Lenin's "The State and Revolution" and Soviet state violence: a textual analysis

Ryan, James ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8296-234X 2007. Lenin's "The State and Revolution" and Soviet state violence: a textual analysis. Revolutionary Russia 20 (2) , pp. 151-172. 10.1080/09546540701633452

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Abstract

Through an examination of his pamphlet The State and Revolution, this article seeks to understand how Vladimir Lenin, on the eve of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in October 1917, conceptualized proletarian state violence. Building on certain key works on Lenin and his thought, both recent and not so recent, it demonstrates that the apparently large disparity between The State and Revolution and Lenin’s years in power in the Soviet Union is, in fact, quite false. It is to be argued here that Lenin, in fact, envisaged a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ not far removed from the violent and oppressive regime that emerged in Soviet Russia during his years in power. Lenin is to be understood as a complex theorist, whose conception of proletarian state violence was somewhat ambiguous but nevertheless clear in that force was to be the midwife not just of revolution but of full communism as well.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	History, Archaeology and Religion
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > D History (General) > D839 Post-war History, 1945 on D History General and Old World > DK Russia. Soviet Union. Former Soviet Republics
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Last Modified:	01 Nov 2022 11:29
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/95157

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