Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as **Lenin**, was a Russian revolutionary, politician and political theorist. He is seen as the father of the modern Russian communist movement, and despite being assassinated before the Russian Civil War, his principles and ideas live on through various worldwide organizations and mostly through the Russian Socialist Republic, of which the ideology of Leninism is very influential in the RSR.

## **Revolutionary activities and the Great War**

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Lenin was in Galicia when the Great War broke out. The war pitted the Russian Empire against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and due to his Russian citizenship, Lenin was arrested and briefly imprisoned until his anti-Tsarist credentials were explained. Lenin and his wife returned to Bern, before relocating to Zürich in February 1916. Lenin was angry that the German Social-Democratic Party was supporting the German war effort, which was a direct contravention of the Second International's Stuttgart resolution that socialist parties would oppose the conflict, and saw the Second International as defunct. He attended the Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915 and the Kienthal Conference in April 1916, urging socialists across the continent to convert the "imperialist war" into a continent-wide "civil war" with the proletariat pitted against the bourgeoisie and aristocracy. In July 1916, Lenin's mother died, but he was unable to attend her funeral. Her death deeply affected him, and he became depressed, fearing that he too would die before seeing the proletarian revolution.

In September 1917, Lenin published *Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism*, which argued that imperialism was a product of monopoly capitalism, as capitalists sought to increase their profits by extending into new territories where wages were lower and raw materials cheaper. He believed that competition and conflict would increase and that war between the imperialist powers would continue until they were overthrown by proletariat revolution and socialism established. He spent much of this time reading the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Aristotle, all of whom had been key influences on Marx. This changed Lenin's interpretation of Marxism; whereas he once believed that policies could be developed based on predetermined scientific principles, he concluded that the only test of whether a policy was correct was its practice. He still perceived himself as an orthodox Marxist, but he began to diverge from some of Marx's predictions about societal development; whereas Marx had believed that a "bourgeoisie-democratic revolution" of the middle-classes had to take place before a "socialist revolution" of the proletariat, Lenin believed that in Russia the proletariat could overthrow the Tsarist regime without an intermediate revolution.

## **Controversy with syndicalism**

While Lenin stayed in Switzerland over the next couple years, he began following the situation in the new German Republic after the crackdown on syndicalist organizations and unions resulted in worldwide outrage against Berlin and the Entente, the first instance which would drive the working class of Berlin closer to the breaking point of revolution.

Lenin for his part, grew frustrated as the people of Germany began revolting, beginning after the 1919 general strike and occupation of Bavaria by a syndicalist mob. Throughout the German Revolution, Lenin strongly agitated for vanguardism to seize the revolution and control and to establish the "dictatorship of the proletariat", one of the key aspects of Leninism which advocates for the proletariat taking over the state and being an intermediate force for the transformation of the state from capitalist to communist. This however, never happened. Lenin stayed in Switzerland for the entirety of the German Revolution before writing *The Importance of the Proletariat*, which detailed his controversial stance on syndicalism.

In it, he expressed why he did not believe syndicalism could be an adequate revolutionary ideology, expressing his beliefs that a strong, centralized country would only be able to prevent reactionaries from seizing the state back. Lenin was also frustrated with the treatment of Marxists and communists in the German Union.