Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism

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.

Lenin’s ever-living nonfiction, in which—according to an economist’s view—he explains the background of World War I and provides the key to all of the world history of the 20th century, up to wars in Syria and Donbas. The essay was written in 1916 in Swiss exile. Fearing that the censorship would confiscate the print run, Lenin, as he said himself, was forced “not only to strictly limit himself exclusively to theoretical—especially economic—analysis, but also to formulate political remarks with enormous caution, with hints and with that Eesopian—cursed Eesopian—language that the tsarism made all revolutionaries resort to when they took up their pen for a ‘legal’ work.”