outside of socialist circles, even inside Russia. So, there was a good deal of mystery surrounding him when he suddenly emerged as a revolutionary leader in control of the largest territorial landmass in Europe, whose vast border constituted the bulk of the Eastern front in the still-ongoing First World War. A handful of journalists and activists sympathetic to the revolution — including Louise Bryant, John Reed, and Albert Rhys Williams — did their best to shed light on the matter from inside Russia. However, as sympathizers, their accounts often bordered on sycophancy, and as foreigners, they lacked the insider knowledge that could really provide the in-depth answers that Western political observers were looking for.^[17]

The first Russians possessing any substantial personal knowledge of Lenin to arrive in the West were anything but sympathetic and enthusiastic eyewitnesses. They were Mensheviks, the longtime factional rivals of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Both groups were factions within the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), itself one of several socialist organizations in Russia. The word “Bolshevik” in Russian simply means “majority faction”, which implies the existence of a “minority faction”, or “Menshevik”. These names were adopted unceremoniously after a deep disagreement developed within the RSDLP in 1903,^[18] although the arbitrary monikers often did not actually reflect the political composition of the wider organization: the Bolsheviks frequently found themselves in the minority, yet they retained their name implying the opposite. Further schisms would lead to further factionalization within the organization, and factions became a normal part of the RSDLP’s internal politics — even if they exasperated revolutionaries like Trotsky and others.^[19]

That all changed in 1921 — a time of widespread famine and civil war — when the Bolsheviks, in a desperate attempt to stabilize the post-revolutionary political chaos in Russia, instituted a ban on factions within the former RSDLP, which by then had been renamed the Communist Party.^[20] But already, in order to more effectively organize against the Bolsheviks — or to avoid being persecuted for doing so — many Mensheviks had begun emigrating to the West even before the ban on factions.^[21] After all, socialism was an international movement, and many sought to appeal to socialist organizations and trade unions abroad in an attempt to change the course of the still-recent revolution. The views of the Mensheviks have long been uncontroversially described as quintessentially “anti-Leninist” — not only by both their supporters and detractors, but by the Mensheviks themselves.^[22] So while the Menshevik emigrés did indeed bring to the West some of the first real, in-depth knowledge of Lenin’s background, personality, and political thought, their efforts to explain Lenin’s politics and ideology carried all of the baggage and biases — both personal and political — forged during the decades of deep disagreements with Lenin and his Bolshevik supporters.^[23] Unsurprisingly, their descriptions of him were generally far less than charitable. “Correct or not,” writes Boris Sapir in a landmark 1974 monograph on the Mensheviks, “far-fetched or realistic, these theories were part and parcel of the intellectual baggage of the Mensheviks, who drew from them their conviction of being right … and used them in trying to help Western socialists get their bearing in the Russian revolution.”^[24]

What, then, was the thrust of the Mensheviks’ criticism of Lenin? Broadly, they argued that Lenin was unscrupulously power-hungry, inclined toward reckless revolutionary adventurism, impatient with the project of democratic revolution, and predisposed toward conspiratorial machinations that belied his conniving and deceitful nature.^[25] These Menshevik descriptions of Lenin became the foundational bedrock of how he and his works would be evaluated by Western academics. Without access to — let alone awareness of — any alternative narrative, early Western scholarship on Lenin had little choice but to work with the only information they had available to them. Moreover, the political repression occurring in Russia during the years after the revolution appeared to more than substantiate what the Menshevik emigrés had to say about the Bolsheviks and their leader. In the decades that followed, the depiction of Lenin as an unprincipled and opportunistic political mastermind would further proliferate and ossify, and is still clearly recognizable in historical analyses today. Neil Harding, a Lenin scholar who in 1977 published an exhaustive contextual analysis of Lenin’s writing, argues, “It is undoubtedly the case that much of what we may call Western scholarship on Lenin’s thought bears the heavy impress of the Menshevik critique.”^[26] Finally, Lenin’s ability to plead his own case wasn’t helped after his health took a sudden turn in 1922: a series of massive strokes — from which he would not recover — gradually rendered him unable to communicate effectively, and he was often left unable to defend himself from criticism. By 1923, Lenin’s health had deteriorated to the point where he was barely able to speak, let alone participate in the nascent governmental infrastructure that he had helped build; by 1924, he was dead.^[27]

Soviet Mythologizing of Lenin and the Resistance to It

How events in the Soviet Union unfolded after Lenin’s passing would contribute significantly to the obfuscation of his democratic values. “Subsequently, after Lenin’s death,” writes Harding, “a major part of Menshevik and Western historiography of the Russian Revolution was concerned with explaining the enormities of Stalinism in terms of its ‘origins’ in Leninism”^[28] — readers will recall the Sebestyen and Kotkin quotes at the beginning of this essay. Additionally, many well-known actions of the Stalinist government did precious little to effectively dispel any unflattering representations of their foundational thinker Lenin, whom they would all but deify — and whose legacy they would mold to fit their agenda. In The Foundations of Leninism, published just months after Lenin’s death, Stalin “asserted that Lenin had added to the tactical propositions of Marx and Engels ‘a system of rules and guiding principles’” — and Stalin presented himself as the arbiter of those principles.^[29]

Notably, Nadeshda Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, became increasingly frustrated with Stalin’s perversions of Lenin’s politics and the increasing suppression of political freedoms. In response, she attempted to clear her late husband’s name by releasing writings that ran decidedly counter to the Stalinist narrative. How, for instance, was the authoritarian and bureaucratic centralist administration under Stalin supposed to reconcile this line from Krupskaya’s Reminiscences of Lenin, published in full in 1930? “He held the Party congress to be the highest authority,” she wrote, “where nothing was to be concealed, and everything was to be open and above board.”^[30] Throughout the book, she quotes her late husband at length, demonstrating his commitment to democracy and political transparency. “We must combine the revolutionary struggle against capitalism with a revolutionary programme and tactics in respect of all democratic demands,” reads one such quote, “including a republic, a militia, election of government officials by the people, equal rights for women, self-determination of nations, etc.”^[31] These transparently democratic ideals are hardly the image of the power-hungry autocrat that have long predominated contemporary Western descriptions of the man; nor do they suggest that the heavily centralized and increasingly top-down Stalinist government was living out Lenin’s ideals to the degree that they claimed to be.

Unsurprisingly, Krupskaya’s account was dismissed, ignored, or suppressed by both the Soviet and Western worlds. In the West, she was dismissed by the male-dominated academia, who argued that her account must have been the hopelessly optimistic and “womanish” musings of a widow blinded by her love for a tyrant — or just plain dishonesty. At home in the USSR, she was ignored by the similarly male-dominated Soviet government because her depiction of Lenin was, simply put, incredibly inconvenient for them. Krupskaya’s opposition predictably aroused Stalin’s infamously vindictive ire, and he persecuted her as far as the widow of the much-revered Lenin could be persecuted without raising too many political eyebrows.^[32] Much to Stalin’s relief, she died in 1939 — the same year he managed to have Leon Trotsky, his other great dissenter, assassinated. Thereafter, he could resume his claim, now effectively unchallenged, that he was carrying out Lenin’s dying wishes to the letter.^[33] Not even the incredibly inconvenient passage contained in the document known as “Lenin’s Testament,”^[34] where Lenin appeared to demand in no uncertain terms that the Soviet government “remove Stalin”, could loosen Stalin’s hold on Lenin’s legacy.^[35]

For the next few decades, the “official” Soviet interpretation of Lenin’s political philosophy and thought enjoyed largely unchallenged authority inside the USSR. That is, until the 1960s, when a small but steadily increasing number of Soviet citizens began publicly demonstrating against government overreach and privately circulating samizdat, illegally printed leaflets and books containing criticisms of the Soviet government’s political restrictions. Curiously, one of the primary sources they cited to justify their discontent with the restrictive atmosphere was none other than Lenin.^[35] One such “dissident” (a moniker given by their cheerleaders in the West) was Petr Grigorenko, no less than a Major-General in the Red Army, who went as far as founding (illegally, under the Soviet ban on political organizations) the “Union for the Struggle for the Rebirth of Leninism.”^[36] “I created an organization for the dissemination of undistorted Leninism,” he declared defiantly in an interrogation.^[37] And what were the un-Leninist distortions he claimed to see in the Soviet government? As Grigorenko’s collaborator, the more rank-and-file citizen Ivan Yakhimovich (both an avowed Leninist and a firm believer in the Soviet project), put it, “There is only one way to destroy samizdat [i.e., illegal criticism of the government]: by expanding democratic rights rather than curtailing them,” concluding, “Remember: Leninism—Yes! Stalinism—No!”^[38]

This hardly suggests that an intrinsically authoritarian rigidity pervaded Lenin’s political writings. In the end, the dissident movement — who perceivably would have been referred to as "radicals", “subversives”, or even “extremists” if their actions were directed at a more liberal Western regime — eventually lost steam in the face of repressive measures (and in spite of decidedly less-than-clandestine Western assistance), and the USSR broke apart in the wake of a rightist coup before another meaningful challenge to its authority could be mounted by any other self-declared Leninists. But the perception of Lenin across the “Iron Curtain” took a rather different trajectory.

“Lenin the Jacobin” as Seen From the West

For most Western observers, Stalin’s repressive measures and the Mensheviks’ critiques were more than enough evidence to prove that Lenin had placed no value whatsoever upon democracy and political liberty. Consequently, this authoritarian image of Lenin is one of the few areas in both academic and political discourse that has enjoyed a general consensus across ideological tendencies during and after the Cold War. On the right, criticisms of Lenin are predictably vitriolic and demonizing. In 1966, for example, conservative scholar Stefan Possony made a veritable attempt to exhaust the dictionary of its censorious adjectives when he described Lenin as “self-righteous, rude, demanding, ruthless, despotic, formalistic, bureaucratic, disciplined, cunning, intolerant, stubborn, one-sided, suspicious, distant, asocial, cold-blooded, ambitious, purposive, vindictive, spiteful, a grudge-holder, a coward who was able to face danger only when it was deemed unavoidable.” He concluded, “Lenin was a complete law unto himself, and he was entirely serene about it.”^[39] Quotes like these are easy to find amongst conservative academics.

But in a rare point of political agreement, the radical academic left often cast Lenin as anti-democratic and authoritarian, as well. In a widely circulated video from a 1989 lecture, the self-identified libertarian socialist Noam Chomsky responded to an audience question about his opinion of Lenin by arguing that he “was a right-wing deviation of the Socialist movement, and was so regarded by the mainstream Marxists.” He added later, “In my view it was just opportunistic; he knew that to gain power, he would have to go along with the popular currents that were developing…”^[40] Of course, Chomsky is not a Lenin specialist, but his argument is illustrative of the degree to which the anti-democratic interpretation of Lenin has thoroughly entrenched itself in Western scholarship. For both the left and the right, Lenin was and still is little more than an opportunistic and cunning insurrectionary tactician who only appealed to Marx when it suited him.

But Western scholars have not been simply parroting the Stalinist line or Menshevik critiques. Lenin’s writings have also been victims of selective, non-contextual, and presentist analysis. Beginning in 1926, the first “official” collections of Lenin’s writings were steadily released by the Soviet government. The first edition of 27 volumes was quickly translated into many languages, and the assembled body of work would expand to 55 volumes by its fifth — partially censored — edition in 1965.^[41] Out of these writings, Lenin’s longer and more conceptual works, including State and Revolution and Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, as well as Left-wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, would eventually become the focus for academic research. However, each of these books was written during or after 1917, by which point Lenin was already clamoring for international socialist revolution instead of merely a democratic revolution in Russia.^[42] But it was another book-length work, written much earlier than the aforementioned titles, that stood out to Western scholars as the foundational document of Bolshevism and, critically, the most revealing of Lenin’s true character. A noncontextual and presentist analysis of Lenin’s book titled What Is to Be Done? would cause it to become the favorite “smoking gun” for historians who contend that Lenin had no regard for democracy or political liberties.

Written in 1902, just a year prior to the Bolshevik-Menshevik split, the polemical pamphlet What Is to Be Done? had every appearance to Western observers of being the restrictive and undemocratic homunculus that would grow into the totalitarian ideological framework behind “Leninism”. According to the standard interpretation of What Is to Be Done?, Lenin rejected democratic models in favor of a selective, centralized, and conspiratorial band of “professional revolutionaries” who could seize the power that lowly workers were evidently incapable of taking for themselves.^[43] The subscribers to this interpretation argue that it was Lenin’s perversion of Marxism and his rejection of Social-Democracy that led not only to the Bolshevik-Menshevik split a year after the publication of What Is to Be Done?, but also to the highly centralized, bureaucratic, and authoritarian governmental apparatus that developed under Stalin. Scholars point to the authoritarian decisions carried out by the party under Lenin’s tutelage during the revolution and ensuing civil war, and then subsequently under Stalin’s bureaucratic centralist government; in them, they see direct continuity with the content of What Is to Be Done? For example, Adam Ulam, writing in 1962, contended that “the argument and flavor of What Is to Be Done? have remained imbedded in the values and beliefs of the Soviet system. They are evident in the pronouncements of Khrushchev as they were in Stalin and Lenin.”^[44] But most importantly, it is taken for granted that Lenin intended the text to be a replicable organizational model for socialists everywhere to follow. Yet a growing number of scholars have made the case that this interpretation of What Is to Be Done? is the creation of hopeful academics who have projected their pre-existing conceptions of Lenin onto it.

Challenges to the Western “Jacobin” Consensus

In 1971, the socialist activist and Marxism scholar Hal Draper wrote a short work entitled The Myth of Lenin’s “Concept of The Party” or What Did They Do to What Is To Be Done?, which was published posthumously in 1990. In the article, Draper argues that What Is to Be Done? has been consistently misinterpreted by Western scholarship. Contrary to most readings of Lenin’s text up to that point, Draper contends that Lenin had no intention of creating a universal “blueprint” for revolutionary organizations. “The reader of Lenin’s WITBD must understand that if it embodied some specially Leninist ‘concept of the party’ Lenin himself was entirely unaware of it at the time,” Draper wrote, “He thought he was putting forward a view of party and movement that was the same as that of the best parties of the International, particularly the German party under the leadership of August Bebel – only allowing for the big difference that the Russian movement faced the special problems of illegality under an autocracy [emphasis in original].”^[45]

In Draper’s analysis, the content of What Is to Be Done? is inextricable from the highly restrictive political conditions of Tsarist Russia in 1902, where it was illegal to form any political organizations, much less an open and democratic socialist party. Those historical conditions would change dramatically just three years later, however, with the abortive revolution of 1905. The failed rebellion was a spontaneous popular uprising, and the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party — the majority whose leaders were in exile — was left scrambling to keep up with events. While the attempted revolt failed to overthrow the Tsar, average Russians did win some political liberties: freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and the freedom to organize politically were all granted by the Tsar, among other concessions.^[46] Recall that Lenin and many contemporary European socialists considered these political freedoms to be the “light and air” of the socialist movement. Accordingly, once this modicum of political freedom was obtained and the working-class clamor for uprising began to subside, Lenin altered his tactics to fit Russia’s new sociopolitical reality, and What Is to Be Done? became obsolete.

Lenin himself complained about the tendency to remove the book from its historical context as early as 1908: “The basic mistake made by those who now criticise What Is to Be Done? is to treat the pamphlet apart from its connection with the concrete historical situation of a definite, and now long past, period in the development of our Party.”^[47] Of course, it’s possible for one to take a cynically contrarian stance and suggest that Lenin was simply backtracking with statements like this to save face, but apparently few have bothered to even attempt to make such a case: as Draper further observes, “There is not a single prominent Leninologist who has even mentioned this material in his exposition of WITBD’s original sin.”^[48] Lenin can hardly have imagined how persistent such non-contextual readings would become. He might have had some conception, however, because as late as 1921 he was advising that “the translation [of What Is to Be Done?] must be issued with commentaries, which would have to be written by a Russian comrade very well acquainted with the history of the Communist Party of Russia, in order to avoid false application.”^[49] Lenin’s worries about translations would prove well-founded, as well: Draper demonstrates that one popular English translation of What Is to Be Done? by Sergei Utechin, a still widely-respected Lenin scholar, had gone as far as intentionally omitting inconvenient passages: “he has carefully excised from this text every passage in WITBD that fails to conform with his thesis, and that he can take out”, accused Draper.^[50] Perhaps too charitably, Draper presented a caveat: “This does not necessarily mean that Utechin performed his operation on the body of WITBD with conscious dishonesty” he wrote, concluding, “It is far more likely that he knows only one way to read Lenin: through his own specially made glasses.”^[51] Historical consensus dies hard enough as is, even without the life support of doctored translations of primary sources.

A significant expansion upon Draper’s arguments would arrive with the work of Lars Lih, particularly with his 2005 book Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? In Context. This exhaustive contextual analysis, complete with a new — undoctored — translation, examines in great detail the historical context in which Lenin penned his widely misinterpreted and misapplied polemic. Similar to Draper, Lih argues that virtually all discussion regarding What Is to Be Done? has failed to take the historical context of the work into account. “[E]ven the experts worked without a proper knowledge of context,” he argues. Lih continues, “they misread WITBD and therefore misunderstood Lenin, and then successfully raised up this image to textbook status.”^[52] According to Lih’s analysis, Draper was correct that What Is to Be Done? has been wildly misinterpreted. However, Lih further argues that the significance placed upon the book today by historians is entirely out of proportion with the significance placed upon it by Lenin and the book’s intended audience in 1902. Building on Harding and Draper, Lih demonstrates that Lenin never intended for the pamphlet to be much more than a rebuttal to a handful of writers from rival underground newspapers, the arguments about which constitute the bulk of the text. “The entire purpose of this polemic was to saddle Rabochee delo [a rival socialist newspaper] with positions universally perceived as unacceptable,” writes Lih in an article two years before the publication of Lenin Rediscovered, adding, “For Lenin to have knowingly advanced any new or controversial positions would have defeated his whole project.”^[53] In this reading, Lih ascribes even less significance to What Is to Be Done? than even Draper, who had already argued that the work “was merely a summary of the organizational policy of the Iskra group of 1901-1902, ‘no more and no less.’”^[54] Lih’s argument — and no less Draper’s — regarding the relative insignificance of What Is to Be Done? is reinforced by the fact that “After 1905, Russian Social Democracy moved on to other issues and other crises, and WITBD was never discussed, even by its author, outside of the context of party history.”^[55] “As a result,” Lih concludes, “the textbook status of WITBD is the main barrier to a serious rethinking of Lenin.”^[56]

Lih flatly contends that “Lenin cannot be understood just by reading Lenin.”^[57] Nonetheless, this hasn’t stopped historians of the USSR from treating What Is to Be Done? as if it were intended to be Lenin’s ultimate vision for how any socialist organization should be structured. To continue picking on Sebestyen solely for being one of the most recent transgressors, he wrote in 2017 that “What Is to Be Done? was the bible of Lenin’s Bolsheviks, the blueprint for how he would seize power and hold on to it.”^[58] He’s not entirely to blame, of course. Again, Stalin’s administration did no favors for efforts to dispel this narrative by pointing to What Is to Be Done? as a viable model not only for the structure of underground revolutionary organizations, but also as a retroactive justification for the hypercentralized structure of his own party apparatus. Moreover, as part of Stalin’s effort to internationalize the communist struggle after World War II, the text was disseminated deliberately with the idea that it could “play a role in the founding of new communist parties.”^[59] Prior to this shift in Soviet efforts decades after Lenin’s death, Lih sarcastically observes, “it seems that the Russians were in no particular hurry to make their founding document available to foreign comrades.”^[60] Again, the primary reason for the post-1905 obsolescence of the clandestine strategies outlined in What Is to Be Done? was that political organizations had been legalized in Russia — at least to a much greater degree than before. This meant that revolutionary activities no longer needed to be dominated by the longtime Russian Social-Democratic tradition of konspiratsiia — a word that Lih says simply translates to “the fine art of not getting arrested,” instead of its more sinister-sounding English cognate.^[61] Most importantly, however, it meant that electoral politics were now on the table. Accordingly, running socialist candidates in parliamentary races became a serious priority for even the most dedicated of Marxist revolutionaries, Lenin not least among them. As we have seen, democracy and political liberties were central to his revolutionary politics, and he set to work exercising those freedoms as soon as it was legally and strategically feasible to do so.

“Already well versed in Marx and Engels’ ideas [regarding electoralism],” writes University of Minnesota professor August Nimtz, “Lenin enthusiastically employed them when the opportunity arose in 1906 with the convening of the first Duma, a [parliamentary body] the Russian monarchy was forced to grant owing to the masses’ revolt of 1905.”^[62] In 2014, Nimtz published a two volume work about Lenin’s electoral strategy, a subject on which he says the “Leninologists have also been derelict.”^[63] Nimtz claims that his is the first book-length work dedicated solely to the electoral component of Lenin’s politics — I could find no other, either — a detail he finds strange “since it’s likely that on no other question apart from that of the peasantry did Lenin spill so much ink.”^[64] More to the point, Nimtz charges that “Lenin’s more than decade-long work in electoral/parliamentary politics between 1905 and 1918 is inconvenient for his enemies,” concluding wryly, “and that is why — in almost Stalinist-like fashion — it has been deleted in Leninological accounts.”^[65] The reality is that Lenin devoted nearly as much time and energy to electoral strategy in the decidedly less-than-ideal Russian parliamentary system as he did toward any of his more classically “revolutionary” insurrectionary endeavors — scholarly silence on the subject notwithstanding. Throughout his book, Nimtz illustrates how Lenin pursued electoral victories alongside activities traditionally considered to be more “revolutionary”. To Lenin, even the pseudo-parliamentary Duma was as important as any other agitational and organizational tool at his disposal.^[66] In fact, he maintained Bolshevik participation in parliamentary matters long after he was convinced of the urgent need for a revolutionary overthrow of the provisional government, all the way up until they carried out the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.^[67] Once they had seized power, however, Lenin’s idealism regarding political liberties and democracy would face a serious challenge.

Recontextualizing Lenin’s Anti-Democratic Actions After the Revolution

This finally leads us to the obvious question that still looms large. If Lenin was so committed to democratic ideals and political liberties, why were they so heavily restricted by the state that he founded? The simple answer is that the authoritarian form of the Soviet state that emerged after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 was not at all the plan, nor did it take shape immediately. Rather, the repressive measures and centralized governmental structures were implemented in piecemeal fashion, driven by the pressures of events no less world-shaking and epoch-making than the First World War. We’ve already seen how quick Lenin was to adapt his strategies to the shifting historical conditions unique to Russia, and an international explosion of violence on an unprecedented scale understandably changed the day-to-day calculations of virtually everyone in Europe. Lenin was certainly no exception. “Lenin believed that the war had opened the era of intensified class conflict and placed proletarian revolution on the agenda,”^[68] writes Ralph Miliband, a Marxist sociologist who believed this assessment of Lenin’s to be a gross miscalculation. Similarly, legal historian and Marxist theorist Mike Macnair insightfully suggested in 2008 that during the First World War, Lenin “mistook the crisis of British world hegemony for a terminal-phase crisis of capitalism [author’s emphasis].”^[69]

With hindsight we can easily question and criticize Lenin’s judgment, but the chaos of events in 1917 across Europe must have been positively dizzying for anyone alive at the time, no less a careful observer of capitalist imperialism like Lenin. The fact that the unprecedentedly catastrophic conditions of that war are still frequently described as “apocalyptic” today perhaps makes the nature of Lenin’s misjudgments a bit more understandable, immensely consequential though they would be. As mutinies in German and French forces multiplied, the growing unpopularity of the war coupled with its destruction of capitalism’s resources convinced Lenin and the Bolsheviks that revolution in Europe was imminent. Russia itself was on the verge of collapse, jeopardizing the democratic revolution that had already been won in March of 1917 after spontaneous uprisings had forced the Tsar’s abdication.^[70]

So, Lenin decided to act. Writing not long before the Bolsheviks seized power, he appealed to liberty yet again: “The prisons of countries famed for their observance of law and even for their freedom — Germany, France, Italy and Britain — became filled with tens and hundreds of internationalists, opponents of the war and advocates of a working-class revolution.” The exhortation for revolution emphatically concluded, “we are on the eve of a world-wide revolution [author’s emphasis].”^[71] Then, shortly after seizing power, his convictions undoubtedly bolstered by success, he wrote, “That the socialist revolution in Europe must come, and will come, is beyond doubt. All our hopes for the final victory of socialism are founded on this certainty and on this scientific prognosis.”^[72]

Obviously, Lenin was wrong in this last prediction, science notwithstanding. The hoped-for revolutions in Germany failed, and the prospects of an international revolution evaporated. But no one alive at the time could have possibly known for certain that this revolutionary wildfire would peter out when and how it did. From the perspective of the Bolsheviks, to simply cede their unprecedented revolutionary victory to the forces of counterrevolution was to deliver the workers of Russia, Europe, and beyond back to their capitalist oppressors. Such a surrender was unthinkable in the wake of such an historic revolutionary achievement, and the Bolsheviks were determined to avoid defeat at all costs. To this end, for better or worse, Lenin and the Bolsheviks lamented the violence and repressions that followed in the wake of the revolution as bitterly regrettable but temporary setbacks and concessions, as have innumerable military commanders and government officials facing impossibly difficult wartime decisions throughout history. The unprecedented devastation wrought by the First World War was enough to break even the most hardened military and government leaders throughout the rest of Europe, whose wartime policies and decisions contributed to the deaths of millions of civilians (and working-class conscripts) around the world. Amidst the chaos of revolution, Lenin and the Bolsheviks — none of whom had any experience as statesmen, governors, or military commanders — suddenly found themselves having to confront the multiplying crises of the First World War.

Up against what must have seemed like impossible odds, Lenin himself doubted their chances. He expected the Bolsheviks’ revolution to go the way of the Paris Commune — to suffer defeat at the hands of the counterrevolution. “Our government may not last long,” Lenin told an interviewer barely a year after seizing power, “but these decrees will be part of history.”^[73] Lenin had every reason to be pessimistic: The period in Russia between the 1917 revolution and Lenin’s death in 1924 saw civil war, interventions by foreign militaries, troop mutinies, infrastructural collapse, famine, political upheavals, and assassination attempts — one of which nearly succeeded in taking Lenin’s life.^[74] Additionally, the post-revolution civil war lasted from the Bolshevik’s revolution in late 1917 until roughly 1921 — although sporadic fighting still continued for years afterward — and the conflict even saw limited military intervention in support of forces loyal to the Tsar by the United States, Great Britain, France, Japan, and other allied nations.^[75] While this intervention was rather half-hearted and subsequently exaggerated by Soviet historians,^[76] it did little to stifle fears of “capitalist encirclement” that Western historians often dismiss as undue paranoia. If that weren’t enough, in the early 1920s, the widespread devastation caused by the Russian civil war also contributed to one of the many famines that have plagued all Russian history, long before the USSR existed.^[77] With precious few moments of tranquility, Lenin and the Bolsheviks had no shortage of impossible decisions to make, and at a pace that was similarly impossible to keep up with.

Under such immense pressure, it was clear to Lenin and the Bolsheviks that if an international socialist revolution failed to manifest, all would be lost. Reflecting years later on the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power, he makes it clear how entirely dependent his decisions were upon the outbreak of an international workers’ revolution:

Before the revolution, and even after it, we thought: either the revolution breaks out in the other countries, in the capitalistically more developed countries, immediately, or at least very quickly, or we must perish. In spite of this conviction, we did all we possibly could to preserve the soviet system under all circumstances, come what may, because we knew that we were not only working for ourselves, but also for the international revolution.^[78]

Rather than attributing them to any individual character flaw of Lenin’s, the repressive measures carried out by the Bolsheviks after the revolution are far better explained in the context of quotes like this one, of which there are many. But these are not the sorts of statements from Lenin that historians tend to focus upon. In the last decade of its existence, the Soviet archives began opening as part of Gorbachev’s move toward increased transparency under glasnost — but the real windfall came with the opening of the Soviet archives after the breakup of the USSR. Researchers suddenly had access to “no less than 6,724 unpublished Lenin manuscripts,”^[79] consisting of official documents, internal statements, and even personal letters produced by Lenin that the Soviet government deemed prudent to hold back — and there may be more still. “Paradoxically,” writes Lih, “the opening of the archives, so immensely beneficial in other areas of Soviet history, led to even further decontextualizing of Lenin.”^[80] Understandably attracted to the novelty of the newly released material, many scholars produced works that focused on them more or less exclusively. Lih explains that these were “documents that created problems for the official Soviet interpretation of Lenin, and in particular for the carefully cultivated image of his impeccable virtue and humanity.”^[81] Lih further argues that these documents were “mostly from the time of the Russian civil war, in which [Lenin] demanded energetic repression.”^[82]

An often-cited example of this can be found in Lenin’s order to violently suppress a counterrevolutionary uprising, delivered on August 11th, 1918: “Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks [wealthy peasants], rich men, bloodsuckers.”^[83] These are undeniably shocking words. Terror as a political tactic was indeed widespread, although scholars typically agree that the atrocities committed by forces loyal to the Tsar were more egregious than those of the Bolshevik forces.^[84] But terror is terror, and there is no apologizing for it. While many of the terroristic reprisals committed by Red Army troops during the post-revolution civil war were out of Lenin’s control, if you examine his words and actions during the post-revolution civil war in isolation, it certainly does not paint a flattering portrait. But the same could be said of anyone holding decision-making power during a violent conflict, regardless of their personal or organizational commitment to concepts like “liberty” and “freedom”. War makes monsters of men.

All too often, histories of the Bolshevik Revolution are written as if the author expected the tumultuous events of the period to proceed in an orderly fashion, with little to no disruption in the day-to-day lives of the formerly Imperial Russian citizenry. Moreover, Lenin’s many eager critics frequently assess any decision made by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in isolation, as if the revolutionaries were acting solely in accordance with an unreasonably prescriptive ideology, and in the absence of any external pressures whatsoever. Consequently, historians will occasionally engage in elaborate rhetorical performances in an effort to lay at Lenin’s feet the entirety of the blame for the innate chaos of the revolutionary period in Russia. Histories covering the years immediately following the Bolsheviks’ revolution often frame the decisions and strategies adopted under Lenin as part of a meticulously calculated ideological program. However, this is at best a misconception, and at worst a misrepresentation. Bolshevik policies during the post-revolution civil war were, in fact, a frantic, ad-hoc response to the devastating institutional and societal decay of Imperial Russia, exacerbated by the First World War and deep-seated unrest — none of which the Bolsheviks created, and all of which predated their rise to power.

Take Orlando Figes, for example, and his otherwise incredibly useful contextual history of the Russian revolution. Tellingly titled A People’s Tragedy, the book leaves no doubts as to what Figes thinks of the exploits of Lenin and his comrades. To be sure, there is undoubtedly much to criticize in the efforts of the Bolshevik revolutionaries. However, Figes’ critiques are often self-contradictory and circular in their arguments.

For instance, Figes decries the efforts of the Soviet government to prevent citizens from selling goods on the black market amidst the chaos of the civil war. “Had they not been so hostile to the market,” Figes argues, “the Bolsheviks might have used this collective barter system to help feed the cities and supply industry”^[85] — as if the all-too-nascent Bolshevik state was the only government in history to have illiberally attempted to suppress underground economies during wartime. But even if we were to allow for Figes’ hopeful economic liberalism and accept the potential utility of an ad hoc market system, Figes observes elsewhere that in revolutionary Russia, “Industry and transport were thrown into chaos by the endless travelling of city people to and from the countryside to buy up stocks of food.”^[86] Further, he writes, “Many of them travelled into the countryside with tools, fuel and scrap-iron, which they had stolen from their factories.”^[87] In this way, it would appear that the improvised markets upheld by Figes as a solution were in fact problematic of their own accord. Yet Figes still finds it strange that Lenin and the Bolsheviks would be keen to prevent the illicit sale of an already greatly diminished industrial output amidst both a foreign invasion and a rapidly spiraling civil war.

Revolution is, if nothing else, inevitably chaotic, and it’s absurd to fault Lenin and the Bolsheviks for being skeptical of the capacity of an anarchic, improvised, and piecemeal market system to resolve the myriad self-reinforcing crises faced by the Russian infrastructure. To this point, Figes concedes that in the territories not controlled by the Bolsheviks, “The White economy was thrown into chaos as factories closed down, inflation spiraled, workers went on strike.”^[88] So it would appear that even in the regions where the equally beleaguered counterrevolutionary administration was not hostile to markets, the overburdened economy still floundered under the tempestuous conditions of the civil war. Additionally, unlike Lenin's revolutionary government, many of those anti-Bolshevik strongholds were even receiving material aid from European allies — yet their infrastructures still failed to adequately manage basic resource distribution. Such is the nature of state collapse and revolutionary upheaval, which had begun years before the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power.

This universal crisis of production was further compounded by “the general flight to the countryside”^[89] on the part of the peasant factory workers, an exodus driven by the ongoing peasant revolution that had begun long before the Bolsheviks seized power. For many peasants, the newfound “prospect of a share in the communal land or of setting up in some rural trade was usually enough to lure semi-rural workers back to their native villages.”^[90] As a consequence, the pool of urban industrial labor collapsed. In Petrograd, for example, “The workforce of these factories declined from a quarter of a million to barely 50,000 during the first six months of 1918.”^[91] Under such a complex array of strains, the already notoriously inadequate infrastructure of Russia inevitably stood little chance: “The railway system had virtually collapsed, largely as a result of the economic crisis and the chronic shortages of fuel, and could not cope with the transportation of foodstuffs to the cities.”^[92] Such complex and intertwining internal factors — to say nothing of the pressures of a civil war amidst the most deadly military conflict the world would see until the Second World War — cannot simply be reduced to misjudgment and mismanagement by Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

Figes also devotes many pages to denouncing the Red Army’s often brutal requisitioning of food, an unquestionably tragic endeavor and a common source of moral condemnation for historians of the early Soviet government. However, all too conveniently, Figes only gives passing mention to the fact that such harsh measures were widespread wartime practices that were also conducted by the counter-revolutionary White Army,^[93] let alone by virtually all belligerents in the First World War.^[94] “Given such hellish conditions,” Figes acknowledges, “no one could expect the soldiers to behave like saints.”^[95] In reality, forced requisitioning of farmers, food shortages, starvation, and even the use of terror against civilians were endemic throughout Europe during the terrible conflict. Of course, such extremities were certainly exacerbated in Russia under the competing milieux of total war, infrastructural collapse, and revolutionary upheaval, all of which had taken root well before Lenin and the Bolsheviks had any influence over events. However, Figes’ book and others like it often read as though these sorts of wartime atrocities were unique to the Bolsheviks — and of Lenin in particular.

Lenin’s calls for repression during the post-revolution civil war are often held up as revealing the “true” Lenin, all but confirming the allegations of his inherently tyrannical nature. “Sometimes it seemed as if the whole vast drama of the Russian revolution and its tragic outcomes were caused by one man’s intolerance and cruelty,” observed Lih.^[96] Accordingly, historians often argue that Lenin displayed a callous disregard for the human cost of the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary endeavors. Yet many accounts exist of him utterly despairing over it. In their eyewitness reminiscences between 1921-22, Victor Serge and Natalia Sedova recall Lenin’s lamentations: “‘What mistakes we have made!’ he said repeatedly. ‘It would be criminal to deny that we have exceeded all bounds.’” They also quote Lenin giving an admission of defeat: “‘Our attempt to implement socialism here and now has failed. … The dictatorship shows that never before has the proletariat been in a more desperate situation …’”^[97] Moreover, they depict Lenin as fully aware and crestfallen that the fundamental goal of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia — the spread of a working class uprising into Germany and the rest of Europe — was not going to materialize. Sedova and Serge quote Lenin conceding that the Bolshevik government must “abandon the construction of socialism and fall back on state capitalism in many economic spheres.’”^[98]

Far from a delusional idealist blinded by success, Lenin was making this recalculation as early as 1919, after the first failed socialist revolution in Germany.^[99] But fate would have other plans. When the fiercest domestic violence of the civil war finally subsided around 1921^[100] — scattered skirmishes would persist for several more years — Lenin had not even two years of good health left. “His final struggle with death was interwoven with his struggle against repressive, brutal policies and practices of comrades in the central leadership of the Russian Communist Party,” writes historian Paul Le Blanc in one of the most recent biographies published about Lenin.^[101] If he had lost his commitment to political liberty, freedom, and democracy in practice, he had arguably not lost it in principle. But of course, in times of revolution, famine, and civil war, this is a rather weak consolation.

Overall, surprisingly little serious effort has been made to compare the repressions under Lenin to myriad similar measures taken by Western liberal governments under the extreme pressures of a domestic war during roughly the same period. In calling for energetic repression of their political and ideological opponents during wartime, Lenin and the Bolsheviks have no shortage of otherwise admired historical company. William Tecumseh Sherman is famous for vowing to “make Georgia howl” in his “policy of hard war”^[102]during the American Civil War, and even the most revered figure in that conflict can be found enacting repressive measures and making callous statements. Recall President Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and his lamentation that “No general yet found … can face the arithmetic,”^[103] made in reference to his frustrated search for a general who would be less cautious with the lives of United States Army soldiers — whom he would find in future US President Ulysses S. Grant. If one were to counter that Sherman, Lincoln, and Grant were justified in that they were fighting the very real evils of slavery, it should be remembered that as Marxists fighting capitalism, Lenin and the Bolsheviks thoroughly believed that they were doing the same. Regardless, Lincoln’s commitment to ending slavery in the American Civil War is belied by his own admission: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, not either to save or to destroy slavery.”^[104]

Regarding the domestic curtailing of political liberties under Lenin, we must continue to interrogate the double standards at play. Is Franklin Delano Roosevelt to be judged solely by his executive order to place more than 100,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps? Is the whole of American history to be judged by its energetic, violent, and often deadly repression of antiwar and civil rights activists in the 1960s, to say nothing of the enslavement of Black Africans and genocide of indigenous peoples the nation was founded upon? Who is to be blamed for Moro Crater, No Gun Ri, My Lai, and myriad other civilian massacres perpetrated by the United States military? Perhaps the worst war crimes in American history are the two deployments of nuclear weapons against Japanese civilians in the Second World War, which many still argue was necessary to prevent further casualties among American troops. However, no less than American Five-Star General and future president Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote in his 1948 memoir “that Japan was already defeated” and that the use of atomic weapons “was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.”^[105] Despite Eisenhower’s disavowal of the strategic necessity for the horrific deaths of roughly 200,000 Japanese civilians, there is no shortage of historians seeking to contextualize and apologize for America’s two atomic atrocities — the only instances in human history where such utterly indefensible horrors have been committed. Note that in none of these examples was a war being fought at or within the actual borders of the United States. In post-revolutionary Russia, however, Lenin and the Bolsheviks had to contend with both crises at the same time — and in the wake of the most devastating war in world history up to that point, no less! For comparison, the United States National Guard is currently deployed in a number of American cities for the purpose of discouraging potential civil unrest. So, in all fairness, how much restraint should we reasonably expect from any government, let alone one in the midst of revolution, international war, and civil war — let alone all three?

Was Lenin Sincere?

Perhaps the ultimate — and inconveniently unanswerable — question about Lenin regards his sincerity. Did he mean what he said and wrote about democracy and political liberties? Or was it nothing more than a cynical and Caesarian bid for power, as his fiercest detractors would have it? Even if we accept that the skepticism toward Lenin’s professed ideals is warranted, historians should hold the same standard of judgment for all influential figures, regardless of their ideological alignment. What would such an approach suggest about the libertarian ideals of our own country’s founders? Can we simply assume that the slaveowning mercantile elites who signed the American Declaration of Independence were not only acting in good faith, but in the name of “liberty and justice for all”? They perceivably had much to gain from separating their financial interests from those of the British crown. If Lenin is flatly assumed to have been driven by ulterior motives, should we not assume the same of the United States’ aristocratic founders? After all, the man who had no qualms writing “All men are created equal” also believed firmly in racial inequality and kept his own mixed-race children as slaves.^[106] We can therefore be quite certain that Jefferson’s commitment to “liberty, equality, and fraternity” was highly selective, and by no means uncompromising. Defenders will quickly argue that Jefferson and his compatriots were products of their time, and that their flaws must be viewed in the context in which they lived. Yet in many widely accepted narratives, Lenin is not even considered a flawed product of his era with misguided intentions. Instead, he is presented as nothing more than a conniving, irredeemable autocrat, and he is regularly held to account for the crimes of Stalin that were committed well after Lenin’s death.

At the very least, if the collective aim of historians is to break through ideological bias in pursuit of something approaching historical truth, then the frequent references to democracy and political freedom that permeate Lenin’s writings should not be so easily and uncritically dismissed. To be sure, the timing with which Lenin elected to depart us certainly did his legacy no favors. Just as the historically unprecedented dust of the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the ensuing civil war was starting to finally settle, Lenin was struck by a series of massive, debilitating strokes. Consequently, at the moment when Lenin might have been able to begin to explain himself to the world, his most powerful tools — his mind, voice, and pen — were taken from him. For even the remotely sympathetic observer, Lenin’s final years are filled with poignancy. The period was so difficult for him that he even asked Stalin for cyanide tablets at one point.^[107] He was still young — only 53, the same age as his father when he died of the same cause. The image of the just-recently vibrant revolutionary, watching helplessly as the pages of the history he helped write continued to turn without him, appears as an undeserved torture in the eyes of his adherents, and all-too-poetic justice in the view of his detractors. And if that weren’t enough, Stalin, the man who would subsequently take up the mantle and defense of Lenin’s legacy and life-mission, would turn out to be one of the least credible champions of Lenin’s professed democratic ideals. Judgments of history aside, Lenin’s end evokes a human tragedy that is nothing short of Shakespearean.

Lenin Rehabilitated?

Is there a chance for any degree of historical revision regarding Lenin’s deeply held commitments to economic freedom, political liberty, and democratic ideals? I believe there’s at least a case for it, in terms of how badly misrepresented and unexamined certain parts of his story appear to be. To this end, we must ask whether any of the “Lenin-revisionists” discussed in this essay have made any headway in breaking into the mainstream discourse about Lenin. Two years ago, one winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize was To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement by Benjamin Nathans. The book contained a rather insightful look into the lives of the amorphous and horizontalist collective of Soviet citizens who, beginning in the 1960s, made varied and earnest efforts to resist the politically repressive atmosphere that undeniably existed in the Soviet Union at that time. It’s quite a captivating and insightful read. Yet when it comes to the handful of remarks about Lenin scattered throughout the book, Nathans’ discussion hardly makes for an original offering: “while Lenin emerged as a supreme tactician, he lacked principles. He condoned extreme violence and his language was violent.”^[108] Not that it’s a smoking gun of any sort, but I believe it’s at least worth pointing out that scholars who have challenged this tired narrative — such as Hal Draper, Lars Lih, Paul Le Blanc, August Nimtz, and even the more moderate Neil Harding — are conspicuously absent from the bibliography in Nathans’ recent and otherwise very good book.

Even if the “Lenin-revisionists” are wildly incorrect in their interpretations of Lenin’s life’s work, there hasn’t been a serious attempt to refute their arguments, or to even engage with them at all. This is even true for the liberal left of academia, much less the right. Few historical figures as consequential as Lenin have enjoyed such a long period of unbroken general consensus with little to no revision. Even Lenin’s American contemporary, Woodrow Wilson, once upheld as the “Scholar President”, is now generally acknowledged to have been an overt racist and an architect of neocolonialism. Yet Lenin remains the same cartoonishly power-hungry dictator described by his Menshevik rivals more than a century ago. Ideological bias is to blame, of course. “The great confrontation of pluralism versus totalitarianism is seen at its inception,” wrote Harding fifty years ago, “and with such great causes on the march it is hardly surprising that much of the historical evidence gets trampled.”^[109] In a way, the sort of presentist and noncontextual analysis that Harding is criticizing here is an inversion of Whig history: instead of teleologically moving toward a free and democratic society, Lenin and the Bolsheviks are generally assumed to have been fated from the start to produce totalitarianism, regardless of their intent or the circumstances under which they endeavored. This does little to explain how repressive systems can emerge despite intentions. Likewise, there’s precious little insight to be gained from the history of the Bolshevik revolution if we dismiss Lenin as a deceitful schemer and a petty, ogrish tyrant. Comparatively, the history is far more instructive if we assume Lenin to have been a well-intentioned idealist who fought for democracy, political liberties, and freedom from the very real pressures of capitalism, but who ultimately lost control of a history that he believed he could change for the better. Examining the failures of idealists in spite of their best efforts has the potential to reveal something far more instructive about the actualization of liberty in society than any machinations of an autocrat ever could.

1. Victor Sebestyen, Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, the Master of Terror (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2017), 3.

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2. Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 (Penguin Publishing Group, 2015), 737.

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3. Neil Harding, Lenin's Political Thought: Theory and Practice in the Socialist Revolution (Haymarket Books, 2009), 116.

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4. Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia (Oxford University Press, 1977), 392.

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5. Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (Viking, 1996), 7.

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6. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, 426.

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7. Lars T. Lih, Lenin (Reaktion Books, 2011), 26.

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8. Neil Harding, Lenin's Political Thought: Theory and Practice in the Democratic Revolution (Haymarket Books, 2009), 3.

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9. V. I. Lenin, “Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution”, Collected Works, vol. 9, 4th ed. (Progress Publishers, 1964), 29. Original pamphlet written in 1905.

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10. V. I. Lenin, “A Draft of Our Party Programme”, Collected Works vol. 4, 4th ed. (Progress Publishers, 1964), 253. Original work written in 1899.

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11. V. I. Lenin, “Draft and Explanation of a Programme for the Social-Democratic Party”, Collected Works, vol. 2, 4th ed. (Progress Publishers, 1964), 118. Original work written in prison in 1985-1896.

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12. Lenin, “Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution”, 51.

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13. Brian Pearce, ed., “Programme of the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party”, Second Ordinary Congress of the R.S.D.L.P., 1903: Complete Text of the Minutes, 6.

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14. Lars T. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? in Context (Haymarket Books, 2008), 139.

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15. V. I. Lenin, “Letter To American Workers”, Collected Works, vol. 28, 4th ed. (Progress Publishers, 1964), 62. Originally written in August 1918.

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16. Sebestyen, Lenin, 216.

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17. George Breitman, Paul Le Blanc, and Alan M. Wald, Trotskyism in the United States: Historical Essays and Reconsiderations, 2nd ed. (Haymarket Books, 2016), 206.

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18. Paul Le Blanc, Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution (Pluto Press, 2023), 27.

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19. Robert Service, Trotsky: A Biography (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 121.

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20. Figes, A People's Tragedy, 765.

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21. David J. Dallin et al., The Mensheviks: From the Revolution of 1917 to the Second World War, Leopold H. Haimson ed. (University of Chicago Press, 1974), 232.

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22. Neil Harding, Lenin's Political Thought: Theory and Practice in the Socialist Revolution, 3.

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23. Dallin, The Mensheviks, 376.

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24. Ibid, 374.

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25. Ibid, 369; Neil Harding, Lenin's Political Thought: Theory and Practice in the Socialist Revolution, 3.

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26. Neil Harding, Lenin's Political Thought: Theory and Practice in the Socialist Revolution, 2. Interestingly, in a sort of premonition to how Western historians would formulate these early impressions, Marie Frederiksen argues that even Luxemburg’s famous 1904 criticism of Lenin was in response to information selectively delivered to her by Mensheviks who, much like Lenin himself, along with the vast majority of the influential members of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, had been exiled by Tsarist Russia: “Incidentally, it was on the basis of the requests of, and relying upon information from the Mensheviks, that Luxemburg wrote ‘Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy’” (Marie Frederiksen, The Revolutionary Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, (Wellred Books. 2022).

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27. Le Blanc, Lenin, 161

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28. Neil Harding, Lenin's Political Thought: Theory and Practice in the Socialist Revolution, 3.

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29. Le Blanc, Lenin, xv; J. V. Stalin, Foundations of Leninism (Foreign Languages Press, 2020), 74. Kotkin and a small number of historians have argued that Stalin actually plagiarized this work (Kotkin, Stalin, 532).

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30. N. K. Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin (Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959), 89.

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31. Ibid, 329.

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32. Paul Le Blanc, Revolutionary Collective: Comrades, Critics, and Dynamics in the Struggle for Socialism (Haymarket, 2021), 5.

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33. Ibid.

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34. It’s worth noting that the veracity of “Lenin’s Testament” has been occasionally contested by unlikely bedfellows — Stalinists on the left and anti-communists on the right — who both have a vested rhetorical interest in tying Stalin’s legacy as tightly to Lenin’s as possible, albeit for obviously different reasons.

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35. Benjamin Nathans, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (Princeton University Press, 2024), 6.

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36. Ibid, 216.

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37. Ibid, 219.

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38. Ibid, 338.

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39. Stefan T. Possony, Lenin: The Compulsive Revolutionary (Taylor & Francis Group, 2017), 470.

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40. “Noam Chomsky on Leninism,” posted by Chomsky's Philosophy, July 5, 2015, video, 3:28, https://youtu.be/jxhT9EVj9Kk?si=f97Ww15GiuLXhGQt/

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41. Richard Pipes, ed. The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (Yale University Press, 1996), 2.

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42. Neil Harding, Lenin's Political Thought: Theory and Practice in the Socialist Revolution, 5.

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43. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered, 16.

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44. Samuel H. Beer and Adam B. Ulam, Patterns of Government: The Major Political Systems of Europe (Random House, 1973), 615.

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45. Hal Draper, “The Myth of Lenin's ‘Concept of The Party’ or What They Did to What Is To Be Done?” International Socialist 1, no. 4 (May/June 1999): 41.

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46. Figes, A People's Tragedy, 191.

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47. V. I. Lenin, “Preface to the Collection Twelve Years”, Collected Works, vol. 13, 4th ed. (Progress Publishers, 1964), 101. Original work written in 1908.

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48. Draper, “The Myth of Lenin's ‘Concept of The Party’ or What They Did to What Is To Be Done?”, 37.

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49. Lenin, quoted in Draper, “The Myth of Lenin's ‘Concept of The Party’ or What They Did to What Is To Be Done?”, 50.

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50. Draper, “The Myth of Lenin's ‘Concept of The Party’ or What They Did to What Is To Be Done?”, 49.

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51. Ibid.

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52. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered, 5.

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53. Lars T. Lih, “How a Founding Document Was Found, or One Hundred Years of Lenin's What is to Be Done?”, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 7.

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54. Draper, “The Myth of Lenin's ‘Concept of The Party’ or What They Did to What Is To Be Done?”, 46.

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55. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered, 30.

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56. Ibid, 5.

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57. Ibid, 21.

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58. Sebestyen, Lenin, 139.

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59. Lih, “How a Founding Document Was Found, or One Hundred Years of Lenin's What is to Be Done?”, 27.

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60. Ibid.

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61. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered, 36.

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62. August H. Nimtz, Lenin's Electoral Strategy from 1907 to the October Revolution of 1917: The Ballot, the Streets—or Both (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 147.

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63. August H. Nimtz, Lenin's Electoral Strategy from Marx and Engels Through the Revolution of 1905, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), viii.

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64. Ibid.

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65. Ibid, x.

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66. Nimtz, Lenin's Electoral Strategy from 1907 to the October Revolution of 1917, 149.

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67. Ibid., 150.

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68. Ralph Miliband, Marxism and Politics (Oxford University Press, 1977), 166.

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69. Macnair, Revolutionary Strategy: Marxism and the Challenge of Left Unity (November Publications, 2008), 76.

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70. Neil Harding, Lenin's Political Thought: Theory and Practice in the Socialist Revolution, 162.

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71. V. I. Lenin, “The Crisis Has Matured”, Collected Works, vol. 26, 4th ed. (Progress Publishers, 1964), 74. Original article written in 1917.

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72. V. I. Lenin, “On the History of the Question of the Unfortunate Peace”, Collected Works, vol. 26, 4th ed. (Progress Publishers, 1964), 443. Original article written in 1918.

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73. Simon Liberman, Building Lenin's Russia (University of Chicago Press, 1945), 7.

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74. Figes, A People's Tragedy, 627.

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75. Lih, Lenin, 157.

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76. Figes, A People's Tragedy, 575.

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77. Ibid., 752.

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78. V. I. Lenin, “Report on the Tactics of the R.C.P., July 5”, Collected Works, vol. 32, 4th ed. (Progress Publishers, 1964), 480. Original report written in 1921.

    ↩

79. Pipes, The Unknown Lenin, 3.

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80. Lih, Lenin, 12.

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81. Ibid.

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82. Ibid.

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83. Pipes, The Unknown Lenin, 50.

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84. Figes, A People's Tragedy, 563.

    ↩

85. Figes, A People's Tragedy, 612.

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86. Figes, A People's Tragedy, 611.

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87. Figes, A People's Tragedy, 611.

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88. Figes, A People's Tragedy, 665.

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89. Figes, A People's Tragedy, 589.

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90. Figes, A People's Tragedy, 610.

    ↩

91. Figes, A People's Tragedy, 610.

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92. Figes, A People's Tragedy, 608

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93. Figes, A People's Tragedy, 663.

    ↩

94. Alexander Watson, Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary at War, 1914-1918 (Allen Lane, 2014), 341.

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95. Figes, A People's Tragedy, 599

    ↩

96. Lih, Lenin, 13.

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97. Le Blanc, Lenin, 137.

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98. Ibid.

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99. Lih, Lenin, 155.

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100. Figes, A People's Tragedy, 769.

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101. Le Blanc, Lenin, 144.

     ↩

102. Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Harvard University Press, 2010), 114.

     ↩

103. Geoffrey C. Ward, The Civil War: An Illustrated History (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 2009), 212.

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104. Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (Bold Type Books, 2016), 219.

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105. Martin J. Sherwin, Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2020), 79.

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106. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 118.

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107. Lih, Lenin, 165; Kotkin, Stalin, 414.

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108. Nathans, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause, 198.

     ↩

109. Neil Harding, Lenin's Political Thought: Theory and Practice in the Democratic Revolution, 195.

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