ABSTRACT
Lenin had to make his bid for power during that brief interval when there was no universally recognized legitimate government, and power, so to speak, lay in the streets. Unlike Lenin's permanent dictatorship, it had the grace to call itself "provisional", that is, to regard itself as a prelegitimate government whose chief task was to carry on until a Constituent Assembly could create a new democratic legitimacy. The history of all totalitarian regimes has proved the rightness of Lenin's "scientific definition". The completeness of Lenin's belief in himself was matched by the completeness of his distrust of everybody else, from the proletariat to his own lieutenants, local bodies, and rank and file. Though Lenin sincerely regarded himself as an orthodox Marxist, his Marxism was authoritarian quotational Marxism. Moreover, in his Marxism, as he himself proudly noted, there was a strong admixture of Jacobinism and of the extreme terrorist, centralist, conspiratorial tradition of Tkachev, Bakunin, Zaichnevsky, and Nechayev.
