Richard Pipes Lenin Quotes

Lenin had published a crucial article in Pravda entitled “Theses on the Constituent Assembly.” It was, as historian Richard Pipes puts it, “a death sentence on the Assembly.

The Bolsheviks did not intend to sit back and wait for these revolutions to unfold. As the revolutionary vanguard, they hoped to facilitate the coming turmoil through propaganda, subterfuge, and even warfare.61 In the spring of 1919 they had set up the Communist International, popularly known as the Comintern, a body officially dedicated to the overthrow of capitalist regimes according to a Leninist blueprint, as outlined in books such as What Is to Be Done? (Lenin’s furious denunciation of social democracy and left-wing pluralism, published in 1902).62 In practice, as Richard Pipes has written, the Comintern constituted a “declaration of war on all the existing governments.”63

It’s funny that I’m the one talking about helping Bert,” Victor said, “and not the other way around. I told you my grandfather came to America from Europe for a better life. My uncle died fighting communists in Poland. My dad worked for twenty-five years in an auto plant. He carried a lunch-pail every day. My mom worked part time at the five and ten. Bert’s uncles are big shots in various industries, his dad gives money to the art institute uptown. They’ve had money and position for generations. Bert wants to throw all that out and if he gets his way, no one else will ever have a chance. I used to think that the left....” Victor’s fingers trembled. Without paying attention to what he was doing, he put a spoonful of mashed potatoes into the ash tray with his pipe. “Why does he bother you?” Juliet asked. “You know his dreams will never come to pass. So does he.” She touched his hand. “It’s still warm. Let’s go outside. I’d like to look at the moon.” They walked to Lake Otrobe. The glow from a distant steel mill reddened the southern sky. “Industry,” Victor said admiringly. “Creating wealth.” He began to sputter again on the way back when they passed the apartment building where Bert lived. They looked up at a lighted window. A dark figure with his back to the street sat in a gray armchair, still, his head down. “He’s fallen asleep reading,” Victor mumbled. “Engels no doubt or Lenin or one of those other thieves.

The word communism, coined in Paris in the 1840s, refers to three related but distinct phenomena: an ideal, a program, and a regime set up to realize the ideal.*1 The ideal is one of full social equality that in its most extreme form (as in some of Plato’s writings) calls for the dissolution of the individual in the community. Inasmuch as social and economic inequalities derive primarily from inequalities of possession, its attainment requires that there be no “mine” and “thine”—in other words, no private property. This ideal has an ancient heritage, reappearing time and again in the history of Western thought from the seventh century b.c. to the present. The program dates back to the middle of the nineteenth century and is most closely associated with the names of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In their Communist Manifesto of 1848 Marx and Engels wrote that “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in a single sentence: Abolition of private property.” Engels claimed that his friend had formulated a scientific theory that demonstrated the inevitable collapse of societies based on class distinctions. Although throughout history there had been sporadic attempts to realize the communist ideal, the first determined effort to this effect by using the full power of the state occurred in Russia between 1917 and 1991. The founder of this regime, Vladimir Lenin, saw a propertyless and egalitarian society emerging from the “dictatorship of the proletariat” that would eliminate private property and pave the way for Communism.

Stalin first teamed up with Kamenev and Zinoviev, members of the triumvirate that had run the party during Lenin’s illness, to be rid of their common rival, Trotsky. By slander, intimidation of his supporters, and similar underhanded methods they stripped Trotsky of his posts, expelled him from the party, and then exiled him, first to Central Asia and finally, in 1929, abroad, where, in 1940, Stalin had him murdered. Stalin next turned on Kamenev and Zinoviev, whom he had removed from the Politburo. His victims’ ability to defend themselves against fabricated accusations was fatally weakened by their acceptance of the principle that “the party is always right.

Within a year or two of Lenin’s death he was clearly the party’s boss: having solidified his power, he was ready to resume the drive for Communism interrupted in 1921 by the introduction of the NEP. He had three related objectives: to build a powerful industrial base, to collectivize agriculture, and to impose on the nation complete conformity.

Thus the Bolsheviks who five years earlier in a noisy campaign of blasphemy and ridicule exposed as sham the relics of Orthodox saints, created a holy relic of their own. Unlike the church's saints, whose remains were revealed to be nothing but rags and bones, their god, as befitted the age of science, was composed of alcohol, glycerin, and formalin.