British actor Miles Malleson, a far-left activist and supporter of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, was in the reading room of the British Museum in the 1920s and struck up a conversation with a long-time librarian. Did the librarian remember a Mr. Ulyanov, a Russian who had been a regular at L13 in 1902, at a desk under the room's magnificent central dome, head bowed, furiously reading and writing?
The librarian looked expressionless for a moment and then replied: 'Oh yes, a very charming gentleman, short and with a pointy beard.' Very well said.'
Then he asked in all innocence, “Do you know what became of him?”
What actually happened to him?
By this point, this “charming gentleman” had seized power in Russia in a daring coup, defeated all opposition in a cruel civil war, ordered the cold-blooded assassination of the Tsar and his entire family, and founded the USSR, the first communist state in history (but not the last) and his military power, the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, turned the world so upside down that it would never be the same again.
His statue stood in every Russian city and his embalmed body is still on display in a mausoleum in the heart of Moscow, where he is venerated by numerous visitors.
Soviet propaganda poster with text inscription: “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live”
Vladimir Lenin, left, with Joseph Stalin in 1922. The truth – as much as it may offend those who see Lenin as the acceptable face of communism – is that Stalin was Lenin's protégé and was guided by him.
For Mr. Ulyanov was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who would be the ruthless autocratic ruler of the Soviet Union from 1917 until his death in 1924.
Today is the 100th anniversary of his death and a moment to reflect on the time he spent in London, living with his wife Nadya in shabby rooms in Camden and Clerkenwell and making plans with a motley group of socialist exiles and intellectuals ( ( most of whom he detested for their sordid personal habits) about how to start a revolution at home and, paranoid as ever, evade the police who he believed were watching him as a suspected subversive and terrorist. (In reality the special unit barely registered his presence.)
England was one of the many European countries where Lenin sought refuge during his 16-year exile from his homeland, as a refugee from the Russian authorities who rightly viewed him as a dangerous revolutionary bent on overthrowing the government. He became radicalized as a teenager when his older brother was hanged for conspiring to assassinate the Tsar.
Ironically, he and Nadya loved going to the Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park to listen to the free exchange of views expressed publicly – a far cry from the crackdown on dissent and debate he instituted when he ruled Russia.
He also took a sixpenny bus ride to Highgate to stand admiringly next to the grave of a former political exile in London. Karl Marx, author of the Communist Manifesto, was Lenin's inspiration.
Crucially, however, he distanced himself from Marx and chose a different path than his mentor, who declared that capitalism in an advanced industrial economy would inevitably collapse under the weight of its own contradictions and be replaced by socialism. Lenin agreed in theory, but was impatient for change and unwilling to wait for history. The process could use a strong push – one that he and his Bolsheviks were keen to give.
This too, despite the fact that Russia was far from the advanced industrial nation that Marx had postulated, but rather a largely agrarian country whose peasant economy did not agree with Marx's theory that it was ripe for revolution.
Russia was a country in chaos, facing defeat against Germany in the First World War, its soldiers mutinied in their millions, it was economically in ruins, catastrophically led by the autocratic Tsar Nicholas II until he abdicated and was replaced by an equally inconspicuous clique of socialists became a Democrat.
Lenin decided that if there was ever a time to strike, it would be no matter what Marxist theory dictated.
In October 1917 he risked everything to seize power for himself and his Bolshevik Party. He then ruled as ruthlessly as any tsar. His seven years as leader were marked by one-party rule, the violent repression of dissent, a famine that cost millions of lives, censorship – the complete distortion of the socialist heaven he supposedly created.
There are those who point to his successor Stalin as the real devil in the history of Russia in the 20th century. The Soviet Union far surpassed Lenin's – meaner, more brutal, insanely inhumane, completely incomprehensible. In his paranoia, he murdered friend and foe alike.
Vladimir Lenin speaks on Red Square on November 7, 1918. From the beginning, Lenin had no qualms about using terror as a means of control
And yet the truth – however much it may offend those who see Lenin as the acceptable face of communism – is that Stalin was Lenin's protégé and was guided by him.
From the beginning, Lenin had no qualms about using terror as a means of control.
He not only encouraged violence but also encouraged it, setting up a murderous plan to eliminate his enemies so that his so-called proletarian revolution could succeed.
He sanctioned “unrestricted power and the use of force, not laws,” and believed that it was better for 100 innocent people to die than for one person who threatened the revolution to remain free.
According to historian Robert Service in his new book “Blood On The Snow,” the birth of the malaise that gripped Russia under its communist masters for the next 70 years occurred not under Stalin's despotism but in the first years after October 1917 under Lenin.
It can be argued that Lenin was simply following a pattern set by the Tsars, whose ruthlessness and autocratic rule had shaped and plundered Russia for centuries. But as Lenin sat in the British Museum, he had believed he could create a better, more peaceful and more equal Russia – purely because of the reality of the exercise of power in this vast country and his determination to force a reluctant population to fall in line, whatever it was cost him to turn him into a tsar almost as terrible as his predecessors.
And the horror he caused was not limited to Russia. “The Soviet terrorist state with one party and one ideology gave birth to totalitarianism,” writes Service. “Soviet communism held the patent for a form of rule that was adopted by both the extreme left and the right and provided a fundamental template for the power that the Nazis would use in Germany.” Lenin has a lot to answer for. His first decree upon seizing power was to close enemy newspapers – another irony, since in exile he had edited Iskra (The Spark), a radical newspaper that was smuggled into Russia and secretly distributed to Bolshevik party members.
He knew from experience the power of the press and therefore immediately suppressed it.
He then founded the Cheka, the Commission to Combat Counter-Revolution, Speculation and Sabotage, a secret police force of thugs whose job it is to hound and, if necessary, hunt to death anyone who doubts the legitimacy of the revolution. On Lenin's orders, the USSR began as a police state and remained so for the next seven decades.
Crucially, Lenin broke up with Marx (pictured) and chose a different path forward than that preached by his mentor, who explained that capitalism in an advanced industrial economy would inevitably collapse under the weight of its own contradictions and would be replaced by other socialism
The country felt its wrath most acutely when farmers resisted the collectivization of the land and tried to keep the grain they grew to sell for themselves. “Hang her,” was his instruction to officers in one area. “No less than 100 kulaks.” [wealthier peasant farmers]rich men and bloodsuckers – and make sure the execution takes place in front of the people.'
Villages that rose up against Soviet power were burned down. The families of all opponents of the regime were held hostage in concentration camps. He approved the use of poison gas against rebellious peasant gangs.
The state's confiscation of grain led to widespread famine, with an estimated two million people starving and desperate people resorting to cannibalism. There were horrific stories of mothers killing a child to feed the other members of the family. Lenin's response was to ban the use of the word “famine” in the press.
A decade later, Stalin was infamous for the man-made famines of the 1930s, in which five million people died. He used hunger as a weapon to bring Ukraine under control in a genocidal act that still fuels deep hatred between Moscow and Kiev. But under Lenin almost the same thing had happened, albeit on a smaller scale.
He rarely held back when confronted by those who challenged Bolshevik rule. As “my problem solver,” as he called his buddy Stalin, weeded out suspected counter-revolutionaries, Lenin encouraged him to be “merciless” and “ruthless.”
Stalin replied: “Rest assured that our hand will not tremble.”
It didn't do that either. Faced with a peasant uprising in the Tambov district, Lenin instructed the Cheka leader: “The fastest (and most exemplary) liquidation is absolutely necessary.”
The “Belarusian” forces, a ragtag, disorganized force that attempted to oust the Bolsheviks (and might have succeeded had it not been for their own incompetence and infighting), were brutalized in their defeat, with tens of thousands massacred and many lampposts were left hanging on them to make clear to an increasingly frightened and compliant population what was important.
With good reason, historian Antony Beevor declares: “Given their ruthless inhumanity, the Bolsheviks were unbeatable.” As his grip tightened, Lenin, the atheist who dismissed religion as “the opium of the people,” turned his vengeful gaze on the Orthodox Church . It had been a power station under the Tsars; He destroyed it and confiscated its lands and vast wealth.
Joseph Stalin addresses voters in the Stalin constituency in Moscow on the evening of the election in which Russians voted for the first time under the new constitution
Thirty bishops and more than 1,000 priests were killed, an archbishop had his eyes gouged out and his ears cut off before being shot, another bishop was tied to a rock and thrown into a river.
Over the next 15 years, 97 percent of churches (plus synagogues and mosques) were closed. And here lies the ultimate irony of the Lenin regime – for by this point he was a holy, embalmed and revered figure in death – that Russia under the Bolsheviks simply replaced the old religion with a new one – Leninism.
However, his time was running out. In 1918, he was lucky to survive an assassination attempt in which a lone gunwoman fired three bullets at him, one of which missed his aorta by millimeters.
Lenin recovered quickly (while the Cheka took revenge on his behalf not only on the gunwoman who was executed without trial, but also on thousands of other dissidents) and was soon back at his desk. But he rarely slowed down or took time off; He ate poorly, slept poorly, exercised little or not at all, and the strain on his health was unrelenting.
At the beginning of 1921 he was a sick man – short of breath, with pain in his legs, plagued by headaches, tired. Doctors blamed lead poisoning on the bullets still inside him from the assassination attempt – an unlikely diagnosis, but he still underwent surgery to remove a bullet lodged in his shoulder.
He seemed to be recovering, but a month later he collapsed after suffering a stroke that paralyzed him and affected his speech… and his mind – when asked to multiply 12 by 7, he couldn't .
His handwriting was an illegible scrawl, but he fought on – his deteriorating condition remaining a secret to all but an inner circle.
Further strokes occurred, leaving him unable to speak, his consciousness “cloudy”, he was confined to a wheelchair and his face was distorted into a childlike smile. He begged Stalin to put him out of his misery with poison, but Stalin refused. He had moments of relief. On January 18, 1924, he spent a day leaning on pillows on a horse-drawn sleigh for a countryside excursion, but three days later he fell into a coma and died, with his wife Nadya at his side.
A few days earlier, delegates to a mass meeting of Soviet leaders who had falsely asserted that he was on the mend had stood and cheered: “Long live the leader of the world proletariat, Comrade Lenin.”
With his death, he made a conscious decision to not only keep his name alive, but also elevate his status into the stratosphere.
Dzherzhinsky leads the pallbearers carrying Lenin's coffin from Paveletsky Station to the Temple of Labor, with Sopranov behind him and Kamanev on the left
His body was not to be cremated as usual, but was mummified for display like the relics of a saint. A wooden tomb finished with marble and stone was built next to the Kremlin wall as a shrine for the Lenin cult.
In the ultimate tribute, his name was officially associated with the philosopher who inspired him, and Marxism was renamed Marxism-Leninism.
How should we judge him a hundred years later?
His biographer Victor Sebestyen captures the nuances of Lenin's contribution to history when he writes: “He was not a monster, a sadist or evil.” He was not cruel: unlike Stalin, he never asked about the details of the deaths of his victims and enjoyed the moment. He never wore military-style tunics, as other dictators preferred.
“But he built a system based on the idea that political terror against opponents with a higher purpose was justified.”
It was then perfected by Stalin, but the ideas came from Lenin. The worst of his evils was that he had enabled a man like Stalin to lead Russia after him. This was a historic crime.'
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx's appeal to the world's workers was: “Unite – you have nothing to lose but your chains.” Lenin's legacy was to betray them by binding them more tightly than ever before.