The British actor Miles Malleson, a far-Left activist and supporter of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, was within the Reading Room of the British Museum within the Nineteen Twenties and obtained into dialog with a long-serving librarian. Did the librarian bear in mind a Mr Ulyanov, a Russian, who, in 1902, had been an everyday at L13, a desk beneath the room’s magnificent central dome, head down, furiously studying and writing?
The librarian appeared clean for a second, then replied: ‘Oh sure, a really charming gentleman, brief with a pointed beard. Very properly spoken.’
He then requested in all innocence: ‘Do you recognize what grew to become of him?’
What grew to become of him certainly?
By then, that ‘charming gentleman’ had seized energy in Russia in a daring coup d’etat, fought off all opposition in a vicious civil struggle, ordered the slaughter in chilly blood of the Tsar and his whole household, based the USSR, the first-ever communist state in historical past (however not the final), and its army pressure, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, and turned the world the other way up to the purpose the place it might by no means be the identical once more.
His statue stood in each Russian city and his embalmed physique nonetheless lies on show in a mausoleum on the coronary heart of Moscow, the place it’s honored by a stream of holiday makers.
Soviet propaganda poster with textual content studying: ‘Lenin lived, Lenin is alive, Lenin will reside’
Vladimir Lenin, left, with Joseph Stalin in 1922. The fact – nonetheless a lot it could offend those that regard Lenin’s as the suitable face of Communism – is that Stalin was Lenin’s protege and took his lead from him.
For Mr Ulyanov was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, destined to be the ruthless autocratic ruler of the Soviet Union from 1917 till his dying in 1924.
Today is the centenary of his dying and a second to mirror on the time he spent in London, residing along with his spouse Nadya in down-at-heel rooms in Camden and Clerkenwell, plotting with a rag-tag group of socialist exiles and intellectuals (most of whom he loathed due to their filthy private habits) on tips on how to foment revolution again dwelling and, paranoid as ever, ducking the police he imagined had him underneath surveillance as a suspected subversive and terrorist. (In actuality, Special Branch barely registered his presence.)
England was one among quite a few European nations Lenin took shelter in throughout his 16 years of exile from his homeland, a fugitive from the Russian authorities who noticed him, accurately, as a harmful revolutionary with designs to overthrow the federal government. He had been radicalised as a teen when his older brother was hanged for conspiring to kill the Tsar.
Ironically he and Nadya cherished going to Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park to hearken to the free-flow of opinions being publicly expressed – a far cry from the crackdown on disagreement and dialogue he initiated as soon as he dominated Russia.
He additionally took a sixpenny bus experience to Highgate to face in admiration beside the grave of an earlier political exile in London. Karl Marx, creator of The Communist Manifesto, was Lenin’s inspiration.
Crucially, although, he broke ranks with Marx, choosing a unique method ahead from the one preached by his mentor, which said that in a sophisticated industrial financial system, capitalism would inevitably collapse underneath the burden of its personal contradictions, to get replaced by socialism. Lenin agreed in idea, however, impatient for change, wasn’t ready to attend for historical past to do the job. The course of may do with a heavy shove – one which he and his Bolsheviks have been eager to offer.
This, too, even if Russia was removed from the superior industrialised nation Marx had postulated, however a largely agrarian nation whose peasant financial system did not match Marx’s idea as ripe for revolution.
Russia was a land in chaos, dealing with defeat by Germany within the First World War, its troopers mutinying of their tens of millions, on its knees economically, disastrously led by the autocratic Tsar Nicholas II till he abdicated to get replaced by an equally unimpressive coterie of social democrats.
Lenin determined if there was ever a time to strike, it was then, no matter Marxist idea dictated.
In October 1917, he risked all to grab energy for himself and his Bolshevik social gathering. He then dominated as ruthlessly as any Tsar, his seven years as chief marked by one-party rule, the violent suppression of dissenters, famine that price tens of millions of lives, censorship – the whole distortion of the socialist heaven he claimed he was creating.
There are those that will level to his successor, Stalin, as the actual satan in Russia’s twentieth Century historical past, and there’s no doubt that the repression, the violence, present trials, gulags and butchery of that monster’s 30 years because the dictator of the Soviet Union far exceeded Lenin’s – nastier, extra brutal, insanely contemptuous of human life, completely past rational understanding. In his paranoia, he murdered good friend and foe alike.
Vladimir Lenin talking in Red Square, on November 7, 1918. From the outset, Lenin had no qualms in utilizing terror as a method of management
And but the reality – nonetheless a lot it could offend those that regard Lenin’s as the suitable face of Communism – is that Stalin was Lenin’s protege and took his lead from him.
From the outset, Lenin had no qualms in utilizing terror as a method of management.
He not solely inspired violence however demanded it, setting a murderous agenda to get rid of his enemies so that his so-called proletarian revolution would succeed.
He sanctioned ‘unrestrained energy and using pressure, not of regulation’, satisfied it was higher that 100 harmless individuals ought to die than that one particular person endangering the revolution ought to stay free.
According to historian Robert Service in his new ebook Blood On The Snow, the start of the malaise that gripped Russia underneath its communist masters for the following 70 years occurred not with Stalin’s despotism however within the first years after October 1917, underneath Lenin.
It might be argued that Lenin solely adopted a sample set by the Tsars, whose ruthlessness and autocratic rule had outlined and despoiled Russia for hundreds of years. Yet sitting in his seat on the British Museum, Lenin had fancied he may trend a greater, extra peaceable, extra equal Russia – just for the truth of exercising energy in that huge nation and his willpower to pressure a reluctant inhabitants into line, no matter the fee, to show him right into a tsar in all however identify and each bit as horrible as his predecessors.
And the horror he created did not cease with Russia. ‘The Soviet one-party, one-ideology terror state begat totalitarianism,’ writes Service. ‘Soviet Communism held the patent to a type of rule that might be adopted by each the intense Left and Right, supplying a primary template for energy that the Nazis would use in Germany.’ Lenin has a lot to reply for. His first decree on seizing energy was to shut hostile newspapers – one other irony since, when in exile, he had edited Iskra (The Spark), a radical newspaper smuggled into Russia and secretly distributed to Bolshevik social gathering members.
From expertise, he knew the facility of the Press and so instantly suppressed it.
Then he established the Cheka, the Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Speculation and Sabotage, a secret police pressure of thugs tasked with hounding, to dying if obligatory, anybody who doubted the legitimacy of the revolution. It was on Lenin’s orders that the USSR started as a police state and stayed that method for the following seven many years.
Crucially, Lenin broke ranks with Marx (pictured), choosing a unique method ahead from the one preached by his mentor, which said that in a sophisticated industrial financial system, capitalism would inevitably collapse underneath the burden of its personal contradictions, to get replaced by socialism
The countryside felt the worst of his wrath when peasants resisted the collectivisation of land and tried to maintain the grain they grew to promote for themselves. ‘Hang them,’ was his instruction to officers in a single space. ‘No fewer than 100 kulaks [wealthier peasant farmers], wealthy males and bloodsuckers – and ensure the hanging takes place in full view of the individuals.’
Villages that rose in opposition to Soviet energy have been torched. Families of anybody who opposed the regime have been held as hostages in focus camps. He authorised using poison gasoline in opposition to insurgent bands of peasants.
Requisitioning of grain by the state led to widespread famine, with an estimated two million dying of starvation and determined individuals resorting to cannibalism. There have been horrific tales of moms killing one little one with the intention to feed the others within the household. Lenin’s response was to ban using the phrase ‘famine’ within the Press.
A decade later, Stalin can be infamous for the man-made famines of the Thirties wherein 5 million died, weaponising hunger as a method to convey Ukraine to heel in a genocidal act that also fuels the deep hatred between Moscow and Kyiv. But underneath Lenin, a lot the identical had occurred, although on a smaller scale.
He not often held again when confronted with those that challenged Bolshevik rule. When ‘my troubleshooter’, as he referred to as his sidekick Stalin, rooted out suspected counter-revolutionaries, Lenin inspired him to be ‘cruel’ and ‘ruthless’.
Stalin responded: ‘Be assured our hand is not going to tremble.’
Nor did it. Faced with a peasant rebellion within the Tambov district, Lenin instructed the Cheka chief: ‘The quickest (and exemplary) liquidation is completely obligatory.’
The ‘White Russian’ forces, a motley, disorganised band who tried to oust the Bolsheviks (and might need succeeded if it had not been for their very own incompetence and infighting) have been savagely handled in defeat, with tens of hundreds massacred, many hung from lampposts to ram dwelling the purpose to an more and more terrified and compliant inhabitants.
It is with good motive that historian Antony Beevor declares: ‘For ruthless inhumanity, the Bolsheviks have been unbeatable.’ As his grip tightened, Lenin, the atheist who dismissed faith as ‘opium for the individuals’, turned his avenging eye on the Orthodox Church. It had been a powerhouse underneath the Tsars; he dis-established it, seizing its land and its huge riches.
Joseph Stalin addresses voters of the Stalin election district in Moscow, on the night of the election wherein Russians voted for the primary time underneath the brand new structure
Thirty bishops and greater than 1,000 clergymen have been killed, an archbishop’s eyes gouged out and his ears lower off earlier than he was shot, one other bishop being tied to a rock and thrown right into a river.
Over the next 15 years, 97 per cent of church buildings (plus synagogues and mosques) have been closed down. And right here is the ultimate irony of Lenin’s regime – as a result of by then he was a sainted determine in dying, embalmed, revered – Russia underneath the Bolsheviks merely changed the previous faith with a brand new one – Leninism.
His time, although, was working out. In 1918, he was fortunate to outlive an assassination try when a lone gun-woman fired three bullets into him, one among which missed his aorta by millimetres.
Lenin shortly recovered (whereas on his behalf the Cheka took revenge not solely on the gunwoman, executed with out trial, however hundreds of different dissidents) and was quickly again at his desk. But he not often slowed down or took day without work; he ate badly, slept badly, had little or no train and the toll on his well being was unrelenting.
By the beginning of 1921, he was a sick man – in need of breath, struggling pains in his legs, stricken by complications, drained. Doctors blamed lead poisoning brought on by the bullets nonetheless inside him from the assassination try – an unlikely prognosis however nonetheless he was operated on to take away one lodged in his shoulder.
He appeared to get better however a month later he collapsed, felled by a stroke that paralysed him and impaired his speech… and his thoughts – when requested to multiply 12 by 7, he could not.
His writing was an illegible scrawl however he struggled on – his deteriorating situation saved a secret from all however an inside circle.
There have been extra strokes, leaving him unable to talk, his consciousness ‘cloudy’, confined to a wheelchair, his face contorted right into a babyish smile. He begged Stalin to place him out of his distress with poison however Stalin refused. He had moments of reduction. On January 18, 1924, he spent a day propped up on pillows on a horse-drawn sleigh for a rural outing however three days later he fell right into a coma and died, his spouse Nadya at his facet.
A couple of days earlier, delegates at a mass assembly of Soviet leaders, wrongly assured that he was on the mend, had stood and cheered, ‘Long reside the chief of the world proletariat, Comrade Lenin.’
With his dying got here a aware choice not solely to maintain his identify alive however to raise his standing into the stratosphere.
Dzherzhinsky leads the pallbearers carrying Lenin’s coffin from Paveletsky Station to the Labor Temple, with Sopranov behind him and Kamanev on the left
His physique was to not be cremated, as per regular, nevertheless it was mummified for show, just like the relics of a saint. A picket tomb – upgraded to marble and stone – was constructed beside the Kremlin wall to be a shrine for the cult of Lenin.
As the final word tribute, his identify was formally linked to the thinker who had impressed him, and Marxism re-designated as Marxism-Leninism.
100 years on, how ought to we assess him?
His biographer Victor Sebestyen catches the nuances of Lenin’s contribution to historical past when he writes: ‘He was not a monster, a sadist or vicious. He was not merciless: in contrast to Stalin he by no means requested in regards to the particulars of his victims’ deaths, savouring the second. He by no means donned military-style tunics as different dictators favoured.
‘But he constructed a system based mostly on the concept that political terror in opposition to opponents was justified for a higher finish.
It was then perfected by Stalin, however the concepts have been Lenin’s. The worst of his evils was to have left a person like Stalin ready to guide Russia after him. That was a historic crime.’
In The Communist Manifesto, Marx’s enchantment to the employees of the world had been: ‘Unite – you don’t have anything to lose however your chains.’ Lenin’s legacy was to betray them by binding them extra tightly than ever.