l compare not only actions to actions, but in Stalin’s case, his actions to Lenin’s theory as well as to speculation, as to what Lenin may have done in practice, if he had lived longer.The main aspects of Lenin’s ideology were outlined in a number of written works, the most important of these were: “What Is To Be Done” (1902) and The State and Revolution (1917). In “What Is To Be Done?” Lenin presented the idea that although the Russian peasantry was a potential revolutionary force, it was not capable of developing a revolutionary consciousness of its own. Marx had regarded revolutionary class consciousness to be the natural and spontaneous product of the life experience of the working class . Lenin, by contrast, concluded that “class political consciousness can be brought only from the outside”. Without the assistance of the revolutionary intelligentsia, he argued, the working class could only develop a “trade-union consciousness” . Lenin’s solution was a revolutionary vanguard party that would come not from the peasantry or proletariat, but from the bourgeoisie and be composed of mainly middle class intellectuals. (Strangely enough he seemed to fit this criteria quite snuggly!) This party, he postulated, would have to be a small, closely knit, highly centralized, highly disciplined, conspiratorial and quasi-military organization of professional revolutionaries. It would have to be a fighting organization composed of men totally dedicated to the destruction of the old and the establishment of a new social order . Lenin said, “Give us an organization of revolutionaries, and we will turn Russia upside down!” Also amongst the core principles of Lenin’s vanguard party would be the use of violence as an instrument of policy. Lenin stipulated the need for smashing and destroying the bourgeois state and was not shy in saying in reference to class ene...
