January 1941 - Marxists Internet Archive

FOURTH INTERNATIONAL
VOLUME II JANUARY 1941 NUMBER 1
Our Lenin
By THE EDITORS
Our party is organizing Lenin Memorial meetings during
this month (Lenin died January 21, 1924). These meetings
are not rituals; we devote them to presenting the completely
contemporary program of Lenin, the only program which can
put an end to this war and to all wars.
This great task of resuscitating Lenin's program is made
all the more necessary by the ritualistic pageants which the
Stalinists are conducting under the name of HLenin
Memorial" meetings. Perhaps the best way to describe these
Stalinist incantations is to recall Lenin's description of what
the Social Democracy did to Marx's program:
"During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing
classes have visited relentless persecution on them and received
their teaching with the most savage hostility, the most furious
hatred, the most ruthless campaign of lies and slanders. After
their death, attempts are made to tUrn them into harmless icons,
canonise them, and surround their names with a certain halo
for the 'consolation' of the oppressed classes and with the object
of dup!ng them, while at the same time emasculating and vuIgarising
the reaZ essence of their revolutionary theories and
blunting their revolutionary edge. At the present time, the bourgeoisie
and the opportunists within the labor movement are cooperating
in this work on adulterating Marxism.".
Today, likewise, the bourgeois enemies of Leninism are
cooperating with the Stalinists in the adulteration of leninism.
From the Pope down to Professor Sidney Hook, they insist
that Stalin is the true heir of Lenin; and though they say
so for hostile purposes, their assertions are grist to Stalin's
mill.
The Lenin portrayed in these Stalinist meetings and
Stalinist literature has about as much life in him as the grotesque
mummy which the Kremlin keeps on display in Red
Square. In the seventeen years since Lenin's death, the history
of the Russian Revolution, the story of Lenin's life, has been
rewritten and rewritten at Stalin's behest. In 1923-1926, it
was rewritten to demote Trotsky and glorify Stalin and his
collaborators of that period, Zinoviev, Rykov, Tomsky,' Bukharin,
etc. In 1926 Zinoviev and Kamenev were demoted retroactively.
In 1929 Bukharin and the rest were demoted also.
\Vith each succeeding year Stalin's new exigencies dictated
further alterations in the written record. With the massacre
in the Moscow Trials of the generation which made the Russian
Revolution, the story of Lenin's life is re-told to picture
his closest collaborators as agents of German and world imperialism
in 1918 or earlier! With the murder of Trotsky,
who established for all time the guilt of the Stalin School of
Falsification, the Kremlin's professors are spurred to add new
and still newer laurels to Stalin's crown. Our children will find
it hard to grasp, how such a fantastic masquerade could be
conducted so solemnly.
• State ana RevoZ'ution, Chap. I.
And the Lenin that emerges from this Stalinist literature!
To those who understand anything at all about Lenin's
place in the Russian Revolution, it is clear how Lenin guided
the whole work of the Bolshevik party. He had a realistic
understanding of his leading role. Details, administrative
tasks, he left to others; his luminous mind surveyed the totality
of the process and provided the broader vision which those
preoccupied with specific functions might lack. He made a
sharp distinction between political leadership and administration.
He underlined that distinction, in his Testament-his
last letter to the party-by chiding Trotsky for a Ildisposition
to be far too much attracted by the purely administrative side
of affairs." This criticism was, at the same time, the greatest
tribute he could pay Trotsky: he was insisting that Trotsky
must be the kind of political leader that Lenin was. This pro-,
found conception of Lenin's was one of his major contributions
to the theory' of leadership.
Stalin Retouches Lenin's Portrait
But Stalin must erase it. Not only by keeping Lenin's
Testament from the party-to this day it has riot been published,
for it concludes with Lenin's proposal to remove Stalin,
as Hrude" and "disloyal," from his post as General Secretary
of the party. But also by creating a picture of Lenin in Stalin's
image: a bureaucratic administrator.
One' of the latest instances of this rewriting of Lenin's
life is "The October Days 1917," by one I. Mintz, just published
by the Stalinists. Let us cite one example; it would take
a book to analyse all the lies in this little pamphlet.
The All-Russian Congress of Soviets was in session at
Smolny the night of October 25-26, 1917 (old style calendar).
The debates of that night have passed into history as one of
the great landmarks of revolution. Trotsky was the spokesman
for the Bolsheviks against the Mensheviks and Social
Revolutionaries. All the great questions of revolution were at
issue. Lenin was not there for the same reason that he had
not been present in public for months; the party feared the
counter-revolutionists would try to murder him. The booming
of guns was heard in the session: the attack on the Winter
Palace. With its capture and the victory of the revolution in
Petrograd, Lenin emerged publicly and appeared the next,
day, at the second session of the Congress. During the attack
on the Winter Palace, Lenin spent the night in a room at
Smolny, lying on the floor on makeshift pallets side by side
with Trotsky, who left from time to time to take the floor at
the Congress and answer the opponents of the Bolsheviks.
This story is familiar enough to all students of the revolution.
The State Publishers published it in Moscow (to name but
one source) in Trotsky's HOn Lenin, Materials for a Biographer,"
published April 6, 1924.
But Stalin must erase it. For how can he explain why he,