Paul LeBlanc responds to Cliff Connolly’s review of his book ‘Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution’, available from Pluto Press. 

I greatly appreciate Cliff Connolly’s positive yet critical-minded review of my book Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution. I am especially pleased with the opening sentence: “Everybody should read Paul Le Blanc’s new book on Lenin, but nobody should stop there.” By this, Connolly emphasizes, readers should check out studies by other good scholars as well as such primary sources as Lenin’s own writings – but I assume he also means that we should engage in critical-minded discussions of the book among ourselves, and also engage in an active exploration of the book’s central thesis.

But what is that central thesis? Connolly identifies it as “the well-documented claim that Lenin was at every point of his political career a thorough-going champion of democracy” (my emphasis). I find this to be problematical in at least three ways: 

(1) Connolly is right, of course, that I give considerable attention to the profoundly democratic dimensions of Lenin’s thought – but I also devote an entire chapter to a point in his career – the years of “red terror” and “war communism” (1918-1922) – when he was certainly not a thoroughgoing champion of democracy.

(2) One could argue that the book’s central thesis is the well-documented claim that Lenin was at every point of his political career a thoroughgoing champion of a Marxist orientation that is activist-oriented, critical-minded, open, and non-dogmatic. Or that he was an uncompromising yet flexible revolutionary socialist. Or that he was a political organizer of genius.

(3) As I was writing the book, however, I had in mind a different central thesis (although related to the items in points #1 and #2), which I emphasized in the book’s prologue and epilogue. The central thesis is that Lenin’s essential orientation provides “an incredibly rich resource” for activists of our own time – “insights into what is to be done amid cascading catastrophes of today and tomorrow.”  

Flowing from this, of course, is the need to do exactly what Connolly is doing: critically engaging with what the book seeks to share. In this spirit, I want to engage with some of his criticisms. How many problems he finds in the book, and how severe he feels they are, is not clear. At the beginning of the review he says the book “misses the mark in many places” adding up to more than one “grievous mistake.” At the end of the review, however, he indicates that the book’s “few mistakes … only slightly detract from its overall quality.”  

Whatever the case may be, there are three quite clearly identified criticisms to which attention will be given here – two of which strike me as quite serious indeed. These involve understanding Stalinism and understanding the revolutionary program. Also important, but less so, is the matter of the Narodniks and Lenin’s older brother.

Narodniks, Marx, and Lenin’s Brother

Taking the least serious first, we are told that my book offers “misconceptions regarding the Narodniks’ political orientation.”  The Narodniks were a somewhat diverse intellectual and political movement that crystallized among radicalizing Russian youth from the upper and middle classes in the 1860s and 1870s, who reached out to “the people” (the narod, who in Russia were overwhelmingly peasants), as a force that would be capable of overthrowing tsarist tyranny. Generally socialist oriented (under the influence of such thinkers as Herzen, Chernyshevsky, and Lavrov¹), many of them favored the tactic of assassinating tsars and other authority figures in the hope of sparking popular uprisings.

Connolly writes: “On page 5 of Le Blanc’s book, he claims the terrorist cell in which Alexander Ulyanov (Lenin’s older brother) participated in blended Marxist ideas with the populism of the Narodniks. This is a mischaracterization of the group.” He emphasizes that “it is not accurate to say Ulyanov blended Marxism with narodism. The elder Ulyanov was simply a Narodnik who had read Marx, which was not at all uncommon for his milieu.”

Connolly’s rigid differentiation of Marxism from populism of does not match the complexity and fluidity of this period. Alexander’s statement to the court reflects this: “Only the study of social and economic affairs gave me the deep conviction that the existing order of things was not normal. My vague dreams about freedom, equality, and brotherhood assumed strictly scientific, that is, socialist forms.” As Alexander’s biographer, Philip Pomper, notes, “narodnik terrorists and social democrats worked together in the same organization” in the late 1880s, and Alexander was committed to “a Narodnik-Marxist hybrid”²

Respected Russian historian and Lenin biographer Vladlen Loginov makes similar points. Pouring over the works of Marx and Plekhanov, Alexander “became more inclined towards socialist ideas in their Marxist interpretation,” joining these with the notion that “only terror would impel the government to permit such an ‘indulgence’ as liberty,” which he saw as a necessary precondition for the building up of a mass socialist movement.³ Far from being the rigidly “orthodox” Narodnik that Connolly envisions, it would seem that Lenin’s older brother was actually a transitional figure.

Misunderstanding Le Blanc, Understanding Stalinism

A more serious complaint involves the allegation regarding my inability to explain the tragedy of Stalin’s political project. Connolly characterizes what I say about Stalin as “a polemical disaster.” And a disaster it surely is – at least as Connolly describes it. 

According to Connolly, I contend that “the gulag system was primarily responsible for Soviet industrialization,” and that “the immense human cost of rapid industrialization, the war effort against the Nazis, and the early period of the Cold War was exclusively caused by Stalin’s ‘cruel recklessness.’” He also attributes to me the “ludicrous” position that Stalin “was solely responsible for the often nigh-apocalyptic situation confronting the Soviet Union during his lifetime.” In my opinion, the term ludicrous is too mild. I think Connolly and I can agree, it’s a stupid way of looking at what happened.

The problem with this criticism is that I neither believe nor say any of these things. A primary source for Connolly’s misunderstanding appears to be a lengthy quotation in the book from historian Roy Medvedev.⁴ Readers can easily access this quotation since it is produced in full in Connolly’s review. Re-reading the Medvedev quote more than once, I think I can understand how Connolly comes up with his interpretation – but it is, I believe, a misinterpretation that is not capable of holding the heavy baggage that he loads onto it.

My own understanding of Medvedev’s point is quite different. He notes that some have been inclined to give Stalin credit for the industrialization and modernization of the Soviet Union, as well as for the defeat of Nazism in the Second World War. Medvedev’s response is two-fold. First, it was not Stalin who industrialized and modernized the Soviet Union. Nor was it Stalin who defeated Nazism. It was the Soviet people – liberated, inspired and energized by the October 1917 revolution – that accomplished these wonders. Second, the Soviet people could have achieved these things more effectively without the murderous, authoritarian, oppressive burdens placed on them by the system which is often known as Stalinism.

Connolly and I do seem to differ on whether one should see Stalin’s “character flaws” as worthy of serious attention. I think that Lenin was not off base in politically criticizing Stalin as being “rude” and as “lacking in elementary honesty, simple human honesty.” But Connolly and I agree, nonetheless, that such qualities cannot be seen as “exclusively” explaining what went wrong in the Soviet Union or the world Communist movement.

Joseph Stalin, whatever his personal qualities, began as a dedicated and capable Bolshevik comrade. He made what contributions he could to building up the revolutionary workers’ movement that culminated in the Russian Revolution. This revolution was understood as part of an international wave of insurgency, which would initiate – within a few years – a global transformation from capitalism to socialism. Instead, at the conclusion of a brutalizing civil war, revolutionary Russia was isolated in a hostile capitalist world.

Stalin was transformed by circumstances and terrible pressures – especially the economic backwardness of Russia and the failure of revolutions that would have rescued revolutionary Russia. Such circumstances yielded a bureaucratic dictatorship. Within this context, Stalin and some of his comrades took a fatal path of extreme authoritarianism, involving a commitment to building “socialism in one country” through a brutal modernization process initiated as a “revolution from above.” The accompanying ideology and practices represented something new – which Stalin and those following him were inclined to call “Marxism-Leninism.” This was the Stalinism that came to dominate the world Communist movement, to its detriment.

These last two paragraphs are drawn from an article I wrote several years ago (“Reflections on the Meaning of Stalinism”).⁵ This is far from the viewpoint which Connolly attributes to me, but it is consistent with what is actually written in Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution.

Connolly makes an important and excellent point when he insists that in our effort to comprehend the causes of what is commonly termed “Stalinism,” we must factor in “the difficulty of the task” in Soviet Russia’s efforts to move toward socialism (and, indeed, simply to survive) in an economically backward country embedded in a hostile capitalist world. This applies more generally to our comprehension of the efforts of Lenin and the Bolsheviks as they struggled in the terrible years of 1918-1924. That was the context within which “Stalinism” began to germinate. I give some attention to this in the Lenin book and have devoted a much larger study to it, October Song: Bolshevik Triumph, Communist Tragedy 1917-1924.⁶ 

Connolly claims that my “confused critique of Stalin” is grounded in a belief that “the weakness of the left and relative strength of the right” are “the legacy of Stalin’s political thought.” Fortunately, he quotes what I actually say, which is different from his summary: “there has been a proliferation of problems and crises, and these – dovetailing with Communism’s collapse and the disorientation and disintegration of an organized left-wing working-class movement – has generated a conservative and right-wing onslaught throughout much of the world.” Connolly and I, and a growing number of others, have been working hard to change that situation. I imagine that, as the misunderstandings are cleared away, it might become clear that we share even more common ground than Connolly sometimes acknowledges. 

Revolutionary Program

For us, program involves how to get from here (capitalism) to there (socialism or communism). Connolly sees a serious problem. “The most glaring issue in the book,” he tells us, “is its poor characterization of the minimum-maximum program.” He quotes from the Lenin book:

A common orientation among parties of the Second International contributed to this shocking turnaround. A seemingly quite reasonable separation had been made between a minimum program (reforms that could actually be achieved under capitalism) and a maximum program (the replacement of capitalism with socialism, when the time was right). The crystallization of a bureaucratic apparatus evolved to ensure the practical functioning of the party. This included avoiding moves toward revolutionary socialism when the time was deemed (by the bureaucracy) not to be right. There was a keen sense of the need to prevent revolutionary goals from undermining the reformist goals of the minimum program. There was also a powerful inclination to avoid the fierce repression that would be unleashed upon socialist parties seeking to block ‘patriotic’ policies on behalf of imperialism and war. Such dynamics contributed to the pro-war orientations of many socialists. 

Connolly terms this “a total misunderstanding of the subject.” He succinctly offers his own understanding: “The minimum program consisted of the bare minimum demands that had to be met in order for the Social Democratic parties to enter government, whereas the maximum program was the series of policies that would be enacted after taking power to enact the transition from capitalism to communism.” He adds: “In other words, the minimum section detailed the party’s revolutionary goals while the maximum section described the party’s reconstructionist goals.”

I must confess that Connolly’s understanding seemed strange to me. I was not familiar with what he was saying. Since he positively referred to the 1891 Erfurt Program of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), I re-read it, as well as Karl Kautsky’s admirable elaboration on that document. In neither could I find any references to minimum program and maximum program, let alone “revolutionary goals” and “reconstructionist goals.” Nor was there any reference to “demands that had to be met in order for the Social Democratic parties to enter government.”

Seeking more information, I read through a substantial article entitled “The Revolutionary Minimum-Maximum Program,” authored by one of Connolly’s Cosmonaut comrades, Donald Parkinson (in part a polemic against the Trotskyist conception of the transitional program). Parkinson focuses on the founding program of the French Workers’ Party⁷, written by Karl Marx and Jules Guesde – although he notes that its basic approach could also be found in the Erfurt Program⁸ as well as in the 1902 program of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.⁹ When I read each of these, I found neither “minimum/maximum” nor “revolutionary/reconstructionist” terminology or argumentation.

In Parkinson’s own analysis, however, I found definitions of minimum program and maximum program that approximate my own understanding. He tells us that the minimum program represents “immediate changes that the party will fight for before taking power” – demands which “do not entail a break with the capitalist economic system” (although in Parkinson’s opinion “if instituted in totality,” they would break capitalist rule). The maximum program is socialism, or as Parkinson puts it, “reconstructing society on a communist basis.”

After all of this, my inclination is to stick with my initial understanding of the matter. But I do want to address an additional objection raised by Connolly – that I “go so far” as “to blame the minimum-maximum program for the SPD … supporting their country’s participation in the First World War.” This is not true. I would explain what happened in this way. The pressures of capitalist economics and politics, combined with the “difficulty of the task” in building a mass socialist workers’ movement. That resulted in the formation of a de-radicalized bureaucratic apparatus in the SPD. This conservatized bureaucracy distorted the way that the struggle for reforms was connected to the revolutionary socialist goal (minimum/maximum program). Ultimately, the bureaucratic apparatus also betrayed the socialist program and supported participation in the imperialist slaughter of the First World War. 

Here too, I believe that as the fog of misinterpretation clears away, the common ground shared by Connolly and myself will become more evident. I suspect we would both end up agreeing with Rosa Luxemburg’s understanding of the appropriate connection of reform and revolution, in the introductory paragraph to her classic polemic Reform or Revolution: “The daily struggle for reforms, for the amelioration of the condition of the workers within the framework of the existing social order, and for democratic institutions, offers to the Social Democracy an indissoluble tie; the struggle for reforms is its means; the social revolution, its aim.”¹⁰ 

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1. Connolly mistakenly attributes to me the notion that it was Marx who introduced the socialist idea to Russian revolutionaries – apparently because he misunderstands a quote I offer from James White: “The history of Marxism in Russia begins with Marx himself.” See James D. White, Marx and Russia, The Fate of a Doctrine. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.
2. Philip Pomper, Lenin’s Brother: The Origins of the October Revolution. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010., pgs. 44 and 145
3. Vladlen Loginov, Vladimir Lenin – How to Become a Leader. London: Glagoslav Publications, 2019., pg 76-77
4. Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, revised and expanded edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989
5. Paul Le Blanc, “Reflections on the Meaning of Stalinism,” Crisis and Critique, Vol. 3, Issue 1, 2016
6. Paul Le Blanc, October Song: Bolshevik Triumph, Communist Tragedy 1917-1924.  Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017
7. Karl Marx and Jules Guesde, Programme of the French Workers’ Party, Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/parti-ouvrier.htm#n10
8. The Erfurt Program (1891), Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/1891/erfurt-program.htm
9. Programme of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (1902), Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/rsdlp/1903/program.htm
10. Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution, in Helen C. Scott and Paul Le Blanc, eds., Socialism or Barbarism, Selected Writings of Rosa Luxemburg. London: Pluto Press, 2016