The success of the October revolution, like so much else in Lenin’s life, owed more to Lady Luck than to his own genius. And Lenin was a very lucky man. He was lucky Fanny Kaplan wasn’t a better shot and he was able to survive her attempt to assassinate him in 1918. He was lucky not to have been killed by the armed thieves who stole his car. (He was lucky with his cars generally, owning a brace of Delaunay-Bellevilles and a string of Rolls-Royces. Not bad for a Communist, eh?) And sticking with matters automotive, he was lucky to find on arrival at the Finland Station, Petrograd, in April 1917 that there was an Austin armoured car handy that he could stand on to make his famous speech. It wouldn’t have been half so romantic had he been forced to make do with a John Major soapbox. He was lucky to have had the sealed train to get him there and, as his biographer Robert Service has pointed out, he was above all lucky that the First World War came along, because without that he would have remained a marginalised political crank in exile.
Lenin is credited with great gifts of oratory and powers of political analysis. But too often the content fails to live up to the hype. One has to admit that he was very good at titles: What Is To Be Done? Or my favourite, Left Wing Communism — an Infantile Disorder. Such a shame that once one is drawn in one invariably finds him to be a priggish old windbag.
Then there is the awkward matter of the man having been a mass-murderer. That tends to take the gilt off the gingerbread somewhat. Lenin was responsible for establishing the Cheka (which became the KGB), setting up the first of the camps that would come to form the infamous Gulag, and he personally pioneered the use of mental hospitals to simultaneously contain and discredit political enemies.
He called, in blood-curdling terms, for the murder of priests and the religious and for the strangling of better-off peasants. When it came to terror, Stalin did not have to innovate much. He simply implemented Lenin’s system con brio.
In our own day Lenin is thought by his followers in the far-Left groupuscules to offer a surefire tactical manual to take over the country when the revolutionary moment arrives.
Otherwise sane and sensible people, many with good degrees from our ancient universities, have, following the Lenin delusion, persuaded themselves with every miners’ strike or stock-market wobble that the revolutionary situation is just around the corner and that soon they will be the ones with the jutting chins, eyes on the far horizon. What a waste of talent! A century on, the Russians have begun to ask themselves whether Lenin is any longer worth preserving. And so should we.
