Remembering Lenin

Who is there today who does not know Lenin and does not blow his head when his name is uttered?… For the crores of poor people of the world he has become a star that lights their way towards freedom… Lenin was born in Russia. But he belongs to the whole world, and we too seek our path in that light. It is but proper that we remember this great man and strengthen ourselves with his memory.
 —Jawaharlal Nehru
 (From the Hindi message on Lenin Day, 1938)

GENERALLY, Trotsky’s role in the Revolution is regarded only as second to that of Lenin. There are some who would not concede the first place even to Lenin. Having known both the men rather intimately for a long enough time, I came to the conclusion that there was no comparison. They lived on entirely different planes. Therefore no clash was possible. The one was a thoroughgoing subjectivist, looking upon the world as a stage set for himself to enact a great drama. The other was primarily a philosopher having a detached, objective view of the world and considering himself a part of it. Egoism and unshaken courage of conviction were respectively their outstanding characteristics. There can be no comparison, unless these two characteristics are confounded as the different expressions of the immeasurable mystic factor called personality.

The soul of Lenin’s personality, if I may use use one of those delightfully vague terms, expressed itself in his creation of the Bolshevik Party. Trotsky was neither a co-creator nor a part of the creation. That fact alone is the evidence of the fundamental difference in the temperament and the outlook of the two men. One was anxious to play the towering individual with a mission. The other was the simple man of the mass—the Massenmensch, as the Germans call it. Lenin believed in his power to build, to create something great. But he knew that he must create out of material which was not within himself. In other words, the unfolding of his creative genius was dependent upon numerous other factors, which were independent of himself. That was Lenin’s greatness. In that sense, Trotsky can hardly be called a great man. It is not a mere accident that Trotsky did perform great deeds, and actually rose up to the stature of a great man only during the short period that he came under the influence of Lenin and allowed his subjectivism to be guided by the sober wisdom of the objective philosopher.
 —M.N. Roy
 (Written shortly after Leon Trotsky’s death in 1940)

THE works of Lenin and his ideals of socialism remained for us an inexhaustible source of dialectical creative thought, theoretical wealth and political sagacity. His very image is an undying example of lofty moral strength, all-round spiritual culture and selfless devotion to the cause of the people and to socialism. Lenin lives on in the minds and hearts of millions of people. Breaking down all the barriers erected by scholastics and dogmatists, an interest in Lenin’s legacy and a thirst to know him more extensively in the original grew as negative phenomena in society accumulated….

Today we have a better understanding of Lenin’s last works, which were in essence his political bequest, and we more clearly understand why these works appeared. Gravely ill, Lenin was deeply concerned for the future of socialism. He perceived the lurking dangers for the new system. We, too, must understand this concern. He saw that socialism was encountering enormous problems and that it had to contend with a great deal of what the bourgeois revolution had failed to accomplish. Hence the utilisation of methods which did not seem to be intrinsic to socialism itself or, at least, diverged in some respects from generally accepted classical notions of socialist development…

In the West, Lenin is often portrayed as an advocate of authoritarian methods of adminstration. This is a sign of total ignorance of Lenin’s ideas and, not infrequently, of their deliberate distortion. In effect, according to Lenin, socialism and democracy are indivisible. By gaining democratic freedoms the working masses come to power. It is also only in conditions of expanding democracy that they can consolidate and realise that power. There is another remarkably true idea of Lenin’s: the broader the scope of the work and the deeper the reform, the greater the need to increase the interest in it and convince millions and millions of people of its necessity. This means that if we have set out for a radical and all-round restructuring, we must also unfold the entire potential of democracy.
 —Mikhail Gorbachev
 (Perestroika, 1987, pp. 25-26, 32)

Lenin
 BISHNU DEY

Where accidents of birth or whims of money
 Determine the World’s value, high or low,
 And gambling greed flits where the wealthy go,
 Man’s bagatelle, a pawn, not worth a penny.
 Thru this external fault, mankind has been
 For ages dark, paltry amid profusion.
 But empire’s siren-song, of Commerce queen,
 Now ends, is changed in Life’s great revolution.
 Each his own value now—life’s based on reason.
 Now starts the blade sharp conflict that’s worldwide
 Of mind and body, that new forms allow,
 Being classless. At the delta mouth has risen
 The Soviet workers’ sacrificial tide;
 Brothers! your Bhagirath’s our Lenin, now.

[This poem in Bengali, written before 1945, was translated by David Esbury]

Give us a Lenin......

Rathindranath Tagore, son of the Poet, Rabindranath Tagore, writing in his memoirs, On the Edge of Time, describes a visit to the rural backwaters of East Bengal in the twenties:

….I disembark at a village and meet a group of elderly people. I am eager to question them, to find an answer to the problem which is worrying me. Sitting on a primitive cane chair in the low-roofed verandah of a cottage, with my hosts squatting on a mat in front of me, most of them wearing only a loin-cloth and passing the hookah made of cocoanut-shell to one another, I imagine myself transported to the Middle Ages, holding a Panchayat over some knotty social problem concerning the village.

An old man with flowing white beard gets up and says: “Babuji, what is the use of all this talk? I don’t think our young men will do anything much with all the rubbishy reforms they glibly expound to us. Give us a Lenin and everything will be changed.”

Lenin : Breeze at Dawn
 S.C.

He smiles like the
 breeze at dawn
 as I grope in the
dark
 trying to fathom
the depths of the change
 this world has undergone
 since he passed away
on that cold January morn
eightyfour years ago.

Suddenly he emerges
 from the frame on the wall.

His brows knitted
with anxiety, he learns
 of what had happened
 soon after he left this planet:
 the rape of socialism.

He listens with
 agonising pain
 how the word ‘socialism’
 has become a dirty phrase
 in large parts that once
 prided themselves of
 being socialist.

He turns round
and tells me:
 “Interesting, very interesting
indeed—
 as I had said:
 theory turns gray
as it indeed has,
 but life
for which I went into battle
is evergreen.
 Never forget this meaning of life,
 never.”

He then returns
 to the frame on the wall.

I am struck by his words.
 But more so by his face.
 There is no longer any
 trace of
 anxiety or pain on it.
 Instead, ever-smiling
 it radiates
 the freshness of the
 breeze at dawn.