Quotes from Robert C. Tucker

The internal developmental process was always connected in Lenin's mind with external events, in particular with the prospects of assistance resulting from worker revolutions in other countries. "The complete victory of socialist revolution is unthinkable in one country," he said on November 8, 1918.

His political writings around the turn of the century reflect the emergence of Leninism (a word he himself never used) as an amalgam of the Russian revolutionary heritage and Marxism. One of his themes was the paramount importance of the practical side of the movement—program, organization, and tactics.

It requires the most active cooperation of at least several advanced countries, among which we cannot classify Russia.

Such movements typically attract persons who are experiencing some form of acute distress—social, economic, psychic, or a combination of these—and who respond eagerly to the promise of deliverance from it. An individual in whom this promise appears to be embodied, whether by virtue of his coming forward with a gospel of radical change or his ability to show the way to change, is a candidate for the role of charismatic leader.

The Tasks of the Russian Social Democrats, a pamphlet written in Siberia in 1897 for uncensored publication abroad and, appropriately, the first of his writings to appear under the name "Lenin.

His followers, who are also typically his disciples, freely accept his leadership because they perceive him to be the possessor of extraordinary qualities or powers; and this "recognition" of his special qualification is seen by Weber as decisive for the validity of charisma.[

Indeed, we may hypothesize that the followers' spontaneous emotional tendency to surround the leader with a personality cult is one of the characteristic signs of charisma.

Lenin rejected the idea of confining the revolutionary political struggle to a small group's conspiracy to seize power. The battle against absolutism should consist, he said, not in hatching plots but in training, disciplining, and organizing the workers, in propaganda and agitation among them.

party crisis that prevailed from 1907 to 1912. That period of reaction saw a catastrophic decline in party fortunes. Discouragement, apathy, and political quietism took over in the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution. The party practically fell apart as former activists deserted it en masse and arrests took a heavy toll of those still willing to carry on. By the summer of 1909, not more than five or six of the Bolshevik underground committees were still functioning regularly in Russia.

It has been observed that one common characteristic of "classical populism" in all its forms was the feeling that the "Russian state of bureaucratic absolutism has been the primordial enemy of the popular masses and their intrinsic communal-socialist tendencies."[

Confronted with urgent practical problems centering in the need to industrialize without delay, the collective party leadership shifted the center of gravity more to economics than to "culturalizing." The party debate on how best to build socialism in Russia turned largely into a debate about industrialization,

It had taken about two centuries for the feudal system of economy to show its superiority over the slave system, Stalin said, and about a hundred years or less for the bourgeois system to prove its superiority over feudal economy. Because technological progress had now greatly accelerated the pace of development and change, however, the socialist system of economy could advance with "giant strides" and out-perform capitalism in a much shorter period.

Consequently, Lenin and his followers went down in history as the Bolsheviki (majorityites); their opponents, as the Mensheviki (minorityites).

The proposal for a Russia-based party organ carried an overtone of self-nomination to the editorial role that Stalin in fact came to play when Pravda was founded in Petersburg three years later. In a resolution of January 22, 1910, written by Stalin, the Baku party committee not only repeated the proposal for an all-Russian party organ but called for "the transfer of the (directing) practical center to Russia.

Not only was he appealing to the urge prevalent in the party to concentrate attention and effort on the tasks of Soviet development, he was hinting that a fully socialist economy could be created in a comparatively short time.

Organizational questions," Lenin's views on them in particular, were a fateful bone of contention when fifty-seven delegates from Russia and abroad met in Brussels in July 1903 for the Russian Social Democratic Workers' party's Second Congress—a meeting with more claim than the earlier one in Minsk to be considered the constituent congress.

The socialist doctrines that appeared in the first half of the nineteenth century, Marxism included, were gospels of radical change addressed to the alleviation of this misery. Friedrich Engels himself was one of the first to point out the resemblance between this historical situation and that in which Christianity arose.

when the Bolshevik faction was recast as a separate party at the Prague conference in 1912, the Central Committee, now all-Bolshevik in composition, not only co-opted Stalin but also elected him as one of the four members of a "Russian Bureau" for direction of party activities inside Russia.

During a few years of unpeaceful factional coexistence there were efforts, sponsored by Trotsky among others, toward unification. The split became formal and irrevocable in 1912 when Lenin called an all-Bolshevik meeting in Prague, where his faction constituted itself the "Russian Social Democratic Workers' party (Bolshevik).

Trotsky contended that Lenin was more of a Jacobin than a Marxist and made his often-quoted prediction that "these methods lead, as we shall yet see, to this: the party organization is substituted for the party, the Central Committee is substituted for the party organization, and finally the 'dictator' is substituted for the Central Committee.

On a questionnaire for a district party conference in Moscow in 1931, the one-time seminary dropout replied as follows to the question on schooling: "Kicked out of an orthodox theological seminary for Marxist propaganda."[144]

Born in strife, the original party of Russian Marxists died in schism.

But he did play a commanding part in the larger party controversy of the time by taking up "socialism in one country" as a political and ideological platform. This he did at the end of 1924, when he spoke out for the first time on building socialism in an isolated Soviet Russia.

Far more than Menshevism and other Russian radical groups of the time, Bolshevism was a leader-centered movement. As a faction and later as an independent party, it was essentially Lenin's political following in Russian Marxism. As Menshevik opponents liked to say, it was "Lenin's sect.