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."

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."

  • UmbraVivi [he/him, she/her]
    ·
    1 day ago

    This is accurate. What Lenin actually said was "There are weeks where nothing happens and there are decades where nothing happens."

  • Dirt_Owl [comrade/them, they/them]
    ·
    1 day ago

    "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."

    waow-based

    • HomoSexualTransStalinist [she/her]
      ·
      1 day ago

      STOP POSTING ABOUT GEORGE GALLOWAY! I'M TIRED OF SEEING IT! MY FRIENDS ON TIKTOK SEND ME MEMES, ON DISCORD IT'S FUCKING MEMES! I was in a server, right? and ALL OF THE CHANNELS were just workers party stuff.

  • Chump [he/him]
    ·
    1 day ago

    Hot take: I flatly refuse to take seriously any article about Lenin which reference David "Fucking" Eddings in it.

    I don't care if the reference is relevant, irrelevant, or satirical, the man doesn't bear mentioning in the same context. It's about as relevant as referencing Auntie Anne in an article about the UHC CEO. Sure, he may have enjoyed her corporation's pretzel preparation.... but who the fuck cares?

  • ChicagoCommunist [none/use name]
    ·
    1 day ago

    Yeah it's also a bog standard concept that's probably existed for longer than written language. You'll see similarly basic quotes attributed to most historical figures, often on fridge magnets or coffee mugs or pixelated facebook memes. Still works as a mild leftist dogwhistle I suppose.

    The concept itself is useful for the "nothing ever happens" crowd I guess, but I do worry about how much power platitudes like this have over discourse and analysis. Platitudes and even actual quotes or ideas taken out of context and projected onto whatever topic as if they're universal truths.

    Like most recently, the whole Lenin was against adventurism thing, which becomes a useless floating signifier as it gets stripped of the context Lenin was engaging with a hundred years ago. Without a careful analysis of Lenin's conditions and our own we have no idea how well his specific, nuanced conclusions apply a century later in an entirely different sociopolitical economic structure.

    • HamManBad [he/him]
      ·
      1 day ago

      Platitudes and even actual quotes or ideas taken out of context and projected onto whatever topic as if they're universal truths.

      This is a never ending problem, made even more difficult by the fact that quippy slogans are essential for the success of a revolution.

      • ChicagoCommunist [none/use name]
        ·
        1 day ago

        Yeah it's one way fash have an advantage-- they don't have to care about the meanings behind their words, can just coast off vibes.

        To carve out a place in the larger social consciousness, we have to figure out how to compete with that.

        Def has to be a delineation between how we analyze things with other leftists versus how we engage with average people. The blurring of that line has caused problems in both directions.

    • MrStalin [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      1 day ago

      this is something that in the end doesn't matter in the slightest i just thought it was a little funny that a quote so commonly attributed to lenin that it's turned into a meme among leftists might be something he never actually said

      • ChicagoCommunist [none/use name]
        ·
        1 day ago

        Oh for sure it's a good post. Definitely interesting because it's almost like if "a penny saved is a penny earned" or "good things come to those who wait" or "whatever will be will be" became leftist dogwhistles lol