Word: lenin
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...factions of the world Communist movement join the Russians in celebrating Lenin's birthday, the Lenin who emerges in centennial rhetoric varies sharply in Peking, Rome, Belgrade and Moscow. In China, they cite the Lenin who denounced Czarist Russian expansionism in the Far East, who stressed the threat to revolutionary purity in the unbridled development of bureaucracy, and who believed in the inevitability of world revolution. In Rome, it is the Lenin who stood for every nation's right to self-determination, who observed that when you scratch a Russian Communist, you will find a Russian chauvinist...
...these Lenins and more are genuine. No other modern leader has combined in one person so many different and often contradictory views and impulses. Yet it is impossible to believe that all who call upon his varying ideas would meet with Lenin's approval. Although something of a campus radical at the University of Kazan, he would no doubt excoriate the passionate bomb throwers of America's S.D.S. and other extremist groups as dangerous amateurs, afflicted with the "infantile disease of leftism." Almost certainly, he would be highly suspicious of Tito's reliance on a market economy...
...Many-Faced Lenin...
History, as Adam Ulam of Harvard observes, may have vindicated Lenin's tactics, but it has also repudiated his hopes. History has also affected his contemporary relevance. If his criticisms of bourgeois society retain a certain validity for many, his remedies have proved worse than the ills they are intended to cure. Beyond that, the viability of Lenin's thought has been affected by social changes he did not, indeed could not, account for. Like many another Marxist, he grossly underrated the productive vitality and capacity for change in what he considered a moribund capitalist world. Lenin also...
...Lenin's heirs in Russia do not face this kind of opposition as yet. Nonetheless they are also caught by the contradictory force of middle-class consumer appetites for a better, wider life and by the insistent demands of the creative and scientific intelligentsia for greater freedoms. It is more than likely that both the Western and Communist nations have entered a new historical period. If Soviet leaders choose to react to it by being flexible and granting greater freedoms, they will be able to find chapter and verse in Lenin to justify their course. If they react...