The Leninist Counter-Offensive, August 1990–July 1991

Abstract

In the months following the Congress, the liberal press continued its unremitting assault on the Leninist past. Previously unpublished documents about prominent figures from the revolutionary period were called into service. Thus reminiscences about Aleksandr Blok, author of the popular revolutionary poem ‘The Twelve’, described how he gradually turned against revolution in 1920–1; ‘he would not even hear “The Twelve” mentioned’.¹ The 1918 diary of the famous writer Mikhail Prishvin, once a Marxist and a revolutionary, records his bitter disillusionment:

26 May. The thought suddenly occurs to me: Napoleon was defeated in Russia by the frost: he wanted to save humanity and was defeated by the frost. Lenin, the saviour of humanity, will also be defeated by famine in that same Russia….

I have something in common with [the small peasant] — a physical feeling for the world of nature, for the land. This is completely inaccessible to Lenin. I think that there are similar beings in the countryside, and in nature, and even in the lower world of animals. They transgress this feeling for nature, and they are called criminals …

We can count up all our primitive people who will follow Lenin and inform about concealed stocks of grain …

In the whole village we can count up about eight such people, they all have a criminal past, they are all criminals, and they are all vigorous people.²