when did lenin write what is to be done research
Today the Altstadt is Zurich’s most touristy neighborhood, filled with cafés and gift shops, but when Lenin lived here, it was a down-and-out quarter prowled by thieves and prostitutes. “As for passing judgment, that’s up to our visitors.”. perceiving She led me down a gloomy hallway to the conference room, a former dance hall where the Bolsheviks (“majority”) swept aside their socialist rivals and declared themselves in charge. aggression. A Deutsche Bahn regional train second-class compartment bore me across Germany to Rostock, a port city on the Baltic Sea. Competition between capitals for markets thus gives rise, on Lenin’s account, to military and territorial competition between nation states, which he viewed as the underlying explanation of the world war that broke out in 1914. In What Is to be Done? His birth name was Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov. This sample Leninism Research Paper is published for educational and informational purposes only. Plowing through the blackness of the Baltic night, I found it easy to imagine the excitement that Lenin must have felt as his ship moved inexorably toward his homeland. of any kind of political alliance with liberals or other elements of the bourgeoisie and This tragic event hardened Lenin and although it perhaps did not make him a Nadezhda Krupskaya, the daughter of an impoverished Russian army officer suspected of revolutionary sympathies, joined him there. understanding of Marx, the essential features of which would come to be called Leninism. Fordham University - Vladimir Illyich Lenin's Testament. The curator tossed out most of the hagiographic memorabilia and introduced objects that depicted the less palatable aspects of the Soviet state—an overcoat worn by an officer of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD; a diorama of a Siberian prison camp. By that time the economy was in “It was the most hated museum in Finland,” Kallio said. The work pays tribute to an iconic photo of Lenin strolling the Vasagatan, carrying an umbrella and wearing a fedora, joined by Krupskaya and other revolutionaries. Lenin spent his days churning out tracts in the reading room of Zurich’s Central Library and, at home, played host to a stream of fellow exiles. Truth is the most precious thing. Several copies of the testament were made and sealed with the instruction that they were to be opened by Lenin personally or, in case of his death, by Krupskaya. In Trelleborg, I caught a train north to Stockholm, as Lenin did, riding past lush meadows and forests. He slipped back into Russia and successfully Is to be Done? She had “heard nothing” from her superiors about how they should commemorate the event, and expects only silence. peasantry, a class whose failure to respond to radicalism had frustrated the Russian Ulyanov later would adopt the nom de guerre Lenin (likely derived from the name of a Siberian river, the Lena). A handful of tourists and dozens of Scandinavian and Russian truck drivers sipped goulash soup and ate bratwurst in the cafeteria as the ferry lurched into motion. Twelve years earlier, Lenin had held a clandestine meeting in the Tampere Workers Hall with a 25-year-old revolutionary and bank robber, Joseph Stalin, to discuss money-raising schemes for the Bolsheviks. Like his Populist I will limit the scope of this essay showing only the basic ideas in Lenin's "seminal" text "What is to be done? " The Spiegelgasse, a narrow cobblestone lane, jogs uphill from the Limmat, winds past the Cabaret Voltaire, a café founded in 1916 and, in many accounts, described as the birthplace of Dadaism, and spills into a leafy square dominated by a stone fountain. (Trotsky) Lenin was born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, April 22, 1870, in the provincial city of Simbirsk on the Volga River. In her Reminiscences of Lenin, Krupskaya described their home as “a dingy old house” with “a smelly courtyard” overlooking a sausage factory. And [the Provisional Government] gives you war, hunger, no bread,” he declared. Lenin went abroad in 1900 and with George Plekhanov Initially, he viewed this as necessary only because of the need to organize clandestinely in czarist Russia, where revolutionary groups were illegal, but later he generalized this model. New Research Artifacts ... one of the exiles traveling with Lenin, would write in a memoir. In September, correctly If you need help writing your assignment, please use our research paper writing service and buy a paper on any topic at affordable price. The press should be not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organizer of the masses. (Of course, Russia was a largely agrarian society, without a This page has been archived and is no longer updated. out ruthlessly at his opponents with sarcasm and scorn. While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience. He saw nothing to fear from a In the morning I boarded the Allegro high-speed train at Helsinki Central Station for the three-and-a-half-hour, 300-mile trip to St. Petersburg. The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation. the real danger as he saw it lay with the liberals and bourgeoisie, whose social system, They hired horse-drawn sleds to head across the frozen river to Finland. Lenin then asserted that Stalin was not cautious enough to be entrusted with the large amount of power he had personally accumulated and that, although Trotsky was the most capable individual on the Central Committee, he was too self-assured and overly inclined toward purely administrative functions. Lenin, who represents a tumultuous force that turned a society upside down, is hardly the kind of figure that Putin, a deeply conservative autocrat, wants to celebrate. Germany saw “in this obscure fanatic one more bacillus to let loose in tottering and exhausted Russia to spread infection,” Crankshaw writes. “From the moment of his discovery of Marx...his way was clear,” the British historian Edward Crankshaw wrote. In 1946, pro-Soviet Finns turned that meeting room into a Lenin Museum, filling it with objects such as Lenin’s high-school honors certificate and iconic portraiture, including a copy of the 1947 painting Lenin Proclaims Soviet Power, by the Russian artist Vladimir Serov. writings, especially those of Karl Marx and the Russian critic and nihilist Nikolai Outstanding among these was Stalin’s use of mass terror in the Great Purge of the mid-1930s, during…. I caught a tram outside the Finland Station, rebuilt as a concrete colossus in the 1960s, and followed Lenin’s route to his next stop in Petrograd: the Kshesinskaya Mansion, an Art Nouveau villa given by Czar Nicholas II to his ballet-star mistress and seized by Bolsheviks in March 1917. At the counter, I fell into conversation with a Swiss journalist who freelances for the venerable Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Lenin’s work What Is To Be Done? The manager sketched out a walk that took me past the northernmost IKEA store in the world, and then under a four-lane highway and down the Storgatan, or main street. Under this pseudonym, he published the political pamphlet What Is To Be Done? SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY. © Stepping onto the outdoor observation deck on a cold, drizzly night, I felt the sting of sea spray and stared up at a huge orange lifeboat, clamped in its frame high above me. His way held the seeds of another tyranny.”. He also suffered Keep up-to-date on: © 2020 Smithsonian Magazine. Inside the waiting room I found what I’d been looking for, a bronze plaque mounted on a blue tile wall: “Here Lenin passed through Haparanda on April 15, 1917, on his way from exile in Switzerland to Petrograd in Russia.”. This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets (CSS) enabled. You can use our professional writing services to buy a custom research paper on any topic and get your high quality paper at affordable price. From there, I took the train south to Tampere, a riverside city where Lenin briefly stopped on his way to Petrograd. Lenin’s Bolsheviks put his theory into practice in Russia during the course of 1917, but within a few years the revolution that they led had degenerated into a one-party regime that bore little resemblance to the ideal of workers’ democracy defended in his State and Revolution (1918). Joshua Hammer is a contributing writer to Smithsonian magazine and the author of several books, including The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World's Most Precious Manuscripts and The Falcon Thief: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery, and the Hunt for the Perfect Bird. Lenin remained impatient with the Mensheviks. end of October, the government of Alexander Kerensky was brought down in a military coup. It was at this time that he began to use the pseudonym "Lenin." revolutionary elite genuinely dedicated to the welfare of the workers and the peasants -- Enraged over food shortages, corruption and the disastrous war against Germany and Austria-Hungary, thousands of demonstrators had filled the streets of Petrograd, clashing with police; soldiers loyal to the czar switched their support to the protesters, forcing Nicholas II to abdicate. Although he was forced into exile until 1917 (except for a brief period during The document has been variously interpreted as an attempt by Lenin to guide the party’s choice of his successor or as an attempt to undermine the efforts of his colleagues who, he thought, were trying to usurp his power. He reorganized the The sea was rougher when Lenin made the crossing aboard a Swedish ferry, Queen Victoria. Why we need research? Political achievements. The Bolsheviks were victorious and assumed total control of the country. Certainly before the early 1920s there was always much disagreement, discussion, and debate in Lenin’s party, in sharp contrast to the monolithic dictatorship that developed under his successor, Joseph Stalin (1878–1953), and to the practice of most Communist parties around the world that claimed, following Stalin, to be committed to the tenets of Marxism-Leninism. “Attention must be devoted principally to raising the workers to the level of revolutionaries,” Lenin wrote in his manifesto What Is to Be Done? imprisoned, and sent into exile to Siberia with other members of the Marxist organization predecessors, Lenin continued to stress the need for a party vanguard to lead the A. Hobson (1858–1940), Lenin argued in Imperialism: The Latest Stage of Capitalism (1917) that the imperialist expansion by the world’s major powers in the late nineteenth century was an outgrowth of the development of monopoly capitalism, in which economic power in the advanced countries is increasingly concentrated in a relatively small number of large firms, industrial capital merges with big banks, and there is growing integration of private companies and the state. That's why we should ration it. brought the Bolsheviks to power through the Military Revolutionary Committees and at the Vladimir Lenin, 1922 Why should a government which is doing what it believes to be right allow itself to be criticized? Drawing on the work of the British economist J. The same year, civil war broke out and Book edited by Gastón Espinosa, Columbia University Press, chapter 10, p. 370 (Lenin in a letter to Maxim Gorky in January 1913), 2009. Since neither the “We did not foresee that the new Russia must contain a good deal of the old Russia: censorship, secret police...and an all-powerful and brutal autocracy.”. The Limmatquai skirted a spacious square and at the far corner I reached the popular Café Odeon. Book by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, p. 34, 1999. he was forced to put a Red Army into the field to do battle with the White Army (who were The pamphlet was written in 1901 and published in 1902 (before the revolution in Russia in 1905 and before the October 1917 Bolshevik conquest of power). Collected Works, Volume 6, p. 366, www.marxists.org. document.write("Feedback "); As I settled into my seat in the first-class car, we sped past birch and pine forests and soon approached the Russian border. “Haven’t you heard the news?” he exclaimed. He promised to pull Russia out of the war and do away with private property. Except for a brief period back in Russia, he remained out of the country until 1917. On this analysis, rivalries and wars between major powers are rooted in the dynamic of capitalist development itself, and can only be eliminated by radically restructuring the economic system and replacing capitalism with socialism. In “Where To Begin”, published in Iskra, No. Soon after the outbreak of the world war in August 1914, Lenin and Krupskaya were in Zurich, living off a small family inheritance. document.write(""); This new and better society is called socialist society. Lenin died on 24 January 1924. He practiced law briefly in Samara he maintained, robbed the worker of his true wealth and incited imperialist wars of His corpse was embalmed and placed in a mausoleum on Moscow's Red Square. The man who dreamed of creating an egalitarian society, in fact dealt ruthlessly with anyone who dared oppose him. However, Lenin was puzzled by the inability of Russian Lenin’s Testament, formally Letter to the Congress, Russian Pismo K Syezdu, two-part document dictated by Vladimir I. Lenin on Dec. 23–26, 1922, and Jan. 4, 1923, … Conditions of Use. (1902), Lenin advocated the formation of a disciplined and centralized organization of professional revolutionaries in Russia to agitate for socialism, rather than the looser grouping favored by other Russian Marxists. peace treaty with germany at Brest-Litovsk in 1918. Long live the worldwide Socialist revolution!”, “Thus,” said Leon Trotsky, the Marxist theoretician and Lenin’s compatriot, “the February revolution, garrulous and flabby and still rather stupid, greeted the man who had arrived with a determination to set it straight both in thought and in will.” The Russian socialist Nikolai Valentinov, in his 1953 memoir, Encounters With Lenin, recalls a fellow revolutionary who described Lenin as “that rare phenomenon—a man of iron will and indomitable energy, capable of instilling fanatical faith in the movement and the cause, and possessed of equal faith in himself.”. Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends. He also enjoyed the outdoors and playing chess. A few days later Putin denounced Lenin and the Bolsheviks for executing Czar Nicholas II, his family and their servants, and for killing thousands of clergy in the Red Terror, and placing a “time bomb” under the Russian state. April 13, 2012 and political economy) in 1887 but was soon expelled for his participation in student The testament, written while Lenin was recovering from a severe stroke, concluded with a recommendation that Stalin be removed from his position as secretary-general of the party. What Happened When Woodrow Wilson Came Down With the 1918 Flu? At its peak, the Lenin Museum drew 20,000 tourists a year—mostly Soviet tour groups visiting nonaligned Finland to get a taste of the West. I have an impression that everybody is lost.”. Free research papers are not written to satisfy your specific instructions. “There was a long thin ribbon of sledges. “I remember that it was night,” Grigory Zinoviev, one of the exiles traveling with Lenin, would write in a memoir. Get kids back-to-school ready with Expedition: Learn! Famed for Art Nouveau décor that has changed little in a century—chandeliers, brass fittings and marble-sheathed walls—the Odeon was one of Lenin’s favorite spots for reading newspapers. From the former PUB store, I crossed a canal on foot to the Gamla Stan, the Old Town, a hive of medieval alleys on a small island, and walked to a smaller island, Skeppsholmen, the site of another monument to Lenin’s sojourn in Sweden. On In 1917, exhausted by World War One, Russia was ripe for change. Ideas are much more fatal things than guns. [See also the Lenin “[T]he wretched third-class cars, the Russian soldiers. “Russia had to have revolution.” Upon earning a law degree from St. Petersburg University in 1891, Lenin became a leader of a Marxist group in St. Petersburg, secretly distributing revolutionary pamphlets to factory workers and recruiting new members. disturbances. “Everything was already familiar and dear to us,” Krupskaya wrote in Reminiscences, recalling the train they boarded in Russianized Finland, which had been annexed by Czar Alexander I in 1809. economy along Marxist guidelines. After an interlude at Kazan University, Ulyanov began reading the works of Marx and Engels, the 19th-century theoreticians of Communism. teacher as well. U.S.-Russian relations are more fraught than in decades. As the train left the station, Lenin reached out the window to bid farewell to a friend. This phase of Lenin's career culminated with the publication of What “The Kaiser is paying for the journey....They’re going to hang you...like German spies.” (Evidence suggests that German financiers did, in fact, secretly fund Lenin and his circle.) Now, on the eve of the centenary of the October Revolution that propelled Lenin to power, Putin is being called upon to pass definitive judgment on a figure that, in some ways, prefigured his own rise. It was Max Eastman obtained portions of it and published them in Since Lenin Died in 1925, and The New York Times printed the entire testament, obtained indirectly through Krupskaya, who had joined the opposition against Stalin, in October 1926. In October 1917 Trotsky, the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, based here, mobilized Red Guards, rebellious troops and sailors and prepared them to seize power from the now deeply unpopular Provisional Government. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin), 1870-1924: Whoever wanted to learn to detest feudal barbarism should be born in Simbursk. Not a handful of rich people, but all the working people must enjoy the fruits of their common labour. This revolutionary vanguard would have the clarity of purpose and independence of action necessary to win a majority to its program during a period of major political and economic crisis, and to lead a successful socialist revolution. “We want to talk about Soviet society and his effect on history, and not make this a glorification thing,” said Kallio, adding that business has begun to pick up, especially among Finnish schoolchildren. A female immigration official scrupulously leafed through my U.S. passport, asked the purpose of my visit (tourism, I replied), frowned, wordlessly stamped it and handed it back to me. Terms of Use The Montreal Review, September 2010. tactician. Why should any man be allowed to buy a printing press and disseminate pernicious opinions calculated to embarrass the government? His father, Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov, was a secondary “Either we’ll be swinging from the gallows in three months or we shall be in power,” he predicted. Can Scientists Stop the Plague of the Spotted Lanternfly? Chto delat'? In Vladimir Lenin: Formation of a revolutionary party. Quotations by Vladimir Lenin, Russian Leader, Born April 22, 1870. Assisted by the Germans, who hoped that he would undermine the Russian war effort, Lenin returned home and started working against the provisional government that had overthrown the tsarist regime. Lenin Read more. Once in the Swedish capital I followed in Lenin’s footsteps down the crowded Vasagatan, the main commercial street, to PUB, once the city’s most elegant department store, now a hotel. Internet Library], | The History Guide |