How on earth could Lenin be considered a "dictator"?

[Jacob Cliff]

I've read various threads where people have made the case Lenin was a dictator numerous times, yet the only reason why he is considered one by these people is because of the "authoritarian means" the Bolsheviks used in the Russian Civil War (which I would argue were absolutely necessary to consolidate the proletarian dictatorship, but I'm not going to go into that for now).

Excusing "dictatorial" or "unsocialist" actions by the Soviet State pre-1924, where was Lenin's "dictatorship"? Was he not elected to his position? Did the Party not run in accordance to democratic centralism? If Lenin was a "dictator," why did it take him months to argue for an exit out of the First World War? Why did the Bolsheviks wait until they had the majority in the Soviets before seizing power?

It seems to be that criticism of Lenin as a "dictator" comes from criticism of the dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party, which is not "Lenin's" dictatorship. It functioned democratically. That was the epitome of Bolshevism at the time — democracy in the Party. Whether or not you consider the temporary ban on factions & parties due to revolutionary instability at the time (due to an SR attempting to assassinate Lenin and other Leftist factions joining the Whites) doesn't prove any reason why Lenin was a dictator. If you have other reasons, present them, please. Not tying to argue, but I'm genuinely curious if there's other reasons.

[Armchair Partisan]

I've read various threads where people have made the case Lenin was a dictator numerous times, yet the only reason why he is considered one by these people is because of the "authoritarian means" the Bolsheviks used in the Russian Civil War (which I would argue were absolutely necessary to consolidate the proletarian dictatorship, but I'm not going to go into that for now).

That's a shame. I mean, I have a mixed view of Lenin and do commend him for some of the good things he did and good ideas he had (despite not being a Leninist myself), but I'm really curious how - for example - destroying the Makhnovists was necessary to consolidate the DotP.


Was he not elected to his position?

That alone isn't much of a counterevidence. I mean, we elect our dictators every four years (or however many it is in your local fake democracy), doesn't make them any more accountable during their tenure. Let's not forget that the original Roman dictators (that is, the people who assumed the title) were elected by a body of consuls.


Did the Party not run in accordance to democratic centralism? If Lenin was a "dictator," why did it take him months to argue for an exit out of the First World War? Why did the Bolsheviks wait until they had the majority in the Soviets before seizing power?

It seems to be that criticism of Lenin as a "dictator" comes from criticism of the dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party, which is not "Lenin's" dictatorship. It functioned democratically. That was the epitome of Bolshevism at the time — democracy in the Party. Whether or not you consider the temporary ban on factions & parties due to revolutionary instability at the time (due to an SR attempting to assassinate Lenin and other Leftist factions joining the Whites) doesn't prove any reason why Lenin was a dictator. If you have other reasons, present them, please. Not tying to argue, but I'm genuinely curious if there's other reasons.

I don't know every minute detail of how the Bolsheviks operated, and I think that you are pretty much spot on about most of the stuff quoted in this block. On the other hand, the revolutionary left opposition to Bolshevism tends to criticize precisely the dictatorship of the party itself, not of Lenin personally - and the idea of the vanguard party in general.

[Creative Destruction]

As you noted later in your post, it wasn't so much Lenin being a dictator, but rather there being a party dictatorship. If you were a member of the Communist Party, you could elect delegates who would then vote for the Central Committee, and, on the basis of Democratic Centralism, there would be debate among the Central Committee members and then you would have to fall in line with whatever the CC chose. Lenin was a gifted politician, and for being on the CC continually and being politically able to form alliances within the CC or maneuver around others, his ideas often won out.

This is a deviation from classical Marxism, where Marx also regarded "the party" as the entire working class -- the mass movement, not just "the communist party." Not the entire working class were members of the Communist Party, so it was an expression of that party and that party alone. There was issues with purges, where party organs would dispell members (and, under Stalin, just arrest them or kill them) after undergoing a kind of interrogation process. Democracy was limited only to those who were able to join the party, and you had to exhibit discipline to the party in able to get in. The Soviet population, generally, numbered in the hundreds of millions, but the party membership never broke the tens of millions. So, if you wanted to be charitable, it was a democracy for a 1/10th of the population. That's not a mass movement based on democracy, and is certainly not what Marx had in mind.

This is why the communist party is based on a relation to the proletariat... and a dialectical relationship at that. It doesn't necessarily represent the proletariat. It represents the idea that the proletarians are the only class who can overthrow capitalism and institute socialism, based on their material relations with capitalism. In revolutionary Russia, the soviets were considered the organs of power of mass proletarian action, because they were direct representations of workers, as a class, and were organized in the interest of the working class. The Bolsheviks took over the soviets, and through the CPCC transferred powers away from the soviets and concentrated it in the hands of the Party and, by extension, the Central Committee. What was once an expression of mass proletarian action was now an expression of Party action. This was the main grip of the Left Opposition and the Worker's Opposition who, due to adherence to "party discipline" and "democratic" centralism within the party, were effectively left out of the party, even though they more directly expressed the interests of the working class.

The proletarian dictatorship is supposed to be a mass action of the proletarians taking over political power. Not just a section of the class coupled with support of a party dictatorship that managed to reign in power (or, rather, it ended up being the party dictatorship with tenuous support from a particular section of the class.) Marx once answered Bakunin, when Bakunin wrote, "Would all 30 million Germans be apart of this government?" and Marx wrote, emphatically, "Certainly! The entire thing begins with the self-government of the commune." or something along those lines.

[Jacob Cliff]

As you noted later in your post, it wasn't so much Lenin being a dictator, but rather there being a party dictatorship. If you were a member of the Communist Party, you could elect delegates who would then vote for the Central Committee, and, on the basis of Democratic Centralism, there would be debate among the Central Committee members and then you would have to fall in line with whatever the CC chose. Lenin was a gifted politician, and for being on the CC continually and being politically able to form alliances within the CC or maneuver around others, his ideas often won out.

This is a deviation from classical Marxism, where Marx also regarded "the party" as the entire working class -- the mass movement, not just "the communist party." Not the entire working class were members of the Communist Party, so it was an expression of that party and that party alone. There was issues with purges, where party organs would dispell members (and, under Stalin, just arrest them or kill them) after undergoing a kind of interrogation process. Democracy was limited only to those who were able to join the party, and you had to exhibit discipline to the party in able to get in. The Soviet population, generally, numbered in the hundreds of millions, but the party membership never broke the tens of millions. So, if you wanted to be charitable, it was a democracy for a 1/10th of the population. That's not a mass movement based on democracy, and is certainly not what Marx had in mind.

This is why the communist party is based on a relation to the proletariat... and a dialectical relationship at that. It doesn't necessarily represent the proletariat. It represents the idea that the proletarians are the only class who can overthrow capitalism and institute socialism, based on their material relations with capitalism. In revolutionary Russia, the soviets were considered the organs of power of mass proletarian action, because they were direct representations of workers, as a class, and were organized in the interest of the working class. The Bolsheviks took over the soviets, and through the CPCC transferred powers away from the soviets and concentrated it in the hands of the Party and, by extension, the Central Committee. What was once an expression of mass proletarian action was now an expression of Party action. This was the main grip of the Left Opposition and the Worker's Opposition who, due to adherence to "party discipline" and "democratic" centralism within the party, were effectively left out of the party, even though they more directly expressed the interests of the working class.

The proletarian dictatorship is supposed to be a mass action of the proletarians taking over political power. Not just a section of the class coupled with support of a party dictatorship that managed to reign in power (or, rather, it ended up being the party dictatorship with tenuous support from a particular section of the class.) Marx once answered Bakunin, when Bakunin wrote, "Would all 30 million Germans be apart of this government?" and Marx wrote, emphatically, "Certainly! The entire thing begins with the self-government of the commune." or something along those lines.
I don't disagree entirely, but I don't think Marx saw th Party as being the working class entirely. As Marx says in the Manifesto, "The Communists, therefore, are the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, the section that pushes forward all others." Correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems to be the very definition of the Vanguard Party — of the revolutionary vanguard of the most class conscious workers that leads the charge in revolution.

Is soviet democracy/governance of workers councils necessary for the DOTP? Absolutely. But in such a position that Russia was in, where there was hardly a proletariat at all and the country was cornered on all sides, centralization I think was absolutely necessary.

I don't think Lenin ever saw the dictatorship of the party as a permanent aspect of the DOTP. It was a measure in the chaos during the Civil War.

[Creative Destruction]

I don't disagree entirely, but I don't think Marx saw th Party as being the working class entirely. As Marx says in the Manifesto, "The Communists, therefore, are the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, the section that pushes forward all others." Correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems to be the very definition of the Vanguard Party — of the revolutionary vanguard of the most class conscious workers that leads the charge in revolution.

It's not a vanguard party in the Leninist sense, where the Communist Party would itself lead the revolution rather than the working class itself. He's referring to the Communist movement, here, btw, which wasn't always organized in a party in the classical sense. In fact, Marx and Engels criticized these kinds of politics -- where a minority of the working class would lead all the rest to salvation, as it were:


Blanqui, for example, advocated an educative dictatorship of a small group of revolutionaries. Marx’s use of the word “dictatorship” in the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat,” however, is original and deliberately distinct from Blanqui’s usage. Engels emphasizes this point in a passage on Blanqui: “From the fact that Blanqui conceives of every revolution as the coup de main of a small revolutionary minority, what follows of itself is the necessity of dictatorship after its success-the dictatorship, please note, not of the entire revolutionary class, the proletariat, but of the small number of those who made the coup de main and who themselves are organized beforehand under the dictatorship of one person or a few. One can see that Blanqui is a revolutionary of the previous generation.”37 It is clear that the Leninist model of a particular sect or political party exercising political power is much closer to the Blanquist conception of “dictatorship” than to Marx’s, and Engels explicitly criticized this conception of how political power should be exercised. It is also clear that Blanqui’s model of rule by a small group of revolutionaries shares more in common with popular fantasies about Marx than with Marx’s dictatorship of the whole proletarian class.

https://libcom.org/library/karl-marx-state


Is soviet democracy/governance of workers councils necessary for the DOTP? Absolutely. But in such a position that Russia was in, where there was hardly a proletariat at all and the country was cornered on all sides, centralization I think was absolutely necessary.

As I understand it, Russia became a holding place until Western Europe, who had developed the forces of production, kicked off a revolution. When that never actually came to being, it precipitated Stalin's "socialism in one country" nonsense. If there was no preconditions fulfilled to attain a proletarian dictatorship, much less socialism, then it's odd to say that the crushing power that the CPCC curried was at all "necessary." That's how you ended up with the USSR the way it was.


I don't think Lenin ever saw the dictatorship of the party as a permanent aspect of the DOTP. It was a measure in the chaos during the Civil War.

It should be no aspect of the DOTP, but it wasn't just a measure during the Civil War. It was a party dictatorship after the civil war, which allowed Stalin to effectively exercise control of the country after he exercised control over the party.

[Die Neue Zeit]

This is a deviation from classical Marxism, where Marx also regarded "the party" as the entire working class -- the mass movement, not just "the communist party." Not the entire working class were members of the Communist Party, so it was an expression of that party and that party alone.

That's not quite true. Marx did not regard "the party" as the entire working class. To borrow from Lukacs, "the party" wasn't the class-in-itself, but the narrower class-for-itself.

This equation of the party-movement with the class-for-itself carried over into the pre-WWI revolutionary social democracy in Germany and elsewhere in western and central Europe (the "Marxist Center"), which the Old Bolsheviks themselves tried to adapt most faithfully to Russian conditions (not Trotsky and his colleagues, not the pro-party Mensheviks, and certainly not the anti-party / "liquidator" Mensheviks).

There is a kernel of truth to your statement, though: The whole lot of Comintern-era Bolsheviks, or plain Comintern-ists dropped the party-movement organizational concept and equated "the party" not with the class-for-itself, but only a segment of it.

[Compare [revolutionary] "Social Democracy: the merger of socialism and the worker[-class] movement" with the corrupted "merge, if you will, with the broad masses"]

Nonetheless, revolutionary strategy for the left requires adapting the models of the pre-WWI SPD and inter-war USPD to modern circumstances.

To quote invaluable historian Lars Lih from Lenin Rediscovered:

As we set about the task of rediscovering Lenin's actual outlook, the terms 'party of a new type' and 'vanguard party' are actually helpful - but only if they are applied to the SPD as well as the Bolsheviks. The SPD was a vanguard party, first because it defined its own mission as 'filling up' the proletariat with the awareness and skills needed to fulfill its own world-historical mission, and second because the SPD developed an innovative panoply of methods for spreading enlightenment and 'combination.'

And to quote the CPGB comrade Mike Macnair from a video on Revolutionary Strategy (an old but long-standing signature of mine):

You have to be a Kautskyan on the question of organizing in "Educate, Agitate, Organize!" as opposed to "Agitate, Agitate, Agitate!" to get to the point of having a mass workers' party which can possibly pose the question of power.

[Creative Destruction]

I can't remember where I found that from, so I'll willingly concede the point, but also to say that it doesn't have much bearing on my general argument. Even if Marx considered the party, generally, to be the class-for-itself, it's still far and away (as you acknowledged) from the Leninist conception of the party and it's role where it pertains to the working class en masse. Marx also clearly envisioned the working class, as a class-in-itself, in taking over political power.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Before the whole working class were in position to assume full public policy-making power, Marx also envisioned the relationship between the class-for-itself and the class-in-itself as being like that between a representative and his constituents.

I italicized that to emphasize faithful representation over notions of delegation.

[Prof. Oblivion]

I don't think anyone could reasonably argue that Lenin was a dictator, but it's obvious that there was a party dictatorship at a certain point in Lenin's life. However, I think from a biographical perspective at least, labeling Lenin as someone with dictatorial ambition (as many anarchists and left communists do) is wrong. Lenin was like any other revolutionary - he developed as the movement did. He changed positions on plenty of things, either because he realized he was wrong or the changing conditions called for it. For example, when the Bolsheviks opened up party membership to the masses, and called for broad party democracy, this was clearly a move away from dictatorship. When power was in the hands of the Soviets, and not party functions, this was not a dictatorship of the party.

This changed over time. As the revolution regressed, party organs filled the power void. Power necessarily centralized in the party because it had nowhere else to go. It was already there, waiting to pick up the slack.

As for Makhno, his forces had played a role in the collapse of the Red Army in Ukraine initially and had also formed an existential threat to state power. As states do, the Bolshevik state moved to destroy all threats to it in its consolidation of power and monopolization of violence.

[Tim Cornelis]

If there was a party dictatorship, and Lenin was the leader of the party, then why wouldn't he be a dictator?

[Prof. Oblivion]

If there was a party dictatorship, and Lenin was the leader of the party, then why wouldn't he be a dictator?

Lenin didn't rule the party.

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

It's been a while since I've researched the bolsheviks, what were the significant instances where the party broke with Lenin and won out?

[Sinister Intents]

Why does it matter if Lenin was a dictator, autocrat, or whatever or not? I usually don't focus on his position in Soviet bureaucracy, but on his works and views.

[Armchair Partisan]

It's been a while since I've researched the bolsheviks, what were the significant instances where the party broke with Lenin and won out?

The issue of peace with the Germans. Lenin wanted to peace out quickly; Trotsky wanted to continue fighting. The first time they voted on the issue, Lenin's side lost, which led to the disastrous "no war, no peace" period where the Germans got the best of both worlds and the Soviets got the worst. That's just one example off the top of my head, and I'm not exactly the biggest expert on the topic either.


Why does it matter if Lenin was a dictator, autocrat, or whatever or not? I usually don't focus on his position in Soviet bureaucracy, but on his works and views.

Purely a casual interest in Soviet history is sufficient reason all by itself, as far as I'm concerned.

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

If necessity forces your actions to contradict your theory, then your theory is probably full of shit in the first place and should be dumped.

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

The issue of peace with the Germans. Lenin wanted to peace out quickly; Trotsky wanted to continue fighting. The first time they voted on the issue, Lenin's side lost, which led to the disastrous "no war, no peace" period where the Germans got the best of both worlds and the Soviets got the worst. That's just one example off the top of my head, and I'm not exactly the biggest expert on the topic either.



Purely a casual interest in Soviet history is sufficient reason all by itself, as far as I'm concerned.

Hm Im drawing a blank on this for some reason, in any case wouldn't this have been before the party dictatorship was really in place? I'm assuming people are using the banning of factions within the party as the starting point for the dictatorship, right?

[Creative Destruction]

Why does it matter if Lenin was a dictator, autocrat, or whatever or not? I usually don't focus on his position in Soviet bureaucracy, but on his works and views.

Seeing where he ended up as a result of his works and views is to assume a logical conclusion to where his works and views could lead, you'd think.

[Prof. Oblivion]

Hm Im drawing a blank on this for some reason, in any case wouldn't this have been before the party dictatorship was really in place? I'm assuming people are using the banning of factions within the party as the starting point for the dictatorship, right?

I think you would need to specify as a lot of people treat Lenin as some kind of dictator within the party regardless of time period.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Why does it matter if Lenin was a dictator, autocrat, or whatever or not? I usually don't focus on his position in Soviet bureaucracy, but on his works and views.

Funny, with respect specifically to his time in office, I'm actually more interested in what he represented within the Soviet bureaucracy than his later works and views (except key ones, of course). Everything from Little Sovnarkom to the Council of Labour and Defense to his desire to see Sovnarkom above the CEC (and its Presidium) to... his failed goal to have the Politburo itself take a backseat to Sovnarkom.

[mushroompizza]

Well there are some dictatorial aspects such as his participation in the Red Terror, it being a one party state, and that the people do not "directly" elect him but "elect" him via representatives.

[Ismail]

Lenin didn't rule the party.There was no formal position he held recognizing him as "ruler" of the party by virtue of holding that position (the same could be said about Stalin), but he was clearly recognized as its de facto leader. It was sufficient for him to threaten to resign from the Central Committee (as he did as early as 1918) to get waverers to uphold a position of his, something I rather doubt would work if anyone else in the CC threatened to resign.

The issue of whether Lenin was a "dictator" or not doesn't really tell us anything. Many people assume "dictatorial" functions as part of the class struggle, like Dzerzhinsky as head of the Cheka, or Robespierre at the head of the Reign of Terror. During the American Revolution icons of bourgeois democracy like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson saw nothing wrong with tarring and feathering supporters of Britain, shutting down the loyalist press, etc.

The issue to look for is what class a person serves and to look at the circumstances in which dictatorial powers are taken up and used. The power of the aforementioned Cheka waned after a period when the Red Terror was no longer necessary (and thus Dzerzhinsky lost basically all of his extraordinary, dictatorial powers), even if the fundamental tasks of the Cheka and its successor organizations remained unchanged.

The dictatorship of the proletariat, unlike its bourgeois counterpart, necessitates the conscious activity of the vast majority of the population in taking part in a new social order, in ensuring democracy for the vast majority while suppressing it for the tiny minority, etc. For this reason any "dictator" who rises up in defense of its social order will necessarily look much different from, say, Chiang Kai-shek, Mobutu, Mubarak, Pinochet, and various others who represented the interests of a bourgeoisie afraid of losing power if basic democratic liberties were given to the overwhelming majority of the population. It's important to remember that "dictators" are representatives of dictatorships of specific classes, which assume various forms (some more democratic, others less so) based on the severity (or lack thereof) of challenges they face from other classes.

[Comrade Jacob]

I like Lenin regardless. If he was a dictator then I'm glad he had such power he did good.