Lenin and the American Revolution

The American Revolution remains a vexing period of historical study for the Left. Was the 18th-century movement of emancipation from British control a successful example of a “historically progressive” bourgeois revolution? Or could it be argued that the revolution instead primarily constituted a slaveholders’ revolt and colonial land grab, enabling westward conquest of Indigenous territory? Both sides of the debate have been readily embraced by different segments of the Left. The Trotskyist website WSWS, for example, has championed the pro-American Revolution interpretation, which sees the revolutionary cause as one that was ultimately progressive, despite the destructive and contradictory processes that accompanied it (Mackaman 2016; North 2026). These writers insist the revolution’s historical character is not reducible to the harms inflicted upon Black and Indigenous people.

On the other side of the debate, the celebratory reading of the American Revolution has been challenged in recent years, as seen with the “1619 Project” associated with The New York Times. These writers have told a more critical narrative, highlighting the perspectives of Black and Indigenous people whose experience of these events were hardly triumphant and entailed immense human suffering; the leftist scholar Gerald Horne represents the more radical end of this critical framing, arguing that there really was no American Revolution at all, only a reactionary counter-revolution in defense of slavery. Which side of this debate, then, is more accurate?

For the Left, one of the favoured ways of navigating challenging theoretical questions is to defer to figures of scriptural authority in the Marxist tradition. For some, it might almost seem like a relief to be able to sidestep the convoluted debates of ivory-tower historians interpreting archival evidence and instead defer to those great, tried and true revolutionaries who have actually won revolutions. Certainly, there would be no one better equipped to resolve a debate over the character of a revolution than the greatest revolutionary himself, Lenin. His writings are quite clear:

The history of modern, civilised America opened with one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few compared to the vast number of wars of conquest... That was the war the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed America and held her in colonial slavery...(Lenin 1918)

Lenin regarded the American Revolution as an authentic liberatory struggle, praising these events as one of history’s rare genuinely revolutionary wars and explicitly characterizing the Thirteen Colonies as being held in “colonial slavery” by the British Empire. For many, these comments seem to settle the debate. Lenin, the greatest revolutionary, unequivocally offered his support for this progressive and bourgeois revolution. Yet I would argue that one cannot conclude this so quickly.

Indeed, there are a number of major issues with Lenin’s comments. He decries the “colonial slavery” of the “American people,” but has little to say about the American Revolution’s relationship to those held in the literal bondage of slavery, an institution in which the Founding Fathers participated in and preserved. Lenin says the American Revolution is quite unlike the “vast number” of wars of conquest, with little reference to the fact that the American Revolution is deeply implicated in the conquest of Indigenous land and the destruction of their societies across the continent. This, however, is not to say that Lenin’s blind spots make him an inadequate interlocutor on the American Revolution. In fact, in his own context, he was quite sensitive to the plight of minority nations and Indigenous peoples suffering under the yoke of Tsarist settler-colonialism.

Lenin, a 20th-century statesman in Soviet Russia, was not, and did not pretend to be, an expert on American history, and thus his conclusions were necessarily shaped by the knowledge and state of historical understanding available in his period. His assessment also predates major developments in the historiography of the American Revolution and Indigenous dispossession, and he does not appear to have fully considered the extent to which the Revolution facilitated the subsequent westward expansion of the settler republic at the expense of Indigenous nations. He was, however, deeply knowledgeable about the Russian colonial system he sought to overthrow, and his analysis can be brought into conversation with recent histories of colonial expansion in the Americas to produce a more nuanced, critical account of the American Revolution. While Lenin was writing long before the term “settler colonialism” was common vernacular on the revolutionary left, he nonetheless was an important theorist of this issue in an early variant, espousing an incisive critique of Russia’s conquest and colonial subjugation of minority nations. Indeed, Lenin aptly described the Tsarist Empire as a “prison-house of nations.” We might say the same of the United States.

Lenin had noted the way in which the Russian Empire had spread into new territories, displacing Indigenous inhabitants, settling the land, and imposing its cultural and political rule over oppressed minorities. This, of course, has a number of similarities with the Manifest Destiny of the American Empire and the mass displacement and genocide of Indigenous peoples in America. It would indeed be apt to characterize the United States as a prison of the many Indigenous nations who suffered, and continue to suffer, under the yoke of American colonial power. In the following piece, I will be writing a Leninist critique of Lenin’s interpretation of the American Revolution, drawing on Soviet critiques of settler colonialism (or what Marx and Engels called “colonialism proper”), including Lenin’s own writings on the topic, as well as more recent historical research, to foreground the forms of colonial domination that conventional celebrations of the American Revolution tend to overlook.

From “Colonialism Proper” to “Settler Colonialism”

One popular misconception about the concept of settler colonialism is that it is alien to Marxism, a conceptual apparatus that goes well beyond the contours of Marx’s thought and that, for some, is even perceived as a kind of academic fad or activist reading of history that is politically motivated. This is not true, and what we now know as settler colonialism was a matter of serious importance to Marx, Engels, and Lenin, which is all readily available in the historical record. As John Bellamy Foster (2025) points out in the Monthly Review, Marx did not use the exact phrase “settler colonialism,” as the word “colonialism” itself means “settlerism.” It would have been redundant and incoherent for a 19th-century thinker to use the word in that way. Foster (2025) writes:

by the twentieth century, the meaning of colonialism had so broadened that it was no longer associated with its classical historical origins or its linguistic roots, making the use of the term ‘settler colonialism’ more acceptable.”

For Marx, settler colonialism, or what he called “colonialism proper,” had an eliminationist character that is best exemplified by the extermination of Indigenous nations in European conquests of the Americas and Australia:

Colonialism proper, in Marx’s conception, took two forms, both having as their precondition a logic of extermination, in the nineteenth century sense of exterminate, meaning both forcible eradication and expulsion … Marx’s approach to settler colonialism encompassed not only the exterminist logic directed at Indigenous nations, but also the dual forms of production (free farmers and plantation slavery) that emerged within the resulting settler colonial structure. Nevertheless, the overall dialectic of settler colonialism had as its precondition the extermination (including removal) of Indigenous populations. As Marx expressed it in the first volume of Capital (Foster 2025)

Marx’s understanding of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and the effects of European colonization was informed in part by the Quaker writer William Howitt, whose Colonization and Christianity condemned European imperialism as unparalleled in its brutality. As Howitt wrote, “The barbarities and desperate outrages of the so-called Christian race, throughout every region of the world, and upon every people they have been able to subdue, are not to be paralleled by those of any other race” (Foster 2025). This unrestrained critique of European barbarity was quite unlike that of other 19th-century writers of the time, an outlook that clearly influenced Marx’s own understanding of settler conquest.

For instance, Marx was sharply critical of French settler colonialism in Algeria, examining how the conquest and colonization of the country disrupted Indigenous communal institutions and landholding systems, facilitating the expropriation of Indigenous land and the imposition of private property. Though viewing French settlement as a process of expropriation and dispossession, he concluded during his stay in Algiers that there was no hope for the Indigenous population “without a revolutionary movement.” Marx’s writings on the topic place him squarely within the tradition of anti-colonial thought and as a precursor to Marxist critics of settler colonialism today.

This context is essential for understanding Lenin’s own approach to colonialism. In both his 1916 notebook Imperialism and The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up, Lenin approvingly reproduced Engels’s distinction between “colonies proper,” that were “occupied by a European population,” and countries with native populations “which are simply subjugated” (Lenin 1916). That distinction was subsequently developed within the Soviet communist tradition, in which Lenin was a central figure, best exemplified in the Comintern’s 1928 Theses on the Revolutionary Movement in the Colonies and Semi-Colonies, which situated settler colonies as integral elements within this broader machinery of global imperialism.

As seen in Lenin’s early critiques of imperial expansion, the Soviet historiographical framework explicitly condemned Tsarist domination over its periphery. Soviet Marxist historians of the 1920s and 1930s expanded upon the ideas seen in Lenin’s writings and produced more detailed, historical analyses of Russian settler colonialism, which we will examine later. Lenin’s disgust with the Russian brutalization and exploitation of minorities in Russia’s periphery can be seen, for instance, in his rejection of the term “inorodtsy.” This was a racialized legal term employed by the Imperial regime to describe the “internal aliens” of the empire, such as the Indigenous peoples of Siberia, marking them as barbaric outsiders in need of civilizing by the enlightened metropole. In the time of Peter the Great:

indigenous Siberians were beginning to be considered not merely as adherents of the “wrong” faith (”idolaters”) but as “wild,” “backward,” “unenlightened,” and “poor” people in a state of “childhood,” who were accordingly opposed to those who were “civilized” and whose care they needed. (Akimov 2023)

Lenin understood the dehumanizing, colonial nature of such a system of classification, and was explicit in the need for the Soviet system to reject the forms of racial hierarchy Russian colonialism was predicated on. Golubev (2023, 15) writes:

Lenin mainly used this concept in quotation marks and called upon “an absolute purge of the concept inorodtsy from state life” as early as 1913.

This racial hierarchy of Russian supremacism was deeply implicated within the system of settler colonialism that undergirded the empire. It must also be emphasized that the belief in the inferiority and “child-like” nature of the Indigenous was bound up with the expropriation of Indigenous lands. The Circassians, for instance, suffered greatly at the hands of Russian chauvinism and were subjected to mass expulsion and large-scale settler colonization of their homeland following conquest. The Indigenous people of Siberia experienced extensive and violent land appropriation through Russian settlement. The expropriation and theft of Indigenous land by Euro-American powers likewise, in part, was predicated on civilizing ideology that viewed Indigenous “heathen savages,” whose perceived lack of “civilization” justified the forceful acquisition of their land.

As far as the settler was concerned, Indigenous territories were ripe for the taking as their political and economic imperatives demanded. The newly “discovered” lands of the Americas were a tabula rasa, an empty canvas upon which European civilization could be established, despite the presence of millions of Indigenous inhabitants with intricate political systems and flourishing societies. Indeed, the so-called European doctrine of discovery “provided that newly-arrived Europeans automatically acquired property rights in the lands of indigenous peoples and gained political and commercial rights over the indigenous inhabitants” (Miller et al. 2010). Similarly, a recurring theme in the scholarship of the bourgeois historians of the Tsarist regimes was the inferiority of the non-Russian minorities and their seeming inability to develop “vacant” land, which, it was believed, necessitated the intervention of the Russian state, including its expansion and control over their land.

Soviet Marxist historians critiqued Imperial scholars of the preceding era for their characterization of “Russian settler colonialism as a process that allegedly brought order, prosperity, and civilization to what the pre-1917 Russian historical scholarship described as empty and wild lands” (Golubev 2023, 14). They noted how these imperial scholars aimed to subtly cast the history of Russian settler colonialism as a process dictated by “objective” and “natural” factors, such as “ as land hunger or the desire to escape from the oppressive government moved into ‘empty’ lands” (Golubev 2023, 10). Moreover, across both imperial contexts, Christianization constituted a mode of colonial domination that sought to remake Indigenous societies according to the cultural and moral norms of the imperial power. Not only was it necessary to seize and exploit territory annexed by the invading force, but to fundamentally transform and assimilate the original population into a subordinate position within the cultural framework of the colonizer.