Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (22 April 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He is widely considered one of the most significant and influential figures of the 20th century. Yet whilst his embalmed body still lies in Red Square, the real Lenin has been buried by decades of dictatorship and Cold War, and a century of sanctification and vilification.
In That Howling Infinite has written often about Russian history. So, we couldn’t resist commemorating the centennial of Lenin’s death.
I first became acquainted with him in the fall of 1968 whilst reading politics at Reading University under the tutorship of émigré academic and historian of Russian and Soviet politics Tibor Szamuely. For a while,
Back then, I was a political ingenue and a naïve communist sympathizer and fellow traveler, although my evolving perspectives were transforming and expanding. As my tutor, he advised me to study with an open mind and to put off juvenile thinking. He hadn’t been well when I knew him, and he died a year after I graduated. Under his tuition, I’d resolved to specialize in Soviet Studies – but events intervened, and I ended up in the Middle East (and that is another story. see: Tanks for the Memory – how Brezhnev changed my life). I nevertheless retained an active interest in the history and politics of Eastern Europe.
Szamuely would always impress upon me the historical and political continuity of what he called The Russian Tradition – the title of his one and only book, The Russian Tradition, published shortly before his death, and now, regrettably, out of print. I purchased a first edition when it was published and it is on my bookshelf still.
He believed that the bloodstained drama of the revolutions of 1917 – there were two, the social democratic one in the February, the Bolshevik one in November – and the years that followed, including civil war, the establishment of the USSR and Stalinism largely obscured the underlying consistency of Russian history. He did not live to see the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, and the advent of Putin and Russia Redux, but the basic pattern persists, circular and repetitive. The frequent turmoils that have overtaken this vast continent have in their various ways made changes that were essentially superficial, leading in the end to the intensification, under new forms, of the old authoritarian structure. See The Russian Tradition – Russia, Ukraine and Tibor Szamuely.
Studying Soviet politics, I read quite a few of Lenin’s writings – the mercifully short paperbacks like What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of our Movement (1901), Imperialism, the highest state of Capitalism (1917), and The State and Revolution (1917), and Leftwing Communism, an Infantile Disorder (1920), the best title of them all. They cost very little at a Communist Bookshop, in Soho, I think – a source also, of posters from the Revolution and the Russian Civil War. In my Russian phase, I’d even bought a balalaika – though admittedly my purchase was inspired more by its use by Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull in a great concert in our hall of residence. I never did much with it and saw it last on the sideboard of my late mother’s house in Birmingham.
I still have those books, in addition to the panegyric 1942 edition of The Truth about Soviet Russia, by famous British socialists (and Stalinist apologists) Sydney and Beatrice Webb, which was everything but the truth, posing the rhetorical question “Is Soviet Communism a New Civilization based on the ethical principle of ‘From each man according to his faculty to each man according to his need’.
Vladimir Lenin has a way of confounding Marxist and indeed other historians for he was that rare thing – an individual and singular instigator of historical change. A hundred years after his death, hagiographies and obloquies continue to pouring off printing presses as once did concrete to erect statues of Uncle Volodya. Even his most hostile critics would be churlish to dismiss his outsized role during the heady months leading to Red October.
The principal protagonist of the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 and the brutal and bloody civil war that followed, Lenin served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia, and later the Soviet Union, became a one-party socialist state governed by the Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, his additions to the ideology earned their own title: Leninism.
There is near universal consensus that Lenin had no use for “liberalism” in any form, or democracy which he regarded as a bourgeois delusion. He closed down the elected Constituent Assembly, when elections to it rejected his party, at gunpoint. He then proceeded to ban all other parties. He instigated the Red Terror via setting up the Cheka, the prototype KGB and brought about the deaths of hundreds of thousands, establishing the apparatus and mechanisms of terror so definitively exploited by Stalin. His administration laid the framework for the system of government that ruled Russia and the USSR for seven decades and provided the model for later Communist-led states that came to cover a third of the inhabited world in the mid-20th century.
As a result, Lenin’s influence was global. A controversial figure, he remains both reviled and revered, a figure who has been both idolized and demonized. Even during his lifetime, Lenin “was loved and hated, admired and scorned” by the Russian people. This has extended into academic studies of Lenin and Leninism, which have often been polarized along political lines.
Back in the day, I admired him for the smooth operator that he was, though I was shocked by his cold-bloodedness. No matter what his sophisticated musings in exile or during 1917 told his readers, he conducted the civil way to à l’outrance. See: Red and white terror – the Russian revolution and civil war. Today, I come not to bury Vladimir nor to praise him – Wikipedia provides a good overview of his life and times, and his legacy. It’s a good source for further reading: HERE
I republish below and interesting article from Unherd, my favourite e-zine, on the debatable influence of Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution in British politics.
In the immediate wake of World War One, and the outbreak of civil war, Western Allies’ ideological perspective of the conflict was ambivalent. Many, politicians and military alike, were viscerally opposed to Bolshevism and what it stood for, and feared a Red contagion infecting their own countries, a fear that was not unfounded. After the Revolution, a concatenation of revolts detonated across the globe. Bolshevism spread westwards, from Vienna through Budapest and Sofia to Kiel. The Bavarian Soviet Republic was briefly established in April 1919, before the far-Right Freikorps did it in.
Britain wasn’t immune to the ferment. Between the February and October Revolutions, the Leeds Soviet did indeed appear to be the beginning of something, whilst strikes and demonstrations proliferated to be violently put down by the police and army. Winston Churchill alone of his cabinet colleagues wanted a full-on allied intervention and dreamed – some believed he was indeed dreaming but others claimed that he fantasized – of creating an effective White army and a borderlands alliance to defeat the Bolsheviks. But his aspirations were foiled by the imperialism of the White leadership and of White officers and the various national movements’ fear that that if the Whites prevailed, they would restore Russian rule. Britain’s rulers were reticent about shoring up and providing financial, material support and also, soldiers sailors and airmen to brutal to demonstrably homicidal Cossack brigades and revanchist and reactionary royalist autocrats.
The concern of His Majesty’s Government with the the Bolsheviks is the theme of series three of the superlative British crime saga Peaky Blinders. It is set in 1924, three years after the civil war, and not long after the fabricated Zionoviev Letter implicating the British communist party and by association, the Labour Party in a seditious plot, instigated a “Red Scare” that saw Britain’s first Labour Government defeated in a general election. Home Secretary Mr WS Churchill employs the services of Thomas Shelby and his Brummie brethren in a devious plot to fit-up and compromise the Soviet regime. The White Russian èmigrés, a cabal of revanchist aristocrats that Tommy has to do business with are an unsavory, unprincipled, bigoted and amoral crew.
The fear of this “Red contagion” after Revolution, saw conservative British governments preempt insurrection by mollifying, co-opting even, and caring for the workers and the disadvantaged. The interwar years saw major strides in universal education, healthcare, and insurance Post-war, all that was left for Labour to do was to extend it to one and all. Already covering some 80% of the population, welfare was brought to the remaining one-fifth of Britain by Clement Attlee and William Beveridge.
I qualify this by noting that the article ignores the trends that emerged in the UK during the 19th century, such as the Poor Law Amendment Act, the Factory Acts and the 1870 Education Act which were built upon during the 20th century.
Historian Anil Pratinav’s writes how paradoxically, Soviet communism unwittingly fortified British capitalism. The unintended upshot of Anglo-Marxism was to make the Establishment more heedful of working-class interests. The same went for the welfare state. Peace was preserved between the classes. Redistribution took the edge off class conflict. What’s more, an educated and healthy workforce proved good for business. Moderately progressive taxation was a tiny insurance premium to keep the workers in working condition and the barbarians at bay.
Lenin might’ve said there are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happens – but “these days, barring a few libertarian crackpots, Tory radicals, nostalgics, and campus Marxists, nearly everyone is united in confirming the wisdom of this arrangement. The simple fact is that most Brits like their politics dull.
© Paul Hemphill 2024. All rights reserved.
Other articles on Russian and Soviet history is In That Howling Infinite has written often about Russian history: Ghosts of the Gulag; The Death of Stalin is no laughing matter; Stalin’s Great Terror; Borderlands – Ukraine and the curse of mystical nationalism:The Roots and Fruits of Putin’s Irridentism
How Bolshevism built modern Britain
Lenin still haunts our welfare state
Pratinav Anil Unherd, 15th January 2024
Yet there is another achievement that Lenin was inadvertently, indeed perversely, responsible for: the Western welfare state. That we rarely recognise this owes to a common misperception. Very many of us regrettably buy that Labour conceit, hawked by spin doctors and court historians, that celebrates Clement Attlee and William Beveridge as the co-fathers of our welfare jstate. But as the historian David Edgerton reminds us, it is in fact the Liberal-Tory coalition of David Lloyd George in the immediate aftermath of the First World War that we ought to be thanking. These were the years when the major strides in education, healthcare, and insurance were made. Post-war, all that was left for Labour to do was to extend it to one and all. Already covering some 80% of the population, welfare was brought to the remaining one-fifth of Britain by Beveridge.
As it must in democracies, with the stick also came the carrot. Yes, the workers were brutally put down. But they hadn’t protested in vain. Gone were the Gladstonian days of cheese-paring Liberalism. Lloyd George’s Liberals were an altogether different beast: by turns technocratic, interventionist and ambitious. They were, no doubt, building on pre-war precedent, in particular the health and insurance schemes of 1911, and making good on wartime promises, but they were above all trying to make peace with the bad, mad and dangerous Brits on the streets.
To begin with, they gave a great many people a greater share in government, shepherding them from the barricades into polling stations. Universal male suffrage in 1918 enfranchised unpropertied men — that is, two in five men — as well as propertied women over 30. The same year, the Education Act, lobbied by Lancashire unionists, raised the school-leaving age from 12 to 14 to forestall cotton bosses from battening on benighted boys. And in 1919, the Housing and Town Planning Act put in motion the construction of what became that instantly recognisable feature of the British urban landscape: the council estate.
Bettered by Attlee and Harold Wilson, battered by Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron, the early interwar consensus around the welfare state survives to this day. Both under Labour and the Tories, truculent workers with ideas above their station have been shown their place: from Ramsay MacDonald’s disciplining of the “communistic” trade unions in 1924 through Thatcher’s thwarting of the miners in 1984 to Keir Starmer’s disavowal of organised labour in 2024. Likewise, since 1945, both parties have shown a general commitment to public spending around the 40% of GDP mark. Creaking, underfunded, “our NHS” continues nevertheless to be spoken of only in hallowed whispers.
As with the British welfare state, so with British intellectual life. Our republic of letters would have been a dreary landscape of conformity were it not for the Russian Revolution, which fired three generations of Anglo-Marxists. The interwar years were a time when communists could rise to the very top of the cultural establishment. E.H. Carr, for example, became a leader writer and deputy editor of The Times, a perch from which he preached the gospel of collectivist planning and conciliation with Stalin. His monumental History of Soviet Russia — running to 7,000 pages and 14 volumes — remains the best account of the early years of the revolutionary regime.
Even such a sceptic of the state as George Bernard Shaw was swept away by Russomania. By 1931, with Britain reeling from the Depression, he was singing Stalin’s praises. Fabian gradualism, his old creed, wasn’t going to cut it in the 20th century. MacDonald’s Labour had evidently failed, he reflected in a new preface to Fabian Essays in Socialism. What was needed was “swift effectiveness” — Soviet-style. A trip to Moscow was written up in glowing terms in The Rationalisation of Russia.
In a manner of speaking, the remoter reaches of the ivory tower, too, succumbed to the Soviets. G.E.M. de Ste. Croix inaugurated what was by far the most arresting development in classical studies. A child of empire born in Macau, “Croicks” turned his back on his “thoroughly Right-wing upbringing” on the “lunatic fringe of Christianity” — as he later put it — in the Twenties. A romp across the Soviet Union in 1937 with Intourist, the Soviet travel agency, left him critical of Stalinism but committed to Marxism, on the strength of observing the peasants of the Caucasus. Thereafter, he became a “thoroughgoing Marxist”, tutoring a generation of students at New College, Oxford, who, in their own writings, were to remain alert to class in the classics. The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World appeared in 1981.
Such profiles can be indefinitely multiplied. Suffice it to say that most of the smartest minds of the interwar period were on the Left. This would soon change with the emigration of Eastern and Mitteleuropean conservatives to Britain — Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, Lewis Namier, Ernest Gellner — producing a more balanced intellectual division of labour. But before that, Left hegemony was unrivalled. John Strachey was undoubtedly among the most important political commentators of the Thirties. His father was the editor of The Spectator for nearly 40 years, and Strachey’s best man was Oswald Mosley, then still on the Left. When Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists, Strachey led some of the largest demonstrations against him.
As it was, the Marxist Strachey lost the battle of ideas to the Liberal John Maynard Keynes, who famously had no truck with communism: “How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and intelligentsia who, with all their faults, are the quality of life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement?” Yet Keynes could do little to prevent one of his Cambridge protégés, Maurice Dobb, from taking up the cudgels for the boorish proletariat.
Communism gained a bridgehead in Cambridge thanks to Dobb, who edited The Plebs, a Marxist magazine, in the Twenties. He extolled Lenin as a “stern realist” blessed “with all the Jesuit’s sincerity and idealism”. By contrast, “non-Marxists” were “as silly as pre-Darwinian biologists”. He helped found the Communist Party Historians Group, and set up Kim Philby — of the Cambridge Five ring of spies — with the NKVD. Later students included Amartya Sen and Eric Hobsbawm, whose own Oxbridge appointments were blocked by Tory dons.
Paradoxically, then, Soviet communism unwittingly fortified British capitalism. The unintended upshot of Anglo-Marxism was to make the Establishment more heedful of working-class interests. The same went for the welfare state. Peace was preserved between the classes. Redistribution took the edge off class conflict. What’s more, an educated and healthy workforce proved good for business. Moderately progressive taxation was a tiny insurance premium to keep the workers in working condition and the barbarians at bay. These days, barring a few libertarian crackpots, Tory radicals, Bridesheady (Saltburny?) nostalgics, and campus Marxists, nearly everyone is united in confirming the wisdom of this arrangement. The simple fact is that most Brits like their politics dull.
Pratinav Anil is the author of two bleak assessments of 20th-century Indian history. He teaches at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.
Other articles by Anil: The Marxism of Horrible Histories, and Gandhi hasnt aged well. Both are good reads.
I wrote on Facebook regarding his article Horrible Histories, a Marxist plot?,:
“I am a lifelong history tragic and I’ve degrees in history and politics. Now I’ve heard about horrible histories, I’ll have to look further. All history is, in a manner of speaking, storytelling, its validity and verification changing with the perspectives, perspicacity and prejudices of the storyteller. And on a potentially controversial tangent, all history is political – exhibit one is the proliferation of the culture wars and their corollary, the history wars.
If HHs can bring young folk to history and encourage them to learn more, so much the better. From what I read here, the histories are a more detailed and graphic version of that old, corny chestnut 1066 And All That. Which I still dip into now and then, for its perspective on what we’re owecievd back in the day as “good kings” and “good things”. Bad kings were more often than not the stuff of Shakespeare, whilst there were remarkably few bad things. I share the view of one commentator – that Deary is probably no Marxist, but was taught by a history teacher with Marxist leanings. History can and should be fun as well as serious, and not just the bailiwick of crusty academics and history snobs and culture warriors.
There’s a Canadian writer who tells similar stories about world history called Sweary History or The Day Shit Went Down – I’m sure you get the drift. By the way, I highly recommend Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland’s excellent podcast The Rest is History – a gift that keeps on giving. Solid and well researched stories from history’s back pages with bad impersonations , lots of friendly banter, and loads of humorous irreverence regarding assorted shibboleths and sacred cows”.