Vladimir Illyich Ulyanov (Lenin), 1870-1924.

Russian Marxist, revolutionary leader and statesman. 

Born in Simbirsk, Vladimir Illyich Ulyanov (better known under his alias, "Lenin") was the second son of a Russian provincial official. His elder brother, Alexander, was active in the peasant-socialist Narodnik movement and, in early 1887, was tried and executed by Tsarist authorities, an event which greatly influenced the young Lenin.  

In the fall of 1887, Lenin enrolled at the University of Kazan to study law, but immediately got involved in political study circles and was soon expelled.  It was during this time that he came across the works of Karl Marx and Friederich Engels.  In 1889, Lenin moved to Samara and then, in 1893, to St. Petersburg.  He was active in political study groups in both these cities. Lenin participated in the debate between Social Democrats and Narodniks on the relevance of Marxism (which primarily applied to industrial capitalism) to semi-feudal agricultural societies like Russia.  Although an admirer of Plekhanov, Lenin had little faith in the Narodnik program (1894).     

In 1895, Lenin formed the League for the Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class in St. Petersburg.  However, in the aftermath of a general strike in 1896,  the League was broken up and Lenin and his companions were temporarily sent into internal exile in Siberia.  

In 1898, Lenin founded the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), the forerunner of the communist party, and became director of Iskra, the party's newspaper.  In 1903, at the second congress of the RSDLP (held abroad in London and Paris), the communists split into two factions.  The "minority" (Menshevik) faction advocated the overthrow of the Tsarist regime and the introduction of bourgeois democracy (plus limited land reforms and protection for labor).  The "majority" (Bolshevik) faction, headed by Lenin, aimed for the more radical program of immediate abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the establishment of the "dictatorship of the proletariat". 

Lenin's reasoning can be deciphered in his 1898 Development of Capitalism in Russia.  Russia, Lenin emphasized, was, unlike Britain and other capitalist nations, a "late industrializer".  As a result, much of the industrialization program had been driven by Tsarist directives from above and placed in the hands of a very small politically-connected elite (i.e. what in modern days we would call "crony capitalism").  So, by sheer force of the Tsar's will, Russia had leapfrogged over the early stages of small-scale, competitive capitalism and straight into large-scale monopoly capitalism.  As a result, the Russian bourgeoisie (and its attendant democratic structures) never had the chance to emerge or take hold.  And, assuming Marx's theory of increasing concentration of capital held true, there was no reason to hope that the small bourgeoisie would ever end up dominant in Russia.   Thus the Mensheviks, by resting their hopes on the Russian middle-class, were still saddling a horse for a race that had long begun without it. 

For the Narodniks (and their political successors, the Socialist Revolutionaries, or SRs), who relied on peasant populism to usher in the arrival of socialism, Lenin had a similar pessimistic conclusion.  The abolition of serfdom had led to increasing commercialization of the countryside (notably the emergence of rich peasants, the kulaks).  This process, Lenin argued, had already rended the ancient peasant communes apart and thus disabled them as a force for revolutionary change.

Thus the focus of socialist activists in Russia, Lenin (1898) concluded, had to be among the workers in the large factories of the monopoly capitalists.  There, large numbers of workers, in close proximity and in wretched conditions, were just firewood waiting for a spark.  

Lenin's prediction seemed to come true during the 1905 uprising against the Tsarist regime in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War.  Infected by anarcho-syndicalist notions, industrial workers throughout Russia spontaneously took over factories and set up workers' councils (soviets) to organize strikes and armed uprisings.  In his October Manifesto, Tsar Nicholas II promised to introduce a democratic parliament (Duma) in Russia and, in subsequent months, the soviets were dismantled one by one.  By helping to introduce bourgeois democracy into Russia, the 1905 revolution may seem to have advanced the Menshevik cause.  But the Bolsheviks were more eager to point out that the "revolutionary potential" of the Russian industrial working class had become evident.  The events of 1905 were merely a "dress-rehearsal" for what was to come.

In 1916, Lenin published his famous work on imperialism.  Drawing upon Hobson, Lenin argued that as the increasing concentration of capital in the west had failed to stave off the declining rate of profit, monopoly capitalists had taken control of political institutions of western democracies and urged them towards imperialist goals.  Thus, imperialism was actually "caused" by the need for export markets by monopoly capitalists.  Lenin predicted that the trade wars caused by "inter-imperial" rivalry could lead (inadvertently or otherwise) to hot military wars - the First World War being the case in point.  Lenin's thesis on imperialism was contrasted with Kautsky's, which saw imperialism merely as a "mistake", or bad policy decisions, and not a necessary development.

In early 1917, exhausted, famished and demoralized by the First World War, Russians had started grumbling again.  A wave of strikes in St. Petersburg (Petrograd) in February was followed (once again) by the sprouting up of workers' councils (soviets) in Russian cities.  In March, the Petrograd Soviet anointed a provisional committee from the Russian Duma as the effective government of Russia.  Tsar Nicholas II abdicated the next day.

For Lenin, who was in exile in Switzerland at the time, it was obvious that the alliance of convenience between the bourgeois Provisional Committee and the proletarian soviets was doomed to unravel.  The Provisional Government had miscalculated the basic popular desire for peace and decided to maintain Russia's involvement in the war.  In March 1917, hoping to use him as an agent saboteur, the German authorities dispatched Lenin in a sealed train from Zurich to Russia.  Upon his arrival at Finland Station in Petrograd in April, Lenin denounced the Provisional Committee and the continuation of the "imperialist" war and set to work bringing the soviets and the army over to the Bolshevik cause.  

In July, 1917, an army mutiny, encouraged by the Bolsheviks, broke out and radicalized soldiers took to the streets, demanding an end to the war, the immediate dissolution of the Provisional Committee and the transfer of all power over to the soviets.  But the soviets themselves (dominated by Mensheviks and SRs), instead of accepting power from these "unpatriotic traitors", unleashed loyal garrisons to crush the mutinous elements.  For the remainder of the summer, Bolshevik agents were purged from the army and driven underground.  Lenin himself had to don a disguise and flee to Finland.

The flagging Bolshevik cause received a boost with the failure of the summer offensive against Germany, a Tsarist coup attempt in August, the continuation of food shortages in the cities and chaos in the countryside brought about by the failure of land reforms.  Clearly, Russia was in trouble and the Provisional Government seemed either powerless or unwilling to do anything about it.   The Bolsheviks' radical program, garlanded by the slogans "Land, Bread, Peace", at least promised to change the situation.  

But Lenin had learnt from the July debacle, and was wary of calling for an immediate uprising.  Instead, he ordered Bolshevik agents to infiltrate and take control of the soviets so that any future actions and insurrections would at least seem to be "officially" sanctioned, and not merely Bolsheviks acting on their own.  Lenin also had to ensure that the major garrisons would at least stay "neutral" in the event of an uprising,   Lenin appointed his lieutenant, Leon Trotsky, as his liasion to the garrisons.   

In late October, 1917, once the imposing garrison of the Peter and Paul fortress in Petrograd promised to comply with the Bolsheviks, everything was in place.  In the early morning hours of October 24 (November 6, by the modern calendar), the revolution began.  Bolshevik detachments took control of Petrograd, arrested the members of the Provisional Government (at the Winter Palace) while the new Bolshevik-dominated congress of soviets (at the Smolny Institute) formally transferred all power to the soviets and elected a Council of People's Commissars (with Lenin as its chairman) as the new executive government.   The Bolsheviks had succeeded.   Similar uprising occurred in other Russian cities and by March, 1918, most of central Russia had come over to the Bolsheviks.

In his original plan, Lenin had envisaged a post-Revolutionary Russia which would be "in between" capitalism and socialism.  He took as his model the German Bismarckian economy, where the "commanding heights" of the economy (banking, coal, iron, petroleum, heavy industry, railroads, etc.) were in the hands of a few monopolists, while the rest of the economy (notably agriculture) remained in the hands of small private entrepreneurs.  The only difference Lenin hoped to introduce to the German model was that the Russian State would take the role of the private monopolists in controlling the commanding heights.

However, Lenin's first priority was to meet his promises of peace, land and bread.  He immediately issued two decrees: one proclaiming Russia's commitment to seeking peace with the Axis powers and another instituting land reform.   Peace was achieved in the hastily-drafted Peace of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, pulling Russia out of the First World War -- although war would return swiftly in the form of a brutal four-year civil war between the "Reds" and the "Whites".

The Civil War postponed Lenin's economic plans for Russia.   From 1917 to 1921, Lenin accepted "War Communism", by which the State took direct control of industry, channeled capital to military purposes, introduced forced requisitions and expropriations of surpluses, etc.  A State Planning Committee (Gosplan) was set up to coordinate the war industries.   However, once the Civil War began to fade away, Lenin's original plan re-emerged in the form of the "New Economic Policy" (NEP).  However, by this time, Lenin had been incapacitated by a series of strokes and his participation was minimal.

Lenin's most significant contribution to the Soviet economy was probably his plan for the electrification of Russia unveiled in late 1920.  He oversaw the appointment of a committee of engineers and economists to a new state agency, GOELRO, to construct nearly thirty large power stages and establish a electrical grid throughout all of Russia.  The odds of such a massive plan succeeding in this devastated country were slim -- and Lenin's vision was derided by foes and friends alike (H.G. Wells would write that "Lenin who like a good Orthodox Marxist denounces all 'Utopians', has succumbed at last to a Utopia, the Utopia of the electricians.").  But it was remarkably successful.  Electrification proved to be the impetus necessary to get the Russian economy back on the road to recovery. 

Lenin's death in 1924 prompted a frantic struggle for succession between his three principal lieutenants, Nikolai Bukharin, Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin.  The Soviet planning debates which emerged mirrored their different preferences. The continuation of Lenin's NEP was championed by Nikolai Bukharin, while Trotsky (and his economics guru Preobrazhensky) urged a return to "war communism".  Stalin, at that point just a spokesman for the Soviet administrative elite, supported NEP on a "wait and see" basis.  But by 1928, everything had changed -Stalin won the power struggle, and proceeded to scrap NEP and introduce communist central planning..

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