Lars Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered seeks to replace the textbook-myth of Leninism with a painstaking reconstruction of ‘Lenin’s Erfurtian drama’. That reconstruction is more accurate than the Lenin-myth, but Lih’s step forward is marred by two steps back. One is his account of Lenin’s ‘worry about workers’. The other is Lih’s new translation of What Is to Be Done?.

By what process was the Jacobin identity transplanted into nineteenth-century Russian radical culture? According to the conventional account, the Jacobin label was coined by proponents like Zainevskij and Tkaev. Lenin, in turn, is said to have derived his Jacobin identity from them, thus revealing the non-Marxian source of his political ideas. This article contests that interpretation through a study of the origin and spread of the Jacobin terminology in post-emancipation Russia. I show that the Jacobin identity in Russia was invented (...) by anti-Jacobin populists and that there were scarcely any self-proclaimed Jacobins prior to Lenin. I also reconstruct the path by which Lenin came to identify with French Jacobinism. That path remained within the territory of Marxist theory from beginning to end. (shrink)