Leninist Underground Media Model

During the 20th century, the Leninist underground model of alternative or radical media had considerable influence across the planet. Its influence was to be observed in three forms: in the organization of underground media, in the publications of Marxist parties of one stripe or another, and in the media of Stalinist regimes. The focus in this entry is principally on the first of these.

The pivotal source of this model was Lenin's famous booklet What Is to Be Done? first published in 1902, 3 years before the epochal St. Petersburg insurrection, 15 years before the Bolshevik Revolution. Lenin wrote it against the background of the Tsarist regime's political repression, which banned all political parties seeking to voice working-class challenges; banned all strikes as criminal, even anti-state, activities; and had an extensive secret police presence, a large informer network, and severe punishments for those found producing, distributing, or reading revolutionary publications. (Stalin's regime would far surpass even these achievements.)

The issue, then, that Lenin wanted to solve was how, under these political conditions, to develop a stable organizing center for the revolutionary movement across Russia, Ukraine, and the other component units of the Russian empire—one that would not be perpetually liable to be hauled off to jail or worse, decapitating the movement's leadership. A clandestine political party was one element in his solution, led by full-time organizers to be still more disciplined and efficient on a hierarchical military model than the Tsarist state's apparatus of repression. An all-Russian newspaper strictly controlled by the party was another, which in this case was titled Iskra (Spark), Lenin's imagery being one of the newspaper as “an enormous pair of smith's bellows that would fan every spark … into a general conflagration.”

In Section V of the booklet, Lenin outlined his vision of the revolutionary newspaper as a “collective organizer,” issued at least four times a month. He compared Russia's political situation at the time he was writing to having lots of bricks and bricklayers, but no one to provide the line along which to build. Without organized teamwork, the bricks would be laid haphazardly, and the Tsar's police could “shatter the structure as if it were made of sand and not of bricks.”

The paper would expose political and economic issues all over Russia as material for talks, readings, and informal discussion and to give the full story on issues only hinted at in the legal press or by embarrassed government admissions. It would help the revolutionary movement overcome its dispersed fragmentation that made each local upsurge easy to contain. It would enable sustained and flexible political activity, in Lenin's argument, [Page 302]both in periods of calm and in sudden unanticipated crises. Its network of underground distributors and readers would constitute the party's active and growing core.

But the party leadership's policies on all significant issues would be absolutely binding as regarded the newspaper's contents, a transmission mechanism. Only on topics not yet defined by party policy would it be an opinion forum.

Not surprisingly, in situations of political repression across the planet this model has proved very attractive, whether under South Africa's apartheid regime (1948–1994), Franco's fascist dictatorship in Spain (1939–1975), the Suharto military regime in Indonesia (1965–1998), Argentina's murderous military junta (1976–1982), and elsewhere.

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