of desperately attempting to salvage the authentic Leninist core from the Stalinist alluvium, would it not be more advisable to forget Lenin and return to Marx, searching in his work for the roots of what went wrong in the twentieth-century communist movements?
Nevertheless, was not Lenin’s situation marked precisely by a similar hopelessness? It is true that today’s left is facing the shattering experience of the end of an entire epoch of the progressive movement, an experience which compels it to reinvent the most basic coordinates of its project. But an exactly homologous experience was what gave birth to Leninism. Recall Lenin’s shock when, in the autumn of 1914, all the European social-democratic parties (with the honourable exception of the Russian Bolsheviks and the Serbian Social Democrats) opted to toe the ‘patriotic line’. When the German Social Democrats’ daily newspaper Vorwärts reported that social democrats in the Reichstag had voted for the military credits, Lenin even thought that it must have been a forgery by the Russian secret police designed to deceive the Russian workers. In an era of a military conflict that cut the European continent in half, how difficult it was to refuse the notion that one should take sides and to reject the ‘patriotic fervour’ in one’s own country! How many great minds (including Freud) succumbed to the nationalist temptation, even if only for a couple of weeks!
The shock of 1914 was – to put it in Alain Badiou’s terms – a désastre, a catastrophe in which an entire world disappeared: not only the idyllic bourgeois faith in progress, but also the socialist movement that accompanied it. Even Lenin himself lost his footing – there is, in his desperate reaction in What Is to Be Done?, no satisfaction, no ‘I told you so!’ This moment of Verzweiflung, this catastrophe, opened up the site for the Leninist event, for breaking with the evolutionary historicism of the Second International – and Lenin was the only one at the level of this opening, the only one to articulate the Truth of the catastrophe. Born in this moment of despair was the Lenin who, via the detour of a close reading of Hegel’s Logic, was able to discern the unique chance for revolution.
Today, the left is in a situation that uncannily resembles the one that gave birth to Leninism, and its task is to repeat Lenin. This does not mean a return to Lenin. To repeat Lenin is to accept that ‘Lenin is dead’, that his particular solution failed, even failed monstrously. To repeat Lenin means that one has to distinguish between what Lenin actually did and the field of possibilities that he opened up, to acknowledge the tension in Lenin between his actions and another dimension, what was ‘in Lenin more than Lenin himself’. To repeat Lenin is to repeat not what Lenin did, but what he failed to do, his missed opportunities.
Goodbye Lenin in Ukraine
The last time Lenin made headlines in the West was during the Ukrainian uprising of 2014 that toppled the pro-Russian president Yanukovych: in TV reports on the mass protests in Kiev, we saw again and again scenes of enraged protesters tearing down statues of Lenin. These furious attacks were understandable in so far as the statues functioned as a symbol of Soviet oppression, and Putin’s Russia is perceived as a continuation of the Soviet policy of subjecting non-Russian nations to Russian domination. We should also recall the precise historical moment when statues of Lenin began to proliferate in their thousands across the Soviet Union: only in 1956, after Khruschev’s denunciation of Stalin at the 20th Congress, were statues of Stalin replaced en masse by those of Lenin. The latter was literally a stand-in for the former, as was also made clear by a weird thing that happened in 1962 on the front page of Pravda:
Lenin appeared on the masthead of Pravda in 1945 (one might speculatively suggest that he appeared there to reassert Stalin’s authority over the Party – in light of the potentially disruptive force of returning soldiers, who have seen both death and bourgeois Europe, and in light of circulating myths that Lenin had warned against him on his deathbed). In 1962 – when, at the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party, Stalin was publicly denounced – two images of Lenin suddenly appear on the masthead, as if the strange double-Lenin covered the missing ‘other leader’ who was actually never there!7
Why, then, were two identical profiles of Lenin printed side by side? In this strange repetition, Stalin was, in a way, more present than ever in his absence, since his shadowy presence was the answer to the obvious question: ‘why Lenin twice, why not just a single Lenin?’ There was nonetheless a deep irony in watching Ukrainians tearing down Lenin statues as a sign of their will to break with Soviet domination and assert their national sovereignty: the golden era of Ukraine’s national identity was not tsarist Russia (in which Ukrainian self-assertion as a nation had been thwarted), but the first decade of the Soviet Union when they established their full national identity. As even the Wikipedia passage on Ukraine in the 1920s notes:
The Civil War that eventually brought the Soviet government to power devastated Ukraine. It left over 1.5 million people dead and hundreds of thousands homeless. In addition, Soviet Ukraine had to face the famine of 1921. Seeing an exhausted Ukraine, the Soviet government remained very flexible during the 1920s. Thus, under the aegis of the Ukrainisation policy pursued by the national Communist leadership of Mykola Skrypnyk, Soviet leadership encouraged a national renaissance in literature and the arts. The Ukrainian culture and language enjoyed a revival, as Ukrainisation became a local implementation of the Soviet-wide policy of Korenisation (literally indigenisation). The Bolsheviks were also committed to introducing universal health care, education and social-security benefits, as well as the right to work and housing. Women’s rights were greatly increased through new laws designed to wipe away centuriesold inequalities. Most of these policies were sharply reversed by the early 1930s after Joseph Stalin gradually consolidated power to become the de facto communist party leader.
This ‘indigenisation’ followed the principles formulated by Lenin in quite unambiguous terms:
The proletariat cannot but fight against the forcible retention of the oppressed nations within the boundaries of a given state, and this is exactly what the struggle for the right of self-determination means. The proletariat must demand the right of political secession for the colonies and for the nations that ‘its own’ nation oppresses. Unless it does this, proletarian internationalism will remain a meaningless phrase; mutual confidence and class solidarity between the workers of the oppressing and oppressed nations will be impossible.8
Lenin remained faithful to this position to the end. Immediately after the October Revolution he engaged in a polemic with Rosa Luxemburg, who advocated allowing small nations to be given full sovereignty only if progressive forces predominated in the new state, while Lenin was for the unconditional right to secede, even if the ‘bad guys’ would take power. In his final struggle against Stalin’s project for a centralised Soviet Union, Lenin again advocated for the unconditional right of small nations to secede (in this case, Georgia was at stake), insisting on the full sovereignty of the national entities that composed the Soviet state; no wonder that, on 27 September 1922, in a letter to the members of the Politburo, Stalin openly accused Lenin of ‘national liberalism’. The direction in which Stalin was already blowing is clear from how he proposed to enact the decision to proclaim the government of the RSFSR also the government of the other five republics (Ukraine, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia):
If the present decision is confirmed by the Central Committee of the RCP, it will not be made public, but communicated to the Central Committees of the Republics for circulation among the Soviet organs, the Central Executive Committees or the Congresses of the Soviets of the said Republics before the convocation of the All-Russian Congress of the Soviets, where it will be declared to be the wish of these Republics.9
The interaction of the Central Committee (CC) with its base was thus not merely abolished, so that the higher authority simply imposed its will; to add insult to injury, it was also restaged as its opposite: the CC itself now decided what the base would ask the higher authority to enact as if it were its own wish. (But note also that Lenin himself, by imposing the prohibition of Party factions
