1In 1970, to mark one hundred years since Lenin’s birth, UNESCO paid official tribute to the founder of the USSR. The same year, the Grand Palais in Paris hosted a highly favorable exhibition on his life and work, aimed at the general public. [1] While such approbation may not have been wholly unanimous, at the time his name was synonymous throughout the world with liberation and the future. Lenin was a vital reference for all those calling themselves Marxists, from the “official” communist parties to the various elements on the far-left, while some social democrats and even a handful of conservatives accorded him respect, at a time when the USSR was still a major leading world power. His works were as widely available as the founding texts of the major world religions. From the pamphlet collating his key publications (What Is To Be Done?; The State and Revolution) to his Collected Works, published in numerous languages, it was impossible to ignore the figure with whom the October 1917 revolution was irrevocably associated.

2Twenty years later, the fall of the Soviet Union was accompanied by a profound and enduring dismantling of the Leninist edifice. More significantly still, the “thousand Marxisms” and return to Marx from the late 1990s onward entirely or almost entirely bypassed Lenin, who was associated with the errors and deviations of the Soviet era. This is perhaps a unique case of a thinker who once generated such adulation around the globe being now almost entirely ignored, except by specialists in Soviet history or small far-left political groups. There are of course exceptions such as China, where Lenin has not been officially removed from the list of canonical figures. But elsewhere his name has almost disappeared from the western Marxist tradition he previously dominated.

3So why return to Lenin and Leninism in 2017? Simple historical curiosity? Studying the reception of Lenin and his impact, beginning with the development of “Marxism-Leninism” and its multiple incarnations over the course of several decades, is essential for anyone who wants to understand how, for a large part of the twentieth century, the “relevance” of Marx was closely linked to that of Lenin. Returning to the link between Marxism and Leninism therefore represents a key historical and theoretical question. Thus—without necessarily entirely sharing the conclusions he draws from them—we adopt the words of Georges Labica, written in the mid-1980s when the star of Leninism had already largely begun to fade: “For we believe that Marxism-Leninism is our history. Thus our business […] and that in this area, there can be no question of dodging the issue, even were it to be dressed in the seductions of objectivity.” [2]

4Without claiming to present an exhaustive view of the topic, our contribution seeks to revisit a subject that has long been neglected. The article first explores the development of a body of work and reference in the USSR during the 1920s around the “Marxist-Leninist” ideology, and secondly studies the reception of Lenin’s publications, primarily in the context of France: a country marked by the enduring power of a PCF (Parti communiste français, French Communist Party) firmly attached to the USSR, but also by many examples of dissidence and heterodoxy, often associated with Lenin’s work. [3]

How and why: the invention of “Leninism”

5Some of the studies dedicated to “Leninism” go back as far as the early work of the Bolshevik leader: in the 1970s, for example, Marcel Liebman set out to study “Leninism under Lenin,” over a period even before the emergence of the term. Leninism was however born upon Lenin’s death, and was defined against the backdrop of Soviet political life, from the mid-1920s to the eve of the Second World War. At a methodological level, we might perhaps adopt the point of entry recently suggested by Wolfram Adolphi, who in Historisch-kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus sets out to distinguish “Lenin’s Marxism” (i.e. the personal, specific, and conceptual development of Lenin’s works in their context) from “Marxism-Leninism.” [4] This latter was definitively canonized in the late 1930s, notably in the journal Under the Banner of Marxism, which was published in German and in Russian. In 1931, this previously pluralist journal became an official organ for the defense of “Marxism-Leninism,” a doctrine which then invaded all spheres of political, intellectual, and social life, underpinning the historical and political processes of the past, present, and future. This official line remained sacrosanct until the death of Stalin, and in some aspects until the break-up of the USSR in 1991.

6As they played such a determining role in its later evolution, the early stages of the development of Leninism therefore merit our attention. The invention and then construction of Leninism as a doctrine were closely linked to the history of the USSR and the Communist International. The day after the 1919 attempt on Lenin’s life, in a public meeting Zinoviev, the president of the International, sketched out a biography of the leader of the 1917 revolution, and returned to this in 1923 when illness removed Lenin from public life once and for all. Zinoviev then drove the point home the day following his death by stating:

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For our party, in particular, it is a new life that begins with Ilyich’s death. The loss it has experienced is heavy and irreparable. Governing the life of a great country, the struggle of the Communist International, the work of the Party without Lenin. [...] Lenin is dead, but Leninism lives on. When the proletarian revolution conquers the world, it will be above all the victory of Leninism. [5]

8Until then, “Leninism” had not or had barely existed, though the term “Leninism” had appeared on January 3, 1923 when used by Vladimir Sorin (the Party’s propaganda chief in Moscow) in the newspaper Pravda. It was very much Lenin’s death that opened the way to the systematization of Leninism. The decisive and most visible turning point came with the Fifth Congress of the Comintern in July 1924, with its focus on propagating “Marxism-Leninism” as a revolutionary ideology throughout the world: delivering humanity from misery through the revolutionary struggle, indissociable from the laws of history, and adopting an unconditional defense of the “socialist homeland.” Within the Russian Communist Party (RCP)—and soon within all communist parties internationally—the term of Leninism acted as a means of distinction within a leadership team building a unanimous front against Trotsky. On January 26, 1924, Zinoviev again raised the issue of party unity: “What will happen? Will the RCP and the Soviet power be able to lead our country to the promised land that appears in Lenin’s insightful words? Our party will remain united. It must close ranks, now more than ever.” [6] Kamenev, on the other hand, openly set Trotskyism and Leninism in opposition with one another by identifying the latter with Bolshevism. [7]

9These struggles were accompanied by the development of a cult of Lenin and the canonization of his works. Until the late 1920s, this Marxism-Leninism did not yet have a unique and codified nature: alongside Stalin’s speeches and pamphlets, works by Bukharin, Trotsky, and Zinoviev were published in various journals, and in 1925, Zinoviev was still able to publish his own handbook on Leninism. Bukharin also used Lenin’s theoretical contributions to justify his differences:

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Lenin, a theoretician, still awaits his systematizer. When the work of systematization is complete, when all the new ideas that Lenin contributed and that abound in his works are brought together, the monumental stature and genius of the theoretician of the workers’ and communist movement will then become clear. [8]

11Bukharin rejected all dogmatic approaches and evoked Lenin’s theoretical ability to tackle the new challenges faced by the Russian revolution after 1917: “nothing appalled Lenin more than Marxism being presented as dogma.” [9]

12Finally there was Stalin, general secretary from 1922 and soon to triumph over all of his opponents, fellow self-proclaimed “Leninists.” There is insufficient space here to develop a detailed discussion of the emergence of Stalinism and the reasons for its longevity. [10] But the way in which Stalin codified a “Marxism-Leninism” based on a handful of texts must be discussed, as it constitutes a key aspect of the Stalinist ideological apparatus. Stalin saw clearly that the problem with Lenin’s work was its heterogeneity: from April 1918 onward Lenin had defended the decision to implement temporary state capitalism, far removed from the utopian daring of the withering away of the state outlined in The State and Revolution. War communism was then succeeded by the opening up of the economy with the New Economic Policy (NEP) in spring 1921. At each stage, Lenin justified his positions. This complex body of work was therefore difficult for activists and party cadres to master, and everyone could find their hopes and desires reflected in it. Faced with this disparate, scattered, and difficult to assimilate whole, Stalin proceeded to make efforts to simplify and summarize, hammering out a series of precepts and simple slogans. [11]

13Like his competitors, from 1924 Stalin was one of the chorus striving to appropriate Lenin’s legacy. But he took a pedagogical approach, very quickly distinguishing himself from the other leaders with a series of normative and simplistic statements that defined Leninism as a form of Marxism whose objective was proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Stalin skillfully made use of arguments from various places in order to present himself as the only faithful interpreter of Lenin’s ideas. He enlisted and often significantly altered these concepts, notably in relation to the development of “socialism in one country,” the nature of the state, and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Stalin had no interest in looking back at Lenin’s philosophical work, or even his relationship to Marx, but almost solely focused on Lenin’s political activity as a revolutionary leader. As such, the teaching of “Marxism-Leninism” became increasingly disconnected from the multiple sources that had influenced Lenin’s development of Marxism. Reading Stalin’s Foundations of Leninism (1924) and Concerning Questions of Leninism (1926) is enlightening in this respect. Lenin is cut off from his multiple sources (for example his original relationship to German social democracy), and to some extent Stalin returns to the proven efficacy of pre-1914 socialist propaganda while erasing the Marxist debates of this period from history. The majority of the questions in these publications are resolved with a few quotations from Lenin.

14A sign of contempt for theory? The situation is more complex: Concerning Questions of Leninism focuses on “revolutionary theory” but with a single meaning: the struggle against all deviation. [12] Theory became a quest for expedience, exerting a certain power of attraction in a context of fierce struggle. Outside the USSR, the emergence of Stalinist Marxism-Leninism was seen as a call for global subversion. This Marxism was presented as founded on the principle of Soviets (and thus worker control), fiercely criticizing a parliamentarianism that while presented as democratic was unable to prevent war and worker exploitation, and offering the ultimate prospect of the idea of the withering away of the state: “the Soviet form of state [...] is capable of preparing the ground for the withering away of the state, which is one of the basic elements of the future stateless communist society.” [13] Stalin refers to the experience of the Commune of 1871, thus making a connection to the long revolutionary tradition. We must also be aware of the potential power of such anticolonial slogans in a world still largely subdued by imperialism: “Leninism laid bare this crying incongruity, broke down the wall between whites and blacks, between European and Asiatics, between the ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’ slaves of imperialism, and thus linked the national question with the question of the colonies.” [14] This was undoubtedly one of the key reasons for the extraordinary impact of Leninism at a global level. [15]

15During the 1930s, this Leninism evolved as massive popular circulation of Lenin’s articles and conference speeches developed, aimed at the cadres and activists. These included for example the numerous pamphlets published in the “Petite bibliothèque Lénine” [“Little Lenin Library”] collection, which brought together his most famous works, edited by the PCF publications office. Within the cadre school curriculum, as in the International Lenin School, lessons focused in particular on Marxism, Leninism, and the history of the Bolshevik CP. They were gradually bowdlerized, the professors replaced, and teaching became focused on studying the work of Stalin. The key moment came in 1938, when following the political and then physical elimination of the principal leaders of the Russian revolution, the production and publication of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) (Short Course) became an instrument for the international circulation of a Leninism centered on the history of the workers’ movement, the organization and practices of the communist party, and praise for the construction and defense of socialism in one country. [16] The inclusion of a chapter on dialectical materialism and historical materialism established a philosophical and theoretical model that closely linked Marx and Engels to the ideas of Lenin and Stalin. The international distribution campaign for the textbook was the first “battle of the books” in the spread of Marxism-Leninism. In France, in spring 1939 the PCF announced impressive results, with over 100,000 copies of Stalin’s work sold. In intellectual and academic circles the penetration of Marxism-Leninism was by no means as swift, but real inroads could be observed, as demonstrated by the publication, under the editorship of Henri Wallon, of the two volumes À la lumière du Marxisme. In the first two issues of the journal La Pensée, published in 1939, only Georges Cogniot explicitly discussed Marxism-Leninism, in an article entitled “Les problèmes philosophiques dans l’histoire du Parti communiste de l’Union soviétique [Philosophical issues in the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union].” [17]

16In retrospect, the dogmatism and interventionism may appear incredible, but in the context of antifascist mobilization, Stalinist Marxism-Leninism—to use the phrase of Georges Labica—realized the “old dream of the ‘philosopher-king’, or in other words the fusion of philosophy with the state.” [18] Later on, communist historian Jean Bruhat would look back at this simple and didactic mode of understanding, which provided a means to master the complexity of the world, and thus seduce not only worker activists, but also intellectuals who possessed strong cultural and theoretical capital: “it was enough, we thought, to read it and we would know everything.” [19] These were the glory days of “diamat” [dialectal materialism]. “Only Leninism shows us the way,” proclaimed The Song of the Comintern. The warlike, militarist dimension went hand in hand with the utopian prospect of the withering away of the state.

17An entire specific imaginary accompanied the publication of Lenin’s works, which met with genuine success. For while the Stalinist handbooks dominated the international communist movement from the 1930s onward, the status of exceptionality acquired by Leninism favored its circulation, which had previously been restricted. In relation to France, an initial observation becomes clear from joint study of the reception of Marx, Engels, and Lenin: while the early reception of Marx and Engels is complicated (it was not necessarily socialists who introduced their work), for Lenin, on the other hand, it is really rather simple. [20] Nothing was published on Lenin in French in the form of a proper publication before 1914, and nothing of significance before the October 1917 revolution. During the war, some texts were published in secret in Switzerland, [21] and then, most importantly, immediately after the Russian revolution of 1917, some of Lenin’s texts were translated into French and distributed in the form of short pamphlets with very limited distribution. [22] It was not until Lenin was in power in Russia, during the 1920s, that his texts truly entered circulation. At the heart of this apparatus, the Comintern’s central agit-prop section set itself the objective of spreading the work of Marx, Engels, and Lenin across the world, with its publication department led by Mikhail Yevseevich Krebs until 1937. [23] Within this section, a specific team was charged with proofreading and translating Lenin’s Collected Works. The Lenin Institute, established in Moscow in 1923, published two Russian editions of the Collected Works in the 1920s and 1930s, and these were translated into numerous languages, including French. It was primarily political publishers who distributed Lenin’s work, and very rarely scholarly or literary publishers, as was the case with Marx. There are two exceptions to this, modest in comparison to Marx: La révolution bolchéviste: écrits et discours de Lénine de 1917 à 1923, which was published by Éditions Payot in 1931, and Cahiers sur la dialectique de Hegel, brought out by Gallimard in 1938.

18Many people read and became familiar with Marx and Engels primarily through Lenin or even, throughout a period from the 1930s to the 1950s, through Stalin and/or through the Soviet handbooks inspired by him. But this Stalinist Marxism was not entirely dominant, and certain schools and individuals were already seeking to make a careful distinction between Lenin and this form of Leninism. In parallel with the development of “diamat,” a theoretician and philosopher Lenin had to be recovered: this was already the view of Gramsci, of Mariátegui in Latin America, and also Pannekoek for example, although the latter was highly critical of the Russian revolution. [24] And while “Marxism-Leninism” was at the origin of a later denomination with more of a Stalinist bent, the adjective “Leninist” could not be left only to the new masters of the USSR. Significantly, for a time the term claimed by the Trotskyists was “Bolshevik-Leninists.” We must therefore consider a broad definition of Leninism over a long historical period. Returning once more to Labica, “it does not appear unfounded to see in Leninism a set of ideas equating to the development of Marxism in the context of a new historical period.” [25] Leninism cannot therefore be limited to the sole official conception approved by Stalin, as would be fully confirmed by its ultimate fate.

Returning to Lenin

19As paradoxical as it may seem for an ideology advocating strong ideological cohesion and doctrinal unity, Leninism took on several forms from the late 1950s onward. Until then, the dogma set out thirty years earlier had reigned supreme in most communist parties. The reference to Leninism was even stronger post-1945 in the rhetoric of the PCF. In addition to Etienne Fajon’s book Le Marxisme-léninisme, which discussed his involvement in the Tenth Party Congress of 1945, frequent references were made in the intellectual journals of the communist movement. [26] In La Pensée, works by Stalin and Zhdanov on linguistics, philosophy, and the economy were now referred to and discussed as major contributions to the development of Marxism and Leninism. La Nouvelle Critique: Revue du Marxisme Militant organized communist intellectual study days on March 29 and 30, 1953 devoted to the allocated topic of the late “Leninist” works of Stalin, who had just died and to whom homage was paid. The slogan issued to inspire the intellectuals was “The objectivity of the laws of nature and society.” In his closing speech, François Billoux welcomed involvement from intellectuals who had answered the party’s call: “This confirms the fact that the Communist Party, by making Marxist-Leninist science available to intellectuals, enables them to continually increase and improve their knowledge and express it in their own form without the same old hackneyed phrases.” [27]

20The dogma would however be shattered, and Leninism would evolve. In 1956 the critique of Stalin and the “cult of personality” at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU was proclaimed in the name of a return to “Leninist norms.” In a political context marked by signs of crisis in the “socialist countries,” there was an end to the quasi-monopoly of an institutional Leninism shoehorned onto Stalinist ideas of the party and society. Leninism was not spared in the critique of Stalinism, either by those who distanced themselves from the official communist parties or those who remained active members.

21In the early 1960s, and for a period of at least fifteen years, the rallying call for many individuals was the “return to Lenin.” This was part of a broad approach characterized by the return to Marx’s work, but also by paying particular attention to the interventions, texts, and articles by Lenin that had been previously neglected in the development of Leninism. Beyond various different interventions such as those from Althusser and Garaudy, which produced many articles and interventions on Lenin from the mid-1960s, Lenin also became a spokesperson or even reference for those who sought to consider the relations between state and society, such as Christine Buci-Glucksmann, or those looking to find in Lenin the foundations of a debate between democratic development and socialism, such as Lucien Sève. [28] This was demonstrated by a number of initiatives such as that by the Centre d’études et de recherches marxistes [Center for Marxist Studies and Research] (CERM), which organized a symposium at Orsay on Lenin and scientific practice. [29]

22Here the publishing dimension also indicates the full impact of Lenin’s work. In 1957 the fourth edition of Lenin’s Collected Works was officially launched in the USSR, while Stalin’s was suspended. The PCF ordered a print run of 10,000 copies per volume for the French market, and thirty-nine volumes appeared between 1957 and 1970. From 1962 onward the print run was reduced to 6,000 copies, but this remained a considerable number for such an enterprise. Publication was managed by Progress Publishers in Moscow, without French oversight, although philosopher Roger Garaudy was the nominal editor. [30]

23The movement of May-June 1968 was a shot in the arm for a whole host of small far-left groups, and many of them swore solely by a “return to Lenin”... unlike the Soviet model, which was judged to be obsolete. This was the era of “Living Lenin” (Lénine vivant, a 1970 book by Soviet leader Mikoyan, published by Fayard) and “Marx, Engels, Lenin, now more than ever!,” a slogan seen in book advertisements in Les Cahiers du communisme. One new slogan in particular emerged: “Long live Leninism!” which was proclaimed in Beijing in opposition to Moscow’s “Leninist norms.” This return to original Leninism was advocated by various elements of the international communist movement that wanted to break with the official line of the CPSU. In 1960, Vive le léninisme!, [31] a pro-Chinese Maoist pamphlet, brought together three Chinese Communist Party (CCP) texts that were published in the journal Le Drapeau rouge [32] in April 1960, and were highly critical of the Soviet regime’s “revisionism” on the occasion of the ninetieth anniversary of Lenin’s birth. From this point on, the increasing distance between the People’s Republic of China and the USSR was apparent and of growing significance, as the publishers in Beijing developed their own “Foreign Language Editions” in 1960 and pursued the massive distribution of Lenin’s primary publications in multiple languages. The Chinese approach was presented as the authentic continuation of true Leninism in comparison to the “imposters” of the USSR, and China also distributed Stalin’s works and pamphlets as guarantors of a proper Leninist line in opposition to Russian “revisionists,” despite taking a certain critical distance from the former all-powerful general secretary.

24But Leninism was also defended by the successors of the “Bolshevik-Leninists”: for example by Trotskyist Belgian theorist and historian of the workers’ movement Marcel Liebman. His book Le léninisme sous Lénine [Leninism under Lenin], published by Seuil in 1972–3, criticized Lenin’s actions but refused to draw a line of continuity with the Stalinist period. It emphasized the incredible impact of the founding father of the Soviet state, from the lecture theaters of western Europe to guerilla fighters in the former colonies. For Liebman, “there is hardly any insurrectionary movement today from Latin America to Angola that does not lay claim to the heritage of Leninism,” while western Europe, “which not so long ago was thought to be sunk in a doze of sluggish and cosy satisfaction, has seen the appearance since 1968 of a new Left that is radical in spirit and revolutionary in vocation, and whose obsession with Leninism—whether the reality or a mythical notion of it, and whether as something to be conformed to or something to be shunned—is now obvious.” [33] Liebman went as far as describing a “libertarian Leninism” of utopian design that maintains the radical prospect of the withering away of the state. [34] Looking back at this time, one of the key leaders of the LCR (Ligue communiste révolutionnaire, the Revolutionary Communist League), Daniel Bensaïd, evoked in his memoir Une lente impatience the “urgent Leninism” characteristic of the small groups of revolutionaries that proliferated throughout western Europe. [35] This was a moment in history when, far from being shunned, Lenin constituted a crucial reference: “In essence Leninism was also, fundamentally, the democracy of congress, the freedom to disagree, unfailing brotherhood with the inalienable right to critique—entirely the opposite of what Stalinism would become.” [36]

Historiography and the crisis of Leninism

25During this period, few politicians were discussed with as much passionate interest as Lenin. Alongside the political debates the Cold War saw the development of an intense historiography, which can be divided schematically into four groups. The first of these was the official Soviet or Chinese historiography which, with the Marxism-Leninism institutes, justified the official line taken in the 1930s through a multitude of works: some openly propagandistic, and others with greater academic credentials since they were issued by academic institutions. They were opposed by a major school of American Sovietology, which had significant representation in most western countries and insisted on the totalitarian nature of Leninism, highlighted the criminal dimension of the regime implemented under Lenin, rejected the distinction (or margin) between Lenin and Stalin, and revealed the “totalitarian” similarities between the USSR, fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany. [37] In France, one of Maurice Duverger’s pupils, Dominique Colas, became a Leninist specialist inspired by this school, which also influenced Alain Besançon’s work on the intellectual origins of Leninism. [38] Formed in reaction to the totalitarian school, a “revisionist” school presented an opposing social history, with greater focus on the actors involved, which sought to be highly critical of overly ideological approaches, and of which Moshe Lewin was the leading representative. [39] Some went as far as defending the idea of a Stalinist USSR as a way—brutal, but successful—of modernizing Russian society. In this context Lenin, alongside Stalin, was presented as a kind of enlightened despot. The final group consisted of those who might be termed critical Marxists. Often—though not exclusively—close to Trotskyism, they sought to rescue Lenin from Stalin fossilization. [40] Other more radical groups accused Lenin of being at the origin of a serious distortion of Marx’s work, often dating the evil back to Engels and the systematic nature of his attempts at vulgarization: Anti-Dühring was thus seen as the precursor to the Leninist precepts professed by Stalin. Maximilien Rubel in France, and a major tradition of “ultra-left” critique at an international level, which had a certain impact, embodied this sensibility. [41]

26This period of flourishing debate was succeeded by the diagnosis of the “crisis of Marxism,” which represented a clear distancing from the Marxism-Leninism forged in the 1920s. In 1982, two books emblematic of this new stage appeared in France. First, the Dictionnaire critique du marxisme, a heterodox enterprise taking a critical, historical, and conceptual look at Marxism in all its diversity, which observed that reference to Leninism and the political concepts linked to it (in particular the “dictatorship of the proletariat”) were gradually disappearing:

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Major CPs, including in France and Spain, are taking the explicit decision to remove it from their statutes. In the view of some theorists Leninism should, at least in “western” countries, be substituted for Eurocommunism, and some of its core ideas must be repudiated, such as the dictatorship of the proletariat, proletarian internationalism, and democratic centralism. [42]

28Second, Dominique Colas published a very hostile book, Le Léninisme: Philosophie et sociologie politiques du léninisme, which focused on the criminal and “totalitarian” dimension of Leninism, ignoring the findings of social history in relation to Soviet history. [43] Two different, profoundly contradictory approaches, that both sought to show how Lenin and Leninism had found themselves in crisis. Within western Marxism, the circulation of Lenin’s work went into spectacular free fall. Very few foreign publishers (primarily Soviet and Chinese) were publishing Lenin’s work in French. French publishers, even the Éditions Sociales, produced very little, although this latter did launch a new critical edition of his works, with the first volume coming out in 1990. For several more years the founder of the USSR remained a key reference in official Soviet rhetoric: the fact is almost forgotten today, but the restructuring begun by Gorbachev in 1985 was also introduced in the name of a return to Leninist principles. In China, the wave of reform launched in 1978 also regularly referred to the early years of the Soviet regime, and Bukharin and the NEP were re-examined, again in the name of a return to Marxist-Leninist principles.

Break-up and traces

29But this apparent resurgence was unable to conceal the direction of travel: from the 1990s onward, Leninism appeared to entirely disappear from the political horizon. Not all of its traces were removed of course, but these were primarily the persistent legacy of an earlier period. And while, as noted at the beginning of this article, the renewed interest in Marx and the “thousand Marxisms” increased the distancing from Leninism during the 1980s and 1990s, it would be going too far to conclude that such interest purely and simply evaporated. In many ways the figure of Lenin remains an object of fascination, if not necessarily study. In the former USSR, particularly in Russia, the many representations of Lenin that remain in the public space (statues, portraits, and so on) have been the subject of controversy. He often embodies the attachment to the Soviet past felt by a large part of the population, with a blend of nationalist pride and longing for the social achievements of the former USSR. China represents an intriguing case, with continued reference in official texts to “Marxism-Leninism” reflected in particular by the recent exhaustive publication of Lenin’s Collected Works, taking over from the fifth Russian edition. [44] Among the successors of critical Marxism, while overall rejection continues to dominate, there persists a view of Lenin as an unparalleled strategic thinker and precursor to global decolonization: the volume Lenin Reloaded clearly reflects this sensibility, and the legacy of the work of Lukàcs and Althusser. [45] The most scholarly work clearly remains represented by Richard Pipes and Dominique Colas, although their views are counterbalanced by biographies that reject their reading, such as that by Jean-Jacques Marie published in France. Finally, studies paying the greatest attention to historical contextualization have returned to the years of Lenin’s development, such as the work by Lars Lih, and Tamàs Krausz. [46] None of these various different approaches can however conceal the sidelining of Lenin and of what he continues to represent. Significantly, the only work by the founder of the USSR available from French bookshops is The State and Revolution, [47] a theoretical text with a quasi-libertarian bent, while his other essential contributions can only be found in old editions from the period 1960–70. [48]

30One hundred years after the October revolution, and over twenty-five years after the spectacular break-up of the USSR, will the specter of Lenin continue to haunt the twenty-first century? The glory days of “urgent Leninism” are certainly far behind us. But his actions and dense and varied body of work are worth re-examining anew, if only to understand the impact and fate of revolutions that have permanently changed the course of history.