Unsurprisingly he spent most of his early life in exile, and expected to die there. It was the February Revolution that gave him his chance. As described by Sean McMeekin in his chapter, the Germans shipped Lenin back to Russia in the famous 'sealed train' in April 1917. He then overcame almost total opposition among his Bolshevik colleagues, and galvanised the local political scene, by setting out an extreme programme that included overthrow of the Provisional Government and an immediate end to the war. As other opposition parties gradually came to link themselves with the Provisional Government so the Bolsheviks by their very extremism became more and more conspicuous (and popular) as leaders of the opposition. In particular their demand for peace attracted the crucial support of the Petrograd military garrison. After two major breakdowns of public order (the so-called 'April' and 'July' days) in which the Bolsheviks played a significant role, Lenin was forced once more into exile (and concluded at the time that his hopes for revolution were over). He returned in October and, as described by Orlando Figes, again persuaded his unwilling Bolshevik comrades firstly to launch the October coup that finally placed them in power; and then three months later to repress the long-awaited Constituent Assembly, which was the only immediate challenge to that power.
Lenin's centrality to the events of these months underlines how contingent the outcome was. He of course had able associates, notably Trotsky, who were crucial to carrying the Bolshevik project through. But it is striking how regularly he turns his whole party round with his single-minded insistence on taking and holding power. As Sean McMeekin points out, if the Germans had not sent Lenin back, or any of half a dozen possible accidents had happened to him once he was back, a Bolshevik-dominated outcome in Russia becomes much less likely. Lenin himself after the July Days seemed ready to acknowledge that all was lost and to revert to overseas pamphleteering. It was only the Kornilov fiasco that put him back in the game. Even after the October coup, not many seasoned Petrograd political observers were betting on the long-term survival of the Bolshevik regime.
The true significance of Lenin is that, having got through to achieve power, he (unlike those who fleetingly took the limelight before him - Rodzyanko, Lvov, Kerensky and Chernov) held on to it. After January 1918, there are still moments of contingency, but, somehow, with Lenin's iron grip on the tiller, the course seems more firmly set. He had an unerring eye for the weaknesses of his opponents, and a ruthless readiness to exploit them. Martin Sixsmith underlines Lenin's centrality in his comments on how radically different things could have been if Fanny Kaplan had in fact killed him in August 1918. And I am struck by the doubts among our other commentators on this later period (notably Evan Mawdsley on the Civil War and Richard Sakwa on the possibility of 'Bolshevik democracy') as to whether events by this stage could have gone very differently from how they actually did.
III: LENIN'S LEGACY
Lenin gave the world a political approach, a system and a state, all of which have been among the key drivers of world history through the twentieth century.
His approach to political action was utterly functional and unsentimental. All that mattered was gaining and holding power. He created the Cheka and enthusiastically encouraged the mass (and, where possible, public) murder of his opponents. He bullied his fellow Bolsheviks in 1918 into ceding vast swathes of western Russia to the Germans rather than lose power. Patriotism, compassion, truth would all be abandoned when necessary. There is no sign in Lenin's mature writings of any compunction about this. His lapidary summary of the criterion to be brought to any political judgement was 'Kto, kovo?' - who gains, who loses? This of course was not new in human history; Machiavelli had lauded the brutalities of Cesare Borgia. But it was Lenin, encouraged by Marx's own dismissal of 'bourgeois morality', who gave the doctrine its first mass twentieth-century outing. And, as Richard Sakwa makes clear, it was Lenin who irretrievably injected into the Bolshevik party its contempt for democratic procedure. The chicanery of the road to power, the savagery of the Civil War, the Red Terror, the mendacity and mass propaganda which became his regime's mode of communication with its own people and the wider world; these all cleared the way for the murderous collectivisations and purges which his successors inflicted on Russia. Outside Russia his approach found apt pupils in Mussolini, Hitler, Mao ... right up to Pol Pot and Ceausescu. He popularised an approach to politics that lies like a great stain across the whole twentieth century.
Lenin's second legacy was organisational. Partly by accident he arrived at one of the twentieth century's great political innovations - the one-party state. He had already set out his plans for a vanguard revolutionary party to seize the reins of power in 1902. Having done exactly that in 1917, his revolutionary party, without subsuming the Russian state, then became a monopolistic ruling party, taking all the high offices, pulling all the strings, and squeezing out all political opposition. The reason for things going this way are various: there simply weren't enough Bolsheviks to replace the entire Russian bureaucracy; the Russian state at that stage was in any case seen as no more than an obsolescent structure on the way to world revolution; and it somehow suited the oblique revolutionary mentality to control the state without actually being it - so much more was deniable or blameable on somebody else.
Once invented this was a system that offered huge attractions to twentieth-century authoritarians and ideologues, and it proved immensely successful. It is no accident that the official creed of the Soviet Union became the clumsily double-barrelled 'Marxism/Leninism'. Marxism of course, whatever the inadequacies of its actual implementation, remained a powerful insurrectionary brand, deployed by twentieth-century revolutionaries from Mao to Mandela. But Leninism was at least as important both in managing the Soviet Union itself and in its wider repercussions. Within its first two decades Lenin's one-party state had provided an explicitly acknowledged model for Mussolini, Hitler and Franco. After the Second World War, apart from its imposition all across Eastern Europe, it spread like a plague through newly decolonised Africa, the Middle East and Asia. At its high point, from Turkey to Tanzania and from Syria to Singapore it was the system of governance of more than sixty nations.
IV: THE STATE LENIN CREATED
Lenin's third great contribution to history was the Soviet Union itself. This is not the place to run through the detailed history of the Communist superpower. Rather like the newly independent United States at the end of the eighteenth century, it saw itself as an unprecedentedly innovatory political order ('Novus Ordo Seclorum', as it says on US banknotes). But unlike the United States, which in fact retained most of the legal, social and economic arrangements of its colonial past, the Bolsheviks set out to wipe the slate entirely clean. In what may well have been the biggest politico-economic experiment in the history of mankind, all of society and the economy were made subject to, and in effect the possessions of, a small, ideologically driven, political clique. The population of Russia became no more than grist to the mills of those who were building socialism; and were chewed up in their tens of millions.