CONTENTS

       Acknowledgments

      Introduction: On Lenin

      SECTION ONE. TERRORISM AND UTOPIA

      1.Terrorism versus Absolutism

2.The Elder Brother

3.The Younger Brother

SECTION TWO. INTERNATIONALISM, SOCIALISM, EMPIRES AND WAR

4.The Birth of Internationalism

       5.Socialism

       6.Empires at War

       SECTION THREE. 1917–1920: STATES AND REVOLUTIONS

       7.February

       8.October

       9.The Aftermath

       10.The Third International

       11.Red Army, Civil War, Military Philosophers

       SECTION FOUR. THE QUESTION OF WOMEN

       12.The First Wave

       13.The Octobrist Women

       14.Sunlight and Moonlight

       SECTION FIVE. THE LAST FIGHT LET US FACE

       15.Till the Bitter End

       16.Friends and Enemies

       Epilogue: On Climbing a High Mountain, by V. I. Lenin

       Notes

       Glossary of Personal Names

       Further Reading

       Index

       ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      This book was written to put Lenin in proper historical context. It has been immensely pleasurable to reread his key texts and related material. One reads them differently now than in the last century, but they retain their power. Usually I write a book after a great deal of discussion with audiences at public lectures and meetings. This time, my only companions were books. Of these (listed in the Further Reading section), I must single out the remarkable work of the late John Erickson, a military historian par excellence, whose studies of the Red Army and its command structures from 1917 to 1991 have no peer in any language.

      For brief discussions on particular subjects I must thank Perry Anderson; Robin Blackburn and Susan Watkins, my colleagues at the New Left Review; and Sebastien Budgen, editor at Verso, Paris, who, as usual, sent me extremely useful texts to digest. For reading the manuscript and suggesting useful alterations and elucidations I am grateful to David Fernbach, a comrade of almost fifty years, and Leo Hollis, my editor at Verso, London – whose grandfather, Christopher Hollis, was an early biographer of Lenin who certainly would not have agreed with most of my assessments. Mark Martin at Verso, Brooklyn, and Rowan Wilson and Bob Bhamra at Verso, London, ensured a smooth transition on the production front. Many thanks as well to Ben Mabie at Verso, Brooklyn, for preparing a first draft of the Glossary of Personal Names.

       T. A.28 October 2016

       INTRODUCTION

       On Lenin

      Here I stand, I can do no other.

      Martin Luther

      Why Lenin? First, because this is the centenary year of Europe’s last great revolution. Unlike its predecessors, the 1917 October Revolution transformed world politics and, in the process, remade the twentieth century with a frontal assault on capitalism and its empires, accelerating decolonialization. Secondly, today’s dominant ideology and the power structures it defends are so hostile to the social and liberation struggles of the last century that a recovery of as much historical and political memory as is feasible becomes an act of resistance. In these bad times, even the anti-capitalism on offer is limited. It is apolitical and ahistorical. The aim of contemporary struggle should be not to repeat or mimic the past but to absorb the lessons, both negative and positive, that it offers. It is impossible to achieve this while ignoring the subject of this study. For a long time during the last century, those who honoured Lenin largely ignored him. They sanctified him, but rarely read his work. More often than not, and on every continent, Lenin was misinterpreted and misused for instrumentalist purposes by his own side: parties and sects large and tiny who claimed his mantle.

      The Lenin cult, which he loathed even in its most incipient form, was a disaster for his thought. His texts, never intended or written as a catechism, were mummified, making it difficult to understand his political formation. This phenomenon must be situated at the confluence of two historical processes. Lenin was a product of Russian history and the European labour movement. Both posed questions of class and party, of agency and instrument. The synthesis developed by Lenin was thus determined by the intermingling of two very different currents that can be characterised, broadly speaking, as anarchism and Marxism. He played a crucial role in the triumph of the latter.

      That is why, before moving on to discuss some specific problems confronted by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, I will explain at length the history and prehistory of both currents. Without this excavation, it’s not easy to understand the dilemmas that confronted Lenin.

      It takes imagination to misread Lenin and Trotsky or present them as liberals