Lenin, Elections & Socialist Hegemony 1 Lenin, Elections & Socialist Hegemony Seán Mitchell Lenin, Elections and Socialist Hegemony © Seán Mitchell First published by Rebel, Dublin 2021 www.rebelnews.ie
[email protected] Typeset by Rebel Cover design by Danny Quinn “The election of someone...is a matter of such vast importance that it would be petty, cowardly and disgraceful to be afraid to speak of it straightforwardly, without beating about the bush, to be afraid of “offending” a particular individual, a particular circle, etc.” — Lenin, October 16, 1912. Contents Introduction 1 Boycott or Participation? 10 Elections & Hegemony 24 Left Bloc or Progressive Bloc? 36 Bolshevik Elections in Practice 48 Elections and the Comintern 62 Conclusion 74 Lenin, Elections & Socialist Hegemony 1. Introduction e are now ‘up to the ears’ in the elections,” wrote a fatigued “WLenin to the renowned novelist Maxim Gorky in 1912, as he busied himself with preparations for the Bolshevik campaign for the Fourth Duma. “[T]he building up of the Party”, Lenin explained with characteristic bluntness, “[v]ery much depends on the outcome of the elections.”1 The image elicited in this brief exchange—of a hurried Lenin, embroiled in the finer detail of electoralism, convinced that the future of Bolshevism depended on it—may seem like a peculiar one, at odds with common perceptions of the leader of the October Revolution. At the very least, such a picture sits awkwardly alongside the well-worn Cold War caricature of the authoritarian Lenin, whose “mistrust of the masses” led him to conclude that all exercises in democracy were tiresome impediments to the fulfilment of a pathological lust for power.2 The credibility of this smear was long ago demolished,3 even if it lives on as a stock cliché amongst conservative historians and anti-socialist elements deeply embedded in establishment politics or the ivory towers of academia.