Reviews

The Dilemmas of Lenin: Terrorism, War, Empire, Love, Revolution by Tariq Ali

mark_kivimaki's review against another edition

informative reflective fast-paced

3.75

zare_i's review against another edition

5.0

When you are to read about one of the controversial (to say the least) historical figures in a book written by author that is heavily biased towards that very person one needs to have a clear head. And so, I started this book wanting to see what will I find in it and truly hoping this is not going to be a propaganda-pamphlet-book. I am happy to say this was not the case.

Tariq Ali writes in a wonderful way. This book could have been a very poor and dry read but he manages to make it come to life. Author obviously knows a lot about the period and provides not only references to other works but his own additional comments on the subject and this truly adds to the book.

We follow Lenin from his early days, his early childhood, shocking loss of his brother [executed by Tsarist regime] and finally his rise through the Socialist movements and revolutions of 1905 and 1917, bloody Civil War and his very interesting views on the aftermath (and future of the) revolution at the very end of his life.

Lenin is a very intriguing figure, always living in the shadows and very unwilling to share details about his life. If you ever wanted to read about the ultimate spy then I think one needs not look any further. Although he is ever present in the Socialist circles he is constantly being sent to exile by Tsarist regime and living in Western Europe (especially Germany, Switzerland). After the revolution of 1905 he decides to use more radical measures and organizes his party (soon to be known as Bolsheviks) along the lines of what today would be called guerilla movement (think more in line of "Arlington Road" than "Michael Collins") that was highly illegal in Tsarist Russia and gaining popularity in rest of Europe, especially Germany. Lenin was always experimenting with all sorts of political organization but in the end sensing coming WW1 he made a very radical decision that will mark the coming period in history a lot. Decision was simple - single-handedly take the power of Russia using the WW1 horrors Tsarist regime brought on its people (on top of the already existing horrible conditions when it comes to living conditions of majority of population) as an opportunity to galvanize the popular support. This approach, total antagonization of other political parties (sometimes not just through Lenin's actions but his actions surely did not help) will create the atmosphere that will help Stalin and his followers to completely undermine the results of the revolution and create totalitarian state. As we follow the changes revolution brought into Russian society post-1917 we can also see the outlines of the coming disaster.

Although lots of positive changes were done (armistice, social changes, women rights), great losses from WW1 and then bloody Civil War and finally total loss of momentum [when revolution did not take place in Western Europe] and disappointment with the US government actions slowly caused reformists rule to get replaced by ever more bureaucratic machine based on "scientific and democratic approach" (which sounds very very very disturbing these days). Of course this scientific just means that entire population is to be treated as a mass (not mass of individuals but mass) and thus was looked through prism of what you might call condition engine (if...then...) that would mark someone as anti revolutionary based not on concrete actions but on predictions of the actions (thought police? again brrrrr). Is it surprising that snitching became national sport?
Due to horrendous losses in the war the very people that were supposed to be The Population to carry on the revolution were decimated very close to a man and woman by 1920. Influx of uneducated and rural cadre caused by this further ruined the movement because it brought in people that were strong believers in the Tsarist methods but presented it as a reform revolutionary activity (again, this is not something that can be taken against the rural (majority of) Russian population due to their very history, it was not until 1917 that they gained freedom from feudal rulers of Tsarist regime and of course they knew nothing better than the way they were treated).

Author presents Lenin as a intellectual that argued with his opponents but they just forced his hand in the end and caused him to organize complete power takeover during 1917. John Reed's account gives us a more direct view of the man who knew what he was doing and was not forced by anything or anyone - Lening laid a corner stone for a dictatorship that will then become for all means and purposes cult of personality and finally taken over by Stalin.

Would the rule under Lenin be more benevolent if he did not die prematurely? I think it would. He had a very strong stand on how he sees revolution evolving - his final views were premonitions of things to come and his warning on the newly formed apparatus and people heading it were spot on. But these came too little too late in time when he was potentially sidelined by the new majority.

He was a great thinker and he definitely wanted best for his nation but he was a fanatic and unable to plan in the long run (as is always case with zaelots and fanatics). He wanted to transport his nation from medieval period to modern society in a span of little more that a decade by completely obliterating the past knowledge, history and experiences. Unfortunately this cannot be done (as his last remarks clearly show). Society needs to grow and evolve and unfortunately every step in social evolution that is skipped will bring ruin later. Revolution took place too early, without the population that could actually make all the promises a reality. As a result it ended up in form of secular church (which is something it shares with all dictatorships because they all have need to replace religion and place themselves as body/soul keepers/saviors). If this was done in steps/phases, without exclusivity and with better cooperation with the other Socialist parties who knows what could happen. If there ever was a proof for saying haste-makes-waste this was it.

I especially liked the comments on the foreign elements - fail of revolution in Germany (something Lenin could never get over) that caused raise of another radical dictatorship, resistance of West Europe and launch of counter revolution movements (complete disillusion with the worker movements in West Europe and US - again due to very simple fact that these societies were on a completely different level from Russia to begin with so views on the future and politics just could not match) and finally role played by West Europe and US in invading the Russia and assisting Whites. Bibliography is very detailed and I am already on a lookout for other books covering this same period.

In the end greatest beneficiary of the Russian revolution was not Russia but other nations. Victory of the Bolsheviks gave worker movements strength and they soon got their liberties and rights. Strengthening of worker class in Europe helped a lot in resisting Nazism and Fascism but unfortunately caused ever deepening rift between Russian work class and workers of the rest of the Europe. And all thanks to exclusivity of the Soviet regime and unwillingness to communicate and compromise.

Excellent book that should be a warning to both reformers and those following them - immediate jump is not possible. If you want society to progress immediately we need to ask ourselves why - is it because of the population we want to help or for personal goals. Unfortunately road to hell is paved with good intentions and nobody wants to live in hell (right?).

Recommended.

paulataua's review against another edition

4.0

The book covers a much wider base than expected with Tariq Ali determined to detail the economic and political background far back into the previous century, both in Russia and the wider world, in order to make more sense of Lenin’s dilemmas and the revolution’s pre and post conditions. Not the focus I thought it was going to have, but still a fairly solid and informative history that provokes thought. I am fascinated by how major upheavals happen and what role the people in the middle of them deal with events. Not my go to book on Lenin, but a good read.

alexlanz's review against another edition

Very compelling; it read like a novel.

chalicotherex's review against another edition

4.0

Agree with the general criticism that the book is very digressive, but don't consider that a bad thing. Manages to provide a lot of context for the life of Lenin, while also pontificating on Bismarck's dietary practices, Wilson Woodrow's dishonesty, free love in the English Revolution, what a piece of shit Reagan was, etc etc. Kept thinking of it as a centenary companion piece to Mieville's October.


Stray thoughts:
–Lenin's brother Sasha was an idiot. The cops arrested him but lost his manifesto and he re-wrote it for them. Dumb! The Tsar said, 'This is the writing not even of a madman, but a pure idiot.' He wasn't wrong!
– We should resurrect Soviet architectural ideals, especially constructivism, but work to improve it.
– The chapter on Lenin's love life proves he would've been a volcel left twitter poster a century later.
– The best part of the book is explaining the arguments around war communism, though it has little to do with Lenin. It's an argument between Trotsky (Marxism has nothing to do with war, use tsarist generals and fight a war of position – this is correct), Frunze (war can be marxist, use imaginary proletarian troops and fight a war of maneuver), and Tukhachevsky (a brilliant general but a full on Bonapartist, and after WW1 it's just not the time).

Highlights:

During the course of this conversation Lenin explained his views on anarchism and the decisive factor that helped him to solve the dilemma between anarchism and socialism.
It was the necessity of ‘a mass struggle’, he informed Kropotkin:

We do not need individual terroristic attempts and the anarchists should have understood long ago. Only with the masses, through the masses … All other methods, including those of the anarchists, have been relegated to the limbo of history – nobody needs them, they are no good, and they do not attract anybody – they only demoralise people who in one way or another have been drawn on to that old worn-out path.

the French right and centre singled out the Terror during the French Revolution as the biggest tragedy ever (the victims of the guillotine were in the 3,000 range). During the Commune, 30,000 died, of which 14,000 men and women were executed.

In his first major essay, Prisoners of the American Dream, Mike Davis suggests, with good reason, that a major difference between the United States and Europe was a campaign of sustained violence against the working class by successive US governments, vigilantes and privatised ‘security’ firms, such as Pinkertons. This violence was part of the system itself and its aim was not simply to crush strikes and provide the muscle for blacklegs to replace unionised or striking workers, but also to preempt the emergence of socialist groups and militant unions. True, Europe tried it too, but there success was limited. Hence fascism, the last resort of a petrified ruling class. In the United States there was no need for fascism. The existing system, via a combination of coercion and consent, succeeded in regularly pruning the system of all ‘undesirables’.

What made the Russian Revolution different:

This was the context in which Lenin drafted the explosive April Theses that pushed the Bolshevik Party down the road to a socialist revolution. Unlike all previous revolutions in history, this was a fully conscious, carefully considered call to arms. It was not easy to convince his own party leaders, a fact that proves wrong all those who regarded the Bolshevik Party during this period as being what it later became after ten years in power. The April Theses marked a sharp break with orthodoxies that had previously united all factions of Russian Social Democracy, chiefly the dogma that the revolution had to be bourgeois-democratic, as Marx had said and as the English and French revolutions had demonstrated. Marx’s own views, however, were anything but dogmatic on these issues.

Ali thinks Marx would've called for Lenin to midwife the Revolution:

he first acts of a revolutionary government would be to confiscate the estates, create a single state bank and bring social production and the distribution of products under the control of the soviets. This did not constitute socialism, Lenin argued, but it did lay the foundations for a commune-state to create the space in which a transition to socialism could take place, a commune-state as defended by Marx and Engels. And, Lenin continued, since Rosa Luxemburg herself had, on 4 August 1914, denounced the German SPD as a ‘stinking corpse’, he had to insist that a new International be created.
The denunciations were deafening. He had gone mad, was ‘depraved’ and out of touch with Russian realities, was a ‘criminal’ (this gem came from Axelrod, a longtime colleague on Iskra), had occupied the throne vacated by Bakunin and so on. Bolshevik leaders were more restrained, but equally angry in private. Orthodoxy had all of them in thrall and to such an extent that all they could repeat like parrots or intone like monks was a well-known paragraph from Marx:

No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.

Had medical science been more advanced in Marx’s time, he could just as well have added that in those exceptional cases where a normal delivery might severely damage both the organism and the maturing entity in the womb, a more forcefully induced birth via a midwife might become necessary. He could have even enjoyed playing with the word ‘caesarian’.

The debate on war communism:

The different contributions to this debate all throw some light on the nature of the problems confronting the revolution after October, when war broke out on the vast plains and steppelands of Russia. There were three basic positions. Trotsky, commissar for war and architect of the Red Army, did not believe in the existence of a distinct Marxist strategy of war. He regarded military affairs as a technical branch of knowledge, with no closer relation to politics than engineering or architecture. Thus he wrote:
Historical materialism is by no means a universal method for all sciences … To attempt to apply it in the special domain of military affairs would be the greatest fallacy, no less a one than an attempt to move military science into the group of natural sciences … Even should one agree that ‘military science’ is a science, it is impossible to assume that this science could be built according to the method of Marxism.
Trotsky’s military policy was absolutely logical and consistent with this position. Early on, he made the fundamental decision to use former tsarist officers to train and lead the proletariat in arms. Regarded as the repositories of professional military knowledge, they were renamed ‘military specialists’ and given command of troops: throughout the civil war they dominated the officer corps of the Red Army above the rank of captain.
...
Frunze's starting point was the polar opposite of Trotsky’s. He argued for a ‘unified military doctrine’, by which he meant a refusal of the separation established by Trotsky between Marxism and the theory of war. Frunze was convinced that a new ‘proletarian science of war’ was necessary, which would express the social character of the working class as the new master of society. ‘The character of the military doctrine accepted by the army of any state is determined by the character of the general political line of the social class which stands at its head,’ he wrote.
...
Frunze insisted that, henceforward, a war of manoeuvre predominated over a war of position and analysed the civil war as a historical lesson: fast moves across huge distances would in the future decide the outcome of major military conflicts and as a class, the working class was supremely fitted, by temper and morale, to such mobile offensive actions. This was the fundamental reason for the Red victory in the civil war.
Tukhachevsky occupied a distinct third position in this debate. He agreed with Trotsky on the necessity for classical military discipline and centralisation in the Red Army, and with Trotsky he attacked the cult of anarchic partisan warfare, some of whose adepts later lost the Polish campaign by their insubordination and incompetence. On the other hand, he sided with Frunze and Gusev in their insistence on the new role of the offensive. ‘Manoeuvre is the sole means of securing victory,’ he wrote. Tukhachevsky’s conception of future battles reflected his experience of the fight against Kolchak and Denikin:
Strategic reserves, the utility of which was always doubtful, we need not at all in our war. Now there is one question: how to use numbers in order to gain the maximum force of the blow. There is one answer: release all troops in the attack, not holding in reserve a single bayonet.4
Trotsky and Stalin were later to accuse each other of Bonapartism, a danger that was universally feared in the Bolshevik Party. In fact, the only man who was consciously inspired by the example of Napoleon at this time was Tukhachevsky, who even modelled his addresses to his troops before battle on the style of the French general.

Social basis for the armed contest:

What was the social basis of this armed contest? It is here that the root of the military debates within the Red Army must be sought. The Bolsheviks seized power with a minority of the country behind them: they had a ‘strategic majority’ (Lenin) because the Russian working class served as an overwhelming force in the main towns during October. The peasantry, ten times more numerous than the proletariat, were neutral or benevolent. But when the civil war got under way, the Soviet regime rapidly lost most of the goodwill it had enjoyed among the peasant masses because of the ravages of the war itself, the grip of the Entente blockade and the inexorable necessities of food procurement; compulsory grain deliveries were born, not with collectivisation, but with War Communism. Trotsky expressed the truth with brutal honesty when he later said: ‘We plundered all Russia to conquer the Whites.’ The result was expectable. Henceforward, the revolution fought for its existence in a countryside largely hostile to it. The Whites, of course, were even more feared and hated by the mass of the middle and poor peasants: enough to ensure final military victory, but not enough to alter the political consequences of such a victory for socialism. There was no organic bond in most areas between the Red Army and the civilian population. Spontaneous guerrilla actions in Siberia at the beginning of the conflict, Trotsky remarked, played a positive role in harassing the White rear. In the Ukraine later on, where the kulak element was much more important, the peasants disrupted both sides and acted as a ‘disintegrating force’ (Tukhachevsky) on the Red Army. For the Red Army itself, the ‘proletarian’ force which Frunze postulated for his theory was not working-class in composition. By the very end of the war, after strenuous efforts, proletarian soldiers made up only 15 to 18 percent. The rest were peasants, mostly conscripted, confronting enemy armies also composed (much more exclusively) of peasant conscripts.

Why Frunze was wrong and Trotsky right:

Projected against this background, the essential flaw of Frunze’s theories is evident: they presupposed political forces which did not exist. A ‘proletarian’ military doctrine could not emerge in Russia in 1920 because there was no proletarian army to apply it. By contrast, Trotsky’s great historical merit was his unflinching awareness of the fragile social base of the war. Precisely because it was not in this sense a people’s war, it could and had to be officered by tsarist technicians and fought on staff school lines. A ‘proletarian’ strategy was utopian in the desperate circumstances of 1919. ... More fundamentally, Trotsky reminded the Bolsheviks, the Red Army was overwhelmingly a peasant force with a low level of political education which could not be used at will for dashes across Europe. The peasant soldiers who composed it would not fight with any enthusiasm outside their own frontiers.

Not sure what to think of this, on women:

By 1900, there were more women in tsarist Russia who were teachers, doctors and lawyers than in Western Europe and North America: if Fourier’s definition of a society were to be strictly applied, tsarist Russia would need to be classified as much more progressive at the turn of the century than Germany, Britain, France or the United States, which was patently not the case.

The planned disintegration of the family (Lenin disagreed):

For Nikolai Bukharin, the development of capitalism had sown all the seeds necessary for the disintegration of the family: the unit of production shifting to the factory, waged labour for women as well as men and, of course, the peripatetic nature of city life and work. Kollontai agreed that the family was on the edge of extinction. What was crucial for the Bolshevik government was to make the transition to new forms as painless as possible, with the state providing high-quality nurseries, schools, communal eating facilities and help with housework. Lenin strongly supported this point of view. His strictures on the family were characteristically acerbic. He denounced ‘the decay, putrescence, and filth of bourgeois marriage with its difficult dissolution, its license for the husband and bondage for the wife, and its disgustingly false sex morality and relations’.
The enemy was always the male partner, who avoided housework and childcare altogether. ‘Petty housework’, Lenin raged in 1919, ‘crushes, strangles, stultifies and degrades, chains her to the kitchen and the nursery, and she wastes her labour on barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-racking, stultifying and crushing drudgery.’ His solutions were the same as those of other revolutionary leaders at the time: collective kitchens, laundries, repair shops, crèches, kindergartens and so forth. But for Lenin, the abolition of domestic slavery did not mean the disappearance of individual households or families.
These views were reflected in the architecture of the Constructivists. Moisei Ginzburg’s apartment buildings, both large and small, expressed the new epoch. The communal laundries and dining rooms were considered a huge success. The playground for children was visible from every apartment kitchen, and the size of the space could be modified by moving huge hardwood walls on wheels.

I love the ideas behind that early Soviet architecture, but I'm probably too solitary in nature to enjoy living like that.

Unusually sweet anecdote:

Now a return to work was compulsory. However much he mourned the loss of Armand in private (and this should never be underestimated), he was aware that she was but one casualty out of 3 million. He and Krupskaya adopted the Armand children, which brought him some solace. He set young André chess tests and made sure Varvara was doing well at university, creating a pandemonium by turning up unannounced to her classroom at the university one day and chatting to the students about literature. When he asked the students to name their favourite poet, they replied in unison: ‘MAYAKOVSKY’. As a classicist with conservative literary and artistic tastes, he was shocked. He could never appreciate Mayakovsky. They laughed when he said that Pushkin was the best and always would be. They calmly informed him that Mayakovsky was the poet of Bolshevism. Lenin snorted contemptuously. He had argued in the same fashion against Lunacharsky at the Commissariat of Enlightenment, and had been similarly overruled.

LOLs:

Kropotkin became close to the Populists, was imprisoned and went into exile, where he was greatly influenced by Bakunin’s ferocious debates with Marx, even though one such debate revolved around Bakunin’s agreement to translate Capital into Russian and subsequent failure to do so. It was ‘too boring’, he insisted, while refusing to return the advance he had received for the translation.

Terrorists are just libs with bombs:

The aim of the terror was to rouse the people from their torpor and trigger a mass uprising based on previous models (Razin/Pugachev), but this time under new conditions and in order to completely destroy the autocracy and its institutions. It never worked out and, in a grumpy mood, Lenin once characterised terrorists as liberals with bombs, suggesting that both held the opinion that propaganda alone, of deed or word, would be sufficient for the task that lay ahead. For the most part terrorist acts scared people and legitimated government repression.

Bismarck's breakfast (honestly not sure what place this has in a book about Lenin):

As a young man, Bismarck had travelled to Hull and York and caught a train for Manchester and neighbouring small towns to witness the industrial revolution first-hand. His English was excellent and he always had a healthy appetite. His favourite hotel meal was breakfast, so much better than the fish and ‘atrocious fruit tart’ that comprised lunch, leave alone the disgusting soups ‘so strongly seasoned with white and black pepper that few foreigners can eat them’. But English breakfasts were fine because ‘the most colossal pieces of every sort of meat are available and they put them before you to cut as much or as little as you choose without effect on the bill.’ Bismarck would soon learn that the same could not be done with the British Empire.

Despite all this, the tsarist secret police penetrated both groups fairly easily. There is a psychologically interesting report which suggests that when informers embedded in the two socialist factions were reporting back to the police generals who ran the outfit, each of them took on the colouring of the group to which they ‘belonged’ and became quite heated with each other, causing some merriment at headquarters but also indicating that the state apparatuses were not completely impervious to the debates in which they participated.

A young Vietnamese man who turned up at Versailles to demand self-determination for Indochina was brushed aside with contempt. This was Ho Chi Minh, who went on to attend the founding conference of the PCF and inflicted a memorable defeat on the United States fifty-eight years later.

Alpha commie move:

Lenin, as head of government, instructed the commander-in-chief of the old army, General Dukhonin, to commence peace negotiations on every front. Dukhonin refused. Lenin sacked him by telephone. To the mortification of the old order, the Bolsheviks appointed Ensign Krylenko as the new commander-in-chief, with a stern Bolshevik and former imperial officer M. D. Bonch-Bruevich as the chief of staff.

LOL I don't think you could get away with this in North America "land of free speech" today:

The first years of the revolution now appeared utopian to many of its critics, who began to yearn for its uncertainties and debates. The days when cartoonists could depict a heavily pregnant Virgin Mary queuing eagerly for a Soviet abortion were long gone.

unionmack's review against another edition

4.0

Ali’s writing here is excellent, even if this is in no way an exhaustive biography of Lenin. It’s very wide angle—there are times at which the titular subject doesn’t even feel like he’s the focal point of the book. Still, other than a slight feeling of mismatch between title and content, that wound up being a strength more than a weakness. You do get plenty of deeper insight into Lenin along the way, but you also get to go behind the scenes of late-Tsarist/early-Soviet Russia from a bunch of different angles too. This was my first book by Tariq Ali and I’m excited to read him on other people and subjects; he’s one of the clearest political and historical writers I’ve come across in a while.

hanswan's review against another edition

4.0

5 stars for section four, need more