Symbolic Confusion - Lenin’s Legacy

Pro-Derg rally in Meskel Square, probably 1984

 “It is still incredible to me that the RRC’s [Relief & Rehabilitation Commission, an Ethiopian government agency] most difficult task was convincing our own leaders of the very existence of a widespread famine that was now swallowing up the entire nation. But their sights were set solely on upcoming anniversary celebration. Throughout the country, red flags and pictures of Mengistu, Marx and Lenin were being distributed.... The usual slogans were posted everywhere: ‘The oppressed masses will be victorious!’ ‘Marxism-Leninism is our guideline!’.... Preparations for the celebration were in full swing, including the phony elections for the newly-formed Marxist-Leninist Party.... Hundreds of North Koreans were in Addis decorating the city. They had been invited during Mengistu’s recent visit to North Korea, where he had been impressed by the colorful ceremonies and meticulously planned parades. Money was poured into new buildings, highways, conference halls, and a huge statue of Lenin in the center of Addis. There was no mention of famine anywhere except in my office.” —Dawit Wolde Giorgis, former RRC head, writing in 1989 about 1984, in Red Tears: War, Famine and Revolution in Ethiopia (pp.134-135)

Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mengistu? Workers Party Conference, 1980s

“What is now happening to Marx’s theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonise them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarising it.”—V.I. Lenin, State and Revolution, quoted in “Down with all Revisionist Distortions Against the Ethiopian Revolution, in the pro-EPRP journal Forward, published by the World-Wide Federation of Ethiopian Students, February 1977.

Pro-Derg rally, probably May Day 1977. Civilian left contingent with portraits of Stalin, Lenin, Marx

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was of course the Russian revolutionary who successfully led the Russian October Revolution of 1917. After decades of revolutionary organizing, his wing of the Russian socialist movement emerged triumphant after years of repression and setbacks. His Bolsheviks had rejected the social-patriotism that virtually destroyed the socialist movement during the first World War, and fought their way to dominance after the February Revolution overthrew the Russian emperor or Tsar. When the Bolsheviks emerged triumphant after October at the head of the world's first socialist country, a world communist movement grew like wildfire around the strategical, tactical and philosophical expansion of Marxism that Lenin used to lead the oppressed and working peoples of Russia to victory. Lenin died in 1924, only a few years after the triumph of October, and it's from that moment that Marxism-Leninism appears as the professed ideology of communists around the globe. It is also from that moment that the seeds of future revisionisms sprout.

Huge poster of Lenin overlooks
pro-Derg rally, 1970s

It's too complicated to address here in detail, but numerous rifts and divisions appeared in the communist movement over the coming decades. Lenin’s Communist Party successor Stalin, confronted by a hostile world and to the need to transform the new Soviet Union into a self-reliant power that could resist counterrevolution and imperialism, lead the communist movement for a while, often subjecting the movement to turns necessitated by the foreign policy needs of Russia. Trotsky's defection in the late 1920s spawned a whole new wing of the movement, and Mao’s innovative road to revolution in China in the 1930s and 1940s ultimately led to another wing.

By the time of the Ethiopian revolution in 1974, competing streams of communist thought all claimed the mantle of Marxism-Leninism, and most pointed back to the same inspirational volumes of Lenin’s oeuvre, printed in competing editions in Moscow, Beijing and clandestine printshops around the world. But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that not everyone who calls herself a communist actually means the same thing, and here is the challenging thing about revisionism: people with diametrically opposed politics pretend to use the same words and images to justify their actions. 

“Marxism-Leninism eventually became the new reigning orthodoxy both inside the USSR and its allied communist parties. However, it was no longer a vibrant theory of revolution, but a state religion, a dogma and infallible science used to justify the requirements of whatever the policy the leadership needed it to. Soviet Marxism-Leninism was deterministic, mechanical and economistic.” — Doug Enaa Greene writing on the history of revisionism in ‘The Final Aim Is Nothing’ in Links, International Journal of Socialist Renewal

Mengistu's office in Addis Ababa,
occupied by TPLF fighters in 1991

It then becomes a question of subjectivity to interpret who is actually applying — or synthesizing — Lenin’s ideas to make a revolution, and who is using them as a justification for something else altogether.

When an army led by the Tigrai People's Liberation Front entered Addis Ababa 25 years ago this month and overthrew the Derg's fifteen-year rule, they marched into Mengistu's palace office to reveal a wall of Leninist mementos and communist souvenirs. Clearly Mengistu professed a love of Lenin. But Mengistu had also been engaged in a war of annihilation with others who similarly professed a love of Lenin and an adherence to his ideas.


“Combating every brand of opportunism — be it revisionism or dogmatism, ‘is a question of extraordinary, indeed of primary, importance’ to all Marxist-Leninists engaged in the struggle for true democracy and socialism. After enumerating the many episodes in the long history of arduous struggle waged by the Ethiopian people against internal and external enemies, namely feudalism and western imperialism led by US, ABYOT (vol. 2 no. 7) reminds its readers of the emergence of a fresh enemy in the arena of the Ethiopian democratic revolution, the Soviet hegemonists and their cohorts from Cuba and East Europe.

Feature on Lenin in the pro-EPRP
publication Goh (Dawn), 1975

‘The EPRP did not start to to fight the Moscow counter-revolutionaries only at the time they took the side of fascism and stood against the Ethiopian revolution. When the EPRP was founded it declared that revisionism constitutes a very grave danger and is the main one to the international communist movement. Consequently, the EPRP consistently fought against revisionism both inside and outside the party....’

In a number of its publications, especially in its official organ DEMOCRACIA, the EPRP has been widely teaching the masses the danger posed by the Soviet bureaucrats to the Ethiopian revolution... The supply of arms, ‘experts,’ interrogators, etc. and the diplomatic support the USSR is giving to the crumbling fascist state cannot be isolated from the nature of today’s ‘Soviet’ state. ABYOT describes the ‘Soviet’ Union as a ‘country where democracy has been stifled. It is a country where a clique of bureaucrats rule with iron hands in the name of the working class. It is a country where the working class has no say either in the running of the government or the industries. It is a country where the people are muzzled, where genuine Marxists are hounded....”—from ‘Soviet Hegemonism Exposed,’ in the pro-EPRP journal Forward, WWFES January 1978

Lenin quoted in the pages of EPRP's Abyot, February 1978

By all accounts, the idea of Marxism-Leninism was introduced to the the military Derg by civilian leftists who came from the same largely student-based revolutionary milieu as the EPRP.

Lenin’s ideas were brought to Mengistu first by the likes of Haile Fida and Sennay Likke. Mengistu and his fellows were largely career military officers, isolated from the ideas spreading in the student movement. Indeed while many Ethiopian revolutionaries spent their formative years radicalizing at American universities, Mengistu spent a period in training in the 1960s at US military bases in the American south. Only after “Socialist Ethiopia” was already established, did Derg cadre begin interacting with the Soviet Union, many being sent for education and training in the USSR and Eastern Europe. By 1977, U.S. imperialism had pulled back its support of Ethiopia, and the Ethiopian government needed a strong ally, which it found in the Soviet bloc. It is, of course, left to the observer to decide who best manifested Lenin’s ideas in the course of the Ethiopian revolution.

Soviet propaganda: “Young Ethiopians study the
Russian language, the language of Lenin.”

“It cannot be too strongly maintained that... that the Social-Democrat’s [how communists referred to themselves at that time] ideal should not be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able to generalise all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.” —V.I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done, 1902

A few weeks ago I posted the story of the EPRP’s role in driving the CIA out of the Ethiopian labor movement. Here's a coda to that story that I think suggests something fundamental about the revisionist attitude toward working people, far different than Lenin's.

This account was written by Valentin Korovikov, Pravda's Africa correspondent, in 1979:

“The bankrupt Confederation of Ethiopian Labour Unions had to be replaced by a new Trade Union Association. The law emphasized that in their political and production activities the unions should be guided by socialist principles and by the overall programme for the country's progressive development.... The new labour legislation showed that the military government was taking practical steps to secure the interests of the working people and to improve their life, even though the underdeveloped Ethiopian economy offered few chances for this. The proclamation of workers’ rights helped to expose the demagogy of the ultra-left and anarchist groups that had sought to depict the Dergue as the anti-democratic dictatorship of a military junta.”—Ethiopia: Years of Revolution, p.51

And so the workers’ struggle was reduced to a law that promoted production, banned strikes, and replaced independent working class organization in favor of a top-down state-allied association.

Toward the end of his life, relatively young but in ill health, Lenin was well aware of the challenges to come: the existential challenge of the Soviet Union to survive, and the challenge of keeping the revolutionary flame burning not only in the world movement but inside of Russia itself. In one of his last essays, Lenin worries about the tendencies to entropy and bureaucratization:

“We have been bustling for five years trying to improve our state apparatus, but it has been mere bustle, which has proved useless in these five years, of even futile, or even harmful. This bustle created the impression that we were doing something, but in effect it was only clogging up our institutions and our brains. It is high time things were changed....

25 years ago: Addis Ababa's Lenin statue toppled
in the aftermath of the TPLF victory. Ironically the core
of the TPLF also described themselves as ‘Marxist-Leninists’

In all spheres of social, economic and political relationships we are ‘frightfully’ revolutionary. But as regards precedence, the observance of the forms and rites of office management, our ‘revolutionariness’ often gives way to the mustiest routine. On more than one occasion, we have witnessed the very interesting phenomenon of a great leap forward in social life being accompanied by amazing timidity whenever the slightest changes are proposed.

This is natural, for the boldest steps forward were taken in a field which was long reserved for theoretical study, which was promoted mainly, and even almost exclusively, in theory..... I think that this has happened in all really great revolutions, for really great revolutions grow out of the contradictions between the old, between what is directed towards developing the old, and the very abstract striving for the new, which must be so new as not to contain the tiniest particle of the old....

The general feature of our present life is the following: we have destroyed capitalist industry and have done our best to raze to the ground the medieval institutions and landed proprietorship, and thus created a small and very small peasantry, which is following the lead of the proletariat because it believes in the results of its revolutionary work. It is not easy for us, however, to keep going until the socialist revolution is victorious in more developed countries merely with the aid of this confidence, because economic necessity, especially under NEP, keeps the productivity of labour of the small and very small peasants at an extremely low....” — from Better Fewer, But Better, 1923

This essay, and the whole thing is worth reading, shows Lenin deeply aware of what was happening inside the Soviet government, and with the hindsight of history we can see that everything he talks about in fact came to worsen, not improve. It's not hard to see how the Soviet view of Leninism evolved into something different than the fiery struggles of working and oppressed people for their own emancipation in which it developed, into a kind of roadmap for following a correct institutional model of state control and development. Certainly the cultural revolution in China, winding down by the time of the Ethiopian revolution, represented an attempt to confront this same tendency, harnessing another interpretation of Marxism-Leninism to inspire ongoing revolutionary will and mass democratic participation. Judging by today's China, revisionism won that round as well.

But the ultimate tragedy of revisionism is that it seems to cast its spell mostly only on its own true believers, and the result is a poisoned well. How, now, to present Lenin's bold, insightful and — I believe — actually still relevant and correct, ideas in the context of an Ethiopia where Lenin became the face of oppression?

Workers Party CC member and RRC head Dawit Wolde Giorgis visited a refugee shelter in the town of Korem during the 1984 famine:

“There were a few who still had the strength to shout at us in anger and despair, ‘Why are you coming to see us? We've had so many visitors, why doesn't Mengistu come to see us?’ As if to mock them, even here [in the famine-struck region] the streets were decorated for the upcoming celebration. Heroic posters of Marx and Lenin frowned down upon them in the streets and even inside the shelters. Some, having nothing further to fear from the authorities, were bold enough to point a bony arm at the red flags and shout, ‘That cloth should be covering our bodies, not hanging in the streets! This isn't our wedding, it's our funeral...it's not a time to celebrate it's a time for grief.... Where is the bread? Where is the bread?” —Dawit Wolde Giorgis, op cit, p. 140

The legacy of the Derg's “Leninism”