Lenin and the Jacobin identity in Russia

Abstract

By what process was the Jacobin identity transplanted into nineteenth-century Russian radical culture? According to the conventional account, the Jacobin label was coined by proponents like Zaičnevskij and Tkačev. Lenin, in turn, is said to have derived his Jacobin identity from them, thus revealing the non-Marxian source of his political ideas. This article contests that interpretation through a study of the origin and spread of the Jacobin terminology in post-emancipation Russia. I show that the Jacobin identity in Russia was invented by anti-Jacobin populists and that there were scarcely any self-proclaimed Jacobins prior to Lenin. I also reconstruct the path by which Lenin came to identify with French Jacobinism. That path remained within the territory of Marxist theory from beginning to end.