that he was free from the temptations and corruptions of absolute power.
Lenin was a Marxist who interchanged the “dictatorship of the proletariat”—which for Marx was a broader democracy of the working class counterposed to the narrower democracy of capitalist society—with the outright dictatorship of a minority Communist Party over the proletariat. Lenin believed that the hope of mankind lay in the struggle of the working class to abolish capitalism and therewith all economic classes. But he was even more convinced that this struggle could be successful only when led by his own party no matter what its name. He did not flinch from the inexorable conclusion that, therefore, any individual or group who opposed the Party was objectively “an enemy of mankind.”
At one stroke all other parties of the working class were thrust on the other side of the barricades. Lenin not only used the method of “amalgam” against them, he believed it. The method of amalgam was to link up a Kronstadt sailor fighting for Soviet democracy against party dictatorship with the Black Hundreds of Czarism, to identify a socialist critic of Bolshevism, who had languished for years in pre-revolutionary prisons, with partisans of Denikin and Kolchak. Before Lenin died, anyone who called for Soviet democracy as opposed to party dictatorship was forthwith denounced as a counter-revolutionist. This seems ironical because Lenin’s chief slogan against Kerensky had been “All Power to the Soviets.” But Lenin would have failed to see any irony whatever in such a situation. Slogans, like people, had to be used in a functional or, to use his own expression, in a “concrete” way, that is, to carry forward the political task of the moment. The goal in behalf of which political tasks were to be solved was power for the Bolsheviks. Thus, when it seemed necessary for the victory of the party, Lenin proclaimed “All Power to the Soviets.” In July, when it seemed that the Bolsheviks could not capture the Soviets, Lenin denounced the slogan and looked around for other agencies through which power could be won. Later, when the situation once more made the prospect of Bolshevik capture of the Soviets favourable, Lenin returned to the old slogan. But after power was won in October, Soviet democracy meant the possibility that the Bolsheviks might lose power. To Lenin this was plain counter-revolution.
Had he been consistent, Lenin would have also drawn the
