russell on lenin and marxism...

 Bertrand Russell concerning Lenin and the version of Marxism found in the early Soviet Union

"When I visited Russia in 1920, I found there a philosophy very different from my own, a philosophy based upon hatred and force and despotic power. In the Marxist philosophy, as interpreted in Moscow, I found, as I believe, two enormous errors, one of theory and one of feeling. The error of theory consisted in believing that the only undesirable form of power over other human beings is economic power, and that economic power is co-extensive with ownership. In this theory other forms of power military, political and propagandist are ignored, and it is forgotten that the power of a large economic organization is concentrated in a small executive, and not diffused among all the nominal owners or shareholders.

It was therefore supposed that exploitation and oppression must disappear if the State became the sole capitalist, and it was not realized that this would confer upon State officials all, and more than all, the powers of oppression formerly possessed by individual capitalists. The other error, which was concerned with feeling consisted in supposing that a good state of affairs can be brought about by a movement of which the motive force is hate.

Those who had been inspired mainly by hatred of capitalists and landowners had acquired the habit of hating, and after achieving victory were impelled to look for new objects of detestation. Hence came, by a natural psychological mechanism, the purges, the massacre of Kulaks, and the forced labor camps. I am persuaded that

... Lenin and his early colleagues were actuated by a wish to benefit mankind, but from errors in psychology and political theory they created a hell instead of a heaven."

— Bertrand Russell, Portraits from Memory, Ch. I : An Autobiographical Epitome, p. 8

Background: In August 1920 Russell travelled to Russia as part of an official delegation sent by the British government to investigate the effects of the Russian Revolution. He met Vladimir Lenin and had a hour-long conversation with him. In his autobiography, he mentions that he found Lenin rather disappointing, sensing an "impish cruelty" in him and comparing him to "an opinionated professor". He cruised down the Volga on a steamship. His experiences destroyed his previous tentative support for the revolution. He wrote a book The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism about his experiences on this trip, taken with a group of 24 others from Britain, all of whom came home thinking well of the régime, despite Russell's attempts to change their minds. For example, he told them that he heard shots fired in the middle of the night and was sure these were clandestine executions, but the others maintained that it was only cars backfiring.

Image: Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov; alias Lenin (22 April 1870 – 21 January 1924). Lenin was a Russian communist revolutionary, politician and a political theorist. He served as head of government of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic from 1917, and of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death in 1924. Under his administration, the Russian Empire was replaced by the Soviet Union; wealth including land, industry and business were nationalized. Based in Marxism, his political theories are known as Leninism. Lenin remains a controversial and highly divisive world figure. Admirers view him as a champion of working people's rights and welfare whilst critics seem him as brutal dictator who carried out mass human rights abuses.