Rolf H. W. THEEN. Lenin. Genesis and Development of a Revolutionary. L. 1974. 146 p.

In the recent bourgeois literature devoted to the revolutionary movement in Russia and the theory and practice of socialist construction in the USSR, the Leninist theme still occupies a central place both in terms of its specific weight and in terms of the political and ideological burden it carries. Books and articles dedicated specifically to Lenin continue to be published.

In the works of bourgeois authors in recent years, along with a crude, outright falsification of Lenin's activities, one can also note a clear tendency to use more veiled methods of distorting the theory and practice of Leninism. Concerned about the steady growth of the influence of his ideas (some Sovietologists openly recognize him, understand his connection with the development and deepening of the world revolutionary process1 ), bourgeois authors use such methods to try in every possible way to prevent this. Their main emphasis now is on falsifying the theoretical foundations of Leninism. These trends are most clearly reflected in the work of Rolf Tin, Professor of Political Science and editor of the American Bibliography of Slavic and Eastern European Studies. His focus is on the early period of Lenin's life and work, from the late 1980s to 1900. It was, as is well known, a period of the formation and development of Lenin's revolutionary views, of his intense study of Marxist theory and its propaganda among the workers, of his irreconcilable struggle against opportunism, and of the elaboration of the ideological and theoretical foundations of a new type of Proletarian party. It was during these years that Lenin became the recognized organizer and leader of the Russian proletariat.

Tina's book is written using a wider range of sources than, for example, the works of bourgeois authors of the 60s .2 It uses documents and works published in the Complete Works of V. I. Lenin and Lenin's collections, correspondence of the Ulyanov family, memoirs, and the multi-volume edition " Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Biographical chronicle". Along with the objective reasons (the publication and distribution of Lenin's works abroad) that compel bourgeois authors to turn to primary sources, their desire to make their arguments and conclusions more convincing, to give their works a more "scientific" look and "objective" character also plays an important role in this.

This desire for "objectivity" was also reflected in Tin's attempt to define Leninism. "The combination of Western Marxism, elements of the Russian revolutionary tradition, and the peculiarities of Lenin's own psychology, "he writes," all combined to create a revolutionary doctrine that, combined with objective historical circumstances, not only resulted in the October Revolution of 1917, but also had a significant impact on the Soviet economy.

1 См. "Marxism, Communism and Western Society. A Comparative Encyclopedia". Ed. by With D. Kernig. Vol. 5. N.Y. 1973, pp. 187-188.

2 Z. A. Levina, analyzing the works of S. Possoni, R. Peln and other bourgeois authors devoted to Lenin published in the first half of the 60s, rightly noted their common features-ignoring Lenin's works and ignorance of his life and activities. See Voprosy istorii CPSU, 1966, No. 4, p. 68.

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influence on the development of various political movements that oppose liberal democracy all over the world " (p. 4). This definition includes both the typical desire of all bourgeois authors to present Leninism and the socialist state based on its principles as "anti - democratic" in essence, and an attempt to explain important ideological phenomena by psychological reasons. But at the same time, it also contains an important recognition that, firstly, Leninism was based on Marxism and the revolutionary thought of Russia; secondly, that Lenin's theory was connected with historical reality, with revolutionary practice. Usually bourgeois authors try to deny this.

However," objectivism " is used by Tin only as a cover. Its true purpose is to contrast Marxism with Leninism, to present Leninism as a purely Russian phenomenon, and to prove, contrary to its own admission, that Lenin's teaching did not correspond to objective reality. The author claims that Lenin's works, although they "reflected the changing reality of the revolutionary situation in Russia", reflected it as it was presented to Lenin himself (p. 70). This situation is not proven, but simply declared. Tin tries to attribute his own subjectivism to Lenin.

The helplessness of the author's subjectivist methodology is particularly evident in his attempt to explain the historical conditions of the emergence of Leninism. In essence, this question is reduced in the book to the author's reasoning about the reasons that led Vladimir Ulyanov to the path of revolutionary activity. These arguments are far from original. Like L. Fischer, Tin repeats the speculations of the Menshevik N. Valentinov, claiming that Lenin became a revolutionary thinker only after the execution of his elder brother. True, the author admits that the Russian reality, the situation of social and political oppression pushed the advanced Russian intelligentsia towards revolution and that this alone could have led V. Ulyanov to a revolutionary struggle, but Tin still assigns a decisive role in the development of Lenin's revolutionary activity to the fact of A. Ulyanov's death. "The shock caused by the execution of his brother and his subsequent attempts to understand the interests and motives of Sasha's actions, "Tin argues," is what contributed to the transformation of Volodya Ulyanov into Lenin " (p. 28).

Such an explanation, which ignores the socio-economic and political development of Russian society at the end of the 19th century, does not stand up to serious criticism - to explain the emergence of Leninism only by psychological reasons is both theoretically and factually incorrect. N. K. Krupskaya writes in her memoirs about the impact of A. I. Ulyanov's execution on Lenin: "The fate of my brother undoubtedly had a profound influence on Vladimir Ilyich. A big role in this was played by the fact that by this time Vladimir Ilyich was already thinking about many things independently, already deciding for himself the question of the need for a revolutionary struggle.....The fate of his brother only sharpened the work of his mind, developed in him an extraordinary sobriety, the ability to face the truth, not to allow himself to be carried away for a single moment by a phrase; an illusion, developed in him the greatest honesty in his approach to all questions. " 3
The views of Lenin and the development of his ideas in the 90-ies of the XIX century are considered in Tina's book out of connection with the specific socio-economic conditions of Russia at that time, in isolation from the class struggle of the proletariat. Based on this approach, the author, guided by the desire to undermine the influence of Lenin's teaching, draws conclusions that contradict reality. In order to misrepresent Lenin's teaching as a whole, Tin resorted to the most common technique among bourgeois falsifiers-the deliberate distortion of the meaning of individual Leninist propositions. So, he claims that in the work "What are the" friends of the people " and how do they fight against the Social Democrats?" Lenin allegedly concludes that the struggle for democratic transformation in Russia is unnecessary and even harmful, and calls on the Russian social-Democrats to "break with the ideas of the democrats" (pp. 58-59). The words about breaking with the ideas of the democrats are indeed contained in this Leninist work, but their meaning is exactly the opposite of what Tin is trying to attribute to Lenin. Lenin calls on the Russian social-Democrats to break away, not from the ideas of democracy (he considered the struggle for democratic transformation to be the primary task of the Workers ' Party in Russia), but from the anti-socialist reactionary ideas of liberal narodism, pointing out its fundamental difference from the democratic Party.-

3 "Memoirs of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin", Vol. 1, Moscow, 1968, p. 225.

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kratov of the era of N. G. Chernyshevsky ," when democracy and socialism merged into one indissoluble, inseparable whole " 4 . Tin completely ignores the difference between the liberal Narodniks and the Narodniks of the 60 - 70s of the XIX century, and he tries to portray both of them as representatives of the same democratic trend in Russian social and political life of the XIX century.

Such a distortion of Lenin's thought was necessary for Tin to prove that Lenin allegedly developed the idea of the incompatibility of the ideas of socialism in democracies already in his early works, and that this was later fully manifested in the policy and practice of the CPSU (p.59). As can be seen, the author's guiding motive was not to present Lenin's activities at the end of the nineteenth century in an objective light. Tin pursued a very definite political goal: to discredit Leninism, to discredit the policies of the CPSU and the Soviet state.

Tin tries to carry out his attempts to falsify Lenin's ideas in a veiled form, trying to make certain provisions of the book look plausible. Thus, he asserts, " for example, that Lenin's activity was a continuation of the revolutionary traditions of Russian socio-political thought of the XIX century (pp. 4, 40-42, 49, etc.). This statement cannot be objected to in principle. Our literature notes that the formation of Lenin's views was influenced by the advanced traditions of the revolutionary movement in Russia, that Lenin's theoretical thought was not only a further development of Marxism, but also the highest level of Russian social thought, and at the same time, Soviet scientists have shown that already in their first works (1893-1894 Lenin spoke as a staunch Marxist, creatively applying Marxism to the analysis of the economic and political situation in Russia5; Tin seeks to contrast the influence of" Russian revolutionary "thought and Marxism on Lenin, and to show the" non-Marxist " origins of Leninism. Recognizing the influence of the two main ideological trends of Russian revolutionary thought and Marxism on Lenin, he writes, "I find that the influence of the former was more significant" (p.49). The author tries in every possible way to present Lenin as a follower of the" Jacobin"," voluntaristic " traditions of narodism (pp. 59-60). He reproaches Soviet historians for deliberately exaggerating the role of Marxism in shaping Lenin's views (pp. 44, 48-49). Selecting quotations from Lenin's works about the correlation of objective and subjective factors in the revolution, about the role of the party, and considering these quotations in isolation from the general context of Lenin's works, Tin tries to prove that Lenin's theoretical propositions developed in his works of the 90s of the XIX century, and then in "What to Do?", were the result of the influence of narodnik traditions on it, a departure from Marxism towards subjectivism and voluntarism (p. 79).

Other bourgeois authors had already accused Lenin and Leninism of voluntarism, Narodnaya Volya, and Blanquism, 6 and they borrowed them from the Mensheviks and opportunist leaders of the Second International, who at the beginning of the twentieth century accused the Bolsheviks of deviating from "Western European models" and attributed to them "Blanquist" tendencies. The desire to "separate" Lenin from Marx, to separate Leninism from Marxism, is the main goal of most of the works of bourgeois falsifiers. They try to refute the universal character of Leninism, to present it as a purely Russian scholar, unsuitable for other countries. This interpretation of Leninism, which is established in bourgeois historiography as a doctrine that allegedly does not agree with Marxism, is so far-fetched a distortion of historical reality that it raises objections even from some bourgeois authors. 7 Together with the distortion of Lenin's views Tin

4 V. I. Lenin; PSS. T 1, page 280. .

5 See "V. I. Lenin and Russian socio-political Thought of the XIX-early XX centuries", L. 1969, p. 13; " Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Biografiya". Izd., 5th Moscow, 1972, pp. 33-34.

6 See A. F. Kostin. Lenin's concept of the history of the creation of the RSDLP and its bourgeois critics. Moscow, 1973, p. 61; A. N. Sakharov. Apologetics of "khvostism" in the RSDLP (1895-1903) by modern bourgeois historiography. "The Birth of Bolshevism", Moscow, 1974, p. 109. The idea of V. Y. Lenin's" voluntaristic"," subjectivist "interpretation of Marxism in the 90-ies of the XIX century is persistently repeated in recently published works abroad (see, for example, "The Betrayal of Marx", Ed. by Frederic L. Bender. N.Y. 975, pp. 44-46).

7 See Yu. I. Igritsky. Against the false interpretation of Leninism. Voprosy Istorii, 1977, No. 1.

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It also distorts the history of the working-class movement in Russia at the end of the 19th century. Completely disregarding the facts, he asserts that the Russian working class at that time was evolving towards apoliticalism, and that the development of the working-class movement in Russia was allegedly moving in the direction of "trade unionism, not revolution" (pp. 64-65).

Tin aims to prove that the most important propositions of the Marxist-Leninist theory about a classless society, the disappearance of the state, and the establishment of social equality in society are the result of a misunderstanding of the essence of human nature, a utopia, and that utopianism was an essential feature of Lenin as a theorist (pp. 70, 84-35).

The idea of utopian scientific communism is not new. It was actively used by apologists of the bourgeoisie even in the struggle against Karl Marx. Bourgeois ideologists have long called socialist ideas and teachings "inappropriate" to human nature, utopia. History has refuted such claims, but Tin and other bourgeois political scientists persist in repeating them, regardless of the actual facts.

Tin's attempts to carry the old ideological baggage of opportunism and anti-communism under the banner of "objectivity" and "scientific character" attest to the failure and poverty of modern bourgeois ideology.

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