STATE AND REVOLUTION

Widely considered to be one of his most important works, Lenin's State and Revolution was written in August and September 1917 in Finland, while hiding from Russia's Provisional Government which had put out warrants for his arrest. The charge against him was complicity in the abortive Bolshevik July coup that aimed at seizing power in Petrograd and the rest of post-Tsarist Russia. The literary style is rambling as Lenin exhorts an invisible audience, piling quotation on quotation from Marx and Engels as if the two founders of 'scientific socialism' were the ultimate authorities on every subject. The book's impulse lies in Lenin's boundless political ambition, namely his craving to acquire absolute power in Russia in order to instigate a worldwide revolution. He found support for his position in a remark made by Marx in 1871, following the episode of the Paris commune. The theory was to create a popular civic authority that in Russia's case would be the so-called 'Soviets', councils of workers, peasants and soldiers. And of course Lenin became Russia's dictator and would completely subvert the existing political system with a one-party regime that in time would pay no heed to the wishes of the population. The state would become an obedient instrument of the party, as the party would turn into an obedient instrument of itself-appointed leaders. From the years immediately preceding his death in 1924, his writings are filled with complaints about the size and procrastinations of the Soviet bureaucratic apparatus, which he was incapable of either reducing or restraining. With a new introduction by Richard Pipes, 130pp, paperback.