Daniel J. Mahoney
It has been a century since Vladimir Lenin, the father of the Soviet State, died in 1924 at the age of fifty-three, a victim of poor health and multiple strokes. He was once considered by Communists everywhere as a theoretician of the rank of Karl Marx, a philosopher and ideologist of the first order. But as the French political thinker Raymond Aron aptly noted, Lenin’s writings are of little philosophical interest, since hate and ideological fiat motivate them from beginning to end.
A narodnik or populist supporter of revolutionary violence turned Marxist doctrinaire, Lenin never ceased to ask the question “Kto-kogo”?,” “Who/Whom?,” that is, who would benefit from any particular choice or maneuver? Struggle was everything. Compromise or coalition building was completely alien to his conception of human and political life. He despised what he derided as economism, the view that working people and trade unions could promote their interests through participation in normal political and economic activity. He hated “social democracy,” or any effort to accommodate socialism to free politics or parliamentary procedures.
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