The State and Revolution

An economist and journalist, leader of an underground party, and founder of the first state in history of workers and peasants—few other people influenced the fate of Russia and the world in the 20th century as Vladimir Lenin did. Is Lenin’s cause alive today? That question remains open. But his books—undoubtedly. Elites can argue endlessly about what literature is and what it isn’t, what form is normative and what is marginal; but when the writer Lenin appears, all commonly accepted canon simply gets devalued and abolished. All of this once again confirms the Marxist thesis that true literature is, above all, a social practice.

This hundred-page work—apparently, the most valuable thing Lenin has for today’s Russia—serves as a kind of antidote to the fetishistic cult of the state and the vertical of power. Without yet knowing that within a few months he himself would have to build a new type of state, Lenin—with his astonishing instinct for leadership—argues that the state is a machine of violence. And since the goal of the socialist revolution is to build a classless society, the state is only a temporary phenomenon, whose purpose under an enlightened dictatorship of the proletariat is to wither away. The state will die out—and then there’s no need to fear a man with a gun.