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In sum, Mao has the better of the argument—at least on paper points. But Khrushchev argues effectively that Marxism is not a fixed dogma, but a method that must be applied to different conditions of each era—for instance, to the nuclear age, which drastically changes the nature of war. It is not enough simply to "get out the book and look up what Vladimir Ilyich said. We must do our own thinking, study life diligently and analyze the contemporary setting."
In a way, Lenin did just that. He adapted Marx to totally different conditions than those known to the scholarly, misanthropic exile in 19th century London. Marx predicted that the revolution would happen in an advanced industrial society and shaped his theories to this prophecy; Lenin applied them to a backward peasant country. Marx was inclined to sit back and let the revolution come; Lenin taught that it had to be helped along with the aid of a corps of professional revolutionaries.
Lenin owes nearly as much to Machiavelli and Von Clausewitz as to Marx. He passionately believed in Marxism—but he also believed in using any means to help it win. Thus what he did is at least as important as what he said. In the last analysis, Leninism is Lenin's life. He remains pertinent not only because his successors keep invoking him, but because he epitomizes in his career so much of later Communist history and so much of what is unchanging in Communism's nature.
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was born 94 years ago in a comfortable frame house in the small, sleepy city of Simbirsk, deep in the Russian heartland. His mother, a Lutheran, was a Volga German; his father Ilya, of Russian-Mongolian ancestry, was a teacher who rose to the post of director of elementary schools for his province and received a minor patent of nobility from the Czar. The Ulyanovs were seemingly untouched by the vast, ancient and epically inefficient tyranny that ruled Russia, or by the equally inefficient stirring against it. Vladimir and his older brother Alexander had an idyllic childhood. They swam in the Volga, hunted mushrooms in the birch woods, went ice skating and sleighing during the long winters. In the evenings, they bent over chessboards, sang around the piano, or played games invented by Vladimir with rules that he changed according to his whim. It was a habit he never lost.
Unknown even to Vladimir, Alexander joined a revolutionary movement called the People's Will, and at 20 was hanged for taking part in a plot that failed to assassinate the Czar. Young Vladimir vowed: "I'll make them pay for this! I swear I will!" Payment was to be long deferred.
Alexander had drawn his inspiration from the Populists, who abhorred all dictatorship; he and his companions used terror because they saw it as the only answer to the violence of the czarist state. But 19th century Europe offered a great many other forms of revolution to shop among. There were Saint-Simon, Fourier, and the other Utopian socialists, intellectual descendants of a small wing of the French Revolutionary Jacobins. There were the secret societies organized by the followers of Louis Auguste Blanqui, an erratic Frenchman who was the first to advocate dictatorship of the proletariat; the British