Lenin's study of Hegel's Science of Logic in late 1914 is a pivotal episode for contemporary Marxist theory. In the years that followed, Lenin would not only write such iconic works as Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, the April Theses, and State and Revolution, he would also lead the Bolsheviks to victory in the 1917 Russian Revolution. In the Hegelian-Marxist tradition, this confluence of events has been shaped into an arresting narrative concerning Lenin's philosophical contribution in his notebooks on Hegel. Lenin's heightened sensitivity to ‘self-movement’ and for the ‘unity of opposites’ is credited as ‘the philosophic foundation for all serious writing that Lenin was to do during the rest of his life’ (Dunayevskaya 1973: 97). Lenin's notebooks laid the groundwork for all his major innovations on imperialism and war, since ‘his Hegel studies and his writings on national liberation were of a piece’ (Anderson 2007: 132). And Lenin's refashioning of Marxist dialectics was an attempt to ‘destroy theoretically the matrix of the Second International’ by ‘destroying the metaphysics that presided over the technics of workers’ organization’ (Kouvelakis 2007: 173).

At the core of this purported theoretical breakthrough is Lenin's supposedly newfound appreciation of the potential for historical leaps forward from 1914. Unlike the Social Democrats – who capitu-lated to the nationalist war effort, denounced the new Soviet regime as premature (Kautsky 1918b), and were enthralled to an evolutionary conception of necessary stages to be passed through en route to socialism – after his reading of the Logic, so the story goes, Lenin was able to embrace a more radical dialectics of revolution. Commenting on the effect of Lenin's encounter with Hegel, Anderson (1995: 25) writes that thereafter Lenin's dialectics ‘is a theory of development through leaps, breaks, and negations rather than a variety of scientific evolutionism, as Engels's writings had suggested’.