The Lenin Legend

The starting point in studying Lenin’s intellectual and political biography is the conventional interpretation of Lenin as the man who by his pamphlet What Is To Be Done? inspired the creation of the Bolshevik party, a centralised and tightly controlled organisation of professional revolutionaries, which in October 1917 seized power in Russia. This conception was neatly summed up by Merle Fainsod as follows: ‘In 1902 in What Is To Be Done? Lenin had written, “Give me an organisation of revolutionaries, and we shall overturn the whole of Russia”. On 25 October 1917, the wish was fulfilled and the deed accomplished.’ 1