DESPITE the fact 39 per cent of US adults today now hold a positive view of socialism, to take seriously the ideas of Lenin is still to risk ridicule. Is he not, people will ask, the author of an obsolete and oppressive state socialist model? One that — even if his corpse is still on display in Moscow — was definitively entombed three decades ago?

In truth, Lenin is more relevant now than at any point since the end of the cold war. Waging what seemed like a hopeless struggle against the tsarist regime in Russia, it was the ruin caused by the first world war that provided him with a political opening — to rally to his side those who knew that “reform” was a lost cause and to confront his enemies.

To do this required the construction of solidarity between the working class and the peasantry, for Russia was not a fully industrialised country like England or Germany. If proletarian revolution were to happen, it paradoxically could not rely solely on the proletariat.