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- [00:01]
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Narrator
Few people had as much impact on the course of the 20th century as Vladimir Lenin. From his years as an emigre across the capitals of Western Europe to his role in the October Revolution of 1917 and the inception of the world's first self described socialist state. In this episode of the History Extra podcast, historian Lara Dowd speaks to Danny Byrd about the revolutionary leader from his radical theories and his elevation into a saint like figure in some quarters to his contested legacy in Putin's Russia and around the world.
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Interviewer Lara Dowdes
Lara let's start right at the beginning. Who was Lenin? What kind of world was he born into and what were some of the major events from his childhood?
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Historian Lara Dowdes
So the boy who would become Lenin was born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in a provincial town in the Russian Empire about 400 miles east of Moscow. It's on the Volga River. He's born in April 1870. The context is one of a Russian Empire which is characterized by autocracy. This is a czarist regime which is absolutist, it is repressive. It had only nine years previously abolished Serfdom, you know, economically it's coming out of serfdom, but very slowly. And it's a country that is full of social inequalities, hierarchies between those, you know, of the nobility and the peasants. And it's one in which we're seeing the beginnings of, in those couple of decades before Lenin's birth, the development of a revolutionary movement in the Russian Empire, which mainly intellectuals, educated elite who come to despise the. The inequalities, the injustices that they're seeing and are trying to think about ways to remake the world. It seems as though Lenin's life is kind of has this wonderful sort of almost idyllic, quite happy childhood. He's born into this happy family, the Ulyanovs. His father is, you know, an upwardly mobile, I suppose, bureaucrat we would call him. He had been a teacher. He then becomes an inspector of schools. And he's promoted to the point at which, you know, by Lenin's birth, he has the right of hereditary nobility in the Russian Empire. So, you know, it's a family on the make in many ways. And this family is made up of three brothers and three sisters, of which Lenin is sort of a middle child. And in many ways you don't necessarily see any great seeds of why members of this family would be pushed to become revolutionaries. You know, they all play together, they're very cultured, they enjoy reading, music, painting, walking in nature, all these sorts of things, and are sort of respectable members of society in simbiosk. And all the children, they do very well in schools. Lenin in particular. It has, you know, famous sort of very glowing school reports. But this kind of idyllic early life is shattered. In 1886, his father dies quite suddenly at a fairly young age. And then the following year in 1887, his older brother, Alexander Ulyanov, who had become a student at St. Petersburg University, was arrested. He was arrested for involvement, conspiracy to assassinate the Tsar. So this is Tsar Alexander iii. So he becomes of this what we would, I suppose call a terrorist organization, a revolutionary underground group, the Narodna Evoli, or the People's Will, who have a sort of a vision that carrying out assassinations of government officials is one tactic to incite a sort of uprising of the people in the Russian Empire to overthrow the autocracy, the tsarism. And in their view, this would eventually lead to a kind of socialist system based upon what was a peasant commune type system of the Russian Empire. Alexander Ulyanov becomes, I think, one of four young people I think he's aged 20 at this point to be hanged at the Schlisselberg fortress. And it's, yeah, it's a hugely traumatic moment in the life of the young Vladimir. Ulyana Vaslenin was at this point, and indeed all the family. So they're left, you know, without the father, without the eldest brother. And not only is it emotionally traumatic, I think, for the family, but it's also, you know, in terms of their social status, quite difficult. You know, they're shunned by polite society, which they've been a part of up until this point. It is very much a moment that defines Lenin's feelings about tsarism. We often think of Lenin. He's portrayed as a sort of, you know, a very rational figure, but in some ways, you know, there's a lot of repressed anger that defines his career. And although he very rarely actually, you know, in his later life and career explicitly mentions the death of his brother Alexander, you know, historians now have started to kind of interpret many of the things that he says about, you know, the best of the previous generation have lost their lives. You can see that it's always there in the background defining his ideas.
- [07:18]
Interviewer Lara Dowdes
And as you've mentioned, there was this growing revolutionary activity in Russia during the late 19th century. And I'm curious to know, how did that shape Lenin's core beliefs and when did he discover Marxism?
- [07:31]
Historian Lara Dowdes
So one of the first things that Lenin did after the execution of his brother Alexander was to start to try to work out, you know, what was my brother involved in? It seems as though the family had very little understanding of Alexander's activities at university in terms of these student groups. And Lenin's elder sister and Vladimir, as he was then, start to talk to the friends of Alexander Ulyanov and to try to work out what his ideas were, what had drawn him into these circles. And it's at this point at which Lenin starts to. To learn about the ideas of the neurodniks, as they were called, the populists. Who are these socialists that I mentioned are proto socialists who are interested in a kind of socialism based upon the peasant commune. So this is not Marxism. This is pre Marxism. Lenin starts to explore this, to begin reading, joining discussion circles. By August 1887, the young Vladimir Ulyanov, the young Lenin, joins Kazan University. He enrolls on a law degree. And it's here, you know, universities are these kind of hubs of, you know, reading circles, dabbling in sort of radical ideas. And he begins trying to understand what his brother had been involved in. And I think what he, you know, the conclusion that he eventually comes to is that actually these individual acts of terror that the populists had, you know, been invested in actually weren't all that successful and a new tactic was needed. And this is where Marxism began to come in into it. By the early 1890s, he's really spending time reading Marxist texts and trying to work out where he sits on this. And the conclusion that he comes to is that actually Marxism is more of a kind of foolproof strategy. The tactics are much broader. It's against terror, individual assassinations, it's about getting mass support, bringing about mass uprisings, having the hypnotic sort of philosophy because it really promises that history is on your side and you really can't lose. And that's why it's, it's very enticing kind of idea for many young radicals by the 1890s in the Russian Empire.
- [09:56]
Interviewer Lara Dowdes
And of course Lenin went on to write some highly influential works that are still studied today. And I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about some of those key texts such as what is to be done and how that reflected his interpretation of Marxism and how it should be applied to his homeland.
- [10:12]
Historian Lara Dowdes
Although he was expelled from university pretty early on after only a few months for being involved in student protests, he spends that time at the end of the 1880s, early 1890s, as I said, reading radical texts, beginning to mix with other radical thinkers. He does complete his law degree and he from St Petersburg University, first class honours as an external sort of student. And then it's this sort of dual life of being a junior barrister during the day and then in the evenings reading and beginning to produce his own first text. So from 1893, three probably we start to see him writing his own pamphlet. He writes what the friends of the people are and how they fight the social democrats. So it's this kind of debate about should we continue down this kind of narodnik populist line or should we follow social democracy by Marxism. He then goes abroad very briefly, mid-1890s, 1895, he's going around traveling, contacting the kind of early Marxist groups that are being set up by Russians, but in emigration, in Switzerland, etc. And on his return this leads to his arrest, imprisonment and then exile to Siberia. So we have this sort of end of the 1890s, 1896 to about 1900. It sounds terrible, exile to Siberia, but actually he gets married, of course at this point to a fellow radical socialist, Naderzhda Krupskaya, who comes to Siberia to join him. It's quite a fruitful time for him. What's interesting about Lenin, there's something of the kind of goody two shoes about him from his childhood that kind of comes through his life and that he stays in Siberia, he doesn't try to escape Siberian exile like many other radicals do. You know, Trotsky, for example, famously escaped on a sledge through Siberia. Lenin sits out his term and then in 1900 he comes back when his term is finished and then he goes politely into western emigration, you know, Munich, London, Geneva. And it's, you know, it's this time, yeah, that we see the genesis of what is to be done. This key text. It's also at this point that he starts using that pseudonym Lenin, the name that we know him by. But what is to be done? He's writing up and it's published in 1902. And it's a text that has, you know, had so much attention from scholars as this sort of proto totalitarian text that is, you know, showing the kind of seeds of repressive one party dictatorship. I guess that's traditionally the way that it had been interpreted because, you know, in this text Lenin is engaging in a kind of debate with fellow Russian Marxists, Russian socialists at this point about, I mean, it sounds quite mundane sort of party organization. So who could, who can be defined as a member of the party is what it's all about. But in terms of, you know, defining a revolutionary party, he's very famous at this point in this text. What is to be done of 1902 for saying we need a party of professional revolutionaries. You know, this is. It's not enough to say that any worker can be a party member because we'll be infiltrated by the Okrana, we'll be shut down. We need professional revolutionaries working in sort of conspiracy conditions in order not to be broken. Some historians more recently have said he's not actually that far out of line with trends in German social democracy at this time. So although it has been seen as a seminal text in many ways and a kind of defining text of Leninism, I think it's been perhaps given more emphasis in terms of understanding the Soviet system than perhaps it deserves. It was written as a kind of polemic in a factional debate in an underground revolutionary party at this point. So it's, I think it's more. Seeing it in that context is probably more important.
- [14:37]
Interviewer Lara Dowdes
I wondered if you could just touch upon how he came to adopt the pseudonym Lenin.
- [14:40]
Historian Lara Dowdes
There's no kind of definitive document that tells us. But we know that he went by this pseudonym, Nikolai Lenin. I think it's been suggested that it had something to do with kind of Lena, you know, this sort of area, the kind of goldfields area. But I've not heard a convincing answer to why this Lenin. But we do know that he's using it consistently from 1901 onwards. And he continues obviously to use it up until well after the revolution to his death. But what's quite interesting about his use of his pseudonym, just from my point of view as a kind of historian of the early Soviet state, is that again, the sort of goody two shoes of Lenin comes across when he becomes the leader of the Soviet government and he's, you know, signing minutes of meetings of the Council of People's Commissars, which becomes a sort of government cabinet. He's the really the only one to drop his pseudonym in those documents. And he signs it, you know, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov and then puts Lenin in brackets underneath. So he's trying to be this sort of professional figure, whereas Trotsky and Stalin never really used their actual names.
- [15:54]
Interviewer Lara Dowdes
You referred there, of course, when we were talking about what is to be done to the factionalism within the Russian Marxist Party at that time. And I think we should probably talk about Lenin's role in that division and what it leads to and the fact that two factions essentially crystallize and then later on become two separate parties entirely. Could you tell us a little bit about what happened there and Lenin's role in it?
- [16:16]
Historian Lara Dowdes
The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party is the organization which Lenin is involved in. It had been founded in 1898 in Minsk. Lenin wasn't there. He was in exile, as I mentioned before, in Siberia. But when he's, you know, he comes back from exile, he goes to, to Western Europe and he becomes involved in this party, the RSDLP or the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. And very quickly. So at the second congress of that party in 1903, we see this great debate erupt about party membership too. So it's famously this kind of division of the party into the Bolshevik and the Menshevik faction. So Bolshevik simply means majority. It's the bigger, you know, Bolshoi is big in Russian. Menshevik is a minority faction. The name is interesting. It's Lenin sort of manipulating circumstances because initially Lenin's point of view on party organization had been in the minority. Then some comrades have to leave and event, you know, that puts him in the kind of majority positions there's not necessarily a kind of formal split in the party that only really comes in 1912. You know, it's sort of almost a decade later that there's this kind of formal split in the party into these Bolshevik and Menshevik factions.
- [17:38]
Interviewer Lara Dowdes
And as we've mentioned already, a major part of his life was spent living as a revolutionary emigre in Western Europe prior to the events of 1917. Could you give me a very brief sketch of what he was up to during this period of his life, particularly during the outbreak of the First World War, leading up to the very beginning of what becomes the year that defines the Russian Revolution in 1917.
- [17:59]
Historian Lara Dowdes
He spends many, many years in self imposed emigration. He's trying to stay out of the clutches of the Tsarist secret police, avoid another stretch in prison or in Siberia. And so he's living this kind of peripatetic life really where he's, you know, he's in Germany, he's in England, so he lives in London. He is a keen user of the British Library, for which he has a library card under the pseudonym of Jacob Richter. And he loves the British Library. He thinks it's a really wonderful institution and, you know, a great place to work. It has a great collection. And so he's spending a lot of time reading and preparing his texts there. He briefly returns to the Russian Empire after the outbreak of Revolution in 1905. Lenin returns very briefly in November of 1905, but, you know, he's not really massively involved. And then he goes to Finland and, and then he returns to his Western European emigration in 1907. The one interesting thing, if we're going to say anything about 1905 and Lenin, is that he realizes that the Soviets, the Soviets are workers councils which spring up, well, predominantly work as councils, but also, you know, later on, soldiers councils, peasants councils. He recognizes, and he writes after the 1905 revolution that the Soviets can be these sort of embryonic units of state administration in a way. He spends then another 11 years or so in emigration again in Western Europe. So it's back to Geneva, he's off to Paris, he moves to Poland, he moves to Switzerland. And what he's doing, well, he's, you know, very much a kind of work hard, play hard type of character. And we have a lot of information from the memoirs of his wife, Nadejda Krupskaya, about what they got up to, as it were. He's really supporting himself from his writing, journalistic writings. He has a small amount of income from this writing for kind of Radical socialist and party newspapers like Iskra. He's also actually being subsidized by his mother financially, who he remains very, very close to. There's a lot of correspondence between Lenin and his mother and it's interesting he also has his mother in law with him, living pretty much all the time. And his sisters, he remains close to his sisters so two of his three sisters join him. So he's in this very female environment, I suppose, comradely women who are also dedicated socialists doing their bit for the cause too. In terms of his leisure activities, he particularly enjoys hiking, being outdoors, walking in the mountains of Switzerland. And he sees it almost as a kind of relief for, you know, he has this sort of very intense political focus where he's obsessed with politics. He has very few friendships, well, no friendships outside of politics. And he frequently falls out very strongly with, you know, those who he'd been friends with about politics. So he's, it's, you know, all this sort of outdoorsiness, hiking, you know, he's, he's a keen hunter, I guess we would call kind of self care. Now we can see factional infighting, splitting hairs with fellow Marxists about you know, what party organization and you know, other sort of policies should be. But it really takes on, you know, kind of more momentum with the outbreak of the First World War, which I think the First World War for Lenin is really, really significant. And it kind of bursts that bubble and it stimulates him into more and more action in terms of writing, in terms of his ideas and in terms of his relationship with others in the international socialist movement. It's a busy time from mid-1914 because Lenin really comes out as the most anti war of the European socialists in many ways. And he gets very, very angry with other socialists from Germany and other places who he calls social chauvinists rather than social democrats because he feels that they get on board with their own country's war effort too much. And he says, you know, we are socialists, we're supposed to be against, you know, proletarians fighting proletarians for the interests of their exploiters. And he's trying very, very hard from 1914 onwards to define this anti war kind of extreme position. There's a ZimmerWorld conference in 1915, a meeting where socialists come together. They try to address these divisions in the socialist movement in that have come about because of the differing approaches to the First World War and it's trying to kind of reunite socialists. But you know, Lenin is never really one for reuniting. He's only Ever really one for kind of further defining and splitting off. I think again, it's that Lenin who always thinks that he is right defining features, his, I suppose, his self belief, you know, that I'm right and I will sit and I'll argue. Everybody else out of the room and if they don't agree with, then they can leave. Never really one who's great at compromise, let's say.
- [23:34]
Interviewer Lara Dowdes
Then of course comes 1917, the fateful year of the Russian Revolution. What was Lenin's role in that seismic event? And how did he manage to go from exile to leading a revolution that drastically altered the course not only of Russian history, but which reverberated around the world?
- [23:50]
Historian Lara Dowdes
Of course, Russia has two very different revolutions in 1917. So in the first revolution, he's sitting in emigration in Western Europe. He's writing letters from afar, saying things like, well, our generation will probably never see revolution in our lifetimes. It's going to be the next generation. And then all of a sudden we see this spontaneous revolution breaking out in February, which begins around International Women's Day. Women queuing for bread. They get pretty rowdy, they're pretty annoyed. Workers from the kind of outer districts of what's now Petrograd come to the centre. There's civil disobedience, violence breaks out, and we have a revolutionary situation. And it's really in the days after the revolution that radical activists or revolutionary parties start to try to get involved, to, you know, to kind of push the revolution in particular directions in a similar way to the 1905 revolution. The emergence of Soviets as assemblies, representative assemblies for soldiers, for workers and also then for peasants. So Lenin is absent for all of this. And it's only, you know, in April of 1917 that Lenin returns to the Russian Empire, famously on this sealed train provided by Germany, of course, who are fighting against the Russian Empire, who think that Lenin would pose a problem to the Provisional Government, who are continuing the war effort. So, you know, they, they're happy to send back this, what they think is a sort of ticking time bomb. So he returns to the Russian Empire and, you know, he is very. He makes very significant interventions. The obvious one is his April thesis, which he announces sort of immediately he sort of gets off the train and he gives a speech. It's, you know, it's, here's what I think we should do in terms of, you know, the Bolsheviks, the Russian Social Democrats. And he gives a sort of list of 10, 10 directives that you should refer to as. And the famous ones really are things like all power to the Soviets, this system of workers councils. And they were in a situation of what was referred to as dual power. So after February we have the Soviets and the Petrograd Soviet at the center, which is a really powerful body in practical terms. You know, the soldiers obey the instructions of the Soviets. On the other hand we have the Provisional Government which is this kind of self appointed body of politicians who had been members of the Duma, which was a pretty sorry excuse for a parliament which was established after the 1905 revolution but wasn't particularly representative or authoritative. There's not really a popular mandate. So they're relying on the Soviets who have, you know, the mandate of the people, as it were. So it's a very difficult situation. And what Lenin does is he says no more cooperation or collaboration with the Provisional Government. The Soviets can and should take power as a sort of, as I said earlier, this sort of machinery of a socialist administration or government as it were. He also says we've got no support for the war whatsoever that needs to end right now. He also says quite interesting things in terms of land which, you know, the peasants also are not happy, let's say they'd been really pining for land nationalization we might call it, since the emancipation, which they'd notice got the land that they thought they should get really. So he says, you know, we'll confiscate landed estates of the nobles, we'll nationalize land. He also says we'll pass production of industry into the hands of the Soviets. So there's a nod to workers control of industry. So there's a lot of exciting slogans that come out of his April thesis that really set him and the Bolsheviks apart as the kind of most radical socialist group, the one that has no association with the Provisional Government, which in April isn't necessarily all that important. But by the end of the summer of 1917 when the Provisional Government has really failed to solve any of the key problems that the Russian Empire is facing, you know, it doesn't take Russia out of the war, it doesn't solve any of the economic hardship problems, it doing nothing about land, the popular mood, let's call it, is being pushed evermore to the extreme and to the extreme left as it becomes. So Lenin's position in April actually by, well, even by July, when there's a kind of spontaneous demand of workers for power to the Soviets. But certainly by late September the Bolsheviks are winning majorities in Soviets across the Russian Empire. And Lenin smells blood at this point and he's really ready. He's the only one that's ready. You know, he's saying we can and we should take power into the hands of the Soviets at this point. I guess that's his second key intervention is being the only person crazy enough maybe to suggest we can take power. And Trotsky says something like, you know, we found power lying in the streets October 1917, and we simply picked it up because there is this disintegration of authority in the Russian empire because of all these problems. So it seems as though in some ways Lenin is really significant because he defines the direction of the revolution. But actually conditions have become so terrible really, and the public mood is so angry that it seems to me there may have been a revolution of some kind. Anyway, it's just that Lenin is the person that is willing to go through with it again. It's that self belief and the idea that, you know, history's on his side.
- [29:59]
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- [30:48]
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- [31:45]
Interviewer Lara Dowdes
Of course, once the Bolsheviks come to Power. Following the October Revolution they have to construct an entirely new radical type of state and society. And I was wondering if you could go a little bit into how Lenin went about consolidating power during such a chaotic time. Obviously the First World War is still raging. There's the disintegration to civil war across the former Russian Empire. It's also being invaded by foreign powers at this time. And there's also a lot of opposition within his own party but also across the sort of left broadly, isn't there?
- [32:17]
Historian Lara Dowdes
Yes, absolutely. So it's really interesting. Lenin did not have any blueprint. Marx had not given him a nice worked out plan of what a socialist post revolutionary government should look like. So they're kind of broad principles that come. And Lenin knows that he is going to have to construct what is called the dictatorship of the proletariat. So he knows it's going to be this kind of phase of building of a socialist system that in his eyes and the eyes of fellow Marxist will eventually wither away and we will have a situation where there are no classes, there's no exploitation, there's no need for any authority, police, army, etc. There'll be world revolution, there'll be no borders and this will be communism. But before we get to communism, that's the problem. It's what do we create in the meantime as this dictatorship of the proletariat. And it's a question that Lenin had been thinking about during the First World War. So after he'd finished writing one of his key texts, Imperialism, High Stage of Capitalism, where he's really railing against, you know, the imperialist Western powers. The war is a product, you know, of imperialism and it's also, it's not only part of it but it's a kind of defining feature of capitalism. He then moves on to thinking about the state and he starts work in 1916 on kind of pamphlet called State and Revolution. And this is where he is in some senses trying to work out what Marx and Engels were saying about what the dictatorship of the proletariat would look like. He continues writing it through 1917 and then he's interrupted in finishing the last couple of chapters by the revolution. And he says, you know, actually it's, you know, it's good to be interrupted by having to take power. But it's published in early 1918 and it's his attempt to work out what is a socialist state, what should it be, what should it look like before it withers away. It's very difficult to link what subsequently happened with this text. So historians have often said this is just a moment of madness of Lenin. He's full of this sort of, you know, utopian dreams of that revolutionary year. Or they'll say that actually he's just sort of trying to fool people with this text. He's not sincere in any of this, with this sort of utopian vision that he's, you know, almost very idealistic vision that he has. What he says is that during this phase of the dictatorship of the proletariat, after the revolution, what we're going to have is a system, a state that's based upon the Soviets. So these workers councils are going to be these bodies which become the kind of administrative machinery of the new state. The Soviets go from the sort of most local level up through district, region to the central level. And we have at the center, in practice, this Congress of Soviets and a central executive committee with a cabinet at the top, which is the Council of People's Commissar. Lenin really goes along with Marx and Engels in terms of arguing against parliamentary democracy. So he's very explicitly against parliamentarism. Bourgeois parliamentarism, he calls it. He says this is a sham. It's a con. The separation of powers is meaningless. It's just, you know, a fraud. So that the bourgeoisie and the. The upper classes can pretend to the proletariat that they have some kind of say. But it's really not a true democracy because the upper classes, the elites, maintain control of the media, the voting. So it's a sham, basically. And he takes this from Marx. So he says separation of powers doesn't do any good. The problem is the role of the party isn't necessarily clearly defined at this stage. So we know we have this revolutionary party which is the vanguard of the working classes. It's there to lead them. There's no clear definition in State and Revolution or any other text about what the party should actually do here. What Lenin does talk a lot about in state and revolution is, you know, the participation of the workers in administration, bringing through these councils, members of the working classes, into administration, so that eventually everybody is in some sense takes a turn at administration. And then the state, then as an institution, withers away. So it's quite a complicated, quite a utopian, idealistic text in many ways. And the crux of it is that Lenin assumes that there will be this kind of voluntary coming together and that everybody will sort of agree about the direction. A lot of what we think of as early Soviet government isn't necessarily mapped out in any of this. What Lenin does is he, as I said, he establishes the Council of People's commissars at the Second Congress of Soviets in October of 1917, which is he had timed the October Revolution specifically to fall the sort of evening before the opening of this great Congress of Soviets which was due at the end of October of 1917. So all the delegates come together and Lenin announces we have taken power in the name of the Soviets and we're passing it to the Congress. What happens is that not everybody at that congress is a Bolshevik. There are a Bolshevik sort of majority, but there are also other moderate socialists here, Mensheviks, left, srs, srs, etc and you know, these guys are horrified, you know, that Lenin is kind of presenting this fate accompli. They sort of walk out in protest and Trotsky is supposed to have said off you go then into the dustbin of history. So they storm out to protest the Bolshevik seizure of power. And Lenin is left to construct a government, you know, a solely Bolshevik government at this point and that is headed by him as chairman. The leftists, another sort of radical socialist group, do come back in and sort of join a coalition which is fairly short lived up until the late spring of 1918. It's really Lenin and a Bolshevik government that's constructed. And particularly from summer of 1918 it does become a one party dictatorship.
- [38:49]
Interviewer Lara Dowdes
One of the more brutal chapters of that period was the Red Terror. What exactly was the Red Terror and how involved was Lenin in initiating or justifying it?
- [38:57]
Historian Lara Dowdes
The Red Terror is this wave of violence that breaks out through the summer of 1918 and it's partly a result of the formation of a body called the Cheka, which is the sort of extraordinary commission against counter revolution sabotage, but basically is a body that's set up to fight enemies of the revolution as it were. Class enemies in particular. Lenin was expecting a class war. Marxism is about the engine of history is class struggle. It's going to be a class war between the working class and the bourgeoisie, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. And so he's expecting violence in many ways and violence is certainly what occurs. The war itself had created a context of violence. Lenin's concerns about the repression of things like the Paris commune of the 19th century, that actually they hadn't used enough violence to stay in power and they'd been removed fairly quickly. So it's this idea that violence is always extremely expected and it's on the cards now. That's not necessarily that Lenin was a Particularly, I mean, I may be controversial here personally, sort of violent or bloodthirsty person, but you know, it was part of what he saw in terms of the class struggle developing. And so the use of terror, of arrests, of executions by the Chekar escalates. I don't intend to justify red terror, but this is also a context of white terror. So it's one side begetting violence against another side. And you know, assassination attempts on Lenin and other Soviet figures really heightens this kind of sense of being under attack I guess as the regime. And there is this assassination attempt on Lenin's life at the end of August of 1918, which is unsuccessful, but he is shot twice, a bullet lodges in his neck. So violence is a big part of what's happening throughout 1918, but it's violence by the Reds, by the Bolsheviks. The Soviet leadership also being answered with violence from the whites. So all of those groups that the Bolsheviks had really annoyed by seizing power. So not only, you know, we think of the whites, don't we, we think of the monarchists, the conservatives, the liberals, but also moderate socialists who felt that the Bolsheviks had gone too far in seizing power as a one party dictatorship. This eventually snowballs into a civil war across the Russian Empire where the Reds are fighting against the whites armies which are headed by former military leaders of the, you know, from the Tsarist army, but you know, supported by foreign intervention from those who had been allies with Russia. So you know, Britain, the usa, France, many, many countries sending troops to try to dislodge the Bolsheviks. So it is a very chaotic and very violent time with atrocities on all sides. An economic catastrophe is unfolding across the Russian Empire which eventually leads because of the disruption of the economy because of civil war and the Bolsheviks policy of what became known as War Communism. So confiscation of grain from the peasantry leads to a huge famine from 1921, 1922. So it's a very, very difficult moment for the regime. It does manage to hold on to power, but it ends up becoming something very different than it was before the civil war.
- [42:35]
Interviewer Lara Dowdes
One of the consequences of that economic fallout, and that may surprise a lot of people about Lenin, is the New Economic Policy or the nep. Why did he make such a dramatic shift towards a form of limited capitalism after years of preaching revolutionary socialism?
- [42:50]
Historian Lara Dowdes
So it is a lot to do with this catastrophic impact of the first World War, then the revolution and then the civil war on the economy. He's realizing that people need to eat. This is an absolute catastrophic situation. Industry has Collapsed, production is below pre war levels, people are going hungry, huge shortages across the Russian Empire. And in some ways he's a very practical person and he is able to make these tactical changes of direction. He does this earlier with the Treaty of Brest Litoth, where he makes peace not because he thinks ideologically it's the right thing to do, but because it's a breathing space in some ways. And for Lenin, again, I suppose in some ways, the nep, the New Economic policy is trying to create a breathing space for the recovery of economy, of society in the Russian Empire. And we're coming up to a very important moment in March 1921, which was this 10th Party Congress where Lenin begins to introduce what becomes known as this New Economic Policy. And not only is famine spreading across the Russian Empire in 1921, but we have the Kronstadt uprising of March of 1921, which is extremely painful for the Bolsheviks. So the Kronstadt uprising was naval base just outside of Petrograd, which had been traditionally this stronghold of support for the bolsheviks. And by 1921 it was no longer supporting the Bolsheviks, it was calling for Soviets without Bolsheviks. And it was a lot to do with this really severe hardship economically, but also to do with increasing authoritarianism during the civil war of the Bolsheviks, the suppression of dissent, the lack of political freedoms, all these sorts of things. So this explodes and the Bolsheviks have to put down the Kronstadt Uprising. And it's very, very painful. And so it's really a strong message to Lenin that something has to give and we need a period of trying to stabilize the situation. And so he introduces this new economic policy which begins with getting rid of the grain requisitioning system, so the sieging of grain and introducing a tax in kind of instead. And eventually we start to see the introduction of small scale trade capitalism into the Russian Empire. Lenin refers to it as this tactical retreat. It's one step backwards to take two steps forward or something like that, if that's the right way around allowing trade while the state continues to have ownership of big industry. And it works well, it restores the economy, things get better economically, production increases. Grain production also is on the rise. The problem is that it opens up ideological issues within the party because with capitalism you then have people profiting, you know, kulaks, this word for a rich peasant people who are making profits, which is ideologically uncomfortable for Lenin. But actually after the introduction of nep, very quickly Lenin becomes ill and so he's not able to influence developments.
- [46:07]
Interviewer Lara Dowdes
And as you've referenced there. Lenin's health in the latter part of his life did decline rather steeply. What kind of impact did this have on Soviet politics, but also the Soviet Union, which had just emerged as an entity, hadn't it? And what did his death leave in terms of a power vacuum within Soviet politics?
- [46:25]
Historian Lara Dowdes
Yeah, Lenin had spent so long decades preparing for the revolution, but then he really only gets about four years in power where he's actually properly involved in things. October 1917 up to about July of 1921, when he starts to have really terrible headaches. He has insomnia and he has to start taking time away from work. He's going to rest, to recover. He then has a big stroke in 1922 after there's an operation to remove the bullet that was in his neck from the assassination attempt in August of 1918. He manages just to about to be able to speak. He's paralyzed to some degree, but he manages to get back into politics a little bit. But December of 1922, he has another stroke which really does remove him from political activity. And then he manages to dictate some writings that are very famous, but he's really out of it. And then March of 1923, another stroke completely debilitates him and he dies in January of 1924. So there's a sense, I guess, that there is a kind of power vacuum developing because in his main position, which had been as this chairman of the Council of People's Commissar. So although he is a member of the party Politburo, which everybody's sort of probably more familiar with, he's never actually has a kind of formal position in the Politburo. He's never, you know, the kind of chairman or, you know, Org Bureau or whatever it is secretary that Stalin later becomes. So what he does is he starts trying to introduce deputies into the state bodies to, you know, to try to cover him really while he's ill. And this leads to a kind of drifting of the authority of the Soviet state bodies, whereas his comrades in the Politburo, the top bodies of the Communist Party itself, really start to. That's starting to become a real locus of power. But Lenin is against this. And in his last years, he's really despairing about the system that he's created. He's looking around him and he's thinking, none of these people are able to take over from me. They're all problematic in different ways. Famously, he criticized Stalin for being too rude and he shouldn't be given significant power because he'll use it badly. Trotsky is too arrogant, but is probably the most capable. You know, all these sorts of criticisms in his testaments, but also in his final writings, he dictates about the necessity for education and cultural revolution in the Soviet Union. So, you know, we need to increase literacy. We need to educate people to, you know, to allow people then to join administration, government, and to go back to the idea of state of revolution, of kind of proletarian participation. He argues about proletarian oversight bodies and trying to reform the government structures. But really he's struggling, and you've got to feel his frustration and his disappointment, really, that comes through in those final writings.
- [49:31]
Interviewer Lara Dowdes
Now, something that people are always curious about is what actually happened to Lenin's body after he died? Why was it preserved? And what kind of symbolism did that hold for the Soviet state?
- [49:41]
Historian Lara Dowdes
You know, the cult of Lenin was emerging as Lenin became Soviet leader. And in some senses, this was a response to a popular appetite to have a kind of almost saintly figurehead. The political culture of this period is very personalized, and in some senses, there's authoritarianism of Bolshevik ideas, but there's also the political culture of the Russian Empire. But the Lenin cult, which develops, you know, in the later part of Lenin's life, which Lenin himself really was not very keen on at all and discouraged, eventually becomes a really important tool in the political struggles of the potential successors to produce this kind of hagiography of Lenin. And that his every decision was absolutely correct and everybody wanted to portray themselves as his best friend in order to then legitimize their path to becoming a next leader. That's why it's so difficult, I think, to define Lenin, because so much has been written in terms of hagiography about him. The creation of this revolutionary saint that. That's beyond criticism, is really overshadowing the sources that historians can use. And then, on the other hand, you have those who really want to demonize Lenin. People he fell out with writing memoirs or Western sources who are very critical of socialism. But the image of Lenin and his sort of deification, as it were, you know, the preservation of his body, the removal of his brain to be sliced up and studied to find the source of this genius. And eventually Lenin's mausoleum on red, which becomes this permanent marble structure which is still there today. I think it's as much to do with the political pretensions of those in the Politburo who strove to use him as a tool to legitimize themselves as much as it was anything to do with Lenin. Himself.
- [51:31]
Interviewer Lara Dowdes
Now, we often hear Lenin and Stalin mentioned in the same breath. How much continuity was there between the two.
- [51:38]
Historian Lara Dowdes
First of all, Lenin creates this revolutionary party as the vanguard of the working class. Although Lenin himself governs through what is supposedly this apparatus of the Soviets, he is also very much involved in the Politburo, which becomes Stalin's vehicle later on to become dictator. A colleague of mine once said, you know, Lenin headed a dictatorship, but he wasn't a dictator, which is quite an interesting way of looking at it. Stalin became this unquestionable figure in terms of nobody could call him out, nobody could disagree, nobody could criticize publicly and then even privately. Whereas with Lenin, in terms of his meetings with colleagues in the government, at party congresses, people are always disagreeing with him, people are always criticizing him in the press, at these public forum. And he has to argue, he has to use powers of persuasion and argument really to get his way. And the, the style of rule and the style of leadership, I think for me looks very, very different. I know the ban on factions is introduced, which is often said to be this key moment in moving towards Stalinism later. But the ban on factions of 1921 at that final party congress that Lenin is really involved in is again, it's very much of its time. It's a context of civil war. Everything's falling apart. The party is riven by various factions, you know, left Communist, democratic, centralist, military, opposition, workers opposition. And Lenin is just trying to create this breathing space, you know, pull people together to move forward after the civil war. And it doesn't even work, actually, because they're still arguing about factions. So it's very, very different political environment from that of Stalinism. By the 1930s, Lenin was very famously in favor of internationalism, world revolution. And Stalin's policy of socialism in one country is often referred to as this huge break. But Lenin himself was open to tactical retreats. He had talked about a peaceful coexistence with capitalist powers. He tried to broker trade deals with, you know, the Anglo Soviet trade deal with the Rapallo treaty, you know, 1922. So in some practical senses, I think this not necessarily a big break there. And I guess the other question is in terms of the use of violence, this is what's often a key point in these debates about continuity between Leninism and Stalinism. Did Lenin set up the basis of the extreme brutality of Stalinism? And in many ways you have to say, well, okay, he sets up the machinery, doesn't he? He sets up the cheka, which I mentioned earlier, which then develops into the GPU and, you know, all of these other, you know, the ogpu, the kgb, these instruments of violence that caused so much bloodshed during the 1930s. The first, what we might call gulag or labor camps are set up in the Lenin period, although we might say that dates back to tsarism also. In some senses, he's laying the basis of that machinery of repression. But for me, it's much more complicated than that. I think the scale of violence and the personal kind of vindictiveness of much of the terror, the treatment of the old Bolsheviks by Stalin, I struggle to see that occurring under Lenin's continued leadership
- [55:08]
Interviewer Lara Dowdes
after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. How has Lenin's legacy been treated in Russia and the other former Soviet republics? Is he remembered as a hero, a villain, or something a bit more complicated. Complicated.
- [55:20]
Historian Lara Dowdes
It's been an interesting journey. And after the collapse of communism, there was, you know, obviously a great appetite to criticize because this, you know, the cult of Lenin and, you know, the Soviet historiography had not been allowed to really deviate from hagiography of. Of Lenin for so long. And, you know, the cult of Lenin had taken over Soviet society in many ways. From a young age. Children were taught about grandfather Lenin and, you know, how kind he was and honest, and he's this sort of role model for every Soviet citizen in some way, so sort of sickening degree, I suppose. So it's very natural that there is a kind of pushback against this saintly Lenin, which is a nonsense and absolutely always was an absolute nonsense. You know, it's probably fallen more into just lack of, I say, lack of interest, really. When you think about the problems that Lenin's legacy causes for contemporary Russian leadership, it's very difficult to judge, you know, what is of political use today or not by, you know, Putin's regime, for example. So it's very difficult to work out which bits to celebrate and which bits to. To ignore. And we can see Putin recently blaming Lenin, for example, for the creation of Ukraine. You know, it's the Bolsheviks that created Ukraine. He tells us Ukraine was never a country before the Bolsheviks gave it substance during the creation of the Soviet Union itself. As a student, I was always amazed when I went to the Russian archives around about 2010, I started going. And I was always amazed that in Russian archives, the statue of Lenin was there, and there would always be fresh red carnations placed by him. But perhaps this is not representative of the general view, you know, apart from the odd sort of crazy Communist Party banner wavers in Red Square. There was little sign that anybody was interested in socialism there. And I think it's, you know, he had his image and his reputation is certainly of interest to a much smaller circle of the population within Russia. But that's not to say that he doesn't remain an important symbol for many people globally.
- [57:26]
Interviewer Lara Dowdes
Well, that was going to be my next question, my final, final question, which was from our vantage point in the 21st century, what kind of global legacy has he left behind? And do you think his ideas to have any meaningful relevance today?
- [57:38]
Historian Lara Dowdes
In some ways it's difficult to tease out the usable legacy of Lenin, isn't it? But just recently I read all about eco Leninism, for example. This is something that's new to me, this idea of using Lenin's tactics to protect the environment, as it were, his non compromising tactics. But ultimately I think there's a lot of Leninism that we need to take with a pinch of salt. And we need to think about Lenin as a person who was writing pretty much always for polemical use. His writings themselves are always created in a very specific context for a very specific political goal. And we always need to keep that in mind when we think about their usefulness. On the other hand, the broad vision that Lenin and the Bolsheviks and other social democrats had of this period that sought to create a world that was free from oppression, that was free from exploitation, that was economically equal type of world, I think has meaning today. You know, for many, when we think today about the world and we think about the problems in liberal democracy in the uk, in the us, very mature liberal democracies, and in other parts of the world, when we think about Lenin's message about what is the point in political freedom without economic equality and how even the most mature parliamentary liberal systems can often fail to draw in participation and representation of those with less money than those with wealth, the control and domination of the rich, there's something there, I think, that is worth remembering in terms of, okay, liberal democracy is probably the least bad political system that we have managed to come up with yet in terms of avoiding repression and authoritarianism. But also it's not perfect. And Lenin's message about economic equality and drawing the working classes or the masses into having a greater influence and participation is perhaps worth remembering today.
- [59:54]
Narrator
That was Lara Dowdes speaking to Danny Bird. Lara is Assistant professor in History at Northumbria University and is a specialist in the history of government political practice and political culture in Russia and the Soviet Union. She is the author of Inside Lenin's Power, Ideology and Practice in the Early Soviet States, published by Bloomsbury.
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