Later in this issue, Gary Saul Morson writes about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s masterwork The Gulag Archipelago. Much of that book is devoted to the details of the dehumanizing brutality of the Stalinist regime: its terrifying sadism and staggering assault on basic human dignity. The Stalinist horror show, in which terror was perfected in the forge of deliberately arbitrary deployment, had its roots in the brief but brutal reign of Vladimir Lenin. This year marks the centenary of Lenin’s death. In January 1924, the consummate communist, having blighted as many lives as he could in his two years of rule, finally shuffled off his mortal coil, aged fifty-three. “That was young,” you may say. But we reply, “Not nearly young enough.”
It is worth pausing to remember the hideous legacy of that ice-cold totalitarian. What we have in mind is not so much Lenin’s butcher’s bill as his more general modus operandi. Estimates of the number of people Lenin had tortured, maimed, and murdered vary, but are always well into the millions. But what may be just as creepy is his model of government.
We were reminded of this when, late last year, Miguel Cardona, President Biden’s secretary of education, gave a talk to explain education-department priorities. Promoting a kinder, friendlier department, he said, “I think it was President Reagan [who] said, ‘We’re from the government. We’re here to help.’”
We suppose that was intended to be reassuring. What Reagan actually said, however, as was pointed out about ten thousand times on social media, was the opposite. “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”
Lenin would have known exactly what Reagan meant. The difference is that Reagan’s observation was meant as a warning, an admonition about the dangers of overweening bureaucracy. Lenin, by contrast, regarded the terrifying side of unlimited government as a feature, not a bug. He liked the terror. It has always been thus with budding totalitarians. While Maximilien de Robespierre was a piker by comparison with Lenin, he nonetheless sang from the same chorus sheet, doing his best to disfigure France in the brief time allotted him. An ardent student of that supreme political narcissist Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robespierre was always going on about “virtue,” though he conflated the emotion of virtue with what a Marxist might call “really existing” virtue. Above all, Robespierre knew that achieving the utopia of his dreams would not be easy or painless, which is why he spoke frankly about virtue and its “emanation,” terror.
Karl Marx made a note of that emanation, and in due course his student Lenin aced the class. As Winston Churchill noted in The World Crisis, his magnificent history of the Great War,
Lenin was to Karl Marx what Omar was to Mahomet. He translated faith into acts. He devised the practical methods by which the Marxian theories could be applied in his own time.
The cynosure of Lenin’s character, Churchill wrote, was “implacable vengeance . . . . His purpose to save the world; his method to blow it up.”
The quality of Lenin’s revenge was impersonal. Confronted with the need of killing any particular person he showed reluctance—even distress. But to blot out a million, to proscribe entire classes, to light the flames of intestine war in every land with the inevitable destruction of the well-being of whole nations—these were sublime abstractions.
The perfection of that sublimity lay partly in its arbitrariness, partly in its brutality. As Lenin observed in 1906, the dictatorship of the proletariat depended upon “authority untrammeled by any laws, absolutely unrestricted by any rules whatever and based directly on force.” Thus it is, as Leszek Kołakowski noted in Main Currents of Marxism, that, for Lenin, “ ‘true’ democracy” requires the “abolition of all institutions that have hitherto been regarded as democratic.” Freedom of the press, for example, Lenin dismissed as “so-called” freedom of the press, a bourgeois deceit. Sound familiar?
Lenin said he wanted to vest power in the people. But he insisted that the people had no business in deciding what their interests actually were. (Again, students of Rousseau will hear echoes of his proto-totalitarian idea of the “general will,” which he applauded, and the tawdry particular wills of individuals, which he was always ready to subjugate.)
At the center of the totalitarian impulse is the belief that ultimately freedom belongs only to the state, that the individual should not be treated as a free actor but rather, as Lenin put it, “ ‘a cog and a screw’ of one single great Social-Democratic mechanism.” Of course, few canny bureaucrats quote Lenin today, his association with tyranny having knocked him out of the great game of political PR.
But is he completely gone? One of the most depressing recent spectacles has been the rehabilitation of people and movements that, just a few years back, seemed safely consigned to the underworld. But watching Eloi-like college students praising Hamas, chanting genocidal formulae such as “From the river to the sea,” even excusing the incontinent maunderings of Osama bin Laden, makes us wonder whether any enormity is sufficiently grave to overcome the moral anesthesia of the entitled class. Someone once described the on-again, off-again socialist Philip Rahv as a “born-again Leninist”—their number, it turns out, is legion.
Which is why we predict an effort, perhaps sotto voce at first, to rehabilitate Lenin. After all, he articulated exactly the desire of everyone, from the creepy Doyen of Davos, Klaus Schwab, on down, who tells you that he’s from the global government and he’s here to help. What socialism implies above all, said Lenin, is “keeping account of everything.” Could the covid police, the bureaucrats pushing a cashless society to gain complete control over your spending, or the climate-change fanatics who want to limit your travel and impound your gas stove have put it any better?
Keeping track of your healthcare, disposing of your money, regulating your food and drink and ration of tobacco: there they all are, ready, able, and willing to run your life. Just sign on the dotted line and those repurposed nannies will take care of . . . everything. Note the ambiguous signification of the phrase “take care of.”
What we have seen in recent years is the hideous marriage of political correctness and bureaucratic triumphalism. Its offspring are the chimerical multitude of soft tyrannies we observe all about us today—along with an enervation of spirit that renders the public ever less able to respond to the casual indignities that have become such a prominent part of daily life.
Reviewing the early years of the Bolshevik Revolution, Kołakowski noted the “superhuman energy” through which the party was able to exact enormous sacrifices from the workers and peasants. It “saved Soviet power” but did so “at the cost of economic ruin, immense human suffering, the loss of millions of lives, and the barbarization of society.” We in America are not there yet, not quite, but we are teetering on the threshold, which is why it is an opportune moment to remember Vladimir Lenin and reject utterly his monstrous legacy.
