The Youth of Lénine

the Youth of Lénine is a book of Leon Trotsky published in 1936 by the Rieder editions.

Trotsky had projected to write a complete biography of Lénine. But it had time to write only the first fifteen chapters in 1935, before being monopolized by the Procès of Moscow as from 1936. " Difficult in this moment to work with my book on Lénine: the ideas do not want absolutely to concentrate over 1893! " , writes he in his Journal of exile . This book does not call upon any personal memory of the author because it did not meet Lénine that in 1902 whereas the work finishes in 1893.

Trotsky wrote this work on Lénine in the same frame of mind that it had just written its Histoire of the Russian revolution . It was a question for him of restoring historical truth against the Stalinist school of falsification of the history. The Soviet leaders, nonglad to have embaumé the body of Lénine, endeavoured to forge a Golden Legend around its person who had as a result to disfigure the militant life and the thought of Lénine.

the Youth of Lénine is thus not a hagiographic production moreover on Lénine but an attempt to replace in its context the life of the revolutionary chief to include/understand political logic of it. In connection with the Soviet biographers of Lénine, written Trotsky: " These devoted disciples are not played so easily of the facts and of logic only because they are not sufficiently content with the Master such as it was. They want better Lénine. They allot to him in its first youth the intellectual power which it could acquire only at the price of a titanic work. They exempt to him by overzealousness of additional qualities. Thus they create for themselves another Lénine, Lénine perfect. For us, it is enough for us to that which actually existed. "

Childhood and adolescence (1870-1887)

Trosky starts by planting the decoration. Vladimir Illitch Oulianov was born in 1870 with Simbirsk, chief town of a late province of the edges of the the Volga where a small medium of noble, landowners and civils servant of the tsar, continued to dominate a mass of miserable peasants, in spite of the recent abolition of serfdom. The commercial small-middle-class occupied yet only one quite secondary place in the company. His/her father, an honest civil servant of the state education, belonged to the Intelligentsia. If it took with serious the questions of popular education, it did not have anything a revolutionist and it lived besides in the respect of the orthodoxe religion.

However, in the years of childhood of Lénine, there was current of dispute of tsarism in Russia. Running present primarily in intelligentsia and among the students. Alexandre II had abolished serfdom but refused to go further, to grant a liberal Constitution in particular. This is why most radical of the young protestors formed a populist organization, the Narodnaïa Volia, which turned to terrorism to cut down tsarism. It succeeds in assassinating Alexandre II in 1881. But far from starting a revolution, this event served as a pretext for the new tsar, Alexandre III, to follow a policy of repression and of reaction in all the fields.

In 1886, the father of Lénine died. A few months later, his/her older brother, Alexandre Oulianov, student young person who had never pointed out themselves by his political opinions, was implied in a plot aiming at assassinating the tsar. He was condemned to died and hung in 1887. It was a shock for the young person Vladimir and it is from there only that it started to pose political problems. Until now, it had shown an excellent pupil with the gymnasium of Simbirsk which did not pose a problem of discipline.

Here besides the official appreciation related to the Lénine future by the director Kérensky (the father of the future chief of the provisional government Alexandre Kérensky) at his exit of the gymnasium: " Very gifted, constantly applied and careful, Oulianov were always with the head of its class and, at the end of its studies, were rewarded by the gold medal, about it being shown worthiest by its successes, its development and its control. Neither with the gymnasium, nor outside, one forever announced only one case where Oulianov, either by the word, or by a gesture, would have caused an unfavourable judgment on behalf of the chiefs and of the professors of the gymnasium. The instruction and the moral development of Oulianov attentively were always followed by the parents and, as from 1886, after the death of the father, by the all alone mother, who devoted all her care and all her attention to the education of the children. This education was founded on the religion and a reasonable discipline. (...) "

An young man who seeks his way (1887-1893)

With the autumn 1887, Vladimir was registered in right to the university of Kazan. Brother of one condemned political, it was supervised closely by the police force. Having taken part, without playing a driving role there, at an assembly coed which disputed the mode of the university, it was excluded at the end of four months and having assigned with residence in the countryside in his maternal grandfather. Belonging to the category of the " student excluded for reasons from political hygiene " , the Lénine future saw its compromised future. It spent one year to reading and cultivating themselves while his/her mother in vain tried to make it reinstate in the university. It obtained the authorization to return downtown, in Kazan, at the end of one year.

Trotsky endeavors to reconstitute the intellectual advance of the young person Vladimir Oulianov in these years. But if it is easy to reconstitute its least displacements, thanks to the files of the police force, it is more difficult to know than it read and what he thought. Trotsky which, in its autobiography, My life (1930), had been able to think of its own ideological evolution requires " … how, being still foreign with the policy, having hardly broken with the orthodoxe Church, the high-school pupil of Simbirsk which, without concern, is enivrait of Tourguéniev, became in a lost province of the Volga a perfect Marxist, an inflexible revolutionist, the leader of tomorrow . "

The Lénine future started to attend clandestine circles with Kazan then with Samara where he moved. They were regroupings of students around some political deportees whose activity mainly consisted in reading prohibited books. It is there that it could study the Capital of Karl Marx whose specimens circulated with the account-drop in Russia and were the object of an interest impassioned on behalf of the protestors mediums. The populist ones referred to it as much as the first Marxists themselves. The divergences only started to appear between the partisans of terrorism in the line of Narodnaïa Volia and those which saw the future in the class struggle of the urban proletariat.

In 1890, Vladimir obtained the authorization to pass the examinations of the diploma in right of the university of Saint-Pétersbourg without however being able to attend the courses. Showing a capacity for work really not very common, he only studied, in a few months, in Samara, the programme of four years of right. " For the moment, neither the Marxism, nor the revolution were in the foreground. It was necessary to tear off the diploma of the hands of the imperial university. It was necessary to prepare with a formidable harping of the cours." With the autumn 1891, Vladimir not only obtained his diploma of right but finished first on hundred thirty-four! Trotsky does not hide its admiration in front of this " intellectual acrobatics ".

In 1892, Vladimir could be registered with the bar of Samara to follow the lawyer occupation. " In the capacity as defender, it intervened on the whole only in ten criminal cases; in seven on designation of office, three on request of the defendants. Only of small causes of people of modest means, of the despaired causes, and it lost them all. ".

But what imported! Meanwhile, the Lénine young person had completed to clarify his political ideas. He had become Marxist and social democrat and had decided to devote his life to the fight for socialism. It is to this end that it left Samara in 1893. In addition to the Capital of Marx and Anti-Dühring of Engels, Lénine had been able to get the publications of the founder of the Russian Marxist group the Emancipation of work , Georges Plékhanov, which lived in exile in Switzerland. It is then only, after having seriously studied the question, that Vladimir Oulianov launched out of all his forces in the political battle.

This period of maturation can seem long and this is why certain Soviet biographers wanted to shorten it to the maximum. But the following quotation which applies to Lénine but which summarizes also the opinion of Trotsky will partly make it possible to include/understand time spent to study before acting: " In the field of technology or medicine, the routine, dilettantism and the magic spells is rightly scorned. In the field of sociology, they are presented at any moment in the form of manifestations of the independence of the scientific mind. That for which the theory is only one recreation of the spirit, that one passes easily from a revelation to another, or, more often still, is satisfied of a crumb of each revelation. Infinitely more demanding, more severe and more balanced is that for which the theory is used to direct the action. A skeptic of living room can scoff medicine with impunity. The surgeon cannot live in the atmosphere of scientific uncertainties. The more the revolutionist needs to rest to act on the theory, the more it is intransigent in his safeguard. Vladimir Oulianov scorned dilettantism and hated the bonesetters. In the Marxism, he appreciated over all the disciplined authority of the method. "

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