(5) Why you can't beat a man with a strong mouth - Lenin's style of oratory using venom and rhetoric.

Read Victor Sebeschen's Lenin, Power and Love⑸.

Continued by Victor SebeschenLenin, Power and Love.The following are some of the memorable passages from the

The Great Famine of 1891 and Lenin - The Sprouting of a Ruthless Gaze

The only political activity he dabbled in during his Samara years tells us much about his methods. It is rigor, confidence, brutally cold logic, and a strategic outlook. For Ulyanov, the ends always justify the means. And he always keeps that end in perspective. He did not mind that people hated him.

The Volga region was hit by famine in 1891-92, even though it contained one of the largest grain-producing regions in Russia. The region had experienced occasional famines over the past few centuries, but this one was the worst in generations. More than 400,000 people, mostly peasants, either starved to death or died of typhus or cholera. Many in the middle class, including those who had supported the imperial regime, blamed the government for its incompetence. Starvation was widely reported in the foreign press, and tyranny was hunted internationally as never before. Russia's reputation fell to the ground.

The central government did little to help the millions of starving peasants pouring into the cities in search of food. Bodies lay unburied on the roadsides, and hospitals were helpless. Novelist Lev Tolstoy, with the help of fellow writers, including Anton Chekhov, began a campaign for hunger relief. Chekhov, a skilled physician, opened a free cafeteria and volunteered at an emergency center. Huge sums of money were raised, but there was never enough food.

According to a very radical and liberal view, the famine was another example of the dysfunction of the regime. The bureaucracy of this regime was too slow-moving and inefficient to save the Russian people from starvation, and it never seemed to be moved by the number of victims, no matter how many.

Vladimir Ulyanov, despite having lived so far around the worst famine areas, did not want to get involved in relief and charity work to help the dying peasants. It was important to him that the famine might weaken tyranny and advance the cause of revolution.

The thousands who die of starvation are merely the unfortunate victims of the war against imperial oppression. Capitalism, he argued, by its very nature hurts most peoples and kills many. Famine is the easy proof, he said.

Such insistence was unique among revolutionaries, and he was almost isolated. Even his family could not believe that he would take this seemingly heartless and cruel attitude. His sister Anna collected donations for food aid and walked around distributing medicine to the sick. His sister Marija was horrified by his callousness. In the paragraph where she compares Vladimir to her eldest brother, we find one of the rare instances where she dares to criticize her brother.

Vladimir Ilyich seems to me to have been different from Aleksandr Ilyich: ...... Vladimir devoted his whole life to the working class, but he had no qualities of self-sacrifice."

He routinely brushed aside accusations of inhumanity with rigid logic and a cold interpretation of Marxism that Marx himself would never have condoned had he lived. Trotsky later said, "He carried out a systematic and relentless propaganda against the Committee of Relief.

Ulyanov was convinced that the end of tyranny was near if the government's incompetence and callousness were exposed in the light of day. It is sentimental to think, he said, that "the ocean of need can be pumped out with a spoonful of charity." The famine played a role in moving ...... things forward."
Some line breaks have been made.

Lenin: Power and Love, translated by Victor Sebeschen, Motohiro Miura, and Tsukasa Yokoyama, HakusuishaUpper Volume P100-102

The Great Famine of 1891 was a catastrophe that killed more than 400,000 people. It was an interesting fact that Tolstoy and Chekhov stood up in support of this catastrophe.

Contrary to them, however, Lenin felt quite differently about the famine. As the above quote shows, at this point he already had the idea that the ends justified the means.

From this viewpoint, the famine reveals the incompetence of the government and brings revolution closer. Therefore, the theory goes, this famine is a cause for rejoicing. It seems that the seeds of a dreadful dictatorship by Lenin and Stalin have already begun to sprout.

In fact, this logic was already present in Marx and Engels. Please refer to the following article where we discuss this.

Appearance of revolutionary Lenin (Ulyanov)

From the very beginning of his appearance as an "instigator" of the revolution, those around him quickly realized that Ulyanov was a single-minded man with iron discipline and an unshakable belief that he was right.

He shone through a certain power. It was a little different from charm, it was not charisma, it was intellectual energy. ...... He united himself with the cause in a way that attracted people," said Piotr Struve. Once a comrade socialist of Ulyanov's, who later became an enemy, as did many of his friends.

As a journalist, Ulyanov learned how to write manuscripts quickly and efficiently and became a masterful writer. He was never a flamboyant and passionate wordsmith like Marx or Trotsky in their heyday. But when he was flourishing, his writing was lucid and persuasive, and he was able to use irony very effectively.

He wielded more of a castle-breaking hammer than a slender sword, but in his best writings, he was able to demonstrate strong persuasiveness through reason, logic, and intellect, even though he often took fundamentally false grounds as his starting point. In his lifetime, he wrote and published more than 1,000,000 words, not counting letters to family, friends, and comrades. This is an astonishing output.
Some line breaks have been made.

Lenin: Power and Love, translated by Victor Sebeschen, Motohiro Miura, and Tsukasa Yokoyama, HakusuishaVolume 1 P104-105

It conveys the atmosphere of the time when Lenin began to emerge as a revolutionary. His overwhelming intellectual energy had already begun to influence those around him.

His work as a journalist further refined his writing. During his lifetime, he wrote an enormous 10 million words. This amount of writing while engaged in political activities is astonishing.

Lenin's unique debating style, with its frequent use of tongue and rhetoric.

Ulyanov's method of debate and discussion was established at a young age and remained largely unchanged for the next 20 years. He became more skillful in debate, more confident, and more skillful in technique. But he was always arrogant, loathsome, combative, and sometimes downright mean.

He was "calculated to arouse hatred, animosity, and contempt ...... not to persuade them or correct their errors, but to beat them down, to obliterate them, to wipe their organization off the face of the earth," as he himself admitted. He deliberately used violent language to beat his opponents into submission.

From the very beginning of his debut in the dissident salons of St. Petersburg, he developed a distinctly different approach from other radical agitators and almost single-handedly changed the language of the revolutionary left.

The revolutionary left would follow the crude and aggressive approach he had started. For generations in the communist world, thorny venom and vitriol became the hallmark of its political debates, not only among ideological foes but also among so-called comrades.

Insulting exchanges were justified on the grounds that this was Lenin's way. This was the Soviet way, as inspired by the father of the nation who created so much of the language, lifestyle, and political "culture" of the Soviet Union.

Lenin's successors adopted this method of ridicule long after the Stalin era. Communist parties around the world, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, knew that it was more reasonable to appeal to emotion than to reason, and how to do so ruthlessly and efficiently. This was one of the basic teachings of Leninism.

One of the leading critics of Lenin wrote: "Relentless polemics became the Bolsheviks' wont practice." And the transformation of words into their corresponding acts, physical violence, to complement the brutality of words, was only a logical consequence of that process. ...... This was the manner of argumentation that was peculiarly suited to Vladimir Ilyich's personality."
Some line breaks have been made.

Lenin: Power and Love, translated by Victor Sebeschen, Motohiro Miura, and Tsukasa Yokoyama, HakusuishaUpper Volume P118-119

Lenin showed unusual strength in debate. The secret to this was his tongue and rhetoric.

To seize power, he had to overwhelmingly defeat his opponents. He could speak with reasoned logic, but most effective of all was his tongue and rhetoric, which would make his opponents squirm.

I am sure there are examples of this in our own lives. People who cannot be reasoned with, and just try to get you down with strong words and character assassination....

Such people may want power. They will try to bring others to their knees in order to gain the upper hand. It may be natural that trying to have a reasonable and constructive discussion with such a person will not go well.

You want to have a discussion to achieve better results or to build a good relationship, but the other party does not. All they want to do is to win by getting the other person in front of them. There is no way to have a conversation with them.

How to confront such people may be an eternal theme.

The Effect of Tongue and Rant - Why We Lose to Strong-Mouthed People

The shouting during the debates, in part, indeed, reflected Vladimir's fierce and competitive temperament. But much of it was calculated and premeditated, a tactic that served him well in the endless factional strife within the revolutionary movement. It would continue throughout his life and even after his death.

Those who disagreed with him were "scoundrels," "snobs," "idiots," "scumbags," "whores," "class traitors," "dumb little old hags," "whistle blowers (one of his favorite swear words, which appear frequently in his writings)," and "tongmas. (among others).

Moisha Oligin recalls, "He does not reply to his adversaries." He is a longtime comrade who has known him since his early days when he was making a name for himself in the capital as a young revolutionary.

He vivisects his opponents. He is as sharp as a razor blade. The precision with which his mind works is astonishing. He perceives every flaw in the language of debate. He expresses disagreement with premises he does not accept and draws utterly ridiculous conclusions from them. He is also cynical. He mocks and criticizes his opponents. Listening to him, you would think they are ignorant, stupid, and insignificant. Everyone is taken aback by his remarkable power of logic. Everyone is overwhelmed by his intellectual passion."

The opponent usually had to either deny that he was a "traitorous scoundrel" or a "turd," or shrug his shoulders, surrender the debate to Ulyanov, and leave.

For the radical left, this was a completely new way of debating, and the comrades were shocked. Russian intellectuals are traditionally polite, and even when they disagreed - which was often - they expressed their disagreement with civility.

In his personal associations, he never forgot his upbringing and almost always displayed impeccable manners and elegance. When it came to politics, however, he was relentless in the smoke-filled intrigue room. Those who were not as passionate, wholehearted, or ruthlessly ambitious as he was, were neither ready nor willing to exchange attacks, leaving the movement or moving on to rival groups where they were unlikely to have to endure the snide remarks they would face with him. This is what Ulyanov wants. He won many struggles because his opponents were either too exhausted or did not want to clash with him.

It was a calculated tactic, as Vladimir Voichinsky, a future high-ranking Soviet official and old comrade from the turn of the nineteenth century, saw clearly.

Vladimir Ilyich was probably the most unemotional person I have ever met in my political career. No hatred, no compassion, not even irritation toward his opponents. His relentlessness in debate was not the product of a personal grudge - every word of his writings, even every defamatory innuendo, was coldly calculated.
Some line breaks have been made.

Lenin: Power and Love, translated by Victor Sebeschen, Motohiro Miura, and Tsukasa Yokoyama, HakusuishaUpper Volume P119-120

Lenin's tongue and rhetoric were all calculated. His intention was to make his opponents flinch with his fiery words and discourage them from discussing the issue.

What was also amazing about him was that he had the intellectual capacity to do this and still have the audience believe that he was right.

Many of his rivals left him, saying, "It's no use fighting with this guy." In doing so, Lenin gradually seized power within his own group.

He deliberately uses venom and expletives to beat down his opponents. It is extremely difficult to defeat a person who makes full use of them in a calm and collected manner. He will do everything he can to make his opponents hate him.

I honestly don't know how to deal with these people. This book also doesn't give me a way to deal with them. (This is not a how-to book on life, of course.)

However, just knowing that there are people like this and that the most powerful class of people was Lenin, who created the Soviet Union, is something different. The next time I meet such a person in my daily life, rather than being surprised, I can think, "Oh, he is also a Lenin-like person. I think that alone would make me feel a little different.

What should we do about these people? I would like to consider this as one of my challenges in the future.

*Addition on July 13, 2023

Please refer to the following article as a response to the sophists who use poisonous tongues and rhetoric. The Czech genius writer, Karel Čapek, gives us the secret of how to deal with them as painfully as ever.

Lenin's speech from Gorky's point of view

On the other hand, Vladimir could also use traditional methods of debate. He was skilled in the art of explaining his ideas in a simplified and direct manner. He himself was by no means a friend of the masses, but he knew how to use his intellect to speak effectively to his audience.

Maxim Gorky listened to his speeches many times, but he never forgot the first time he heard them.

When I heard him pronounce the 'P' [equivalent to the Latin letter r] in his husky voice, I thought he might not be a good speaker. But within a minute, I was as enthralled as everyone else. I had never known anyone else who could speak so simply about the most complex political issues. ...... Instead of trying hard to think of eloquent phrases, every word was clearly uttered and its meaning was surprisingly clear.

I didn't think he was this kind of person. I sensed that there was something missing in him,...... and he was too unpretentious. There was nothing in him that reminded me of a "leader. He seemed to stretch out his arms, palms slightly up, weighing each word with them, sifting through the remarks of his adversaries.......

Consistent from beginning to end, his speech was complete, direct, and powerful, and his overall appearance was like a true masterpiece of classical art. Everything was there, but nothing superfluous, and if the ornamentation was there, no one would know it was so, and it was as natural and inevitable as two eyes on a face and five fingers on a hand."
Some line breaks have been made.

Lenin: Power and Love, translated by Victor Sebeschen, Motohiro Miura, and Tsukasa Yokoyama, HakusuishaVolume 1 P121-122

This is a review of Lenin from the perspective of Gorky, a leading writer of the late imperial and Soviet periods.

From his point of view, Lenin's speech made a powerful impression on Gorky.

Lenin's intellectual energy and oratorical skills were overwhelmingly inspirational.

be unbroken

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