The upheavals in Russia during 1917 changed the
history of the world. Russia broke with the evolu-
tionary Western path of national development.
The birth of communist power was seen by Lenin,
its founder, as the means by which not only the
vast lands and peoples of Russia would be trans-
formed, but also the world. For seven decades
Lenin was revered by half the world as its spiritual
guide despite the bitter dissensions among com-
munist countries as to which was the rightful heir.
His vision of communism as a world force was
realised less than twenty-five years after his death.
One of the fascinations of history is that it
shows how a man, in many ways very ordinary,
with ordinary human weaknesses, making mis-
takes and bewildering his contemporaries with the
inconsistencies of his actions, can exert enormous
influence on his own times and on the world
decades later. Napoleon and Hitler caused devas-
tation. Napoleon left some good behind him;
Hitler, nothing but destruction. Lenin’s reputa-
tion today has suffered with the demise of the
Soviet Union. Once elevated by propaganda, he
is now stripped of myth, but the impact of his
ideas was enormous.
The success of Lenin’s revolution, and the
birth and growth of Soviet power, exercised great
appeal as well as revulsion. Lenin’s achievement
was that he gave concrete expression to the the-
ories of Karl Marx. The Russian Revolution
appeared as the beginning of the fulfilment of
Marx’s ‘scientific’ prophecy that capitalist society
was heading for its inevitable collapse and that the
‘proletariat’, the workers hitherto exploited,
would take over and expropriate the exploiters.
The poor shall inherit this world, not the next.
That was obviously an intoxicating message. Of
course, Marx had written his great works in the
mid-nineteenth century. Some ‘adjustments’ of
his predictions were necessary to square them
with the realities of the early twentieth century.
In Germany, where Marx’s teachings had the
largest political following, and where a powerful
Social Democratic Party emerged, the lot of the
working man was improving, not getting worse
as Marx had predicted. The collapse of capitalism
did not after all seem imminent. Some German
socialists asked whether the party should not con-
centrate on securing practical benefits for the
workers and accept the political system mean-
while. This became the policy of the majority of
the party. The British Labour movement was
clearly taking this direction too. In France the
doctrine of industrial and class strife leading to
revolution had limited appeal outside the towns.
Marx’s apocalyptic vision of capitalism in its last
throes bore little relevance to conditions in the
most industrialised countries. But Lenin was
not disconcerted. He sharply condemned all the
‘revisionists’ and compromises with the ‘exploit-
ing’ bourgeois society. He found the answer to
the paradox much later in the book of an English
radical on the nature of imperialism. J. A. Hobson
believed that the drive for empire by the Euro-Chapter 9
WAR AND REVOLUTION IN THE EAST, 1917