Quotations from V.I. Lenin

This blog will exclusively post quotations from Russian Marxist Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, as anthologized in his Collected Works, available online in English here.

"Marx said that France would begin and that Germany would finish. But it turned out that the Russian proletariat achieved more than anybody else."

"The Social-Democrats have built a proletarian party which will not be disheartened by the failure of the first armed onslaught, will not lose its head, nor be carried away by adventures. That party is marching to socialism, without tying itself or its future to the outcome of any particular period of bourgeois revolutions. That is precisely why it is also free of the weaker aspects of bourgeois revolution. And this proletarian party is marching to victory."

"A feature of the Russian bourgeois revolution is that a revolutionary policy on the key issue of the revolution—the agrarian question—is being pursued by the Black Hundreds and by the peasants together with the workers. The liberal lawyers and professors, on the other hand, are advocating something that is absolutely lifeless, absurd, and utopian...Economic necessity will certainly call for, and will certainly bring about a most 'drastic change' in Russia’s agrarian system."

"Notwithstanding all the efforts that have been made, the experience of two years of reaction has not created any reliable support within the country for the Black-Hundred autocracy, nor any new class elements capable of rejuvenating the autocracy economically. And without this no atrocities, no frenzy of the counter-revolution can save the present political system in Russia."

"Incidentally, I have begun to study Italian and, as a learner, I pounced at once on the address written by Maria Fyodorovna: expresso instead of espresso! Let's have that dictionary!"

"The sympathy of the socialist proletariat will always be on the side of the Republicans against the monarchy. But what they have succeeded in doing so far in Portugal is only to frighten the monarchy by the assassination of two monarchs, but not to destroy it."

"We regret that in the happening to the king of Portugal [his assassination] there is still clearly visible the element of conspiratorial, i.e., impotent, terror, one that essentially fails to achieve its purpose and falls short of that genuine, popular, truly regenerative terror for which the Great French Revolution became famous."

"I am extremely grateful to him; I'm afraid he can't always make out my terrible English!"

"The bourgeois papers write well when stung to the quick. Life becomes a more cheerful thing when you see this growing ideological unity among the liberal enemies of the proletariat all over the world, for this unity is one of the guarantees of the unification of the millions of the international proletariat, which will win for itself its promised land, come what may."

"Marx and Engels taught the proletariat revolutionary tactics, the tactics of developing the struggle to its very highest forms, the tactics which rally the peasantry behind the proletariat — and not the proletariat behind the liberal traitors."

"Engels said that the tactics of Marx in 1848 were correct, that they and only they really provided reliable, firm and unforgettable lessons for the proletariat. Engels said that these tactics were unsuccessful in spite of their being the only correct tactics. They were unsuccessful because the proletariat was insufficiently prepared, and capitalism was insufficiently developed."

"The bankruptcy of liberalism meant the triumph of the reactionary landlords. Today, intimidated by those reactionaries, humiliated and spat upon by them, transformed into a serf-bound accomplice of Stolypin's constitutional farce, liberalism will shed an occasional tear for the past."

"What kind of 'reconciliation' can there be here, dear A. M.? Why, it is ludicrous even to mention it. A fight is absolutely inevitable. And Party people should devote their efforts not to slurring it over, putting it off or dodging it, but to ensuring that essential Party work does not suffer in practice."

"That is why I am against allowing any kind of philosophy in the journal...

"I say: separate the fight from the faction. Of course, such a separation, on living persons, is rather difficult and painful. It needs time. It needs solicitous comrades."

"I repeat, on no account is it permissible to mix the disputes of writers about philosophy with a Party (i.e., factional) matter...We should continue to conduct our factional work harmoniously..."