The Dogma of Lenin (2017)

Book Review from the December 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The Dilemmas of Lenin’, by Tariq Ali (Verso Books 2017)

Opening this book, you might expect to find a Lenin who is an open-minded, flexible, freethinker. This was not the case – and anyone who has ever met a Leninist will tell you a better title would have been ‘The Dogma of Lenin’.

In the field of so-called ‘Lenin studies’ (Lih, etc) nuanced critique is supposed to have replaced the ‘Great Man of History’ approach. So Ali writes ‘this book was written to put Lenin in his proper historical context … Lenin was a product of Russian history and the European labour movement.’ And that Lenin would have died in exile without the First World War and the events of February 1917. However, by p.2, comes something of a reversal, and a flavour of the rest of the book ‘First things first, without Lenin there would have been no socialist revolution in 1917. Of this much we can be certain.’

Worse still, it suffers from a teleological interpretation, for example; asserting ‘this [lack of revolution] is where the Bolsheviks as a party were headed strategically and tactically before April 1917.’ And ‘Lenin understood that if the moment were not seized reaction would triumph once again’.

Ali argues the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War demonstrates peasant support. Combined with urban proletariat support in the Russian Revolution, Ali concludes the Russian Revolution was not a ‘coup’. A laugh might be forgiven at the statement ‘It was only after Bolsheviks won majorities in the soviets that they set the dates for an insurrection’.

And of Bolshevik slogans ‘Land, Peace and Bread’ Ali makes the unlikely claim that ‘behind each word lay a set of ideas encompassing Bolshevik ideology.’ Later he states ‘Bolshevik slogans were not particularly if at all socialist.’

Contradictions

Also strange is that Ali claims that Lenin’s rage (at Kamenev and Zinoviev exposing his date for insurrection), was both understandable but in the end didn’t matter at all. Lenin’s peace deal with Germany was ‘shameful’ but also ‘necessary’ (and ‘compromise’ is a word reserved for opponents). ‘War communism had been necessary to win the civil war’ but in the absence of a German revolution the ‘New Economic Policy’ was then necessary (and later ‘there was no credible alternative’). With no hint of irony is written ‘contempt for political chameleons stayed with Lenin all his life’.

Later chapters include one, ostensibly on the contribution of women to the revolution, but seemingly devoted to the women in Lenin’s life. Lots of criticism is expressed for 11,000 American troops Woodrow Wilson sent to invade Russia during the Civil War, but very little by comparison for 1.4 million German troops Kaiser Wilhelm II sent Eastwards during the First World War. This can only be explained as anti-Americanism, later confirmed in a dig at American academics.

As the final chapter, the Bolshevik-Menshevik split (following whole sections on ‘dilemmas’ of ‘Terrorism and Utopia’, ‘Internationalism, Socialism, Empires and War’) is wholly inappropriate. Both chronologically and in terms of significance of ‘dilemmas’ it should have come first.

The epilogue is worse than the rest of the book, reprinting an autobiographical Lenin analogy on climbing a high mountain. This is really a ‘great man’ approach to looking at Lenin, and one we would reject.

DJW