MARPLES, DAVID R.

(2000) LENINS REVOLUTION: RUSSIA, 1917-1921, England:

Pearson Education Limited
- debate over whether Lenins revolution paved the way for Stalins cruel and
bureaucratic regime which persecuted millions of Soviet citizens -> difficult to
discern how Lenin would have governed a state in peacetime, in good health, and
with a stable economy (these three factors never occurred during the period 1917-24
- influenced by Marxism? (evidence: by 1889 he was acquainted with some of the
writings of Marx, including Das Kapital, and he made contact with some of the
Russian-based Marxists.
- The April Theses -> no compromises within the Provisional Government; Bolsheviks
should work for the overthrow of the government, the war in Europe had to be
transformed to a civil war, the police and army had to be abolished, land should be
socialized and all private lands confiscated, private banks should be dissolved and
replaced by a single national bank under the control of the Petrograd Soviet
WHITE, JAMES D. (2001) LENIN: THE PRACTICE AND THEORY OF REVOLUTION,
ENGLAND: PALGRAVE
- The Theses included a long list of party tasks including: the immediate convocation of
a party congress; alteration of the party programme on the questions of imperialism,
the state, and the minimum programme; the change of the partys name from Social
Democrat to Communist.
- Lenin did not set out to create the Bolshevik party; he was intent on gaining control
over the whole of the RSDLP and he spent over a decade forming alliances which he
hoped would make things possible. In the end he failed in his objective.
- Lenin wrote a pamphlet: Left Wing Communism. An Infantile Disorder. The
pamphlet criticized leftist elements in Germany and Britain for neglecting
parliamentary tactics and for failure to take advantage of legal means available to
them in their respective countries. It was the kind of argument Lenin had deployed
against the Recallers over a decade earlier. Now Lenin was generalizing his tactics to
guide the world revolution.
- Bolshevism, which consisted in the strictest centralization and iron discipline had
arisen on the granite theoretical foundation of Marxism.
- Lenin paved the way for Stalin -> Stalin made use of the cult, but he did not create it
as he found it already in existence. Stalin gave a series of lectures at the Sverdlov
University under the general title The Foundations of Leninism, in which he
introduced his ideas on socialism in the country. It was Stalins contention that
according to Lenins theory of revolution the individual national capitalist systems
were linked together in a single chain to form a united front of imperialism.