Table of Contents
Read Victor Seveschen's "Lenin: Power and Love" (1)
Lenin, Power and Love by Victor Seveschen, which I mentioned in my last article, was a very interesting book to read.
So far in this blog, we have mainly continued to introduce the book and give a brief synopsis and description of the book.
Although I have introduced parts of novels in my blog, I have never introduced them in detail in the form of "reading '~~'", but I would like to start a new article with a slightly different flavor.
Because the book you are about to read, "Lenin: Power and Love," will give you a detailed insight not only into Lenin himself, but also into the historical background of his time. Above all, it will reveal to us what kind of world we live in.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed and seemed to be the right answer. The author says that this situation is reminiscent of the time when Lenin was trying to start a revolution. This is why it is important to study Lenin now in order to prevent a repetition of the bloody history.
It would be a shame to only briefly introduce this book in one article. I wanted to preserve it in a tangible form for my own learning. (*This is not to say, of course, that the books I have read so far were not worth it.)
So, although this is not a memorandum, I would like to introduce some of the memorable parts of this book from now on.
So let's get started.
We will start by reading the "Introduction" text to get an idea of how the book flows.
Introduction.
On the side of Moscow's Red Square, there remains a landmark familiar to those who knew the Soviet Union during the now-defunct communist era.
Day after day, people patiently wait in long lines to buy tickets to visit Lenin's gravesite, which is located inside a huge marble enclosure built at the end of the 1920s. The wait is endless, but the tour itself is over in a matter of minutes.
Visitors enter the crypt and walk a few meters down a dimly lit, creepy, bare hallway to reach the coffin. In this tomb, powerful lights illuminate the embalmed body, which has been lying for almost 90 years on a luxurious red velvet.
The crowds were so great that visitors had only a maximum of five minutes to pay their respects to the body or to gawk at it. Some of the visitors are foreigners. Most of the visitors are Russian.
Whoever is buried there, this is a hair-raising place to visit in the 21st century. That Vladimir Ilyich Lenin could continue to draw such large crowds 25 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union seems the strangest anachronism of all.
Everyone knows of the catastrophe he caused. Few people now believe in the doctrines he espoused. But Lenin still attracts people's attention and is even loved in Russia.
Hakusuisha, Victor Sebeschen, translated by Motohiro Miura and Tsukasa Yokoyama, Lenin: Power and Love, p9-10
Some line breaks have been made.
As a tourist attraction in Moscow's Kremlin, Lenin's Mausoleum still draws many visitors there.
Although this is definitely a place that is introduced in tourist guidebooks, it is probably not of much interest to Japanese people. I have to admit that until I learned about the Russian Revolution, I had never really thought about Lenin's Mausoleum.
However, after studying the Russian Revolution and learning about the Soviet era that followed, I began to think about this Lenin Mausoleum and saw that this tomb was a tremendous thing.
After all, Lenin's body has actually been embalmed and continues to be enshrined there in the same manner as before his death. It is not that there are monuments or tombstones to visit. It is just that Lenin is there in his eternal, undying form.
In a sense, Lenin was to be enshrined there not as an ordinary dead man, but as a god. A leader is deified after death and will live on forever. This is the intention of the Lenin Mausoleum. It could even be called religious. It was very interesting to learn about religion in the Soviet Union, which ostensibly excludes religion.
Putin and Lenin still living today
The current Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, has no intention of removing this tomb. On the contrary, he approved a huge expenditure to repair the mausoleum in 1999, when it was in danger of collapse. Lenin's faith lives on, albeit in a different form.
Putin's grandfather Spiridon was Lenin's cook after the Russian Revolution, and it is not because of the current president's feelings for his family that he has tried to leave Lenin's body in its original place. The obvious message is that Russia is still, as it always has been in the past, an overwhelming and mercilessly autocratic leader, a Russianvoshti (Voshti wine merchant)The idea is to show the historical continuity, that is, the notion that the boss is needed.
Lenin's tomb once symbolized the ideology of internationalism, or world communism. Later, it was transformed into an altar of revived Russian nationalism.
It is not only Laneen's body that is embalmed. His human image is also "protected. Despite the large amount of new information about Lenin that has come to light since the archives began to be opened in the former Soviet Union, there has been little reassessment of his personality, motives, and intentions in the past 30 years.
During the Soviet era, all biographies of Lenin were saintly biographies and required reading in schools. In school, children referred to this founder of the Soviet state as "LeningrandfatherHe was taught to call him "the most important man in the history of the world. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Communist Party, also called Lenin a "special genius" and was wont to quote him. Lenin was the pillar of Bolshevik purity in every respect.
Hakusuisha, Victor Sebeschen, translated by Motohiro Miura and Tsukasa Yokoyama, Lenin: Power and Love, p10
Some line breaks have been made.
The Lenin faith is still alive today. President Putin has not ignored its power.
And it is interesting to note that President Putin's grandfather served as Lenin's cook. This gives us a glimpse into the mysterious connection between President Putin and Lenin.
Lenin's Significance Today
The communist world that Lenin created in his ascetic image may have been consigned to the dustbin of history. But he still has significance today.
At the end of the Cold War, the idea of democracy andneoliberalismwas victorious. Socialism and its various forms were completely discredited. There seemed to be no solution to political and economic problems other than what the globalized market would bring.
But after the financial crisis and recession of 2007-2008, the world changed. In many countries of the Western world, faith in the democratic process itself was lost. For millions of people, the certainties that two generations had accepted as basic premises-the realities of the world-have all but faded away. Lenin would probably have regarded the world of 2005 as the dawn of a revolutionary period.
Lenin is in the limelight again not because of the flawed, bloody, brutal, and misguided answers he offered, but because he was seeking answers to the same problems we are seeking answers to today.
Millions of people, and some dangerous populist leaders on both the left and right, doubt whether liberal democracy has ever succeeded in creating a fair society, maintaining freedom and prosperity, or redressing inequality and injustice.
The terms "global elite" and "one percent" are now being used in an obviously Leninist sense. It is unlikely that Lenin's solutions will ever be applied again anywhere. But the questions he posed are still being asked, and may be answered in the same bloody way.
Hakusuisha, Victor Sebeschen, translated by Motohiro Miura and Tsukasa Yokoyama, Lenin: Power and Love, p11
Some line breaks have been made.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed and seemed to be the right answer. The author says that this situation is similar to the time when Lenin was trying to start a revolution. That is why it is important to study Lenin now. We must not repeat the bloody history.
Lenin's political methods
Lenin seized power in a coup d'état, but he did not act entirely by terror. Lenin is in many respects a thoroughly modern political phenomenon, a kind of demagogue familiar to us in Western democracies and to those under dictatorships.
In his pursuit of power, he promised people everything, whatever it was. He offered simple answers to complex problems. He lied without shame. He identified scapegoats that could later be labeled "enemies of the people. He justified himself in terms of all that was necessary to win. The ends justified the means.
Anyone who has recently experienced elections in a Western political culture considered sophisticated might think of Lenin. Lenin is the father of what critics a century later have called "post-truth politics.
Hakusuisha, Victor Sebeschen, translated by Motohiro Miura and Tsukasa Yokoyama, Lenin: Power and Love, p12
Some line breaks have been made.
Lenin's political methods are still relevant today. This book will tell the story of Lenin's fearsome political skills. It is a book that I hope you will read, as I will show you in the articles that follow. I believe that this is the wisdom we need today to protect ourselves from the politics of fear by politicians like Lenin.
Lenin's Personality
Lenin considered himself an idealist. He was not a monster, sadist, or scumbag. In his personal dealings with people, he was always kind and behaved as an upper-middle-class gentleman, befitting his upbringing. He was not a conceited man. He could laugh, and sometimes directed that laugh at himself. He was not brutal. Unlike Stalin, Mao, and Hitler, he never inquired about the details of the deaths of his victims and tasted them.
In any case, for him death was a theoretical thing, a mere number. Lenin never wore the uniform or military dress that other dictators preferred. But in the years of struggle with other revolutionaries, and in the years of maintaining the power he had gained, he did not show leniency to his defeated opponents or perform humanitarian acts, unless they were politically useful.
He created a regime based on the idea that political terror against the enemy was justified if it served a greater purpose. It was Stalin who perfected this system, but the idea was Lenin's.
Lenin was not necessarily a bad man, but he did terrible things. Angelika Barabanova, one of his old comrades who had long revered him but later came to fear and loathe him, astutely pointed out that Lenin's "tragedy, to use Goethe's expression, was that he desired good ... and yet produced evil" ("Always desire evil, always do good" in Mephistotle's Faust). He astutely points out, "The worst of the evils he has created is that he has created evil. The worst of the evil he created was leaving a man like Stalin in a position to lead Russia after his death.
Lenin is often portrayed as a rigid ideologue, a communist fanatic, and in some ways that is true. He is well known to have said, "Without theory there can be no revolutionary party.
But one argument he more frequently made to his supporters is often forgotten. That is that "theory is a guide, not a scripture.
Whenever ideology clashed with expediency, he invariably chose the tactical path over doctrinal genuineness. If that would get him closer to his goal, he could completely change his mind. He was motivated by emotion as well as ideology. As powerful as his belief in Marx's theory of surplus value, what drove Lenin was the thirst for vengeance that had been in him since the execution of his brother for plotting to assassinate the Czar.
Lenin wanted power and to change the world. He took power into his own hands for four and a bit years, after which he became physically and mentally unable to maintain power due to illness. But, as he predicted, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 "turned the world upside down. Neither Russia nor many countries from Asia to South America have recovered since then.
Hakusuisha, Victor Sebeschen, translated by Motohiro Miura and Tsukasa Yokoyama, Lenin: Power and Love, p12-13
Some line breaks have been made.
The key point is that "Lenin was not necessarily an evil man." That not necessarily evil man "justified the means to an end and ended up killing many people.
You may think that Lenin is a person in the history of the world, a special human being, and that this is an issue that has nothing to do with us. However, it seems to me that Lenin poses a very serious question when we consider what is the essence of human nature.
And in a passage that appears later in this quote, Lenin's brother plotted to assassinate the Czar and was executed. Here is a hint as to why Lenin became a revolutionary and why he was so ruthless in his attempts to accomplish his revolution. We will look at this again in a later article.
be unbroken
Next Article.
Click here for a list of "Reading Biography of Lenin" articles. There are 16 articles in total.
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