Churchill Essay Lenin

Again, “all tender feelings of family life, friendship, love, must be stifled” (pp44-45).

Again, “all tender feelings of family life, friendship, love, must be stifled” (pp44-45).

It revealed all facts in focus—the most unwelcome, the most inspiring—with an equal ray.

The intellect was capacious and in some phases superb.

This argument is considered thoroughly and of course it is Trotsky alone who challenges it, literally as the Red Army approaches the Polish border in 1920.

Poland’s “conditions were not ripe for revolution…Polish nationalism was an elemental force which could be aroused by a Russian army, no matter what its colours.” Lenin seems rather marginalised here. The militarisation of the revolution meant that the Red Army displaced workers’ soviets, which never recovered.

Or should we accept that an important question has been legitimately left open for further debate?

Or, perhaps most importantly, should we not bring Lenin back and note that the party Lenin built, its communist principles, its commitment to working class self-emancipation and dreams for the future, were the antidote to Russian terror?

Another declares “he has rejected the science of the world…he knows only one science, that of destruction”.

Another begins, “he despises public opinion”, another calls for him “to prepare for death every day”.

If just a handful of those Corbynistas and Sanders supporters buy it, they’ll want to know more. In the chapter “Octobrist Women” 18-year-old factory worker Anna Litveiko learns about the differences between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.

The former wanted to fight the Tsar and the bosses but the Mensheviks “were neither one thing nor the other”.