Was Lenin a Jacobin-Blanquist?

The article assesses the charge that Lenin was a Jacobin or a Blanquist, i.e., a supporter of the seizure of power by an elite party of professional revolutionaries and the establishment of a minority revolutionary dictatorship. It is based upon a comparison of the ideas contained in Čto delat'? (What Must be Done?, 1902) and Gosudarstvo i revoljucija (The State and Revolution, 1917) and a discussion of the importance of these two texts within Lenin's overall political ideology. I argue that Soviet authorities, Soviet scholars and Western scholars have all reduced Lenin's thoughts to “Leninism”, i.e., to the “elitism” Lenin expounds in Čto delat'? and other texts written in 1899–1902. In this way, Lenin's break with his previous “elitism” after the outbreak of the revolution in 1905 as well as the libertarian, populist, anti-Jacobin-Blanquist message of some of Lenin's most important theoretical writings, notably Gosudarstvo i revoljucija, are systematically suppressed. I further argue that the transformation of Lenin's thought to ‘“Leninism” must be related to the political development of Soviet Russia after the Bolshevik coup d'état in October (November) 1917 – a development that made it impossible to implement the libertarian thoughts of Gosudarstvo i revoljucija and other theoretical works by Lenin.