Counterfactuals: Could Lenin or Trotsky Have Changed History?

Welcome to Origin Story. The Story of Socialism is our first ever themed season and now we begin our first ever three-part story because there’s just so much to tell: Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin.

Vladimir Lenin’s political journey begins in 1887 when he’s 17 and his older brother is executed for plotting to assassinate the Tsar. As Russian socialism pivots from rural agitation to Marxism, Lenin develops his own version of Marxism: violent revolution led by an elite vanguard rather than the masses, leading to a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat (details TBC).

Forced to leave Russia, Lenin wages a power struggle for command of its socialist exiles in Europe, splitting the party into his own aggressive Bolsheviks and the more moderate Mensheviks. In the process, he first meets the flamboyant writer and orator Leon Trotsky and the sullen Georgian activist who will become Stalin.

After the failure of Russia’s 1905 revolution, Lenin tightens his grip on the movement. In 1907, the socialists of the Second International pledge not to fight each other in a European war but the Polish-German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg predicts that nationalism will trump class solidarity when it comes to the crunch. She’s right. When the First World War begins in 1914, socialists take up arms and the Second International implodes. 

The war also finishes off the teetering Tsarist regime in February 1917 and a Provisional Government of liberals and socialists takes over, but it’s doomed from the start. Lenin races to Petrograd, where he reconnects with Trotsky and Stalin and convinces the Bolsheviks to stage a second revolution. In October, Petrograd revolts, the government caves in and Lenin takes charge of a vast empire of 125 million people — the world’s first socialist regime. Leninism has triumphed. The dictatorship of the proletariat can begin.

What was Leninism? How did one man redefine Russian Marxism and squash his rivals? How did he see the distinction between socialism and communism? What role did the very different personalities of Trotsky and Stalin play on the road to revolution? Was it only the war that made revolution possible, let alone inevitable? Who predicted years in advance that Bolshevism would mean tyranny? And is this really want Marx wanted? Join us as we begin one of the most earth-shaking stories of the 20 th century

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Reading list

• Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky: 1879-1921 (1954)

• Ian Dunt, How to be a Liberal: The Story of Freedom and the Fight for Its Survival (2020)

• Elzbieta Ettinger, Rosa Luxemburg: A Life (1988)

• Oleg V Khlevniuk, Stalin: New biography of a dictator (2015)

• V. I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? (1902)

• V. I. Lenin, ‘The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution’ (aka the April Theses) (1917)

• V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917)

• Reds, co-written and directed by Warren Beatty (1981)

• Kevin Morgan, ‘Rummaging in Trotsky’s dustbin or what does the left need with history?’ (2003)

• John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (1919)

• Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (2000)

• Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (2004)

• Robert Service, Trotsky: A Biography (2009)

• Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (1932)

• Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography (1994)

• Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940)
Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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