Bolshevism-Leninism looking into the future!
“Those who do not move do not notice their chains”
(Rosa Luxemburg)
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov 2022
He was barely 51 years old, when on May 25, 1922, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known worldwide as Lenin, suffered a severe attack that caused his legs to fail, he fell to the ground and his eyes became cloudy. The medical reports said that he suffered from “a serious disturbance in the functioning of the blood networks of the brain.” The brightest head of the Russian revolution of 1917 was struck by lightning, from which, despite medical attempts to restore him, he could not fully recover until his death on January 21, 1924.
At that time, Lenin’s main concern was to see how to fight against the monstrous bureaucratic deformations that he had begun to observe within the new workers’ State of the Soviets and within the Bolshevik Party itself, already renamed the Communist Party of Russia – PCR.
Lenin’s illness and the rise of bureaucracy
In the summer of 1922, when he managed to restore consciousness and somewhat recover his faculties, he demanded that the Central Committee of the Party keep him informed of the situation and began to periodically send notes, with precise instructions, just as he began to write down what the He called himself “a bombshell for the next Party Congress”, writing little by little with his secretaries what would become known in history as his “Letters to the Congress”, or more easily called Lenin’s Testament.
He sees the objective situation as so dangerous due to the cancer that bureaucratization entails, that despite medical advice and orders to rest, which he defies and ignores, deciding to attend the Politburo meeting in July 1921. His devastating criticisms At the meeting they are heard by the rest of the Politburo, who formally agree, but ignore him in practice. She criticizes Stalin, whom she claims is “infantilizing” him. It is one of the last times in which he has the opportunity to verify that in reality what Stalin and his bureaucratic clique are doing is betraying him politically.
Later, in his effort to be up to date with the situation and to be able to fight the development of the bureaucracy, between the months of October and November 1921 he appeared at the sessions of the IV Congress of the Communist International, of the Comintern In those meetings his colleagues noticed a “strange” Lenin, sick, with a voice that does not sound with the firmness and integrity of the past. Lenin confesses to those close to him that “his legs tremble, making it difficult for him to remain standing.” On December 16, 1922, VI Lenin suffered a new attack, which condemned him irremediably.
But before becoming completely incapacitated by his serious health problems, he had already managed to write his “Letters to Congress”, in which he had unequivocally left in writing his firm position regarding the situation of the Party and the bureaucracy. He had stated his firm political position that “Stalin must be removed.”
Stalin was always a gray party man, one of those who were nominated as the “practical ones”, limited in theoretical and political abilities, who fit well among the staff as an “organizer”. He was, to put it finally, “a man without ideas of his own.” Perhaps for this reason, although quietly, he always viewed the theoretical leaders, such as Lenin, with envy and a certain contempt, knowing he was incapable of living up to him politically.
During the revolutionary processes he passed without “pain or glory”, being practically unknown by the great revolutionary masses, at those times when the Bolshevik Party was known as the Party of Lenin and Trotsky. Although on more than one occasion he maintained fundamental disagreements with Lenin’s ideas, such as when upon his arrival in Russia he proposed “The April Theses”, whose ideas were the opposite of those he had defended while at the head of the newspaper. Pravda”, with a policy of conciliation with the Provisional Government. His own personal characteristics, together with his manifest political incapacity, made him shy away from debates and he always ended up “silent and scheming in the corners”, silencing his true points of view in the Assemblies and Congresses.
The General Secretary did not exist as such in the Bolshevik Party and in the early 1920s she was created to handle the organizational affairs of the Party. For her, “a practical” was chosen, J. Stalin. It was clear that in those days neither Lenin, nor Trotsky, nor any of the other leaders of the Party still thought that “that cook who prepared spicy dishes”, Stalin, was going to meanly use that organizational position to nuclear power around himself at the same time. nascent bureaucratic caste, which developed, increased and strengthened to the extent that the problems for the revolution increased. The bureaucratic caste gradually replaced and supplanted the masses, the Party’s own militancy, the activists and representatives of the workers, peasants and soldiers in the Soviets.
Lenin, on the YouTube Channel of La Marx International
Specifically, literally, Lenin said in his “Letters to the XIII Congress” of the Party that “Stalin is too abrupt, and this defect, fully tolerable in our environment and in the relations between us, communists, becomes intolerable in office.” That is why I propose to the comrades that they think of a way to transfer Stalin to another position and to appoint to this position another man who differs from Comrade Stalin in all other respects only by one advantage, namely: that be more tolerant, more loyal, more correct and more attentive to your comrades, less capricious, etc.”
The state of affairs within the Party and the workers’ State had gone so far, much further than Lenin himself had managed to visualize, that finally the Triumvirate (Stalin, Kamanev and Zinoviev), after Kamanev read the document to the others , they forced a compromise so that the XIII Congress as a whole would not learn about those “Letters to Congress”, known as “Lenin’s Testament”, which were finally hidden for decades in a drawer.
The agreement and conditions reached in the Triumvirate were:
· The will would be read by representatives of the Party leadership to each regional delegation separately.
· Taking notes would not be allowed.
· The will would not be mentioned during the plenary session of Congress.
Stalin, in his capacity as General Secretary, turned Head of the rising bureaucracy, managed to intercept “Lenin’s notes written to his secretaries” and maneuvered to prevent them from being known to the entire XIII Congress of the Party, hiding them. to the Party for years, until they were finally published for the first time in a pamphlet by Trotsky, which he published in 1934. Later their veracity was confirmed by the documents that were published during the period called “perestroika – glasnost.” “, by Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. This undoubtedly made it much easier, contrary to Lenin’s positions, for Joseph Stalin to be re-elected General Secretary at the XIII Congress.
VI Lenin continued to live for some time longer, as almost “a living dead man”, because he was no longer able to speak or move, until finally on January 21, 1924, now one hundred years ago, his physical death was certified by the doctors.
The USSR in critical moments
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s illness was not, in retrospect, sudden. Long before he became the most prominent leader of Bolshevism, he had been suffering from severe headaches and migraines, which left him semi-paralyzed. Then his partner and wife, Nadia Krupskaya, was the one who forced him to take long walks in nature and rest from his activity.
The historian Hélène Carrère d’Encausse (who last year won the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences), explained in a biography about Lenin, published in Spanish by the Espasa publishing house, that “with the revolution, an intense activity, like never before, had known before, the pressure of events, everything came together to bear its weight on his nervous balance.
When Lenin suffered the first serious symptoms of his illness, in the summer of 1921, in which he felt very fatigued and had severe headaches, it was in an objective context where the USSR was on the verge of complete collapse. We can say that the events were wreaking havoc at all levels in the revolution and in the revolutionaries.
In those months in Minsk and Gomel (currently known as Belarus) violent pogroms were taking place, with Jews accused of hiding food that the population needed. The Volga peasants were facing the police and the army, who were requisitioning the crops in a context where hunger was growing in the countryside as well. In general there was a real danger that the peasants could revolt against the Bolsheviks and this seemed like it could also have contagion effects on the workers in several important cities. The looting of grain, loaded on trains to the cities, occurred in the middle of the journeys. ….
During those months of Lenin’s rest, the national question also intensified, with the resurgence of the Great-Russian chauvinism of the bureaucracy, which increased and provoked even more the state of anxiety of Lenin, who had always firmly defended the national rights of the oppressed nationalities, including the firm defense of their right to self-determination.
Stalin, who was of Georgian origin, had fallen ideologically into the camp of repugnant ideas and behaviors of “Great-Russian chauvinism.” When problems arose in Georgia he sent a Commission, with Ordzhonikidze at the head, to “resolve differences within the Party in Georgia.”
When Lenin learned that Ordzhonikidze had even physically attacked Party leaders in Georgia, he was so scandalized that he decided to take the matter of defending the Georgians into his own hands, agreeing with Trotsky to defend this matter. .
In his Letters to the XIII Congress Lenin wrote :
“It seems to me that I have incurred a serious fault before the workers of Russia for not having intervened with sufficient energy and harshness in the decided problem of autonomization, which is officially called, I believe, the problem of the union of the Soviet socialist republics.
This summer, when the problem arose, I was ill, and then in the fall I was overconfident that I would recover and that the October and December plenary sessions would give me the opportunity to intervene in the problem. But I couldn’t attend either the October plenary session (dedicated to this problem) or the December one, so I haven’t touched it almost at all.
I have only been able to talk with Comrade Dzerzhinsky, who has returned from the Caucasus and told me what this problem is like in Georgia. I was also able to exchange a couple of words with Comrade Zinoviev and express my fears on the matter. What Comrade Dzerzhinsky, who chaired the commission sent by the Central Committee to “investigate” the Georgia incident, told me could only leave me with the greatest fears. If things turned out in such a way that Ordzhonikidze could resort to the use of physical violence, as Comrade Dzerzhinsky told me, we can imagine what a puddle we have fallen into. Apparently, this whole enterprise of “autonomization” was false and untimely at all.
It is said that the unity of the device was necessary. Where did these statements come from? Could it not be from that same Russian apparatus that, as I already indicated in one of the previous issues of my diary, we have taken from tsarism, having limited ourselves to lightly anointing it with Soviet oil?…
I think there is no need for further explanations or to go into more details when it comes to Bolsheviks, communists. And I believe that in this case, in relation to the Georgian nation, we have a typical example of how the truly proletarian attitude requires extreme caution, delicacy and compromise on our part. The Georgian who disdains this aspect of the problem, who disdainfully launches accusations of “social-nationalism” (when he himself is not only an authentic and true “social-national”, but a vast Russian henchman), that Georgian hurts, in essence, the interests of proletarian class solidarity, because nothing retards the development and consolidation of this solidarity as much as injustice on the national level, and the “offended” components of a nationality are not as sensitive as the feeling of equality. and the undermining of that equality by their proletarian comrades, even if they do so through negligence, even if the thing seems like a joke. Therefore, in this case, it is preferable to exaggerate in terms of concessions and softness towards national minorities, than to err on the side of default. Therefore, in this case, the vital interest of proletarian solidarity, and consequently of the proletarian class struggle, requires that we never look formally at the national problem, but that we always take into consideration the obligatory difference in the attitude of the proletarian of the oppressed (or small) nation towards the oppressing (or large) nation.”
The matter of Joseph Stalin’s “new Great Russian” positions, together with the news he received that he had seriously offended, by telephone, Nadezhda Krupskaya, his companion and wife, while he was bedridden, brought him to make the categorical decision to break all types of relations, political and personal, with Stalin, relations that he would never reestablish.
The dangers that threatened the revolution were multiple and Lenin, still ill, was well aware of all this. In view of the celebration of the XIII Congress, he established an agreement with Trotsky so that he would take charge of the Georgian defense. The Congress also had to elect a new leadership for the Party and hence Lenin’s insistence that it was necessary to “remove Stalin from his position.”
With the aim of fighting the political battle to fight against the growing difficulties that the Russian revolution faced, Lenin wrote a “controversial” text, raising these existing difficulties and stating what tasks the communists had before them. . He proposed that this text be published in the official newspaper “Pravda”, of which at that time Nikolai Bukharin was its Editor-in-Chief. But after reading Lenin’s text he was filled with doubts and fears, because in the text Lenin very clearly repudiated Stalin’s authoritarian practices and tendencies.
The following information can help us understand the situation at that time: After reading the text, Bukharin brought it to the Party’s Politburo for debate. Things had gotten to such a point that one member even raised the possibility of editing a single copy of the text, to send it to him and therefore deceive him. In the end things did not go so far out of “boxes” and Lenin’s text was printed and published.
In these paradoxes of life. In his capacity as General Secretary of the Party, Stalin was designated as responsible for monitoring and ensuring that Lenin received good care, therefore responsible for ensuring all matters relating to Lenin’s health. But this meant, neither more nor less, the same as putting a tiger to monitor the state of health of a deer, or any other animal desirable for the tiger to eat. From that position Stalin began an intense activity of intrigues and maneuvers with the objective of “completely isolating the patient from the outside world.”
With the excuse that “the doctors recommended more and more rest for the patient”, Stalin actually tried to prevent Lenin from having any contact with the rest of the Party leaders, particularly with Trotsky. Like almost nothing in life, this was no coincidence, Stalin was very aware that Lenin was getting closer and closer, in all fundamental political and organizational aspects, to the other theoretical genius of Bolshevism, Leon Trotsky, whom he saw as his main and fundamental rival when it comes to ascending Stalin to absolute power in Russia. Under the excuse of medical recommendations, he also prohibited Lenin from continuing to dictate any more political notes to his secretaries.
This is explained clearly by Carrère (Dzerhinski, the fanatic and implacable founder of the Cheka revived in Moscow by order of Putin) , when he clearly states that “Lenin will soon suspect that it is not the doctors who are at the origin of the slogans that Stalin tries to enforce, but it is Stalin, on the contrary, who forces doctors to give such strict instructions.
Despite all this, VI Lenin still maintained moments of magnificent mental clarity and tried to carry out certain activities that he considered of utmost importance in his last and decisive fight: the fight against the counterrevolutionary excrement of the bureaucratic caste that was gradually rising to power.
As best he could, Lenin dictated new notes to his wife Nadia, with precise instructions to Leon Trotsky. It was here, when Stalin learned of this, that he flew into a rage, rudely and brutally insulting Lenin’s life partner and comrade, whom he even dared to threaten with “taking disciplinary measures within the Party against her.” .
As we said, when Lenin found out about these threats and behavior of Stalin in the phone call he made to his wife, he immediately demanded and forced the Secretary General to apologize. Already at that time Stalin was so absorbed by his arrogance and his growing power, which the whole world was beginning to know and suffer, that he simply bowed his head before Lenin like a genuine political bastard and did not answer anything. Lenin cut off all relations with this Chief of Bureaucrats.
A 20th century Marxist
Likewise, as we said above, the position of General Secretary of the Party, which became the most important in the USSR, still at the end of 1923 and beginning of 1924, until after the XIII Congress of the Party, the leaders of the Committee Central, the leadership of the Party and the communist militancy itself still considered it as a routine position, without much political importance, of a purely administrative nature. Even so, in his last moments of lucidity Lenin tried to warn the Party that a political war was opening against Stalin and the bureaucratic clique that he was forming around the General Secretary.
In one of his last shorthand notes to his secretaries Lenin warned against Stalin in the following terms (the same Lenin who was always extremely careful when choosing words, which always have a specific meaning): “Stalin is too rude and brutal (. …) That is why I propose to the comrades to think about a way to displace Stalin.”
As we said above, the one who had been designated “Lenin’s political nurse.” Stalin managed to intercept these “notes” and managed to hide them from the Party, to prevent Trotsky from taking over from Lenin, as the most politically prestigious figure of the Central Committee, while he was able to be re-elected again as General Secretary, against the position of Lenin, ending up converting said Department, little by little, into the “center of gravity of the formation and strengthening of the bureaucratic caste”, the true center of Power of Stalinism, which ended up expelling the working class from political power in the party and in Soviet institutions.
The Triumvirate gradually began a campaign against Trotsky and what they began to call “Trotskyism” (a term that was invented by the Stalinist lackeys), in order to prevent him from being Lenin’s natural successor after his death. It was thus when Lenin died that Stalin was in charge of organizing the funeral and informing the Russian and world working class of the event.
Stalinism embalmed Lenin’s corpse and attempted to do the same with his ideas, perspectives, program and methods, turning the revolutionary into a harmless icon, which they could display without representing a problem of legitimacy for the new bureaucratic caste, which he represented in first person Stalin himself.
After Lenin’s death, only the Left Opposition that was organized within the Leon Trotsky Party and its supporters continued to defend the legacy of the October Revolution, the genuine ideas and methods of Leninist Bolshevism. For this they, as a whole, paid a high price, including being murdered en masse by direct order of Stalin himself. Many of the Oppositionists were shot to death in the concentration camps while singing “The Internationale.”
The bureaucracy, led by Joseph Stalin, continued its upward path towards total power, destroying each and every one of the ideas, methods and practices of the Party during Lenin’s lifetime. To do this, they had to not only embalm the corpse of the revolutionary leader, but also mutilate his theoretical works, which in some cases were prohibited in practice. The Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party that allowed the Russian working class to take power in October 1917 was physically annihilated, following the death of Lenin. León Trotsky was the last assassinated, by a Stalinist agent in Mexico in 1940. From that headquarters of the revolution, only Stalin remained alive.
The bureaucracy played a truly criminal role in all aspects. Although in words and in propaganda they declared themselves the successors of Lenin in the USSR, starting with Stalin, they did not hesitate to mutilate his ideas and writings, in order to rise above their adversaries, who like Trotsky were light years away from Stalin. and his cronies in political and theoretical capacity.
But that did not matter to the bureaucracy, which had seen in Stalin its worthy representative, willing to falsify the history, ideas, perspectives and even the photographs of the revolution, where they made those whom Stalin considered disappear from them. his enemies, who were disassociated and artificially “confronted” Lenin, the genuine historical leader of Bolshevism.
Lenin’s ideas and perspectives live on, in the face of the rot of capitalism and the useless corpse of Stalinism
Today, the same day we write these notes, marks 100 years since the physical death of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. However, we can say that Lenin’s political and theoretical legacy not only remains fully valid, but is even more so than at any other time he was. His extensive written works, which occupy 55 volumes in their translation into Spanish, represent a legacy and treasure of political wealth, philosophical, political, economic theory and the correct methods of building leadership, of the revolutionary organization that the working class world continues to need in the present to address its historical tasks, the fight for the socialist transformation of society.
At the beginning of the 90’s the Stalinist regimes, in the former USSR and other countries in Eastern Europe, collapsed miserably, as a result of the dead end to which the bureaucracy inherited from Stalin led the economy and society in these countries. . To this day, old Stalinists still roam the margins of the labor movement, reduced to their minimum historical expression, who with their old stories and lies no longer manage to deceive many people.
While more and more thousands of workers and young people around the world are understanding the need to organize and thus be able to fight to change the world, with the genuine ideas of Bolshevism. The theoretical ideas of Lenin and Trotsky will end up finding the way to allow the most conscious workers, the most revolutionary young people, to be able to build the vehicle, the revolutionary leadership, which represents the necessary previous step to guarantee that this struggle will be successful. the fight for social change. In this broad and dialectical sense, the ideas, program and methods of Lenin’s Bolshevism, which were maintained and enriched by the later struggle of Trotsky and the genuine Bolshevik-Leninists, represent the true future of humanity.
The collapse and collapse of the Stalinist regimes showed the entire world the moral misery of the bureaucratic caste, which rose to power on the shoulders of the Russian working class of 1917, withering and soiling the very name of genuine Bolshevism and that of VI Lenin himself. . That same bureaucratic caste that did not hesitate to completely go over to the field of bourgeois counterrevolution. Those events put an end to that bureaucratic scourge that usurped the revolution, which became the new bourgeois class in Russia and other countries. From then on they will no longer be able to play the counterrevolutionary role that they played on every occasion that arose, the role of preventing the bourgeoisie from being defeated by the processes of the socialist proletarian revolution.
