Lenin, according to Lukács, argued that reality had a slyness that required a critical effort to decipher. This is Lenin’s realism, which is an appreciation of the dynamic complexity of reality grounded in the sense of its fundamental intelligibility. While contemporary celebrations of Lenin often focus on his thinking as one of contingency, subjectivity, and the revolutionary leap, this fundamentally misunderstands Lenin’s thinking as a grasping of reality developing towards communism. This is not a conservative emphasis on reality as a limit, but a revolutionary embrace of reality as source of change. The origin of Lenin’s realism is traced through his writings on aesthetics, which challenge the claims of the avant-garde and contest our own modernist heritage. Then this realism is used to grasp his political writings, which are not merely the embrace of contingency and power politics. Instead of the image of Lenin as a thinker of revolution without guarantees, what emerges is a Lenin concerned with the need to trace objective forms, their contradictions, and their potential transformations. Lenin’s realism connects his concern with philosophy, evident in his reading of Hegel and critique of empirio-criticism, with the Lenin of political intervention. It is this Lenin that we need to repeat today as the Lenin who can help us be equal to the slyness of contemporary reality.