Lenin ‘was quite fond of Kropotkin, and he was quite fond of some of the anarchist militants and activists. How could he not be? They had dominated Russian politics for the whole of the nineteenth century. It wasn’t Marxism that was dominant. It was anarchism. This was the ideology the young people liked. These were…
Tag: Lenin
Tariq Ali: “How Lenin’s love of literature shaped the Russian Revolution”
Literature shaped Russian political culture: “The classicism that was so deeply rooted in Lenin acted as a bulwark to seal him from the exciting new developments in art and literature that had both preceded and accompanied the revolution. Lenin found it difficult to make any accommodations to modernism in Russia or elsewhere. The work of…
Alexander Reznik interviewed on “Trotsky: The Prickly Lion of the Revolution”
“Insurrection of the masses does not require a justification. And what took place was indeed an insurrection and not a conspiracy. We openly forged the will of the masses for an insurrection… To those who left from here and who are proposing other courses of action, we have only this to say: You are pitiful…
Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s novel _What Is to Be Done? Some Stories about the New People_ (1863)
Much of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s oeuvre was written as a kind of retaliation against Chernyshevsky’s ideas. In 1902, Lenin named his first serious book What Is to Be Done? in homage to Chernyshevsky’s novel. Progressive young Russians, in imitation of Chernyshevsky’s “new people,” practiced free love and new forms of marriage and experimented with Chernyshevsky’s communal economic model.