– Pedro de la Hoz –
(Translated by NEPH from granma.cu, April 22, 2022)
“The tribute to Lenin can be given with feeling. But when one studies his work and his life, when one studies his thinking and his doctrine, the peoples acquire what could be called a true treasure from the political point of view.”
There were those who believed that Lenin’s time had passed. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the dismantling of political systems in Eastern Europe and the supposed End of History proclaimed, anything that smelled of socialism in the early years of the last decade of the past century was demonized.
The German film Good bye, Lenin arrived on screens with the image of a toppled Lenin sculpture. Attacks against the leader of the October Revolution took place in various countries. Photos and videos circulate of the mob that, in December 2013, dismantled the statue of the Russian leader in a central square in Kiev.
The world did not get better. They attacked the symbols, but the problems did not disappear. On the contrary, social gaps, the exclusion of large human conglomerates, the neo-colonial derivation of the old colonialism, the subjugation of nations and peoples, and imperial voracity have exponentially increased in the contemporary scene.
153 years after the birth of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in the town of Simbirsk on April 22, 1870, a serious and unbiased analysis with an eye on current coordinates allows us to affirm the validity of Lenin’s legacy — the sharpest edges of his thinking, his creative approach to Marxist theory, his ability to interpret the signs and contradictions of the era, his exemplary leadership, and his deep-rooted revolutionary vocation — as one of the guiding compasses in the urgent path towards emancipation and the construction of just and dignified societies.
It is about avoiding labels and dispelling commonplaces, understanding the man and his circumstances, and valuing how a substantial part of that man’s work fits into our circumstances. Knowing, as Nicolás Guillén did with metaphoric acuity in a memorable poem dedicated to the Bolshevik politician, that Lenin is “tempest and shelter,” that he is here and there “like a simple and cheerful familiar god, / day by day in the factory and the wheat, / one and diverse universal friend of iron and lily, / of volcano and dream.”
In 1970, on the occasion of the first centenary of Lenin’s birth, Fidel Castro observed with full knowledge of the matter: “The tribute to Lenin can be given with feeling. But when one studies his work and his life, when one studies his thinking and his doctrine, the peoples acquire what could be called a true treasure from the political point of view.”
Let us then say Welcome, Lenin, welcome in all languages and in all actions.