Lenin had a strong political intuition, coupled with a brutal will to power

On January 22, 1917, Lenin addressed the Swiss working youth at the Volkshaus in Zurich. He spoke in German about the coming European revolution that would emerge from the war. He did not believe he himself could play a role in the new era.

He concluded his lecture with the words: "We, the older generation, may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution. But I believe I can express with great confidence the hope that the young people (. . .) will have the good fortune not only to fight, but also to win in the coming proletarian revolution."

Lenin was wrong. A month later, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated. And less than a year had passed since his appearance in Zurich in January 1918, when Lenin established an autocratic system that he sold to his followers as the "dictatorship of the proletariat."

Lenin had already become radicalized at an early age. In 1887, his older brother Alexander was hanged for plotting an assassination attempt on the Tsar. Lenin was seventeen years old at the time. He wanted to destroy Tsarist Russia, not reform it. Therefore, he criticized relief efforts during the devastating famine of 1891, which claimed the lives of over half a million people.

Lenin followed the motto "The worse, the better." In his view, every catastrophe increased the chances of a radical upheaval of the existing social order. For Lenin, reforms were only harmful.

Rejecting all compromises was initially a risky strategy. Lenin lost a number of dedicated comrades because he opted for a close-knit, effective force of professional revolutionaries. As late as 1898, Lenin had one of Russia's brightest minds, the "legal Marxist" Pyotr Struve, at his side. Struve, who was the same age as Lenin, came from a wealthy Baltic German family; his father had risen to the rank of governor in the Tsarist Empire.

Struve soon transformed from a convinced Marxist to a liberal politician, which, however, made him no less suspect in the eyes of the Tsarist authorities. In 1903, he founded the "Liberation League" with like-minded intellectuals in Schaffhausen. After the first revolution of 1905, this group gave rise to the so-called Cadet Party, which derived its name from the abbreviation "KD" (Constitutional Democrats).

The sociologist Max Weber observed events in Russia very closely at the time. The Tsarist "October Manifesto" of 1905, which introduced a parliament in Russia for the first time, carefully avoided the term "constitution." Max Weber aptly referred to it as a "pseudo-constitutionalism."

Weber summarized the program of the "Liberation League" in four points: 1. civil liberties, 2. constitutional rule of law, 3. social reform based on the Western European model, 4. agrarian reform. This was, of course, a far cry from the Bolshevik forced happiness that Lenin enforced with an iron fist.

Lenin and Struve, former companions, became bitter enemies. In exile in Paris, Struve painted an extremely negative picture of the revolutionary leader in his memoirs. He described Lenin as obsessed with an ascetic hunger for power and as having no sense of compromise. As early as 1920, Struve had described Lenin as a "thinking guillotine" and accused him of "personal malice" and "moral perversion."

Conversely, Lenin also gave Struve nothing. After the break, Lenin didn't even want to rule out the possibility of Struve being killed. In general, Lenin's political work was characterized by uncompromising severity. He implemented a revolutionary line that paid little attention to Marxist philosophy of history.

To achieve this, he even accepted the risk of a split in the party in 1903. In a random vote, his faction prevailed, which he promptly dubbed the Bolsheviks ("majority") to emphasize their claim to leadership over the Mensheviks ("minority"). The Mensheviks were prepared to accept the bourgeois era in Russia envisioned by Marx on the path to socialism and communism.

Lenin, on the other hand, believed that the Tsarist Empire was the "weakest link" in the chain of imperialism. In his view, a Russian revolution would trigger a world revolution in the industrialized countries.

Soon, the course of history relieved Lenin of the burden of all theoretical speculation. In February 1917, faced with the dire supply situation and the looming military defeat, the Tsar abdicated. Subsequently, a provisional government was formed, dominated by left-wing Social Revolutionaries.

However, the provisional government soon adopted the foreign policy position of the "Kadets," who still clung to illusory war aims. This fatal mistake ultimately cost the provisional government support among the war-weary population.

After the end of Tsarist rule, there was no stopping Lenin in exile in Switzerland. With the help of the Swiss communist Fritz Platten, Lenin obtained permission from the German government to enter Russia in a sealed freight car.

For Germany, Lenin was human dynamite, with which Russia would finally be defeated. Indeed, Lenin delivered exactly what Germany had hoped for. No sooner had he arrived in St. Petersburg than he published his "April Theses." He called for the overthrow of the provisional government and an immediate end to the war.

In July 1917, the Bolsheviks attempted their first coup to seize power. This attempt failed miserably. Lenin had already fled St. Petersburg wearing a wig and was hiding in Finland. At the end of October, another opportunity seemed to have arrived. In a commando operation, Lenin's comrade-in-arms, Trotsky, occupied strategic points in the capital and routed the provisional government.

What was later glorified in Soviet propaganda as the "Great October Socialist Revolution" was in reality merely a coup by a small group of activists. A "storming of the Winter Palace" was only staged according to all the rules of theatrical art on the third anniversary of the events of October 1917.

Director Nikolai Yevreinov mustered over ten thousand extras to make the Bolsheviks' support of the "revolutionary masses" seem credible. Sergei Eisenstein immortalized the myth of the "storming of the Winter Palace" in the 1927 film "October," marking the tenth anniversary of the revolution.

On March 3, 1918, Germany and Russia signed a separate peace treaty in Brest-Litovsk. Although Lenin had called for a "peace without annexations and contributions" in his "Decree on Peace" in November 1917, even this proposal was excessive given the dire military situation. Lenin imposed a peace treaty against the wishes of his allies, resulting in enormous Russian territorial losses.

The price of peace was painful, but Lenin had clearly seen that he could only secure popular support by ending the war. Meanwhile, in Russia, World War I seamlessly transitioned into civil war. The "Reds" faced the "Whites," who sought to defend the conservative and nationalist ideals of the Tsarist Empire.

In this situation, Great Britain, France, the United States, and Japan decided to intervene in Russia. They supported the White Army and also sent their own troops to fight the Bolsheviks and prevent the revolution from spreading to Europe.

The Czechoslovak legions, which controlled almost the entire route of the Trans-Siberian Railway by the summer of 1918, were particularly prominent. However, in fierce fighting, the Red Army managed to achieve victory in the Russian Civil War by 1922. A decisive role in this was played by War Commissar Lev Trotsky, who acted as a brilliant military strategist and ruthless executioner.

The provisional government had already promised a constituent assembly, but repeatedly postponed the convening of a constituent assembly in anticipation of a favorable outcome to the war. With Machiavellian cunning, Lenin also catered to this need of Russian intellectuals. The constituent assembly finally met briefly at the beginning of 1918.

However, Lenin had planned a farce from the beginning. The Bolsheviks sabotaged the debates wherever they could and closed the event after only thirteen hours. The Red Guards' justification for ending the deliberations has become proverbial: "The guard is tired."

The Bolsheviks distinguished themselves from other left-wing groups vying for power through their unconditional will to use violence. In May 1918, Lenin openly called for "not to shy away from barbaric methods in the fight against barbarism."

The struggle against real and alleged counterrevolutionaries intensified against the backdrop of various assassination attempts. In the summer of 1918, events escalated rapidly. On July 9, the German ambassador Wilhelm von Mirbach-Harff was murdered by left-wing Social Revolutionaries. On August 30, the Social Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan attempted to assassinate Lenin. On the same day, Cheka leader Moisei Uritsky was shot.

In response to these attacks, Lenin unleashed the "Red Terror." Censorship and the death penalty, which the revolutionary leader had initially renounced for public benefit, were also reintroduced.

On July 17, 1918, the Bolsheviks cold-bloodedly executed the Tsar, the Tsarina, and their five children in Yekaterinburg. Since the February Revolution, the former ruling family had been under house arrest in various places of exile. Through the high-profile assassination of the Tsar, the revolutionaries made it clear that a return to the monarchy of Russia was out of the question.

In the summer of 1920, peasants in the Tambov region rose up against Bolshevik rule. The Red Army, under the leadership of Marshal Tukhachevsky, crushed the uprising with unimaginable brutality. They even used poison gas against the rebels. The fighting soon resembled a civil war. The Bolsheviks executed approximately 15,000 people and sent 100,000 men, women, and children to various labor camps. Unofficial reports of the Red Army's merciless actions soon led to mass resignations from the Communist Party.

In 1921, a sailors' revolt broke out in the Kronstadt fortress. The soldiers protested against the Bolshevik party dictatorship and demanded a return to revolutionary council democracy. This threatened the very core of the Bolsheviks' totalitarian project. Marshal Tukhachevsky was called into action again. At enormous cost, he stormed the fortress. The suppression of the revolt was followed by numerous executions and deportations.

The Bolshevik leadership realized that war communism was unsustainable. Therefore, in 1921, Lenin launched the "new economic policy," which advocated entirely un-Marxist elements such as private trade, property, and capital accumulation. Immediately after the October Revolution, Lenin had already demonstrated ideological flexibility when it came to questions of power.

The "Decree on Peace" replaced the demand for transforming the world war into an international civil war with Russian pacifism. And the "Decree on Land" provided for the expropriation of large landowners, but not of ordinary peasants and Cossacks.

Lenin had established a reign of terror in five years. He worked day and night to enforce the Bolshevik order. But the enormous effort took its toll. In May 1922, he suffered the first of four strokes that gradually paralyzed him, deprived him of his ability to speak, and ultimately caused him to die in terrible agony.

The October Revolution was perceived in Europe as both a horrific event and a source of fascination. In Italy and Germany, the outcome of the First World War had led to great discontent. "Versailles" became an Italian and German derogatory term. Gabriele d'Annunzio coined the slogan "mutilated victory" (vittoria "mutilata") because Italy had to renounce its territorial claims in Dalmatia. In Germany, the myth circulated that the army had remained "undefeated in the field" and had been "stabbed in the back."

Against this backdrop, the brutal actions of the Russian Bolsheviks must have appeared as a shining example of sovereign political action. Both Mussolini and Hitler considered themselves revolutionaries, even though their reigns were not marked by revolutions.

The October Revolution presented an attractive interpretation for the self-presentation of the fascists and National Socialists. Goebbels, in his enthusiasm for the revolution, went so far as to even detach Lenin from doctrinal communism and glorify him as a national leader. No tsar had understood the Russian people's national instincts as well as Lenin, Goebbels asserted, adding: "Lenin sacrificed Marx and in return gave Russia freedom."

After Lenin's death in 1924, Goebbels found lofty words for the leader of the Russian Revolution in his diary: "Lenin died on January 21. The greatest spirit of communist thought. You will not replace him. The leading figure in Europe. Perhaps one day he will become a legendary hero."

Hitler himself took a much more skeptical stance than Goebbels. In 1920, Hitler asked at a Nazi Party meeting: "What has been achieved in Bolshevik Russia? The bureaucracy has grown enormously, militarism is greater than ever, and the death penalty is being used extensively." Hitler called Lenin a "Jew" and a "mass murderer."

Mussolini displayed a very ambivalent attitude toward the Russian revolutionary leader. On the one hand, he criticized the Bolshevik tyranny, which he considered more brutal than that of the tsars. On the other hand, Mussolini was impressed by Lenin's assertiveness: "I declare that I reject all Bolshevisms, but if I had to choose one, I would choose the one from Moscow and from Lenin, solely because it has assumed gigantic, barbaric, universal proportions."

Mussolini admired the rapid and efficient establishment of state structures in Soviet Russia. He allowed himself to be carried away by rhapsodic enthusiasm for Lenin's dictatorship: "In Lenin's Russia, there is only one authority: his. There is only one freedom: his. There is only one law: his."

As for Hitler, Mussolini also considered the October Revolution ultimately a conspiracy against the Russian people, but not a Jewish one, but a German one. Mussolini interpreted the Jewish surnames of the Bolshevik revolutionaries as pure "tedescheria" (German nationalism). However, he confused several things: Lenin, to him, was "Ceorbaum" – but Zederbaum is the surname of the Menshevik leader Yuli Martov, who had just spoken out against the October Revolution. Mussolini also cited the revolutionaries Apfelbaum, Rosenfeld, and Bronstein – that is, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Trotsky. On December 4, 1917, Mussolini wrote succinctly in an article: "Lenin's government is German." And on March 2, 1918, he stated categorically: "Whether the Kaiser, the Tsar, or Lenin is at the top, it all comes down to the same thing."

In the Soviet Union, the October Revolution was celebrated as the founding event of the world's first workers' and peasants' state. After the collapse of the communist system, communist ideology also fizzled out. The anniversary of the October Revolution, once the most important holiday, was abolished and replaced by "Russian Unity Day."

Official history policy today speaks of the "Great Russian Revolution," which lasted from 1917 to 1922. The half-decade of the February Revolution, the October Revolution, and the civil war thus appears as a temporary, crisis-ridden break in the supposedly "thousand-year history" of Russian statehood, which has also been enshrined in the constitution since 2020.

Putin is working to cement state structures and fears nothing more than a popular uprising. Lenin is a negative figure for him because he destroyed "historical Russia" and introduced Soviet federalism. For Putin, the memory of victory in the "Great Patriotic War" has become his most important historical-political power resource. This is what the Second World War is called in Russia because the precarious period of the Hitler-Stalin Pact must be ignored.

Putin sees himself as the anti-Lenin: He must reunite the Russian lands under which Lenin placed a "time bomb" and which were lost under Gorbachev. Putin would prefer to bury the revolutionary leader, who is laid to rest in the mausoleum on Red Square. But he knows full well that the older generation still harbors nostalgic feelings for Lenin. What Putin won't admit is that he perfected Leninist techniques of rule and thus secured his own power.

Ulrich M. Schmid is Professor of East European Studies at the University of St. Gallen.