As long as the movement follows the Leninist compass, its members will be able to distinguish between North and South, between good and evil, between the road to triumph and the path to disaster

A Farewell to Lenin: Stalin’s Litany of Vows

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

 The banner of Leninism is invincible, as Stalin, Mao, Khrushchev, Castro,

 Che Guevara, Dolores Ibarruri, Nicolae Ceausescu, etc. would have it.

Ninety years ago, on January 21, 1924, the founder of the Bolshevik party and of the Soviet Union, the undisputed coryphaeus of world communism, passed away. Lenin’s last year was nothing but an endless agony. Isolated in a mansion turned into a sanatorium of sorts, a former artistocratic residence located outside Moscow, Lenin was in fact a prisoner of information strictly filtered by the Bolshevik leadership’s emissary, the Politburo member and the head of the party’s department of cadres, the Georgian-born revolutionary Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, known as Stalin, and also, for his close friends, as Koba.

In his “Letter to the Congress,” dictated in December 1922 and January 1923 to his secretary, Lydia Fotieva, Lenin requested Stalin’s replacement as general secretary. Politburo members read the document but decided to keep it secret. Lenin’s demands were ignored, denied, forgotten. The old leader’s power had vanished. Paeans were of course dedicated to him, he was lionized in poems and songs, his name was frantically chanted, but he had ceased to be the real decision-maker regarding the great strategic choices and bureaucratic appointments. By that moment, all the key institutions of the totalitarian system had been set in place and made to function in order to preserve the Bolsheviks’ absolute hold on power. In the following years, the epigones, and Stalin more than anybody else, did their utmost to radicalize them and to exacerbate the exclusionary, genocidal logic of Leninism.

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In his “Oath,” Stalin forcefully highlighted the themes that were to energize him in his endeavor to demonstrate that he outdid all his rivals in terms of deep dedication to Lenin’s desires:

“Departing from us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us to hold high and guard the purity of the great title of member of the Party. We vow to you, Comrade Lenin, that we shall fulfill your behest with honor! … Departing from us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us to guard and strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat. We vow to you, Comrade Lenin, that we shall spare no effort to fulfill this behest with honor! Departing from us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us to strengthen with all our might the alliance of the workers and peasant. We vow to you, Comrade Lenin, that this behest, too, we shall fulfill with honor! Departing from us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us to strengthen and extend the union of republics. We vow to you, Comrade Lenin, that this behest, too, we shall fulfill honor! Departing from us, Comrade Lenin enjoined us to remain faithful to the principles of the Communist International. We vow to you, Comrade Lenin, that we shall not spare our lives to strengthen and extend the union of the working people of the whole world–the Communist International!” (see T. H. Rigby, editor, “Stalin”, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1966, p. 40). It is noteworthy that Stalin addresses Lenin in present tense, thus suggesting that, as a famous slogan put it, “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live!”

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