SOURCE: "A Centenary View of Lenin," in International Affairs, Vol. XXXXVI, No. 3, July, 1970, pp. 490-500.

[In the following essay, Toynbee explains why Lenin remains one of the most important twentieth-century historical figures despite the failure of communism.]

Everyone has been speaking or writing of Lenin recently, and there is very little that I can add.

I will start with the obvious: Lenin is one of the few people in our lifetime who has been recognised within his own lifetime as being a figure of first-class importance in world history. By 'world history', of course, I mean the tail-end of world history, just the last 5, 000 years during which there have been records of people. No doubt there were as many other distinguished and able people in every branch of life in the first million years, but we do not have any record of them. But even to be as distinguished among people in the last 5, 000 years as to be world-famous in your lifetime is quite an achievement.

Let us think for a moment of other people who have had the same immediate success. One thinks, first of all, of political people, and above all, conquerors, people like Alexander, or Caesar, or the Emperor Constantine the Great. They were world-famous—at least famous at our end of the Old World, on our side of the Old World—in their own lifetime. And they had Chinese counterparts who, I expect, when China becomes the dominant nation in the world in the next fifty or a hundred years, will be household words in the whole world, as Caesar and Alexander are in the West today. These Chinese names are not household words at present. They will be, but I will not mention them yet.

What other kinds of immediately world-famous people can one think of? There have been some religious leaders. In our world, of course, Luther and Calvin, who were so shocking that they immediately became famous in this tiny Western Europe. Some of the greater religious leaders did not become famous in their own life-times. The Buddha was the son of a small king, heir to a kingdom if he had chosen to be that, and he had the entrée to the bigger kings round about him (in Bihar and that part of India), so he was known socially, so to speak, to the great of his time. I doubt if any of the kings who received him because he was his father's son took him seriously as going to be the Buddha, the founder of one of the religions or philosophies which was going to have the majority of mankind for its adherents. Jesus, of course, was certainly not famous in His own lifetime. There is hardly any record of His existence by contemporary—or even later—Greek or Roman historians. Mohammed went into politics (and politics is the quick way, especially politics conducted by war, to immediate fame), yet Mohammed just missed being world-famous in his own lifetime. Just before he died, after he had conquered Arabia, he wrote to the Roman and Persian emperors, saying: 'Accept Islam, or else'. And they thought this an awful joke. Of course, six years later they did not think it a joke at all, either of them, but by that time Mohammed was dead, so he just missed it.

Then, if you think of artists who have become world famous in their own lifetimes, I suppose the Renaissance Italians who are known by their Christian names, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, and so on, must have been famous in their own lifetime, though only within our small Western world.

What of the scientists, Western scientists, who have become quickly famous? I suppose Copernicus was famous in his own lifetime; certainly Galileo was, and certainly Newton was, and certainly Darwin. When you say just 'Darwin', everyone knows that, out of all the Charles Darwins, you mean that particular one. That is real fame! Of course, Darwin was shocking, like Luther and Calvin, and this is one quick way to fame.

But, coming back to our generation, I can really think of only one other person who became immediately famous in his own lifetime, and that is Einstein. Lenin and Einstein, a curious pair: the supreme political leader, and the supreme thinker. Einstein, of course, is in that series that begins with Copernicus and Galileo. On second thoughts, I can think of two more: Freud and Hitler. But even now I have only four.

Of course, there may be people now living who are at present completely obscure, but who may become world-famous posthumously. I have mentioned Jesus. Mendel in the 19th century is another case. No one really knew about Mendel when he was abbot of a monastery, in Moravia. Then suddenly his work was discovered thirty or forty years after his death, and now anyone who has a glimmering of knowledge of science knows Mendel's name.

Now I have starred Lenin—I have put him with Einstein and Freud and Hitler as one of four people who became world famous in our time. So let us see if we can debunk him. That is always a healthy exercise. I say at once that I do not think we can debunk Lenin, but we can have a try.

So, first question: Has Lenin really changed the course of Russian history? Has not Lenin's revolution merely reproduced the previous Imperial Russian régime in a more extreme form—more authoritarian, more autocratic, more ruthless, but still unmistakably Muscovite? Is he not (a French analogy) like Napoleon? Did not Lenin outdo Peter the Great in the way Napoleon outdid Louis XIV? Napoleon did what some of the ministers of the Ancien Régime dreamed of doing but could not do, and Napoleon achieved it. And is not Lenin like that, as compared with, say, Nicholas I? I think that is true, but I also think it is not the last word.

Then, economics: Lenin said something like—I can't remember the exact words—'Socialism is electrification'. A very striking phrase. But, in this forceful imposition on Russia of modern Western technology, was not Lenin just continuing, in Peter the Great's high-handed way, the bout of Western technology that Peter had started before the close of the 17th century? I think that is true, but, again, it is not the last word about Lenin.

Then, Lenin might claim to have transformed a nation of peasants into a nation of urban industrial workers. That is quite true, but this was happening at high speed in Russia before the First World War and before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Russia's immediate pre-First World War economic development has, I think, been rather obscured by the fact that Russia gave such a poor technological performance in the First World War. It was poor compared with the contemporary performance in the First World War of Germany and the Western allies. But, compared to Russia's recent past, Russia's economic development—the growth of industries, the growth of urban population—during the twenty-five or thirty years before 1914 was terrific. So, has Lenin really done more than speed up things which were already going strong before he had a chance of taking control of Russia? In fact, did not the First World War, and the Russian Revolution, and the Civil War after that, merely retard a process that might have gone faster if Lenin had not intervened? Can Lenin therefore really be given credit for the resumption of Russia's prewar industrialisation? Was he perhaps a retarding factor?

Again, industrialisation and urbanisation were not just a Russian phenomenon. In Russia these things had been done relatively late and had been relatively feeble. But this movement had started in Britain more than a century before 1870, the year in which Lenin was born. Was not Lenin merely the local instrument of an impersonal technological and social revolution that has been worldwide, and that did not begin or end either with Russia or with Lenin? Again, that is true, I think, but it does not dispose of Lenin.

So I am going to say why I think that Lenin is, all the same, an historic figure, and why I think that debunking, though one can do it rather plausibly, does not finish him off. I am going to say why I think he remains as big as before. I think that, whether we like it or not, Lenin's career is maybe 'the wave of the future'—a grim thought, but I think it may be true. Yet even if his career were just to miss being 'the wave of the future', it would certainly have come near enough to being that to ensure for Lenin his place as an historic figure. It is now more than half a century since Lenin seized power in Russia in 1917; already we can begin to see Lenin's career in perspective. We can see its effect on world history so far.

Now, I suggest three reasons why Lenin is—at least, so it seems to me—historic, whatever may be going to happen in the future to confirm or diminish his position. I think I see three things that Lenin stands for, or symbolises, or is posthumously working for.

First of all, the repudiation of the modern Western middle-class way of life and attitude to life, except (and this is a big exception) for technology and for the background and basis of technology in science.

Second, the revival of an intolerant, dogmatic, religious faith. Because Communism is a religion, and a religion of a particular family; it is religion of the Jewish-Christian-Muslim family, call it the Judaic family if you like. It is very thinly disguised. God—He is there as 'Historical Necessity' the Chosen People—they are there as 'the Proletariat'. The millennium—that is there as 'the withering of the state' the heathen raging furiously against Zion and not being able to prevail—that is in the Communist doctrine about the pre-destined fate of the capitalist world.

Of course Communism—Marxism—was invented in the Western world; it was invented by two Westerners from the Rhineland, one of whom spent most of his life in the British Museum Reading Room, and the other as manager of a small factory in Manchester in order to support Marx—I am talking of the amiable and disinterested Engels. Communism could have been invented only in the Western part of the world. It is inconceivable, I think, that Marxism could have been invented either in the Indian part of the world or in the East Asian part. It could not have been invented, either, in the pre-Christian Graeco-Roman world, which was much more like present-day India and Eastern Asia than like the post-Christian and post-Muslim western end of the Old World.

These are two things which make Lenin historic. The third thing is the belief in the need for, and in the legitimacy of, dictatorship. Let me enlarge a little on these three points about Lenin, because I think they are important in trying to estimate his place in history.

The repudiation of modern Western civilisation. In 1870 our Western middle-class civilisation was dominant in the world. Its enemies, as well as its friends, assumed that it had come to stay, in fact that this was 'the wave of the future'. You can establish certain conventional dates for the beginning of modern Western civilisation. You might say that the military date is the failure of the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1682-83. After that, until the First World War and until the Russian Revolution, the Western civilisation had no formidable enemies in the world to face. It was dominant. Or you might take, on a political plane, 'the Glorious Revolution' in this country in 1688. Or, on the intellectual and cultural plane, which is really more important, you might take the foundation of the Royal Society in 1660 or the 'Battle of the Books' in the latter part of the 17th century, the triumph of the idea that, after all, the Ancients were not oracles for ever, and that the Moderns had gone beyond the Ancients and had something to say which the Ancients did not know.

Those things together make the beginning of the Modern Age, I think, and they all happened in the latter part of the 17th century. Notice that Peter the Great of Russia was converted to modern Western civilisation just at that time, at the end of the 17th century. Notice also that Saint Vladimir, the Christianiser of Russia, was the first person to impose an ideology on Russia by force. Vladimir was converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity when the Byzantine Empire was apparently on top of the world. It is rather interesting that it was apparently, but not really. It had a crash almost immediately afterwards, just as our Western civilisation had a crash, immediately after Lenin's career, as a result of the cumulative effect of the two world wars.

Now Lenin repudiated and challenged modern Western civilisation at a time when this seemed, to ordinary reason, unassailable. The West's dominance lasted from Peter's conversion to Lenin's challenge. You might say that, each time, it was a Russian who decided when the dominance of the West should begin (Peter decided that) and when it should end (Vladimir Ulyanov, the new Vladimir, decided that).

Now, since Lenin's death, on January 21, 1924, this challenge that Lenin initiated has grown. The external challenge to the West was delivered at first just by Russia. That was not new, because Peter the Great had challenged the West by adopting Western weapons as long ago as the end of the 17th century. But now we have China, Vietnam, Cuba, the liquidation of the Western colonical empires, Black Power in the United States, race conflict in this country—the challenge to white Western dominance has grown. Many non-Western peoples, of course, have rebelled against the West, against the West's military, political and cultural domination, in order to westernise their way of life voluntarily. That was Peter's reaction. That was the Meiji Revolution's reaction in Japan. It was also Atatilrk's reaction in Turkey; and Communist Russia might involuntarily go the same way, because the compulsive power of technology is tremendous. If you do not adopt the latest modern technology, you fall behind in the race for power; if you do adopt it, then, as a consequence, you have to adopt dozens of other things besides, and the westernising process runs away with you.

A more significant revolt against modern Western civilisation is the internal revolt. I am not talking just about the hippies, who are perhaps exhibitionists, or about the militant students, who are, after all, a smallish minority. I am thinking, first of all, of the non-militant students who are rejecting the profit-motive and are opting for non-remunerative, or not very remunerative, liberal professions. This is the real portent, I think, in the United States today. And it is amusing to think that Lenin would—at least, so I believe—have disapproved, first of all, of the anti-technology movement; and, secondly, he would certainly have disapproved of the students being free to choose their careers (though Lenin himself, of course, chose his career freely, because he was brought up in a relatively liberal society; for even 19th-century Tsarism was a relatively free society). Lenin would also have disapproved of industrial workers using their trades-union organisation as a weapon in a free-for-all free-enterprise scramble for the fruits of technology. He recognised that the peasantry in Russia were potential capitalists and free enterprisers, and that is why he rejected any reliance on them and broke, over this, with the social revolutionaries. But he did not recognise that the industrial workers were going to go the same way.

Then, the revival of an intolerant, dogmatic religious faith. Lenin's religious career shows, I think, how difficult it is to jump clear of the cultural tradition of the society in which one has been born and brought up. Russia has been converted forcibly three times so far: by the first Vladimir to Eastern Orthodox Byzantine Christianity; by Peter to modern Western civilisation; and by Lenin to Communism, which is a modern Western rejection of modern Western civilisation.

Communism rejects two of the things which, to our minds, have been at the root of modern Western civilisation since the close of the 17th century, religious toleration and scientific open-mindedness. I suppose these are two facets of the same attitude of mind. Now, I think the first of those conversions—the conversion of Russia by Vladimir to Orthodox Eastern Christianity—has been by far the most important of the three, and I think it has continued to govern Russia's Weltanschauung through all her superficial metamorphoses since then. It was not for nothing that Lenin's Christian name was Vladimir.

This notion of Eastern Orthodoxy starts very early. The Greeks were civilised, the Romans were barbarians (though they conquered the Greeks). Greek Christianity, that was the orthodox form of Christianity. Western Christianity, that was deviationist. Catholicism and Protestantism—an Eastern Orthodox Christian cannot see the difference between them; to him they are both equally deviationist. Both have the same aberration in the creed. Now today Marxism, though Western, is orthodox for Russians and liberalism is heterodox. Russian Marxism is ultra-orthodox, but Western Marxism is just a capitulation to liberalism; it is not really Marxism at all.

Now Lenin's rejection of the Mensheviks, of the German revisionists and of the Second International reminds me of the Russians' rejection of the Ecclesiastical Union of Florence in 1439. You remember that, at that time, the Metropolitan of the Russian Church was a Greek. He came back from the Council of Florence to Russia with the Act of Union in his pocket, and the Russians kicked him out, saying 'We're not standing for this. We're the real Orthodox. You Greeks can come to terms with the schismatic Western Latins if you like, but not we'. This is very much like Lenin's attitude towards Western Marxists—'These degenerate Western Marxists'.

I think that in all ages since about the year 1,000—Vladimir was converted in 989—Russia has been Orthodox in her own eyes, and from this it follows inevitably that all the rest of the world ought to follow Russia's interpretation of Orthodoxy, or else it will be convicting itself of being heterodox. Russia is always the sole depository and citadel of the new faith. Lenin, I think, could not have repudiated Orthodox Christianity (he was brought up as a child as an ordinary Russian Orthodox Christian), if he had not replaced Orthodox Christianity by orthodox Marxism. I do not think he could have been just a sceptic or a scientific researcher with an open mind, as his elder brother, Alexander, was. Lenin believed, I think sincerely and unquestioningly, in the dogmas of Communism. But he believed in these dogmas as interpreted by Lenin. To Lenin, non-Leninist Marxism was anathema, perhaps even more anathema than non-Marxism or even than anti-Marxism.

This reminds me of a passage in Herzen's Memoirs. In this passage Herzen is standing on the Swiss Frontier in 1848 watching the failed West European revolutionaries streaming across the frontier into Switzerland for asylum. And Herzen comments: 'These miserable Western revolutionaries. Of course they have failed, the halfhearted creatures. When we make our revolution in Russia, we will show them what a real revolution is.' Herzen died in 1870, the year in which Lenin was born, but already he had foreseen what Lenin was going to do.

Lenin did not overlap chronologically as a grown-up person either with Herzen or with Marx. Marx died in 1883; Engels died in 1895, I think, and I have seen it said that Lenin quotes Engels rather more than Marx—Engels being a nearer contemporary is more real to him. Lenin was 25 when Engels died. I do not know whether he had already begun to read Marxist writings.

Then, thirdly, there is the belief in, and the need for, and the legitimacy of, dictatorship. And here I fear that Lenin's career may indeed be 'the wave of the future', though I hate to say so. Dictatorship has often been accepted as a lesser evil than anarchy in times of very revolutionary change; and majority rule by secret ballot, free speech, and free thought are, after all, spiritual luxuries, characteristic of times when life is relatively tranquil and secure. Today the human race is in the throes of the urban industrial revolution, the greatest revolution in human history since the agricultural revolution which was made about 8, 000 or 10, 000 years ago; and even lesser revolutions have produced dictatorships.

Russia is in the Roman tradition of revolutionary dictatorship. The Roman imperial office was always a revolutionary institution, never a constitutional one. Anyone could become Roman Emperor who had the ruthlessness, the ability, and the energy to force his way to the top, and, once he had done so, he was consecrated by having seized power. That goes through all the history of the Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire, and, though dynasties in Russia have lasted rather longer than they did in the Roman and Byzantine Empires, I think there has always been this revolutionary aspect of autocracy in Russia too. This is why, unhappily, I think that Lenin's career might be 'the wave of the future', because I think that the conditions in the whole world today are pretty like the condition of Russia in Lenin's lifetime. We have world-wide anarchy today—nationalism, racialism, inflation, sabotage of all kinds, the generation-war, the revolt of the under-dog, the pollution of the natural environment by technology. Any one of those things is enough to hoist a dictator into power, and we have them all. So the world, I fear, is ripe for ruthless dictators, self-righteous and therefore self-confident, because a dictator believes himself to be the sole possessor of the orthodox faith and the sole agent for making orthodoxy prevail, and of course orthodoxy ought to be made to prevail. That is what the Roman Emperor Theodosius I thought when, at the end of the 4th century, he rammed Christianity down the throats of the non-Christian majority of the population of the Roman Empire.

So is not Lenin's career a trial trip for a coming world dictatorship?

Let me conclude with a word or two about Lenin's personality and career. The great thing about his beginning, I think, is that he had a very normal middle-class family background and upbringing. His father was an efficient and devoted civil servant who spread primary schools in the Simbirsk province, a rather outlying province of European Russia. What is interesting is that Lenin's father did not question the Imperial régime, and it did not question him. What he was doing really, in spreading primary education, was an extremely revolutionary act, but he was rewarded for it by being ennobled. Lenin was thus technically a noble.

Psychologists tell us that the things that change your inborn character, that warp it or develop it, are things that happen very early. Now, nothing bad or upsetting happened to Lenin very early. When his brother Alexander was put to death, Lenin was 17. I am sure this influenced Lenin's career, but I doubt whether it changed his character or personality at that age. I suspect that Lenin would have been what he was and that he would have done what he did, even if his brother, instead of being put to death, had lived on, leading a peaceful life as a biologist or even as a monk—Alexander Ulyanov was rather monk-like in character. Indeed, he was a characteristic representative of one type of Russian hero, the non-violent martyr. The prototypes are the two princely saints Boris and Gleb, who were too proud to fight and who voluntarily gave themselves up to be put to death though they were the rightful heirs to the throne. I fancy that Alexander's fate confirmed Lenin's intention not himself to go like a lamb to the slaughter, as his brother had done, but to be Machiavelli's 'prophet armed', which is what he became. Of course Lenin suffered very unfairly for his brother's condemnation. He was banned from the university; he was not allowed to have a proper higher education. He was exiled to Siberia. A monstrous injustice and a grievance, but would not Lenin have been a revolutionary even if he had not been penalised? Was not his whole generation going to be revolutionary? After the reaction that had followed the assassination of Alexander II, was not revolution in the air in Russia in Lenin's time?

Personal life? All I will say about that is that I do not think any of the Communist leaders had time for much personal life, especially sexual life. They were rather Victorian about that, I think, not hypocritical Victorians, but bona fide ones.

Lenin's self-confidence is the astonishing thing about his personality. What was at the root of his self-confidence? As he was technically an aristocrat, one might think it was the same sort of self-confidence as the late Lord Russell had or the present Lord Salisbury has. A British aristocrat, when he has come to the conclusion that he is right, will back his opinion against the world. Perhaps the rest of us, if we are moved strongly by our conscience, may do the same, but we can do it only with agony. The British aristocrat does it effortlessly and painlessly. Now Lenin did it effortlessly and painlessly. And I think there may have been a touch in him of the late Lord Russell or the present Lord Salisbury. But I think the main part of his self-confidence came, not from his rather recent aristocratic label, but from religious conviction. I think this is more probable. If you are convinced that you know for certain what is true and right, say Marxism, and if you are also convinced that you alone know exactly what is true and right, this conviction will give you the self-confidence to defy the world single-handed whether you are an aristocrat or not. I think that in Lenin there was something of the late Lord Russell, but I feel that there was very much more of St. Paul.

When I read about Lenin's time in exile, when he muscled his way in among much older and more distinguished Russian revolutionaries, it reminds me of the second part of the Acts of the Apostles. Here is James, the brother of the Lord and the hereditary head of the Christian community, and here is Peter, the doyen of the Apostles, and Paul comes muscling in and says, 'I am an apostle, too', and they had to accept him. They say, 'But you represent nothing', and he says, 'You are wrong. I represent the majority of the population of the Roman Empire, whom I am going to convert, and you represent only a small sect of Jews'. In that critical vote in 1903, when the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks split, there was a stage, I think, at which Lenin's party was actually the minority, but of course he called his party the majority party, the Bolshevik party. And the interesting thing is that the others became identified as being the minority, which of course is fatal for anyone. Lenin could put that over. This is very like St. Paul.

I think that self-identification with a cause is probably necessary if one's will to power, and we all have the will to power in some form, is to be uninhibited, to be total, to be devoted, ascetic and ruthless—here comes St. Paul again. Unless you can identify your personal will to power with a supra-personal cause, you cannot have the face to fight for your will to power. You have got to be unaware of the difference between your will to power and your cause.

The Russians in exile all adopted pseudonyms, and of course there was a matter-of-fact reason for this; they wanted to evade the secret police. But remember that monks, when they take their vows, adopt a new name as a symbol that they are starting a new life, and I think that, in these funny pseudonyms that Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin all adopted, there is an element of this monkish devotion which was a very strong spiritual force in the Russia in which Lenin grew up.

Finally, one word about the types of Russian revolutionary. I have mentioned the Boris and Gleb type which was represented by Lenin's elder brother Alexander. Then there is the Bazarov type, represented by the hero of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, a revolutionary thinker who comes to a dead end, for whom suicide is the only way out. It is said that Lenin's favourite 19th-century Russian novelist was Turgenev, not Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky came too near to the bone, perhaps. Anyway, Lenin was not going to be a Bazarov; he was not going to come to a dead end and commit suicide; he was going to get through—as he did. Then there is the silly type in Dostoyevsky's The Possessed, the figure of fun, Stefan Trofimovich, a very common type among Russian revolutionaries abroad. That is why Lenin could knock most of them down like ninepins. Then there is the ruthless, practical type—Stefan Trofimovich's son, Piotr Stefanovich, the sinister hero of The Possessed. There is a lot of Lenin in Piotr Stefanovich. I do not think that Lenin was cynical through and through; I think he was cynical about the means he used, but not cynical about his ends. Dostoyevsky leaves you thinking that Piotr Stefanovich was cynical about everything. All the same, I think you can learn a good deal about Lenin from Dostoyevsky's portrayal of Stefan Trofimovich. You can also admire Dostoyevsky's amazing prescience in foreseeing what was coming a generation or two generations ahead of the event.