It has been almost 80 years since the death of the Russian Revolu-tionary Vladimir Illich Lenin, and yet the controversy generatedby his life’s work—that is, the building of the revolutionary so- cialist party that led the Russian working class to power in the RussianRevolution of 1917—still rages over whether Lenin and his legacy areto be held up as a method for building a revolutionary movement oras a failure to be roundly condemned in order never to be repeated. The scenario from Lenin’s naysayers usually reads something like this: In 1917, Lenin and a tiny band of co-conspirators pulled off—not a massive, popular, social upheaval—but a military coup, and thenproceeded to rule Russian society with an iron fist. The post-revolu-tionary period was, thus, not a flourishing of working-class democ-racy, but a totalitarian dictatorship. It is also assumed that the brutaldictator who ruled Russia from the late 1920s until his death in the1950s, Joseph Stalin, simply inherited his position from Lenin—thatStalinism is a continuation of the Russian revolution, rather than acomplete negation of everything that Lenin stood for. And, the argu-ment concludes, this entire scenario owes its theoretical substance tonone other than Karl Marx.

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