Did Lenin, Engels, Kollontai and Trotsky's predictions about the future come true?

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The internet is awash with political predictions, including from people that many believe. About a hundred years ago, Lenin, his associates and his opponents also made predictions. It is interesting to compare with what actually happened, and to think about whether it is worth panicking from analytics on the Internet.

United States of Europe (not) possible

The idea of uniting Europe into something like the United States, where each state has its own law, but in general they operate as a single system with common foreign policy interests, was in the air already at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was expressed, for example, by Leon Trotsky, who believed that economic evolution would abolish national borders. Vladimir Ilyich was firmly convinced that such a unification was impossible by peaceful methods, since capitalism was not capable of such alliances. A third point of view a little later, in the thirties, was presented by Winston Churchill, who advocated the European Union as a supranational entity. As you can see, it was he who ultimately guessed the future of Europe.

Revolution (not) soon

In January 1917, at a speech in Zurich, Lenin expressed his uncertainty that the revolution would take place during his lifetime. A month later, the first revolution took place in Russia, and a few months later - the second. Also, Lenin and his associates at that time thought that the Russian revolution would only be part of the world revolution, that is, a series of revolutions that would flare up around the world at about the same time - because information about one coup would fuel the desire and readiness of another coup among residents of other countries. And this chain will most likely begin in Germany, where the labor movement came from.

Incidentally, Engels, whom Lenin was looking back at, believed that revolutions would start at once by three nations of Europe, as the most progressive - Germans, Hungarians and Poles. And all other peoples will melt in the storm of revanchist wars that will follow these revolutions, and Germans and Hungarians will sweep almost all Slavs out of revenge and hostility from the face of Europe. Engels saw nothing wrong with this: only progressive peoples should remain, and reactionary places should be in the dustbin of history. In a way, Engels foresaw Hitler and World War II.

And in the thirty-sixth year, Trotsky assured that Hitler was about to unleash a new world war, but the Germans would lose the second in the same way as the first, if not more crushing. Well, he was right. However, the Nazis had already been in power for three years, and it was easier to guess the future with them.

Russia will switch to commodity exchange

An intermediate step between complete communism and NEP, in which private and state trade coexisted, Lenin saw a general exchange of goods. He hoped that by the thirties and forties the Soviet Union would completely give up money and switch to the exchange of goods. In a way, he was right, although he did not guess with the timing and with how much it could bring communism closer: “thing for thing” barter became a constant reality in the life of citizens of the late USSR and the first years of the Russian Federation. True, this did not bring communism one step closer.

The official will eat the working class

In a large book criticizing the Stalinist turn in building a "bright future" as an almost complete departure from the ideas of revolution, Trotsky argues that in the USSR, on the course on which he is holding, the bureaucracy will eat up the state of workers, the country will turn into a country of officials. Among other things, the victory of the bureaucracy, in his opinion, will be the victory of the bourgeois view of the family and the bronzing of the authority of the elders. He also believed that the overthrow of the bureaucratized elite, a new coup, would lead to the victory of the almost abandoned ideals of the revolution.

Well, it seems that of all the predictors, Trotsky was not only the most dreamy, but also the most accurate. Under Stalin and after him, the bureaucracy developed so much that in satire they did nothing but ridicule the bloated bureaucratic apparatus - and this satire was indeed both poignant and relevant for an ordinary citizen. The bronzing of the secretaries general, the retention of power in the departments by the elderly officials who have long lagged behind the times - all this also happened. Here are just a coup nowhere bureaucracy does not work. In fact, Russia inherited the bureaucratic apparatus from the USSR and changed little in it.

There will be no more family

According to forecasts about the family of the future, the main one among the revolutionaries was Alexandra Kollontai. In the twenty-second year, she published a utopia story with the promising title "Coming Soon", where she painted pictures of life under communism. First of all, people would live with each other, dividing not into families, but by age: separately children, separately adolescents, adults, old people. This division was seen as the most reasonable due to the different regime and medical and hygienic measures required at different ages. As we can see, if this "soon" comes, it will not happen soon.

But her promise that the traditional family will no longer be beneficial to either the state or the people, and therefore will gradually begin to wither away, seems to come true by half. It is still beneficial for the state to have women take care of the sick, the elderly and children - who in this case will inevitably look for husbands so as not to starve to death. For many modern people, the family in the form in which we are used to seeing it in ABC books is burdensome.

There will be no lessons

The Bolsheviks believed that the educational system would change in an advanced society. Lessons will disappear, children will work on projects that will help them consider the same topic from different angles, and there will be laboratories in schools instead of classes. Instead of "disciplines" and "subjects" there will be "complexes" of different topics. Children will also learn different crafts and professions, which will tie abstract knowledge to practical.

Surprisingly, the predictions of the Soviet dreamers of the twenties seem to have begun to come true. Only not in Russia, but in Finland, where they are really gradually moving towards such an education system. But our system was curtailed under Stalin, returning as much as possible everything that was before the revolution.

By the way, Krupskaya was the main one for children in the early USSR. Little-known facts about Nadezhda Krupskaya: What happened in her life, except for Lenin and the revolution.