Violence in Lenin's thought and practice: The spark and the conflagration

Drawing on Lenin's writings, the commentary of Soviet specialists, and the work of those who focus on the special character of violence, this article discusses Lenin's views on violence over his lifetime, his distinction among different types of violence, his policies and their results, and finally the doubts about his practices that he ultimately expressed near the end of his life. Beginning in the tsarist era with Lenin's campaign among his fellow revolutionaries to reject individual terror in favor of mass violence, it follows him into power as he put his tenets into practice and finally into his introspective retirement. It discusses how, oblivious to developing danger he unleashed mass violence and prodded it to action in the service of the revolutionary state; why he refused to incorporate safeguards against runaway violence; and how, as its deleterious effects became manifest, he continued to employ violence as both instrument of choice and substitute for legitimate authority. It shows that Lenin evinced an addiction to violence that caused him to overlook or foreclose other, less radical, political methods for accomplishing his goals. We see that Lenin's evident belief in the efficacy and controllability of violence blinded him to its potentially counterproductive and even disastrous effects. The state that resulted from Lenin's policies was not what he had envisaged, and not the result of a preconceived plan. But equally it did not emerge as the simple product of ineluctable circumstances defeating a hapless Lenin. Lenin made a series of policy choices ‐ none foreordained by circumstance ‐ which yielded an authoritarian state grounded in violence. These choices were explicitly contested by prominent contemporaries within and outside of the Bolshevik government, who correctly and vocally predicted the results which were becoming clearly visible during Lenin's tenure. Lenin chose to ignore the results, reject the alternatives and silence the critics, decisions he himself came to regret.