How not to quote Lenin

Submitted by Anon on 9 April, 2007 - 10:43

AS noted in the accompanying summary of the debate, Kerensky spent much of his time working over scraps of quotations from Lenin — from different periods, contexts, and articles indiscriminately, — la Boris Shub — under the heading of a discussion of the Russian Revolution and democracy.

While it takes at least ten times longer to nail one of these forgeries than it takes to reel off the distorted quotation, Shachtman was able to take them up effectively.

Here is one of the "quotations" which Kerensky tossed off, for example. Quite often it was impossible for the audience to determine from his speech where his alleged quotation ended and his own commentary on it began, and his confused quote-mongering was further complicated (still from the audience's angle) by the fact that it was not always possible to clearly distinguish the words.

Thus, at one point, he quoted Lenin as writing (as far as this reporter heard it): “Human nature cannot do without subordination”, plus something which sounded like this: “This is not a free state and must be overthrown at all costs”.

Assuming that the latter part was supposed to be a quotation from Lenin, we have no knowledge at the moment where it is supposed to be from; but we can say unequivocally, with Shachtman, that the first part is one of the standard forgeries, quite probably lifted from Shub's biographical hatchet-job on Lenin, and in any case completely unrelated to the second sentence with which it was coupled by Kerensky.

In Shub's Lenin, the author set out to show that in Lenin's philosophy it was the nature of people to want to be ruled. In his review of Shub's book in The New International, Shachtman showed how Shub quoted Lenin to make it look as though Lenin set out to satisfy this alleged craving of the masses by ruling them with an iron hand.

What Lenin actually wrote — in the passage where the phrase quoted by Kerensky crops up — conveys a diametrically opposite thought.

“We are not utopians, we do not ‘dream’ of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination. These anarchist dreams, based upon incomprehension of the tasks of the proletarian dictatorship, are totally alien to Marxism, and, as a matter of fact, serve only to postpone the socialist revolution until people are different. No, we want the socialist revolution with people as they are now, with people who cannot dispense with subordination, control, and ‘foremen and accountants’.

The subordination, however, must be to the armed vanguard of all the exploited and working people, i.e., to the proletariat. A beginning can and must be made at once, overnight, to replace the specific ‘bossing’ of state officials by the simple functions of ‘foremen and accountants’, functions which are already fully within the ability of the average town dweller and can well be performed for “workmen’s wages”.

One of Kerensky’s associates in the provisional government, the bourgeois politician Miliukov, was also a historian of the revolution.

He wrote of Kerensky’s bearing and attitude at the state conference in Moscow before his downfall:

“This man seemed to be trying to frighten somebody and create upon all an impression of power and force of will in the old style. In reality, he evoked only a feeling of pity”.

In the breast of a fellow bourgeois politician, it could be pity...

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