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Lenin and the Twentieth Century: A Bertram D. Wolfe Retrospective (Volume 293)
Bertram D. Wolfe was one of the foremost American authorities on Soviet history and politics. Several generations of students in dozens of countries have acquired their first understanding of the events and personalities that shaped modern Russia from Wolfe's landmark study, Three Who Made a Revolution. The twelve essays on Lenin and Leninism published in this volume were written during the last decades of Wolfe's life and reflect the unique blend of personal experience, thorough scholarship, and commitment to humanism that informed all of his writings. These essays, nine of which appear in print here for the first time, do not constitute an integrated or complete biography of Lenin. Rather they suggest the direction of Wolfe's research and thinking on the subject of Lenin's place in the twentieth century.
222 pages, Hardcover
First published March 6, 1984
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April 1, 2025
This is a posthumous collection of essays on Lenin by Bertram Wolfe. He evidently intended to write a monograph devoted to this theme, but did not live long enough to finish it, so this compendium is, I suppose, the attempt to provide a substitute.
Every one of these essays is chock-full of insights that ought to be better known. It is clear from these works that Lenin was very much aligned with Tkachev, and was obsessed with party organisation and discipline. He used the interesting analogy of a general staff in relation to an army.
We find here early enthusiasm for Russian defeats against Japan, a desire for general war to break out from the Balkan situation, and a desire to seize power through violent methods.
We learn that Lenin had set up an embryonic German Government in Minsk, anticipating that Warsaw would fall and Germany would go red.
We learn that Lenin was, as every study acknowledges, ruthless and Machiavellian. Everything was a tactical expedient, including the NEP which he framed as a disciplined retreat before returning to the fray for world revolution.
Though these are only roughly connected, the essays work rather smoothly in depicting Lenin's life and the consistency of his thoughts and methods. He was a totalitarian from the beginning, dominating his party and his colleagues long before Red October.
Wolfe, of course, does not claim that Lenin was a dictator in the fashion of Stalin. Simply that Lenin was imperious and domineering. He would not typically get his way by silencing or eliminating opponents as did Stalin, but he would harangue and cajole his party ceaselessly until they conceded the argument.
It is sad to see here Lenin's ideals fall before the practical realities of actually exercising power. Lenin's hopes of creating a classless, democratic, nonviolent society foundered on the rocks of reality. His abolition of censorship, the death penalty, secret diplomacy, all of these are commendable.
But the exigencies of the Russian Civil War and the intervention by the Allies caused this to all go up in smoke. All of Lenin's 'temporary' measures turned out to be rather more than temporary, and the Soviet Union became the most oppressive, most censored, most ruthless, and most secretive state in the world.
Lenin was man enough and courageous enough to admit his faults when they occurred, to announce new policies like the NEP and explain why they were adopted. To explain why earlier measures were unsuccessful.
But his successors did not see things this way. Wolfe argues that Lenin created the Bolshevik Party and he alone might have been able to guide it as he envisioned, but the machinery was hijacked by Stalin and the promise of the revolution was lost.
Specific essays that are of especial importance are those examining the relationship of Lenin and Trotsky, where they converged and where they diverged, the curious friendship of Lenin and Gorky, and finally one examining the nature of totalitarianism in a philosophical sense.
This last one was very intellectually stimulating, positing that the twentieth century with its revolution in communications and transportation is what made the totalitarian state possible. Even had earlier autocracies, like the Tsarist, desired such complete control, the physical limitations on their power made it impossible.
But the ability to communicate or travel anywhere rapidly enabled the Soviet state to enter and control the ordinary person's life to an extent undreamt of before, and Wolfe insists that Lenin is the architect and prototype of the totalitarian state.
He nonetheless notes that the creeping of government power into everyday life was by no means restricted to the Soviet Union, and cites examples of the phenomenon in the United States too.
This echoes recent work by scholars such as Giorgio Agamben and Olga Velikanova who suggest that stricter state control was a tendency affecting all states during and after the First World War and the Stalinist regime, rather than constituting an aberration, was merely the extreme culmination of these developments.
Wolfe asks the question of whether we are to be servants of the state, or if the state is to be our servant.
Despite its short page length this work is a remarkable look into the career and influences of Lenin, and of his impact on the world. The author takes the traditional line that Stalin was merely a continuation of Lenin, which has been challenged in recent decades, but this hardly detracts from the work.
Every one of these essays is chock-full of insights that ought to be better known. It is clear from these works that Lenin was very much aligned with Tkachev, and was obsessed with party organisation and discipline. He used the interesting analogy of a general staff in relation to an army.
We find here early enthusiasm for Russian defeats against Japan, a desire for general war to break out from the Balkan situation, and a desire to seize power through violent methods.
We learn that Lenin had set up an embryonic German Government in Minsk, anticipating that Warsaw would fall and Germany would go red.
We learn that Lenin was, as every study acknowledges, ruthless and Machiavellian. Everything was a tactical expedient, including the NEP which he framed as a disciplined retreat before returning to the fray for world revolution.
Though these are only roughly connected, the essays work rather smoothly in depicting Lenin's life and the consistency of his thoughts and methods. He was a totalitarian from the beginning, dominating his party and his colleagues long before Red October.
Wolfe, of course, does not claim that Lenin was a dictator in the fashion of Stalin. Simply that Lenin was imperious and domineering. He would not typically get his way by silencing or eliminating opponents as did Stalin, but he would harangue and cajole his party ceaselessly until they conceded the argument.
It is sad to see here Lenin's ideals fall before the practical realities of actually exercising power. Lenin's hopes of creating a classless, democratic, nonviolent society foundered on the rocks of reality. His abolition of censorship, the death penalty, secret diplomacy, all of these are commendable.
But the exigencies of the Russian Civil War and the intervention by the Allies caused this to all go up in smoke. All of Lenin's 'temporary' measures turned out to be rather more than temporary, and the Soviet Union became the most oppressive, most censored, most ruthless, and most secretive state in the world.
Lenin was man enough and courageous enough to admit his faults when they occurred, to announce new policies like the NEP and explain why they were adopted. To explain why earlier measures were unsuccessful.
But his successors did not see things this way. Wolfe argues that Lenin created the Bolshevik Party and he alone might have been able to guide it as he envisioned, but the machinery was hijacked by Stalin and the promise of the revolution was lost.
Specific essays that are of especial importance are those examining the relationship of Lenin and Trotsky, where they converged and where they diverged, the curious friendship of Lenin and Gorky, and finally one examining the nature of totalitarianism in a philosophical sense.
This last one was very intellectually stimulating, positing that the twentieth century with its revolution in communications and transportation is what made the totalitarian state possible. Even had earlier autocracies, like the Tsarist, desired such complete control, the physical limitations on their power made it impossible.
But the ability to communicate or travel anywhere rapidly enabled the Soviet state to enter and control the ordinary person's life to an extent undreamt of before, and Wolfe insists that Lenin is the architect and prototype of the totalitarian state.
He nonetheless notes that the creeping of government power into everyday life was by no means restricted to the Soviet Union, and cites examples of the phenomenon in the United States too.
This echoes recent work by scholars such as Giorgio Agamben and Olga Velikanova who suggest that stricter state control was a tendency affecting all states during and after the First World War and the Stalinist regime, rather than constituting an aberration, was merely the extreme culmination of these developments.
Wolfe asks the question of whether we are to be servants of the state, or if the state is to be our servant.
Despite its short page length this work is a remarkable look into the career and influences of Lenin, and of his impact on the world. The author takes the traditional line that Stalin was merely a continuation of Lenin, which has been challenged in recent decades, but this hardly detracts from the work.
Displaying 1 of 1 review