MARPLES, DAVID R. (2000) LENIN’S REVOLUTION: RUSSIA, 1917-1921, England: Pearson Education Limited

- debate over whether Lenin’s revolution paved the way for Stalin’s cruel and bureaucratic regime which persecuted millions of Soviet citizens -> difficult to discern how Lenin would have governed a state in peacetime, in good health, and with a stable economy (these three factors never occurred during the period 1917-24

- influenced by Marxism? (evidence: by 1889 he was acquainted with some of the writings of Marx, including Das Kapital, and he made contact with some of the Russian-based Marxists.

- The April Theses -> no compromises within the Provisional Government; Bolsheviks should work for the overthrow of the government, the war in Europe had to be transformed to a civil war, the police and army had to be abolished, land should be socialized and all private lands confiscated, private banks should be dissolved and replaced by a single national bank under the control of the Petrograd Soviet

WHITE, JAMES D. (2001) LENIN: THE PRACTICE AND THEORY OF REVOLUTION, ENGLAND: PALGRAVE

- The Theses included a long list of party tasks including: the immediate convocation of a party congress; alteration of the party programme on the questions of imperialism, the state, and the minimum programme; the change of the party’s name from ‘Social Democrat’ to ‘Communist.

- Lenin did not set out to create the Bolshevik party; he was intent on gaining control over the whole of the RSDLP and he spent over a decade forming alliances which he hoped would make things possible. In the end he failed in his objective.

- Lenin wrote a pamphlet: Left Wing Communism. An Infantile Disorder. The pamphlet criticized leftist elements in Germany and Britain for neglecting parliamentary tactics and for failure to take advantage of legal means available to them in their respective countries. It was the kind of argument Lenin had deployed against the ‘Recallers’ over a decade earlier. Now Lenin was generalizing his tactics to guide the world revolution.

- Bolshevism, which consisted in ‘the strictest centralization and iron discipline’ had arisen on the ‘granite theoretical foundation’ of Marxism.

- Lenin paved the way for Stalin -> Stalin made use of the cult, but he did not create it as he found it already in existence. Stalin gave a series of lectures at the Sverdlov University under the general title ‘The Foundations of Leninism”, in which he introduced his ideas on ‘socialism in the country’. It was Stalin’s contention that according to Lenin’s theory of revolution the individual national capitalist systems were linked together in a single chain to form a united front of imperialism.