POSTSCRIPT
It was widely believed by those of us who were captives of the Marxist way of thinking that, had Lenin only lived a little longer, he would have steered the proletarian ship of state onto a proper course. In the blindingly sacred image conjured by Party propaganda, we saw Lenin as a man whose life had been stolen from him at a cruelly early age, preventing him from completing the task he had begun. We were deluding ourselves.
Speaking on 23 April 1924, two months after Lenin's death, at a congress of mining engineers, Kamenev declared that future happiness would be secured ‘by carrying out Lenin's revolutionary proletarian commandments precisely and rigorously … only by taking the path of Leninism will we live until the moment when we can go to Lenin's Mausoleum on Red Square and take the glad tidings that Leninism, and hence proletarian Communism, has conquered the world’.1 Needless to say, no one has yet carried that message to the Mausoleum, and the mummy itself may not be there much longer anyway.
Even in the mid-1980s many of us still believed that we had only to ‘return to Lenin’ for the elusive Communist firebird to appear in our hands. The reforming Gorbachev, speaking at the Politburo in October 1987, declared with conviction that ‘a bridge must be thrown from Lenin, connecting Lenin's ideas and Lenin's approach to the events of his time to the affairs of today. That, after all, was the dialectic by which Lenin solved problems, it is the key to the solution of our present tasks.’2 Party propaganda had imbued us with the image of Lenin as a man who had made a historic breakthrough to a new and equitable way of life, as the creator of the New Economic Policy and the ideologue of cooperative agriculture, as the initiator of peaceful co-existence and the tireless fighter against bureaucratism. We had never been permitted to reflect on the truth of these myths.
It never occurred to us that the ‘breakthrough’ of October 1917 might be a counter-revolution, when compared to the events of February of that year. Nor did we realize that the NEP was not an economic strategy, but merely a tactical manoeuvre forced on Lenin by the devastating collapse of the genuinely Leninist policy of War Communism. Lenin, far from being the initiator of the NEP, was in fact its long-time foe. Speaking on 5 December 1919 at the Seventh All-Russian Congress of Soviets, he told those ‘who want to trade freedom for bread’ that they were wrong: ‘We will struggle against that to the last drop of blood. There can be no concessions on this.’3 This oath was forgotten by the time he was ready to introduce the NEP in March 1921.
We did not realize that, despite the common sense of some of his ideas on cooperative farming, Lenin was always profoundly hostile to the peasants. Even before he came to power, in 1916 there were no less than 10, 500, 000 members of cooperatives in Russia. By his dependence on the working class, Lenin condemned the peasants to be the mere building blocks of the Communist edifice that he had fixed in his mind. It was the peasants who bore the brunt of the civil war. Typically, as we have seen, he instructed the Bolsheviks in Livny ‘to organize the poor peasants of the district, confiscate all the grain and all the property of the rebellious kulaks, hang their ringleaders, mobilize and arm the poor peasants and give them reliable leaders from among our own people, arrest hostages from among the rich and keep them under arrest until all the surplus grain of their district has been collected and loaded’.4 This was the path to Lenin's cooperative plan and socialist industrialization. It was for this, according to him, that people were shot in their thousands.5 Yet in 1916, when the Swedish socialist Zeth Höglund was arrested and put in prison for a few months for preaching defeatism, Lenin wrote to Alexandra Kollontai: ‘this savagery is unprecedented, it's incredible!!!’6
We did not realize that peaceful co-existence with the outside world was forced on Lenin by the failure of his dream of an instant onslaught on the capitalist citadels. As Adolf Ioffe wrote in his unpublished memoirs:
The world revolution seemed (and indeed was) so close that any agreement with the bourgeoisie was regarded as extremely short-term and therefore of no consequence. What was important was not what one could obtain in talks with the bourgeoisie, but only that both the talks and the agreement itself should have the greatest possible revolutionary effect on the broad masses … somehow to make it doubly clear that their content was immaterial and to emphasise their ephemeral character. When at the end of the talks I brought Vladimir Ilyich the bound copy of the treaty, he narrowed his eyes cunningly, slapped the cover and asked: ‘Well, did you manage to write a lot of dirty tricks into it?’
In Ioffe's view, it was only the slow pace of the revolution that prompted the temporary shift to a ‘peaceful offensive’. Lenin did not, nor would he ever, repudiate the future revolutionizing of the planet. Ioffe wrote: ‘When the Central Committee sent me to Turkestan in 1921, in our talks before I left and in letters he sent when I was in Tashkent, Vladimir Ilyich constantly urged and stressed that: “Turkestan is our world policy. Turkestan means India …” ’7
Lenin seemed unable to accept that the revolution in Germany had failed not because of the treachery of ‘the renegade Kautsky’ and the German Social Democrats, but because the workers had not believed in it, the intelligentsia had not wanted it, and the peasants had had no time for it. Needless to say, the army and the middle classes were deeply hostile. While German gold had assisted Lenin in making revolution in Russia, the millions the Bolsheviks poured into Germany were thrown to the wind. While the revolution in Russia had succeeded in large part because Lenin had helped to undermine the Russian army, in Germany the army, although it had succumbed to the Allied powers, was still strong and determined enough to crush the revolution. One disappointment in the external sphere followed another as Finland, Hungary, Persia, India, China, Poland and other countries failed to ignite and maintain the revolutionary momentum. ‘The world revolution,’ Ioffe wrote, ‘was held up.’8
There were failures in the internal sphere also: the policy of War Communism proved unsustainable, the new bureaucracy indestructible, large sections of society were silently hostile to Bolshevism, and there was none of the Party unity Lenin had struggled to maintain. The defeat Leninism was to suffer seventy years after the revolution was already prefigured while he was still alive. This is evident from the fact that from the earliest days socialist structures were replaced by state institutions. In part spontaneously, the Bolsheviks began using the vast arsenal assembled by the state: the unlimited power of the bureaucracy, strict centralization, undivided state power, regimentation of public life and ideology as a substitute for religion. The imperial style of government was thus preserved by the Bolsheviks. Having destroyed first the tsarist and then the bourgeois dictatorship, Lenin replaced them by the dictatorship of his Party. Since the historical traditions which created the Bolsheviks were incapable of evolution, one form of oppression was replaced by another, both harsher and more repugnant.
It is conceivable, as has often been claimed, that Lenin would not have exterminated his comrades in the Politburo, as Stalin did, and it is hard to imagine that he would have introduced collectivization at the cost of millions of peasants' lives, or eliminated dissidents—even potential dissidents—by the methods used by Stalin at the end of the 19305. But even a more ‘moderate’ form of Communism under Lenin would still have been Bolshevik in kind. There would still have been terror and collectivization and the hunt for the ‘impure’. The system he created could work no other way, the only variations being those of scale.
But the genetic origins of the system provide no basis for blaming its founder for every crime and mistake committed by his successors. Lenin cannot be blamed for the monstrous decision of the Politburo to execute thousands of Poles at Katyn in 1940 and to cast the blame on the Nazis. Perhaps this was, as some thought, Stalin's revenge on the Poles for the humiliating defeat of Soviet Russia in 1920. But it was indeed Lenin who in August 1920 ordered Sklyansky and Dzerzhinsky to ‘hang kulaks, priests and landowners’ and to ‘cast the blame for these crimes on [General] Bulak-Bulakhovich's units in Poland’.9
Lenin cannot be blamed for planning a bizarre attempt on the life of Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito in 1948:
‘Max’ [Soviet agent Grigulevich] will obtain a personal audience with Tito during which he will remove from within his clothing a silent mechanism and release a dose of pulmonary plague bacteria, ensuring the infection and death of Tito and the others present. ‘Max’ himself will not know the content of the substance. In order to save ‘Max's’ life he will be inoculated with anti-plague serum.10*
But in 1920 Lenin instructed his comrades that ‘it is essential and urgent to prepare the terror in secret’.11
Nor can Lenin be blamed for the plan to intervene in Poland in 1980 to crush ‘Solidarity’, the widespread movement against the Communist regime. A document signed by Suslov, Gromyko, Andropov, Ustinov and Chernenko called on the Central Committee to have a number of units placed on battle alert, and ‘to mobilize up to 100, 000 reservists and 15, 000 automobiles’.12 In the event, it was the Polish army and police that suppressed the opposition for another eight years.
The leadership's Leninist way of thinking was demonstrated in 1960 by an event that has never before been revealed. The Soviet ambassador to Poland, Ponomarenko, reported in May of that year that, since the Twentieth Party Congress of 1956, the Polish Workers' Party had been ‘seething’. Khrushchev, Mikoyan, Bulganin, Molotov and Kaganovich decided to fly to Warsaw on the eve of the Polish party's Central Committee plenum. Ochab, Gomulka and other Polish leaders protested, but Khrushchev and the others resolved to go nevertheless. According to the notes Mikoyan kept, the discussion at a meeting in the Belvedere Palace following the plenum was stormy. Gomulka and the other Polish leaders wanted non-interference in their party's affairs, a definition of the status of Soviet troops in Poland, a reduction in the number of Soviet advisers, and the recall of Soviet Marshal Rokossovsky as Polish Minister of Defence.
Khrushchev, Bulganin and Molotov responded belligerently, shouting, ‘you want to turn your faces to the West and your backs to us … you've forgotten that we have our enormous army in Germany’. Emotions grew heated. Mikoyan's notes continue: ‘During this conversation one of the Polish comrades handed Gomulka a note. Gomulka turned to Khrushchev and said, “I'm told that your units from the western part of Poland are moving tanks right now on Warsaw.” Gomulka requested that they be ordered back to their stations. We exchanged glances and Khrushchev ordered Konev [the Soviet Commander-in-Chief of Warsaw Pact troops] to stop the tanks and send them back to their stations.’13 Even in talks with their allies, the Soviet leaders used tanks as an argument.
Lenin had resorted to such violent measures as had been available to him when settling ‘disputes’ with his neighbours, whether by sending troops into Georgia or planning revolutionary acts in the countries bordering the Soviet Union. He had been quite explicit that Latvia and Estonia be ‘punished by military means’ when in 1918 they established their independence. In his own hand, he made the message clear: ‘Cross the frontier somewhere, even if only to a depth of half a mile, and hang 100-1,000 of their civil servants and rich people.’14
Lenin cannot be blamed for the fact that the top Party leadership in the republics, regions and territories was riddled with embezzlement, corruption and disintegration. When public outrage demanded it, these people were discreetly moved to other jobs. But it had also been Lenin's custom to cover things up, to rescue and defend his lieutenants. When Ordzhonikidze was asserting Moscow's control over the local Communists in the Caucasus in 1922, Lenin wrote to him: ‘Comrade Sergo, I've received a report that you and fourteen army leaders were boozing and womanizing for a week. A formal complaint has been laid … Scandal and shame. And there was I, boasting to all and sundry about you. You must straighten up. It's not good enough. You're giving a bad example. Greetings, Yours, Lenin.’15
The long war in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989, in which the Soviet leadership had mindlessly intervened, was over, yet the Comintern way of thinking survived until the very end. In 1991 Defence Minister Dmitri Yazov reported to the Politburo on the ‘'results’ of the ten-year campaign. No less than 546, 255 members of the Soviet armed forces had served in Afghanistan. Of this number, 13, 826, including 1977 officers, had laid down their lives ‘performing their international duty’. The whole adventure had cost the country tens of billions of roubles.16Such losses were almost negligible when compared to those inflicted by Lenin's promise to turn the imperialist war into civil war. True to his mentor's teaching, Stalin saw human lives as no more than statistical units. During the Second World War, he would conclude his orders with the words, ‘This task must be carried out regardless of losses.’
Such analogies and comparisons could be made without end. Lenin cannot be made to bear responsibility for his successors' acts, but plainly, there is much he might have prevented or avoided. No one has yet succeeded in creating heaven on earth, even if many have seen what hell is like. Lenin can, however, be held responsible for creating a dictatorship which functioned for many years according to his laws. Even after the Twentieth Congress, during the thaw, the inner structure of the system barely changed. While execution for political dissidence ceased, the psychiatric hospital, prison and exile to the concentration camps continued for those brave enough to voice or to publish a disapproved opinion.
Despite the fact that it was doomed to defeat, the Leninist system was extraordinarily viable. This is explained not only by social inertia and the Party's monopoly of power, but also by some of the more attractive features of Leninist ‘socialism’. There was its broad base of elementary social security: free education, medicine, holiday pay, accommodation, full employment, a guaranteed minimum wage and much else. The idea of social justice seemed to have found its realization, although, to be sure, all this was accomplished at the cost of the exploitation of the workers and the country's resources.
A closer look reveals that the people's rights and liberties were negligible, and that their lives were led at a level of guaranteed poverty and total dependence on the ideological postulates of the only active political party. Nevertheless, despite all the ugliness of the Leninist system, it could not have maintained itself for as long as it did purely as a result of violence or the threat of violence.
But the life the Soviet people lived for seventy years was not socialism. Without the dictatorship, the Bolsheviks would not have been able to hold onto power and the state they created in 1917. They rejected parliamentary democracy, and Lenin installed his extreme and harsh dictatorship without a second thought. From that moment the primary features of Bolshevism were ‘hatred for class enemies’ and implacable hostility to imperialism and everything else that was not socialist, not Marxist, not Leninist. Here Lenin's personal characteristics played a far-reaching role. We have seen the violence of the language he used against his ideological enemies, to say nothing of his former friends. No insult was too crude or dismissive, and conscience was nowhere to be heard. We have also seen how easily this destructive approach to the opinions of others escalated into the physical elimination of all those who chose not to fall into line, and how, once absorbed as normal behaviour by the Party, this became an integral and essential feature of the regime in its post-Lenin years.
The legacy of this ‘political culture’ will die hard. The defeat, by those who valued Russia's fragile democratic institutions, of the attempted coup in August 1991 provided an opportunity to create a genuinely new and free society. But a background of savage invective, formerly used against external ‘foes’, is preventing Russian politicians from talking to each other except in terms of ‘struggling to a victorious end’, elevating abuse and disrespect to moral, political and aesthetic virtues, as we were taught to do by so many books with tides such as Lenin's Languageand On Lenin's Polemical Art. In worshipping the ‘genius of abuse’—to quote Berdyaev on Lenin17—we cultivated a slavish psychology in ourselves, as well as undemocratic conduct and dogmatism.
The defeat of Leninism was brought about by the change in the international climate. As soon as Gorbachev's foreign policy began to bear fruit, in the form of growing trust of the Soviet Union's traditional enemies, the erosion of Leninism accelerated. Lenin and his system could exist only by watching its opponents through the cross-hairs of a gunsight, only by digging deeper and stronger defences, only by feverishly competing for military superiority. To flourish, Communism needed a military threat, and both domestic and foreign enemies. The defeat of Leninism was programmed by history. Lenin had only one chance to save it: he could have preserved political pluralism after October 1917 and given scope to social democratic aspirations and traditions. But that would not have been the Leninist way.
One thing is certain, and that is that the ‘Epoch of Lenin’ is gone forever. Legend has it that Alexander the Great once read an inscription on the grave of a fallen king: ‘Deny me not the handful of earth that covers my body.’ Lenin's heirs, by making him into an earthly god, denied him even his handful of earth. Since then, the cosmic requiem of eternity is being sung not only for his mummy, but also for his cause.
* Tito had long been wary of Stalin's efforts to subvert his authority, and was ever on his guard against the agents planted in his organization by Russia. The attempt to infect him came to nothing.