Fact Check: Lenin Said, 'There Are Decades Where Nothing Happens' and 'Weeks Where Decades Happen'?

Claim:

Russian revolutionary and politician Vladimir Lenin said, "There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen"?

Rating:

Misattributed ( About this rating? )

Vladimir Lenin, the Russian revolutionary and founding leader of the USSR, has long been rumored to have said, "There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen."

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” - Lenin [1200x670]
by u/yer_cousin_joe in QuotesPorn

The quote has been the subject of numerous posts on social media sites including X , LinkedIn , Medium and Goodreads . On Reddit, it has made frequent appearances on quote-focused subreddits including r/quotes and r/QuotesPorn . It has also appeared in a range of print publications including Billy Idol's memoir "Dancing with Myself" and an editorial published in a 2013 issue of the Journal of Hepatology.

However, there is no evidence that Lenin ever spoke or wrote these words.

As the blog Quote Investigator pointed out in a 2020 article , the quote appears to have been first attributed to Lenin in 2001, 77 years after the Russian revolutionary's death, in a Guardian op-ed by British politician George Galloway.

Quote Investigator speculated that the misattribution may have come about due to confusion with a similar — but much wordier and less aphoristic — sentiment expressed in a 1918 pamphlet titled "The Chief Task of Our Day," which is securely attributable to Lenin. In the translation printed in "V. I. Lenin: Collected Works," a multivolume work published by Moscow's Progress Publishers in 1965, that quote reads,

In the space of a few days we destroyed one of the oldest, most powerful, barbarous and brutal of monarchies. In the space of a few months we passed through a number of stages of collaboration with the bourgeoisie and of shaking off petty-bourgeois illusions, for which other countries have required decades.

But where did the version that circulates today come from? The earliest appearance of a very similar version of the quote that Quote Investigator was able to find was a 1991 Christian Science Monitor article about Mexican poet Homero Aridjis, who is quoted as saying,

There are centuries in which nothing happens and years in which centuries pass.

That quote is a direct translation from the Spanish of two lines of Aridjis' poem "Sefarad, 1492," which was written in 1990 and included in Aridjis' 1991 poetry collection "Obra Poética: 1960–1990." In the original Spanish, the lines read:

Hay siglos en los que no pasa nada / y años en los que pásan siglos

Aridjis was not the first to use this turn of phrase or a close variant, however. By searching variations on phrases used in the quote (for example, "in which nothing happens" instead of "where nothing happens"), Snopes was able to track down earlier versions not included among Quote Investigator's findings.

In 1982, for example, fantasy author David Eddings included a close variant in his novel "Pawn of Prophecy." That version reads:

Centuries pass when nothing happens, and then in a few short years events of such importance take place that the world is never the same again.

An even earlier version — and one that more closely resembles the version in the claim —  was published in 1908, during Lenin's lifetime, although there is still no evidence to link it to Lenin himself. This version was published in "The Devil," a novel by Dutch-American author Adriaan Schade van Westrum:

There are years, centuries, in which nothing happens, and there are days, like yesterday, into which a whole lifetime is compressed.

Van Westrum's novel was based on the Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár's 1907 play of the same name (in the original Hungarian, "Az Ördög"). However, we've been unable to locate any variation on the phrase in Molnár's original Hungarian text , so it seems likely that its inclusion in the 1908 novel adaptation was a bit of artistic license on van Westrum's part.

Regardless of whether van Westrum invented the quote or read it elsewhere, there is no evidence that Lenin originated the version that has widely circulated under his name since 2001. For this reason, we rate this claim as "Misattributed."

Sources:

Aridjis, Homero. Obra poética, 1960-1990 . [México], D.F. : Joaquín Mortiz, 1991. Internet Archive, http://archive.org/details/obrapoetica196010000arid .

Eddings, David. Pawn of Prophecy . Del Rey, 1982. Internet Archive, http://archive.org/details/pawnofprophecybe00davi .

Friedman, Scott L. ""There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen"–Vladimir Ilyich Lenin." Journal of Hepatology 60.3 (2014): 471-472.

Galloway, George. "We Will Not Be Silenced." The Guardian , 20 Oct. 2001. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/oct/20/britainand911.afghanistan .

Lenin, Vladimir Ilʹich. Collected Works . Moscow : Foreign Languages Pub. House, 1963. Internet Archive, http://archive.org/details/collectedworks0027leni .

"Mexican Novelist Sees 1492 As 'A Year of Centuries.'" Christian Science Monitor . Christian Science Monitor, https://www.csmonitor.com/1991/1011/11101.html . Accessed 23 July 2024.

Molnár, Ferenc. Az ördög, vigjáték három felvonásban . Budapest, Franklin-Társulat, 1907. Internet Archive, http://archive.org/details/azrdgvigjt00moln .

Quote Origin: Days Into Which 20 Years Are Compressed – Quote Investigator® . 13 July 2020, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/07/13/decades-weeks/ .

Idol, Billy. Dancing with Myself . Simon and Schuster, 2014. Internet Archive, http://archive.org/details/isbn_9781471157295 .

Van Westrum, Adriaan Schade. The Devil . Chicago : M.A. Donohue, c1908. Internet Archive, http://archive.org/details/thedevil00vanwiala.