From: "Karl Carlile" <joseph-AT-indigo.ie> Date: Sat, 9 Nov 1996 20:02:04 +0000 Subject: Re: M-G: Lenin married in a church? KARL: From what I can gather at this point in time the following may be correct: The Boshevik party strangled the 1917 revolution. After seizing the Winter Palace in October 1917 they went about the process of transforming the soviets into empty shells that merely rubber stamped the decisions of the the leadership of the Bolshevik party. They destroyed the proletarian character of the factory committees and prevented theme from federating. They converted the revolutionary army into a regular army robbing that army of its popular revoutionary character. They crushed the Kronstadt rising. They virtually eliminated all opposition both outside and within the Bolshevik party. They helped reduce the number of workers in the city by forcing many of them to migrate into the country in search of food.They also indiscriminately crushed the greens which included the Mahknovists.Then there was their very smelly work in Georgia. I could go on. The Bolsheviks may have had two choices. They could have chosen to assist the working class in developing the proletarian character of the russian revolution which probably would have meant going down fighting since the chances of the revolution being transforming into a genuine European revolution may have been quite small. Instead they chose to sit on the proletarian revolution and actively strangle it by resurrecting a new and effective despotic state. By making the second choice the Bolsheviks were counter-revolutionaries who set themselves the task of defeating of the workers' revolution. Lenin must be hailed as one of the great counter revolutionaries of this century. In short by 1922 the Bolheviks had succeeded in constructing a depotic state that represented neither workers nor peasants. Revolutionary marxists must make it there aim to destroy the Lenin legend. If the above is true then it would seem to me that marrying in a church would not have been a tactitic to further the revolution. Lenin was one of these so calle drevolutionary socialists who could justify about everything he did. And when he could not justify his action he would simply admit that he made a mistake and that the importan thing is that one learns from one's mistakes. He would have fitted in very well with modern bourgeois politicians who can justify just about everything they do. In connection with this it is interesting that Lenin's testimony concerning the Malinovsky affair was not included in the collected works of Lenin nor in edition of the commissions records.In it he tries to justify in Clinton like fashion the existence of the police informer Malinovsky on the Central Committee of the party. There is a view that he knew that Malinovsky was a double agent. It is curious to watch how Lenin squirms. VLADIMIR: Surely? Then, of course, Engels - another committed and dedicated marxist as he claimed to be- would've forgone being an owner of a textile factory; and his friend, one Moor, who - while claiming not being a marxist - knew a few things about capitalist exploitation would've never thought of living off the profits Engels made by exploiting his workers. True, this bunch of unprincipled individuals had some weak excuse to make for their moral transgressions by claiming that while being a part of the bourgeois society they did what they could to bring it down. Perhaps, they could also ask (from their graves) their modern critics what is the economic foundation of their own moral uprightness, their critical powers, education, and the varigated lives resulting from it. Perhaps, they could ask how this educated public justifies its own priviliged position in the division of labor on the backs of the billions of modern slaves, and how these billions who feed and clothe this caste judge ITS morality. And why would they - both professional revolutionaries - consider this private event (if it happened at all!) so important and "interesting" that to include it in their political writings (Krupskaya's memoirs are also political writing par excellence)? Was it because they were trying to hide some grim secret, or because their understanding of what was appropriate and what was not for their generation of revolutionary marxists was different from their modern chastisers? BTW, this is not true that their marriage or rather plans to have a legal marriage are not mentioned in Lenin's collected works (not collected by him). V.55 of the 5th edition of Lenin's Complete Works contains his letters to relatives (1893-1922). This collection is not complete. And in her introduction to the 1930 collection of Lenin's letters, his older sister Anna Ulyanova-Elizarova mentions with regret that many of Lenin's letters to "his relatives and friends" had been lost over the years. Yet even those left and published repudiate any claim that Lenin himself or the handlers of his literary heritage tried to conceal or supress any facts concerning his marriage. How else could we explain that the complete works contain a number of Lenin's letters re his church, i.e. the legal marriage procedure? E.g. in Letter# 47 (10/5/98) Lenin writes to his mother: As you know, N.K. (Krupskaya-V.B.) was given a tragicomic ultimatum: if she does not marry *immediately* (sic!) she will be deported back to Ufa. I am not going to let them do this, and therefore we have begun our "petitions" (mostly, requests for documents without which it is impossible to get married (in church) [Lenin uses Russian 'venchatsa' that means to be married in church - V.B.], so that we can have married before the Lent. /Trans is mine/. For anyone who knows Russian this letter clearly tells that Lenin and Krupskaya planned to get married legally, i.e. according to the rites of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Why would those who created "myths" about Lenin and allegedly tried to suppress the fact of his church marriage would publish such an "incriminating" document? The real question is: in whose eyes this sort of facts are construed as "incriminating" and for what purposes? Karl enigmatically refers to "many other things" that have been kept in secret >from the moral consciousness of modern judges. Well, let us hear them and hope that next time the judges will be more forthcoming and give a better sense of where their moral authority stems from. > > I wonder whether there has been much stuff released from the Soviett archives > on Lenin since the collapse of the Soviet Union. I would say there is some > very interesting material to found deep down in those archives > concerning Lenin. After all what has been constructed > is the Lenin legend, not the real guy. I have a gut feeling of what sort of hope this neuter "interesting" might express. I can assure you, Karl, that an army of "experts," "scholars" and other sorts of bourgeois worshippers of Minerva's owl have been eagerly looking for "interesting material" in Russian/Soviet archives. And you can rest confident that they and those who pay them will make any affort imaginable to spread the "good news" around the world when they have them. Just keep listening to the vultures' sounds. Vladimir Bilenkin --- from list marxism-general-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- --- from list marxism-general-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- --- from list marxism-general-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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