Sunday 21 January 2024 is the centenary anniversary of Vladimir Lenin’s death. It might come as a surprise to readers of The New Conservative that during my late teens and early twenties, I was an apologist for the Bolsheviks and their leader Lenin. At a university interview at Warwick, I remember declaring that I had a ‘soft spot’ for Lenin to which my interviewer rightly replied that I would not if I had seen inside one of his labour camps.
In my college room, I had a photograph of Lenin and some of his close comrades, perhaps Zinoviev and Kamenev, blu-tacked on the wall facing my desk. This bemused one of my friends to whom I explained that Lenin was admirable because he epitomised strong, daring leadership that was prepared to risk all in an attempt to create a better world.
Happily, my youthful idealism died in my third year as an undergraduate. Having Orlando Figes, who has called the Russian Revolution a tragedy, as one of my lecturers killed off my Lenin worship. Now my preferred kind of leader is democratic, honourable, sensible, pragmatic and right of centre, but not too far right. I suppose it is a sign of middle age that I prefer politicians who can maintain a healthy status quo rather than strive for an impossible utopia.
It is therefore troubling that in his article for The Spectator, James Bartholomew reports that when he asked Whitestone Insight to conduct an opinion poll into what people think of Lenin, it appears that 43% of those between the ages of 18 and 24 who were surveyed have a favourable view of him. This is consistent, according to Bartholomew, with polls in the US which find that 28% of Gen Z and 22% of Millennials think Communism is a great political ideology. Reasons given for this are that Lenin overthrew a violent and repressive Tsarist regime; if Lenin had lived, Communism would have succeeded in the Soviet Union; and that Lenin was a great historical figure.
It is certainly true that Lenin was a great historical figure, but not because he was a great statesman whose policies benefited the multitudes, but because of the magnitude of his influence on the history of the twentieth century. The evils of his legacy indubitably outweigh the good.
Therefore, for those who continue to hold a candle to Lenin, such as the Young Communist League of Britain who commemorated Lenin’s death by tweeting their fond memories of him (are they not far too young to have fond memories of Lenin?), here is a short history lesson.
Lenin did not overthrow the Tsarist regime. That happened in the 1917 February Revolution while Lenin was in exile in Switzerland. The revolution brought to power a democratic authority called the Provisional Government. It was this authority that Lenin and the Bolsheviks sent to the dustbin of history in the following October.
It is very unlikely that Soviet Communism would have succeeded if Lenin had lived. In 1921, Lenin had to recognise that the Communism of the Civil War era had failed and in order to revitalise the economy, he permitted limited amounts of private trade and profit-making. No Communist leader has managed to create a truly Communist society and there is no good reason to think that Lenin would have done so.
Lenin’s Bolsheviks were a minority party in Russia. They were popular in the city centres but other parties such as the Socialist Revolutionaries were more popular. To maintain minority rule, Lenin was violently ruthless. He sent Red Guard detachments into the countryside to requisition food which caused famine among the peasants and the death of at least three million people in 1920-21. His radical atheism led to the persecution of the Orthodox Church. In two years, more than 30 bishops and 1,200 priests were killed. To destroy his class enemies and rival socialist leaders, Lenin created the Soviet secret police known for short as the Cheka. It summarily murdered thousands of so-called enemies of the state and brutally administered concentration camps of political prisoners. Though Lenin did not suffer the paranoid mania of Joseph Stalin whose purges of the Soviet population are staggering in their scale, Vyacheslav Molotov, a senior Soviet politician who served both Lenin and Stalin, opined that Lenin was the harsher of the two.
On this basis, let us have no more veneration of Lenin. His conduct was appalling and outweighs any good qualities and effects he might have had. It is time too for the Russian people to remove his embalmed body from Red Square and bury it like any other mortal, in this case, a deadly flawed one.
Peter Harris is the author of two books, The Rage Against the Light: Why Christopher Hitchens Was Wrong (2019) and Do You Believe It? A Guide to a Reasonable Christian Faith (2020).
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I was lucky enough to spend 6 weeks in the USSR in the Summer of 1968, as – unbeknownst to us and the Soviet people, the tanks trolled towards Prague. School trip, with a master fluent in Russian. Leningrad to Odessa.
During that time what I saw – which included Czech students marched away at gunpoint when seen talking to us – informed even a raw 16 year old that Communism was hell.
Yes, everyone was equal (bar, of course, the ruling elite). Equal in their material misery, and misery of the spirit
I remember reading that the suppression of the Prague Spring was particularly brutal.
Don’t believe those surveys for a minute, I sincerely doubt that the poorly educated and self-centred youth of today have even heard of Lenin or know anything about Communism except for cool symbols for tattoos. Of course this is a sweeping generalisation.