Airbrushing Out Revolutionary Social Democracy: Lenin, Stalin, and Potresov on the Second International

In early 1915, Lenin engaged in a polemic with former comrade and by then longtime foe Aleksandr Potresov over the best way to account for the failure of the Second International’s response to the outbreak of European war. Potresov presented a unitary portrait of the Second International as nonrevolutionary, whereas Lenin countered this portrait with a bipartite model of fundamental conflict existing within the Second International, between “Opportunism” and “Revolutionary Social Democracy”. A decade later, Stalin adopted Potresov’s unitary model of the Second International—a major cause of the dominance of this model today. Rather than a conflict within the Second International between over-all Opportunism and Revolutionary Social Democracy, Stalin instead portrayed a conflict between the Second International’s opportunism and what he called Leninism. Realizing that Stalin’s portrait of Leninism is actually Revolutionary Social Democracy in disguise can introduce us to a forgotten historical reality.