Quotes About Lenin

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

But to be a Bolshevik in the early years was not so much to accept a particular set of beliefs as it was to gravitate into the orbit of Lenin as a political mentor, revolutionary strategist, and personality.

Not he but Trotsky had risen to the heights of glory as Lenin's right-hand man in the Revolution and the Civil War.

the revolutionary party dictatorship had in Lenin an acknowledged individual supreme leader of such pre-eminence that it could properly be described as a "Lenin regime.

Since the party was the ruling political authority in the Soviet state, it was not as chief of government but as head of the party that Lenin acted as supreme leader.

Since Lenin wrote as he spoke, his political writings had something of the compelling quality of his political speeches.

Lenin had managed to communicate to people who yearned for socialist revolution without seriously expecting it a feeling that such a revolution was a real possibility, and in doing this he was ministering to their deep-seated need for confidence in their own commitment.

Marxism and the National Question was basically Stalin's, and the collaboration with Lenin that underlay it seems to have been mutually beneficial.

In the closing period of the World War, according to Trotsky, it took Lenin a full year to secure agreement to his proposal to change the official name of the party from "Social Democratic" to "Communist" as a means of making an organizational break with Social Democratic Marxism on an international scale.[67

Without a third revolution to carry off, there could be no second Lenin.

It is hard to believe that Lenin would not have won the case had his health permitted him to argue it before the court of the party congress. But when the

Although Lenin did not directly take issue with it, his own outlook differed radically.

Its platform, subsequently published abroad, was suppressed inside Russia. Its efforts to arouse worker support by clandestinely distributing such materials as the text of Lenin's testament and by organizing street demonstrations in Moscow and Leningrad on November 7, 1927, the tenth anniversary of the Revolution, were foiled by the authorities.

Lenin approved and relied heavily upon them as a source of funds to finance political activity. With his connivance they continued in the aftermath of 1905 despite the fact that a Menshevik-sponsored resolution forbidding them was passed at the party's Fourth Congress—the so-called Unity Congress—held in Stockholm in 1906.

Although these operations (known among the revolutionaries as "exes") aroused much opposition in the party, especially from the Mensheviks, Lenin approved and relied heavily upon them as a source of funds to finance political activity. With his connivance they continued in the aftermath of 1905 despite the fact that a Menshevik-sponsored resolution forbidding them was passed at the party's Fourth Congress—the so-called Unity Congress—held in Stockholm in 1906.

One factor in their success was the vigor with which they adopted the general Menshevik-favored tactic of participating in the elections for the first Duma. The Bolsheviks, meeting for a conference in the Finnish town of Tammerfors in December 1905, decided (over Lenin's objections) to boycott these elections.

The portion of the "Letter to the Congress" kept secret at the time of writing remained unopened during the first few months after Lenin died. It was probably fortunate for Stalin's emotional equilibrium in those tense months that he continued in ignorance of the fact that Lenin had intended to unseat him from the post of general secretary. The blow was hard enough to sustain when it came.

In these early writings, as it turned out, Plekhanov was laying the theoretical foundations not of the Russian Marxist political movement as a whole but of its Menshevik wing. The opposing, Bolshevik, wing, of which Lenin became leader, showed the influence of some of the very ideas Plekhanov was attacking. But not until much later did all this become clear.

he advocated a strategy of pressing forward from the stage of democratic revolution represented in the Provisional Government to that of socialist revolution via the seizure of power and establishment of a "dictatorship of the proletariat." In an effort to validate this position ideologically, Lenin went back to his Marxist texts during an interval of forced inactivity during 1917 and wrote The State and Revolution, his principal work of political theory.