Was it a political uprising or Trotsky’s bloodstained counter-revolution? Either way, Leninism and the Bolshevik opposition no longer considered the Soviet Union an actual employee’ condition. Lenin could not evade the dichotomy of whether Stalin was only to condemn or if Lenin and the other Bolshevik authorities were likewise liable in the sights of Russian employees. The myth of Lenin as the champion of the Russian Revolution began to fade.
As Soviet archives became more accessible, defending Lenin’s legacy got harder—mainly as the West avoided or manipulated debates around him. Trotskyists tried to persuade workers that Lenin did not just represent the “official” stance on Stalin. This discussion has remained littered with slander, historical falsification, and analysis of Bolshevism since 1918. So, what aspects contributed to the rise of Stalinism?
When did Stalinism start? What rhetoric led to such historical falsification?
The opposition between Leninism and Bolshevik resistance originates with Stalinism, which has unique defining traits. Among these, it is tough to find any core Leninist principles. Stalin’s foreign policy promoted peaceful coexistence with the West while building socialism in the Soviet Union, which became a supposed antidote to Stalinism.
By contrast, Lenin is seen as someone willing to take risks for a vision. Yet Stalinism brought about a complex system—one-party rule, lack of worker control over the economy, and authoritarianism that weakened socialism in one country.
The Soviet Union served as both a counterpoint and a model for other European nations, standing in stark contrast to countries that had torn apart, exploited, and enslaved places like Africa. Just as the spirit of the French Revolution inspired enslaved Haitians to revolt, the Soviet Union inspired colonized nations to resist feudalism, imperialism, and capitalism. Leninism and Bolshevik resistance became symbols as the Bolshevik Revolution surged, with workers and soldiers seizing government offices in Petrograd and later the Winter Palace.
The 1905 revolution forced the Tsar to create the Duma, Russia’s first parliament. The second revolution in February 1917 overthrew the monarchy and replaced it with a republic. Finally, the Communist Revolution, or the October Revolution, saved Russia from military dictatorship and, beyond ending World War I for Russia, shook the capitalist world.
Marxists played a crucial role in sparking these shifts, challenging Marx’s original thesis that Russian socialists should first transform a capitalist society into a socialist one.
Lenin led the Soviet Union from October 1917 until January 1924, when he died. During this time, different groups formed within the Russian Communist Party, criticizing the Bolshevik leadership and its revolutionary principles. As Lenin described in State and Revolution and other works, the defining feature of a communist state was rejecting bureaucratic authority. In his theory, employees would hold power literally via grassroots institutions.
Plant representatives and associations recreated equal parts in financial energy. Further substituting remote requests with industrial democracy, Lenin thought employees would discover reasonably via hands-on knowledge. He sought to certify the active groups, making their faith and tool a personal class—this was his dream before the October Revolution.
Gavril Myasnikov, a Bolshevik revolutionary, blatantly broke with the Bolshevik promises. Though the October Revolution had achieved a lot, it reintroduced hierarchy and discipline among workers to keep things functioning. However, what would happen if class enemies returned to control the factories and rule over the workers? By refusing democratic views, Miasnikov, as the preferred norm, kept his love for the procedure.
He desired to notice parity, convey satisfaction needs, aid employees’ innovative goods, and promote and control capitalist exploitation. Lenin held yet caught this sight, and Miasnikov opposed Bolshevik tactics vocally. Rather than condemning the party’s bureaucracy, he mocked every attempt to bring back old rules and capitalist methods.
In The History of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky argued that while the barbarians of the West had taken over the ruins of Roman culture, the Slavs in the East could only look over their vast, empty lands. The Slavs, he said, were at a lower developmental level than the European barbarians—no parliament, no capitalist solid class. For centuries, no Russian prince could seriously challenge the centralization of power under the Tsar in Moscow.
However, Russia did have radical peasants. Since the late 1800s, there has existed a pile in peasant radicalism and a sort of rustic socialism, constantly fueled by anti-monarchist roughness. A paramount juncture in this tide of radicalism was when Alexander II was assassinated. Invariant after Lenin’s crackdown on heretics in the Bolshevik crusade, there was a confidential account: Lenin’s brother was snared conniving against the Tsar in 1887.
For decades, Leninism and Bolshevik opposition aligned with the revolutionary peasants’ need to disassemble the monarchy and eliminate the current drive. The founding of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party finally broke into Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, moving the left’s obsession from rural populism. The Bolsheviks replaced the peasants with workers as agents of the revolution and embraced the idea of a bourgeois phase leading to socialism.
The orthodox Marxists would bring about liberal democracy. It is not only because of Russia’s experimental conditions but also because the leading players in capitalism and bureaucracy are inadequate. The industrial proletariat’s shoulders are shaking the agenda for the monarchy’s destruction and the political revolution.
At the Ninth Party Congress, the setback prompted one-person management and hiring of technical specialists, which Myasnikov became suspicious of. Lenin usurped the most basic revolutionary conquest of the working class. The manifesto declaration was continued purely bureaucratically and without the direct participation of the middle class. The manifesto demands industrial management of the middle class from each factory.
Therefore, the middle class saw the manifesto as increasing their power and privileges. In this way, too, there can be attacks from all sides of arrogance and hypocrisy. The socialist phrase’s lip slogan is immediately considered a lie and emphasizes bourgeois ambition. Machajski, a radical Polish at the turn of the nineteenth century, spoke of the emergence of the new intellectual class’s name, socialism, and specialists determined to ride the workers’ struggle.
Myasnikov also adopted a brand of Makhaevism and was influenced by Machajski’s ideas; there is no evidence apart from the similarities between their bureaucratic and sacred ideologies.
On the other hand, Lenin adhered to an administrative solution, rejecting any proposals about the fresh air of democracy through the party apparatus. He considers that triggering democracy is more dangerous than bureaucratism itself besides relying on bureaucratic reform. Myasnikov denied this because Lenin failed to target a root cause. Myasnikov’s real reform could only emerge from below and call for all-out capitalism at home and abroad.
Refusing to cooperate with moderate socialists, insisting on limited economic benefits, weakening the proletarian revolution, and diverting socialism’s primary mission will overthrow the capitalist system. This will begin the October Revolution’s eruption in the next phase of Leninism and the Bolsheviks’ resistance.
In less than two months, the October Revolution erupted. As a result, the rest of history was in the hands of the Bolsheviks. In addition, the defeat of Russian troops on several World War I fronts sparked demoralization among the army, draining domestic resources and dragging the Romanov dynasty. Just as Russia’s failure to Japan in 1905 triggered a political crisis, the February 1917 Revolution erupted after protests and labor strikes at Petrograd.
Women workers from textile factories also took to the streets on February 23 to mark International Women’s Day. For several months, the Mensheviks succeeded in issuing many progressive policies, such as guarantees of freedom of the press, the right to association, and the right to vote for women—eight months of instability in the Provisional Government. Given the Bolshevik Party’s opportunity, Alexander Kerensky, the Provisional Government’s prime minister, passed thousands of weapons to the workers.
On the other hand, the Petrograd army, already under Bolshevik influence, attempted to thwart a military coup.
During World War I, Russia’s allies turned into enemies, like Germany, which joined forces to disrupt the revolution. In other words, they all occupied parts of Russia. Anticommunist ideas were ubiquitous in many governments and emerged violently in German fascism. The Civil War caused chaos and lasted for four years, but in the end, the communists won and officially started the Soviet Union on December 22, 1922.
Meanwhile, there were stories of Lenin dancing in the snow, celebrating the revolutionary era. His fears of being crushed ended with Russia’s victory in the Civil War in 1922. However, things did not look much better for the Paris Commune, as radical leftist movements sprang up worldwide after the October Revolution. From 1918 to the 1920s, places like Bavaria in Germany, Finland, Hungary, and Iran tried for red republics, but they did not last long.
Even though the right-wing service parties fought against these motions, more people were starting to realize that this shady group could not be pinned down to just one country. They needed to fight for change across the globe at the same time. Leninism and the remaining Bolsheviks organized a Congress of Eastern Nations in Baku in 1920, attended by representatives from Arab countries. The communists decided to support radical nationalists in colonized nations seeking complete independence.
References
- Carr, E. H. (1960). The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923 (Vol. 1). Macmillan.
- Fitzpatrick, S. (1990). The Russian Revolution. Oxford University Press.
- Kotkin, S. (2017). Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941. Penguin Press.
- Lenin, V. I. (1965). The State and Revolution. In Collected Works (Vol. 25). Progress Publishers.
- Pipes, R. (1990). The Russian Revolution. Knopf.
- Trotsky, L. (1932). The History of the Russian Revolution (Vol. 1). The New American Library.
- Wood, E. M. (1991). The Retreat from Class: A New ‘True’ Socialism?. Verso.
- Zinn, H. (2005). A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present. Harper Perennial.
