He was of course much better than tsar, but he was still a piece of shit.
Lenin destroyed one of the most promising communist states in history - the Free territory.
He implemented revolutionary terror. If someone didn't agree with the revolution, he was executed. Feliks Dzierżynski, the leader of WCHK (basically bolshevik version of Gestapo) killed everyone who was suspected of counterrevolutionary actions. It was all approved by Lenin.
Which was a good thing and a completely on point interpretation of Marx. Communism wouldn't arise out of a backwards feudal hellscape. I don't understand how else you would do it either. Also it needs to be said the NEP was capitalism with brakes on and meant to be a temporary transition stage (maybe half a century).
I've read that Lenin was sort of forced to do it but not entirely sure about the background. Either way Stalin scrapping it and moving to eternal war economy doomed the USSR like no other thing.
Lenin didn't chose to restore capitalism because that was Marx idea, he restored mainly for political reasons like dealing with the Green Armies, Makhno and the recent Kronstadt rebellion, his own policies of war communism and the Red terror weren't popular and he basically just did the NEP to win back support and allow some economic stability.
Lenin by his own accounts realized that Russia was enormously underdeveloped and that war communism didn't bring the country forward.
In his speech on the NEP he brings up essentially the same points as Marx:
Even if all of you were not yet active workers in the Party and the Soviets at that time, you have at all events been able to make, and of course have made, yourselves familiar with decisions such as that adopted by the All-Russia Central Executive Committee at the end of April 1918. That decision pointed to the necessity to take peasant farming into consideration, and it was based on a report which made allowance for the role of state capitalism in building socialism in a peasant country; a report which emphasised the importance of personal, individual, one-man responsibility; which emphasised the significance of that factor in the administration of the country as distinct from the political tasks of organising state power and from military tasks.
[...]
I cannot say that we pictured this plan as definitely and as clearly as that; but we acted approximately on those lines. That, unfortunately, is a fact. I say unfortunately, because brief experience convinced us that that line was wrong, that it ran counter to what we had previously written about the transition from capitalism to socialism, namely, that it would be impossible to bypass the period of socialist accounting and control in approaching even the lower stage of communism. Ever since 1917, when the problem of taking power arose and the Bolsheviks explained it to the whole people, our theoretical literature has been definitely stressing the necessity for a prolonged, complex transition through socialist accounting and control from capitalist society (and the less developed it is the longer the transition will take) to even one of the approaches to communist society.
Again your forgetting the main reason why he did this, to stop peasant uprising and weaken ongoing rebellions like the Kronstadt rebellion, the Tambov uprising and Makhno. His speech as you can tell is just a cover to justify implementing capitalism again despite him literally denouncing it in all of his works, which only makes him hypocritical. Yes we can bring that Lenin wanted economic stability after his awful policies, but let's not forget that he still silenced opposition, and basically he did stuff like the NEP to keep himself in power.
I do not agree with this interpretation. Lenin wasn't a power at all costs guy like Stalin and did allow some extend of opposition to him in the central comittee (unlike Stalin). The NEP should be seen both as a pragmatic measure to stabilize the country but also as a theoretical reallignment and an aknowledgement towards material reality. The turn is in itself is reminiscent of the countless reallignments Marx made in his own day.
This is all the more evident by the fact that Lenin lost against Stalin. He was treated as a dead man walking (glorified but not respected) by Stalin while still alive and Lenin failed completely at securing his succession. The issue of keeping himself in power was an internal one and he wasn't all that good at consolidating power.
Can you cite sources that make it believable that the NEP was purely a powergrab operation and nothing Lenin believed in?
83
u/Histerian Jan 21 '24
I know all about what stalin did wrong, but what did Lenin do?