Archive of The Dilemmas of Lenin

This year we've been marking the centenary of the Russian Revolution with new books from Tariq Ali and China Miéville, plus Weekend Reads looking at women in Russia before and after the Revolution, the Black Bolsheviks, and lots more. 

In this series of posts (Part I below, Part II, and Part III) we ask writers to respond to the Revolution and its importance today. 

Do you know your Lenin from your Lunacharsky? Your Krupskaya from your Kerensky? If so, then we have just the quiz for you!

In the centenary year of the Russian Revolution, and to celebrate the launch of Tariq Ali's The Dilemmas of Lenin, we're giving away a huge bundle of Russian Revolution books to two lucky people! One person from North America and one from the rest of the world will win copies of The Dilemmas of Lenin, China Miéville's October, Red Rosa, Moshe Lewin's Soviet Century, The Communist Manifesto/April Thesis, The Prophet, and Revolutionary Yiddishland.

THIS QUIZ IS NOW OVER.

"First things first. Without Lenin there would have been no socialist revolution in 1917. Of this much we can be certain."

In The Dilemmas of Lenin Tariq Ali provides an insightful portrait of Lenin’s deepest preoccupations and underlines the clarity and vigour of his theoretical and political formulations. In this exclusive extract from the Introduction he explains that without Lenin there would not have been a socialist revolution in Russia in 1917.

The Dilemmas of Lenin is 50% off until May 28th as part of our Russian Revolution reading. See all the books on the reading lists here.

It is the contradictions of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as it was beginning to develop in Russia, that form the object of Lenin's analysis and of his arguments. If you forget this fact, you can easily fall into dogmatism and formalism: Leninism can be represented as a finished theory, a closed system — which it has been, for too long, by Communist parties. But if on the other hand you remain content with a superficial view of these contradictions and of their historical causes, if you remain content with the simplistic and false idea according to which you have to "choose" between the standpoint of theory and that of history, real life and practice, if you interpret Lenin's arguments simply as a reflection of ever changing circumstances, less applicable the further away they are in history, then the real causes of these historical contradictions become unintelligible, and our own relation to them becomes invisible. You fall into the domain of subjective fantasy