(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
It has been said – even by AJP Taylor – that Europe's history, and by far the world's history in the first half of our century, can be written as three major biographies: Churchills, Hitlers and Lenins.
Churchill's political career spans the entire half-century, from 1900, when he became a Member of Parliament for the first time, to 1955, when he finally resigned as prime minister. Hitler made a distinctive mark on Germany in the 20s, on Europe in the 30s and the world in the 40s. Against these lifestyles differ Lenin clear out. The time available to him to lead the revolution and to destroy the Soviet state lasted from April 1917 to November 1922, when he was struck for the second time. 5 small years of dense history, and they were not even prepared in the society they were about to change, but through 20 years of country volatility.
Emigrant in almost his entire adult life
In 1897, as a 27-year-old Marxist and a fresh lawyer, Lenin was banished to Siberia for revolutionary activities. Immediately after returning from there he had to go abroad. In 1905 he returned to Russia for three months, but was then banished again, this time until 1917. He spent almost all of his adult life as an emigrant in Western metropolises: London, Geneva, Paris, Berlin, Munich, Zurich. It was here that the preparations were made: that the Russian Social Democratic Party was blown up by Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, that Lenin wrote his most famous works, and that through reports he analyzed the developments at home in Russia with a view to the final thrust.
At that time, exile politics was doomed to take place in an atmosphere of stress, frustration and internal pressure in conspiratorial small groups. Reality is so distant under such conditions, the abstractions and intrigues so obvious. In addition, the Russian revolutionary socialists were persecuted for the lives of tsarist agents and by the "local" police wherever they were.
Many did not manage the stress, dropped out or committed suicide. Invariably, the Bolsheviks had to change their name, address, letter code, city of residence and emigration country. The years in London, the liberalist sanctuary, were perhaps the easiest for Lenin. "The conspiratorial conditions are excellent here," Krupskaja wrote in her bio about her husband. Yet the air in her and Lenin's bedroom was also filled with burning odor from the invisible ink of correspondence, which was carried through all the years with great care to revolutionaries at home and abroad.
revolutionary Leader
To survive such a life with the political senses in full retention and judgment, the tactical insight, rather sharpened than weakened, testifies to Lenin's personal strength. Returning to Russia after the March Revolution in 1917, he immediately tore the leadership out of Stalin's and Kamenev's uncertain hands, forcing the whole party into traces that were otherwise rooted in a completely opposite revolutionary theory of the one he had used for years to torment and which among other things had led to the break-up with Trotsky.
How would the revolution have developed if Lenin had not reached Russia in April 1917?
Faced with the Russian reality of 1917, Lenin now saw that the proletarian revolution could be envisaged as a direct continuation of the bourgeois March revolution, and not expected as the next step in the future. This is typical. Lenin was a politician, a dialectically revolutionary politician. Today, his 55 volumes of compiled writings have become sacred dogmatics. But they were written down as a guide to the various actions and situations of the moment: it was ingenious revolutionary journalism Lenin wrote, not philosophy or theory in anything approaching the depth of intention of a Marx or a Luxembourg. He was, in writing and deed, the revolutionary will itself in 1917. Without him – yes, what then? What was the necessity, what was the opportunity in the Bolshevik revolution? Asking is easier than answering, but one thing is certain: what existed was opportunity, it was just seen and seized by Lenin. A famous passage in Trotsky's revolutionary history reads as follows:
How would the revolution have developed if Lenin had not reached Russia in April 1917? Lenin was not the one who initiated the revolutionary process, but rather entered a chain of objective historical forces. But he was an important link in this chain. The dictatorship of the proletariat was immanent in the situation, but it still had to be created. It could not be created without a lot. And the party could carry out its task only after understanding it. For this Lenin was needed ...
International organizer
Og revolution succeeded, that is, the Russian part of it. No one, and at least Lenin, believed that the Bolsheviks had no chances without the support of revolutionary travel in Western countries. The revolution would infect – whatever it did. All over Europe there was a revolt, where workers rose with new demands and revolutionary intentions. Lenin gathered the most radical of them into a new International, the Comintern, in 1919, even before his revolution at home was fortified. As a builder of the Soviet state, Lenin became a statesman. With the Comintern he took the step as one of the great leaders in the international history of the time. Not as a nationalist intrigue on the Europe map, like Hitler or for that matter Churchill. Lenin divided Europe into two, not by borders but social customs, and created an international workers' army. In all countries, the proletariat was mobilized in defense of the Soviet state and in the fight against their own governments. In all countries, the labor movement after 1917 was lifted by a wave of revolution that rose to crush capitalism and its slaughter bench of an imperialist war. Now it was going to happen. And Lenin emerged as the leader.
He could not know that the battle was all lost. There was no uprising. 1919 was a climax. Never later did the situation in Europe become as revolutionary as then, and Russia soon had problems that led development away from what Lenin and everyone else predicted. Thus, 1917–1919 is the epilogue of an old age, the classic era of worker socialism, when the proletariat in Europe believed in the collapse of capitalism as a socio-economic necessity – and not as everyone believed the prologue of a new one: the socialist society. While the bureaucracy stiffened in the Soviet Union (the thought of it plagued Lenin throughout the sickness until his death in January 1924), the capitalist world shook with fascism and crisis. But no revolution. Lenin died right after the failed German voyage in 1923, the last blast of proletarian mass action in Europe.
The world is more revolutionary today than it was in 1919.
Historical foreground figure
Vladimir Ilyich, little father, why are you crying? Millions inquired and cried in 1924. Perhaps they were given greater reason to cry eventually, under Stalin and Hitler. But it is a different story, and besides, it is not ours, but the Russians. For us socialists after 1945, Lenin is at one time alive and dead: a 100-year-old mummy, a monument to the revolutionary thoughts that were born in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, and which turned into flesh and blood in a peripheral, semi-federal country, this Today, mummy is a historical figure for rebellious people even more distant, in the world's poorest peasant country. The world is more revolutionary today than it was in 1800. It has probably never been as revolutionary as it is now. Europe, this dark technological greenhouse, is a revolutionary periphery, a place where a handful of students can cultivate "Leninism" as political entertainment for others. But outside of this small world, people are reading Lenin's writings on party, tactics, discipline and imperialism with practical revolutionary utility, and they are more today than ever before.
Any better anniversary situation could be hard to wish for, the architect of the revolution and the reveal of imperialism. Although there was another revolution and another imperialism, that was his reality.
Hans Fredrik Dahl (historian, 1939-).
