Lenin

North Canterbury Gazette, Volume 8, Issue 36, 1 September 1938, Page 7

Lenin

A Study of the man

It is difficult to keep in mind the many councils and committees that were formed in Russia, after the Tsar was compelled to abdicate in the middle of March, 1917. The revolutionary government took at the outset the name Petrograd Soviet of Soldiers' and Workers' Deputies. The ordinary Parliament of Russia, the Duma, under orders from the Tsar to dissolve, changed into, or appointed, a very liberal Provisional Govermnet, and the Soviet, which so far had no particular leader, promised some amount of support. This Soviet, moving with great rapidity, issued the famous "Order No. 1" on the night of March 14th,"'at a meting of soldiers in the Tauride Palace. As one after another called out a suggestion, the chairman wrote it down. It first established the above Soviet and Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. Then arrangements were made for all military and naval units to elect deputies. Officers were denied weapons, and military salutes were forbidden. On Mrach 22 the Declaration of the rights of Soldiers Avas passed by the Soviet, by which the control of the army virtually passed out of the officers hands into those of the deputies. It became fairly evident and indeed was often stated that there was no wish on the part of the soldiers to fight their "comrades" of other countries for the sake of capitalist or Imperial interests.

It soon became impossible to offer any resistance to a German attack, and the Provisional Government was quite unable to stem the tide of desertion, illtreatment of officers, mutiny and refusal to obey orders .It was also compelled to authorise the arrest of the late Tsar and family, the order being carried out on March 21. The prisoners were kept in custody until the summer when they were transported to Tobolsk, in Siberia, and murdered during the civil war.

It is easy to understand that conflict would soon arise between the Soviets, which sprang up all over Russia, and the Provisional Government. The revolution was an outbreak of soldiers and workers and no kind of co-operation could be allowed with parties at all tainted, as Avas the Provisional Government, with upper-class interests. And if Government affairs were too complex for \ new masters, such affairs would have to be cut down until anyone could take charge of them. A cook, said Lenin, should be able to administer the State!

During the first month of the revolution, Lenin was at Zurich, in concealment from the usual warranty of arrest, but feverishly looking for a return to Russia. This was finally ac-. complished by way of Sweden, and his arrival was duly celebrated by a throng of sailors, soldiers and Avorkers. But he found the out-and-out Bolshevik or prolatarian revolutionist in only a small minority even in the Petrograd soviet, and a fresh lay-out of his main aims was needed before he could win entire allegiance from men like Stalin and Kamenev. At a speech on the morning of his arrival he asked that his party should change its name to "Communist," and he demanded that all power should be solely with the Soviets, and he held up world revolution- as a universal slogan. This hard, uncompromising attitude cut sharply into vsj numbers of liberals and democrats, who had Some 'slight sympathy with some of the old ideals. At once it aroused class hatred, but it secured the allegiance of the workers, and then of the army, and finally of the poor peasants. Very possibly the revolution would have fizzled out if Lenin had not come forward with a definite uncompromising ruthless aim. As for Lenin himself this name was dropped as a pen-name to conceal his indentity in his early revolutionary writings. His signature to documents when President of the Republic was Vladimir Ilyitch Ulianov (Lenin). He was born in 1870 at the village Simbirsk on the Volga; was head of the High School there in 1887, and entered Kazan University, from which he was shortly expelled fofrevolutionary activities. In this year his elder brother, a student at St. Petersbury University, was executed for taking part in a conspiracy against the Tsar Alexander 111. Lenin's- younger brother and two sisters joined the Bolshevik Party, so that this family, the children of a school inspector and the daughter of a poor doctor, were of the intelligentsia., educated and revolutionary. These traits often combined in Tsarist Russia, though rarely to the complete Marxian limit of rule by the pholehariat alone. After a year or two Lenin was admitted to the university of St. Petersbury and took his degree in law. He did not give much time to and in 1895 with

some city associates was impiisoned and in 1897 was exiled to Siberia for three years. There he had a decent time, wrote and corresponded with friends. He lived away from Russia until 1905, as an emigre in varous countries. It was at a congress of Social Democrats in Brussels in 1913 that Lenin's party became known as Bolsheviki or the "The Majority," as his party always won in the divisions, and it was about now that?one of his most brilliant hits made him very widely known. This was his scheme to associate the poor peasants with the town workers in a proletarian revolution. Here he was quite in opposition to the leaders of the other faction of the Social Democrats, like Mensheviki or Minority es, who advocated some union of the workers with the liberal non-socialists in a revolution. In the Great War Lenin was a defeatist, arguing that victory would establish for a lifetime the Imperial and capitalist outlook, while defeat would unloose for civil war the above stated poorer classes and this class war would be engineered by a few professional revolutionaries. The forecast was correct; but it is likely that of the endless enquiries into and studies of Lenin's system, the most difficult question is whether or not a slight admixture of liberalism would have secured the present progressive achievements of Russia with very much less of the bloodshed and presecution and hardship and famine that characterised the time of the Civil War.

In pre-Darwinian days, in 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote: "Amongst all the classes that confront the bourgeoise today, the proletariat alone is really revolutionary," and in the major work, "Capital," the doom of that system is forecast, thus, to- give merely one sentence, "while there is a progressive diminution in the number of the capitalist magnates, there occurs a corresponding increase in the mass of poverty, oppression, enslavement, degeneration and exploitation; but at the same time there is steady intensification of the wrath of the working class, a class which grows ever more numerous, and is disciplined, unified and organised by the very mechanism of the capitalist method olNproduction." And the breaking point sometimes arrives. Perhaps no country has more fiercely seethed in argument than Russia in 1917, and the peak came towards the end when Lenin was able to persuade his Bolsheviki to seize all power by means of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. This was nearly bloodlessly effected on November 7, and on the evening of November 8 Lenin stated the planks of the new Government at a Congress of Soviets, and the launching of the new State will be taken up in another article. J.R.W.

"What could be better than lying in the open air and seeing the stars above you?" asks a holiday-maker. Persuading the wretched tent to stay up, surely.