Vladimir Ilich Lenin (1870–1924)

Abstract

The term used by Lenin and the Bolsheviks to express the heart of their outlook was “hegemony.” Because this idea is not discussed in the works by Lenin most familiar to foreign readers, it requires special emphasis today. In Bolshevik discourse, this term had special application to Russia, with its advanced socialist proletariat and its peasant majority. Lenin’s widow Nadezhda Krupskaya called it “the grand idea of Marx: the idea that the working class is the advanced detachment of all the laborers and that all the laboring masses, all the oppressed will follow it.” The logic behind this idea goes back to the Communist Manifesto, and Lenin also pointed to a 1906 article by Karl Kautsky that applied the logic specifically to Russia. In order to bring Russia’s upcoming “bourgeois democratic revolution” as far as it could go (“to the end”), the proletariat should assume a leadership role over the narod (the people, principally the peasants), since the Russian bourgeoisie was thoroughly incapable of this historical task. After the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks saw themselves as moving toward socialism. Nevertheless, the logic of hegemony – proletarian leadership of the peasant majority – remained intact.