Lenin, a fanatic still idolized in Russia

The inhabitants of Henichesk, in the south of Ukraine, were convinced of this: they would never again see this man recognizable by his goatee and his severe appearance on their streets. However, Lenin reappeared in mid-April in this seaside resort on the Black Sea. In the wake of the Russian invasion, a statue of the father of the Bolshevik revolution was installed in the city center. The previous one had been unbolted in the wake of the February 2014 revolution, like more than 1,300 effigies in the country.

Symbol of a false liberation and a real occupation, Lenin, whose real name is Vladimir Ilyich Oulianov, remains an emblem as untouchable as it is useful for Russia, where monuments to his glory persist, as well as in countries where territories that remained within Moscow’s orbit (Central Asia, Belarus, Transnistria). Despite the disappearance of the USSR, his mausoleum, backed by the Kremlin and open to visitors, is still maintained, as is his body mummified like that of a pharaoh. In France, about twenty streets still bear his name, as in the communist municipality of Ivry-sur-Seine (Val-de-Marne).

This persistence in the public space recalls how much this character, unlike Stalin, continues to be sacred. For some, including part of the Western left, Lenin is the hero of a revolution as important as the French Revolution. For others, especially historians who worked on inaccessible Soviet archives until the 1990s, he is to be placed in the category of the bloodiest despots in Russia.

“A rowdy and capricious temperament”

How to explain the indulgence he continues to enjoy? First, the cult of his personality was amplified by his successor, Stalin, as much to associate himself with his image and present himself as his worthy heir as to stigmatize rivals such as Trotsky, portrayed as a traitor to Leninism. Secondly, “de-Stalinization” never went as far as “de-Leninization”. “At the death of Stalin, the Soviet leaders needed to restore legitimacy to the regime and fell back on Lenin, adorned with all the virtues, explains Stéphane Courtois, research director at the CNRS and author of Lenin, the inventor of totalitarianism (Perrin, 2017). Tsarist power was discredited to such an extent that it is still today the only figure left.”

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was born into a wealthy home on April 10, 1870 in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk), a quiet town on the banks of the Volga, 900 kilometers east of Moscow and 1,500 from the then capital, Saint -Petersburg. Nothing predisposes him to annihilate the line of the Romanovs. His father, Ilia, a senior education official, was devastated by the assassination in 1881 of Tsar Alexander II, who led to the abolition of serfdom and the first liberal reforms.

A first family tragedy puts an end to the happy childhood of young Volodya, who is a brilliant student. His father died before his eyes of a cerebral hemorrhage in January 1886. A year later, his brother Alexander was arrested by the police in full preparation, with other revolutionaries, of an attack against the Tsar. This chemistry student admits to being the artificer and claims the use of terrorism during his trial. His hanging, at the age of 21, constitutes a new trauma for Vladimir, described by his sister Anna as “a rowdy and capricious temperament” with, already, a “destructive side”. He nourished a deep hatred against the imperial family, of which he had all the members assassinated, in the greatest secrecy and without trial, in July 1918.

The architect of the October Revolution

He radicalized politically with the discovery of revolutionary readings of his older brother, whose library houses the works of the nihilist Serge Nechayev, the activist Nikolaï Tchernychevski and the German philosopher Karl Marx. The young man’s writings and activism led to his being imprisoned by the Tsarist police in 1895, then condemned to internal exile in Siberia, in a house where he could nevertheless secure the services of a servant. In 1900, when this house arrest ended, he joined a small group of Russian revolutionaries in Switzerland determined to convert the working class to Marxism. Dissension led Lenin, a pseudonym he had just adopted, to launch his Bolshevik movement.

The ambitious took part in the 1905 revolution, but too late to have any influence. Especially since it was overcome by Tsar Nicolas II thanks to concessions to the liberals. Returning to Switzerland, he learned with amazement of the outbreak of the February 1917 revolution. Under pressure from the street, a provisional republican government replaced the power of the Romanovs. With the help of the German authorities, at war against the Russian army, Lenin joined Petrograd on April 3, via Finland. He takes advantage of the difficulties of the new leaders to monopolize all the powers, thanks to the coup de force of his Red Guard. It’s the October Revolution.

It wants to be internationalist. It must therefore ignore borders, starting with those that crack the former tsarist empire. He welcomes the emergence of a Ukrainian national movement – which Vladimir Putin reproaches him for today – and says he is a supporter “without reservation of the total, unlimited freedom of the Ukrainian people”. But it is to better send the Red Army to support a Soviet Republic of Ukraine at its heels and crush the separatists. Out of the question, for him, to give up a territory already considered as a granary and where there is, in the Donbass, an industry of crucial importance.

“He is a fanatic ready to do anything to implement his ideas”

Lenin applies to the letter the theoretical corpus on which he worked during his exile. “His ideology is that of the class struggle, where everything that is qualified as bourgeois must be eliminated in favor of everything that is proletarian, explains Stéphane Courtois. As long as a party-state has not achieved a socialist world perfect, he must exterminate his enemies by permanent civil war.” These principles will be the common matrix of leaders like Fidel Castro, Mao or Pol Pot, whose fanaticism leads to the genocide of a quarter of the Cambodian population.

Convinced of being in the best position to lead the people to their happiness, Lenin stopped all the democratic advances of February 1917 (freedom of the press, political plurality). To nullify any dissent, he establishes mass terror in the form of systematic oppression. He abolished private property and created in December 1917 the Tcheka (ancestor of the KGB), the political police responsible for fighting against “enemies of the people”. These are executed summarily, when they are not sent to camps where the detainees are killed on the job, a prelude to the Gulag established in 1930 by Stalin.

The latter, moreover, invented nothing: ordered by Lenin, the political trial of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, rivals of the Bolsheviks, in 1922, foreshadowed those of Moscow, symbol of the great Stalinist purges. In the same year, Lenin rejoiced over the famine: “With all these starving people feeding on human flesh, with the roads strewn with hundreds of thousands of corpses, it is now […] that we can confiscate the property of the churches”, he writes. Hunger as a political weapon will be reused a decade later by his successor to bring the Ukrainian peasantry to heel.

“Lenin is the founder of a totalitarianism of which Stalin is the continuator, insists Stéphane Courtois. He is a fanatic ready to do anything, even to kill massively, to implement his ideas.” The task exhausted him and strokes put him on the sidelines at the end of 1922. When he died on January 21, 1924, the country was bloodless: the war of the Reds against the “Whites” made 2 million deaths, the same number of deaths from typhus and twice as many from hunger. But the Bolsheviks triumphed over their enemies. The Lenin myth is only in its infancy.

___________________________________Lenin in 7 dates

1870 Birth of Vladimir Ilyich Oulianov, in Simbirsk, a town on the banks of the Volga, renamed, on his death, Ulyanovsk.

1887 Arrest and execution of young Vladimir’s older brother, Alexander, for his part in a plot to assassinate the Tsar.

1900 After three years of house arrest in Siberia, he went into exile in Switzerland, where he joined other Russian revolutionaries.

1905 First Russian revolution of the 20th century. Tsar Nicolas II proceeds to a timid liberalisation, but retains a large part of the political power.

1914 Beginning of the First World War, Russia, an ally of France and the United Kingdom, waged war on Germany and Austria-Hungary.

1917 February Revolution: end of tsarist power in favor of a provisional government. October Revolution: Lenin sweeps away all opposition and founds the USSR.

1924 Death of Lenin, after a year away from power, weakened by illness. Stalin succeeded him at the head of the USSR.