Russian Refugees and Posthumous Evaluation of Lenin in Slovenian Politics

Abstract

Throughout the Slovenian political arena, Lenin was seen as an extraordinary world-historical figure. This was emphasised most frequently on the occasion of his death (21 January 1924), which prompted the most comprehensive Slovenian statements about the leader of the Russian Bolshevik revolution. Lenin’s revolutionary work was analysed by all three Slovenian political camps: Catholic, Liberal, and Marxist. The revolutionary part of the Marxist camp welcomed it, while its non-revolutionary part perceived Lenin as an embodiment of schism and hatred, a man of great deeds and terrifying destruction, standing outside all accepted moral laws. The opinion of the Liberals was similar: for them, Lenin represented a world born from revolution, fatally threatening the existing balance of social and political power. The Catholic camp, on the other hand, harboured for him a peculiar admiration. To be sure, he was seen as a dictator, a demonic genius ethically inclining towards a social justice which was based on the denial of individualism and on a ruthless, atheist, ‘Genghis Khan-like’, bloody Marxist revolution. However, he was also perceived as a man of action and energy, unmatched by either Peter the Great or Napoleon, and counted among the greatest Slavic personages. This was taking place at a time when the Slovenian political Catholicism still credited communism with an ability to provide certain social and economic solutions for other social movements as well.

The Slovenian politics of the mid-1920s emphasised both the extraordinary nature of the Lenin phenomenon and his radical revolutionary acts, which sprang from a monumental political ability and relentless pursuit of the envisioned goal. This emphasis was accompanied by an understanding of the historical forces underlying the past events. The developments in Russia were accepted as facts, and this was what the Russian refugees had to come to terms with as they looked for a new home on the western edge of the Slavic world.