“Hoisting Men on Pedestals is Weakminded Nonsense”: Nestor Makhno on the Lenin Cult

Kate Sharpley Library / Aotearoa Workers Solidarity Movement || For a start, and especially in the states making up the Union of Soviet Republics, there is a deafening and nonsensical clamour to the effect that: “Lenin is the guide of the workers in every land and he has constructed a theory for them and shown them the real path to liberating revolution.”

This even in the land where the White and Red butchers, pursuant to the interests of their respective parties, have decapitated the incomparable Great Russian Revolution – the one that set the workers free – and currently they set the goal for the toiling masses, where they have lost belief in themselves, belief in the creative force of spontaneous action to organize the new society, in the land where such a tremendous revolution erupted only to end prematurely and long before it could fully develop, despite the enthusiasm displayed by the labouring masses.

Pleasantries of this sort, which attest to a criminal irresponsibility, echo the calls from Lenin’s supporters in countries outside of Russia. And as a result they are also taken as true by those who are not Lenin supporters, men in whom intelligence, strength and determination can still be found despite the strictures of capitalist education.

That the bourgeois Lenin should be the world proletariat’s guide is not acceptable. To those of us revolutionary peasants who have gone through every stage of the Russian revolution and had experience of “Leninism”, such a claim seems unjustified and unfounded. Hoisting Lenin on to a pedestal like that is a nonsense, proof only of the weakmindedness of those are itching to hand such a man the leadership of the proletariat whereas, in actual fact, he was not even in the country at the time of the great phase of the Russian revolution. The doing to death of the latter is down to the childish naivety of the people and, more so, to the mercenary bayonets which, in their blindness, hired themselves out to the Leninist party.

AKHNO

Sweden, May 1925.

L’Adunata dei Refrattari, 17 October 1925 [Volume 4 Number 42, via umedia.lib.umn.edu

This article also appeared in L’En Dehors (France) 31 August 1925

[After his escape from Danzig in February 1925 Makhno travelled (illegally) to Berlin via Sweden. It is unclear if this article was actually written in Sweden. Yuri Kravets writes ‘It is well-established that by late May, 1925, Nestor Makhno was in Berlin. When he arrived there from Danzig, he was probably intoxicated with freedom, and did not take precautionary measures; a number of his letters and articles indicated his actual whereabouts. But he was in Germany illegally, without any documents. Apparently one of the comrades pointed out this circumstance to him and subsequently he gave his place of residence as Sweden.’

Update: Yu. P. Kravets has determined that Makhno’s article: Ленин, его партия и недомыслие вокруг них [Lenin, his party and the misconceptions concerning them] was first published in the Russian-American journal Рассвет [Dawn] in July, 1925.]

From: L’Adunata dei Refrattari, 17 October 1925. Translated by: Paul Sharkey.