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After decades of misinformation during the Soviet period, we can today, with historical hindsight and a better grasp of old and new sources, appraise what Lenin’s government meant for Russia and the world.
Without Lenin, the alternative models of totalitarian dictatorships in the 20th century, so aptly characterized this way by Hannah Arendt, would have been unthinkable. In what some have called “the Russian century,” the Soviet regime was an unflinching enemy to parliamentary democracy, separation of powers, the market economy, civil rights and free speech.
Lenin destroyed politics understood as a process of dialogue and negotiation, and implemented a policy of terror.
Roberto Echavarren is a poet, novelist, essayist, and translator. He was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, where he studied philosophy and law. He then pursued graduate studies in philosophy at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, and received his Ph.D. at the University of Paris VIII. Echavarren taught at the University of London before a twenty-year career teaching at New York University. He has published five novels, notably his last three short novels combined under the title Archipiélago (Archipelago). He was awarded the 2021 Amado Alonso International Prize of Literary Criticism for his book El pensamiento chino (Chinese Thought).