Appendix Two: The Case of Béla Kun¶
Core Argument¶
This appendix reproduces and contextualises a suppressed speech delivered by Lenin to the Executive Committee of the Communist International on 17 June 1921, on the eve of the Third Congress. The core of the chapter is a vindication of Trotsky’s position against the ultra-leftism of Béla Kun, and a demonstration that the political alliance between Lenin and Trotsky was so close that Stalin later found it necessary to suppress the record. The speech is presented as a decisive intervention against a species of leftist sectarianism that Lenin regarded as every bit as dangerous as opportunism.
Lenin’s central claim is that Béla Kun fundamentally misunderstands what it means to be a revolutionary Marxist. Kun, in Lenin’s assessment, equates communism with a mechanical defence of leftists “everywhere and under all circumstances,” irrespective of concrete political conditions. Lenin insists that Marxism consists precisely in determining what policy is appropriate in different types of circumstances. The immediate context is the French Communist Party’s response to the mobilisation of French troops in the Ruhr. Lenin argues that in such a crisis, slogans of “sangfroid and discipline” of the type Kun endorses are a catastrophic blunder. He warns that if the leftist comrades continue in this manner, they will “dig the grave of the communist and workers’ movement in France.”
The speech draws heavily on the experience of the Russian revolutionary movement as a theoretical reference point. Lenin notes that the organisational form of the “cell” (noyau) is a purely Russian expression, born from the long struggle against tsarism, Menshevism, and bourgeois democracy. He praises the French party’s work in winning over the trade unions and establishing cells within them, but warns that this hard-won progress can be undone by leftist adventurism. The revolution, he insists, cannot be carried out by “the class of 1919” — a pointed rebuke to those who imagine that revolutionary will alone can substitute for patient, mass work.
The polemic is directed on two fronts. Against the opportunism of figures like Marcel Cachin, who defended the Franco-British alliance in the legislature as a guarantee of peace when it was in fact “a gang of robbers,” Lenin calls for open and specific criticism. But the greater part of his fire is reserved for Béla Kun, whose errors he describes as “not worthy to be expressed by any Marxist.” The speech also rebukes a comrade from Luxembourg who charged the French party with failing to sabotage the occupation of Luxembourg, dismissing this as a “geographical” rather than political question. The chapter concludes by noting that the speech’s suppression under Stalin was a direct consequence of the political affinity it revealed between Lenin and Trotsky.