Lenin’s Legacy
21st January 2024
Although the world is becoming increasingly distracted with this year’s elections, there are several events that should not slip under the radar. This month marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the death of a man who left an indelible imprint upon the modern world and, in fact, all of human history. January 21st, is the anniversary of the death of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known to the world as Comrade Lenin.
Despite a century having passed since he died, his legacy is still very much up for debate. But those discussions are not closed to the former Soviet Union alone. Lenin impressed his name and ideas so deep into our modern political consciousness that it is only fair to acknowledge that the world would be entirely different had he not existed. It seems likely that history would have been far better without him; but, as is often the case in human history, it could also have been much worse.
To give the devil his due, Lenin was and remains a hero to many, portrayed as the great revolutionary who, with little but his indefatigable will, inspired his fellow countrymen to overthrow the Czarist order, one of the most oppressive and arbitrary rules in modern history. And, indeed, Lenin was a remarkable individual, possessing a ferocious intellect and political cunning. Like the other great men of the early 20th century who maximised the capacity of the new means of communication, Lenin was all-consuming in his oratory: captivating, eloquent, and forceful. Better still for his age, he possessed the much rarer gift of collecting esoteric ideas and condensing them into comprehensible doctrines capable of being understood and adopted by the working man.
Lenin was Hitler without the insanity.