Comrade Lenin Enters Eternity

A century since Lenin's death. January 21, 1924, frigid, inclement weather. Koba Dzhugashvili and Grisha Zinoviev are running the show. They act together as the Grand Priests of Leninism. Trotsky is conspicuously absent. They had made sure he would not be in Moscow for the funeral. He’s in the Cuacasus in a sanatorium, the Politburo (via Stalin) urged him not to rush to Moscow. Not attending the quasi-religious ceremony was a symbolic debacle. Newsreels and photographs immortalize Stalin’s presence and Trotsky’s absence. Celebrated as the Teacher of the World Proletariat, he was the founder of the first "workers' and peasants' dictatorship" led by a revolutionary Marxist party. His party. He saw himself as the true interpreter of the Marxian creed. He defended his revolutionary vision against all odds. Stubbornly, jealously, vindictively. As a polemicist he was ruthlessly vitriolic. He banned factions within the Bolshevik Party, but he had been himself a serial factionalist.

To write about Marx in the form of a comprehensive balance sheet as if Lenin had never existed or was just an aberration having nothing to do with Marx's philosophy, is the ultimate intellectual dishonesty. I would call this a dialectical trick and thosde who resort to it dialectical tricksters. I don't say that Lenin was the only legitimate heir to the author of "Das Kapital." Of course he was not. But for the political religion founded by Marx, Lenin was the only successful apostle. The founding father believed in immanent triumph, not in transcendent mirages. Antonio Gramsci's analogy works quite well: Marx was Jesus, Lenin was St Paul. In this respect, Leszek Kołakowski remains the best guide in the efforts to assess the political, moral, and social consequences of the doctrine associated with Karl Marx's ideas and struggles: A theory which had claimed to result in universal emancipation ended up as a justification for universal bondage...

Lenin's funeral coincided with an intensification of the fierce struggle for the late leader's mantle. No Bolshevik luminary could claim to be a new Lenin. The competition was for the title of true apostolic heir. The farewell to Lenin lasted a whole week, until January 27. In addition to the nominal head of state, Mikhail Kalinin, the triumvirs were actually running the show: party boss, Joseph Stalin; Comintern Chairman Grigory Zinoviev; and acting chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, Lev Kamenev. The history of Bolshevism under Lenin's guidance had been one of permanent purges (chistkas). Since late 1923, Trotskyism was denounced as a heresy. In turn, Trotsky accused Stalin of being responsible for the "bureaucratic degeneration" of Lenin's party. Each faction accused the other of Bonapartism. In his eulogy, Stalin pledged unconditional dedication to “fulfiling Comrade Lenin’s behests.” In the forthcoming years, he smashed all oppositional groups. First, first the Troskyists, then “United Left,” than the “Right.” In 1939, aqt the 18th Party Congress, all but two of Lenin’s Politburo members had been executed as “{traitors, wreckers, filthy spies.” The two were Stalin himself and Lev Trotysky, a political refugee in Mexican exile. On August 21, 1940, NKVD agfent Ramon Mercader hit Trotsky’s skull from the back with an ice axe. The founder and first commander of the Red Army died two days later.