Lenin Vladimir Ilich (1870–1924), Russian political leader and Marxist theorist, a principal creator of Soviet dialectical materialism. In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909), he attacked Russian contemporaries who sought to interpret Marx’s philosophy in the spirit of the phenomenalistic positivism of Avenarius and Mach. Rejecting their position as idealist, Lenin argues that matter is not a construct from sensations but an objective reality independent of consciousness; because our sensations directly copy this reality, objective truth is possible. The dialectical dimension of Lenin’s outlook is best elaborated in his posthumous Philosophical Notebooks (written 1914–16), a collection of reading notes and fragments in which he gives close attention to the Hegelian dialectic and displays warm sympathy toward it, though he argues that the dialectic should be interpreted materialistically rather than idealistically. Some of Lenin’s most original theorizing, presented in Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) and State and Revolution (1918), is devoted to analyzing the connection between monopoly capitalism and imperialism and to describing the coming violent replacement of bourgeois rule by, first, the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and, later, stateless communism. Lenin regarded all philosophy as a partisan weapon in the class struggle, and he wielded his own philosophy polemically in the interests of Communist revolution.
As a result of the victory of the Bolsheviks in November 1917, Lenin’s ideas were enshrined as the cornerstone of Soviet intellectual culture and were considered above criticism until the advent of glasnost in the late 1980s. With the end of Communist rule following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, his influence declined precipitously.
See also MARXISM, RUSSIAN PHILOSOPH. J.P.Sc.