Word: leninization
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...Lenin did not start the revolution, but he knew how to harness its spontaneous, anarchic forces and to establish his authority by sheer organization. "Our fighting method is organization," Lenin proclaimed. "We must organize everything." When he had attained power, he evolved a network of interlocking organizations-trade unions, youth groups, administrative hierarchies, control commissions, agitation and propaganda centers-with the party as its nucleus. Before anyone else in history, he recognized the limitless potential of political and social engineering to reach into every aspect of a people's life and transform it. The durability and power...
...Lenin put it, the Bolshevik seizure of power during the ten world-shaking days of October 1917 was "as easy as lifting a feather." Lenin and his ideas did not arouse the masses to overthrow an exploiting regime, as his early scenario had called for. Instead, he simply but effectively thrust himself into the vacuum of power that had been created by the disintegration of the Russian state and society. In the name of building socialism, he overthrew the "bourgeois" liberties that Russia had barely begun to enjoy, convinced that he knew what was best for the people. "The will...
...Lenin applied his theories in the name of Karl Marx but, as Harvard's Samuel P. Huntington observes, "Lenin was not a disciple of Marx, rather Marx was a precursor of Lenin." Marx had not the faintest notion of what practical strategy and tactics could achieve his revolutionary goals. In many ways, Lenin revised-some would say subverted-the teachings of his proclaimed mentor. Marx predicted that the revolution would be possible only in industrially advanced nations, as the inevitable culmination of capitalist development. Lenin demonstrated that a successful Socialist revolution could take place in a backward, predominantly peasant...
...Lenin always considered the coercive system he built as a temporary necessity. It is, of course, true that Lenin's ultimate goal was the liberation of humanity, and the creation of an egalitarian Utopia when the state, as envisioned by Marx, had withered away. Yet it was under Lenin that the CHEKA was created-the brutal, terrorizing model for all later Soviet secret-police systems. Many former capitalists were sent to forced labor camps or summarily shot. It was Lenin who started the campaign of harassment against well-to-do peasants, which escalated into open warfare when thousands...
Inexorably, the question arises of Lenin's responsibility for the horrors of the Stalin era. Probably the essential difference between the two leaders was that Lenin considered coercion as a temporary weapon in Socialism's struggle against its enemies, while Stalin applied it as a method of everyday rule. Yet the fact remains that Lenin created the instrument of power that allowed Stalin to do as he did, and he formulated the principle that ultimately made all of his successor's crimes possible: "Our morality is completely subordinated to the class struggle." Here is the 20th century...