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All these Lenins and more are genuine. No other modern leader has combined in one person so many different and often contradictory views and impulses. Yet it is impossible to believe that all who call upon his varying ideas would meet with Lenin's approval. Although something of a campus radical at the University of Kazan, he would no doubt excoriate the passionate bomb throwers of America's S.D.S. and other extremist groups as dangerous amateurs, afflicted with the "infantile disease of leftism." Almost certainly, he would be highly suspicious of Tito's reliance on a market economy and private farming, bewildered by Castro's wild-eyed barbudos, and appalled by Che's adventuristic forays in Latin America. Although he took a certain satisfaction in being revered as the Marx of the 20th century, Lenin was a man of personal modesty; he might well consider the cult of Chairman Mao a trifle excessive. He would be contemptuous of the intellectual poverty of his successors in the Kremlin, and despise their grossly simplistic reiterations of his ideas. Their chauvinism and anti-Semitism would enrage him. The expansion of Communist systems to more than one-third of the globe would please him; the quarrels between Communist countries, verging on armed conflict, would shatter his dream that the victory of revolution would bring peace among nations.
A Many-Faced Lenin
History, as Adam Ulam of Harvard observes, may have vindicated Lenin's tactics, but it has also repudiated his hopes. History has also affected his contemporary relevance. If his criticisms of bourgeois society retain a certain validity for many, his remedies have proved worse than the ills they are intended to cure. Beyond that, the viability of Lenin's thought has been affected by social changes he did not, indeed could not, account for. Like many another Marxist, he grossly underrated the productive vitality and capacity for change in what he considered a moribund capitalist world. Lenin also did not have to confront today's youth. There is a fine irony in the fact that in many nations the revolutionary party he helped create is regarded as reactionary by the anti-Establishment young—witness the ferocious diatribes against French Communism by students involved in the May 1968 revolt. The newest revolutionary impulse is not economic or political but romantic and sensual (at its mildest) or anarchic (at its harshest). The young rebels oppose material progress and the very principle of organization—including Communist organization.