Word: lenin
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...Only Lenin offers a thread of continuity and legitimacy of rule for Russia's present, apparently divided leadership. Virtually all of Lenin's closest Bolshevik comrades-Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev-were dishonored and murdered by Stalin. For 40 years, from Lenin's death in 1924 through Khrushchev's ouster in 1964, every Russian leader was irreversibly disgraced by his successors. Such an interruption in legitimate succession demands a fresh reinforcement of the link between the present leaders and the founding father...
Besides, it seems to be a law of Communist history that the more remote from Leninism the Soviet system becomes, the greater is the effort made to invoke him. Thus the less that Russian leaders are interested in fomenting world revolution and the less that they are concerned with creating a Communist society as Lenin saw it, the greater the volume of Leninist rhetoric. Lenin's real remoteness is underscored by the problems with which a great power must struggle in an age of computer technology. Just as Lenin discovered that there was little in Marx to tell...
...Lenin myth portrays him as the master theoretician of Communist revolutions. In fact, not one successful 20th century revolution-not even the Russian-followed the pattern that Lenin advocated. As he saw it, small bands of professional revolutionaries would inspire the masses and lead them in forcibly overthrowing established regimes. This was his hope as he waited in self-imposed exile in Western Europe around the turn of the century. There, amid endless quarrels with rival Socialist exiles, he created his own cadre of disciples who expected revolutions to break out in Europe and then spread throughout the world. Lenin...
...years passed and the spark failed to light any major fires, he grew discouraged. Six weeks before the February 1917 revolution, which would depose Czar Nicholas II, Lenin, then 46, told a group of young Socialists in Zurich: "We old people will probably not live to see the decisive battles of the coming revolution." Less than a year later, he was established as the heir of the Romanovs...
...February revolution, Russia's only spontaneous popular uprising, created a constitutional government that Lenin despised. He viewed it as "giving power to the bourgeoisie, because of the proletariat's insufficient awareness and organization." In his immediate shock over the revolution, he even described it as a plot by France and England to prevent Russia from signing a peace treaty with Germany. Lenin may have been unprepared for this momentous turning point, but he had the political genius to capitalize on it. He persuaded the Bolsheviks-a band of perhaps 20,000 disciplined revolutionaries in a population...